We the Poor

Jan 21, 2014 — Bigger is better in Stanley Kramer’s crazily crammed slapstick epic, a timeless showcase for comedy genius.

Mar 13, 2025 — While a film’s stars are forced to bear the responsibility of moving a narrative forward, supporting actors get to have fun providing comic relief or suggesting whole lives being lived beyond the screen.

Aug 17, 2021 — Songbook It will always figure for me as an interval of eerily suspended time: not only a formative moviegoing experience but a jolt of awareness when the line between screen and life dissolved. In a dimly lit Tokyo cabaret the...

May 22, 2026 — This week brings a look back at Cronenberg’s Crash and conversations with Boots Riley and Wallace Shawn.

Jan 19, 2024 — We’ve been reading about Francis Ford Coppola, James Baldwin, Chantal Akerman, and Cary Grant and Randolph Scott’s barely kept secret.

May 19, 2017 — Let’s open today’s round of interviews with one from the archives, a conversation with Michelangelo Antonioni that originally ran in Corriere della Sera in 1982 but evidently took place during the final stages of shooting Blow-Up (1966). It’s been translated...

Sep 4, 2012 — Umberto D. is perhaps the most astringent film ever made about a poor old man and his dog. Critics today tend to like the astringent parts: the long, deliberately undramatic sequences full of mundane activity (such as a housemaid’s morning...

Mar 10, 2009 — Akira Kurosawa made Dodes’ka-den (1970) during the most crisis-laden period of his career. He had just spent two years embroiled in an ill-fated venture with the Hollywood studio Twentieth Century Fox to direct the Japanese segments of the World War...

Mar 19, 2019 — A few weeks after Barbara Loden, the writer, director, and star of Wanda, died at age forty-eight after a long battle with cancer, Elia Kazan, her widower, was interviewed by Marguerite Duras for Cahiers du cinéma. It was 1980, and...

Sep 19, 2005 — Jane Campion is a rarity, not simply because she is a world-class female director, but because she has devoted her career to exploring female subjectivity.