Category: Ithaca Film Journal

What I’m Seeing This Week: As longtime readers of this blog know, I consider the “movie year” to begin and end on Oscar night. The Monkey, which I’m planning to catch at either Cinemapolis or the Regal Ithaca Mall, will therefore be my first theatrical screening of 2025. More about this when I publish my top ten list on Sunday!

Also in Theaters: No Other Land, the film I’ll be rooting for to win this year’s Best Documentary Feature Oscar, continues its run at Cinemapolis and remains the best new movie now playing Ithaca that I’ve already seen. I also recommend Best Picture nominees I’m Still Here and The Substance, which are at Cinemapolis all week, and A Complete Unknown, which closes there today. This week’s special events are highlighted by the Ithaca Experimental Film Festival, which is at Cinemapolis on Saturday and Cornell Cinema on Sunday. There is also a free screening of local filmmaker Ira McKinley’s The Throwaways accompanied by excerpts from his new work A Tale of Two Journeys at Cinemapolis tonight and a free screening of the movie Lilting at Cornell Cinema on Wednesday. Finally, doors open for Cinemapolis’s annual Oscar night fundraising gala at 6:30pm on Sunday. On the repertory front, your best best bets are the screenings of Black Narcissus (which I wrote about last August) and The Annihilation of Fish, the rerelease of which Carlos Valladares recently called “the cinematic event of the year,” at Cornell Cinema on Friday and The Red Shoes on Saturday.

Home Video: If you want to see *all* of this year’s Oscar-nominated shorts, you’ll need to head to Cinemapolis or (in the case of the documentaries) Cornell Cinema. The ones I’ll be rooting for are all available online, though! In the Best Animated Short Film category, my favorite is Wander to Wonder, a tale of survival starring characters from a creepy 70s/80s kids television program that uses Shakespearian quotation and engages with the idea of unfathomably (and therefore “indistinguishable from magic) advanced technology (here: VHS!) in a way that reminds me of Arthur C. Clarke’s classic science fiction novel Rendezvous with Rama. It is available for rental via Vimeo. My pick in the Best Live Action Short Film category is streaming on Vimeo for free: A Lien is a tense, effective Paul Greengrass-style shaky cam thriller about the despicable U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (aka ICE) practice of arresting people at their green card interviews. But the cream of the whole crop is Best Documentary Short Film nominee Incident, which uses stunningly complex and effective split-screen editing to recreate the cacophony and chaos of being on the scene of an “incident” (the almost completely unmotivated killing of a black man by a white police officer) that everyone knows never should have happened and fears will blow up into something even more horrible any second and debunks the proceduralist myth of infallible law enforcement professionalism in the process. It is available via The New Yorker. By way of an honorable mention I also recommend Instruments of a Beating Heart, which I described on Letterboxd as “the Muppet Babies version of Whiplash” and which is probably my second-favorite one of these movies overall. It is available via The New York Times.

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 decided I didn’t want to risk missing out on No Other Land last week, so I still have one Oscar-nominated shorts program left to go: I’m planning to catch the live action shorts at Cornell Cinema on Saturday, but they’re also playing Cinemapolis all week.

Also in Theaters: No Other Land is a contender for my Movie Year 2024 top ten list (which I’ll publish on Oscar night like usual) and my top new film recommendation. It continues its run at Cinemapolis. Of the two Oscar-nominated shorts programs I’ve already seen, the documentaries are significantly better than the animated shorts. You can see the latter at Cornell Cinema tomorrow, and both are playing Cinemapolis all week. Other first run features I enjoyed include A Complete Unknown and I’m Still Here, both of which are at Cinemapolis. You also have one last chance to see The Brutalist and Nickel Boys, one of which (I still haven’t made up my mind) I’ll be rooting for to win this year’s Best Picture Oscar, there today. On the special events front, the highlights are free screenings of the documentaries The Bomb at Cornell Cinema on Tuesday and of Anonymous Sister and Free For All: The Public Library at Cinemapolis on Saturday and Tuesday respectively. Your best bets for repertory fare are The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and Fantastic Mr. Fox, which are at Cornell Cinema tonight and Sunday respectively. Finally, I would be remiss if I did not also mention that Twilight, which is beloved of my favorite film scholar who graduated from Cornell Matt Strohl (class of 2003), is screening there on Saturday.

