In Theaters: My family is very excited to see Wildwood at Cinemapolis or the Regal Ithaca Mall, but we have both family and friends visiting this weekend, so it will have to wait. I won’t be able to attend the Empire State Film Festival at Cinemapolis for the same reason, unfortunately, but plan to catch The Devils there after it wraps and either Whalefall or Wicker at the Regal once our guests have gone home. Other first-run fare I’m interested in includes Aanikoobijigan (ancestor/great-grandparent/great-grandchild), which is at Cornell Cinema on Sunday; A Talent for Murder, which opens at Cinemapolis tomorrow; and Sense and Sensibility, which is there and at the Regal.
Digger remains my favorite holdover, and it continues its run at the Regal, albeit now on just one screen. I also enjoyed You Can See Everything, everyone else’s favorite documentary of the year (mine is Remake), which could have been called Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery if that title wasn’t already taken, and which will presumably be playing both Cinemapolis and the Regal all fall.
Special events include a screening of Faust at Cornell University’s Sage Chapel accompanied by a new score by the Invincible Czars tomorrow, and a free screening of Unseen there followed by a Q&A with filmmaker Set Hernandez on Wednesday. Finally, noteworthy repertory options include Young Frankenstein and Scream at Cornell Cinema this evening and on Saturday respectively, and Marie Antoinette at the Regal on Sunday.
Home Video Recommendation: If you rue missing The Double Life of Véronique at Cornell Cinema last week or liked it so much that you already want to watch it again, I have good news! Cornell faculty, staff, and students have access to it on Kanopy via a license paid for by the Library, and everyone else can view it on the Criterion Channel with a subscription and purchase or rent it from a number of other streaming video platforms. Here’s what I recently said about it on Letterboxd:
Krzysztof Kieślowski’s surrealistic tale of spooky action at a distance was released just as the world was beginning to wake up from the nightmare of the Cold War. Sławomir Idziak’s through-a-glass-darkly cinematography is occasionally self-indulgent (too many point-of-view shots!) but ingenious in the variety of ways it finds to depict a world turned upside down, and the music by “Van den Budenmayer” (actually Zbigniew Preisner) is haunting. What makes it all work, though, is Irène Jacob’s East/West angel.
Véronique is also available on Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection.
Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts can be found here. A running list of all of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.
