Other noteworthy special events include Cornell Cinema‘s traditional end-of-semester Mystery Screening and a free screening of Vieques: A Living Archive followed by a Q&A with director Juan Carlos Rodriguez at Cinemapolis this evening. Finally, this week’s repertory highlights are the screening of Purple Rain at the Regal on Sunday and Cruising at Cinemapolis on Tuesday, the latest installment in their “Staff Picks: Erotic Thrillers” series.
Home Video Recommendation: I called Northern Lights a “black and white stunner” in the FLEFF ’26 dispatch I published yesterday, but went much longer on it on Letterbox during the fest. Here’s what I said:
Has the same relationship to fellow 2026 Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival selection Seedsas Come and See has to Green Border, but that’s the long arc of the moral universe for you! This was deservingly the second-ever winner of the Caméra d’Or at Cannes, and the scene where Robert Behling’s Ray Sorensen rehearses a speech introducing “the next governor of North Dakota!” as an economical and also more intimate alternative to a nominating convention hall full of extras is one all aspiring filmmakers should be familiar with. In a Q&A ably facilitated by friend and Ithaca College professor Dr. Ashley R. Smith, co-director John Hanson explained the verisimilitude of the amazing threshing scene was attributable to an actual unplanned snow storm that they later wrote additional scenes around so that they could incorporate it into the film. He also confirmed that, yes, Ingmar Bergman (whose films he first became acquainted with while working as a projectionist) was an influence.
When I interviewed Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival Co-Directors Michael Richardson and Andrew Utterson last month, they explained that their ideal FLEFF theme “will resonate with a range of different films, but not be too determining of how we think about them.” It perhaps therefore shouldn’t be a surprise that only two of the 12 movies I saw at this year’s edition directly address “Migrations” in what I’d think is the most obvious sense of animals or people moving from one geographical location to another. Appropriately for an opener, that’s how Clash of the Wolves, a Rin Tin Tin vehicle (my first) from 1925 accompanied by event mainstays L’il Anne and Hot Cayenne, begins: the famous canine’s Lobo leads his wolf pack down from forest fire-ravaged mountains to the desert, where borax prospector Dave Weston (Charles Farrell) earns his loyalty by removing a cactus thorn from his paw. Hijinks ensue when Dave brings Lobo, who is known throughout the region, to town in a bizarrely effective beard disguise that makes him look like Dr. Fido Freud:
Per Utterson, “connecting the early 20th century with debates that resonate 100 or so years later” is one of the reasons FLEFF continues to include silent films in their programming each year, and the intersections between Clash and winner of the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary at Sundance 2026 Nuisance Bear are a great example of what this looks like in practice. Co-directed by hometown hero Jack Weisman, the latter drew one of the biggest crowds of any event I attended, and just as the fest’s first audience applauded when Lobo’s pack mauled Pat Hartigan’s villain in the final reel, these folks were audibly Team Ursine. But while the box office draw of animals may not have changed much in the past hundred years, the tone of the narratives they appear in definitely has, and where the earlier picture celebrates Dave for taming Lobo, Bear‘s subject is the dangers of disrupting the natural order. Both films are also noteworthy for their cinematography: intro speaker Thomas Bohn described the Joshua Tree National Park locations as something that set Clash apart from the backlot and studio sets the major studios favored at the time, while the best thing about Bear are its horizon line widescreen compositions and the way it zooms out to expose the “human infrastructure” deliberately hidden by other arctic photographers.
Utterson’s “historical vectors” are also at work in the way Seeds, which won the prize for Best Documentary at Sundance last year, can be read as having the same relationship to restored 1978 fellow black and white stunner Northern Lights as the antiwar classic Come and See has to Agnieszka Holland’s 2024 movie Green Border. Just as the descendants of Belarusians victimized by the Nazis went on to use Middle Eastern refugees as sacrificial pawns in a chess match against the European Union a few generations later, so too will the sons and daughters of the Scandinavian immigrants in Lights become the tormenters of Seeds‘ Southern Black family farmers who stayed behind during the Great Migration. The plainspoken lessons about economic power structures from Robert Behling’s labor organizer Ray Sorensen must have rubbed off in more ways than one!
