What I’m Seeing This Week: I’m finally seeing Killers of the Flower Moon this afternoon at Cinemapolis!
Also in Theaters: Palme d’Or winner Anatomy of a Fall is the best new movie now playing (at Cinemapolis) in local theaters that I’ve seen. Light Matter, an annual experimental film and media arts festival, opens today in nearby (less than two hours by car) Alfred, New York and runs all weekend. Hat tip: MUBI’s Notebook blog. The outstanding local film series “From Silent Film Star to American Icon: Celebrating Anna May Wong” continues on Saturday with a screening of Shanghai Express at Cornell Cinema. You can see The Rocky Horror Picture Show at the same venue later that evening.
Home Video: Piccadilly, which I saw for the first time Cornell Cinema last week, is even better after a second viewing! Like Anatomy of a Fall, it ends with a murder trial. Like Pyaasa, the subject of my last Drink & a Movie post, it uses close-ups and camera movements which come to rest on faces to link characters through their emotional responses to the same event. It’s far more cynical than either of them, though. Highly recommended as a testament to how sophisticated late-silent era audiences were at following complex storytelling techniques and of course for the excellent performance by Anna May Wong! Charles Laughton is also pretty great in an uncredited role as an unhappy diner who sparks an all-too-familiar passing of the buck all the way down the club’s hierarchy from its owner to Wong’s dishwasher Shosho. The stunning BFI restoration I watched both times is now streaming on The Criterion Channel with a subscription and may be available on Kanopy as well if your local academic or public library purchased a license like we did at Cornell.
Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts can be found here.
The Prodigal Cinephile 