Home Video Recommendation: While my religious beliefs haven’t fundamentally changed since the age eleven revelation I wrote about last week, my views on religion have evolved considerably during this time. To hijack a popular meme, the pithily wry short The Tomb now streaming on the Criterion Channel as part of their “Sudanese Film Group” collection (which is well worth watching in its entirety, by the way) represents “how it started” with its charlatan church built atop a bag of wheat. The Age of the Medici, which you can watch on the same platform, uses a variation of the same story (this time it’s about a chapel dedicated to the remains of a saint which turned out to be the bones of a dog) to pick up where the former movie’s cynical “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em!” ending leaves off and suggests that maybe just maybe the wonders of art and architecture surrounding this preacher are ends that justify the means:
Tag Gallagher calls this “the greatest defense of capitalism ever filmed” in The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini, but there’s a lot to love about this movie even if that doesn’t sound like your particular brand of vodka. As I recently said on Letterboxd:
Roberto Rossellini rewrites the Great Man theory of history as biochemistry. Almost the entirety of the final third of Cosimo de’ Medici’s story is devoted to cataloging the achievements of another, Leon Battista Alberti, who in turn would have seen far less were it not for his vantage point atop the pile of art and scholarship commissioned and collected by his patron. It is, in other words, a tale of enzyme catalysis. The brilliant forced perspective establishing shots of Florence keep the fires of activation energy burning.
Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts canbe found here.A running list ofall of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.
Religion stopped working for me sometime between the age of ten and eleven. Born and raised in a part of Pennsylvania that my father used to refer to derogatorily as “fundy country,” it took me that long to realize Christianity wasn’t the only game in town; as soon as I did, I started to have trouble sleeping. Everyone seemed to agree that admission into heaven was dependent on living a good life, but how was it possible to determine which system of keeping score was the right one? Eventually I decided that it wasn’t, labeled myself agnostic, and haven’t had any issues getting eight hours a night ever since.
This is also when I discovered that my family owned a VHS copy of the original Star Wars trilogy taped off the television by someone who occasionally forgot to hit the “stop” button during commercials like this one. By the dawn of the day I piled into a friend’s mom’s car to wait in line for an hour to buy tickets to the theatrical premiere of the “special edition” of A New Hope in 1997, I must have watched it 150 times easy. Although I distinctly remember declaring that “this was the closest thing to a religious experience I’ve ever had!” afterward, I don’t think I connected these two events until just last year when I read Lauren Jackson’s New York Times article “Americans Haven’t Found a Satisfying Alternative to Religion.” Upon doing so I immediately made a note to myself to explore whether or not George Lucas’s tale from a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away functioned for me as a sort of dietary supplement that supplied the “three B’s” Jackson mentions (belief, belonging and behaviors) which otherwise would have been missing from my life.
That prospective blog post was still languishing on the back burner when I saw My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow at Cornell Cinema last year and was struck by how often its characters mention Harry Potter. A few weeks later I watched Best Documentary Feature Oscar nominee (and eventual winner) Mr. Nobody Against Putin, which includes shots featuring this toy in the foreground:
And of these posters adorning director/narrator/subject Pavel Talankin’s office:
There are, in fact, a total of 12-15 Harry Potter references in My Undesirable Friends depending on how you count, beginning with Joker James performing a song live on TV Rain that contains lyrics about “deaf dementors” near the start of chapter one “The Lives of Foreign Agents.” About ten minutes later the children of primary subject Anna Nemzer ask to watch one of the movies, there’s a Harry Potter advent calendar at the beginning of chapter two “The Town Crazies,” and toward the end of it Alesya Marokhovskaya and her girlfriend prepare a birthday cake for their friend Ira Dolinina modeled after the one Hagrid makes Harry:
Ksenia Mironova displays a picture she paid to have taken with Tom Felton, the actor who plays Draco Malfoy, in chapter three “The Holiday Special,” then she mentions “a lecture about why Putin’s Russia is like Harry Potter” about two-thirds of the way through chapter four “The Expected Impossible.” There’s a close-up of a paperback edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone about ten minutes later, and Olya Churakova listens to a voicemail from her podcast partner Sonya Groysman a few seconds after that in which she describes feeling like “this whole time we’ve been in some Harry Potter book and now it’s the moment when the Ministry has fallen and Ron, Hermione, and Harry leave school to look for Horcruxes”:
