The Prodigal Cinephile

In Theaters: A new Steven Spielberg movie is always an event, and people seem even more excited for Disclosure Day (which opens at the Regal Ithaca Mall today and Cinemapolis tomorrow) than the last few, but here are a couple of holdovers that I hope you’ll also make time for! First, you have one final chance to see Carolina Caroline at the Regal today at 2:55pm. As I recently wrote on Letterboxd:

The primary job of the plot in an old-school effort like this is just to focus the movie star energy of leads Kyle Gallner and Samara Weaving, and for that it gets a solid A. Gallner’s grifter Oliver also poses an intriguing question, though: had he never met Samara Weaving’s titular protagonist, could he have continued to float through the early-aughts rural American landscape like a trickster demigod indefinitely, or was she a lover from previous lifetimes à la The Beast who was always the destination of his Southern odyssey? Also featuring Kyra Sedgwick as a harpy in the classical sense who shows everyone who shoehorned Jean Reno into Tuner how to steal a scene without hijacking the film and a diffused climax that deconstructs Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid‘s back nine.

I also really enjoyed Power Ballad, a musical midlife crisis starring Paul Rudd with a Candide-esque message about the importance of tending your own soundgarden, and surprise hit of the early summer Obsession. Both movies remain at both Cinemapolis and the Regal. If none of these options sounds family-friendly enough, your best bet is to take your crew to see The Sheep Detectives at the Regal, and if they sound *too* family-friendly, my recommendation is I Love Boosters at Cinemapolis.

In addition to Disclosure Day, I’m planning to check out The Little Sister at Cinemapolis on Sunday as well. I’d also be interested in seeing The Furious at the Regal or Stop! That! Train! there or at Cinemapolis, but I don’t think I’m going to get a chance and neither appears likely to stick around longer than a week. This week’s special events include a “Drag Movie Night” presentation of Pink Flamingos at Cinemapolis on Wednesday featuring performances and games by local performers Tilia Cordata and Dizzy DeScretion and KPop Demon Hunters sing-alongs at the Regal Monday-Thursday. Finally, additional repertory highlights include screenings of Ponyo at the Regal Saturday-Wednesday and A Room with a View at Cinemapolis on Tuesday.

Home Video Recommendation: I’m just about caught up on the backlog of titles my friend Scott and I have been watching for our two-person film club that I mentioned last month! Our second-most-recent selection The Cloud-Capped Star was a good one. Here’s what I said about it on Letterboxd:

Opens with a shot of one of cinema’s great trees. Thinking back its branches may remind you of pulmonary arteries when the movie ends by erasing the distinction between Supriya Choudhury’s long-suffering heroine Neeta and the land she inhabits as a refugee: her voice first Echoes off the hills, then lights on another woman whose sandal breaks in a symmetrical act of sympathy and finally reverberates through eternity over a dark screen accompanied by the same otherworldly warble that elsewhere announces the onset of a dizzy spell.

The interiority of Star‘s famous whiplash sound effect is similarly ambiguous. While it initially functions entirely as a non-diegetic external manifestation of her feelings upon discovering that the man she’s been saving herself for didn’t have the patience to reciprocate, it appears again later to punish him when he finally faces what he’s done. Even more interestingly, her brother Shankar almost seems to hear it in the scene where he checks himself before he too forsakes the path she sacrificed her youth to set him on.

The point of all this aural expressionism is perhaps best exemplified by one of the film’s outstanding visual moments, a rack focus to a Falconetti close-up of Neeta’s face in the foreground when she finally castigates her mother for taking her for granted. The Passion of Joan of Arc is about the trial and tribulations of a saint about to ascend to heaven; Star is set in the hell that is other people.

You can stream this movie on the Criterion Channel with a subscription, and it’s also available on both Blu-ray and DVD from the Criterion Collection.

Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts can be found here. A running list of all of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.

In Theaters: I don’t talk much about box office performance on this blog because what’s a hit and what’s flopping isn’t terribly relevant to my particular brand of cinephilia. I am deeply invested in my local theaters making enough money to stay in business, though, so I’m rooting for both the twin horror sensations Backrooms and Obsession to continue making a killing even though I liked one of them much more than the other.

