The Last Thing I Saw

Ep. 266: Venice 2024: Guy Lodge on Harvest, Babygirl Redux, Peacock, Diciannove (Nineteen) Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. The 81st Venice Film Festival is underway, and I’m podcasting from the Lido about the latest movies to screen. This time I chatted with critic Guy Lodge of Variety about a number of titles including Harvest (directed by Athina Rachel Tsangari), Diciannove (Giovanni Tortorici), Peacock (Bernhard Wenger), and one more time, Babygirl (Halina Reijn), starring Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson. Please support the production of this podcast by signing up at: rapold.substack.com Photo by Steve Snodgrass

Ep. 265: Venice 2024: Glenn Kenny on The Room Next Door, I’m Still Here, Wolfs, Separated, Finally, The Brutalist Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. The 81st Venice Film Festival is underway, and I’m podcasting from on site about the latest movies to screen. This time I chatted with critic Glenn Kenny (Roger Ebert, The New York Times) about a number of titles including The Room Next Door (directed by Pedro Almodóvar), I’m Still Here (Walter Salles), Separated (Errol Morris), Wolfs (Jon Watts), and Finally (Claude Lelouch), with notes on a couple of restorations. Glenn also weighs in on The Brutalist and One to One: John & Yoko. Please support the production of this podcast by signing up at: rapold.substack.com Photo by Steve Snodgrass

Ep. 264: Venice 2024: Jordan Cronk on The Brutalist, Cloud, Baby Invasion, The Day the Clown Cried, Three Friends Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. The 81st Venice Film Festival has just begun, and I’m podcasting from the festival about the latest movies to screen. This time I chatted with critic and programmer Jordan Cronk. Among the titles we discussed are The Brutalist (directed by Brady Corbet), Cloud (Kiyoshi Kurosawa), Baby Invasion (Harmony Korine), Three Friends (Emmanuel Mouret), and a documentary about Jerry Lewis’s unfinished film The Day the Clown Cried, From Darkness To Light (Michael Lurie and Eric Friedler). Please support the production of this podcast by signing up at: rapold.substack.com Photo by Steve Snodgrass

Ep. 263: Venice 2024: Jonathan Romney on Maria, Babygirl, The Quay Bros., John and Yoko, Beetlejuice 2 Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. The 81st Venice Film Festival has just begun, and I will be podcasting from the festival about the latest lineup. To make sense of the opening batch of movies, I sat down for a chat with critic Jonathan Romney, who is covering the festival for Screen Daily and The Observer. Among the titles we discussed are Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (directed by Tim Burton), Maria (Pablo Larrain), Babygirl (Halina Reijn), One to One: John & Yoko (Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards), and the long-in-the-making new film from The Brothers Quay, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. Please support the production of this podcast by signing up at: rapold.substack.com Photo by Steve Snodgrass

Ep. 262: Locarno 2024 with Keva York: Invention, Sparrow in the Chimney, Mandico, Vernier Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. Before the fall schedule of festivals and new releases begins in earnest, the Locarno festival has its say with a few choice selections (last year including one of my favorites, Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World). This year, I chatted about the Locarno selection with critic Keva York, who was attending the festival. We discussed a few stimulating movies including Invention (directed by Courtney Stephens), Dragon Dilatation (Bertrand Mandico), Cent mille milliards (Virgil Vernier), and The Sparrow in the Chimney (Ramon Zurcher). Please note that this episode was recorded earlier in August during the Locarno Festival. Please support the production of this podcast by signing up at: rapold.substack.com Photo by Steve Snodgrass

Ep. 261: Nathan Silver and C. Mason Wells on The Strange Mr. Victor, Serpent’s Path, Parenthood, and more Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. Nathan Silver’s latest movie Between the Temples comes to cinemas on August 23, with a cast lead by Jason Schwartzman and Carol Kane. So for this episode, Silver and his co-writer, C. Mason Wells, join the podcast to talk about recent viewing (some of it in preparation for writing a new film!). Among the titles discussed are The Strange Mr. Victor (Jean Gremillon, 1938), Serpent’s Path (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1998), Parenthood (Ron Howard, 1989), and other intriguing picks from their viewing. Please support the production of this podcast by signing up at: rapold.substack.com Photo by Steve Snodgrass

