The Last Thing I Saw

Ep. 394: Eric Hynes on Cannes 2026: Fatherland, Parallel Tales, In Waves, The Match

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. The 2026 Cannes Film Festival is underway, and I was delighted to sit down with Eric Hynes, critic and director of film curation and programming at the Jacob Burns Film Center. We discussed a few titles from the first days of the festival: Fatherland (directed by Pawel Pawlikowski, starring Sandra Hüller and Hans Zischler), Parallel Tales (Asghar Farhadi, starring Isabelle Huppert, Virginie Efira, Vincent Cassel, Adam Bessa), In Waves (Phuong Mai Nguyen), and the 1986 World Cup documentary The Match (Juan Cabral and Santiago Franco). Subscribe for more to keep up with the latest premieres from Cannes!

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Photo by Steve Snodgrass

Ep. 393: Jordan Cronk on Cannes 2026: Directors’ Fortnight Preview, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Nagi Notes, Butterfly Jam, plus Play-Doc retro + Jeonju

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. For the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, I’m very happy to start the big show with Jordan Cronk, critic and programmer. We discussed a few films from the first full day of programming: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (directed by Jane Schoenbrun, starring Gillian Anderson and Hannah Einbinder), Nagi Notes (Koji Fukada), and Butterfly Jam (Kantemir Balagov, starring Barry Keoghan, Riley Keough, Harry Messing). But I was also treated to a preview of Directors’ Fortnight, the Cannes showcase where Cronk is also a program advisor, and which this year includes films by Radu Jude, Alain Cavalier, Dominga Sotomayor, Lisandro Alonso, longtime Apichatpong Weerasethakul collaborator Sompot Chidgasornpongse, Clio Barnard, and Bruno Dumont.

But that's not all! Cronk also shares a highlight from two festivals he visited just before Cannes: Play-Doc in Galicia, Spain, where he saw a very intriguing retrospective, and the Jeonju International Film Festival in Jeonju, South Korea.

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Photo by Steve Snodgrass

Ep. 392: Ildiko Enyedi on her new film Silent Friend, tree time, the everlasting serenity of Tony Leung, and theories of consciousness

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. Silent Friend is the latest feature from filmmaker Ildiko Enyedi, whose On Body and Soul won the Golden Bear at the 2017 Berlinale and was an Oscar nominee. Like the Hungarian director's debut feature, My Twentieth Century (1989), Silent Friend is her latest ambitious work, spanning three time periods: 1908, when the first female student at a German university attempts to begin her studies; 1972, when a student finds the activities of a geranium far more intriguing than protests; and 2020, when a visiting professor (played by Tony Leung) conducts experiments around plant consciousness. What ties the eras together is a giant, beautiful gingko tree, in a film that’s equally a work of ideas, sensuous textures, and youthful experience. I had the pleasure of chatting with Enyedi during her visit to New York for the release of Silent Friend, and the conversation fairly quickly went into the realm of deep tree thoughts.

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Photo by Steve Snodgrass

Ep. 391: Michael Lee Nirenberg on Cinematic Immunity, his new oral history about New York filmmaking crews

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. This week I go behind the scenes with filmmaker and author Michael Lee Nirenberg, whose new book Cinematic Immunity is an oral history of New York filmmaking of a different sort. Rather than directors or screenwriters, Nirenberg interviewed crew members across departments—and decades—to recount the making of movies like The French Connection and Do the Right Thing, shows like Pee-Wee’s Playhouse and The Sopranos, and generally the ethos of working with Sidney Lumet or Spike Lee. As our conversation demonstrates, we were able to delve into stories and anecdotes that offer different perspectives and angles on film culture and the esprit de corps of studio filmmaking.

“Cinematic Immunity: An Oral History of New York Filmmaking As Told by the Crews That Got the Shot” is available for purchase online and in bookstores. Also, the Frank Perry film that's mentioned, Last Summer (1969), is screening on May 3 at the Paris Theater.

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Photo by Steve Snodgrass

Ep. 390: James N. Kienitz Wilkins on The Misconceived

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. Destined to be one of my favorite movies of 2026, The Misconceived is the latest feature from James N. Kienitz Wilkins, a filmmaker who’s always boldly playing with film form, ideas around authenticity and class, and how we talk about cinema. The Misconceived centers on a carpenter, Tyler, who once wanted to be a filmmaker and whom we now join renovating the country cabin of a college classmate, Tobin, who has found success as an artist. On paper it's an "indie drama" of class tensions and resentments—but it's filmed using motion capture, a computer graphics game engine, and naturalistic, scathingly funny dialogue streaked with savvy movie and critical references. I was delighted to speak with Wilkins about The Misconceived, the benefits of motion capture, the post-2016 political morass, cinephilia, and much more.

The Misconceived opens the First Look 2026 at the Museum of the Moving Image (which runs April 23 to May 3) and then plays at Anthology Film Archives in May.

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Photo by Steve Snodgrass