The Prodigal Cinephile

In Theaters: I audibled away from The History of Concrete last week, so seeing it at Cinemapolis remains my top priority. I’m also planning to catch NAZA there, and Primetime there or at the Regal Ithaca Mall.

My favorite holdover is the much-maligned (but also, in other corners, passionately defended) Digger, which continues its run at the same two theaters and which, for reasons I can’t explain without risking “spoilers,” dovetails perfectly with the blog post I’m currently writing about the 28 Years Later movies, Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s novel A Canticle for Leibowitz, this Substack post by Cass Sunstein, and personal responsibility in an age of perpetual political crisis. I look forward to revisiting the film after I finish getting my thoughts in order, so: stay tuned! I also enjoyed Filipiñana, which is at Cinemapolis on Sunday.

Additional new releases that I’m interested in, but don’t currently have time for, include the documentary Barbara Forever, which plays Cornell Cinema tonight; Verity, which continues its run at the Regal; and The Social Reckoning, which is opening there and at Cinemapolis.

Special events include three more free Cine con Cultura screenings at Cinemapolis and Ithaca College. Finally, repertory highlights include Terminator 2: Judgment Day at Cornell Cinema tonight, Stalker there tomorrow, The Thing at the Regal on Monday, and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari at Cinemapolis on Wednesday.

Home Video Recommendation: Longtime readers know that one of my passions is identifying movies that would make for killer double features, and the other day I came up with a great one after finally watching West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty! As I said on Letterboxd:

This would make an excellent double feature with Quatermass and the Pit, which features an excavated (space) ship that reawakens modern London’s latent hive mind. Here director Med Hondo builds a slaver in an abandoned French factory to remind us that our base instincts are responsible for much of the wealth Western Europe enjoys to this day. I love how you can see his colonizer characters’ breath in many scenes, which literalizes how they’re full of hot air.

West Indies is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel with a subscription and is also available on Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection, and Quatermass is available on Blu-ray from Shout! Factory.

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

In Theaters: Happy Birthday Cinemapolis! Our local arthouse movie theater is celebrating its 40th with a Free Movie Day on Saturday that includes a screening of a 1916 version of Snow White accompanied by harpist-composer Leslie McMichael and violist Barbara McMichael to kick off the Wharton Studio Museum’s annual Silent Movie Month. That would also be an excellent time to check out 2026 films The History of Concrete, which I’m hearing great things about, and Digger, which I’m not, but am going to see anyway. I didn’t make it to Resident Evil last week, so that’s on my list as well. It and Digger are also at the Regal Ithaca Mall.

The other new release I’m making time for is Levitating, which plays Cornell Cinema Saturday evening. I have varying degrees of interest in If I Go Will They Miss Me (Cinemapolis), Primetime (Cinemapolis and the Regal), and Verity (Regal) as well, but they’ll have to wait. My favorite holdover, meanwhile, is once again The Odyssey.

Special events include two more free Silent Movie Month screenings of Out Here at Cinemapolis and The Great K&A Train Robbery at the Cayuga Museum of History and Art‘s Carriage House Theatre on Sunday and Wednesday respectively; a bunch of free Cine con Cultura 2026 screenings at Cinemapolis and Cornell Cinema throughout the week; the return of CatVideoFest to Cornell Cinema this weekend; and a free program of short films from Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine at Cornell Cinema on Tuesday called “Poetics of Life and Death.” Finally, noteworthy repertory options include The Shining at the Regal on Friday, Stalker at Cornell Cinema on Sunday, and House at Cinemapolis on Tuesday.