About ten minutes into chapter five “Don’t Say War” there’s a sequence in which Ksenia notes that her TikTok “is filled with comparisons between Harry Potter and Russia,” followed by a suggestion that “Harry Potter is [opposition leader Alexei] Navalny,” followed by a note that “I watched Harry Potter as a kid and couldn’t understand why so many people can’t overthrow one bald guy who’s been ruling for 20 years but now I get it,” followed by an observation that “Navalny is always quoting Harry Potter in court,” and concluding with her friend holding up a wand bought in London:
A few minutes later her friend says that she has lots of foreign friends who write her, “you can stop this: go out and protest!” and laments the fact that “clearly [they] haven’t lived in Russia, especially recently,” to which Ksenia replies, “let’s go back to talking about Harry Potter.” She makes another reference to how her social media feed consists of “nonstop Harry Potter” about ten minutes after that while waiting for a colleague arrested at a protest to be released from prison, and finally appears wearing this Hogwarts jacket about 30 minutes before the end of the film:
Meanwhile, while there’s only one additional Harry Potter reference in Mr. Nobody when Pavel rhetorically asks, “is Severus Snape our new headmaster?” after stumbling upon students marching through the hallway:
Shots of the posters above reappear multiple times. So what’s going on here? To start with the obvious, My Undesirable Friends director Julia Loktev observed in a 2025 interview with Michael Sicinski for In Review Online that for her characters, “Harry Potter is a framework for understanding good and evil and a framework for understanding Putin’s Russia.” Jackson (who interestingly notes that she first encountered the work of Richard Dawkins at a Barnes & Noble in middle school when she went there “to buy the latest Harry Potter”) supplies a possible reason why in the form of a long-term study that found “women who attended religious services once a week were 33 percent less likely to die prematurely than women who never attended.” She quotes one of its authors, Tyler J. VanderWeele, as explaining that this was because “they had higher levels of social support, better health behaviors and greater optimism about the future,” which sounds a lot like the advice Navalny gave his fellow citizens in a speech appealing his conviction for violating the terms of a previous suspended sentence. “It’s important not to feel lonely, because if I were Voldemort I would like you to feel lonely,” he said. “Obviously, our ‘Voldemort’ in his palace also wants it.” He quoted the Bible in the same speech: “blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied.”
The Church of Dumbledore actually isn’t the only secular religion My Undesirable Friends proposes for Russia. Anya calls New Year’s Eve the country’s “one religious holiday” in chapter three and TV Rain’s lawyer Dima laughingly suggests that “Russia’s real religion is, what’s that Phoenician religion, the cult of Baal” in chapter five:
“There is some divine boss whom no one has ever seen,” he explains, and “it’s always, ‘I don’t make decisions, the boss does.'” The punchline: “Baal in Phoenician just means ‘boss.'” They are, of course, both joking, but there are also three other references that I find significant. The first comes just six minutes into chapter one: “this is really Mordor,” Anya says about a building that to her embodies the worst tendencies of the Putin regime:
“Where else can you find a Mordor like ours?” Lena Kostyuchenko asks about halfway through chapter two. “We have the most Mordorous Mordor!”
Finally, in a cab home from an airport with Lena and her newly-arrived American girlfriend, Loktev herself asks, “how is it ‘Mordor’ in English?” from offscreen as they pass the Kremlin, and is answered with solemn nods.
Whatever comfort and community Harry Potter provides for Loktev’s subjects and Talankin, I can’t help but wonder if they all wouldn’t have been better served by The Lord of the Rings. Consider Ksenia and her friend. “We have a Harry Potter but he’s in prison,” they lament in chapter five.
J.K. Rowling’s tale is just as much a product of the “John the Baptist complex” I wrote about in my Movie Year 2025 top ten (percent) list entry for L’Empire as Star Wars. I have no doubt that My Undesirable Friends‘ dissident journalists knew exactly what they were fighting for and I can’t imagine it would have made a whit of difference in the end, but it seems to me that humble, persistent Frodo Baggins and steadfast Samwise Gamgee would have made for more empowering role models than “The Boy Who Lived.”
In Theaters: The headliner in our household is definitely the free “Family Classics Picture Show” screening of Back to the Future at Cinemapolis on Sunday! This film has quickly become a favorite of the girls since I showed it to them for the first time last summer and we’re all excited to see it on the big screen for the first time. We’re also going to Toy Story 5 at the Regal Ithaca Mall, and I’m planning to catch The Death of Robin Hood there or at Cinemapolis as well. While I’m interested in Girls Like Girls (Cinemapolis) and Leviticus (Regal) too, I don’t think I’m going to get to either of them this week.
