Category: Ithaca Film Journal

In Theaters: We aren’t a Minions household for whatever reason, and the girls are in Canada for the summer anyway, so this is a “meh” week for us for new releases. I didn’t get to Leviticus last week, so seeing it at Cinemapolis is my top priority, and I’m going to try to catch either Ask E. Jean or Girls Like Girls there as well. Obsession, which continues its run there and at the Regal Ithaca Mall, remains my favorite holdover. I also enjoyed Disclosure Day and Toy Story 5, which are at the same two venues and, as I noted on Letterboxd, have basically the same ending. I think it must just be too damn hot for special events, but repertory highlights include 85th anniversary screenings of Citizen Kane at the Regal on Sunday and Wednesday and My Own Private Idaho at Cinemapolis on Tuesday.

Home Video Recommendation: The World Cup and Wimbledon are in full swing, the Tour de France is right around the corner, and it’s going to be a while before the buzz of the Knicks finally winning a banner wears off, so I’ve got sports on the brain! That makes now a great time to watch what for my money is one of the most underrated movies of the millennium, Undisputed. As I recently argued on Letterboxd:

Over the past two months, millions of parents around the country let their children stay up late to watch the New York Knicks’ run to their first NBA title in 53 years, creating shared memories they will cherish for the rest of their lives. O.G. Anunoby’s tip-in in Game 4 and highlights from Jalen Brunson’s performance for the ages in Game 5 will be celebrated and replayed not just by fans of the team, but all lovers of the sport. The championship brought a city together. It also resulted in 63 arrests, Spurs fans being assaulted, and the destruction of five school buses.

Undisputed is one of the great sports movies because it’s laser-focused on the fight between Ving Rhames’ George “Iceman” Chambers, a world heavyweight champion recently fallen from the mountaintop of fame and fortune, and Wesley Snipes’ Monroe Hutchen, a could-have-been-a-contender convicted of murder in his prime and undefeated after ten years of underground prison bouts, not as the climax of a story but as an object of inquiry in its own right. The beauty of boxing, as Peter Falk’s aging Cosa Nostra connoisseur says, lies in its simplicity: “two guys fighting to the finish but just one guy wins because he’s the better man and that’s what the goddamn sport is about.” That’s what all sports are about, even if parasites and poets create spectacles, rackets, and morality plays around them.

Characters are introduced by the crime they committed first, then their name, because what matters most for the purposes of this narrative is how they got here. Lloyd Ahern’s camera is restless. It searches for truth in the main story, archival footage of old fights, flashbacks to the one time Hutchen lost control, and the face of the woman who has accused Chambers of rape. But it doesn’t tell us what it finds because this is no The Jericho Mile or The Longest Yard. Those are both fine movies, but they’re about something else. Undisputed is about a boxing match between two men who fight to the finish according to the London Prize Ring Rules. Just one guy wins because he’s the better man. Neither of them appears to learn anything. And that’s it. Whatever else we come away with is something we brought with us.

You can stream Undisputed on Paramount+ with a subscription or rent it from a variety of other platforms, and it’s also available on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber.

Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts can be found here. A running list of all of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.

In Theaters: The headliner in our household is definitely the free “Family Classics Picture Show” screening of Back to the Future at Cinemapolis on Sunday! This film has quickly become a favorite of the girls since I showed it to them for the first time last summer and we’re all excited to see it on the big screen for the first time. We’re also going to Toy Story 5 at the Regal Ithaca Mall, and I’m planning to catch The Death of Robin Hood there or at Cinemapolis as well. While I’m interested in Girls Like Girls (Cinemapolis) and Leviticus (Regal) too, I don’t think I’m going to get to either of them this week.

Obsession remains my favorite holdover, and I also enjoyed zeitgeist movie Disclosure Day, which is way more about “AI” in my opinion than, oh I dunno, A.I. Artificial Intelligence to randomly pick another film from Steven Spielberg’s oeuvre. Both of those films remain at both Cinemapolis and the Regal. The Sheep Detectives is still going strong at the latter as well and is well worth your consideration whether or not you have kids in tow, and if you like martial arts movies, you should check The Furious out there for its virtuoso fight choreography.

