What I’m Seeing This Week: My top priority is On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, since it will be at Cinemapolis for one week only, and I’m planning to see Eephus there as well because I don’t want to risk missing it either. Finally, our plans for a “date night” outing to Black Bag at Cinemapolis or the Regal Ithaca Mall last week fell through, so my loving wife and I trying again tomorrow.
Also in Theaters: The best new movie now playing Ithaca RIGHT NOW that I’ve already seen No Other Land, but its final screening at Cinemapolis is today at 2:50pm. After that it will be Anora, which continues its post-Best Picture Oscar run at Cinemapolis and the Regal. That should definitely be your first choice if you somehow haven’t already checked it out, but otherwise it’s all about special events and repertory fare this week. Highlights on the former front include free screenings at Cornell Cinema of an experimental short films program called “Matter Falling Out of Form” tonight, The Year Between on Monday evening and a shorts program called the “Women’s Adventure Film Tour 2025” on Wednesday, as well as a double feature of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and La La Land there on Saturday. My other “old movie” recommendation is Peeping Tom, which closes out Cornell Cinema’s “Powell and Pressburger: Titans of Technicolor” series tomorrow.
Home Video: My oldest daughter Lucy recently scored the first two points of her basketball career in the final game of her second season. We’re extremely proud of all the hard work she has put in on and off (her coaches think that indoor rock climbing has had a noticeable impact on her upper body strength) the court and have enjoyed watching her improve each week. In addition to the bucket, she also fought for rebounds and let her teammates know when she was open, which she attributes to our new pre-game ritual of playing the song “Defying Gravity” on repeat in the car so that she and her sister can lustily sing along to it to warm up her voice. In honor of this momentous event (which literally brought tears to my loving wife’s eyes!) in our family’s history, this week’s home video recommendation is Love & Basketball, which Cornell Cinema actually screened in February and which is now streaming on Peacock.
This film was released theatrically almost exactly one year before I officially became a diehard basketball fan during my freshman year at the University of Pittsburgh when my soon-to-be-beloved Panthers went on a Cinderella run during the Big East (RIP) tournament. Although this wasn’t enough to secure an NCAA Tournament bid that year, they went on to appear in the next ten and came within a heartbreaking miracle Scottie Reynolds coast-to-coast basket of the Final Four in 2009. Throughout this run they always had great point guards, so I was delighted when this turned out to be the position that Love & Basketball‘s protagonists Monica Wright (Sanaa Lathan) and Quincy McCall (Omar Epps) both play and in heaven when the movie’s pivotal moment turns out to be Wright taking a charge. It also features one of cinema’s great one-on-one games (along with Arthur Agee’s showdown with his father in my March, 2024 Drink & a Movie selection Hoop Dreams) followed by a heartwarming final scene celebrating the WNBA, which was still only in its third year of existence during shooting.
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 