What I’m Seeing This Week: We’ll be out of town for the next few days, but My Loving Wife and I are planning to see Hokum with friends at the Philadelphia Film Society’s SpringFest during our travels. I’m hoping to catch The Christophers at Cinemapolis and Normal at the Regal Ithaca Mall after we return as well.
Also in Theaters: My favorite new movie now playing Ithaca is The Drama, which continues its run at Cinemapolis and the Regal. Here’s what I said about it on Letterboxd earlier this week:
Captures the kaleidoscopic mélange (!) of assumed intent, other people’s actual and imagined reactions, and imagined futures that we’re actually reacting to when someone does or says something that upsets us. Which is to say that, for better or worse, this is much, much less about the big plot twist (which traffics in a taboo that Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die already cathartically allowed me to laugh at earlier this year) than Robert Pattinson’s Charlie’s response to it. Which was designed to be chewed on with post-movie cheeseburgers in Andy’s Diners the world over.
Special events include 3D presentations of Jurassic Park and Dial M for Murder at Cornell Cinema on Saturday and Sunday respectively. There are too many free events at Cinemapolis and Cornell Cinema this week to list, but highlights include a “Family Classic Picture Show” screening of one of my childhood favorites Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, at the former on Sunday and a “Collaborative Filmmaking; Indigenous Media” program at the latter on Monday featuring Mobilize, Doing the Sheep Good, Ringtone, and Ghosts. Finally, on the repertory front Bigger than Life is playing Cornell Cinema tonight and Fight Club screens at the Regal on Wednesday.
Home Video Recommendation: Magellan, which clocked in at third on my Movie Year 2025 top ten (percent) list, is now streaming on the Criterion Channel with a subscription! Here’s my blurb from that post:
I made a point of mentioning how grateful I was to Cinemapolis for programming this film in every single one of my conversations with someone who works there for a solid month because I didn’t think it was high-profile enough to *ever* play here, let alone during its first run in theaters! Like 28 Years Later it is, for me, first and foremost a quasi-adaptation of a great science fiction novel I never expected to get to see on the big screen, in this case Orson Scott Card’s Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus, which postulates that if just one or two things had gone differently, we could easily be living in a world where Mesoamericans “discovered” and subjugated Europe instead of vice versa. Here Gael García Bernal’s titular explorer is depicted as not much more than a crab in a metal carapace, washed up on a beach at the beginning of the film and ready for the boil by the end of it.
And here’s a screengrab from the first stunning crustaceous tableau to further whet your appetite:
Now go watch it!
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 