What I’m Seeing This Week: My loving wife and I are going to take advantage of the fact that the girls will be at Camp Grandma and see F1: The Movie at either Cinemapolis or the Regal Ithaca Mall.
Also in Theaters: The Phoenician Scheme, which is still going strong at Cinemapolis, makes it three weeks in a row as my favorite new release now playing Ithaca, threatening Sinners‘ Movie Year 2025 record of four. Ballerina, which continues its run at the Regal, is right behind it, and I also enjoyed Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning and 28 Years Later, which is rich in ideas but predictably can’t quite live up to its epic trailer, one of the best I’ve ever seen. The latter is at both Cinemapolis and the Regal, and the former is just at the Regal. Finally, your best bets for repertory fare are This Is Spinal Tap and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which play the Regal Saturday-Monday and Tuesday-Wednesday respectively.
Home Video: I was originally hoping to publish my penultimate “bonus” Drink & a Movie post tomorrow, but am going to take advantage of the fact that I’m not at all on pace to do so to double dip. You see, I just happen to be writing about the greatest *Third* of July film of all time, the silent/sound hybrid Lonesome, which is available on DVD/Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection. The beautiful restoration is based on a nitrate print from the Eastman Museum collection which the Dryden Theatre screened in 2015. The film itself is about as close as a major Hollywood studio (Universal) ever came to making a feature-length experimental film and also sets a gold standard for depictions of urban alienation that for my money won’t be matched until Tsai Ming-Liang comes along more than a half a century later. It’s also only 69 minutes long, so you don’t even have to choose between it and Independence Day or whatever else your go-to is for this particular holiday weekend!
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 