What I’m Seeing This Week: I’ll be in Rochester for the Nitrate Picture Show today through Sunday, but am hoping to catch Bring Her Back at Cinemapolis or the Regal Ithaca Mall after I return. My loving wife and I are also still working on carving out time for a date night outing to Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning at one of those two theaters or the IMAX screen at the Regal Destiny USA in Syracuse, and my oldest daughter has informed us that her next Family (née Friday) Movie Night selection will be Lilo & Stitch at the Regal, so I’ve got those two films in my near future as well.
Also in Theaters: Sinners, which continues its runs at Cinemapolis and the Regal, is my top new movie recommendation for the third week in a row and fourth overall. I didn’t love any of the other first run fare that I’ve already seen, although the jury is still out on Friendship, the demented evil twin of one of my favorite American comedies of the past twenty years I Love You, Man which is also at both Cinemapolis and the Regal. That potentially just makes the screenings of The Lady Vanishes at Cinemapolis on Tuesday as part of their train-themed June “Staff Picks” series even more compelling, though! There doesn’t appear to be anything of note happening on the repertory and special events fronts otherwise.
Home Video: NPS’s opening night selection Becky Sharp is new to me, the first time in three visits that this has been the case, which is exciting! It has some big shoes to fill, though, because the last two were bangers. I called Black Narcissus “one of the most transportative films ever shot entirely in a studio” when I wrote about it last August for my Drink & a Movie series, and while there’s no way to recreate the experience of seeing on a “better than very good” (per intro speaker Graham Brown) legendary (it opened the influential 1992 Pacific Film Archive series The Primal Screen) nitrate print, the formal qualities I’m referring to shine through just fine on the Criterion Collection’s Blu-ray and DVD releases; you can also stream it via a number of other commercial platforms. Meanwhile, although I was on the fence when I logged it on Letterboxd last year, I’ve since decided that I would indeed include Intolerance on any all-time Top Ten list I might find myself compelled or moved to create. As I heard someone say on the way out of the Dryden Theatre, even after more than a century it still represents perhaps the most sophisticated use of intertwining narratives in film history, and the lavish Babylon sequences may never be surpassed for sheer monumental grandeur. As a public domain title it’s widely available, so do check it out if you’ve never seen it or if it has been awhile!
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 