The Last Thing I Saw

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 Universal Language (Matthew Rankin). I also flag Everybody Loves Touda, directed by Nabil Ayouch and co-written by Maryam Touzani (The Blue Caftan). Stay tuned for more to come! Please support the production of this podcast by signing up at: rapold.substack.com Photo by Steve Snodgrass

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 Fowl (Rungano Nyoni) in Un Certain Regard, Sergei Loznitsa’s wartime Ukraine documentary The Invasion, and Ernest Cole: Lost and Found, Raoul Peck’s look at the photographer and South African exile. Please support the production of this podcast by signing up at: rapold.substack.com Photo by Steve Snodgrass

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 days this year. He shared his initial thoughts about Megalopolis, which stars Adam Driver as a would-be visionary city planner, and about another competition title, The Girl with the Needle (Magnus von Horn), and a Cannes Classics selection, Abel Gance’s Napoleon. Please support the production of this podcast by signing up at: rapold.substack.com Photo by Steve Snodgrass

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 pleasure chatting about how movies first seized his imagination, about interviewing movie lovers of all stripes, the Garry Marshall movie he insisted on presenting at the cinematheque just before Cannes, reflecting on tragedy through movies, and the last movie he saw (and purchased). Please support the production of this podcast by signing up at: rapold.substack.com Photo by Steve Snodgrass

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 Purple Noon—and also films she uses in her teaching at Bard College, in coursework that involves students re-creating the filmmaking of certain scenes. “American Landscapes: The Cinema of Kelly Reichardt” begins May 11 at Metrograph, starting with her first feature, River of Grass, on through Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff, Night Moves, Certain Women, First Cow, and her most recent, Showing Up, plus two shorts streaming on Metrograph at Home. Please support the production of this podcast by signing up at: rapold.substack.com Photo by Steve Snodgrass

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, The Great John Carpenter); new release The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed (Joanna Arnow); and My Morning with Magic Mike (John Wilson, visiting Mike Kuchar), which was available for the blink of a week on Le Cinéma Club. I also shout-out Museum of the Moving Image’s discovery-laden Hiroshi Shimizu series (e.g. Children of the Beehive, 1948) and, also from Quebec-Core, Mireille Dansereau’s Dream Life (1972). Please support the production of this podcast by signing up at: rapold.substack.com Photo by Steve Snodgrass

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 Époque), an actress and a madman in 2010’s California, and a woman facing a fateful choice in a not-too-distant future where artificial intelligence promises to remove individual trauma. I chatted with the restless French auteur (Nocturama, Saint Laurent) about the struggle for connection across these stories, being tempted by AI, directing Mackay and Seydoux, and more. The Beast is in theaters now, and Bonello’s previous feature, Coma, will have its first U.S. theatrical run on May 17. Please support the production of this podcast by signing up at: rapold.substack.com Photo by Steve Snodgrass

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 historical pageant that includes shots from the 1914 film Lime Kiln Club Field Day starring Bert Williams). Bradley has described her work as being about Black life, and also as a series of love stories, and she’s just published a new book of dialogues, essays, and images, called Devotion. The book will be celebrated with a program at Metrograph screening some of her shorts, Time, and a film of her choosing: Satyajit Ray’s 1960 film Devi, about a young woman believed to be a goddess. We spoke about the instincts that guide her filmmaking, the importance of editing and immediacy in her practice, her thoughts on her film America, and what she’s working on now (which may include an adaptation of Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower...). Please support the production of this podcast by signing up at: rapold.substack.com Photo by Steve Snodgrass

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 regions and armies and has a belligerent president in the White House. (The plot follows four journalists—played by Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny, and Stephen McKinley Henderson—who are driving to Washington, D.C., to try to interview the president.) Jon and I also share some other recent watches, including the documentary series Quiet on Set (directed by Mary Robertson & Emma Schwartz), the Road House remake (Doug Liman), Larry Fessenden’s latest horror movie, Blackout, and nature’s own mighty contribution to cinema. Please support the production of this podcast by signing up at: rapold.substack.com Photo by Steve Snodgrass

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 relationship between photographer Joel Meyerowitz and writer Maggie Barrett (Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other, directed by Jacob Perlmutter and Manon Ouimet), and about Brazilian love motels (Eros, directed by Rachel Daisy Ellis). We also discuss The Limits of Europe (directed by Apolena Rychlíková, featuring journalist Saša Uhlová), Balomania (Sissel Morell Dargis), La Base (Vadim Dumesh), Once Upon a Time in a Forest (Virpi Suutari) and the documentary that went on to win the festival’s top prize, The Flats (Alessandra Celesia). Please support the production of this podcast by signing up at: rapold.substack.com Photo by Steve Snodgrass