My biggest disappointment was Our Land for reasons I detailed on Letterboxd, but mainly just because it pales in comparison to director Lucrecia Martel’s fiction films. The Blue Trail didn’t quite live up to expectations raised by its status as the festival’s closer either, although the conclusion reminiscent of Abe Simpson’s reading of Rudyard Kipling’s “If—” was a cheerful note to go out on. Mare’s Nest also brought a classic Simpsons episode to mind, but its post-apocalyptic world populated only by children is more comically uncanny than Trail‘s “Logan’s Run with a walker” take on the end times it often feels like we’re living through the beginning of. Dessert is fine and good, but dark resonates more with the anxious absurdity of the present moment than an optimistic ending.
While nothing I mentioned in the previous paragraph has more than a tenuous connection to the theme, that also describes the two titles in this year’s lineup that I liked best. The bigger stretch was Faust, which was accompanied by an excellent (portentous at the beginning and appropriately big throughout) live score by Cloud Chamber Orchestra, another friend of the festival. Richardson’s introduction identified plagues as one throughline from the medieval milieu of the setting to the 1920s when it was shot to today, and I suppose you could argue that Faust’s personal growth is a migration of sorts? Or not. But who cares? The glint in Faust’s eye early and off the ring he gives Gretchen later rank among the most ingenious uses of lighting in all of cinema, and it was awesome to bask in their big screen splendor. Meanwhile, my favorite new movie, The Love That Remains, is an Icelandic “Break Up in a Small Town” that features a flock of migrating geese responsible for a morbidly hilarious plane crash, an artist who works in weather and rust, and striking seasonal landscapes, but is far more Scenes from a Marriage than Koyaanisqatsi.
One highlight among the more traditional “environmental film” fare was the ethnographic agitprop The Falling Sky. It comes across a bit too much like Twin Peaks: The Return: The Documentary at times, but opens with an incredible reset-your-clock long take and a dramatic turn to the second person that reminded me of In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, which I saw at Cinemapolis a week before the festival started. Silent Friend advocates even more effectively for thinking and feeling on a slower timeframe by grounding its three era-spanning narratives set at a German university (shades of Sound of Falling) in the perspective of a giant gingko tree in its botanical garden. But the biggest surprise at all was A Life Illuminated. While it touches all the biodoc bases, the movie is interestingly much more about Dr. Edith Widder’s work than her life and as the father of two girls whose creative ambitions often outpace their patience, I appreciate the way it presents failure as a disappointing but unavoidable and even necessary part of scientific progress. It’s also a wonder to see how far deep-sea marine biology has come during Widder’s lifetime, a tale initially told through archival footage that graduates first to grainy but beautiful black-and-white recordings of bioluminescence which could stand alone as an awesome experimental film, then to astonishingly beautiful capstone original images that capture one of her crowning achievements.
I didn’t originally include A Life Illuminated on my viewing schedule, and my biggest takeaway from 2026 is that it’s safe to trust the good people programming it and take a flyer on things! This edition is the first one I’ve gone whole hog on since moving to Ithaca, and more movies also meant more fun connections with the non-FLEFF films playing local theaters at the same time like Alpha, another diary of a plague year, and the kiddie and grown-up sci fi adventure stories about suddenly inhospitable ecosystems Hoppers and Project Hail Mary. Here’s to doing it next year when the festival turns 30!
Previous film festival dispatches canbe found here.
24 minutes into The Devil Wears Prada, Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) is welcomed home from a long day at work by her boyfriend Nate (Adrian Grenier) with a grilled cheese sandwich:
This scene commences with a “J cut” (Wikipedia link because I was “today years old” when I learned this term, as the kids say, so maybe it’s new to you too) that cleverly uses the sound of sizzling to signify how badly she has just been burned by her boss Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), editor-in-chief of Voguestand-in Runway magazine, who delivers a showstopping monologue while putting the finishing touches on an outfit for an upcoming issue with the help of her art director Nigel (Stanley Tucci).
