What I’m Seeing This Week: We will be out of town until Tuesday, but I’m going to try to catch 28 Years Later at Cinemapolis or the Regal Ithaca Mall after we return. I definitely want to see F1: The Movie at one of those theaters before it closes, too, but it probably isn’t going to happen before next Thursday.
Also in Theaters:The Phoenician Scheme, which continues its run at both Cinemapolis and the Regal, remains the best new movie on Ithaca screens that I’ve already seen for the second week in a row. I also enjoyed Ballerina and Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, which are both still playing the Regal. This week’s special events headliner is a screening of the cult classic The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert preceded by a drag performance by Tilia Cordata and other local performers at Cinemapolis on Sunday, while your best bets for repertory fare are the 30th anniversary screenings of Clueless at the Regal on Sunday and Monday. Which, wow that makes me feel old! Finally, I should maybe also mention that there are a ton of family-friendly options in local theaters right now, including Elio (Regal), How to Train Your Dragon (Cinemapolis & Regal), Lilo & Stitch (Regal), and two screenings of The Wild Robot at the Regal on Tuesday and Wednesday.
The story of the 2025 Nitrate Picture Show begins at the end. Like the eight that preceded it, this year’s festival concluded with a “Blind Date with Nitrate” screening of a film identified in advance only by one single frame enlargement on page 26 of the program, and as the lights went down and the hypnotically lush gold curtains of the Dryden Theatre slowly rose, very few people knew for sure what we were about to see. Although I also attended NPS last year and in 2023, I didn’t stay past Sunday morning either time, so as a novice blind dater the absence of applause or any other kind of reaction when the title card appeared didn’t strike me as all that odd. I noticed it, certainly, but while NPS is one of the few occasions when I operate under the assumption that I’m probably not the smartest person in the room, I have seen a lot of damn movies, and Occam’s razor suggested that this plus the fact that I had never even heard of The Trip to Tilsit before must just mean that it was legit obscure. All of this faded from my mind as the movie continued and I began to analyze what I was seeing with a modified version of the wine tasting steps in Kevin Zraly’s Windows on the World Complete Wine Course that I’ve been trying to discipline myself to use so that I don’t overlook essential attributes of whatever I’m watching. And so: academy ratio, black and white, classical Hollywood editing with a mobile camera, and a sophisticated use of sound. We must be in the mid- to late-30s and this is a studio production from somewhere, presumably Germany based on the language it’s in . . . holy crap, could this thing be from the Third Reich!?
The program notes by festival director Peter Bagrov handed out after the film confirmed that yes, it sure was. I didn’t recognize the name of the director Veit Harlan when it showed up in the credits, but I definitely learned about his follow-up work Jud Süß as an undergraduate film studies major. Bagrov describes it as “arguably the most famous piece of antisemitic propaganda in the history of cinema” and goes on to observe that Harlan was “put on trial twice, charged with crimes against humanity, and, controversially, acquitted both times” after the war. So why screen The Trip to Tilsit? The opening remarks by Bagrov and NPS founder Paolo Cherchi Usai, who told a confusing story about Jewish and Palestinian friends of his who both loved D.W. Griffith, weren’t super helpful, but the last two lines of Bagrov’s program notes are much more illuminating. “Harlan’s reputation besmirched all of his works, even the purest of them. But, as Henri Langlois allegedly said, ‘All films are born free and equal.'”
Langlois was already on my mind because the print of La Ronde that we watched on Friday came from the Cinémathèque française that he founded in 1936 and directed until his death in 1977. This screening was marred by problems with the live subtitles and after a French-language print of Three Little Pigs was shown without them the following day, I found myself wishing that the earlier movie had been presented the same way since its appeal is much more visual than verbal and I could have done without the distraction. After all, it’s my understanding that Langlois regularly programmed unsubtitled foreign language fare; he also didn’t always announce what would be playing on a given night in advance. This is not to say, however, that the experience of those audiences was somehow more pure as a result. Every movie tells the story of its origin and all viewers go through a version of the interpretive process I describe above, even if only unconsciously. Meanwhile, we almost inevitably spend exponentially more time with our memories of the things we watch than we do with the objects themselves, and even if some NPS attendees enjoyed, say, Tilsit‘s scene stealing big fluffy dog or the Katie Ledecky of horses more than they would have had they realized they (or their owners, anyway) were probably Nazis, it’s hard to imagine this fundamentally changing anyone’s relationship to the text.