Special events include a KPop Demon Hunters “sing-along” at the Regal this morning and a free screening of the documentary The Niagara Movement: the Early Battle for Civil Rights at Cinemapolis on Tuesday. Finally, additional repertory highlights include 25th anniversary screenings of Ocean’s Eleven at the Regal on Sunday and Wednesday, Raiders of the Lost Ark there on Sunday, and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown at Cinemapolis on Tuesday.

Home Video Recommendation: As a lifelong Mets fan, I grew up watching both actual recordings and this brilliant R.B.I. Baseball reconstruction of Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. I was just four years old when it actually took place, though, so while I believe I was present in front of a television set for at least part of the live broadcast, I have no memory of it. I wasn’t ever tempted to revisit any other sporting event before this week, but I had to go back and bask in the glory of the last 15 minutes of Game 5 of this year’s NBA Finals on Watch ESPN. Having done so, I can attest that they’re a lot more fun when you aren’t seething at the injustice of a lopsided whistle and can simply luxuriate in the indomitable will of Jalen Brunson, offensive rebounding prowess of Mitchell Robinson, and timely contributions from the rest of the best-constructed roster of any team I’ve ever had the pleasure of rooting for. Thanks for the memories fellas!

Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts can be found here. A running list of all of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.

In Theaters: A new Steven Spielberg movie is always an event, and people seem even more excited for Disclosure Day (which opens at the Regal Ithaca Mall today and Cinemapolis tomorrow) than the last few, but here are a couple of holdovers that I hope you’ll also make time for! First, you have one final chance to see Carolina Caroline at the Regal today at 2:55pm. As I recently wrote on Letterboxd:

The primary job of the plot in an old-school effort like this is just to focus the movie star energy of leads Kyle Gallner and Samara Weaving, and for that it gets a solid A. Gallner’s grifter Oliver also poses an intriguing question, though: had he never met Samara Weaving’s titular protagonist, could he have continued to float through the early-aughts rural American landscape like a trickster demigod indefinitely, or was she a lover from previous lifetimes à la The Beast who was always the destination of his Southern odyssey? Also featuring Kyra Sedgwick as a harpy in the classical sense who shows everyone who shoehorned Jean Reno into Tuner how to steal a scene without hijacking the film and a diffused climax that deconstructs Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid‘s back nine.

I also really enjoyed Power Ballad, a musical midlife crisis starring Paul Rudd with a Candide-esque message about the importance of tending your own soundgarden, and surprise hit of the early summer Obsession. Both movies remain at both Cinemapolis and the Regal. If none of these options sounds family-friendly enough, your best bet is to take your crew to see The Sheep Detectives at the Regal, and if they sound *too* family-friendly, my recommendation is I Love Boosters at Cinemapolis.

In addition to Disclosure Day, I’m planning to check out The Little Sister at Cinemapolis on Sunday as well. I’d also be interested in seeing The Furious at the Regal or Stop! That! Train! there or at Cinemapolis, but I don’t think I’m going to get a chance and neither appears likely to stick around longer than a week. This week’s special events include a “Drag Movie Night” presentation of Pink Flamingos at Cinemapolis on Wednesday featuring performances and games by local performers Tilia Cordata and Dizzy DeScretion and KPop Demon Hunters sing-alongs at the Regal Monday-Thursday. Finally, additional repertory highlights include screenings of Ponyo at the Regal Saturday-Wednesday and A Room with a View at Cinemapolis on Tuesday.

