Ep. 303: Justin Chang on Berlin 2025: Blue Moon, Dreams (Sex Love), Girls on Wire

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. For my latest dispatch from the Berlin film festival, I sat down with Justin Chang, film critic at The New Yorker (which, as it turns out, makes an appearance in one of the movies!). Films discussed include: the Golden Bear winner Dreams (Sex Love) from director Dag Johan Haugerud, Blue Moon (directed by Richard Linklater and starring Ethan Hawke and Andrew Scott, who won a Silver Bear for Best Supporting Performance), and Girls on Fire from director Vivian Qu.

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Ep. 302: Dan Sullivan on Berlin 2025: The Ice Tower, Little Trouble Girls, Smile at Last, Canone Effimero

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. For my latest dispatch from the Berlin film festival, I sat down with Dan Sullivan, a programmer at Film at Lincoln Center (and also, as he points out, a former colleague!). Films discussed include: The Ice Tower (Lucile Hadzihalilovic), Smile at Last (Leida Laius and Arvo Iho), Little Trouble Girls (Urska Djukic), Living the Land (Huo Meng), and Canone Effimero (Gianluca De Serio and Massimiliano De Serio), with a word for Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, having its international premiere in Berlin.

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Ep. 301: Guy Lodge on Berlin 2025: Kontinental ’25, Living the Land, Eel, Shoah doc All I Had Was Nothingness

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. For my latest dispatch from the Berlin film festival, I sat down with Guy Lodge of Variety to talk about another batch of highlights from across the lineup. The titles we discussed include: Kontinental ’25 (directed by Radu Jude), Living the Land (Huo Meng), the stunning debut feature Eel (Chu Chun-teng), and a documentary about Claude Lanzmann’s making of Shoah, All I Had Was Nothingness (Guillaume Ribot).

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Ep. 300: Julia Loktev on My Undesirable Friends: Part I—Last Air in Moscow

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. Last October I interviewed the filmmaker Julia Loktev during the New York Film Festival about her latest work, My Undesirable Friends: Part I—Last Air in Moscow. This week her film has its international premiere at the Berlinale. It’s about independent journalists in Russia before and after the start of Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. When I spoke to Loktev last fall, I asked about how skillfully the five-hour-plus movie is put together, and she in turn explained how the situation in Russia grew even worse with the invasion. Since then, Trump’s election in the United States and his radical re-shaping of the government have created an additional context for the film, in which Loktev’s descriptions of Russia’s strategies of suppression and deception start to sound even more like a frightening warning.

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Ep. 299: Jordan Cronk on Berlinale 2025: What Marielle Knows, new James Benning and Kevin Jerome Everson, Olmo, After Dreaming, Paul

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. Look at me, I’m at the 75th Berlinale! For my latest dispatch, I spoke with a regular of the festival, Jordan Cronk, about titles from a mix of sections. Films discussed include: James Benning’s latest, Little Boy, and Kevin Jerome Everson’s latest, When the Sun is Eaten (from Forum and Forum Expanded, respectively); Olmo, directed by Fernando Eimbcke, in Panorama; What Marielle Knows, a Competition title directed by Frédéric Hambalek; Paul, from Denis Côté (in Panorama Dokumente); and After Dreaming, directed by Christine Haroutounian (in Forum).

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Ep. 298: Jonathan Romney on Mickey 17 and Dreams at Berlin 2025

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. The Berlinale begins its 75th edition this year, and I’ve been busily seeing movies and talking to critics here at the festival. To kick things off I’m joined by Jonathan Romney (of Screen Daily and the Observer) to discuss the hotly anticipated Mickey 17 from multiple-Oscar-winner Bong Joon Ho, headlined by Robert Pattinson, and the latest Michel Franco provocation, Dreams, starring Jessica Chastain and Isaac Hernandez. Both were world premieres, with Mickey 17 opening in the U.S. on March 7.

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Ep. 297: RaMell Ross on Nickel Boys

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. One of the great films of 2024 and now nominated for Best Picture and Adapted Screenplay, Nickel Boys is the fiction feature debut of RaMell Ross, who adapted Colson Whitehead’s novel with Joslyn Barnes, after previously directing the Oscar-nominated Hale County This Morning, This Evening. I was lucky enough to speak with Ross about making the movie, especially crafting its form, the screenwriting collaboration, the technology of racism, what he brought from documentary filmmaking, casting, and some of his influences.

Ross and his DP Jomo Fray use an innovative mix of extended first-person camerawork to tell the stories of two boys, Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson), in a Jim Crow-era reform school in Florida that’s essentially a prison; Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor co-stars as Elwood’s grandmother, Hattie. Archival video and film provide additional impressionistic glimpses of the world in the film's bold conception. (Note: this interview was recorded earlier.)

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Ep. 296: Chloe Lizotte on OBEX, Endless Cookie, Luz, The Reality of Hope, and 4DX Cinema

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. It’s been far too long since Chloe Lizotte, deputy editor of MUBI Notebook, has been on the podcast, so we joined forces for one more (final?) episode on Sundance 2025... and beyond! We talked about Sundance titles OBEX (directed by Albert Birney), Endless Cookie (Pete and Seth Scriver), Luz (Flora Lau), and The Reality of Hope (Joe Hunting). But then we conclude by re-entering the multiplex in all its mysteries: my guest shares a beat-by-beat experience with the sensory-assault-style 4DX format (at a screening of Flight Risk).

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Ep. 295: Amy Taubin on BLKNWS, Ricky, Sorry Baby, Alabama Solution, The Things You Kill

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. There are still great movies to catch up with from Sundance 2025, and once again I was fortunate to talk with the one and only Amy Taubin about her highlights. Films we discussed included stand-outs and prize-winners from this year's edition: BLKNWS: Terms and Conditions (directed by Kahlil Joseph), Ricky (Rashad Frett), The Things You Kill (Alireza Khatami), The Alabama Solution (Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman), and of course Sorry, Baby (Eva Victor). Plus a few words from me about Train Dreams (Clint Bentley).

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Ep. 294: Manohla Dargis on Sorry Baby, Atropia, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, BLKNWS, Omaha

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. For the latest Sundance 2025 podcast, I was fortunate again to discuss the festival and its movies with Manohla Dargis, chief film critic of The New York Times. In addition to reflecting on Sundance’s planned move and the backdrop to the festival, we talked about a whole selection of films from this year’s edition: Sorry, Baby (directed by Eva Victor), If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (Mary Bronstein), Atropia (Hailey Gates), BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions (Kahlil Joseph), Omaha (Cole Webley), The Alabama Solution (Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman), The Ugly Stepsister (Emilie Blichfeldt), Rebuilding (Max Walker-Silverman), and more.

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