Home Video: Sometimes works of art feel like adaptations even when you know they aren’t. The best example of this for me might be the Beatles song “For No One,” which I always hear as retelling James Joyce’s short story “The Dead.” It is perhaps therefore appropriate that when I finally saw the movie Distant Voices, Still Lives for the first time a couple of weeks ago, the overwhelming impression I got was that it was director Terence Davies’ version of his fellow Liverpudlians’ “In My Life.” I’d have a lot more to say about this movie, which is commonly regarded as both the first and second volumes in a trilogy were it not for the fact that its conclusion, The Long Day Closes, is a straight-up masterpiece. Here’s what I said about it on Letterboxd:

The Christmas dinner interior/exterior mash-up tableau is an all-time great movie image, although the exterior shot of the rowhouse with just the top of a Christmas tree with blinking lights visible through the windows as a drizzly rain falls which follows shortly afterward and the lengthy study of how an old carpet looks at different times of day might resonate with me even more for personal reasons. The opening and closing shots which derive power and meaning from a later string of overhead tracking shots connecting child’s play to cinema to church to school (where the lesson is about the forces of erosion) also rank among the great bookends in cinema history. Finally, if that wasn’t already enough, The Long Day Closes is the best argument I can conceive of for why some (to be clear: not all!) films definitely should have 85-minute runtimes that I can possibly imagine.

The Long Day Closes, which is now streaming on the Criterion Channel, is perfectly intelligible as a standalone work, but it’s totally worth ponying up $2.99 to rent Distant Voices, Still Lives on Prime Video so that you can watch the entire cycle.

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 didn’t make it to I’m Still Here last week, so I’m going to try to catch it at Cinemapolis after work today, plus I hope to see all three of the Oscar-nominated shorts programs screening there and at Cornell Cinema before next Thursday!

Also in Theaters: I’m saving it for next week for scheduling reasons, but No Other Land is actually the new release opening in Ithaca (at Cinemapolis) today that I’m most looking forward to. The best first-run movies now playing locally that I’ve already seen are The Brutalist and Nickel Boys, both of which are at Cinemapolis as well. I also enjoyed Dahomey, which screens at Cornell Cinema tonight; A Complete Unknown, which continues its run at Cinemapolis; Moana 2, which is still going strong at the Regal Ithaca Mall; and two films which close at Cinemapolis today, Memoir of a Snail and The Seed of the Sacred Fig. This week’s special events are highlighted by the return of the Banff Centre Mountain Film Festival to Cornell tomorrow and Saturday and a free screening of Benji at Cinemapolis on Sunday as part of their “Family Classics Picture Show” series. Your best bets for repertory fare are two 4k restorations at Cornell Cinema: The Annihilation of Fish screens there tonight, and Happy Together follows it tomorrow.

Home Video: If, like me, you were scared away from last Saturday’s Soundtrack to a Coup d’État screening at Cornell Cinema by the weather forecast, fear not! Current Cornell faculty, staff, and students can view this ambitious and stylish found footage documentary about the assassination of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba on Kanopy thanks to a license paid for by the Library, and everyone else can rent it from a variety of streaming video platforms. It is edited to the sound and rhythm of the jazz musicians who were unwittingly being used as “cultural ambassadors” to the third world by the same American government that likely killed him until they got wise, and although at 150 minutes it runs a bit long, it’s frequently funny, sometimes shocking, and never dull.

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’m going with Soundtrack to a Coup d’État, which plays Cornell Cinema on Saturday, and I’m Still Here, which opens at Cinemapolis tomorrow.

Also in Theaters: My favorite new release now playing Ithaca is once again All We Imagine as Light, which screens at Cornell Cinema tonight. The Brutalist, which is at Cinemapolis and the Regal Ithaca Mall, and Nickel Boys, which is at Cinemapolis, are contenders for my Movie Year 2024 top ten list too, and I also enjoyed A Complete Unknown (Cinemapolis + the Regal), Memoir of a Snail (Cinemapolis), Nosferatu (Cinemapolis + the Regal), and The Seed of the Sacred Fig (Cinemapolis). Noteworthy special events include free screenings of I Didn’t See You There (which is directed by Reid Davenport, whose new film Life After just debuted at Sundance to much acclaim) and Oppenheimer at Cornell Cinema on Tuesday and Wednesday respectively and a screening of Bisbee ’17 followed by a conversation with director Robert Greene there on Monday. Finally, your best bets for repertory fare are The Third Man, and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, which play Cornell Cinema Friday and Sunday respectively. You can also see Nosferatu the Vampyre there tonight.