Home Video Recommendation: I’m just about caught up on the backlog of titles my friend Scott and I have been watching for our two-person film club that I mentioned last month! Our second-most-recent selection The Cloud-Capped Star was a good one. Here’s what I said about it on Letterboxd:

Opens with a shot of one of cinema’s great trees. Thinking back its branches may remind you of pulmonary arteries when the movie ends by erasing the distinction between Supriya Choudhury’s long-suffering heroine Neeta and the land she inhabits as a refugee: her voice first Echoes off the hills, then lights on another woman whose sandal breaks in a symmetrical act of sympathy and finally reverberates through eternity over a dark screen accompanied by the same otherworldly warble that elsewhere announces the onset of a dizzy spell.

The interiority of Star‘s famous whiplash sound effect is similarly ambiguous. While it initially functions entirely as a non-diegetic external manifestation of her feelings upon discovering that the man she’s been saving herself for didn’t have the patience to reciprocate, it appears again later to punish him when he finally faces what he’s done. Even more interestingly, her brother Shankar almost seems to hear it in the scene where he checks himself before he too forsakes the path she sacrificed her youth to set him on.

The point of all this aural expressionism is perhaps best exemplified by one of the film’s outstanding visual moments, a rack focus to a Falconetti close-up of Neeta’s face in the foreground when she finally castigates her mother for taking her for granted. The Passion of Joan of Arc is about the trial and tribulations of a saint about to ascend to heaven; Star is set in the hell that is other people.

You can stream this movie on the Criterion Channel with a subscription, and it’s also available on both Blu-ray and DVD 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.

In Theaters: I don’t talk much about box office performance on this blog because what’s a hit and what’s flopping isn’t terribly relevant to my particular brand of cinephilia. I am deeply invested in my local theaters making enough money to stay in business, though, so I’m rooting for both the twin horror sensations Backrooms and Obsession to continue making a killing even though I liked one of them much more than the other.

Backrooms traffics in a lot of the same themes as last year’s The Woman in the Yard, but for better or worse it trades clarity for atmosphere. I haven’t dug into the web series it’s based on beyond giving the Wikipedia entry a once over, so the only thing it builds on for me personally is the teaser trailer. While there wasn’t anything in the movie itself that made the production design-driven conceit more interesting than it already was aside from a monster that reminded me of the papier-mâché puppets that are staples of Ithaca’s parade scene, I will give at least one of its inevitable sequels a chance to change my mind.

Obsession is less overtly fascinated by a past its creator and primary audience are too young to have experienced firsthand, but it also revolves around a fictional museum piece. Like the “liminal spaces” of its like-it-or-not companion film, it remains ambiguous what the “One Wish Willow” is meant to tell us about the previous era it supposedly hails from: is the idea that a heart’s desire didn’t yield as much destructive power in simpler times? Or is yet another generation issuing a disclaimer that “we didn’t start the fire”? I think this question represents value-added intrigue rather than a distraction because it’s secondary to the anxiety about what constitutes consent that most of its horror comes from. There are also some vestigial genre mores, to be sure, but just as the audience I saw Hokum with seemed to enjoy its empty jump scares, I’ve got no objections here to giving the people what they obviously want.

Both films continue their runs at both Cinemapolis and the Regal Ithaca Mall this week. Obsession is my top recommendation for both venues, but each is worth seeing if for no other reason than because their wild popularity with young viewers feared to be allergic to movie theaters all but guarantees that they’ll be one of the most important stories of Movie Year 2026. Go see ’em!

I’m planning to spend three of my next seven evenings glued to the television watching my beloved Knickerbockers take on Victor Wembanyama and the Spurs in the NBA Finals myself, but I do intend to make time to see Carolina Caroline at the Regal and Power Ballad there or at Cinemapolis. Although I’m giving the Nitrate Picture Show a miss this year in favor of Capitolfest 2026, I might also sneak up to Rochester on Saturday to try my luck with the rush lines depending on what’s playing. Other new releases I enjoyed include, in approximate order of preference, The Sheep Detectives (Regal), I Love Boosters (Cinemapolis), and Tuner (Cinemapolis). Finally, special events/repertory highlights include the return of Ran to Cinemapolis 40 years after it became the first film they ever screened on Tuesday and a 30th anniversary presentation of Trainspotting at the Regal on Sunday.

