The Ear

Aug 30, 2022 — A lyrical study of a farming community in Ethiopia, Jessica Beshir’s debut feature reckons with the consequences of the region’s reliance on the cash crop khat.

Aug 25, 2022 — While working on our edition of Martin Scorsese’s 1980 masterpiece, producer Abbey Lustgarten found out how the director achieved some of the movie’s most evocative visual and sonic effects.

Aug 16, 2022 — The Safdie brothers drew inspiration from their childhood memories for their first feature as codirectors, a terrifying yet wondrous portrait of an unpredictable father.

Apr 21, 2022 — In 1948, leftist filmmaker Leo Hurwitz directed a documentary whose title summed up the uncertainty of its moment: for America’s antifascists, the end of the Second World War was a Strange Victory indeed. Using newsreels from the war’s front lines,...

Mar 8, 2022 — A parable of wayward women in a world without mothers, Márta Mészáros’s 1975 feature catapulted the Hungarian auteur to international prominence.

Mar 1, 2022 — The first film I saw at last year’s Morelia International Film Festival opens on the image of a freshly dug grave. Shovelfuls of earth fall into the open pit as two doctors stand above it, lamenting the loss of yet...

Feb 24, 2022 — More than seventy films, including work from Sergei Parajanov, Ana Vaz, Ben Rivers, and Daïchi Saïto, are freely available worldwide.

Feb 22, 2022 — Acting, that undefinable amalgam of technique, persona, and plain hard work, dominates this month’s roundup.

Feb 18, 2022 — This week we’re celebrating pioneers of queer cinema and reading about Melville, Menelik Shabazz, Patrick Wang, and Francis Ford Coppola.

Oct 22, 2021 — Sexuality—how one defines it, lives with it, hides it, shuns it, or wields it—is inextricable from matters of socioeconomic class, though rare is the American film that centralizes this intersectional reality. Americans have long been encouraged to buy into the...