The Last Thing I Saw

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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Photo by Steve Snodgrass

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

Ep. 369: Sundance 2026 – Abby Sun on Closure, Cookie Queens, To Hold a Mountain, Seized

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. The Sundance Film Festival rolled out another promising lineup of documentary in its 2026 edition, and so I rang up Abby Sun, editor-in-chief of Documentary Magazine, to chat about a few of the notable titles she had seen. Titles discussed include Closure (directed by Michal Marczak of All These Sleepless Nights), Cookie Queens (Alysa Nahmias), To Hold a Mountain (Petar Glomazic and Biljana Tutorov), and Seized (Sharon Liese, about the 2023 police raid on the Marion County Record in Kansas).

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Photo by Steve Snodgrass

Ep. 368: Sundance 2026 – Tim Grierson on The Invite, The Weight, The Friend’s House Is Here, plus All About the Money

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. The 2026 Sundance Film Festival is in progress, and I sat down in Park City with festival veteran Tim Grierson who is filing reviews for Screen Daily and is also a frequent contributor to the Los Angeles Times. We spoke about a few highlights of the lineup so far, including The Invite (directed by Olivia Wilde, starring Seth Rogen, Penelope Cruz, Ed Norton, and Wilde), The Weight (directed by Padraic McKinley, starring Ethan Hawke and Russell Crowe), The Friend’s House Is Here (directed by Maryam Ataei and Hossein Keshavarz), and a curious documentary I caught called All About the Money (Sinead O’Shead) about the communism-curious scion of a billionaire family fortune.

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Photo by Steve Snodgrass