Home Video Recommendation: In the spirit of nostalgia, this week’s home video recommendation is News From Home, one of the best documentary portraits of a New York City that exists no more ever committed to celluloid. Here’s what I said about it on Letterboxd the last time I watched it:

The old man in avocado-colored checkered pants who gets on the subway at about the 30-minute mark, stares directly into our eyes for a few beats, then switches cars is the absolute final word on people looking at the camera. Letter-writing is often bemoaned as a lost art, but here it sounds utterly exhausting. If you score this film like a prize fight between home where the art is (was?) and the strange land Akerman is now a stranger in based on whether VO or diegetic audio is dominant, the latter seems en route to victory, but then it ends with 1970s New York sinking into the ocean like the lost city of Atlantis.

You can stream News From Home on both the Criterion Channel and HBO Max with a subscription; it’s also available for rental from a variety of other platforms and as part of the Criterion Collection’s Chantal Akerman Masterpieces, 1968–1978 Blu-ray box set.

Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts can be found here. A running list of all of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.

In Theaters: No movie can compete with the thrill of watching the New York Knickerbockers return to the NBA Finals for the first time since I was in high school. They don’t start until Wednesday, though, so I’m going to try to catch Tuner at Cinemapolis and both Backrooms and Pressure there or at the Regal Ithaca Mall before then. I’d like to see Manas at Cinemapolis on Sunday as well, but that’s already a busy day, so it probably isn’t in the cards.

Obsession, which continues its runs at Cinemapolis and the Regal, remains my favorite holdover. I also enjoyed I Love Boosters, a psilocybin-fueled Students for Socialism brainstorming session come to life that’s at both theaters as well, and if you’re looking for something for the whole family, The Sheep Detectives features the best counting sheep joke I can remember and a refreshingly matter-of-fact attitude toward death that has the potential to spark some interesting conversations in the car ride home. It’s at the Regal.

Special events include a “Drag Movie Night” presentation of To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar at Cinemapolis on Wednesday. Finally, this week’s repertory highlight is Inside Llewyn Davis, which screens at the Regal throughout the day today.

Home Video Recommendation: I have a backlog of titles my buddy Scott and I watched for our two-person film club to talk about here! This week I’m going with The Gleaners & I, which is currently available on the Criterion Channel with a subscription, for rental from a variety of other platforms, and as part of the Criterion Collection’s The Complete Films of Agnès Varda Blu-ray box set. As I said on Letterboxd:

Her movie could be your life. When I was a Star Wars-obsessed teenager I owned a silly DVD-ROM that included brief parodies of A New Hope in the style of other filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino. Gleaners already contains at least one such “extra” in the scenes in which berobed barristers recite the French penal code amidst cabbage patches and junk piles, which you could drop into an episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus as is without anyone noticing. It’s also fun to imagine what Thomas Pynchon or his cinematic interlocutor Paul Thomas Anderson might have done with this material. 

Varda’s appropriative but not exclusively personal engagement with low- and high-culture original paintings and reproductions is my kind of art history. I love the brief shot of the manual for the DV camera she’s using, which is a perfectly incomplete metaphor for the film itself. It’s astonishing how many disparate threads scavenged from warehouses and waste bins she’s able to weave into such a concise essay. But actually, now that I think about it, I do have one “note”: how could she not make the amazing rap songs by Agnès Bredel and Richard Klugman available in their entirety somewhere!?

Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts can be found here. A running list of all of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.

In Theaters: There are a lot of intriguing new titles popping up on local marquees today and tomorrow, but I’ve got a lot going on this week and thus only have time to see two. I think I’m going with the one the internet has been buzzing about, The Blue Heron, and Obsession largely on the strength of its teaser trailer. They’re both opening at Cinemapolis, and the latter is at the Regal Ithaca Mall as well. I also have varying degrees of interest in The Wizard of the Kremlin (Regal), Steal This Story, Please! (Cinemapolis), Is God Is (Regal), and In the Grey (Regal), but they’ll all have to wait. Hokum, which continues its runs at both Cinemapolis and the Regal, remains my favorite holdover.

