What I’m Seeing This Week: I only made it to one movie (Four Daughters) last week, which means I still haven’t seen The Zone of Interest. I’m going to gamble that it will still stick around for awhile longer, though, and go with Best International Feature Film Oscar nominee The Teachers’ Lounge since it’s playing Cinemapolis for one week only.
Also in Theaters: My favorite new movie now playing in Ithaca is Poor Things, which continues its run at both Cinemapolis and the Regal Ithaca Mall. Other 2024 Oscar nominees you can see this week which I haven’t already mentioned include American Fiction, which is also at both Cinemapolis and the Regal, and Oppenheimer, which is just at the Regal. There’s a lot of kid-friendly repertory fare to choose from right now, including The Sound of Music at Cornell Cinema on Saturday and Sunday, Pixar’s Turning Red at the Regal all week, and one of my family’s favorites How To Train Your Dragon (which features an excellent score by John Powell) at the Regal on Saturday. I don’t know why you’d want to revisit Dune: Part One *this* far ahead of its sequel’s opening on February 29, but it is now playing at the Regal and will presumably stay there until then. Finally, you could do far worse for a Valentine’s Day date night than When Harry Met Sally…, which has a 35th anniversary screening at the Regal on Wednesday.
Home Video: Four Daughters just ended a one-week run at Cinemapolis and Bobi Wine: The People’s President is now streaming on Disney+. Did you know that current Cornell University faculty, staff, and students have access to the remaining three 2024 Oscar nominees for Best Documentary Feature Film via licenses and subscriptions paid for by the Library? To Kill a Tiger, a pointedly didactic dispatch from the front lines of the battle against systemic misogyny in rural India that counts Mindy Kaling and Dev Patel among its executive producers and which I suspect will be many people’s rooting interest in this category if enough of them see it, is available via Docuseek. Less immediate in its goals is The Eternal Memory, which chronicles married couple Augusto Góngora and Paulina Urrutia’s private and public rearguard actions against forgetting as victims of Alzheimer’s Disease and key media figures during and after Chile’s Pinochet era. It’s also a great movie about the COVID-19 pandemic in that it is strongly influenced artistically by the limitations it imposed and depicts what must have been one of the most challenging lockdown situations to contend with. I would not be disappointed if this film, which is available via Projectr, wins. My favorite, though, has got to be 20 Days in Mariupol, although that really isn’t the right word for a devastatingly unflinching depiction of life during wartime for civilians with the misfortune to live in the combat zone. Anyway, it will be on the top ten list for Movie Year 2023 I publish next month and is available via both Academic Video Online and Kanopy. Best Documentary Short Film nominee The ABCs of Book Banning is available from Projectr (which the New York Public Library subscribes to as well, by the way, if you’re a cardholder there) too, but I can’t recommend it for any reason other than completism.
Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts can be found here.
The Prodigal Cinephile 