Dear Last Thing I Sawfolk,
Hello there. I am back with goodies from Locarno, Switzerland, courtesy of the very fine film festival there. There are four Locarno episodes with films aplenty, from world premieres like Radu Jude’s much-anticipated new film which very much rocks, to a retrospective of lesser-known Mexican studio cinema stretching from the 1940s through the 1960s.
It’s also been a busy patch for writing. I’m especially happy to be back in the Los Angeles Times, with a feature on Dustin Guy Defa’s excellent new film The Adults, now in theaters.
I conclude as ever with a big thank-you to all my supporters who make The Last Thing I Saw possible. More to come!
Yours, &c.,
Nic
THE PODCAST
Locarno #1 with Jessica Kiang: Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, Sweet Dreams (Ena Sendijarević), and Manga d’Terra (Basil Da Cunha)
Locarno #2 with Beatrice Loayza: Mademoiselle Kenopsia (Denis Côté), Yannick (Quentin Dupieux), Camping du Lac (Éléonore Saintagnan), and The Vanishing Soldier (Dani Rosenberg)
Locarno #3 with Giovanni Marchini Camia: The Human Surge 3 (Eduardo Williams), Critical Zone (Ali Ahmadzadeh), A Good Place (Katharina Huber)
Locarno #4 with K.J. Relth-Miller on the festival’s Mexican cinema retrospective “Spectacle Every Day”
Jessica Kiang is a Berlin-based freelance film critic with bylines in Variety, Sight & Sound, and The New York Times, and is the international programmer of the Belfast Film Festival.
Beatrice Loayza is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn. She is a contributing film critic at The New York Times and her work appears in Artforum, 4Columns, the Nation, and other publications.
Giovanni Marchini Camia is a programmer at the Locarno Film Festival and co-founder of The Fireflies Press publishing house.
K.J. Relth-Miller programs at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles and teaches film at CalArts.
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 Los Angeles Times, I wrote a feature on Dustin Guy Defa’s latest, The Adults—one the best movies about sibling relationships I’ve seen. It stars Michael Cera, Hannah Gross, and Sophia Lillis, who are all terrific, and it’s not what you expect.
For the Financial Times, I interviewed Louis Garrel about L’Innocent, a film he directs and stars in. It’s about a guy whose mother marries someone in the prison where she works—based on a true story...
For the Metrograph Journal, I filed an interview with Eduardo Williams, whose film The Human Surge 3 premiered at Locarno. Truly one-of-a-kind filmmaker.
And for The New York Times, I reviewed a new documentary about Bella Abzug, titled Bella!.
THIS CRITIC’S PICKS
The Vanishing (Criterion) Yup.
Incredible But True (MUBI) Quentin Dupieux directs a time-travel parable
Star 80 (HBO MAX)
The Batwoman (MUBI) As discussed on the final Locarno podcast
Tori and Lokita (Criterion) Dardenne brothers. My interview from when it was in theaters and weirdly overlooked by many
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, 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 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