Backrooms traffics in a lot of the same themes as last year’s The Woman in the Yard, but for better or worse it trades clarity for atmosphere. I haven’t dug into the web series it’s based on beyond giving the Wikipedia entry a once over, so the only thing it builds on for me personally is the teaser trailer. While there wasn’t anything in the movie itself that made the production design-driven conceit more interesting than it already was aside from a monster that reminded me of the papier-mâché puppets that are staples of Ithaca’s parade scene, I will give at least one of its inevitable sequels a chance to change my mind.

Obsession is less overtly fascinated by a past its creator and primary audience are too young to have experienced firsthand, but it also revolves around a fictional museum piece. Like the “liminal spaces” of its like-it-or-not companion film, it remains ambiguous what the “One Wish Willow” is meant to tell us about the previous era it supposedly hails from: is the idea that a heart’s desire didn’t yield as much destructive power in simpler times? Or is yet another generation issuing a disclaimer that “we didn’t start the fire”? I think this question represents value-added intrigue rather than a distraction because it’s secondary to the anxiety about what constitutes consent that most of its horror comes from. There are also some vestigial genre mores, to be sure, but just as the audience I saw Hokum with seemed to enjoy its empty jump scares, I’ve got no objections here to giving the people what they obviously want.

Both films continue their runs at both Cinemapolis and the Regal Ithaca Mall this week. Obsession is my top recommendation for both venues, but each is worth seeing if for no other reason than because their wild popularity with young viewers feared to be allergic to movie theaters all but guarantees that they’ll be one of the most important stories of Movie Year 2026. Go see ’em!

I’m planning to spend three of my next seven evenings glued to the television watching my beloved Knickerbockers take on Victor Wembanyama and the Spurs in the NBA Finals myself, but I do intend to make time to see Carolina Caroline at the Regal and Power Ballad there or at Cinemapolis. Although I’m giving the Nitrate Picture Show a miss this year in favor of Capitolfest 2026, I might also sneak up to Rochester on Saturday to try my luck with the rush lines depending on what’s playing. Other new releases I enjoyed include, in approximate order of preference, The Sheep Detectives (Regal), I Love Boosters (Cinemapolis), and Tuner (Cinemapolis). Finally, special events/repertory highlights include the return of Ran to Cinemapolis 40 years after it became the first film they ever screened on Tuesday and a 30th anniversary presentation of Trainspotting at the Regal on Sunday.

Home Video Recommendation: In the spirit of nostalgia, this week’s home video recommendation is News From Home, one of the best documentary portraits of a New York City that exists no more ever committed to celluloid. Here’s what I said about it on Letterboxd the last time I watched it:

The old man in avocado-colored checkered pants who gets on the subway at about the 30-minute mark, stares directly into our eyes for a few beats, then switches cars is the absolute final word on people looking at the camera. Letter-writing is often bemoaned as a lost art, but here it sounds utterly exhausting. If you score this film like a prize fight between home where the art is (was?) and the strange land Akerman is now a stranger in based on whether VO or diegetic audio is dominant, the latter seems en route to victory, but then it ends with 1970s New York sinking into the ocean like the lost city of Atlantis.

You can stream News From Home on both the Criterion Channel and HBO Max with a subscription; it’s also available for rental from a variety of other platforms and as part of the Criterion Collection’s Chantal Akerman Masterpieces, 1968–1978 Blu-ray box set.

Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts can be found here. A running list of all of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.

In Theaters: No movie can compete with the thrill of watching the New York Knickerbockers return to the NBA Finals for the first time since I was in high school. They don’t start until Wednesday, though, so I’m going to try to catch Tuner at Cinemapolis and both Backrooms and Pressure there or at the Regal Ithaca Mall before then. I’d like to see Manas at Cinemapolis on Sunday as well, but that’s already a busy day, so it probably isn’t in the cards.