If you scroll through the recent reviews of this film on Letterboxd, you will find many from people who felt tricked into seeing something they may have preferred to avoid. While I myself am glad to have been present at what I believe will be remembered as a historically significant, if perhaps notorious, screening, I’m also sympathetic to the argument that they should have been given a choice. That said, Americans are living through a period of our country’s history which may well be remembered similarly to Germany 1939, and not knowing for certain if I had called this movie correctly helped bridge these two eras in a more concrete way. In the end I personally found spending 90 minutes with a popular entertainment for “good Germans” more edifying than recent critical darling The Zone of Interest, which was too easy to reject as not actually saying anything about me for reasons I attempted to articulate more fully last April.
The Trip to Tilsit may have been the de facto main event, but when I think back on NPS 2025 the first title that will likely come to mind for me is one from a different future Axis power. Wife! Be Like a Rose! was the first Japanese sound film commercially released in the United States. Ninety years later it began the process of correcting probably my most egregious cinephile blind spot by becoming my official introduction to the work of director Mikio Naruse. Like Tilsit it revolves around a love triangle, but here it’s a truly equilateral one: there’s no Aryan saint or Polish devil, just three-dimensional human beings with virtues and flaws. Protagonist Kimiko (Sachiko Chiba) is the daughter of two of them, and while Etsuko (Toshiko Itô) and Shunsaku (Sadao Maruyama) are technically still married, Wife! captures what it’s like to watch your divorced parents interact with each other as an adult better than any other movie I’ve ever seen, which was not something I was expecting to encounter in one from 1935! The final shots are a masterpiece of hard-won empathetic understanding and they combine with the drawn shades of the opening sequence to make a fascinating set of book ends. A thirty-film Naruse retrospective is currently making its way around the country, and hopefully at least one or two titles will make their way to upstate New York at some point; in the meantime, I look forward to working my way through the “Directed by Mikio Naruse” collection on the Criterion Channel.
In retrospect the comment that “within five years all but German foreign language films were banned as Japan mobilized for war” in James Layton’s program notes for Wife! looks like a clue. So too does the emphasis on the fact that the version of Three Little Pigs screened in the color-themed “Nitrate Shorts” included a joke excised from the version of record premised on the idea that the pigs would let the wolf in if he was dressed as a Jewish (and therefore kosher) peddler. It also featured three animated shorts made in Czechoslovakia between 1935-37, one of which, The Crucial Two Minutes, is an incredible depiction of drunkenness doubling as an advertisement for toothpaste starring a severely depressed man who may or may not say something about the mindset of a nation on the verge of occupation. A highlight of the program was another commercial, Len Lye’s entrancing abstract direct animation Colour Flight, which I appreciated in part because commissioned works are often overlooked by movie snobs despite the fact that they remain an arena for experimentation to this day–the short Snowbird that Sean Baker directed in 2016 for the fashion brand Kenzo is maybe my favorite of his works, for instance. I was also wowed by The Destroyers of Our Gardens, which consisted of four minutes of stencil-colored macro footage of caterpillars that wouldn’t embarrass David Attenborough despite the fact that it was made almost a decade before he was even born accompanied by the legendary Philip Carli on piano. But best of all was director Mary Ellen Bute’s Spook Sport, her follow-up to Synchromy No. 4: Escape, which I was lucky enough to see at NPS 2023. Once again the shapes and colors, especially amorphous red and blue shapes gamboling in front of a receding starscape, moved me in a way that’s hard to explain and certainly can’t be replicated in a home viewing environment.
