In Theaters: This is the final week before Ithaca goes back to being a two movie theater town when Cornell Cinema closes up shop until the students return in August, but all the stuff I’m most interested in is at Cinemapolis and the Regal Ithaca Mall anyway. I’m definitely going to try to see director David Lowery’s latest Mother Mary and I Swear at the former, and if I add a third movie it will be Michael at the latter despite bad reviews because it will be fun if I decide everyone else is wrong!
My favorite holdover is The Christophers, which continues its run at Cinemapolis. Here’s what I said about it on Letterboxd last week:
In which Michaela Coel’s artist Lori Butler lays out a dinner’s worth of takeout containers with the same careful attention she would devote to organizing a palette. I appreciated the use of glitter in the Christophers III series more for having seen Noah Davis’s 2004 (1) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art yesterday. Refreshingly alive to the many different ways a work of art can impact someone: in most movies “it changed my life!” is a boringly undynamic positive.
Movie of the moment The Drama remains there and at the Regal and is worth seeing as well if for no other reason than so that you can have an opinion on it. I’m also interested in My Father’s Shadow, which made my “Cannes 2025 Films That I Am Most Eager to See” list, but it isn’t a priority for me because it’s available on Mubi. Special events include a free screening of The Librarians, which unlike most movies about my profession I didn’t hate, at Cinemapolis on Saturday and four free events at Cornell Cinema: a “Science on Screen” presentation of A Birder’s Guide to Everything this evening, a “Sensory Ethnography” program featuring Leviathan and two shorts on Monday, a screening of Rosemead that evening, and a Kleber Mendonça Filho double feature of Pictures of Ghosts and The Secret Agent on Wednesday. Finally, other noteworthy repertory fare includes 35th anniversary screenings of The Silence of the Lambs at the Regal on Sunday and Wednesday and Eyes Wide Shut at Cinemapolis on Tuesday to kick off their new “Staff Picks: Erotic Thrillers” series.
Home Video Recommendation: I read an interesting Substack post by Will Manidis & Nabeel S. Qureshi called “Rented Virtue” a couple of months ago right around the time I saw The Testament of Ann Lee. It proposes that the Quaker sect’s spiritual prohibition on lying was directly responsible for the success in trade that gave them an outsized influence on the development of the British empire, and that there is no secular alternative to achieving this kind of result because irrational-seeming constraints imposed in the absence of God can’t ever reliably answer the question, “why maintain this when it is costly?” I thought of this just the other night while watching Barbary Coast on the Criterion Channel because Joel McCrea’s willingness to put poetry ahead of profit and his proselytizing influence on Miriam Hopkins seems to represent a rebuttal. If that doesn’t float your boat, the opening sequence is a classic Howard Hawks proceduralist depiction of a 19th century ship docking in San Francisco harbor, plus you’ve got both Walter Brennan wearing a fake (spoiler alert?) eyepatch and Edward G. Robinson donning an even danglier earring than the one he wore as a character note in Tiger Shark three years earlier. Barbary Coast will disappear from the Criterion Channel at the end of the month, but is also streaming on Prime Video with a subscription and Tubi, and copies of the Warner Archives Collection’s 2015 DVD release remain plentiful.
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 