What I’m Seeing This Week: I’m going with Babygirl at Cinemapolis.
Also in Theaters: The best new movie now playing in Ithaca that I’ve already seen is A Complete Unknown, which is at both Cinemapolis and the Regal Ithaca Mall. Timothée Chalamet’s Bob Dylan turning the members of the “teaspoon brigade” of Edward Norton’s Pete Seeger against themselves is a destined to be a great movie metaphor for the comeuppance of whatever holier-than-thou movement you think is only getting what they deserved, I enjoyed its depiction of early 60s Greenwich Village (played here by Jersey City) as a place with ambient crackling energy, and the music is of course excellent. Nosferatu, which is also at both Cinemapolis and the Regal, would be what I’m seeing this week, but I’m saving it for a date night with my loving wife. Gladiator II (Regal), Moana 2 (Regal), and Wicked (Cinemapolis & the Regal) are all fine. Your best bet for repertory fare is the classic anime film Paprika, which screens at the Regal on Wednesday, although I’m not sure how 2025 qualifies as its “15th anniversary.”
Home Video: La Chimera, which is now streaming on Hulu, will appear on my year-end top ten list on the strength of its treatment of the theme that there’s more to a good life than just being happy and a bevy of brilliant little touches like the list the smile Alba Rohrwacher’s Spartaco gives Josh O’Connor’s Arthur after he takes capricious action to temporarily (she will, of course, be back) resolve the question of how a certain piece of statue is worth, the disheveled suit Arthur wears at the beginning of the movie, Valentino Santagati and Piero Crucitti’s cantastorie, and a shot from inside an Etruscan tomb which is about to be unsealed for the first time in thousands of years. If you aren’t yet sick of Christmas movies, director Alice Rohrwacher’s 2022 short film Le pupille, which is available on Disney+, is also very much worth checking out.
Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts can be found here. A running list of all of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.
The Prodigal Cinephile 