What I’m Seeing This Week: We’ll be out of town for the next five days, but my loving wife and I are going to take advantage of the fact that we’re staying with willing babysitters to see Stalker at The Screening Room in Kingston, Ontario tonight.
Also in Theaters: The Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival kicks off in earnest tomorrow with two screenings at Cinemapolis, where all remaining events will take place. Highlights include three films which made a splash on the festival circuit last year: Green Border, winner of a Special Jury Prize at the Viennale, on Saturday; Last Things and Youth (Spring) on Monday; and Pictures of Ghosts, which is directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho, whose last feature Bacurau was the topic of my May, 2023 Drink & a Movie blog post, on Tuesday. You can find reviews of all of them by searching my Film Blogs, Etc. 2.0 CSE by title. The best new film now playing locally that I’ve already seen remains Dune: Part Two, which is at both Cinemapolis and the Regal Ithaca Mall. Wicked Little Letters, which my loving wife wants to see, opens at the same two theaters tonight. Anything with both Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley in it is an easy sell for me, so we might have to make plans for another date night soon! I’m intrigued by two action movies at the Regal: Monkey Man, which is directed by one of my favorite actors, Dev Patel, and the Liam Neeson vehicle In the Land of Saints and Sinners. Critics seem to like both! Cornell Cinema returns from Spring Break with free screenings of the Burkinabé film Borders on Tuesday and A Pocketful of Miracles: A Tale of Two Siblings on Wednesday. The latter will be followed by a Q&A with director Aviva Kempner and Cornell professor Elliot Shapiro. Otherwise, your best bets for repertory fare are a trio of films playing the Regal: Gone with the Wind on Sunday, Monday, and Wednesday; The Matrix tonight; and The Dark Knight on Wednesday.
Home Video: As mentioned previously on this blog, I was troubled by this year’s Oscar winner for Best International Feature Film and Best Sound The Zone of Interest. While that remains the case, I feel like I have more appreciation for what it is *trying* to do after finally seeing The Act of Killing, which it references in a key moment that I now understand clarifies that Christian Friedel’s Rudolf Höss knows that he is a monster. This is important because I don’t think “living next to Auschwitz” is a terribly useful metaphor. The Act of Killing and its companion film The Look of Silence delve deep into the psychology of killers like Höss (in this case the leaders of gangs that murdered hundreds of thousands of so-called “communists” in Indonesia in the 60s) by way of depicting in harrowing detail not just the sky-high cost of resisting them in the moment, but also the Sisyphean task of holding them accountable afterward should they emerge victorious. This is, to me, a far more potent “there but for the grace of God” than the fear we might one day be judged by history and/or our maker to have been “good Nazis” because it doesn’t let us off the hook so easily—we can’t just say not me, I attended a protest/changed my profile picture to a flag/cast a protest vote against Joe Biden/whatever. Anyway, these movies would be a mortal lock for any Best Films of the Millennium list I might be moved to create, so: highest possible recommendation! The Act of Killing is now streaming on Peacock, The Look of Silence is available on Prime Video, and current Cornell University faculty, staff, and students have access to both via Academic Video Online.
Previous “Now Playing in Ithaca, NY” posts can be found here.
The Prodigal Cinephile 