Episodes
Ep. 256: Amy Taubin on Leos Carax’s It’s Not Me, The Shrouds, Charles Atlas, Arthur Jafa, Man Ray, and More
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. The one and only Amy Taubin comes back to The Last Thing I Saw for a wide-ranging conversation about what she’s been watching. That includes at least a couple of Cannes titles—Leos Carax’s It’s Not Me and David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds—and New York repertory highlights from the spring: the enormous Charles Atlas...
Published 06/09/24
Ep. 255: Cannes 2024 Redux: Jessica Kiang on Black Dog, 2nd Features, The Other Way Around, Viet and Nam
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. Every year at Cannes there are a few more films I want to talk about, even as the time is running out at the festival. So for a very special postscript (and postgame), critic Jessica Kiang of Variety joined to talk about the ones that got away. Among the titles discussed: Un Certain Regard prize-winner Black Dog (directed by...
Published 06/05/24
Ep. 254: Cannes 2024 Finale: Manohla Dargis on The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Anora, The Apprentice, Marcello Mio, and more
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. It’s become an annual tradition on the last day of Cannes to sit down with Manohla Dargis, the chief film critic for The New York Times, and take stock of the festival, some selected highlights, and other points of interest. For our 2024 chat, in a corner of the Palais starting to buzz with activity before...
Published 06/01/24
Ep. 253: Cannes 2024: Justin Chang on All We Imagine as Light, Caught by the Tides, The Shrouds
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. On the latest selection of highlights recorded during the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, I was delighted to sit down with Justin Chang of The New Yorker, recent recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, with whom I’d last chatted when he was at the Los Angeles Times. On this episode, occasionally to the soundtrack of Cannes doves...
Published 05/28/24
Ep. 252: Cannes 2024: Beatrice Loayza on Visiting Hours, Eat the Night, and September Says
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. On the latest episode chock full of highlights from the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, I sat down with critic Beatrice Loayza to discuss some of the lesser-spoken-about titles from the festival. That includes two titles from Directors’ Fortnight: Patricia Mazuy’s Visiting Hours, starring Isabelle Huppert and Hafsia Herzi, and Eat the Night...
Published 05/27/24
Ep. 251: Cannes 2024: Nick Davis on Bird, Grand Tour, Emilia Perez, Motel Destino
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. On the latest episode chock full of highlights from the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, I welcome a dear old friend, Nick Davis, a professor of film at Northwestern University and writer/editor of his own outstanding longtime site of film criticism (nick-davis.com). On his inaugural visit to Cannes, he shared his typically quicksilver thoughts on a...
Published 05/26/24
Ep. 250: Cannes 2024: Eric Hynes on Caught by the Tides, Apprendre, Cannes Classics (Brocka, Bellocchio, Insta-Wiseman)
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. On the latest episode from the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, I bring back Eric Hynes, curator of film at Museum of the Moving Image, to discuss two essential highlights of this year’s edition—Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides and Claire Simon’s Apprendre—and restorations from Cannes Classics: Lino Brocka’s Bona,...
Published 05/24/24
Ep. 249: Cannes 2024: Jonathan Romney on Misericordia, Rumours, Being Maria, The Second Act, Parthenope
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. On the latest episode on the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, I chatted with critic Jonathan Romney and caught up with a number of movies in this year’s edition: Misericordia (directed by Alain Guiraudie), The Second Act (Quentin Dupieux), Being Maria (Jessica Palud), Parthenope (Paolo Sorrentino), and Rumours (Guy Maddin and Evan...
Published 05/24/24
Ep. 248: Cannes 2024: Mark Asch on Anora, Horizon, Julie Keeps Quiet, Armand, It Doesn’t Matter
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. On the latest episode on the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, I sat down with Mark Asch, critic and pod vivant, to talk about several highlights, each from a different section or showcase at Cannes. We discuss the highly acclaimed Anora (directed by Sean Baker, in Competition), Armand (Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel, from Un Certain Regard), Julie...
Published 05/23/24
Ep. 247: Cannes 2024: Jon Dieringer on The Apprentice, The Substance, Megalopolis Squared
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. On the latest episode on the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, I’m joined by Jon Dieringer, editor and mastermind of Screen Slate, to cope with a couple of doozies in this year’s lineup. First up is The Apprentice (directed by Ali Abbasi), also known as The Trump Movie, followed by the full-on The Substance (Coralie Fargeat). Both movies also...
Published 05/22/24
Ep. 246: Cannes 2024: Bilge Ebiri on Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness, Schrader’s Oh Canada, Furiosa, plus Bertolucci
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. For the latest episode on the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, I was happy to chat with Bilge Ebiri of New York Magazine for his inaugural Cannes appearance on the podcast. We discuss the much-anticipated new films from Yorgos Lanthimos (Kinds of Kindness), Paul Schrader (Oh Canada), and for a well-deserved encore,...
Published 05/20/24
Ep. 245: Cannes 2024: Jordan Cronk on Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, The Damned, Eephus, Universal Language
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. The 77th edition of the Cannes Film Festival marches on, and I sat down with critic and programmer Jordan Cronk to hear about some recent highlights from Directors’ Fortnight and Un Certain Regard: Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point (directed by Tyler Taormina), The Damned (Roberto Minervini), Eephus (Carson Lund), and...
Published 05/19/24
Ep. 244: Cannes 2024 with Alissa Wilkinson: Furiosa, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, The Invasion, Ghost Trail, Ernest Cole
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. The 77th edition of the Cannes Film Festival is officially underway, and it’s easy to miss films in the scrum of first few days. So I spoke with Alissa Wilkinson of The New York Times about, yes, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, but also Ghost Trail (directed by Jonathan Millet) in Critics’ Week, On Becoming a Guinea...