Obsession, which continues its runs at Cinemapolis and the Regal, remains my favorite holdover. I also enjoyed I Love Boosters, a psilocybin-fueled Students for Socialism brainstorming session come to life that’s at both theaters as well, and if you’re looking for something for the whole family, The Sheep Detectives features the best counting sheep joke I can remember and a refreshingly matter-of-fact attitude toward death that has the potential to spark some interesting conversations in the car ride home. It’s at the Regal.

Special events include a “Drag Movie Night” presentation of To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar at Cinemapolis on Wednesday. Finally, this week’s repertory highlight is Inside Llewyn Davis, which screens at the Regal throughout the day today.

Home Video Recommendation: I have a backlog of titles my buddy Scott and I watched for our two-person film club to talk about here! This week I’m going with The Gleaners & I, which is currently available on the Criterion Channel with a subscription, for rental from a variety of other platforms, and as part of the Criterion Collection’s The Complete Films of Agnès Varda Blu-ray box set. As I said on Letterboxd:

Her movie could be your life. When I was a Star Wars-obsessed teenager I owned a silly DVD-ROM that included brief parodies of A New Hope in the style of other filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino. Gleaners already contains at least one such “extra” in the scenes in which berobed barristers recite the French penal code amidst cabbage patches and junk piles, which you could drop into an episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus as is without anyone noticing. It’s also fun to imagine what Thomas Pynchon or his cinematic interlocutor Paul Thomas Anderson might have done with this material. 

Varda’s appropriative but not exclusively personal engagement with low- and high-culture original paintings and reproductions is my kind of art history. I love the brief shot of the manual for the DV camera she’s using, which is a perfectly incomplete metaphor for the film itself. It’s astonishing how many disparate threads scavenged from warehouses and waste bins she’s able to weave into such a concise essay. But actually, now that I think about it, I do have one “note”: how could she not make the amazing rap songs by Agnès Bredel and Richard Klugman available in their entirety somewhere!?

Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts can be found here. A running list of all of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.

In Theaters: There are a lot of intriguing new titles popping up on local marquees today and tomorrow, but I’ve got a lot going on this week and thus only have time to see two. I think I’m going with the one the internet has been buzzing about, The Blue Heron, and Obsession largely on the strength of its teaser trailer. They’re both opening at Cinemapolis, and the latter is at the Regal Ithaca Mall as well. I also have varying degrees of interest in The Wizard of the Kremlin (Regal), Steal This Story, Please! (Cinemapolis), Is God Is (Regal), and In the Grey (Regal), but they’ll all have to wait. Hokum, which continues its runs at both Cinemapolis and the Regal, remains my favorite holdover.

It’s mostly all quiet on the special events front, but there is a free “Family Classics Picture Show” presentation of the Aardman Animations classic Chicken Run at Cinemapolis on Sunday. Other noteworthy repertory fare includes a staff picks screening of the good (Cronenberg) Crash at Cinemapolis on Tuesday and an eclectic mix of musicals and sci fi movies at the Regal highlighted by Close Encounters of the Third Kind on Sunday, An American in Paris on Monday, Singin’ in the Rain on Tuesday, and Annihilation on Wednesday.

Home Video Recommendation: Jordan Ruimy reports that 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple has not been doing well on Netflix and speculates that as a result the trilogy will never be completed, which is a real shame because the first 28 Years Later made my Movie Year 2025 top ten (percent) list and this one is my second-favorite film of 2026 so far, trailing only Alpha. Matt Patches recently published an article on Polygon called “It stinks that we may never see the end of the decade’s best trilogy” that ends with a series of suggestions to save it. Serious question: what about an Oscar campaign for Ralph Fiennes? After all, as I said on Letterboxd in January after revisiting part one:

Nominating and then finally awarding Ralph Fiennes an Oscar for his supporting turn as an orange-skinned anti-Trump in this film would have been not only delightfully ironic (considering how many oh so serious roles he was passed over for) and richly deserved, but also a perfectly timed middle finger to You-Know-Who and his thugs. Missed opportunity! Let’s not do it again next year, eh?

Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts can be found here. A running list of all of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.