The Last Thing I Saw

Ep. 374: Sundance 2026 – Eric Hynes on Carousel, One in a Million, Frank and Louis, The Lake, Time and Water

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. To wrap up Sundance 2026, I talked with Eric Hynes, director of film curation and programming at the Jacob Burns Film Center. We talk a bit about movie theaters, as we often do, and then discuss a few final movies from the lineup: Carousel (Rachel Lambert), One in a Million (Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes), Frank and Louis (Petra Volpe), The Lake (Abby Ellis), and Time and Water (Sara Dosa). Then at the end I round up a couple of fiction films that somehow escaped the pod dragnet, including new films from Macon Blair and Gregg Araki.

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Photo by Steve Snodgrass

Ep. 373: Sundance 2026 – Chloe Lizotte on Night Nurse, Homemade Gatorade and other shorts, Public Access Redux, plus A Rotterdam Surprise

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. To look at the remote experience of Sundance 2026, I chatted with Chloe Lizotte, deputy editor of MUBI Notebook, for what ended up being a bit of a mindbending tour through cinema’s possibilities. Among the Sundance films discussed: Night Nurse (directed by Georgia Bernstein), Homemade Gatorade (Carter Amelia Davis), and Public Access (David Shadrack Smith) and Joy Bubbles (Rachel J. Morrison) from another angle. And for a final twist, we couldn’t resist talking about James N. Kienitz Wilkins’s newest feature, The Misconceived, freshly premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

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Photo by Steve Snodgrass

Ep. 372: Sundance 2026 – Amy Taubin on Shame and Money, Bedford Park, Filipinana, Public Access, If I Go Will They Miss Me, Who Killed Alex Odeh, Silenced

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. For the latest dispatch on the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, I reunited with Amy Taubin, with whom I recorded my first episode at the beginning of the festival. We compared notes on Sundance and what we’ve each seen, including several films that won awards. Among the films discussed: Shame and Money (directed by Visar Morina), Bedford Park (Stephanie Ahn), Filipiñana (Rafael Manuel), Public Access (David Shadrack Smith), If I Go Will They Miss Me (Walter Thompson-Hernández), Who Killed Alex Odeh? (Jason Osder and William Lafi Youmans), Silenced (Selina Miles), Nuisance Bear (Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman), and Once Upon a Time in Harlem (William Greaves and David Greaves).

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Ep. 371: Sundance 2026 – Siddhant Adlakha on Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!, When a Witness Recants, Undertone, Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie, plus Buddy

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. For the latest dispatch on the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, I was pleased to connect finally with Siddhant Adlakha, a critic who contributes to several publications including Variety. Among the films discussed were Ha-Chan Shake Your Booty! (directed by Josef Kubota Wladyka), When a Witness Recants (Dawn Porter), Undertone (Ian Tuason),
Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie (Alex Gibney), and Buddy (Casper Kelly).

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Photo by Steve Snodgrass

Ep. 370: Simón Mesa Soto on his new film A Poet

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. One of the most delightful break-outs in recent cinema is Simón Mesa Soto’s A Poet (Un Poeta), a funny, dynamically shot, and quite touching portrait of a Colombian writer who’s stuck, years after his early success. Actor Ubeimar Rios embodies Oscar with an unstoppable, tragicomic energy that pushes back on turning the poet into an object of self-pity in this multilayered film, as he tries to reconnect with his estranged family and encounters a student poet named Yurlady. I spoke with Simón Mesa Soto about both the comedy he embraces and the sincere feeling he achieves in tapping personal experience, as well as some filmmakers whose art and portrayal of artists have inspired him, and how the great Colombian poet José Asunción Silva figures in the film and its making. A Poet is in theaters now.

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Photo by Steve Snodgrass