It’s mostly all quiet on the special events front, but there is a free “Family Classics Picture Show” presentation of the Aardman Animations classic Chicken Run at Cinemapolis on Sunday. Other noteworthy repertory fare includes a staff picks screening of the good (Cronenberg) Crash at Cinemapolis on Tuesday and an eclectic mix of musicals and sci fi movies at the Regal highlighted by Close Encounters of the Third Kind on Sunday, An American in Paris on Monday, Singin’ in the Rain on Tuesday, and Annihilation on Wednesday.

Home Video Recommendation: Jordan Ruimy reports that 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple has not been doing well on Netflix and speculates that as a result the trilogy will never be completed, which is a real shame because the first 28 Years Later made my Movie Year 2025 top ten (percent) list and this one is my second-favorite film of 2026 so far, trailing only Alpha. Matt Patches recently published an article on Polygon called “It stinks that we may never see the end of the decade’s best trilogy” that ends with a series of suggestions to save it. Serious question: what about an Oscar campaign for Ralph Fiennes? After all, as I said on Letterboxd in January after revisiting part one:

Nominating and then finally awarding Ralph Fiennes an Oscar for his supporting turn as an orange-skinned anti-Trump in this film would have been not only delightfully ironic (considering how many oh so serious roles he was passed over for) and richly deserved, but also a perfectly timed middle finger to You-Know-Who and his thugs. Missed opportunity! Let’s not do it again next year, eh?

Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts can be found here. A running list of all of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.

In Theaters: It’s a pretty quiet week, which is just fine because the Knicks are rolling through the playoffs and in the immortal, puzzlingly non-Oscar winning words of Diane Warren, “I don’t want to miss a thing!” While I’m definitely going to make time to see Erupcja and staff pick In the Cut at Cinemapolis, Deep Water and The Sheep Detectives (both of which are at the Regal Ithaca Mall) can wait for a future Friday and Family Movie night respectively.

The Devil Wears Prada 2, which continues its run at both of those venues, is worth seeing at Cinemapolis or the Regal just to enjoy the line of dialogue referencing a fictitious summa cum laude from Cornell and a shoutout to famous real-life alum Ruth Bader Ginsburg with your fellow locals, but my favorite holdover is the Irish haunted house movie Hokum, which is at the same two theaters. Special events include the HUMP! Film Festival at Cinemapolis tonight and a free student film screening at Cornell’s Schwartz Center for Performing Arts tonight and tomorrow, and repertory highlights include screenings of Top Gun and Top Gun: Maverick at the Regal starting on Wednesday in honor of the former’s 40th anniversary.

Home Video Recommendation: I’m a firm believer in the idea that even a 10-minute short can be way too long and an epic with an intermission can feel all too brief–it’s all in how well they’re made! That said, once you get over the 240 minute mark, a movie is an undertaking no matter how you slice it. If you aren’t yourself a sports fan, the relative lack of compelling alternatives might make this the perfect time to tackle Wang Bing’s nine-hour-long magnum opus West of the Tracks. Here’s what I said about it on Letterboxd about a month ago:

The first two hours could stand alone as an almost conventional documentary about the shuttering of plants in a factory town, but that isn’t director Wang Bing’s project. He is, instead, using a 21st-century technology, his DV camera, to chronicle the death throes of the Industrial Age. And so it continues, and even more so than in his Youth trilogy, each subsequent part is essential for making meaning of the whole.

West‘s subject is the ripple effects of monumental events, their impact on regular people, not the events themselves. But they haunt each minute of the movie like hungry ghosts, and the unavoidable question their presence raises is What if? What if someone like Wang had been there every step of the 20th century filming hundreds, thousands, millions of hours of footage, becoming better than invisible–a confidant. Would the workers of Shenyang still have lead in their blood? What other atrocities might have been avoided?