As Rebecca Traister described it in an article for Salon that was published on the day the film premiered:
In a matter of seasons, she explains, a particular shade of blue trickles from her office to magazine pages to couture collections, moving down the fashion food chain until the hue is all the rage in plain-Jane department stores and outlying retail outlets, finally winding up in “some tragic Casual Corner bargain bin,” the very bin out of which a holier-than-thou shopper like Andy has fished the blue sweater she’s wearing. Andy may find her boss’s attention to accessories beneath her but she should understand that on her back she sports a garment that would not have existed save for the decisions made in this very office, by the very person she’s sneering at.
It made such an impression on me that shortly after seeing Devil for the first time I decided the time had finally come to stop dressing like a gutter punk and enlisted the aid of a fashion-conscious friend to help me overhaul my entire wardrobe! But while this explains how the DVD that provided all the screengrabs in this post found its way into my collection, and although it’s almost certainly the shoutout to it in I Love You, Man that prompted My Loving Wife Marion and I to first watch it together, the grilled cheese is what makes it one of “our” movies. The close-up at the top of this post is part of a six-second-long shot that ends with a quick pan up to Nate’s face as he turns to look at Andy:
This is followed by a four-second-long shot of Andy coming toward him from their bedroom ranting about work:
Cut to Nate for three seconds as he laughs sympathetically at her story:
Then back to Andy for eight as she complains that Miranda isn’t happy “unless everyone around her is panicked, nauseous or suicidal”:
Mentioning “the Clackers” in the process, which draws a questioning, “the who?” from Nate.
We return to Andy two seconds later for her explanation that it’s an onomatopoeic reference to the sound of stilettos in the marble lobby, a throwaway description that was the best thing in the book the movie is based on, and which the singer Raye recently co-opted for a studiously cinematic collaboration with Hans Zimmer. After four seconds we cut back to Nate, who pours two glasses of red wine:
And hands one to her two seconds after that:
The camera starts to follow her as she turns to walk away, but to no purpose, and five seconds later we’re with Nate again as he flips the sandwich over with a deft flick of his wrist:
The rhythmic alternation between shots four- to six-seconds-long with shorter ones continues a few more times as Nate hands Andy the grilled cheese:
And she laments the fact that she doesn’t even want to eat it because “that is why those girls are so skinny,” prompting him to rush over because “there’s, like, eight dollars of Jarlsberg in there!”
The scene ends with a helpfully expository declaration by Andy that she just has to “stick it out for one year” and won’t let Miranda get to her in the meantime as Nate chomps on the grilled cheese:
Followed by another J cut to a montage of her boss dropping a series of fashionable coats on her desk:
And that’s it! No food porny oozing cheese or unconventional ingredients, just that initial close-up of a sandwich already on the verge of being over-browned and an admittedly enticing crunch as Nate bites into it later. So why did this become the only way I ever made grilled cheese for over a decade? Simple: it’s good! And simple! You can get great results by mixing and matching aged and mild cheddar or Gruyère, but if you only want to grate once, you aren’t going to do much better than Jarlsberg, which is both flavorful AND melts beautifully. Which is also true of mild Gruyère, to be sure, but Jarlsberg has the advantage of being less expensive, and if it’s not quite as strong, that’s arguably a feature not a bug: just as Nate’s sandwich isn’t actually the focus of this scene, I invariably eat grilled cheese with either Cook’s Illustrated‘s aptly-named ultimate cream of tomato soup (which Deb Perelman also swears by) or Michael Symon’s spicy tomato blue cheese soup, which are respectively extremely rich and rather pungent and therefore cry out for a textually-satisfying supporting player, not a co-star.
The problem with all this is that Marion doesn’t like Jarlsberg. And this is the story of the film for us, because I persisted in making sandwich after sandwich for her anyway in the hope that she’d eventually realize that Nate and I were right. She didn’t, and the joke became that if I Love You, Man was the movie most emblematic of our courtship, this one would be responsible for our divorce. Eventually I wised up and gave in, but even if we’re a cheddar family now, we still talk about Devil every time grilled cheese is on the menu.
