Here's to clear(er) skies
Dear Last Thing I Sawfolk,
I’m back from my travels, and working on new articles and podcasts. I should have another episode to share quite soon, and maybe even an interview for your delectation. At the moment, I’m happy simply to breathe fresh(er) air and look at blue skies after a few days of jaundiced smog.
I’m sharing below my special finale episode with Manohla Dargis about Cannes highlights, many of which will be coming to U.S. theaters eventually and/or appearing at more festivals. (Or in the case of Asteroid City, apparently a preview this weekend?) Anyway, it was a lot of fun, so I hope you enjoy it too.
It’s back to editing/producing the next episode, but I hope you enjoy the below in the meantime—including a limited-time-only streaming rarity courtesy of Le Cinema Club.
Thank you as always to all my supporters, who have made The Last Thing I Saw the media conglomerate behemoth that it is today, available in 19 galaxies and participating nebulas!
Sincerely,
Nic
THE PODCAST
Manohla Dargis on Catherine Breillat’s Last Summer, Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City, Wang Bing’s Youth (Spring), Sean Price Williams’s The Sweet East, and more (Cannes Finale)
Episodes of The Last Thing I Saw are also available at other podcast places such as Spotify.
For more information on the podcast’s opening and closing music by The Minarets (gratefully used with permission), follow the band on Instagram:
@theminaretsmusic
RECENT WORK
For The New York Times, my feature about long-haul documentaries screening at this year’s Tribeca Festival has now been published online and in print. I spoke to the directors and subjects of three films—Apolonia, Apolonia, Between the Rains, and Q—about making a movie focusing on someone (as long as a decade-plus). These movies are screening this week.
For Metrograph’s editorial site, the Journal, I wrote about the extremely sharp-looking gambling/yakuza film Pale Flower, another winner from Japanese maverick Masahiro Shinoda. This one that’s screening in town at Metrograph, or you can find it on Criterion, but it’s really one for the big screen.
Also for the Times, I wrote up A Woman Escapes, an experimental epistolary film by a supergroup of filmmakers (Sofia Bohdanowicz, Burak Cevik, Blake Williams). Little known fact is that I also wrote the headline, which is sometimes the case.
THIS CRITIC’S PICKS
Splendor in the Grass (Criterion)
Reality (HBO MAX) Sydney Sweeney plays whistleblower Reality Winner in an adaptation of the play based on FBI transcripts
Yeast (Le Cinema Club) Mary Bronstein’s long overlooked 2008 film – available for one week only for free
No Home Movie (Criterion) Chantal Akerman’s final feature
Caché / Hidden (MUBI) Michael Haneke
Kicking and Screaming (Netflix) Noah Baumbach’s postgrad classic
THE END
Here I may end with a song.
ABOUT ME
Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw! I’m your host, Nicolas Rapold.
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, 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 past programming, drop me a line.
On the editorial side, I worked as editor-in-chief of Film Comment magazine, where I was in editorial for 15 years in all. There 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.
Feel free to get in touch re: writing, editing, moderating, programming, podcasting, etc.
nicolas.rapold@gmail.com