Beatrice Loayza and Adam Nayman Play Favorites + Screen Slate Bestplosion

A new podcast! A glorious list! Movies, movies, everywhere!

Dear Last Thing I Sawfolk,

Another year, another smorgasbord of delicious lists! I put on my pollster hat for Screen Slate for another Best Films of 2023 and—my personal favorite part—Favorite First Viewings. As always it’s a fun read—the Screen Slate community really came out for this one, and we had some terrific special guests sharing their best first watches of 2023 (including Isabelle Huppert!). Grateful to all who contributed!

In the spirit of the season, I chatted with critic colleagues Adam Nayman and Beatrice Loayza about their favorite films of the year. Links below!

That’s all for now, but I wager this won’t be the last you hear from me this year.

Thanks, dear supporters of The Last Thing I Saw!

Nic

THE PODCAST

Beatrice Loayza and Adam Nayman on The Zone of Interest, May December, Knock at the Cabin, and more

Adam Nayman is a contributing editor for Cinema Scope and writes on film for The Ringer, Sight and Sound, Reverse Shot, and Little White Lies. He has written books on Showgirls and the films of David Fincher and the Coen Brothers and lectures on cinema and journalism at the University of Toronto and Ryerson University.

Beatrice Loayza is a contributing film critic for The New York Times and a freelance writer with bylines in Artforum, the Nation, 4Columns, and Sight & Sound.

Episodes of The Last Thing I Saw are also available at other podcast places such as Spotify.

RECENT WORK

Here is Screen Slate’s Best Movies of 2023.

And in case you’re sick of top 20s, you should read the grand Favorite First Viewings list with a hundredstrong list of contributors sharing discoveries—movies from any year that they saw for the first time in 2023.

THIS CRITIC’S PICKS

Streaming selections.

The Store (Le Cinema Club) Very cool - Frederick Wiseman’s 1983 film of Neiman-Marcus central in Dallas is streaming. While supplies last! i.e. two weeks only

Certain Women (MUBI)

Animalicious (Criterion) The cinematic bestiary of Australian auteur Mark Lewis. Saw this in a summer series curated by John Wilson at Anthology Film Archives. Maybe Criterion Channel seems to get some inspiration from New York repertory programming

The Delinquents (MUBI) Slow-cooked bank heist movie offering a new sort of retirement plan. I interviewed the director at Cannes—alternate headline: “The Camera Catches Everything, Like an X-Ray Machine”

Death Line (Amazon)

Actual People (MUBI)

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.