We rewatched the film the other day for the first time in awhile and it holds up pretty well, albeit not for reasons that make me excited for the sequel which opens nationwide next week. Miranda’s monologue may no longer strike me as particularly revelatory, but I still find Nigel’s argument in a subsequent scene that the designers featured in Runway created something greater than art “because you live your life in it” compelling.
“Well, not you, obviously, but some people,” he adds, referring to Andy, and this dressing down is actually more narratively significant than its more famous counterpart, given that it’s the one that finally convinces Andy to start putting effort into her attire. If as Martha P. Nochimson put it in her Cineaste review Miranda is “feminine magic,” then Nigel is “Miranda’s human interpreter, wittily explaining her protocosmic mysteries and daring us to deny her importance.” Hideki Fujita also reads the work as a modern fairy tale, noting in his article “The Initiatory Experience of a Fashion Novice” that Miranda’s insistence on calling Andy by the name of her previous second assistant Emily echoes the treatment of Chihiro in Spirited Away, and like her what Andy ultimately learns is how to be her own self.
While many of Devil‘s critics lament Andy’s choice of what Nochimson calls the “dowdy track,” it’s clear to me that in the final scene our hero is indeed “not quite the old Annie” anymore as director David Frankel says in his DVD commentary track. The jeans are back, but “she has more style from having gone through her experience at Runway.”
Even more interestingly, the quiet laugh and small smile Miranda allows herself in the shot immediately after the one above shows that she is both conscious and proud of having mentored Andy.
In the very last moment of the film, a softer side of her emerges. Although silent in her thoughts, she appears happy for having contributed to Andy’s career as a journalist. However, to emphasize that this outburst of sentimentality is unusual, Miranda aggressively and rudely commands her driver with a sharp, “Go!” Thus, in the final scene, Miranda appears slightly more nuanced, with her character’s portrayal diverging from the flat, one dimensional image of the woman manager.
But herein lies the problem. Our last viewing of Devil came mere weeks after the New York Times published Julia Moskin’s exposé of René Redzepi’s abusive managerial practices at his restaurant Noma and I couldn’t keep it out of my head. The article begins with a vivid depiction of Redzepi publicly shaming a sous-chef for daring to “put on techno music, a genre that Mr. Redzepi disliked, in the production kitchen” that doesn’t seem too far removed from some of Miranda’s behavior up until the point where Redzepi throws a punch. The question is: where do you draw the line? If it’s at physical abuse, Priestly gets a pass, but Moskin goes on to note that the 35 former Noma employees she interviewed “described lasting trauma from layers of psychological abuse, including intimidation, body shaming and public ridicule.” If that isn’t just a problem because it’s part of a pattern, then what does it say about the offices of Runway where Nigel can get away with “affectionately” calling Andy “Six” after her dress size and where Miranda is able to refer to her even more simply as “fat” without anyone blinking an eye?
A really good sequel would delve into this question, especially one coming out now. Something tells me The Devil Wears Prada 2 won’t, but either way, we’ll always have Jarlsberg.
In Theaters: This is the final week before Ithaca goes back to being a two movie theater town when Cornell Cinema closes up shop until the students return in August, but all the stuff I’m most interested in is at Cinemapolis and the Regal Ithaca Mall anyway. I’m definitely going to try to see director David Lowery’s latest Mother Mary and I Swear at the former, and if I add a third movie it will be Michael at the latter despite bad reviews because it will be fun if I decide everyone else is wrong!
In which Michaela Coel’s artist Lori Butler lays out a dinner’s worth of takeout containers with the same careful attention she would devote to organizing a palette. I appreciated the use of glitter in the Christophers III series more for having seen Noah Davis’s 2004 (1) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art yesterday. Refreshingly alive to the many different ways a work of art can impact someone: in most movies “it changed my life!” is a boringly undynamic positive.