Ep. 260: Trap, Twisters, This Closeness, Janet Planet, Last Summer, and more with Maxwell Paparella and Elissa Suh Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. After a little summer vacation, it’s time once again to chat about some recent releases with two guests making their premieres on the podcast: Maxwell Paparella, an editor at MUBI Notebook, and Elissa Suh, a critic who’s published in Screen Slate, Vogue, and Bon Appetit, and writes a substack called MOVIEPUDDING. We talk about the new M. Night Shyamalan movie, starring Josh Hartnett; Twisters (Lee Isaac Chung) and the matter of Glen Powell; This Closeness (Kit Zauhar); Annie Baker's Janet Planet; Family Portrait (Lucy Kerr); and Last Summer (Catherine Breillat). Please support the production of this podcast by signing up at: rapold.substack.com Photo by Steve Snodgrass

Ep. 259: K.J. Relth-Miller on Il Cinema Ritrovato 2024: Sisters of Nishijin, Amadeus, Anatole Livtak retro, The Innerview, The Sealed Soil Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. Il Cinema Ritrovato, the annual festival of revivals and restorations, showcases a bounty of discoveries, classics, and rarities in Bologna, Italy, many of which will then make their way across the world. Among the eager audience members was K.J. Relth-Miller, director of film programs at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles, who joins this episode to share some highlights. Film discussed include: Sisters of Nishijin and Undercurrent (both directed by Kozaburo Yoshimura), L’Equipage and The Snake Pit (Anatole Litvak), The Innerview (Richard Beymer), Deliverance (John Boorman), The Sealed Soil (Marva Nabili, whose film is the earliest surviving Iranian feature by a female director), and already touring this week in a restoration, Amadeus (Milos Forman). Please support the production of this podcast by signing up at: rapold.substack.com Photo by Steve Snodgrass

Ep. 258: Amy Taubin on Tribeca Picks, Agnieszka Holland, Bleak Week, Mireia Sallarès’s Little Deaths Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. Why go through the summer without a return visit from the inimitable Amy Taubin? On this episode we discuss a few films cherry-picked from this year’s Tribeca Festival; Agnieszka Holland and her incisive latest film Green Border; the intriguing repertory series known as Bleak Week, held annually at L.A.’s American Cinematheque and recently exported to New York’s Paris Theater; and two works by Mireia Sallarès, Little Deaths and The Potential History of Francesc Tosquelles, Catalonia and Fear. Plus: I share a remarkable documentary about police investigations called Roubaix, Police Department, Ordinary Business, a discovery on the OVID streaming service. Please support the production of this podcast by signing up at: rapold.substack.com Photo by Steve Snodgrass

Ep. 257: The Nitrate Picture Show 2024 with David Schwartz Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. The Nitrate Picture Show takes place every year in Rochester, New York, at the George Eastman Museum, projecting movies from nitrate prints. The resulting super-vivid images create a movie-going experience that can be, in the words of my guest, programmer David Schwartz, “life-changing.” I asked Schwartz about some of his highlights at this increasingly popular festival, including The Good Fairy (directed by William Wyler), Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli), Intolerance (D.W. Griffith), and The Strawberry Blonde (Raoul Walsh). We also talked about films that offered something a little different such as the documentary The Plow That Broke the Plains (Pare Lorentz), the experimental parody Tomato’s Another Day (James Sibley Watson), Homecoming (Hideo Oba), and Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero. Plus: rare Lubitsch (From Mayerling to Sarajevo) and Renoir’s A Day in the Country. Please support the production of this podcast by signing up at: rapold.substack.com Photo by Steve Snodgrass