Ep. 199: Venice 2023 with Guy Lodge: Poor Things, New Wiseman, City of Wind, Explanation for Everything

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw. I’m your host, Nicolas Rapold. The 80th Venice Film Festival has begun, and I’m reporting from Venice about the movies that are making their premieres here. For the second episode, I’m joined by Guy Lodge, who’s writing for Variety and Film of the Week. We discuss Yorgos Lanthimos’s unexpected hit Poor Things, Frederick Wiseman’s Menus Plaisirs – Les Troisgros, and two films from the Horizons section: City of Wind from director Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir, and Gabor Reisz’s Explanation for Everything.

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Photo by Steve Snodgrass

Ep. 198: Venice 2023 with Glenn Kenny: Ferrari, Dogman, Hollywoodgate

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw. I’m your host, Nicolas Rapold. The 80th Venice Film Festival has begun, and I’ll be reporting from Venice about the movies that are making their premieres. For the first episode, I’m joined by Glenn Kenny of The New York Times and RogerEbert.com. We discuss Michael Mann’s highly anticipated Ferrari, Luc Besson’s Dogman, and Ibrahim Nash'at’s extraordinary Taliban documentary Hollywoodgate, and Glenn shares what other movies he’s looking forward to seeing.

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Photo by Steve Snodgrass

Ep. 197: Manohla Dargis on Summertime Viewing (and possibly Barbie)

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw. I’m your host, Nicolas Rapold. This week I catch up with a very special guest, Manohla Dargis, chief film critic of The New York Times. Instead of comparing festival notes or discussing recent reviews, this is a glimpse at what Dargis happens to have been watching recently. So in the interest of preserving the surprise, I’ll leave out the usual viewing list, though I can say we get some final thoughts on Barbie.

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Photo by Steve Snodgrass

Ep. 196: Locarno 2023 with K.J. Relth-Miller on Mexican Retro: Spectacle Every Day

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw. I’m your host, Nicolas Rapold. We have one final report from the Locarno film festival, on this year's retrospective. K.J. Relth-Miller, who programs at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles, has been attending Locarno's overview of Mexican popular cinema dating back to the 1940s: “Spectacle Every Day.” Among the films we discuss are The Batwoman, Take Me in Your Arms, El Suavecito, The Mind and the Crime, and The Three Garcias.

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Photo by Steve Snodgrass

Ep. 195: Locarno 2023 with Giovanni Marchini Camia on The Human Surge 3, Critical Zone, Good Place

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw. I’m your host, Nicolas Rapold. This week I’ve been reporting on the Locarno film festival, and for the latest batch of premieres, I am happy to welcome back a past guest, Giovanni Marchini Camia, who is a programmer at Locarno, a critic, and co-founder of the publishing house Fireflies Press. We discuss Eduardo Williams’s The Human Surge 3; the Golden Leopard winner Critical Zone, from Ali Ahmadzadeh; and Katharina Huber’s A Good Place, a discovery that went on to win two prizes.

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Photo by Steve Snodgrass

Ep. 194: Locarno 2023 with Beatrice Loayza: Mademoiselle Kenopsia, Yannick, Camping du Lac, The Vanishing Soldier

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw. I’m your host, Nicolas Rapold. This week I’m reporting from the Locarno film festival. Beatrice Loayza, who’s attending the festival for the first time, joins the podcast to discuss a few highlights, including: Quentin Dupieux’s Yannick, Denis Côté’s Mademoiselle Kenopsia, Éléonore Saintagnan’s Camping du Lac, and Dani Rosenberg’s The Vanishing Soldier.

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Music: “Tomorrow’s Forecast” by The Minarets, courtesy of The Minarets

Photo by Steve Snodgrass

Ep. 193: Locarno 2023 with Jessica Kiang: Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Sweet Dreams, Manga D'Terra

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw. I’m your host, Nicolas Rapold. This week I’m reporting from the Locarno film festival, where Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, has been a major stand-out. Jessica Kiang (Variety) joins the podcast to discuss Radu Jude’s film as well as two more titles in Locarno’s competition lineup: Ena Sendijarević’s Sweet Dreams and Basil Da Cunha’s Manga d’Terra. Please note: the audio in this episode may sound different at one point because of a mic change.

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Music: “Tomorrow’s Forecast” by The Minarets, courtesy of The Minarets

Photo by Steve Snodgrass

Ep. 192: John Wilson on How To with John Wilson

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw. I’m your host, Nicolas Rapold. This week I talk with John Wilson, the mastermind of How To with John Wilson, the sui generis series on HBO. The third and final season of How To has now begun, and so I took the opportunity to ask Wilson about the secret to assembling the show’s serendipitous paths through New York and his own experience of the world. We also talked about his recent viewing and selections from the Anthology Film Archives series he programmed for this month.

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Music: “Tomorrow’s Forecast” by The Minarets, courtesy of The Minarets

Photo by Steve Snodgrass

Ep. 191: Amy Taubin on Oppenheimer, Barbie, Command-Z, Richard Kelly

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw. I’m your host, Nicolas Rapold. This week I talk with the one and only Amy Taubin about the double feature that has attracted crowds to movie theaters this weekend: Oppenheimer, directed by Christopher Nolan, and Barbie, directed by Greta Gerwig. We pick apart what we loved (or hated) about the two films, and then we discuss Steven Soderbergh’s surprise series Command-Z, available only online. Plus a few thoughts on upcoming Richard Kelly screenings.

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Music: “Monserrate” by The Minarets, courtesy of The Minarets

Photo by Steve Snodgrass

Ep. 190: Mstyslav Chernov on Ukraine documentary 20 Days in Mariupol

Welcome to the Last Thing I Saw. I’m your host, Nicolas Rapold. This week I’m speaking with the director of the Ukraine documentary 20 Days in Mariupol, now showing at Film Forum and winner of a Sundance audience award. Mstyslav Chernov was a video journalist for the Associated Press who stayed in the city when the Russian invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022. The AP journalists were the last from an international organization who remained in the city, and they were able to film the people and the streets during Russia’s brutal siege and bombardment, at one point filming from a hospital that became a target. Chernov and his colleagues won a Pulitzer Prize for their reporting, but 20 Days in Mariupol goes beyond news clips to give a fuller, tense chronicle of these days. I asked Chernov about crafting his documentary, getting the facts out about the war, and what films, fiction or documentary, have inspired him.

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Music: “Monserrate” by The Minarets, courtesy of The Minarets

Photo by Steve Snodgrass