The Last Movie Guy

Hope (2026) – The Eternal Appeal of the Monster

Posted on 2 Hours Ago by Hugo Pagan Soto

Cinema and monsters are a recipe as old as cinema itself. Long before Jaws (1975) turned monsters on celluloid into modern machines for generating blockbusters, cinema had already terrified audiences with an entire legion of grotesque creatures. King Kong, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Nosferatu, The Golem… the stuff nightmares are made of has always found fertile ground on the big screen. Hope, the new film from Korean director Na Hong-jin, reminds us that this old formula remains just as effective today as it was a hundred years ago.

The Last Movie Guy – Episode #2: Memory, Identity, And Legends

Posted on 1 Day Ago by Hugo Pagan Soto

Pip: The Last Movie Guy — where even the documentaries have better narrative structure than most feature films.

Mara: Hugo Pagan Soto has been watching closely this week — films about exile and memory, about timelines that fold back on themselves, and about the messy, mythologized business of making a Hollywood legend.

Pip: So, stories about how stories get told. Let’s start with memory — and what cinema does when it refuses to let the past stay buried.

The Age of Goodbyes (2026) – A Cinematic Labyrinth of Memory

Posted on 1 Day Ago by Hugo Pagan Soto

An exploration of time, memory, the past, and the present is what Edmund Yeo offers in The Age of Goodbyes. The screenplay, written by Yeo himself, is an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Malaysian writer Li Zi Shu. The film presents us with several timelines unfolding in parallel. From the central story, we move into narratives that intertwine with one another. The chronology of events arrives like the memories of the characters, seemingly blurring the boundaries between past and present, between the real and the mystical.

I Play Rocky (2026) – The Making of a Hollywood Legend

Posted on 4 Days Ago by Hugo Pagan Soto

What I Play Rocky does is not something new in cinema. As recently as last year, Richard Linklater imagined the birth of one of the most important films in the history of cinema in his Nouvelle Vague (2025). Brilliantly, we witnessed the dramatization of Jean-Luc Godard and his process of making À bout de souffle (1960). If we dig through the archives, we will find many films that tell the story of how another movie was made, and if we expand our search to documentaries, there are countless more. Director Peter Farrelly’s latest venture takes on one of the most iconic films in the history of the seventh art: Rocky.

Edward Said: Between Worlds (2026) – Between Exile and Memory

Posted on 5 Days Ago by Hugo Pagan Soto

“I firmly believe that the historical and moral sufficiency of the Palestinian cause will ultimately survive and overcome any attempt to distort it.” (The Question of Palestine)

In the documentary Edward Said: Between Worlds, director Maiken Baird revives the voice of one of the most influential figures in the struggle for Palestinian rights. Edward Said’s discourse gave the Palestinian cause an intellectual framework that transcended borders. We do not need outside narrators; the protagonist’s own words are enough. Through audio recordings, interviews, television appearances, and material from Said’s family archive, Baird constructs a powerful film.