Category: Ithaca Film Journal

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.

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.

What I’m Seeing This Week: I plan to close out the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival with the screening of Faust with live musical accompaniment by Cloud Chamber Orchestra on Saturday and The Blue Trail on Sunday. I’m also going to check out local production No Choice during its limited run at Cinemapolis that starts on Monday and am hoping to finally see The Drama there or at the Regal Ithaca Mall as well.

Also in Theaters: You have one last chance to see Alpha, my favorite film of Movie Year 2026 so far, at Cinemapolis this afternoon: don’t miss it! Special events include the Ithaca Short Film Festival at Cinemapolis on Wednesday and five free events at Cornell Cinema: a “Science on Screen” screening of A Good Year this evening, a screening of TCB: The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing followed by a Q&A with filmmaker Louis Massiah which also includes free popcorn tomorrow, Tongo Saa on Monday, Microhabitat on Tuesday, and Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire on Wednesday. The FLEFF screening of An Inconvenient Truth on Saturday afternoon is free as well. Finally, repertory highlights include a 3D presentation of House of Wax at Cornell Cinema on Saturday and Mad Max: Fury Road there later the same evening. If you want to make a day of it, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is playing the Regal, where you can also catch National Lampoon’s Vacation tomorrow and Caddyshack on Sunday.

Home Video Recommendation: I watched India Song for the first time a few months ago and I doubt a day has gone by since when I didn’t find myself whistle its titular theme at least once! Here’s what I said about on Letterboxd after my second viewing in February:

In the same way that I’m no longer capable of hearing the Beatles song “For No One” without thinking about James Joyce’s short story The Dead, now that I’ve convinced myself of the affinities between this film and John Cale’s “Paris 1919,” I’m probably doomed to forever think of it as an “adaptation.” But maybe the hypnotic brilliance of Carlos D’Alessio’s score is enough to guarantee something more like a two-way street? This month’s selection for the two-person film club I’m in with my buddy Scott is also a weirdly perfect follow-up to the last couple, featuring as it does interiors with a green-red color scheme that matches the two-strip Technicolor tones of Mystery of the Wax Museum and a similarly estranged relationship between sound and image as Blue.

It is now streaming on the Criterion Channel and is also available on Blu-ray and DVD from the Criterion Collection in a two-film box set with Baxter, Vera Baxter.

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

What I’m Seeing This Week: I am hoping to catch six movies at the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival before next Thursday! Nuisance Bear tomorrow, Mare’s Nest on Saturday, A Life Illuminated and Seeds on Sunday, Our Land on Tuesday, and Northern Lights on Wednesday. I’m also interested in The Drama, which opens at Cinemapolis and the Regal Ithaca Mall today, but it will have to wait.

Also in Theaters: Alpha is terrific and I’m just a bit puzzled by its tepid reception at Cannes last year, although as a movie that needs space to breathe I can see how it might not have played well in a compressed festival context. Anyway, Cinemapolis has added an extra week to its run, which: good on you, Cinemapolis! Here’s what I wrote about this one on Letterboxd last week:

The best film about the AIDS epidemic since Witnesses. Here the feeling of Armageddon is completely literalized into the setting, but not exclusively: the maybe-real-maybe-figurative-maybe-both sandstorms raging outside are also inside the infected. Reminiscent of one of my Movie Year 2023 favorites All of Us Strangers in its dual (dream?) timelines and the way it deals with families and grief. What’s new is the decision to ground the story in the perspective of child first too young to understand, then too old not to, and the depiction of victims as beautiful monuments to the failure of science and society to save them.

One FLEFF selection *not* listed in the previous section is Best Documentary Feature Oscar winner Mr. Nobody Against Putin, which I’ve already seen. It’s good! Drop me a line if you have any thoughts on the Harry Potter references because I’m planning to write about them (and the ones in My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow) in June.

Special events include free screenings of Republic of Amnesia and Possible Landscapes followed by filmmaker Q&As at Cornell Cinema on Tuesday and Wednesday. Finally, noteworthy repertory options include Blazing Saddles, National Lampoon’s Animal House, and Airplane! at the Regal as part of their “LOL” series tomorrow, Saturday, and Wednesday respectively. The Killer plays there on Sunday, Monday, and Wednesday as well.

Home Video Recommendation: I’m happy to report that current Cornell University faculty, staff, and students can now view 7 Walks with Mark Brown, my favorite film from last year’s FLEFF, on our in-house Library MediaSpace platform! Here’s what I said about it when I included it on my Movie Year 2025 top ten (percent) list:

The titular paleobotanist who guides a filmmaking crew through the Pays de Caux region to “collect” primeval plants for a cinematic herbarium could be this blog’s patron saint, and the 16mm second half of its diptych comprises some of the most satisfying long shots I’ve ever seen.

