What I’m Seeing This Week: As longtime readers of this blog know, I consider the “movie year” to begin and end on Oscar night. The Monkey, which I’m planning to catch at either Cinemapolis or the Regal Ithaca Mall, will therefore be my first theatrical screening of 2025. More about this when I publish my top ten list on Sunday!
Also in Theaters: No Other Land, the film I’ll be rooting for to win this year’s Best Documentary Feature Oscar, continues its run at Cinemapolis and remains the best new movie now playing Ithaca that I’ve already seen. I also recommend Best Picture nominees I’m Still Here and The Substance, which are at Cinemapolis all week, and A Complete Unknown, which closes there today. This week’s special events are highlighted by the Ithaca Experimental Film Festival, which is at Cinemapolis on Saturday and Cornell Cinema on Sunday. There is also a free screening of local filmmaker Ira McKinley’s The Throwaways accompanied by excerpts from his new work A Tale of Two Journeys at Cinemapolis tonight and a free screening of the movie Lilting at Cornell Cinema on Wednesday. Finally, doors open for Cinemapolis’s annual Oscar night fundraising gala at 6:30pm on Sunday. On the repertory front, your best best bets are the screenings of Black Narcissus (which I wrote about last August) and The Annihilation of Fish, the rerelease of which Carlos Valladares recently called “the cinematic event of the year,” at Cornell Cinema on Friday and The Red Shoes on Saturday.
Home Video: If you want to see *all* of this year’s Oscar-nominated shorts, you’ll need to head to Cinemapolis or (in the case of the documentaries) Cornell Cinema. The ones I’ll be rooting for are all available online, though! In the Best Animated Short Film category, my favorite is Wander to Wonder, a tale of survival starring characters from a creepy 70s/80s kids television program that uses Shakespearian quotation and engages with the idea of unfathomably (and therefore “indistinguishable from magic) advanced technology (here: VHS!) in a way that reminds me of Arthur C. Clarke’s classic science fiction novel Rendezvous with Rama. It is available for rental via Vimeo. My pick in the Best Live Action Short Film category is streaming on Vimeo for free: A Lien is a tense, effective Paul Greengrass-style shaky cam thriller about the despicable U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (aka ICE) practice of arresting people at their green card interviews. But the cream of the whole crop is Best Documentary Short Film nominee Incident, which uses stunningly complex and effective split-screen editing to recreate the cacophony and chaos of being on the scene of an “incident” (the almost completely unmotivated killing of a black man by a white police officer) that everyone knows never should have happened and fears will blow up into something even more horrible any second and debunks the proceduralist myth of infallible law enforcement professionalism in the process. It is available via The New Yorker. By way of an honorable mention I also recommend Instruments of a Beating Heart, which I described on Letterboxd as “the Muppet Babies version of Whiplash” and which is probably my second-favorite one of these movies overall. It is available via The New York Times.
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 