Obsession remains my favorite holdover, and I also enjoyed zeitgeist movie Disclosure Day, which is way more about “AI” in my opinion than, oh I dunno, A.I. Artificial Intelligence to randomly pick another film from Steven Spielberg’s oeuvre. Both of those films remain at both Cinemapolis and the Regal. The Sheep Detectives is still going strong at the latter as well and is well worth your consideration whether or not you have kids in tow, and if you like martial arts movies, you should check The Furious out there for its virtuoso fight choreography.
Home Video Recommendation: As a lifelong Mets fan, I grew up watching both actual recordings and this brilliant R.B.I. Baseball reconstruction of Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. I was just four years old when it actually took place, though, so while I believe I was present in front of a television set for at least part of the live broadcast, I have no memory of it. I wasn’t ever tempted to revisit any other sporting event before this week, but I had to go back and bask in the glory of the last 15 minutes of Game 5 of this year’s NBA Finals on Watch ESPN. Having done so, I can attest that they’re a lot more fun when you aren’t seething at the injustice of a lopsided whistle and can simply luxuriate in the indomitable will of Jalen Brunson, offensive rebounding prowess of Mitchell Robinson, and timely contributions from the rest of the best-constructed roster of any team I’ve ever had the pleasure of rooting for. Thanks for the memories fellas!
Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts canbe found here.A running list ofall of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.
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 orStop! 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.
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.
This is a full month ahead of schedule, but I’ve already heard 80 minutes worth of new music this year worthy of being immortalized in a mix. Without further ado, therefore, here’s an annotated track list for my 2026: The Mixtape, Vol. 1 Spotify playlist!
Then we continue with a track from one of my favorite actual film scores of 2026 about a journey to the city that currently sits atop my dream travel destinations.
3. Charley Crockett – Diamond Belle (Country Boy)/I Shot Jesse James
I envision these two tracks being played back-to-back the way the classic rock radio DJs of my youth always paired Jackson Browne’s “The Load-Out” and “Stay” or Pink Floyd’s “Brain Damage” and “Eclipse.”
4. Julianna Barwick & Mary Lattimore – Rachel’s Song
Cover of a soundtrack song which doesn’t actually appear in the film (Blade Runner) it was written for.
5. Bill Callahan – Pathol O.G.
Unlike Andra Day’s character in Is This Thing On? I *don’t* feel like I’m 24 anymore, but like Bill Callahan I’m cool with this!
6. Robyn – Dopamine
A highly anticipated return which lived up to the hype!
7. Kevin Morby – Die Young
Another song for the proudly over the hill.
8. Arise & Go – Jos Cormier / Jock Broon’s 70th
My favorite song by a local band so far this year.
9. Luke Combs – Days Like These
A fun one to sing along with! I mess up the final twist on the chorus every time, though: it really feels like it should be “hell, I’d probably miss the leaves.”
10. Kiss Facility – Cheap Poetry
Reminds me of the best part of my least favorite plotline from Love Actually, the “Here With Me” needle drop after Andrew Lincoln says “enough” and resolves to finally stop harassing poor Keira Knightley.
11. Will Epstein – Dishwasher
Not so much a song of middle age as adulthood generally.
12. BLACKPINK – Champion
A good upbeat anthem for a World Cup year.
13. James Brandon Lewis & The Messthetics – Clutch
Probably my favorite track on this mix.
14. Courtney Barnett – Stay In Your Lane
Unless maybe this one is?
15. Alvarius B. – Rock N’ Roll
Killer road trip music.
16. Jill Scott feat. Trombone Shorty – Be Great
If this doesn’t make you want to get up and high-step around your living room, I don’t know what to tell you!
Epic in a way that reminds me of the novels I just finished reading, The Nobody People and its sequel The Somebody People by local author (and friend) Bob Proehl.
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.
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 canbe found here.A running list ofall of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.
