What I’m Seeing This Week: I’m going with Happyend and Lurker at Cornell Cinema and The Librarians at Cinemapolis.
Also in Theaters: This week’s theatrical highlight is probably once again the 35mm print of Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai screening at Cornell Cinema tomorrow night. Looking just at first run fare, my top recommendation is Die My Love, an instant classic of mother-in-law cinema that continues its runs at both Cinemapolis and the Regal. I also enjoyed Frankenstein, which opens at Cinemapolis tomorrow, for Kate Hawley’s outstanding costumes and Movie Year 2025’s most tragically unrealistic closing line. In addition to the titles listed in the previous section, I’d like to see Nuremberg, which opens at Cinemapolis and the Regal Ithaca Mall, as well, but I promised my loving wife I’d save it for a future Friday night; I’m interested in Bugonia (Cinemapolis and the Regal) and Good Fortune (just the Regal), too, but the latter is down to just one screening per day, so it’s probably not going to happen. Special events highlights include a program of works by the Irish film collective aemi called “The Said and the Unsaid” at Cornell Cinema tonight and free screening of Kirikou and the Sorceress at Cinemapolis on Sunday as part of their Family Classics Picture Show series. Finally, noteworthy repertory options include The Boy and the Heron at the Regal Saturday-Wednesday, All That Jazz at Cornell Cinema on Sunday, and the movie my loving wife and I saw on our very FIRST date, Hugo, at the Regal on Saturday.
Home Video: A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I’ve been slowly but surely picking off the greatest films I’ve never seen according to the 2022 Sight and Sound critics poll. They’ve universally been terrific and The Last Laugh is no exception. Here’s what I said about it on Letterboxd after my second viewing:
After more than a century, still the cinematic gold standard depiction of the idea that, as Sarah Jaffe put it, “work won’t love you back.” Also the feelings of being pleasantly soused and crushed (literally here, by a high-rise) by guilt. But it’s the violent tonal swings that make this a masterpiece: almost Linnaean in their comprehensiveness, they catalog the various tricks (circumstantial, psychological, social, etc.) we “civilized” human beings compulsively employ to make ourselves and one another miserable and, by cancelling each other out, show how unnecessary and avoidable the entire pathological enterprise really is.
Current Cornell University faculty, staff, and students can watch this film on Kanopy via a license paid for by the library, and because it’s in the public domain in the United States, everyone else can view it on a variety of free platforms such as Tubi.
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 