The Ear

Mar 6, 2018 — Scholar Donald Petrie delves into how inspired choices in casting and cinematography gave Tony Richardson’s Oscar-winning period comedy its modern sensibility.

Dec 3, 2015 — Repertory PicksIn advance of the upcoming release of Quentin Tarantino’s latest film, The Hateful Eight, Chicago’s Music Box Theatre will host a week-long series called Tarantino & Friends that begins tomorrow and includes a selection of films that influenced the...

Nov 5, 2015 — Director Guillermo del Toro isn’t shy about the wealth of influences that have shaped his dark and fantastical cinematic worlds. In a piece published earlier this month in the Guardian, the acclaimed Mexican filmmaker cited a range of inspirations for...

Oct 14, 2015 — Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. Add to that list of great on-screen duos the Italian movie legends Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni, who appeared in more than ten films together. Their 1977 film, A Special...

Nov 18, 2013 — When Tokyo Story was released in late 1953, Western audiences were just being exposed to Japanese cinema. Akira Kurosawa had made his breakthrough with Rashomon three years earlier, and Kenji Mizoguchi was moving to the forefront of the international festival...

Oct 8, 2013 — René Clair’s I Married a Witch is among the buried treasures of 1940s American filmmaking. As the title promises, this is the most fanciful of screwball comedies, one with a peculiar charm that may take you by surprise. Known as...

Apr 9, 2013 — This essay by novelist, playwright, and culture critic Gary Indiana originally appeared in the 1992 book Everything Is Permitted: The Making of “Naked Lunch.” Burroughs’s work tends to affect people like a Rorschach test. It separates cultural conservatives from avant-gardists,...

Jan 2, 2013 — Performances Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Still Walking is an exquisitely lived-in portrayal of family life. It takes place largely over the course of one day, at the home of the aging Yokoyamas, Toshiko (Kirin Kiki) and Kyohei (Yoshio Harada), as they welcome...

Sep 20, 2012 — The following is excerpted from a 1990 audio interview that originally appeared on the Criterion Collection’s laserdisc edition of Children of Paradise. It was conducted by the late Brian Stonehill, who was a communications and media studies professor at Pomona...

Jun 27, 2012 — The writer and director Nora Ephron, who died yesterday at age seventy-one, was an icon in an industry dominated by men. Earlier this year, for the Criterion release of Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture, Ephron and Dunham sat down for a...