Movie of the moment The Drama remains there and at the Regal and is worth seeing as well if for no other reason than so that you can have an opinion on it. I’m also interested in My Father’s Shadow, which made my “Cannes 2025 Films That I Am Most Eager to See” list, but it isn’t a priority for me because it’s available on Mubi. Special events include a free screening of The Librarians, which unlike most movies about my profession I didn’t hate, at Cinemapolis on Saturday and four free events at Cornell Cinema: a “Science on Screen” presentation of A Birder’s Guide to Everything this evening, a “Sensory Ethnography” program featuring Leviathan and two shorts on Monday, a screening of Rosemead that evening, and a Kleber Mendonça Filho double feature of Pictures of Ghosts and The Secret Agent on Wednesday. Finally, other noteworthy repertory fare includes 35th anniversary screenings of The Silence of the Lambs at the Regal on Sunday and Wednesday and Eyes Wide Shut at Cinemapolis on Tuesday to kick off their new “Staff Picks: Erotic Thrillers” series.
Home Video Recommendation: I read an interesting Substack post by Will Manidis & Nabeel S. Qureshi called “Rented Virtue” a couple of months ago right around the time I saw The Testament of Ann Lee. It proposes that the Quaker sect’s spiritual prohibition on lying was directly responsible for the success in trade that gave them an outsized influence on the development of the British empire, and that there is no secular alternative to achieving this kind of result because irrational-seeming constraints imposed in the absence of God can’t ever reliably answer the question, “why maintain this when it is costly?” I thought of this just the other night while watching Barbary Coast on the Criterion Channel because Joel McCrea’s willingness to put poetry ahead of profit and his proselytizing influence on Miriam Hopkins seems to represent a rebuttal. If that doesn’t float your boat, the opening sequence is a classic Howard Hawks proceduralist depiction of a 19th century ship docking in San Francisco harbor, plus you’ve got both Walter Brennan wearing a fake (spoiler alert?) eyepatch and Edward G. Robinson donning an even danglier earring than the one he wore as a character note in Tiger Shark three years earlier. Barbary Coast will disappear from the Criterion Channel at the end of the month, but is also streaming on Prime Video with a subscription and Tubi, and copies of the Warner Archives Collection’s 2015 DVD release remain plentiful.
Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts canbe found here.A running list ofall of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.
What I’m Seeing This Week: We’ll be out of town for the next few days, but My Loving Wife and I are planning to see Hokum with friends at the Philadelphia Film Society’s SpringFest during our travels. I’m hoping to catch The Christophers at Cinemapolis and Normal at the Regal Ithaca Mall after we return as well.
Also in Theaters: My favorite new movie now playing Ithaca is The Drama, which continues its run at Cinemapolis and the Regal. Here’s what I said about it on Letterboxd earlier this week:
Captures the kaleidoscopic mélange (!) of assumed intent, other people’s actual and imagined reactions, and imagined futures that we’re actually reacting to when someone does or says something that upsets us. Which is to say that, for better or worse, this is much, much less about the big plot twist (which traffics in a taboo that Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die already cathartically allowed me to laugh at earlier this year) than Robert Pattinson’s Charlie’s response to it. Which was designed to be chewed on with post-movie cheeseburgers in Andy’s Diners the world over.
Special events include 3D presentations of Jurassic Park and Dial M for Murder at Cornell Cinema on Saturday and Sunday respectively. There are too many free events at Cinemapolis and Cornell Cinema this week to list, but highlights include a “Family Classic Picture Show” screening of one of my childhood favorites Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, at the former on Sunday and a “Collaborative Filmmaking; Indigenous Media” program at the latter on Monday featuring Mobilize, Doing the Sheep Good, Ringtone, and Ghosts. Finally, on the repertory front Bigger than Life is playing Cornell Cinema tonight and Fight Club screens at the Regal on Wednesday.