Published 05/17/24
Ep. 243: Cannes 2024: Eric Hynes on Megalopolis, plus Napoleon and The Girl With the Needle
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. The 77th edition of the Cannes Film Festival is officially underway, and no film was more highly anticipated than Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis. To get the very latest, I connected with Eric Hynes, curator of film at the Museum of the Moving Image, fresh from a press screening of the movie, which has loomed over Cannes’ opening...
Published 05/16/24
Ep. 242: Cannes 2024: Arnaud Desplechin on Filmlovers! and recent favorites
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. The 77th edition of the Cannes Film Festival opens this week, and for my 2024 series of Cannes episodes, I begin by talking with director Arnaud Desplechin about his new documentary that’s premiering at Cannes, Filmlovers! (aka Spectateurs!). Desplechin’s Kings and Queen is a 21st-century classic, and a formative viewing experience for me, so it was a...
Published 05/15/24
Ep. 241: Kelly Reichardt on Alain Delon, David Lean's Passionate Friends, Recreating Rear Window, and more
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. With a retrospective of Kelly Reichardt’s work starting at Metrograph, I had the honor and pleasure of sitting down with Reichardt in one of the Metrograph theaters to talk about... the last things she saw! The director of (most recently) Showing Up discussed a run of Alain Delon movies she saw in the theater—starting with...
Published 05/11/24
Ep. 240: Caroline Golum on Quebec-Core, Ghosts of Mars, The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed, Borzage’s Man’s Castle
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. Filmmaker and self-described “rep rat” Caroline Golum returns to the podcast after far too long to discuss highlights from recent viewing! These include: Au clair de la lune (1983, Andre Forcier) from the “Quebec-Core” series at Anthology Film Archives; couples viewing Ghosts of Mars (2001,...
Published 05/05/24
Ep. 239: Bertrand Bonello on The Beast, Experimenting with AI, Crafting Melodrama, Reading Henry James, and more
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. Bertrand Bonello’s latest film The Beast has been melting minds with its time-skipping saga of star-crossed lovers and strangers played by Léa Seydoux and George Mackay. Inspired by a Henry James story, The Beast spans three different time periods and pairings: a married woman and a suitor in the 1910s (Belle...
Published 04/30/24
Ep. 238: Time director Garrett Bradley on instincts, Devotion, America, and Satyajit Ray’s Devi
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. Garrett Bradley is the director of Time, the Oscar-nominated 2020 documentary about Sibil Fox Richardson and her efforts to get her husband released from prison. Bradley has directed several incredible short films, including Alone (2017, about a friend planning to marry her imprisoned boyfriend) and America (2019, an amazing visual...
Published 04/25/24
Ep. 237: Screen Slate leader Jon Dieringer on Civil War, plus Roadhouse, Quiet on Set, The Eclipse
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw with your host, Nicolas Rapold. With the country in the grips of Civil War fever, I join forces with Screen Slate editor-in-chief Jon Dieringer, who was fresh from seeing the much-anticipated movie at a local Regal Cinema. We talk about the different layers to Civil War and Alex Garland’s approach to depicting a future United States that’s broken up into separate...
Published 04/14/24
Ep. 236: CPH:DOX 2024 with Mads K. Mikkelsen on Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other, Kix, and much more
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw with your host, Nicolas Rapold. For this episode I journeyed to Copenhagen for the 2024 edition of CPH:DOX, and talked about my favorite documentaries from the selection with the festival’s Head of Program Mads K. Mikkelsen. These include films about a Hungarian skateboarder growing up (Kix, directed by Dávid Mikulán and Bálint Révész), about the...
Published 04/05/24
Ep. 235: K.J. Relth-Miller on Berlin Retrospectives: Lubitsch, Helke Sander, Carlos Saura, and more
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw with your host, Nicolas Rapold. For a number of festivals now, I’ve been fortunate enough to delve into the retrospective selections with programmer K.J. Relth-Miller from the Academy Museum (who also teaches at CalArts). This time we talked about the special Retrospective selections drawn from the Deutsche Kinemathek and films in the Classics section at the...
Published 03/29/24
Ep. 234: Radu Jude on Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw with your host, Nicolas Rapold. This week I present a chat with Radu Jude, the director of what’s already the most acclaimed movie of the year: Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World. The wild, funny, multi-layered movie follows a young production assistant, Angela (the incredible Ilinca Manolache), on her endless days working in Bucharest, Romania. Jude creates a crazy quilt that...
Published 03/23/24
Ep. 233: Christine Smallwood on Chantal Akerman and La Captive
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw with your host, Nicolas Rapold. This week a new book on Chantal Akerman by Christine Smallwood enters the world, a volume about Akerman’s wholly original Proust adaptation La Captive that’s the latest in the Fireflies Press series of Decadent Editions focused on films of the 2000s. So I was delighted to speak with Smallwood about Akerman and her film's hypnotic exploration of the strange...
Published 03/13/24
Ep. 232: Eric Hynes on First Look and True/False 2024: Flying Lessons, There Was, There Was Not, Knit’s Island, Achilles
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw with your host, Nicolas Rapold. As I did last year, I joined forces with Eric Hynes, curator of film at Museum of the Moving Image, for a double fest discussion, covering True/False, the Missouri nonfiction festival, and MoMI’s own annual First Look in New York. We discuss titles including: Flying Lessons (directed by Elizabeth Nichols),...
Published 03/07/24