Deliver Us From Putin

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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:

Medium shot of students gathered around a table in Pavel Talankin's office with a Harry Potter toy in the foreground

And of these posters adorning director/narrator/subject Pavel Talankin’s office:

Medium shot of a whiteboard covered in flyers and pictures, including ones of Harry, Hermione Granger, and Severus Snape

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:

Close-up of a cake with "Happee Birthdae Ira" written on it in green icing

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”:

Medium shot of Olya listening to a voicemail in her kitchen with a worried expression

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:

Medium shot of Ksenia's friend inspecting a replica of Severus Snape's wand

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:

Medium shot of Ksenia at her computer in a Hogwarts jacket

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:

Medium long POV shot of Pavel observing students conducting marching drills in the hallway of his school

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:

Close-up of Dima talking outside at night with a mask around his chin

“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:

Medium shot of Anya craning her neck to look at something out the windshield of the car she's driving
POV shot of a monumentalist skyscraper

“Where else can you find a Mordor like ours?” Lena Kostyuchenko asks about halfway through chapter two. “We have the most Mordorous Mordor!”

Close-up of Lena laughing

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.

Medium close-up of Ksenia sitting on a couch laughing, but with a hand over one of her eyes and a fatalistic expression

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 is. 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.”

Ithaca Film Journal: 6/18/26

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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.

Special events include a KPop Demon Hunters “sing-along” at the Regal this morning and a free screening of the documentary The Niagara Movement: the Early Battle for Civil Rights at Cinemapolis on Tuesday. Finally, additional repertory highlights include 25th anniversary screenings of Ocean’s Eleven at the Regal on Sunday and Wednesday, Raiders of the Lost Ark there on Sunday, and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown at Cinemapolis on Tuesday.

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 can be found here. A running list of all of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.

Ithaca Film Journal: 6/11/26

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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.

Ithaca Film Journal: 6/4/26

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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.

2026: The Mixtape, Vol. 1

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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!

1. Blod – Jennys Sång

We begin and end as we did last year with a theme and its reprise, this time from the retro soundtrack for an imaginary film.

2. Duval Timothy & CJ Mirra – Journey to Lagos

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!

17. Daphni – Good Night Baby

Features a delightfully trippy music video that the girls like a lot.

18. Bleachers – you and forever

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.

19. Hildur Guðnadóttir – The Bone Temple

I enjoyed Young Fathers’ score for the first 28 Years Later movie overall, but this track from its sequel is the best thing in either of them.

20. Blod – Jennys Sång (Repris)

See above.

Links to previous mixes I’ve posted about can be found here.

Ithaca Film Journal: 5/28/26

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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.

Ithaca Film Journal: 5/21/26

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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:

Striking assembly of gray, white, and frosty blue horizontal lines that looks like it could be an Arctic landscape but maybe not?

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 can be found here. A running list of all of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.

The Mandalorian Trade-Off

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One of my New Year’s resolutions was to be less of a movie snob and watch a few TV series with My Loving Wife. With December 2022 Drink & a Movie selection Elf director Jon Favreau’s latest Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu opening on May 22, The Mandalorian seemed like a good place to start. Three episodes in, something struck me as strangely familiar.

I served on the University Senate at the University of Maryland from 2016-2019 and the Faculty Senate at Cornell University from 2022-2025, where I listened to many debates about endowment spending. They invariably began with one of my colleagues suggesting that doing more of it seemed like an obvious solution to a funding problem that troubled them, continued with someone else (usually an administrator) patiently explaining that this wasn’t as easy as it sounded and would be foolhardy in any case, and ended in stalemate because neither side ever came close to convincing the other.

We meet the Mandalorian “covert” just 18 minutes into season one. Bounty hunter Din Djarin aka “Mando” (Pedro Pascal) looks around to ensure the coast is clear, ducks into a doorway, and descends a staircase:

Medium shot of Djin Djarin looking around
Medium shot of a silhouetted Mandalorian pulling aside a curtain to enter a doorway
Medium long shot of the Mandalorian's legs and torso as he descends a staircase

He makes his way past other helmeted figures to the Armorer (Emily Swallow):

Long shot of the Mandalorian walking down a hallway flanked by other Mandalorians
Long shot of the Armorer at a forge

And places an ingot of Beskar steel from their ancestral homeworld that he received as pre-payment for a new commission before her:

Medium long shot of Din Djaron placing an ingot of Beskar in front of the Armorer, who sits facing him with her back to the camera in the right foreground
Close up of the Armorer picking up the Beskar

“This is extremely generous,” she says as she melts it down. “The excess will sponsor many foundlings.”

Close-up of the Armorer handling the ingot with tongs
Close-up of the ingot starting to melt
Low-angle long shot of the Armorer looking at a hologram of a pauldron

“That’s good,” he replies. “I was once a foundling.” As the Armorer hammers the steel into a pauldron, violent scenes from Mando’s childhood flash before his eyes:

Close-up of the Mandolorian's helmeted face superimposed over both flames from a violent episode in his youth and the Armorer hammering

Two episodes later his captured quarry Grogu becomes fascinated by the metal knob atop a lever in his starship, which for some reason easily screws off:

Medium close-up of Grogu grasping the knob on a lever in Din Djarin's spaceship in front of the latter, who does not notice

Mando is well compensated for delivering him to The Client played by Werner Herzog, another “Drink & a Movie” alum:

Medium shot of The Client opening a container
Close-up of the container revealing that it is full of Beskar

A crowd forms when he delivers the bounty to the Armorer, who informs him that it’s enough for a full cuirass:

Medium close-up of Din Djarin sitting before the Armorer, who is out of focus in the foreground with her back to the camera, as a crowd of Mandalorians forms behind him

But not everyone is impressed. Paz Vizsla aka “Heavy Infantry” picks up an ingot and studies it contemptuously:

Medium close-up of Heavy Infantry contemplating a Beskar ingot

Then initiates the following exchange with the Armorer:

HEAVY INFANTRY: These were cast in an Imperial smelter. These are the spoils of the Great Purge. The reason that we lie hidden like sand rats.

