What I’m Seeing This Week: I am planning to see both Nickel Boys and The Room Next Door after they open at Cinemapolis tomorrow.
Also in Theaters: It’s officially awards season at the Regal Ithaca Mall! Oscar nominations were originally scheduled to be announced tomorrow, and although this has been pushed back to next Thursday because of the devastating wildfires in California, contenders have started to reappear on the Regal’s screens. My top recommendation among the first batch is Anora, which screens Friday-Saturday and Tuesday-Wednesday. Additional titles returning to town this week include Conclave, The Substance, and The Wild Robot. Other new movies that I enjoyed include Babygirl (Regal), Nosferatu (Cinemapolis + the Regal), and A Complete Unknown (Cinemapolis + the Regal) in that order. I also hear good things about Better Man, so hopefully it will stick around at the Regal for at least another week. You have one last chance to see The Umbrellas of Cherbourg at Cinemapolis this evening, and that definitely should be your highest priority for repertory fare, but there’s also a free screening of the Marx Brothers vehicle A Night at the Opera there on Sunday as part of their “Family Classics Picture Show” series. Another fine choice would be The Goonies, which has 40th anniversary (typing that made me feel SO old) screenings at the Regal on Sunday and Monday. On the special events front, there will be a free screening of the documentary Move When the Spirit Says Move at Cinemapolis on Monday followed by a panel discussion about subject Dorothy Foreman Cotton.
Home Video: Green Border, one of the candidates for my top ten list for Movie Year 2024 (which as always I’ll publish in March), is currently available on Kanopy to all current Cornell University faculty, students, and staff thanks to a license paid for by the library. As a multifaceted view of the Belarus-Poland border crisis which began in 2021 when the government of Belarus disingenuously began offering refugees free passage into the European Union, it is topical, but seeing it shortly after Come and See underscored for me the extent to which it, too, is an anti-war film. As I wrote on Letterboxd:
Although it tragically comes at the cost of thousands of innocent lives, the path out of Green Border‘s hellscape is littered with less and less bodies as it progresses. People who are not desperately fighting for their own survival retain the capacity to be shocked into action by exposure to violent acts that their citizenship makes them complicit in, whereas war inevitably breeds future conflicts: the earlier film’s Belarusian victims of Nazi atrocities are themselves the instigators of this one’s new cycle of dehumanization.
It also contains powerful individual moments like the image of a mother squeezing a meager harvest of water droplets from the branches of an evergreen into the mouth of her child and a sickening thud that you’ll recognize when you hear it which I won’t soon forget.
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 