Authors — Nicolas Rapold
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John Travolta on Propeller One-Way Night Coach
When I was asked for my favorite discoveries at Cannes this year, “the Travolta” was high on the list. Propeller One-Way Night Coach (2026), John Travolta’s feature directorial debut, premiered on the frantic first Friday night, when no one knew exactly what to expect. Before the screening, and following a highlights reel of the star’s career, Thierry Frémaux bestowed an honorary Palme d’Or on Travolta, who was touchingly grateful. But what, we in the packed theater wondered, would his film about a boy’s first airplane flight in 1962 look like? The answer was an absolutely charming portrait of experience, with a loving […]
by Nicolas Rapold on Jun 9, 2026 -
“I Wanted It to Feel Like… Some Children Just Took a Camera and Documented a Few Hours of Their Life”: Director Stillz on His Edglrd-Produced “Barrio Triste”
Barrio Triste premiered at the Venice Film Festival weighted with at least a couple of expectations. It’s the debut feature for Stillz, known till now for directing music videos for Bad Bunny (who years ago took him on quite early in his career) and other artists. It’s also the latest feature produced by Edglrd, Harmony Korine’s creative conglomerate, following the frontal audiovisual assaults of Aggro Drift and Baby Invasion, both directed by Korine and themselves highly anticipated for how they would re-scramble cinema. In actuality, Barrio Triste (as might be expected from watching Stillz’s moodily evocative videos) evolves its own […]
by Nicolas Rapold on Sep 15, 2025 -
“Something Sent to Me by the Film Gods to Break the Spell of Tragedy”: Ross McElwee on His Venice-Premiering Remake
You don’t need to have watched Ross McElwee’s films over the years in order to be moved by Remake, in which his ongoing saga of art and life collides in freshly shattering ways with the unlikely prospect of a Hollywood deal and the unthinkable death of his son Adrian. But if you have been following along (or catching up) with his journey from Sherman’s March through to Photographic Memory, the personal loss can all feel that much more poignant, as if you know him personally. That’s a function of his incredibly skillful, essayistic voice (and voiceover), in movies that are—as […]
by Nicolas Rapold on Sep 11, 2025 -
Chapter Break: Eva Victor on Sorry, Baby
Sorry, Baby opens with a wide shot of a lone house on a quiet New England country night—an image that could be the height of snoozy serenity or scary isolation. Writer-director Eva Victor remembers this being a genuine issue in the edit of her first feature. “It ended up feeling like the beginning of a horror movie. I was like, ‘I don’t really care that it does.’ And everyone else was like, ‘Is that what we’re doing?’” The same thoughts might occur to viewers at the beginning of any movie dealing with the trauma at Sorry, Baby’s core while also […]
by Nicolas Rapold on Jun 18, 2025 -
“‘History’ with a Capital ‘H'”: Mascha Schilinski on Cannes 2025 Award-Winner Sound of Falling
Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling was so rapturously acclaimed upon its premiere on the first full day of Cannes 2025 that some thought they’d already seen a possible Palme d’Or winner. In the end, her film shared the Jury Prize with another adored Competition title, Sirât, whose end-times death-trip might seem to overshadow the ordinary-sounding logline for Sound of Falling: four generations of girls on a farm in Germany. But this film swiftly establishes itself as an equally virtuosic secret history and sustained experiment in female subjectivity in kaleidoscopic form, drawing on scenes and notes from journals and voices from […]
by Nicolas Rapold on Jun 2, 2025 -
Nine Years of Storytelling: Seth and Pete Scriver on Endless Cookie
Sundance is capable of showing some fairly excruciating and/or formulaic comedy, but one alternative this year was the shaggy DIY delight of Endless Cookie. Tucked away in the World Cinema Documentary Competition, this Canadian animation from half-brothers Seth and Pete Scriver (who are white and indigenous, respectively) daisy-chains stories about their family history, from the far-flung Shamattawa First Nation community in Manitoba (where Pete lives) to 1980s downtown Toronto (where they logged time together). Stories from the past blur with the constant activity of the house and environs where Pete’s children and dogs live as Seth visits to record people’s […]
by Nicolas Rapold on Feb 6, 2025 -
“There is No Nice Way to Bulldoze a School”: Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham on No Other Land
Originally published February 27, 2024, just following the Berlin International Film Festival, this interview with No Other Land‘s directors Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham is being republished today, as the documentary opens at Film at Lincoln Center for a one-week run. — Editor Co-directed by an Israeli-Palestinian collective of four, No Other Land was filmed in the West Bank, in Masafer Yatta, where Israeli military and increasingly civilians have forced Palestinians out from their villages. Premiered at the 74th Berlinale, the debut feature won both the juried documentary award and the Audience Award in its section, Panorama—amply deserved honors for […]
by Nicolas Rapold on Nov 1, 2024 -
“The Distributors Point the Finger at the Streamers”: Dea Kulumbegashvili on April
Dea Kulumbegashvili’s entrancing second feature grew partly out of preparations for her first, Beginning, when she cast children in Georgia and met mothers who married quite young and had large families. In April, Ia Sukhitashvili (the lead in Beginning) plays Nina, a leading obstetrician at a maternity clinic in eastern Georgia who delivers babies at the hospital and also secretly travels to houses in the countryside to perform abortions. But while there are social and legal complications to providing these services, as envisioned by Kulumbegashvili Nina’s story transcends conventional drama to be a sometimes hyperreal, sometimes enigmatic journey through darkness […]
by Nicolas Rapold on Sep 24, 2024 -
“We Ascribe this Cuteness to Older Women”: Sarah Friedland on Familiar Touch
Depicting aging and diminishing mental acuity, with increasing candor about same, essentially has become its own subgenre—the drama of descent or disappearance. Sarah Friedland’s Familiar Touch feels like something different, eschewing the conventions of linear decline to stay rooted in the present-tense bodily experience of its protagonist: Ruth Goldman, played by a galvanizing Kathleen Chalfant. Beyond the subjective design of the filmmaking—comprising not just what we hear, but how we understand the premise of any given scene—this is a catalyzing collaboration between Chalfant, storied veteran of both stage (Wit) and screen, and Friedland, a student of choreography who sought out […]
by Nicolas Rapold on Sep 13, 2024 -
“We Have Regressed Into an Obtuse and Rigid Moral Order”: Catherine Breillat on Last Summer
It’s been a long decade’s wait since Catherine Breillat’s last feature, the semi-autobiographical Abuse of Weakness with Isabelle Huppert, but Last Summer shows the uncompromising French filmmaker in top form, at once fierce and precise. Returning to a favored subject—the desires and power dynamics in affairs between adolescents and usually much older adults—Breillat brings in another taboo this time: the messy sexual obsession between a lawyer, Anne (Léa Drucker), and her 17-year-old stepson, Théo (newcomer Daniel Kircher). After Théo comes back to stay at the family’s idyllic home outside Paris, the two carry on secretly until the truth becomes inescapable […]
by Nicolas Rapold on Jun 27, 2024
