Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw. I’m your host, Nicolas Rapold. It’s not as well-known as the main competition, but I have always loved Cannes Classics and its selection of restorations, revivals, and film documentaries. The genuine discoveries and clever programming are outstanding, but many people find it hard to fit them into the usual crazy Cannes schedule. So, this year I vowed to put together a special Cannes Classics episode. There are far too many worthy titles to cover them all, but I g...
Jul 26, 2021•53 min
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. We heard from Amy Taubin at the beginning of this Cannes series, and now that the festival has wound down, I got together with Amy once more. This time, we single out some strong movies that could use more attention. That includes a remarkable group of films set in Latin America: Prayers for the Stolen, La Civil, and Clara Sola. We also talk about the Bangladeshi drama Rehana, and Amy gives a few preliminary thoughts on a much-anti...
Jul 25, 2021•55 min
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. For this week’s episode, I catch up with my colleague Jonathan Romney, a veteran critic of the festival circuit who regularly files for Screen Daily. For this year’s blockbuster Cannes lineup, he joins the podcast to talk about a strong batch of films that we haven’t heard about yet. That includes two Iranian movies: A Hero from Oscar winner Asghar Farhadi, and Hit the Road, from Panah Panahi. Plus there was a curious new movie co-...
Jul 20, 2021•50 min
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. By happenstance, we still have some of the biggest titles at Cannes to discuss, and I couldn’t be happier to talk about them with the critic Mark Asch, a longtime colleague who I’ve worked with as both an editor and a writer over the past decade and change. Mark brings a lot of goodies to the program, including Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch; Sean Baker’s Red Rocket; Titane, the sophomore feature from Julia Ducournau, who direc...
Jul 17, 2021•49 min
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. There are only a few days left in the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, but there are still plenty of excellent films left to tak about. So my job here is not done, and joining me today is the critic Carlos Valladares. We’ll talk about the unusual new film Cow, from Andrea Arnold, perhaps best known for American Honey and Red Road as well as work for television. We’ll also hear about the Spanish film Libertad, a sharp Croatian coming-of-a...
Jul 16, 2021•50 min
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. Today we're talking with Justin Chang, film critic at The Los Angeles Times, about more movies from the Cannes Film Festival. We talked about Blue Bayou, a drama from Justin Chon; Stillwater, starring Matt Damon, from the director of Spotlight; the mysterious Mia Hansen Love movie, Bergman Island; and Kogonada’s new science fiction film, After Yang, with Colin Farrell. I talked with Justin at the last edition of Cannes in 2019 and ...
Jul 15, 2021•48 min
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. Today from the Cannes film festival, we hear about the much anticipated film from director Paul Verhoeven: Benedetta, about a young nun whose sexual awakening causes a stir in her convent. My correspondent this time is the critic and programmer Jordan Cronk, whose work is published in many publications including Cinema Scope, Reverse Shot, and MUBI Notebook. Jordan also tells us about the vibrant film Ahed’s Knee, from Israeli aute...
Jul 13, 2021•42 min
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. Today we’ll hear about the new film from Joanna Hogg, The Souvenir Part 2, which continues the portrait of an artist begun in The Souvenir, again starring Honor Swinton Byrne and Tilda Swinton. We’ll also talk about Drive My Car, a Haruki Murakami adaptation from Ryusuke Hamaguchi, who is perhaps best known for Happy Hour and Asako I & II. And finally, a strong entry from Mahamat Saleh Haroun called Lingui, the Sacred Bonds, wh...
Jul 11, 2021•41 min
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. We are back talking about the highlights of the Cannes film festival with critic Amy Taubin. Last time we talked about the Velvet Underground and now we move on to another musical selection, Annette, the new film from Leos Carax, starring Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard. We also devote some time to two movies that haven’t been talked about as much in the frenzy of the festival’s first week: A Chiara, from Jonas Carpinagno, and Ari...
Jul 10, 2021•34 min
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. The Cannes Film Festival kicked off this week and so I joined forces with critic Amy Taubin, who is a veteran of the festival. This year Cannes is a little different for a number of reasons, which we talk about, but we also discuss the new film about The Velvet Underground from director Todd Haynes. Amy is actually in the documentary, and she was kind enough to share some of her firsthand experiences at the time with the Velvet Und...