Home Video Recommendation: Speaking of silent movies, although the Criterion Collection’s Eclipse Series box set Silent Naruse is out of print, you can still (and should!) watch the five films it includes on the Criterion Channel with a subscription. Apart from You and No Blood Relation contain exuberant tracking shots which, as I noted on Letterboxd, struck me as “another link in the chain between the ‘unchained camera’ of F.W. Murnau and Karl Freund and the Guru Dutt/V.K. Murthy collaborations Pyaasa and Kaagaz Ke Phool” that “represent for me the pinnacle of expressive cinematography.” But if you only have time for one movie, my recommendation is Flunky, Work Hard! Here’s what I said about it on Letterboxd:

Wife! Be Like a Rose! was THE discovery of last year’s Nitrate Picture Show for me, and while this fellow noun-imperative work by director Mikio Naruse isn’t quite on the same level, it also more than earns its exclamation point with a dazzling display of technique and seamless shift in tone. Highlights include a wife nearly sweeping out the (toy) baby and a picture of the husband she’s mad at with the dustbin, two insurance salesmen endangering a whole neighborhood of children in their distracted zeal to make a sale, and a montage featuring every (visual) trick in the 1931 edition of the book to represent a man’s reeling reaction to an unthinkable tragedy. Watched with my kids coincidentally just minutes after I lectured them about lashing out at each other, which was convenient.

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

In Theaters: I decided to wait on American Doctor a bit when Cinemapolis announced that they were holding it over for another week, so that remains my top new movie priority. Cornell Cinema Director Molly Ryan singled out Filipiñana and Levitating when I interviewed her earlier this month, so I’m excited to see the former there on Saturday; I’m going to wait on the latter, which screens this Sunday, until it returns on October 2. We’re also taking the whole family to the Regal Ithaca Mall for Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom this weekend, and I’m going to catch Resident Evil there or at Cinemapolis later in the week. Other new releases I’m interested in, but unfortunately don’t have time for, include If I Go Will They Miss Me, which opens at Cinemapolis tomorrow, and Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!, which is there and at the Regal all week.

Of the stuff I’ve already seen, my favorite is The Odyssey, which continues its impressively long run at the Regal. I also enjoyed Spider-Man: Brand New Day, another summer stalwart still going strong at the Regal as we turn the corner into fall, and Chronovisor, which returns to Cornell Cinema on Saturday. Here’s what I said about that one on Letterboxd:

Highbrow Dan Brown that swaps long shots of the grand edifices that house the world’s secrets for extreme close-ups of the texts within, and which wears its 80s influences on its VHS sleeve. As a librarian, I appreciate its love for libraries and archives, but resent how it reduces the people who tend them to disembodied voices. Long live the old flesh!

Special events include three free screenings at Cornell Cinema: A Poet tonight, The Librarians (which has issues of its own, but does at least foreground my profession) on Tuesday, and Cinema Pe Cinema: The Theatres. The Movies. And Us on Wednesday. You can also see a 35mm print of Better Luck Tomorrow there tonight. Finally, additional noteworthy repertory options include North by Northwest at the Regal tomorrow, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior there on Tuesday, and Portrait of a Lady on Fire at Cinemapolis on Tuesday.

Home Video Recommendation: Last week I compared Ross McElwee’s latest documentary Remake to Journey to Italy, which reminded me that it had been a while since I last watched the Roberto Rossellini film I’ve long thought of as one of my favorites! So long, in fact, that I’d forgotten some of the plot details and was therefore pleasantly surprised to discover that they dovetail with one of my recent fixations, trying to spot the influence of James Joyce’s “The Dead” on, well, everything. Anyway, here’s what I wrote on Letterboxd last week after revisiting it:

I had completely forgotten that the plot is largely set in motion by the tale of a rain-soaked admirer at the window who died young, and that the married couple played by Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders are named Joyce! I’m fond of reading the Beatles song “For No One” as an “adaptation” of Dubliners‘ “The Dead” because while I understand that it isn’t really, Paul McCartney’s lyrics might as well be about Gabriel. What I like best about Journey to Italy is how it does the same thing in reverse by letting us wake up with Gretta the next morning: in the story she falls asleep immediately after puncturing her husband’s bubble, and then “snow was general all over Ireland.”

You can watch Journey to Italy on the Criterion Channel and HBO Max with a subscription, buy or rent it from a number of other streaming video platforms, and it’s available from the Criterion Collection as part of “3 Films by Roberto Rossellini Starring Ingrid Bergman” Blu-ray and DVD box sets.