It’s also available on Blu-ray from Vinegar Syndrome and can be streamed for a rental or purchase fee on Vimeo.

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

What I’m Seeing This Week: The Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, one of the highlights of Ithaca’s movie calendar, starts tomorrow! Read my interview with Co-Directors Andrew Utterson and Michael Richardson, then join me at Cinemapolis for the opening night screenings of Clash of Wolves (which will be accompanied by live music by Li’l Anne and Hot Cayenne) and Silent Friend. I’m also planning to see The Love That Remains and The Falling Sky at FLEFF on Saturday and Sunday respectively, plus I’m chaperoning a matinee outing to the Regal Ithaca Mall for Hoppers this weekend and hoping to catch Alpha at Cinemapolis later in the week.

Also in Theaters: My top new movie recommendation remains Sirât, which continues its run at Cinemapolis. Additional special events include a free screening of Remaining Native at Cornell Cinema this evening followed by a Q&A with director Paige Bethmann. Noteworthy repertory options include Bigger Than Life and Mad Max: Fury Road at Cornell Cinema tomorrow, No Country for Old Men at the Regal on Sunday, and On the Waterfront there on Monday. Finally, since you may be wondering, I have seen Project Hail Mary, which continues its runs at both Cinemapolis and the Regal, and it’s fine.

Home Video Recommendation: An early highlight of Movie Year 2026 was the program of experimental shorts by late Binghamton University professor Tomonari Nishikawa at Cornell Cinema last week which was introduced by his wife Miki and filmmaker colleague Sofia Theodore-Pierce. All seven films we saw were terrific and collectively created a beautiful progression. The clear highlight for me, though, was Light, Noise, Smoke, and Light, Noise, Smoke, which like the other six is available on Vimeo. Here’s what I said about it on Letterboxd after the screening:

For a long time I misremembered Kenneth Anger’s Eaux d’artifice as being about fireworks for some reason instead of fountains. *This* is something like the film that existed in my mind all those years, which I think explains the intense feeling of déjà vu I experienced while watching it. Friend Brian Darr, who saw it many months before I did, notes in his Letterboxd review that “creating an optical soundtrack out of the explosive patterns” was one ingenious way Nishikawa found to make fireworks footage interesting; this is also the first time I can remember ever paying as much attention to the smoke they generate as their light, and the introduction of a trip-to-the half moon created a host of other associations for me. A stunner.

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

What I’m Seeing This Week: There are a ton of great events to choose from, but I think I’m *most* excited to finally catch up with Wings, the first movie ever to win an Academy Award for Best Picture, at the Regal Ithaca Mall on Monday! I also intend to be in the audience for at least 1/3 of the free “The Anti-Films of Guy Debord” screenings at Cinemapolis Friday-Sunday, and I’m hoping to make it to Project Hail Mary there or at the Regal as well. Finally, if my oldest daughter’s basketball tournament ends on time, there’s a program of six works by the late experimental filmmaker and Binghamton University professor Tomonari Nishikawa at Cornell Cinema on Sunday that I don’t want to miss which features 16mm prints of four of them: Apollo, 45 7 Broadway, Amusement Ride, and Ten Mornings Ten Evenings and One Horizon.

Also in Theaters: Sirât, which continues its run at Cinemapolis, clocked in at sixth on my Movie Year 2025 Top “Ten” list, so that’s my highest new movie recommendation. I haven’t yet seen Hoppers because I’m planning to take the girls *next* weekend, but I hear good things! It’s at the Regal. Special events include a free screening of Seeds at Cornell Cinema that features free concessions and a Zoom Q&A with director Brittany Shyne this evening and a free screening of Madrid, Ext. followed by a conversation with filmmaker Juan Cavestany on Wednesday. You can also see Mário and 2001: A Space Odyssey there gratis on Monday and Tuesday respectively, and there’s a free “Family Classics Picture Show” screening of The Adventures of Robin Hood at Cinemapolis on Sunday. Finally, additional repertory highlights include A Woman is a Woman at Cornell Cinema tomorrow, Imitation of Life there on Saturday, and Rififi at Cinemapolis on Tuesday.

Home Video Recommendation: Speaking of Best Picture Oscar winners, the most recent film to join this club, One Battle After Another, is streaming on HBO Max with a subscription and available for rental or purchase on a number of other platforms. As the only nominee to make my aforementioned Top Ten (Percent) list, I was glad to see it win! Here’s the blurb from that post:

Contains many of my favorite individual sights and sounds of the year, including the climactic car chase over hills that, because I saw it for the first time five days after watching Patriot Games, will always remind me of waves and Jonny Greenwood’s pitch-perfect use of Shepard Tone in the theme he wrote for Teyana Taylor’s Perfidia Beverly Hills.

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