I made a point of mentioning how grateful I was to Cinemapolis for programming this film in every single one of my conversations with someone who works there for a solid month because I didn’t think it was high-profile enough to *ever* play here, let alone during its first run in theaters! Like 28 Years Later it is, for me, first and foremost a quasi-adaptation of a great science fiction novel I never expected to get to see on the big screen, in this case Orson Scott Card’s Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus, which postulates that if just one or two things had gone differently, we could easily be living in a world where Mesoamericans “discovered” and subjugated Europe instead of vice versa. Here Gael García Bernal’s titular explorer is depicted as not much more than a crab in a metal carapace, washed up on a beach at the beginning of the film and ready for the boil by the end of it.
And here’s a screengrab from the first stunning crustaceous tableau to further whet your appetite:
Now go watch it!
Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts canbe found here.A running list ofall of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.
Home Video Recommendation: I watched India Song for the first time a few months ago and I doubt a day has gone by since when I didn’t find myself whistle its titular theme at least once! Here’s what I said about on Letterboxd after my second viewing in February:
In the same way that I’m no longer capable of hearing the Beatles song “For No One” without thinking about James Joyce’s short story The Dead, now that I’ve convinced myself of the affinities between this film and John Cale’s “Paris 1919,” I’m probably doomed to forever think of it as an “adaptation.” But maybe the hypnotic brilliance of Carlos D’Alessio’s score is enough to guarantee something more like a two-way street? This month’s selection for the two-person film club I’m in with my buddy Scott is also a weirdly perfect follow-up to the last couple, featuring as it does interiors with a green-red color scheme that matches the two-strip Technicolor tones of Mystery of the Wax Museum and a similarly estranged relationship between sound and image as Blue.
Also in Theaters:Alpha is terrific and I’m just a bit puzzled by its tepid reception at Cannes last year, although as a movie that needs space to breathe I can see how it might not have played well in a compressed festival context. Anyway, Cinemapolis has added an extra week to its run, which: good on you, Cinemapolis! Here’s what I wrote about this one on Letterboxd last week:
The best film about the AIDS epidemic since Witnesses. Here the feeling of Armageddon is completely literalized into the setting, but not exclusively: the maybe-real-maybe-figurative-maybe-both sandstorms raging outside are also inside the infected. Reminiscent of one of my Movie Year 2023 favorites All of Us Strangers in its dual (dream?) timelines and the way it deals with families and grief. What’s new is the decision to ground the story in the perspective of child first too young to understand, then too old not to, and the depiction of victims as beautiful monuments to the failure of science and society to save them.
One FLEFF selection *not* listed in the previous section is Best Documentary Feature Oscar winner Mr. Nobody Against Putin, which I’ve already seen. It’s good! Drop me a line if you have any thoughts on the Harry Potter references because I’m planning to write about them (and the ones in My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow) in June.
The titular paleobotanist who guides a filmmaking crew through the Pays de Caux region to “collect” primeval plants for a cinematic herbarium could be this blog’s patron saint, and the 16mm second half of its diptych comprises some of the most satisfying long shots I’ve ever seen.
Also in Theaters: My top new movie recommendation remains Sirât, which continues its run at Cinemapolis. Additional special events include a free screening of Remaining Native at Cornell Cinema this evening followed by a Q&A with director Paige Bethmann. Noteworthy repertory options include Bigger Than Life and Mad Max: Fury Road at Cornell Cinema tomorrow, No Country for Old Men at the Regal on Sunday, and On the Waterfront there on Monday. Finally, since you may be wondering, I have seen Project Hail Mary, which continues its runs at both Cinemapolis and the Regal, and it’s fine.
For a long time I misremembered Kenneth Anger’s Eaux d’artifice as being about fireworks for some reason instead of fountains. *This* is something like the film that existed in my mind all those years, which I think explains the intense feeling of déjà vu I experienced while watching it. Friend Brian Darr, who saw it many months before I did, notes in his Letterboxd review that “creating an optical soundtrack out of the explosive patterns” was one ingenious way Nishikawa found to make fireworks footage interesting; this is also the first time I can remember ever paying as much attention to the smoke they generate as their light, and the introduction of a trip-to-the half moon created a host of other associations for me. A stunner.
Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts canbe found here.A running list ofall of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.
The Prodigal Cinephile 