The 1916 release print of The Destroyers of Our Gardens shown on Saturday was actually the oldest one ever screened at NPS. This year’s festival also pushed boundaries in the opposite direction with Mother Joan of the Angels. As Ken Fox explained in his program notes, “though most of Western Europe and the United States had long since phased out nitrate film stock in favor of acetate safety film, the Soviet Union and some Central and Eastern European countries continued to use it well into the 1960s.” The entertaining Argentinian noir Hardly a Criminal represented another first when it became NPS’s inaugural foray into South America on Friday. Neither blew my mind the way Spook Sport did, but I enjoyed their interrogations of the respective notions of earthly and heavenly rewards thoroughly, and while many people writing about this event wax poetic about the unique properties of nitrate film stock, these three selections exemplify what I have come to think of as the main reason to travel to Rochester each spring: whatever intrinsically superior qualities the format might have, what matters even more is that it’s how everything screened at NPS was originally meant to be seen.
This is particularly relevant in the case of opening night movie Becky Sharp, which apparently defied some attendees’ expectations for what it was “supposed” to look like. Bagrov noted in an introduction the following day that those attributing its muted colors to age were incorrect because Technicolor doesn’t fade and that this instead represented as a conscious decision typical of the era (as I learned at NPS 2023) that has not always been honored by the people responsible for Blu-ray and DVD restorations. It also started things off on an anti-establishment note which I thought would be my primary throughline for this dispatch right up until the final day of the festival. Although Sharp is set in the Napoleonic Era, Miriam Hopkins’s titular heroine is clearly a woman of the 1930s who in hindsight says a lot about how little (or, more cynically, how much) our leaders learned from World War I. You Only Live Once (which I actually skipped at NPS in favor of a nap, unhurried lunch, and writing but caught up with after the festival ended) is even more pessimistic about society’s willingness to cut the wrong sort of person any slack, while It’s in the Bag! is a guerilla film made right under the noses of the French would-be fascist authorities on leftover Pathé sets in a short window of time before they were torn down and tweaks the same appendage with jokes about predatory capitalism, somnambulistic fascist salutes, and populist headgear that the appreciative laughter of my fellow audience members suggests have sadly come back into style.
Other not-quite-as-light-as-it-may appear fare included an old favorite in My Man Godfrey and a new discovery for me in Hue and Cry. The latter’s ragamuffin kids playing air raid games in the bombed out ruins of post-Blitz London make it a fascinating companion to last year’s selection Germany Year Zero, but it might pair even better with No Greater Glory as a pre-/post-war double feature about the affects of militarism on a nation’s youth. The NPS 2025-iest movie of all, though, was probably Canyon Passage, which features a love pentagon, the year’s most breathtaking (salmon) color celluloid sky, and a burgeoning western society marked as corrupt by a poker game that only Dana Andrews’s protagonist Logan Stuart seems to realize or care is fixed. Its naive suggestion that Manifest Destiny could have been a win-win if only white settlers had cooled it a bit with the rape and murder is redeemed by its frank acknowledgement that acts of the latter sort absolutely did take place and a brutal saloon fight that makes it clear that director Jacques Tourneur and company have no illusions about the Wild West being some sort of Garden of Eden.
I headed to NPS in May thinking it might be my last one for awhile because even though the price of a festival pass is extremely reasonable and I’m fortunate enough to live just a short bus ride away, taking three days off from work to stay in a hotel, eat out, and watch movies still strikes me as a questionable extravagance in a time of rising costs. It occurred to me even while I was there that the eve of the tenth anniversary edition was a funny time to duck out, though, and I’ve gotten quite good at economizing by staying just a few blocks further away from the Dryden than most of my fellow attendees and being thoughtful about my meals: a large Italian Assorted sub from Calabresella’s is not only delicious, for instance, but also big enough for two lunches if you have a fridge in your room! I’m planning to give my liver a good, long break from booze for services rendered after my “Drink & a Movie” series wraps this December as well, so that’s one more opportunity to save money. Most importantly in light of the uproar surrounding this year’s Blind Date, I want to make it clear that I support this unique annual event as much as ever, so I’m stating now for the record that I intend to return in 2026, hopefully to a reserved seat (a new initiative that from my perspective was an unqualified success) in the first row as close to the middle as possible. I’ve got my fingers crossed that director Frank Borzage will finally make his NPS debut, but otherwise what I’m looking forward to hasn’t changed: I can’t wait to be surprised!
Previous film festival dispatches canbe found here.
What I’m Seeing This Week: I’m going with The Life of Chuck at Cinemapolis and I think Prime Minister as well at its one and only screening there on Wednesday at 6pm. I definitely intend to see 28 Years Later either there or at the Regal Ithaca Mall before it closes, too, but probably not this week.
