The Last Thing I Saw Nicolas Rapold

Ep. 257: The Nitrate Picture Show 2024 with David Schwartz

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. The Nitrate Picture Show takes place every year in Rochester, New York, at the George Eastman Museum, projecting movies from nitrate prints. The resulting super-vivid images create a movie-going experience that can be, in the words of my guest, programmer David Schwartz, “life-changing.” I asked Schwartz about some of his highlights at this increasingly popular festival, including The Good Fairy (directed by William Wyler), Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli), Intolerance (D.W. Griffith), and The Strawberry Blonde (Raoul Walsh). We also talked about films that offered something a little different such as the documentary The Plow That Broke the Plains (Pare Lorentz), the experimental parody Tomato’s Another Day (James Sibley Watson), Homecoming (Hideo Oba), and Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero. Plus: rare Lubitsch (From Mayerling to Sarajevo) and Renoir’s A Day in the Country.

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Photo by Steve Snodgrass

Ep. 256: Amy Taubin on Leos Carax’s It’s Not Me, The Shrouds, Charles Atlas, Arthur Jafa, Man Ray, and More

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. The one and only Amy Taubin comes back to The Last Thing I Saw for a wide-ranging conversation about what she’s been watching. That includes at least a couple of Cannes titles—Leos Carax’s It’s Not Me and David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds—and New York repertory highlights from the spring: the enormous Charles Atlas retrospective at Anthology Film Archives (which is still ongoing through June), the Man Ray restorations touring with new Jim Jarmusch–led score, and Arthur Jafa’s shattering reimagining of the brutal ending to Taxi Driver, titled “*****”, shown at the Gladstone Gallery. There are also shout-outs to the Antoinetta Angelidi revival in Prismatic Ground, a new Blu-ray of Too Much Sleep, and more.

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Ep. 255: Cannes 2024 Redux: Jessica Kiang on Black Dog, 2nd Features, The Other Way Around, Viet and Nam

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. Every year at Cannes there are a few more films I want to talk about, even as the time is running out at the festival. So for a very special postscript (and postgame), critic Jessica Kiang of Variety joined to talk about the ones that got away. Among the titles discussed: Un Certain Regard prize-winner Black Dog (directed by Guan Hu), Quinzaine prize-winner The Other Way Around (Jonas Trueba), Viet and Nam (Truong Minh Quy), and a number of second features from female directors, including The Balconettes (Noémie Merlant) and All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia).

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Ep. 254: Cannes 2024 Finale: Manohla Dargis on The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Anora, The Apprentice, Marcello Mio, and more

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. It’s become an annual tradition on the last day of Cannes to sit down with Manohla Dargis, the chief film critic for The New York Times, and take stock of the festival, some selected highlights, and other points of interest. For our 2024 chat, in a corner of the Palais starting to buzz with activity before the awards ceremony, we discussed a number of titles including: The Seed of the Sacred Fig (directed by Mohammad Rasoulof), Anora (Sean Baker), The Apprentice (Ali Abbasi), All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia), On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (Rungano Nyoni), Wild Diamond (Agathe Riedinger), Marcello Mio (Christoph Honoré), Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola), and more.

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Ep. 253: Cannes 2024: Justin Chang on All We Imagine as Light, Caught by the Tides, The Shrouds

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. On the latest selection of highlights recorded during the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, I was delighted to sit down with Justin Chang of The New Yorker, recent recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, with whom I’d last chatted when he was at the Los Angeles Times. On this episode, occasionally to the soundtrack of Cannes doves cooing nearby, we talked about All We Imagine as Light (directed by Payal Kapadia), Caught by the Tides (Jia Zhangke), and The Shrouds (David Cronenberg). We also chatted about the festival’s ebb and flow, and the awards prospects at the time of recording.

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Ep. 252: Cannes 2024: Beatrice Loayza on Visiting Hours, Eat the Night, and September Says

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. On the latest episode chock full of highlights from the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, I sat down with critic Beatrice Loayza to discuss some of the lesser-spoken-about titles from the festival. That includes two titles from Directors’ Fortnight: Patricia Mazuy’s Visiting Hours, starring Isabelle Huppert and Hafsia Herzi, and Eat the Night from Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel. We also chat about the feature-length directorial debut from Ariane Labed, September Says, adapted from the novel by Daisy Johnson and featured in the Un Certain Regard section.

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Photo by Steve Snodgrass