Fun, thought-provoking film analysis — deep-dives, lists, criticism, and everything in between.
Rough Cut's Top Romantic Comedies
Stories

The Third Annual Rough Cut Awards
It's that time of year again! As the Academy weighs in with their nominees, our team here at Rough Cut came together to make our picks for the best movies of 2021.

The Best Scenes of 2021
The cinema of 2021 was filled with a lot of empty formalism – as every year should be. Because to attempt true visual storytelling is to risk falling flat on one’s face. With streamers expanding and the pandemic accelerating the great elision of film and television, that there remain so many cinematic moments made to be seen on a big screen – made so that they can be felt and understood without dialogue – is a minor miracle in itself…

2021 Wrap-Up: The Year in Theater-Going
For me, the year in movies was defined primarily by one thing: the fact that for the first time since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, theater-going once again felt (depending on one’s own risk and comfort level) like a regular part of the movie-watching routine. Just as Nicole Kidman points out in her relentless AMC advertisements, the movie theater feels like home to me — somewhere I go to cry, to laugh, to be thrilled, and to relieve stress…

50 Most Anticipated Films of 2020
As we shuffle our best-of lists from 2021, why not look ahead to what’s sure to be a sumptuous year of cinnema? Here are our top 50 most anticipated films of 2022.
Lists
Rough Cut's Best of Sundance 2022 10 films
The Rough Cut team's collective favorite films from the 2022 edition of the Sundance Film Festival.
A Rough Cut Holiday Season Programming Guide 28 films
Read the full annotated guide here!
Best of the Fests 22 films
The highest rated films of each decade from Berlin, Cannes, and Venice, per Letterboxd users.
Check out the full story…
Rough Cut's Top Movie Musicals 27 films
In Honor of Pig: Oink your Face/Off 14 films
Movies that would have been better with Nic Cage or a pig ("read notes" version is recommended -- otherwise, you'll…
The "Return to Theatres" Lineup 11 films
The Rough Cut team curates a program of the films they'd use to welcome audiences back to the movies.
Check…
Recent reviews
Like many musician biopics, Elvis can feel a bit like an overstuffed Greatest Hits album at times—Presley’s recording and concert successes, forays into film and television, and Vegas residency all get significant airtime, in addition to his marriage to Lisa Marie, addiction struggles, and financial exploitation by Parker—but Elvis is more than just an average tale of a musician’s rise and fall. I mean, sure, it is that, but it’s also a Baz Luhrmann picture, which means it’s a maximalist…
If nothing else, writer-director Alex Garland is a premier purveyor of visual spectacle, a trait his latest film bears out. The winkingly titled Men offers up a buffet of imagery that intrigues, confuses, and terrifies in equal measure, all lusciously shot by regular Garland collaborator Rob Hardy. But while spectacle often suffices, Garland tends to set his sights higher, marrying his visual creativity with unsettlingly ambiguous ideas about the nature of humanity and its place in the cosmos. In previous…
With Crimes of the Future, David Cronenberg’s fourth collaboration with star Viggo Mortensen, right around the corner, Kino Lorber has issued a new release of the director and actor’s second feature together, 2007’s Eastern Promises. Their follow-up to the critically acclaimed A History of Violence, Cronenberg and Mortensen — alongside writer Steven Knight and co-star Naomi Watts — turn their sights on the operations of the Russian mafia in London. When hospital midwife Anna Khitrova (Watts) comes across the diary…
Maximalism is the name of the game when it comes to RRR, S. S. Rajamouli’s three-plus-hour genre-defying action-musical-bromance, but I’m confident you’ll find it worth every minute. Rajamouli’s epic period piece fictionalizes the lives of two early-mid 20th century Indian revolutionaries, Komaram Bheem and Alluri Sitarama Raju, by asking the all-important question: what if these two men, who by all accounts never met, were actually…best friends? If that sounds a little silly it’s because it is, but that’s a feature,…
Liked reviews
The greatest opening scene of all time?????
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
Over here yelling "are they pulling a star trek vi?!" during the hospital scene while my fiancée looks at me in a real "welp, this is my life" kind of way
Cary Grant does not look good in aviator goggles, ergo nobody looks good in aviator goggles
The Rough Cut staff picks their favorite romantic comedies, with minimal in-fighting about the definition of the genre.
Check out our February 2022 Spotlight on Rom-Coms over at Rough Cut Cinema!