The Ear

Mar 17, 2016 — Repertory Picks This weekend, Row House Cinema will launch the first-ever Pittsburgh Japanese Film Festival, featuring four diverse films by some of Japan’s most beloved filmmakers—including Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu. Among the films screening during the festival is Ozu’s...

Feb 17, 2016 — It’s been nearly fifty years since the original release of Nagisa Oshima’s Death by Hanging, yet the 1968 feature remains as viscerally powerful as ever. Oshima, one of the Japanese New Wave’s most prominent directors, made the film as a...

Jan 5, 2016 — Toshiya Fujita’s two-film saga set exuberant, manga-inspired martial-arts choreography against a backdrop of a Japanese society in transition to unfold a vivid tale of epic vengeance.

Nov 24, 2015 — Film scholar David Bordwell has written a terrific new piece for his blog about the incredible influence and evolution of Agnès Varda’s six-decade-long filmmaking career. “Varda is now regarded as a living treasure of world cinema,” Bordwell writes. “Whatever she...

Mar 11, 2015 — More than thirty years after his death in 1977, Roberto Rossellini is remembered by your average film buff as the father of Italian neo­realism (Rome, Open City, 1945; Paisan, 1946; Germany Year Zero, 1948) and of actress and model Isabella...

Feb 20, 2015 — In time for this year’s Academy Awards ceremony, we wanted to celebrate all the incredible women who have been nominated for best actress Oscars for their roles in Criterion titles. They range from the 1930s to the 2010s, and include...

Dec 1, 2014 — Agroup of rich Italians is on a cruise off the coast of Sicily when one of their number—a moody, unhappy young woman—disappears. Murder, kidnapping, accident, suicide? Her boyfriend and her close friend search for her, but the search turns into...

Sep 29, 2014 — We were saddened to learn of the death of our dear friend Peter von Bagh. The seventy-one-year-old Finnish film director, historian, writer, and programmer (he cofounded the world-renowned Midnight Sun Film Festival in Sodankylä and was the artistic director of...

Aug 26, 2014 — Define the Japanese New Wave however you like—there are innumerable possible launching points, and the name players in the fifties and sixties were old and young and in between—but from any juncture, Shohei Imamura was a primary figure and, at...

Aug 19, 2014 — Alfonso Cuaron, a filmmaker congenitally allergic to creative constriction, made his most liberated movie with this erotic, moving, often funny threesome tale.