film | The Last Movie Guy

The Beloved (2026): A Desert Between Father and Daughter.

In The Beloved, the desert is the setting of the film the protagonists are shooting, but it is also a reflection of the emotional desolation that separates them. Rodrigo Sorogoyen uses metacinema to construct a family drama centered on the broken relationship between a father and his daughter: he is a successful film director; she is an actress who has not yet found her way. From that conflict, the film draws on each of their demons and creates a remarkably powerful dramatic tension.

Furies (2026): When Survival Becomes a Heist

Posted on 10 Days Ago by Hugo Pagan Soto

In 2019, Lebanon’s financial crisis reached its breaking point. Protests across the country intensified, banks closed their doors, and soon began imposing restrictions on depositors’ withdrawals and transfers. Three years later, the collapse was total: money was frozen in bank accounts, people could no longer access their savings, and many citizens took desperate measures to get their money back. It is precisely in that bleak year of 2022 that Furies, directed by Rami Kodeih, is a work of fiction that comes painfully close to reality.

The Roaring Twenties (1939): When the Gangster Dream Died

Posted on 17 Days Ago by Hugo Pagan Soto

Warner Bros. had built a solid niche around the gangster film. James Cagney was instrumental in bringing the genre to prominence: films such as The Public Enemy (1931) and Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) were pillars that helped sustain the legendary studio throughout the decade. With The Roaring Twenties, Raoul Walsh crafted a film that serves as the closing chapter of the classic gangster film, a genre that would evolve in the following decade toward a darker, more cynical tone: film noir.

Hope (2026) – The Eternal Appeal of the Monster

Posted on 19 Days 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 20 Days 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.