What I’m Seeing This Week: Happy Thanksgiving! We’re currently in Baltimore celebrating this holiday and my oldest daughter’s birthday with family, but I’m planning to see Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery at Cinemapolis after we return.
Also in Theaters: I saw Sentimental Value and Bugonia at Cinemapolis last week and recommend them both because the former contains my favorite building and prop of Movie Year 2025 so far and the latter features some of the best costumes (by Jennifer Johnson). I also enjoyed Frankenstein, which continues its run there, and Lurker, a reworking of some scenes and themes from Whiplash that returns to Cornell Cinema on Tuesday. I will eventually take my kids to see Wicked: For Good at either Cinemapolis or the Regal Ithaca Mall and Zootopia 2 at the latter, but am in no hurry because I expect them both to stick around for awhile. This might not be true of Rental Family (Cinemapolis and the Regal), Now You See Me: Now You Don’t (Regal), or Sisu: Road to Revenge (Regal), but if so I’m content to just catch up with them on a streaming video platform down the road. Special events highlights include Casablanca breaking its own record as Cornell’s most-screened film of all time on Monday, while on the repertory front the Regal is kicking of the Christmas season with Gremlins tomorrow, Elf on Saturday, The Polar Express on Sunday, and The Holiday on Monday.
Home Video Recommendation: There aren’t a whole lot of classic movies out there that My Loving Wife has seen but I haven’t, but until just the other night Witness for the Prosecution was probably the most prominent. I enjoyed it first and foremost as a smorgasbord of great acting in a variety of styles by a bevy of legends including Charles Laughton, Marlene Dietrich, Tyrone Power, and Elsa Lanchester, but Laughton’s character also struck me as a variation on the tragic heroes of some of my favorite Westerns like The Searchers and Canyon Passage for reasons I’d have to spoil the ending to explain but detail on Letterboxd if you’ve already seen it. We actually watched it on Tubi, but it’s also streaming commercial-free on Watch TCM through Sunday
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 