Home Video: Speaking of my top ten list, I now know for sure that Evil Does Not Exist, which is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel, will be on it following a second viewing. Oft-described as an eco-fable or -parable, it is more broadly about the concept of balance: although the bare-bones plot revolves around a “glamping” concern descending on a rural farming community, the gutshot deer at the beginning of the film which was dead before they ever arrived demonstrates that the one at the end doesn’t have anything to do with it directly. Playmode (what a great awful name!) employee Takahashi (Ryûji Kosaka) is instead standing next to Hitoshi Omika’s Takumi when they encounter it because he has gotten absurdly carried away with an idea of who he *could* be, which only serves to reveal how little he knows about the man he actually is and the world he’s trying to shoehorn himself into. Evil Does (Not) Exist (which is how the font coloring of the title card suggests it maybe should be written) also features a satisfyingly crisp winter color palette and a frustrating community feedback meeting that I have been on both sides of the table of at least a hundred times in my life.

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 going with Hard Truths, which closes at the the Regal Ithaca Mall today but continues its run at Cinemapolis at least through next Thursday, and continuing my quest to see all of this year’s Oscar nominees before the ceremony on March 2, I’m also planning to see The Seed of the Sacred Fig sometime after it opens there tomorrow.

Also in Theaters: Speaking of the Oscars, Best Animated Feature Film nominee Memoir of a Snail (which I’m planning to see next week) also opens at Cinemapolis tomorrow. Other contenders you can see on local big screens include The Brutalist (Cinemapolis + Regal), A Complete Unknown (Cinemapolis + Regal), Nickel Boys (Cinemapolis), Nosferatu (Cinemapolis + Regal), and Wicked (Regal). My favorites are The Brutalist and Nickel Boys, but they’re all worth seeing. The very best new movie now playing Ithaca that I’ve already seen is All We Imagine as Light, which screens at Cornell Cinema Saturday evening. I also enjoyed Babygirl and Presence, both of which are at the Regal. This week’s special events are highlighted by the Ithaca Underground Music Video Festival, which is at Cinemapolis tonight. Your best bets for repertory fare are A Matter of Life and Death, which is at Cornell Cinema tomorrow, and Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, which is there on Saturday. You can also see last week’s “Home Video” recommendation Mulholland Drive there tonight along with Eraserhead, which is of course also directed by the late, great David Lynch.

Home Video: Six films have basically already clinched spots on the top ten list for Movie Year 2024 I’ll publish in March. All We Imagine as Light is one of them. Another is Close Your Eyes, which recently started streaming on Mubi. I originally thought I was going to present it as tied with La Chimera and write them up together, but while they do have a lot in common thematically, Close Your Eyes has started to differentiate itself in my mind, so we’ll see. Anyway, here’s what I said about it on Letterboxd:

Close Your Eyes begins and ends with excerpts from one of my new favorite films within a film, an unfinished work called The Farewell Gaze, and contains both a diegetic rendition of “My Rife, My Pony and Me” and a load-bearing reference to Carl Theodor Dreyer, but it’s way more than mere cinephile catnip. Rather, like Movie Year 2024’s La Chimera, it’s a thorough and nuanced investigation of the question Is it possible for an aesthete to live a good life in the absence of art? Where that film’s Arthur (Josh O’Connor) is faced with a choice, though, this one’s protagonists Miguel Garay (Manolo Soto) and Julio Arenas (Jose Coronado) have that reality thrust upon them. Or do they? Doubling abounds–even the title is a reference to director Victor Erice’s 1973 magnum opus The Spirit of the Beehive.

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: My Loving Wife and I are dropping the kids off at a playdate and seeing The Brutalist at Cinemapolis on Sunday, and I’m going to try to see Presence at the Regal Ithaca Mall as well.

Also in Theaters: Although we’re prioritizing The Brutalist for scheduling reasons, I’m actually more excited to see Hard Truths, which opens at both Cinemapolis and the Regal today. Soundtrack to a Coup d’État and Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, which screen at Cornell Cinema tonight and tomorrow respectively, have each appeared on at least 30 Best Movies of 2024 lists according to the website CriticsTop10. I fear that I’m going to have to give the latter a miss, but I’m planning to catch the former when it returns to town on February 8. My top recommendations among first-run options that I’ve already seen are Nickel Boys, a formally audacious requiem for those whom the arc of the moral universe didn’t bend fast enough toward justice to save that I anticipate will be my rooting interest for any number of Oscars which continues its run at Cinemapolis, and Flow, my favorite animated film of Movie Year 2024 which plays Cornell Cinema on Saturday and Sunday. Other new movies I enjoyed include Babygirl (the Regal), A Complete Unknown (Cinemapolis & the Regal), Nosferatu (Cinemapolis & the Regal), and The Room Next Door (Cinemapolis). Your best bet for repertory fare is Wild at Heart, which screens at Cinemapolis on Monday in memory of director David Lynch, who passed last Wednesday, but other great options include A Matter of Life and Death and Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, which are at Cornell Cinema tomorrow and Sunday respectively.