Jul 09, 2021•32 min
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. The Cannes Film Festival begins this week, and part of its celebration of our collective return to movies is the world premiere of The Story of Film: A New Generation, from filmmaker and critic Mark Cousins. The latest work from Cousins looks at the most recent decade in cinema and sets out to pick the movies that brought something new to the art form. Cousins has taken on the herculean task of charting film history before, most fa...
Jul 07, 2021•40 min
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. The director Abel Ferrara takes movies into the outer limits of experience and emotion, often challenging us with characters in the grips of moral and spiritual corruption. His movies include King of New York, Bad Lieutenant, The Addiction, 4:44 Last Day on Earth, and the semiautobiographical Tommaso, which had its world premiere in Cannes. His latest film is Siberia, which premiered in Berlin and stars Ferrara’s frequent partner i...
Jul 06, 2021•26 min
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. This week is a two-part episode, with a special interview. First I chat with the one and only Amy Taubin about our recent viewing, starting with the new Steven Soderbergh movie, No Sudden Move, a highlight of the summer. We also cherry-pick a couple of films from festivals, Courtroom 3H and Souad. And looking at the big picture, we celebrate online programs like Another Screen. And then the grand finale: I chat with No Sudden Move ...
Jul 04, 2021•1 hr 12 min
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. This week I was happy to chat again with the critic Beatrice Loayza, whom you might know from her reviews in The New York Times and essays in Reverse Shot and other publications. We caught up with In the Heights and another sort of musical movie, Bo Burnham’s Inside. And since we hadn’t seen Fast 9 yet, I picked a replacement and talked about that instead: Walter Hill’s The Driver, with Ryan O’Neal, Bruce Dern, and Isabelle Adjani....
Jun 28, 2021•54 min
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. Directed by Janicza Bravo, Zola follows a Detroit waitress and dancer played by Taylour Paige as she goes along with her brand-new friend Stefani on a trip to Tampa, Florida. Stefani (Riley Keough) says the plan is to make some money stripping, but things get increasingly messy and shady and dangerous. It’s a comedy with a crazy energy that crashes into bleaker moments as Zola keeps a cool head in Stefani’s world of pimps, gangster...
Jun 23, 2021•37 min
You’re listening to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. First I interview the directors and co-stars of The Beta Test, a crackling new comedy of panic set in the double-talking world of Hollywood agents. Then it's the thrilling conclusion of my conversation with writer/critic Bruce Bennett, about the 1961 Japanese mystery/melodrama Zero Focus and bizarro 1975 thriller The 'Human' Factor, starring George Kennedy. The Beta Test screens in this year’s Tribeca Film Festival and com...
Jun 13, 2021•1 hr 27 min
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. First I chat with Christian Petzold, the delightful director of Transit, Phoenix, Barbara, and now Undine, which comes out June 4. Undine is about a Berlin historian(Paula Beer) who may be a figure from ancient myth. She gives regular lectures in tours of the municipal museum, and eventually she connects with an industrial diver (Franz Rogowski). This being a Petzold movie, there are layers of history and myth that haunt the main p...
Jun 03, 2021•1 hr 16 min
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. For a period in the 1980s and 90s, Oliver Stone directed movies as if somebody might stop him at any time. His movies tended to land like bombshells in American culture: Platoon, JFK, The Doors, Natural Born Killers, to name a few. I spoke with Stone recently on the occasion of the paperback publication of his latest book, Chasing the Light: Writing, Directing, and Surviving Platoon, Midnight Express, Scarface, Salvador, and the Mo...
May 28, 2021•36 min
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. Every year the True/False Film Fest puts together a terrific showcase of nonfiction film, and for several years I’ve headed out to Columbia, Missouri, to attend. This year I attended virtually and compared notes with someone who went in person, Screen Slate managing editor Cosmo Bjorkenheim. After our conversation, I talk with Theo Anthony, the director of the fascinating essay film All Light, Everywhere, which screened in True/Fal...
May 18, 2021•1 hr 30 min
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. For his new book, Films of Endearment, critic Michael Koresky (Reverse Shot) watched 10 movies from the 1980s with his mother, a fellow movie lover. This simple premise becomes a way to talk about the decade’s bounty of great acting by women and reflect on the many facets of his mother’s life and their relationship together. Michael makes it look easy as he mingles film criticism, family biography, and social history, with his char...
