Ep. 374: Sundance 2026 – Eric Hynes on Carousel, One in a Million, Frank and Louis, The Lake, Time and Water

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. To wrap up Sundance 2026, I talked with Eric Hynes, director of film curation and programming at the Jacob Burns Film Center. We talk a bit about movie theaters, as we often do, and then discuss a few final movies from the lineup: Carousel (Rachel Lambert), One in a Million (Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes), Frank and Louis (Petra Volpe), The Lake (Abby Ellis), and Time and Water (Sara Dosa). Then at the end I round up a couple of fiction films that somehow escaped the pod dragnet, including new films from Macon Blair and Gregg Araki, and the absolutely lovely documentary short The Boys and the Bees.

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Ep. 373: Sundance 2026 – Chloe Lizotte on Night Nurse, Homemade Gatorade and other shorts, Public Access Redux, plus A Rotterdam Surprise

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. To look at the remote experience of Sundance 2026, I chatted with Chloe Lizotte, deputy editor of MUBI Notebook, for what ended up being a bit of a mindbending tour through cinema’s possibilities. Among the Sundance films discussed: Night Nurse (directed by Georgia Bernstein), Homemade Gatorade (Carter Amelia Davis), and Public Access (David Shadrack Smith) and Joy Bubbles (Rachel J. Morrison) from another angle. And for a final twist, we couldn’t resist talking about James N. Kienitz Wilkins’s newest feature, The Misconceived, freshly premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

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Ep. 372: Sundance 2026 – Amy Taubin on Shame and Money, Bedford Park, Filipinana, Public Access, If I Go Will They Miss Me, Who Killed Alex Odeh, Silenced

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. For the latest dispatch on the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, I reunited with Amy Taubin, with whom I recorded my first episode at the beginning of the festival. We compared notes on Sundance and what we’ve each seen, including several films that won awards. Among the films discussed: Shame and Money (directed by Visar Morina), Bedford Park (Stephanie Ahn), Filipiñana (Rafael Manuel), Public Access (David Shadrack Smith), If I Go Will They Miss Me (Walter Thompson-Hernández), Who Killed Alex Odeh? (Jason Osder and William Lafi Youmans), Silenced (Selina Miles), Nuisance Bear (Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman), and Once Upon a Time in Harlem (William Greaves and David Greaves).

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Ep. 371: Sundance 2026 – Siddhant Adlakha on Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!, When a Witness Recants, Undertone, Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie, plus Buddy

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. For the latest dispatch on the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, I was pleased to connect finally with Siddhant Adlakha, a critic who contributes to several publications including Variety. Among the films discussed were Ha-Chan Shake Your Booty! (directed by Josef Kubota Wladyka), When a Witness Recants (Dawn Porter), Undertone (Ian Tuason),

Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie (Alex Gibney), and Buddy (Casper Kelly).

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Ep. 370: Simón Mesa Soto on his new film A Poet

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. One of the most delightful break-outs in recent cinema is Simón Mesa Soto’s A Poet (Un Poeta), a funny, dynamically shot, and quite touching portrait of a Colombian writer who’s stuck, years after his early success. Actor Ubeimar Rios embodies Oscar with an unstoppable, tragicomic energy that pushes back on turning the poet into an object of self-pity in this multilayered film, as he tries to reconnect with his estranged family and encounters a student poet named Yurlady. I spoke with Simón Mesa Soto about both the comedy he embraces and the sincere feeling he achieves in tapping personal experience, as well as some filmmakers whose art and portrayal of artists have inspired him, and how the great Colombian poet José Asunción Silva figures in the film and its making. A Poet is in theaters now.

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Ep. 369: Sundance 2026 – Abby Sun on Closure, Cookie Queens, To Hold a Mountain, Seized

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. The Sundance Film Festival rolled out another promising lineup of documentary in its 2026 edition, and so I rang up Abby Sun, editor-in-chief of Documentary Magazine, to chat about a few of the notable titles she had seen. Titles discussed include Closure (directed by Michal Marczak of All These Sleepless Nights), Cookie Queens (Alysa Nahmias), To Hold a Mountain (Petar Glomazic and Biljana Tutorov), and Seized (Sharon Liese, about the 2023 police raid on the Marion County Record in Kansas).

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Ep. 368: Sundance 2026 – Tim Grierson on The Invite, The Weight, The Friend’s House Is Here, plus All About the Money

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. The 2026 Sundance Film Festival is in progress, and I sat down in Park City with festival veteran Tim Grierson who is filing reviews for Screen Daily and is also a frequent contributor to the Los Angeles Times. We spoke about a few highlights of the lineup so far, including The Invite (directed by Olivia Wilde, starring Seth Rogen, Penelope Cruz, Ed Norton, and Wilde), The Weight (directed by Padraic McKinley, starring Ethan Hawke and Russell Crowe), The Friend’s House Is Here (directed by Maryam Ataei and Hossein Keshavarz), and a curious documentary I caught called All About the Money (Sinead O’Shead) about the communism-curious scion of a billionaire family fortune.

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Ep. 367: Sundance 2026 – Sam Adams on Josephine, Wicker, The Moment, Kogonada’s Zi

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. The 2026 Sundance Film Festival is in progress, and I sat down in Park City with festival veteran Sam Adams, Slate writer and senior editor, to talk about a few highlights of the lineup so far. Among the films discussed are The Moment (directed by Aidan Zamiri, starring Charli xcx), Josephine (Beth de Araujo, starring Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan), Wicker (Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, starring Olivia Colman and Alexander Skarsgård), and, briefly, Kogonada’s briefly titled new film, zi.

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Ep. 366: Sundance 2026 - Amy Taubin on the festival, plus a preview of John Wilson's The History of Concrete

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. The Sundance Film Festival begins its 2026 edition, and to kick off its final, I took a look back with Amy Taubin, a Sundance veteran who has written about the festival’s films and evolution over decades. She shares her thoughts on Sundance, past and present, and we trade notes on titles in this edition whose premieres we have been anticipating, including the historic Once Upon a Time in Harlem. Finally, I talk about one festival highlight premiering on opening night, The History of Concrete, directed by John Wilson (of HBO’s “How to With John Wilson” fame), and Taubin reflects on the history of Sundance’s vaunted Main Street.

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Ep. 365: Chicago Film Society’s Rebecca Lyon and Cameron Worden on The Unholy Three, Heather McAdams, Bob Balaban’s Parents, Proto-Beavis and Butthead, By the Bluest Sea

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. The Chicago Film Society screens wonderful seasons of features and shorts at Chicago theaters, carefully curated with printed program notes, all of which I’ve enjoyed from afar. I was delighted to kick off another new year of the podcast with two CFS members (and projectionists): Rebecca Lyon and Cameron Worden. Since the Chicago Film Society is between its Fall 2025 and Spring 2026 seasons, we talked about some past programming, including: The Unholy Three (the 1930 sound version), Parents (directed by Bob Balaban), ephemera collected by filmmaker Heather McAdams, home movies from the Filipino American Historical Society of Chicago, and Wes Archer’s extraordinary animated short that prefigured Beavis and Butt-head. Bonus: a sneak peek at a couple of events coming up at Chicago Film Society in the spring.

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