Home Video: Speaking of David Lynch, My Loving Wife and I both chose to celebrate his life by finally watching movies directed by him which we’d never seen before. I was lucky enough to first encounterMulholland Drive at the Squirrel Hill Theater (RIP) during its original theatrical run with a bunch of other members of the University of Pittsburgh’s Twin Peaks Club , but she somehow never got around to it. Although Blue Velvet was my first love and Dune will always hold a special place in my heart, this is probably the David Lynch film I’d pick as my favorite. Meanwhile, I’d always understood The Straight Story to be a skippable aberration in his filmography, but this is not at all the case: for all of his weirdness, Lynch also valued sincerity, and this film is as pure a distillation of that aspect of his sensibility as the eighth episode of Twin Peaks: The Return is of another. Both are highly recommended, as is everything else Esther Zuckerman mentions in her New York Times article “12 Cryptic Titles From David Lynch and Where You Can Stream Them.”

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 planning to see both Nickel Boys and The Room Next Door after they open at Cinemapolis tomorrow.

Also in Theaters: It’s officially awards season at the Regal Ithaca Mall! Oscar nominations were originally scheduled to be announced tomorrow, and although this has been pushed back to next Thursday because of the devastating wildfires in California, contenders have started to reappear on the Regal’s screens. My top recommendation among the first batch is Anora, which screens Friday-Saturday and Tuesday-Wednesday. Additional titles returning to town this week include Conclave, The Substance, and The Wild Robot. Other new movies that I enjoyed include Babygirl (Regal), Nosferatu (Cinemapolis + the Regal), and A Complete Unknown (Cinemapolis + the Regal) in that order. I also hear good things about Better Man, so hopefully it will stick around at the Regal for at least another week. You have one last chance to see The Umbrellas of Cherbourg at Cinemapolis this evening, and that definitely should be your highest priority for repertory fare, but there’s also a free screening of the Marx Brothers vehicle A Night at the Opera there on Sunday as part of their “Family Classics Picture Show” series. Another fine choice would be The Goonies, which has 40th anniversary (typing that made me feel SO old) screenings at the Regal on Sunday and Monday. On the special events front, there will be a free screening of the documentary Move When the Spirit Says Move at Cinemapolis on Monday followed by a panel discussion about subject Dorothy Foreman Cotton.

Home Video: Green Border, one of the candidates for my top ten list for Movie Year 2024 (which as always I’ll publish in March), is currently available on Kanopy to all current Cornell University faculty, students, and staff thanks to a license paid for by the library. As a multifaceted view of the Belarus-Poland border crisis which began in 2021 when the government of Belarus disingenuously began offering refugees free passage into the European Union, it is topical, but seeing it shortly after Come and See underscored for me the extent to which it, too, is an anti-war film. As I wrote on Letterboxd:

Although it tragically comes at the cost of thousands of innocent lives, the path out of Green Border‘s hellscape is littered with less and less bodies as it progresses. People who are not desperately fighting for their own survival retain the capacity to be shocked into action by exposure to violent acts that their citizenship makes them complicit in, whereas war inevitably breeds future conflicts: the earlier film’s Belarusian victims of Nazi atrocities are themselves the instigators of this one’s new cycle of dehumanization.

It also contains powerful individual moments like the image of a mother squeezing a meager harvest of water droplets from the branches of an evergreen into the mouth of her child and a sickening thud that you’ll recognize when you hear it which I won’t soon forget.

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: My Loving Wife and I have a babysitter and are going to go see Nosferatu at either Cinemapolis or the Regal Ithaca Mall this weekend!

