What I’m Seeing This Week: I decided I didn’t want to risk missing out on No Other Land last week, so I still have one Oscar-nominated shorts program left to go: I’m planning to catch the live action shorts at Cornell Cinema on Saturday, but they’re also playing Cinemapolis all week.
Also in Theaters: No Other Land is a contender for my Movie Year 2024 top ten list (which I’ll publish on Oscar night like usual) and my top new film recommendation. It continues its run at Cinemapolis. Of the two Oscar-nominated shorts programs I’ve already seen, the documentaries are significantly better than the animated shorts. You can see the latter at Cornell Cinema tomorrow, and both are playing Cinemapolis all week. Other first run features I enjoyed include A Complete Unknown and I’m Still Here, both of which are at Cinemapolis. You also have one last chance to see The Brutalist and Nickel Boys, one of which (I still haven’t made up my mind) I’ll be rooting for to win this year’s Best Picture Oscar, there today. On the special events front, the highlights are free screenings of the documentaries The Bomb at Cornell Cinema on Tuesday and of Anonymous Sister and Free For All: The Public Library at Cinemapolis on Saturday and Tuesday respectively. Your best bets for repertory fare are The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and Fantastic Mr. Fox, which are at Cornell Cinema tonight and Sunday respectively. Finally, I would be remiss if I did not also mention that Twilight, which is beloved of my favorite film scholar who graduated from Cornell Matt Strohl (class of 2003), is screening there on Saturday.
Home Video: Sometimes works of art feel like adaptations even when you know they aren’t. The best example of this for me might be the Beatles song “For No One,” which I always hear as retelling James Joyce’s short story “The Dead.” It is perhaps therefore appropriate that when I finally saw the movie Distant Voices, Still Lives for the first time a couple of weeks ago, the overwhelming impression I got was that it was director Terence Davies’ version of his fellow Liverpudlians’ “In My Life.” I’d have a lot more to say about this movie, which is commonly regarded as both the first and second volumes in a trilogy were it not for the fact that its conclusion, The Long Day Closes, is a straight-up masterpiece. Here’s what I said about it on Letterboxd:
The Christmas dinner interior/exterior mash-up tableau is an all-time great movie image, although the exterior shot of the rowhouse with just the top of a Christmas tree with blinking lights visible through the windows as a drizzly rain falls which follows shortly afterward and the lengthy study of how an old carpet looks at different times of day might resonate with me even more for personal reasons. The opening and closing shots which derive power and meaning from a later string of overhead tracking shots connecting child’s play to cinema to church to school (where the lesson is about the forces of erosion) also rank among the great bookends in cinema history. Finally, if that wasn’t already enough, The Long Day Closes is the best argument I can conceive of for why some (to be clear: not all!) films definitely should have 85-minute runtimes that I can possibly imagine.
The Long Day Closes, which is now streaming on the Criterion Channel, is perfectly intelligible as a standalone work, but it’s totally worth ponying up $2.99 to rent Distant Voices, Still Lives on Prime Video so that you can watch the entire cycle.
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 