If our review of this year’s Oscar-nominated live-action shorts is any indication, the Academy got it right when handing their award to Benjamin Cleary‘s Stutterer. We summed up the best of the bunch by saying, “Cleary provides his character a fully realized history in but twelve minutes of real estate by letting these questions sit hidden behind audience assumptions. And [Matthew] Needham dives deep to silently ask them so that we only realize once the answer is known. Many movies fail because they’re defined by their ending. Others excel because their ending reveals how deceivingly complex the rest truly was.”

And now one can see Stutterer for themselves, thanks to The New Yorker. Be sure to pair your viewing with a piece from No Film School, wherein Cleary details his struggles: a tiny budget, a short schedule, inexperience, and numerous festival rejections — none of which typically lead to exposure,...