THE ARMORER: Our secrecy is our survival. Our survival is our strength.

HEAVY INFANTRY: Our strength was once in our numbers. Now we live in the shadows and only come above ground one at a time.

Mando asks the Armorer to reserve some excess Beskar for the foundlings, to which she replies, “the foundlings are our future.”

Medium close-up of the Armorer

A few minutes of screentime later, Mando is getting ready to set off on a new adventure, when a rack focus suddenly alerts us to the fact that he never reinstalled the knob Grogu liked to play with:

Medium close-up of Mando reaching toward something out of focus in the foreground
Continuation of the previous image: a rack focus has revealed that the object he was reaching for is the lever which is still missing its knob

He undergoes a change of heart and embarks on a rescue mission which goes well until it doesn’t. Just when all hope seems lost, Din Djarin’s fellow Mandalorians descend from the sky to save him and his new ward:

Close-up of Din Djarin looking skyward
Low-angle long shot of flying Mandalorians coming to the rescue

“You’re going to have to relocate the covert,” Mando says to Heavy Infantry, who answers with the words of their creed: “this is the Way.”

Close-up of the Mandalorian addressing Heavy Infantry, who is offscreen
Reverse shot of Heavy Infantry replying to Mando, who is out of focus in the foreground

In his seminal Journal of Legal Studies article on the topic, Henry Hansmann argued that while university endowments “are now so familiar that their purpose is seldom questioned,” upon close examination “it is not obvious why they are accumulated.” On the one hand, as Hansmann notes, it’s quite simple: “the accumulation of endowment is, in effect, a form of saving, presumably for expenditure in the future.” But because “each dollar added to endowment represents a dollar less for current research or for educational services to current students or a dollar more in tuition that must be charged current students in order to provide them with the same level of services,” it only makes sense to refrain from spending this money if the amount saved will “be used to provide more research, more education, or lower tuition in the future.”

Universities concede by their actions that they can dip into their endowment each year: per Hansmann c. 1990, his home institution Yale was typical in adopting a policy whereby expenditures should not exceed the long-run real rate of return of its endowment investments to ensure that the real value of the endowment does not decrease. The only question, then, is how much is appropriate? Hansmann devotes 25 pages considering eleven common justifications for rules favoring endowment accumulation in turn before concluding that while ideas such as that they “serve as a financial buffer against periods of financial adversity” and/or “assist in passing on values prized by the present generation” are compelling, there’s little evidence either that they actually explain university behavior or “that the sizes of existing endowments, and the ways in which they are managed, are well chosen to serve these goals.”

The parallels between this and the case of the covert run surprisingly deep. Former foundling Din Djarin operating out in the open while everyone else remains literally underground represents a form of “spending to the real rate of return,” and a population that slowly and steadily increases is like an investment portfolio rich in growth stocks. More to the point, like Peter Conti-Brown during the Great Recession, Benjamin Bernard during the COVID-19 global pandemic, and Allison Tait last year shortly after the Trump administration began its attacks on higher education, the Armorer and her fellow Mandalorians decided that the “moral trade-off” (as Bernard put it) of inactivity during a time of crisis wasn’t worth it.

As a staunch believer in the old adage “there’s no such thing as a free lunch,” I confess that during my time as a senator the administrator argument that, as Karen W. Arenson quoted Princeton president Shirley M. Tilghman writing to her Senate Finance Committee, “the endowment does not function as a ‘piggy bank’ or ‘rainy day fund’ waiting to be used or allocated” rang true to me. And indeed this pile of armor initially suggests that the Mandalorians made a mistake by revealing themselves:

Close-up of a pile of discarded Mandalorian armor

But season three dawns on Paz Vizsla’s son Ragnar Vizsla being initiated into the relocated covert, proving that their gamble did in fact pay off:

Long shot of the Armorer holding a helmet above an initiate as they both stand in water and a crowd of Mandalorians looks on from just outside the entrance to a cave

One consequence of using popular culture texts to explain concepts like endowment spending is that they’re often persuasive in ways you didn’t anticipate. That isn’t quite what happened here for me, but I do find myself pretty well convinced by Conti-Brown’s “cultural theory of endowment accumulation,” and The Mandalorian is a good illustration of one of its central points: the danger of confusing the means for the end. As Conti-Brown notes, an endowment “can be a point of reference and pride akin to a winning football team, the prominence of a faculty member, or the ranking of the university” because its absolute size “provides a clear criterion for objective ranking.” The problem arises when protecting it at all costs entails withholding benefits from the students of today in the name of the students of tomorrow–after all, that’s who they were when the bargain was struck!

Bernard observes that “the choices universities make now will also affect the future composition of the professoriate,” and it isn’t a coincidence that when the ceremony above is interrupted by a Dinosaur Turtle attack:

Long shot of the Armorer whisking Ragnar Vizsla away from the approaching Dinosaur Turtle
Medium long shot of the Dinosaur Turtle knocking Ragnar Vizsla to the ground

It’s Din Djarin and Grogu who arrive in the nick of time to play hero:

Medium shot of Mando in his ship in front of the dead Dinosaur Turtle and a crowd of Mandalorians
Medium shot of Mando from the other side, this time with Grogu visible behind him

To put it in terms they would appreciate, this is the Way.