What I’m Seeing This Week: I am hoping to catch six movies at the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival before next Thursday! Nuisance Bear tomorrow, Mare’s Nest on Saturday, A Life Illuminated and Seeds on Sunday, Our Land on Tuesday, and Northern Lights on Wednesday. While I’m also interested in The Drama, which opens at Cinemapolis and the Regal Ithaca Mall today, but it will have to wait.
Also in Theaters: Alpha is terrific and I’m just a bit puzzled by its tepid reception at Cannes last year, although as a movie that needs space to breathe I can see how it might not have played well in a festival context. Anyway, Cinemapolis has added an extra week to its run, which: good on you, Cinemapolis! Here’s what I wrote about this one on Letterboxd last week:
The best film about the AIDS epidemic since Witnesses. Here the feeling of Armageddon is completely literalized into the setting, but not exclusively: the maybe-real-maybe-figurative-maybe-both sandstorms raging outside are also inside the infected. Reminiscent of one of my Movie Year 2023 favorites All of Us Strangers in its dual (dream?) timelines and the way it deals with families and grief. What’s new is the decision to ground the story in the perspective of child first too young to understand, then too old not to, and the depiction of victims as beautiful monuments to the failure of science and society to save them.
One FLEFF selection *not* listed in the previous section is Best Documentary Feature Oscar winner Mr. Nobody Against Putin, which is there tomorrow night. It’s good! Drop me a line if you have any thoughts on the Harry Potter references because I’m planning to write about them (and the ones in My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow) in June.
Special events include free screenings of Republic of Amnesia and Possible Landscapes followed by filmmaker Q&As at Cornell Cinema on Tuesday and Wednesday. Finally, noteworthy repertory options include Blazing Saddles, National Lampoon’s Animal House, and Airplane! at the Regal as part of their “LOL” series tomorrow, Saturday, and Wednesday respectively. The Killer plays there on Sunday, Monday, and Wednesday as well.
Home Video Recommendation: I’m happy to report that current Cornell University faculty, staff, and students can now view 7 Walks with Mark Brown, my favorite film from last year’s FLEFF, on our in-house Library MediaSpace platform! Here’s what I said about it when I included it on my Movie Year 2025 top ten (percent) list:
The titular paleobotanist who guides a filmmaking crew through the Pays de Caux region to “collect” primeval plants for a cinematic herbarium could be this blog’s patron saint, and the 16mm second half of its diptych comprises some of the most satisfying long shots I’ve ever seen.
It’s also available on Blu-ray from Vinegar Syndrome and can be streamed for a rental or purchase fee on Vimeo.
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 