Each movie which emerges from Gaza or Ukraine confirms that the answer is probably “not many,” but at least we’ll never again be able to offer “but we didn’t know!” as an excuse. And now we have the image of workers attacking the stalagmites of ice which rose up from the floor during the winter months their employer shut its doors because it couldn’t pay its heating bills and shoveling them out open windows on the first day of spring in part one “Rust.” And a house symbolically lit by gaslight after the authorities cut off its supply of electricity to coerce its inhabitants into moving out in “Remnants.” And shadows shimmering on the sand of a glass works-bound rail car like a desert mirage in “Rails.”

This is a hard watch, to be sure. Like other films-fleuve I’ve recently tackled while the rest of my family was out of town, what looked on paper like something I could have started in the morning and finished by dinner instead took all day and nearly half a pack of cigarettes, and this one left me literally shaking by the time I finally stumbled off to bed at 2am. But where my first experience with Wang was honestly just a bit of a letdown, this one was absolutely worth it.

Current Cornell faculty, staff, and students can stream this film via the Library’s subscription Academic Video Online: here’s a link to the catalog record for part one Rust. Others may have access to it via Kanopy, copies of Tiger Releases’ 2003 PAL DVD are still floating around, and there’s also a (presumably illegal) English-subtitled copy on YouTube.

Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts can be found here. A running list of all of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.

In Theaters: As I said in my recent blog post about the movie it’s a sequel to, I go into The Devil Wears Prada 2, which opens at both Cinemapolis and the Regal Ithaca Mall today, with some trepidation. But that’s obviously the headliner. I saw Hokum, which begins a run at both theaters as well, with an enthusiastic audience at the Philadelphia Film Society’s SpringFest a couple of weeks ago and it’s worth your time as well as long as you’re okay with jump scares–my friend Katie, who isn’t, walked out of it! Among the holdovers, The Christophers handily beats Mother Mary in the battle of Michaela Coel vehicles; both are at Cinemapolis. I’m intrigued by the disconnect between Michael‘s box office and reviews, so I’m likely going to see it at the Regal, and I’m also going to take advantage of the second chance to catch “Modern Fables for Complicated Times,” a “visual album” of shorts by local filmmaker John Scott that I missed when it played the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, at Cinemapolis on Wednesday.

Other noteworthy special events include Cornell Cinema‘s traditional end-of-semester Mystery Screening and a free screening of Vieques: A Living Archive followed by a Q&A with director Juan Carlos Rodriguez at Cinemapolis this evening. Finally, this week’s repertory highlights are the screening of Purple Rain at the Regal on Sunday and Cruising at Cinemapolis on Tuesday, the latest installment in their “Staff Picks: Erotic Thrillers” series.

Home Video Recommendation: I called Northern Lights a “black and white stunner” in the FLEFF ’26 dispatch I published yesterday, but went much longer on it on Letterbox during the fest. Here’s what I said:

Has the same relationship to fellow 2026 Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival selection Seeds as Come and See has to Green Border, but that’s the long arc of the moral universe for you! This was deservingly the second-ever winner of the Caméra d’Or at Cannes, and the scene where Robert Behling’s Ray Sorensen rehearses a speech introducing “the next governor of North Dakota!” as an economical and also more intimate alternative to a nominating convention hall full of extras is one all aspiring filmmakers should be familiar with. In a Q&A ably facilitated by friend and Ithaca College professor Dr. Ashley R. Smith, co-director John Hanson explained the verisimilitude of the amazing threshing scene was attributable to an actual unplanned snow storm that they later wrote additional scenes around so that they could incorporate it into the film. He also confirmed that, yes, Ingmar Bergman (whose films he first became acquainted with while working as a projectionist) was an influence.

It’s currently streaming on the Criterion Channel with a subscription, but only for one more day! It will still be available for rental from a variety of other platforms after that, though, and Kino Lorber released it on Blu-ray and DVD last year.

Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts can be found here. A running list of all of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.