A Doubleheader of Highlights from True/False and First Look at MoMI + My Oscar Writings
Lovely chat, lovely films, thanks so much
Dear Last Thing I Sawfolk,
This week I’m sharing a twofer podcast, covering True/False in Columbia, Missouri, and First Look at Museum of the Moving Image in New York. I sampled movies from both, with some especially haunting documentaries among them, and rang up curator-and-critic Eric Hynes for a chat on, you guessed it, The Last Thing I Saw.
I’m also very happy to share my interview with Richard Linklater—details below. And with the Oscars looming, I’ve pulled together some of my writing about Academy Award nominees, from Anatomy of a Fall to (the frankly woefully underrepresented) May December to Godzilla Minus One.
Thank you as always to the supporters of The Last Thing I Saw, who will all prevail on Oscar night.
Warmly,
Nic
THE PODCAST
Eric Hynes on True/False ’24 + First Look: Flying Lessons, Knit’s Island, Magic Mountain, Achilles, A Photographic Memory, There Was, There Was Not
Eric Hynes is curator of film at the Museum of the Moving Image. First Look runs March 13 through 17 at MoMI and happens to feature many movies discussed on this and past episodes of the podcast. Fun!
Episodes of The Last Thing I Saw are also available at other podcast places such as Spotify.
THIS CRITIC’S PICKS
Streaming selections
Ishtar (MUBI) “Honest and popular don’t go hand in hand”
Love Letter (Criterion) Kinuyo Tanaka directs
Full Time (MUBI)
Ratcatcher (Criterion) Lynne Ramsay directs
The Parallax View (Netflix)
Adventures in Moviegoing: Richard Linklater in Conversation (Criterion) An absolute tonic
RECENT WORK
Things I wrote.
I interviewed Richard Linklater about his latest movie: God Save Texas: Hometown Prison, his moving personal documentary about the prison industry in Huntsville, Texas, where he grew up. Incredible to speak with this filmmaker, as ever. The feature-length movie is the first of the three-part God Save Texas series at HBO MAX.
For Sight & Sound, I reviewed two movies that premiered at the Berlin film festival: Victor Kossakovsky’s Architecton and Olivier Assayas’s Suspended Time.
And here’s that sampling of my writings on Oscar-nominated movies, plus one podcast interview. You can hear about most of the Academy Award nominees on my Cannes/Venice/Toronto/Sundance podcasts.
May December – interview/essay with director Todd Haynes for MUBI Notebook
20 Days in Mariupol (Best Documentary Feature) – interview with director Mstyslav Chernov on The Last Thing I Saw podcast
Oppenheimer - reflecting on bomb blast iconography in The New York Times
Anatomy of a Fall - talking to director-writer Justine Triet and co-writer/partner Arthur Harari for The Los Angeles Times
Poor Things – first impressions from its Venice premiere in my report from Artforum (RIP)
Past Lives – talking with writer-director Celine Song for the Financial Times
Godzilla Minus One – reviewing the big guy’s latest for the NYT
THE END
Here I may end with a song.
ABOUT ME
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw! I’m your host, Nicolas Rapold. Feel free to get in touch re: writing, editing, moderating, programming, podcasting, etc. by writing me at nicolas.rapold[at]gmail.com
Besides hosting the podcast, I’m a writer and an editor. My features, interviews, festival reports, and reviews are published in The New York Times, Screen Slate, Sight & Sound, Filmmaker, Air Mail, The Los Angeles Times, and W Magazine. (Plus dearly departed publications such as The Village Voice, Stop Smiling, The New York Sun, and The L Magazine.) For notes on my superfun programming experience, drop me a line.
On the editorial side, I worked as editor-in-chief of Film Comment magazine, where I was for 15 years in all. I assigned and edited both web and print, hosted The Film Comment Podcast and Talks, curated and hosted Film Comment Selects screenings, learned from brilliant writers, and wrote a lot, including interviews with Spike Lee, Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, Pedro Costa, and Frederick Wiseman. Film Comment received the Film Heritage Award from the National Society of Film Critics.