In Theaters: Every year there’s at least one movie that everyone else absolutely loves which I merely like. It Was Just an Accident held this distinction last year, and in 2024 it was Hundreds of Beavers, both of which I found . . . fine. The new incumbent is shaping up to be Blue Heron, which reminded me of two recent films I really liked, Petite Maman and All of Us Strangers, but with all the magic schematized out of them. You should go see it at Cinemapolis anyway, though, because it has a 97% grade on Rotten Tomatoes, is averaging four stars from the people I follow on Letterboxd who have rated it, and will almost certainly end up in the top ten of the 2026 IndieWire Critics Poll, all of which means you’ll probably disagree with me, too. Leave me with a comment if you do and tell me what I’m underrating!
Obsession, which continues its runs at Cinemapolis and the Regal Ithaca Mall, is an exploration of the impossibility of ever actually getting what you wish for as an example of the Lovecraftian sublime that is much more on my wavelength. I also hear good things about holdovers Is God Is and The Sheep Detectives, but I’m going with new releases In the Grey and I Love Boosters. All four films are at the Regal, and Boosters opens at Cinemapolis tonight as well. We’re saving Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu, which probably doesn’t have anything new to say about endowment spending, for a family matinee outing to the Regal next weekend.
Special events include a free screening of The Warrior Tradition at Cinemapolis on Monday. Finally, the cream of a weak crop of repertory options is The Blues Brothers, which has a number of showtimes at the Regal on Monday.
Home Video Recommendation: Prismatic Ground, as its website says, “is an annual festival in New York City centered on experimental documentary and avant-garde film.” It started life in 2021 as a virtual event, but appears to have evolved into a first truly hybrid, then mostly in-person one which still retains a virtual component over the past five springs. Last year was the first time I remember hearing about it, and this year I almost remembered to check the festival website in time to catch some of the “wave ∞” films, but was a day or two late. Luckily for me, 31 selections from the first five editions are now available on the Criterion Channel with a subscription as part of their “Prismatic Ground Presents” collection, which I recently finished working my way through.
Genuinely boundary-pushing art is just as likely to irritate as it is to awe you, sometimes even within the same work. Hinkelten, for instance, was probably my least favorite movie of the lot, but it also opens with a starkly Arctic horizontal composition that I’d love to frame and hang on my wall so that I can stare at it without the distraction of gratingly slowed-down voiceover dialogue that I found nearly unbearable:
Other titles such as As If No Misfortune Had Occurred in the Night, which is meant to be “presented in black and white as a three-screen projection,” didn’t work for me because they seem to have lost a lot in translation from installation setups like this one to the small screen. Quite a few are worth mixing in with your feature film viewing, though! Here are five of my favorites:
5.Exterior Turbulence. This richly-textured (even in its interstitial white text-on-a-black-background title cards!) dream diary directed by Binghamton University professor Sofia Theodore-Pierce won Best in Show at the 2023 Ithaca Experimental Film Festival, an annual event that I’m now extremely embarrassed not to have made it to yet. Next year!
4.L’Éscale. I still get a big kick out of flying, and this movie’s deceptively simple window seat visuals tap into that same “surly bonds of earth” sense of wonder. It pairs them with voiceover dialogue describing a Kafkaesque stopover, though, foregrounding a different way international aviation is a miracle: successfully navigating past multiple interstitial spaces where you can be made to disappear without anyone knowing until they receive a ransom demand.
3. Yaangna Plays Itself. One of our local movie theaters recently introduced a well-intentioned but overlong and repetitive land acknowledgement which now precedes most of their screenings. This dynamic experiment in filmic terroir models a materialist approach to setting the celluloid record straight that I’d love to see them look at as inspiration for future efforts. Especially if they created a series, perhaps corresponding to the changing seasons, it would be much more engaging!
2. Tuktuit: Caribou. Astonishingly resourceful 16mm cinematic ouroboros created with developers and emulsion made from the same lichen and fleshed-down caribou depicted in the movie. Which is also beautiful and mysterious in a way that reminded me of Movie Year 2025 favorite 7 Walks with Mark Brown! If I was organizing a screening of Nuisance Bear, I’d want this to play before it.
1. Ma’loul Celebrates Its Destruction. The oldest film here, a 2024 wave ∞ online exclusive from 1984, is at its best in classroom scenes that suggest intonation as an antidote to Orwellian doublespeak. It also uses speeded-up archival footage to a similarly understated subversive effect and features a juxtaposition of a mural aide de mémoire against travelogue footage from a visit to a place that doesn’t exist anymore which certainly anticipates and maybe even directly inspired a number of other works in this collection.
Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts canbe found here.A running list ofall of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.
The Prodigal Cinephile 