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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Ep. 355: Jafar Panahi on It Was Just an Accident

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. This year during the New York Film Festival, I was extremely fortunate to speak with Jafar Panahi, director of It Was Just an Accident. The story concerns a prison survivor who runs into the man he believes to be his former tormenter, leading him to take action and reconnect with others. Panahi’s outstanding film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year, after years of government bans of one kind or another on his filmmaking and freedoms. Through a translator I spoke with Panahi about It Was Just an Accident and especially the enduring philosophical issues raised by its characters living under a repressive regime.

It Was Just an Accident opens in theaters on October 15.

My thanks to the translator for making the conversation possible. (Please note that because of recording circumstances, the audio of my questions is only in English.)

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Ep. 354: Robert Daniels on Good News, Anemone, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, The Love That Remains

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. In the last week of the 2025 New York Film Festival I was pleased to catch up with Chicago-based critic Robert Daniels, who is associate editor at RogerEbert.Com and a regular contributor at The New York Times. We talked about a few movies he had seen while attending NYFF, as well as an outstanding title from the Toronto film festival that’s coming up this week on Netflix. Films we discussed included Anemone (directed by Ronan Day-Lewis), Good News (Byun Sung-Hyun), Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (Scott Cooper), and The Love That Remains (Hlynur Palmason).

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Ep. 353: Sergei Loznitsa on his latest film Two Prosecutors

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. At the 2025 New York Film Festival I spoke with Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa, whose fiction and documentary work comprise an ongoing examination of history, war, memory, and resistance. His latest film, Two Prosecutors, is set in 1937 and based on a novella by Soviet scientist and political prisoner Georgy Demidov. In the almost parable-like story, a young prosecutor, Kolev, sets out to investigate the status of a prisoner in a gulag who has managed to get a note to the outside world, but Kolev's reasoned attempts run into the full force of the Stalinist regime. Just before the New York Film Festival premiere of Two Prosecutors, I spoke with Loznitsa about the contemporary resonance of the story, his choices in shooting and locations, the incredible resilience required to survive under these circumstances, two films that he recommends around this subject matter, and what conclusions about paths forward can be drawn from this history.

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Ep. 352: Kleber Mendonça Filho on The Secret Agent

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. At the 2025 New York Film Festival I was fortunate enough to speak with Kleber Mendonça Filho, director of The Secret Agent. Set during the military dictatorship in 1977 Brazil, his riveting film follows a man who must go into hiding under a new identity after running afoul of a corrupt businessman. Utterly unpredictable and mingling the rhythms of daily life and survival, as well as the machinations of violent enforcers, it was a movie I was eager to talk to the director about, written as it was under the regime of Jair Bolsonaro (later rejected and convicted). We discuss the portrayal of the protagonist (played by Wagner Moura), the role of memories in capturing the time period, how geography figures into Brazil’s history, the film’s fascinating den-mother character (Tania Maria), and a range of his viewing—from last week to pandemic viewing under Bolsonaro to teenage years.

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Ep. 351: Pre-Code Parade with Cristina Cacioppo and Caroline Golum: Supernatural, Night Nurse, Million Dollar Legs, and more

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. For the latest episode I’m delighted to be joined by programmer Cristina Cacioppo and writer-director Caroline Golum for a celebration of pre-code films in all their anarchic, outré splendor. Cristina Cacioppo is director of programming at Brooklyn’s Nitehawk Cinema where she and Caroline present Pre-Code Parade, a regular series of pre-code movies (shown on film!). We discuss titles that will show or have already shown at Nitehawk, including: the upcoming Supernatural, a psychic medium thriller starring Carole Lombard; the W.C. Fields fake-country Duck Soup-esque comedy Million Dollar Legs; and Night Nurse, the Prohibition-era working-girl classic starring Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Blondell, and Clark Gable as a sinister chauffeur.

Supernatural screens October 7 at Nitehawk Cinema at Prospect Park. Caroline Golum's new feature, Revelations of Divine Love, premiered at FIDMarseille.

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Ep. 350: Tim Grierson on One Battle After Another, Hamnet, Wake Up Dead Man: Knives Out 3, The Lost Bus, Hedda

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. As we look ahead to the fall with movies from Venice and Toronto set for release, I was very happy to talk about some Big Fall Films with Tim Grierson, Senior U.S. Critic for Screen Daily and a battle-tested veteran of the key festivals. But of course there was also another title that stood apart from festivals this year that we couldn’t miss to talk about either: the new Paul Thomas Anderson movie. So the titles we discussed include One Battle After Another (directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, opening September 26), Hamnet (Chloe Zhao, November 27), Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (Rian Johnson, November 26), Hedda (Nia DaCosta, October 22), and The Lost Bus (Paul Greengrass, out now).

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Ep. 349: Toronto 2025: Edo Choi on The Christophers, Wavelengths, The Currents, Two Pianos, Nouvelle Vague, plus Tuner

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. The 50th edition of the Toronto International Film Festival had far too many movies for a single episode, and so I’m happy to talk through more titles with Edo Choi, film programmer at Metrograph. Among the films discussed are The Christophers (directed by Steven Soderbergh), Two Pianos (Arnaud Desplechin), The Currents (Milagros Mumenthaler), Nouvelle Vague (Richard Linklater), Tuner (Daniel Roher), and a few highlights from the Wavelengths section: Morgenkreis (Basma al-Sharif), CONFERENCE (Björn Kämmerer), Rojo Zalia Blau (Viktoria Schmid), and FELT (Blake Williams).

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Ep. 348: Mark Asch on Toronto 2025: Christy, Maddie’s Secret, Claire Denis’s The Fence, Sacrifice

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. The Toronto International Film Festival began its 50th edition, and for this jubilee year, I kicked things off with critic Mark Asch, a past TIFF correspondent on the podcast who is writing for The Art Newspaper and Little White Lies. Among the TIFF premieres discussed are Christy (directed by David Michod and starring Sydney Sweeney), The Fence (directed by Claire Denis), Maddie’s Secret (directed by and starring John Early), and Sacrifice (a Romain Gavras joint). Stay tuned for more on TIFF’s sprawling slate!

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Ep. 347: Venice 2025 – Jessica Kiang on Silent Friend, Duse, Cover-Up, Girl, The Holy Boy, plus In the Hand of Dante

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. For a grand finale to my episodes from the 2025 Venice Film Festival, I sat down with critic Jessica Kiang, who is writing reviews from Venice for Variety. Among the films discussed are Silent Friend (directed by Ildiko Enyedi), Cover-Up (Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus), Duse (Pietro Marcello), Girl (Shu Qi), No Other Choice (Park Chan-wook), and The Holy Boy (Paolo Strippoli), with my few additional sleep-deprived words on In the Hand of Dante (Julian Schnabel). Please note: this was recorded before the end of the festival.

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