May 09, 2021•55 min
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host Nicolas Rapold. This week I talk with the one and only Manohla Dargis, a chief film critic at The New York Times. We chose a couple of movies to watch in advance -- one by a pioneering French female filmmaker who should be better known, another a Hollywood small-town picture with an intriguing pair of stars -- and discuss. We also talk about television aesthetics, life under the pandemic, and, taking a fresh audiovisual angle, AOC’s historic use of...
May 03, 2021•1 hr 29 min
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. This week the conversation starts with R.W. Fassbinder's serial drama Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day. My guest is a regular on the show, critic Beatrice Loayza (The New York Times, Reverse Shot, A.V. Club). Beatrice’s viewing leads us to two dramas with British star Dirk Bogarde and two comedies by the great Albert Brooks. We also take the measure of studio blockbuster filmmaking from recent months, including Godzilla vs. Kong and No...
Apr 26, 2021•56 min
Streaming is a subject that’s often left weirdly opaque, but this week’s guests bring industry insights that are illuminating and informative. The starting point is a new series on the Criterion Channel called Close to Home in which filmmakers drew inspiration from their own homes and everyday lives, from Martin Scorsese to Maya Deren to Blake Edwards to Chantal Akerman. It was co-programmed by Nellie Killian, programmer at Screen Slate, and Chris Wells, who works at MUBI in distribution. They d...
Apr 18, 2021•1 hr 29 min
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. The film Collective is an investigation of corruption in the aftermath of a deadly fire in a Romanian nightclub that led to protests that toppled the prime minister. Director Alexander Nanau follows tenacious journalists as they expose wrongdoing at hospitals and in government dealings with the help of whistleblowers. He also gains access to a newly appointed health minister who is trying to reform the system. Like All the Presiden...
Apr 09, 2021•27 min
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. This week Genevieve Yue tells us about a film series she programmed at Metrograph called Implicit Movies. It's a fascinating selection of films, exploring a world of backgrounds, bit parts, and fragmented memories that lurk behind every image. Genevieve is an assistant professor of culture and media at the New School, and so we also talk about how she taught Uncut Gems in one of her classes. And as part of my “bring a friend” initi...
Apr 04, 2021•1 hr 7 min
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host Nicolas Rapold. For this special episode I talk with director David Fincher and production designer Don Burt about Mank, a black-and-white evocation of Hollywood through the jaded eyes of one Herman J. Mankiewicz, as he writes the screenplay for Citizen Kane. If you’ve seen any Fincher films since Zodiac, you’ve also seen Burt's beautiful work, which won him an Academy Award for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. We talk about the conception of M...
Apr 02, 2021•49 min
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host Nicolas Rapold. This week we begin with some films from the cult label Something Weird Video: the revenge drama Johnny Firecloud, and a couple of films from the one and only Doris Wishman. My adventurous guest is Adam Piron, Los Angeles-based programmer for the Sundance Film Festival where he's associate director of the indigenous program. Other movies discussed: Straight Time; Bless Their Little Hearts; The Exiles; and the silent movie The Daughte...
Mar 28, 2021•1 hr 6 min
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host Nicolas Rapold. Critic Nick Pinkerton and cinematographer Sean Price Williams join this episode. Pinkerton’s new book on Tsai Mingliang’s wonderful film Goodbye Dragon Inn is available now from Fireflies Press. Sean Price Williams’s vibrant and dynamic work as a cinematographer includes the acclaimed movies Good Time, directed by Josh and Benny Safdie, and Her Smell, directed by Alex Ross Perry. A leading cinematographer of his generation, Williams...
Mar 19, 2021•1 hr 3 min
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host Nicolas Rapold. For the final installment in our essential picks from the 2021 Berlin Film Festival, I’m joined by Berlin-based critic Jessica Kiang, who wrote about the festival for The New York Times and filed multiple reviews of highlights for Variety. Movies discussed include The Scary of 61st, from Red Scare podcast co-host Dasha Nekrasova; the Georgian small-scale epic What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?; fresh readings of Alice Diop’s We...
Mar 15, 2021•1 hr 7 min
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host Nicolas Rapold. The one and only Amy Taubin joins to talk about a couple of selections from the Berlin Film Festival and Berlin Critics’ Week, with some comments on watching on the small screen. Movies discussed include Ballad of a White Cow, An Unusual Summer, Nous (We), and Petite Maman. You can support this podcast and read show notes with links at: rapold.substack.com Opening music: “Monserrate” by The Minarets Photo by Steve Snodgrass
Mar 12, 2021•40 min
