In Theaters: This is a truly excellent week for movies in Ithaca, and although I’m staying in tonight to watch football (Hail to Pitt!), I’ll be seeing something for six days in a row after that, which is a lot even for me! The one I’m most excited about is Chronovisor, which I started hearing great things about when it premiered at Rotterdam in January and have been tracking ever since. It plays Cornell Cinema tomorrow evening. I’ll be returning on Saturday to see the “2026 Sundance Film Festival Short Film Tour” and again on Sunday for the 35mm print of Vagabond screening in their “Wayfaring Strangers” series.
Speaking of Sundance, I’m also going to see The Weight, which got great reviews there, at the Regal Ithaca Mall. Last but not least, I’m hoping to catch both of the documentaries starting one-week runs at Cinemapolis tomorrow, American Doctor and The Cycle of Love. Other noteworthy new releases that I’m going to wait on a bit include Filipiñana, which screens at Cornell Cinema tonight but will return on 9/26, and Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom, which opens at the Regal today and will hopefully stick around awhile.
So that’s what I’m up to. One film you should definitely check out at Cornell Cinema on Sunday if you missed its first screening there last week is Remake, which is easily my favorite documentary of Movie Year 2026 so far. Here’s what I recently said about it on Letterboxd:
“I used to be a filmmaker,” director Ross McElwee says in the aftermath of the death of his son Adrian, but not by way of declaring this to be his last movie. As he recently told David Schwartz in an interview for Film Comment, “that’s meant to be a kind of mournful acceptance of the fact that something’s different now. I don’t say what that is right away.” Although McElwee then immediately adds, “I didn’t really see how I could continue to be a filmmaker,” his practice of capturing big and small moments from his life on camera comes across here as compulsive and not entirely unlike the addictions that plagued Adrian.
This sense that this is something McElwee needed to do binds Remake to this year’s critical darling Blue Heron. Writing for Cahiers du Cinéma, Ariel Schweitzer described the goal of that film’s director Sophy Romvari as “reconstructing the past in order to better understand it, in the hope of healing the wounds of her childhood.” But where Romvari meticulously recreates the late 1990s to process a trauma that occurred then, McElwee is acting more like an archaeologist of his own autobiography. What he gives us, the audience, when he cuts footage shot by Adrian into his film is something akin to what Katherine and Alex Joyce experience in Journey to Italy when they witness a plaster cast being made from the cavity a Roman couple’s bodies left behind at Pompeii.
Holdovers I especially enjoyed include The Samurai and the Prisoner, a rangy period piece which features both a subtle tea ceremony smile and an equally delightful close-up of a spider that’s anything but, and The Odyssey, which I’ve already talked about in this space a bunch of times. They continue their runs at Cinemapolis and the Regal respectively.
Special events include four free Reproductive Rights Film Festival screenings at Cinemapolis tonight through Saturday, a free “Family Classics Picture Show” presentation of Akeelah and the Bee there on Sunday, free screenings of Overburden and The Message at Cornell Cinema tonight and Tuesday evening respectively, and a “Drag Movie Night” presentation of Steel Magnolias at Cinemapolis on Wednesday hosted by Tilia Cordata. Finally, additional repertory highlights include Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049 at the Regal on Saturday, L’Eclisse at Cornell Cinema on Saturday, and Mad Max: Fury Road at Cinemapolis on Tuesday.
Home Video Recommendation: Last weekend I shared my Movie Year 2026 Mid-Point Top Ten (Percent) list on Bluesky and X, and while Power Ballad didn’t quite make the cut, I did list it as an honorable mention. Here’s what I said about it on Letterboxd in June:
I was so angry at this movie for not being more worthy of Paul Rudd and its promising I Love You, Better Man premise, until suddenly it was! Some of that trajectory is attributable to frontloading obvious jokes with no prayer of working before we’ve gotten to know the characters. In retrospect, though, certain aspects of its Candide-esque message about the importance of tending your own soundgarden may have also hit a bit close to home for this adamantly (TOO adamantly?) amateur film blogger. If Ballad doesn’t take home a Best Original Song Oscar, I give up, by which I am of course referring to the delightfully cheesy “Finishing Line”, not “How To Write a Song Without You”.
Power Ballad is now available on Blu-ray and DVD from Lionsgate, and can be rented or purchased from a variety of streaming video platforms.
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 