What I’m Seeing This Week: I am currently out of town at a library conference, but I’m hoping to catch a few films at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival while I’m away. I’ll write them up in a dispatch blog post if I’m successful, so stay tuned! I’m also going to try to see The Woman in the Yard, which I’m hearing good things about from people I trust, at the Regal Ithaca Mall after I return.
Also in Theaters: If I was in Ithaca this week, I’d be prioritizing the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, specifically the screenings at Cinemapolis of Snow Leopard on Friday; Sleep with Your Eyes Open on Saturday; and Little, Big, and Far on Tuesday. The best new movies now playing local theaters that I’ve already seen are the enjoyable genre exercises Black Bag (spy film), which continues its runs at both Cinemapolis and the Regal, and A Working Man (Jason Statham), which is at just the Regal. This week’s special events are highlighted by free screenings of the movies Improper Conduct and The Accelerator at Cornell Cinema on Monday and Tuesday respectively. Finally, your best bet for repertory fare is Princess Mononoke, which is at the Regal all week.
Home Video: I’ve been digging the fact that there have been many pre-Code movies with ~60 minute runtimes featured on Watch TCM lately because they’re the perfect thing to watch when, say, we miraculously get the kids settled on Thursday night with about an hour to spare before Top Chef comes on. My favorite recent discovery is the 1933 film Female, which starts where Movie Year 2024’s Babygirl ends: with a girlboss CEO exiling an employee she has slept with to a faraway branch office. A lot of people seem to be hung up on the messaging of the climax, but the preponderance of available evidence suggests to me that whatever they say to each other in the final scene, Ruth Chatterton’s Alison Drake is much more comfortable in the board room than George Brent’s engineer Jim Thorne is ever likely to be. Anyway, the film also features delightfully profligate back projection and some outrageous wipes, so be sure to check it out before it disappears from the platform on April 9!
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 