Ep. 356: Alissa Wilkinson on The Perfect Neighbor, Is This Thing On, A House of Dynamite, Diane Keaton, Frankenstein, Sphere

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. As the fall season gets underway and movies make their way to screens and streaming, I was happy to talk with Alissa Wilkinson, a movie critic at The New York Times and author of We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine. Among the titles we discussed were The Perfect Neighbor (directed by Geeta Gandbhir), Is This Thing On? (Bradley Cooper), A House of Dynamite (Kathryn Bigelow), and—in memory of Diane Keaton’s recent passing—Reds (Warren Beatty). We also think about the prominence of movies playing off mothers and fathers in extreme circumstances, such as Hamnet, Die My Love, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, and the postpartum-inflected Frankenstein. Plus, I ask about Wilkinson’s trip to Sphere—just Sphere—in Las Vegas.

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Photo by Steve Snodgrass