Also in Theaters: My favorite new film now playing Ithaca is Babygirl, which as Alexis Soloski recently noted in the New York Times is part of a bumper crop of “age-gap romances centered on women in midlife” that also includes this week’s home video recommendation. Its final scenes literalize the notion that a failure to communicate is the root of all interpersonal conflicts a bit too much for my tastes, but you can easily imagine Nicole Kidman’s Romy Mathis ending up someplace very different, and the film absolutely gets credit for that. She and male co-lead Harris Dickinson are terrific, as is Antonio Banderas in a supporting role. Babygirl closes at Cinemapolis today but continues its run at the Regal at least through Thursday. I also enjoyed A Complete Unknown, which is at Cinemapolis and the Regal all week. I’m intrigued by The Last Showgirl, which opens at both of those theaters this week, and Better Man, which opens at the Regal, but alas my schedule only permits me to see one movie. On the repertory front, the 4k restoration of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg at Cinemapolis for one week only should be your top choice if you’ve never seen it. I wrote about director Jacques Demy’s next film The Young Girls of Rochefort last February if you’d like some sense of what you’re in for. But seriously: just go!

Home Video: Last Summer, which is now streaming on the Criterion Channel, is similar to Babygirl in that it also features a female protagonist in her 50s who is depicted as sexy and a plot that revolves around implications and after effects of her having sex with a much younger man. Or boy, maybe, in this case. Here she’s named Anne and played by Léa Drucker, who in the words of David Ehrlich (speaking of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort) “still faintly resembles a young Catherine Deneuve” and he’s played by Samuel Kircher, a 21-year-old in real life whose character Théo is still in high school in the film. Oh yeah, and he’s Anne’s stepson. But while that may sound lurid and sensational, where Babygirl is specifically about the difficulty of achieving both personal and professional fulfillment when the deck is stacked against your gender, Last Summer is about the even more general disturbing urge to throw it all away that I suspect many people who “have it all” will identify with.

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’m going with Babygirl at Cinemapolis.

Also in Theaters: The best new movie now playing in Ithaca that I’ve already seen is A Complete Unknown, which is at both Cinemapolis and the Regal Ithaca Mall. Timothée Chalamet’s Bob Dylan turning the members of the “teaspoon brigade” of Edward Norton’s Pete Seeger against themselves is a destined to be a great movie metaphor for the comeuppance of whatever holier-than-thou movement you think is only getting what they deserved, I enjoyed its depiction of early 60s Greenwich Village (played here by Jersey City) as a place with ambient crackling energy, and the music is of course excellent. Nosferatu, which is also at both Cinemapolis and the Regal, would be what I’m seeing this week, but I’m saving it for a date night with My Loving Wife. Gladiator II (Regal), Moana 2 (Regal), and Wicked (Cinemapolis & the Regal) are all fine. Your best bet for repertory fare is the classic anime film Paprika, which screens at the Regal on Wednesday, although I’m not sure how 2025 qualifies as its “15th anniversary.”

Home Video: La Chimera, which is now streaming on Hulu, will appear on my year-end top ten list on the strength of its treatment of the theme that there’s more to a good life than just being happy and a bevy of brilliant little touches like the list the smile Alba Rohrwacher’s Spartaco gives Josh O’Connor’s Arthur after he takes capricious action to temporarily (she will, of course, be back) resolve the question of how a certain piece of statue is worth, the disheveled suit Arthur wears at the beginning of the movie, Valentino Santagati and Piero Crucitti’s cantastorie, and a shot from inside an Etruscan tomb which is about to be unsealed for the first time in thousands of years. If you aren’t yet sick of Christmas movies, director Alice Rohrwacher’s 2022 short film Le pupille, which is available on Disney+, is also very much worth checking out.

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’m out of town for the holidays, so I won’t be seeing anything in Ithaca, but I’m hoping to catch Babygirl, A Complete Unknown, The Fire Inside, or Nosferatu at a multiplex somewhere during my travels. All four are now playing both Cinemapolis and the Regal Ithaca Mall.

Also in Theaters: The new releases mentioned above account for most of our local big screen real estate, but holdovers worth considering if you’re in the mood for something different include the sequels Gladiator II and Moana 2, which continue their respective runs at the Regal, and Wicked, which is at both the Regal and Cinemapolis. It’s understandably a light week for special events and repertory fare, but there *is* a “sing-along” screening of Wicked at the Regal every day at 11:10am if that sounds like your thing.

Home Video: The greatest New Year’s Eve movie of all time is indisputably (I assume) The Phantom Carriage, but I already recommended it in this space last October. Number two on my list is the first Coen brothers film I ever fell in love with, The Hudsucker Proxy which can be streamed on the Criterion Channel through the end of the month/year. It’s a particularly great choice if you’re ready to move on from whatever other winter holiday(s) you celebrate, since it’s set in a universe in which none of them seem to exist. If you aren’t a Criterion Channel subscriber, you can also watch it on Tubi if you don’t mind ads.

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