What I’m Seeing This Week: My loving wife and I are dropping the kids off at a playdate and seeing The Brutalist at Cinemapolis on Sunday, and I’m going to try to see Presence at the Regal Ithaca Mall as well.
Also in Theaters: Although we’re prioritizing The Brutalist for scheduling reasons, I’m actually more excited to see Hard Truths, which opens at both Cinemapolis and the Regal today. Soundtrack to a Coup d’État and Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, which screen at Cornell Cinema tonight and tomorrow respectively, have each appeared on at least 30 Best Movies of 2024 lists according to the website CriticsTop10. I fear that I’m going to have to give the latter a miss, but I’m planning to catch the former when it returns to town on February 8. My top recommendations among first-run options that I’ve already seen are Nickel Boys, a formally audacious requiem for those whom the arc of the moral universe didn’t bend fast enough toward justice to save that I anticipate will be my rooting interest for any number of Oscars which continues its run at Cinemapolis, and Flow, my favorite animated film of Movie Year 2024 which plays Cornell Cinema on Saturday and Sunday. Other new movies I enjoyed include Babygirl (the Regal), A Complete Unknown (Cinemapolis & the Regal), Nosferatu (Cinemapolis & the Regal), and The Room Next Door (Cinemapolis). Your best bet for repertory fare is Wild at Heart, which screens at Cinemapolis on Monday in memory of director David Lynch, who passed last Wednesday, but other great options include A Matter of Life and Death and Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, which are at Cornell Cinema tomorrow and Sunday respectively.
Home Video: Speaking of David Lynch, my loving wife and I both chose to celebrate his life by finally watching movies directed by him which we’d never seen before. I was lucky enough to first encounter Mulholland Drive at the Squirrel Hill Theater (RIP) during its original theatrical run with a bunch of other members of the University of Pittsburgh’s Twin Peaks Club , but she somehow never got around to it. Although Blue Velvet was my first love and Dune will always hold a special place in my heart, this is probably the David Lynch film I’d pick as my favorite. Meanwhile, I’d always understood The Straight Story to be a skippable aberration in his filmography, but this is not at all the case: for all of his weirdness, Lynch also valued sincerity, and this film is as pure a distillation of that aspect of his sensibility as the eighth episode of Twin Peaks: The Return is of another. Both are highly recommended, as is everything else Esther Zuckerman mentions in her New York Times article “12 Cryptic Titles From David Lynch and Where You Can Stream Them.”
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 