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

In Theaters: This is a truly excellent week for movies in Ithaca, and although I’m staying in tonight to watch football (Hail to Pitt!), I’ll be seeing something for six days in a row after that, which is a lot even for me! The one I’m most excited about is Chronovisor, which I started hearing great things about when it premiered at Rotterdam in January and have been tracking ever since. It plays Cornell Cinema tomorrow evening. I’ll be returning on Saturday to see the “2026 Sundance Film Festival Short Film Tour” and again on Sunday for the 35mm print of Vagabond screening in their “Wayfaring Strangers” series.

Speaking of Sundance, I’m also going to see The Weight, which got great reviews there, at the Regal Ithaca Mall. Last but not least, I’m hoping to catch both of the documentaries starting one-week runs at Cinemapolis tomorrow, American Doctor and The Cycle of Love. Other noteworthy new releases that I’m going to wait on a bit include Filipiñana, which screens at Cornell Cinema tonight but will return on 9/26, and Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom, which opens at the Regal today and will hopefully stick around awhile.

So that’s what I’m up to. One film you should definitely check out at Cornell Cinema on Sunday if you missed its first screening there last week is Remake, which is easily my favorite documentary of Movie Year 2026 so far. Here’s what I recently said about it on Letterboxd:

“I used to be a filmmaker,” director Ross McElwee says in the aftermath of the death of his son Adrian, but not by way of declaring this to be his last movie. As he recently told David Schwartz in an interview for Film Comment, “that’s meant to be a kind of mournful acceptance of the fact that something’s different now. I don’t say what that is right away.” Although McElwee then immediately adds, “I didn’t really see how I could continue to be a filmmaker,” his practice of capturing big and small moments from his life on camera comes across here as compulsive and not entirely unlike the addictions that plagued Adrian.

This sense that this is something McElwee needed to do binds Remake to this year’s critical darling Blue Heron. Writing for Cahiers du Cinéma, Ariel Schweitzer described the goal of that film’s director Sophy Romvari as “reconstructing the past in order to better understand it, in the hope of healing the wounds of her childhood.” But where Romvari meticulously recreates the late 1990s to process a trauma that occurred then, McElwee is acting more like an archaeologist of his own autobiography. What he gives us, the audience, when he cuts footage shot by Adrian into his film is something akin to what Katherine and Alex Joyce experience in Journey to Italy when they witness a plaster cast being made from the cavity a Roman couple’s bodies left behind at Pompeii.

Holdovers I especially enjoyed include The Samurai and the Prisoner, a rangy period piece which features both a subtle tea ceremony smile and an equally delightful close-up of a spider that’s anything but, and The Odyssey, which I’ve already talked about in this space a bunch of times. They continue their runs at Cinemapolis and the Regal respectively.

Special events include four free Reproductive Rights Film Festival screenings at Cinemapolis tonight through Saturday, a free “Family Classics Picture Show” presentation of Akeelah and the Bee there on Sunday, free screenings of Overburden and The Message at Cornell Cinema tonight and Tuesday evening respectively, and a “Drag Movie Night” presentation of Steel Magnolias at Cinemapolis on Wednesday hosted by Tilia Cordata. Finally, additional repertory highlights include Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049 at the Regal on Saturday, L’Eclisse at Cornell Cinema on Saturday, and Mad Max: Fury Road at Cinemapolis on Tuesday.

Home Video Recommendation: Last weekend I shared my Movie Year 2026 Mid-Point Top Ten (Percent) list on Bluesky and X, and while Power Ballad didn’t quite make the cut, I did list it as an honorable mention. Here’s what I said about it on Letterboxd in June:

I was so angry at this movie for not being more worthy of Paul Rudd and its promising I Love You, Better Man premise, until suddenly it was! Some of that trajectory is attributable to frontloading obvious jokes with no prayer of working before we’ve gotten to know the characters. In retrospect, though, certain aspects of its Candide-esque message about the importance of tending your own soundgarden may have also hit a bit close to home for this adamantly (TOO adamantly?) amateur film blogger. If Ballad doesn’t take home a Best Original Song Oscar, I give up, by which I am of course referring to the delightfully cheesy “Finishing Line”, not “How To Write a Song Without You”.

Power Ballad is now available on Blu-ray and DVD from Lionsgate, and can be rented or purchased from a variety of streaming video platforms.

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