What I’m Seeing This Week: I am going with Hard Truths, which closes at the the Regal Ithaca Mall today but continues its run at Cinemapolis at least through next Thursday, and continuing my quest to see all of this year’s Oscar nominees before the ceremony on March 2, I’m also planning to see The Seed of the Sacred Fig sometime after it opens there tomorrow.
Also in Theaters: Speaking of the Oscars, Best Animated Feature Film nominee Memoir of a Snail (which I’m planning to see next week) also opens at Cinemapolis tomorrow. Other contenders you can see on local big screens include The Brutalist (Cinemapolis + Regal), A Complete Unknown (Cinemapolis + Regal), Nickel Boys (Cinemapolis), Nosferatu (Cinemapolis + Regal), and Wicked (Regal). My favorites are The Brutalist and Nickel Boys, but they’re all worth seeing. The very best new movie now playing Ithaca that I’ve already seen is All We Imagine as Light, which screens at Cornell Cinema Saturday evening. I also enjoyed Babygirl and Presence, both of which are at the Regal. This week’s special events are highlighted by the Ithaca Underground Music Video Festival, which is at Cinemapolis tonight. Your best bets for repertory fare are A Matter of Life and Death, which is at Cornell Cinema tomorrow, and Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, which is there on Saturday. You can also see last week’s “Home Video” recommendation Mulholland Drive there tonight along with Eraserhead, which is of course also directed by the late, great David Lynch.
Home Video: Six films have basically already clinched spots on the top ten list for Movie Year 2024 I’ll publish in March. All We Imagine as Light is one of them. Another is Close Your Eyes, which recently started streaming on Mubi. I originally thought I was going to present it as tied with La Chimera and write them up together, but while they do have a lot in common thematically, Close Your Eyes has started to differentiate itself in my mind, so we’ll see. Anyway, here’s what I said about it on Letterboxd:
Close Your Eyes begins and ends with excerpts from one of my new favorite films within a film, an unfinished work called The Farewell Gaze, and contains both a diegetic rendition of “My Rife, My Pony and Me” and a load-bearing reference to Carl Theodor Dreyer, but it’s way more than mere cinephile catnip. Rather, like Movie Year 2024’s La Chimera, it’s a thorough and nuanced investigation of the question Is it possible for an aesthete to live a good life in the absence of art? Where that film’s Arthur (Josh O’Connor) is faced with a choice, though, this one’s protagonists Miguel Garay (Manolo Soto) and Julio Arenas (Jose Coronado) have that reality thrust upon them. Or do they? Doubling abounds–even the title is a reference to director Victor Erice’s 1973 magnum opus The Spirit of the Beehive.
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 