Talking with Amy Taubin about highlights screened during the New York Film Festival

Eo and beyond!

Dear Last Thing I Saw Fans,

The adventure continues! This week I had a delightful chat with Amy Taubin about her recent viewing at the New York Film Festival. The episode is below and it covers some films she liked, plus one of which she is not so fond.

I’ve been busy with interviews the past couple of weeks, and some of the fruits of those labors have now been baked into delicious pies (articles). Among them are conversations with Isabelle Huppert and the filmmaker Ashley McKenzie, but look for more in the weeks, months, years to come.

Both of them were far away from me when we spoke: Huppert in Tokyo (explained in the piece) and McKenzie on a secluded Canadian isle. So do I travel, even when I sit at a desk with a cat partly obscuring my view of the laptop and sprinkling pawfuls of letters and symbols on whatever I’m writing.

Thank you to all of the invaluable supporters who make the production of The Last Thing I Saw possible. More to come, soon!

Your groveling host,

Nic

THE PODCAST

Amy Taubin on Eo, Tár, Alcarras, Master Gardener, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

This episode is also available on Spotify, Soundcloud, and other podcast places.

Amy Taubin wrote about the 60th New York Film Festival in Artforum, where she is a contributing editor.

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 WRITING

For W Magazine, I interviewed Isabelle Huppert about Film Forum’s retrospective and touched down at a few points in her storied career. The interview took place at midnight her time in Tokyo—which is explained in the article.

Also for W Magazine, I interviewed Ashley McKenzie about her film Queens of the Qing Dynasty, which I first saw at the Berlinale and which screened again recently in the Toronto and New York film festivals. It’s an incredible and unusual work of portraiture about a young woman on the margins with a very distinctive outlook.

For The New York Times, I reviewed Hinterland, a vividly shot movie set in Vienna in the chaotic aftermath of World War I, from the director of The Counterfeiters (which won an Academy Award some time ago).

THIS CRITIC’S PICKS

Delectable selections for home viewing.

Vampire’s Kiss (Criterion) A hoot

The Kindergarten Teacher (Kino Lorber Free on YouTube)

Center Stage (MUBI) Maggie Cheung

The Headless Woman (Criterion)

Daisies (Criterion)

THE END

Here I may end with a song.

Fear Not for Man, Fela Kuti

ABOUT ME

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw! I’m your host, Nicolas Rapold.

Besides hosting a podcast, I’m a writer and an editor. My features, interviews, festival dispatches, and reviews are published in The New York Times, Sight & Sound, Artforum, Filmmaker, and W Magazine (and appeared in dearly departed publications such as The Village Voice, Stop Smiling, The New York Sun, and The L Magazine).

I worked as editor-in-chief of Film Comment, where I was for 15 years. I assigned and edited both web and print editorial, hosted its podcast and talks and screenings, learned from brilliant writers, curated Film Comment Selects, and wrote a lot, including interviews with Spike Lee, Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, and Frederick Wiseman. Film Comment was subsequently awarded the Film Heritage Award by the National Society of Film Critics (an honor historically awarded to the Museum of Modern Art and other institutions).

Feel free to get in touch re: writing, editing, moderating, programming, podcasting, etc.

nicolas.rapold@gmail.com