The Prodigal Cinephile

In Theaters: My family is very excited to see Wildwood at Cinemapolis or the Regal Ithaca Mall, but we have both family and friends visiting this weekend, so it will have to wait. I won’t be able to attend the Empire State Film Festival at Cinemapolis for the same reason, unfortunately, but plan to catch The Devils there after it wraps and either Whalefall or Wicker at the Regal once our guests have gone home. Other first-run fare I’m interested in includes Aanikoobijigan (ancestor/great-grandparent/great-grandchild), which is at Cornell Cinema on Sunday; A Talent for Murder, which opens at Cinemapolis tomorrow; and Sense and Sensibility, which is there and at the Regal.

Digger remains my favorite holdover, and it continues its run at the Regal, albeit now on just one screen. I also enjoyed You Can See Everything, everyone else’s favorite documentary of the year (mine is Remake), which could have been called Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery if that title wasn’t already taken, and which will presumably be playing both Cinemapolis and the Regal all fall.

Special events include a screening of Faust at Cornell University’s Sage Chapel accompanied by a new score by the Invincible Czars tomorrow, and a free screening of Unseen there followed by a Q&A with filmmaker Set Hernandez on Wednesday. Finally, noteworthy repertory options include Young Frankenstein and Scream at Cornell Cinema this evening and on Saturday respectively, and Marie Antoinette at the Regal on Sunday.

Home Video Recommendation: If you rue missing The Double Life of Véronique at Cornell Cinema last week or liked it so much that you already want to watch it again, I have good news! Cornell faculty, staff, and students have access to it on Kanopy via a license paid for by the Library, and everyone else can view it on the Criterion Channel with a subscription and purchase or rent it from a number of other streaming video platforms. Here’s what I recently said about it on Letterboxd:

Krzysztof Kieślowski’s surrealistic tale of spooky action at a distance was released just as the world was beginning to wake up from the nightmare of the Cold War. Sławomir Idziak’s through-a-glass-darkly cinematography is occasionally self-indulgent (too many point-of-view shots!) but ingenious in the variety of ways it finds to depict a world turned upside down, and the music by “Van den Budenmayer” (actually Zbigniew Preisner) is haunting. What makes it all work, though, is Irène Jacob’s East/West angel.

Véronique is also available on Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection.

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

In Theaters: I 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.