Also in Theaters: My favorite movie now playing Ithaca is The Phoenician Scheme, which continues its run at both Cinemapolis and the Regal. It actually reminds me a bit of its neighbor at the latter Ballerina, my top recommendation last week, in part because it opens with a bit of graphic violence of the sort that I associate more with the World of John Wick than the oeuvre of director Wes Anderson. Its protagonist Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro) is also sort of Baba Yaga of mid-20th century industrialism: undefeated, but not indestructible, as demonstrated by the visibly increasing wear and tear on his body, only he’s trying to stay *in* the game, not get out of it. But the main connection is that the plot of each film is secondary–to imaginative action set pieces in the case of Ballerina, and to the painstakingly-chosen pieces of art and other objects that comprise the set dressing of The Phoenician Scheme. Both could well wind up on my year-end Top Ten list. I also enjoyed Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, which is at the Regal, and Friendship, which is at Cinemapolis. This week’s special events highlights include free screenings of the documentaries It’s All Right To Be Woman and Remembering Roe: Then & Now at Cinemapolis tonight and Monday evening respectively. Finally, your best bet for repertory fare is 2017 Best Picture Oscar winner Moonlight, which plays Cinemapolis on Sunday.
Home Video: The premiere of the latest Spike Lee joint Highest 2 Lowest at the Cannes Film Festival last month reminded me that it has been too long since I last watched High and Low, the 1963 movie it’s based on. Luckily the latter streaming on the Criterion Channel, and if you haven’t checked it out recently or ever you really should, because it’s a true monument to the fundamental allure of cinema. A riveting police procedural can also be a meticulous dissection of society and vice versa–you don’t need to choose between art and entertainment, the very best films are always both! I definitely do see the appeal of turning director Akira Kurosawa’s literal and figurative wide-angle lens on today’s America, but it’s one hell of a hard act to try and follow. Highest 2 Lowest has a release date of August 22, so we will see soon enough for ourselves if the gamble was worth it!
Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts canbe found here.A running list ofall of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.
What I’m Seeing This Week: There are tons of movies I want to see in local theaters right now! I’m definitely hoping to catch Pavements before it closes at Cinemapolis today and The Phoenician Scheme and maybe Materialists there or the Regal Ithaca Mall later in the week as well.
Also in Theaters: In addition to the titles above, I’m also intrigued by The Life of Chuck, which opens at the Regal today and Cinemapolis tomorrow. Sticking just to stuff I’ve already seen, my favorite among the first-run fare is Ballerina, a spinoff contemporaneous with the events of John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum that impressed me with colorful, imaginative action sequences that aren’t merely ornamental, but also perform the load-bearing function of advancing character development. I also enjoyed Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, a satisfying farewell to a favorite franchise which makes up for a surfeit of self-aggrandizing fluff with an underwater set piece and bi-plane stunt that can stand toe-to-toe with anything in the previous seven films, and the entertaining dark bromance comedy Friendship, which continue their runs at the Regal and Cinemapolis respectively. Fun repertory options include Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, which you can see for free at Cinemapolis on Sunday as they close out this season of their “Family Classics Picture Show,” and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, which plays the Regal on Saturday, Sunday, and Wednesday. Finally, special events highlights include a screening of Marcella at Cinemapolis on Monday followed by a Q&A with director Peter Miller and one of Lost Nation there on Wednesday followed by a Q&A with writer/director Jay Craven and musical score producers Judy Hyman and Jeff Claus.
Home Video: I’m still working on my dispatch from this year’s Nitrate Picture Show. In the meantime, I noticed that Land of the Pharaohs, which as a lover of costume drams and procedurals has always been a favorite of mine, is streaming on Watch TCM until June 29. Upon revisiting it I realized that Jack Hawkins’s Pharaoh Khufu is pretty much exactly who Jorge Salcedo’s José Moran from NPS 2025 selection Hardly a Criminal wants to be–each is even described by a close associate in terms of a virtually identical story about a time when they were greedy in their youth! As such it isn’t a surprise that Moran similarly is so consumed by fears of losing the money he is finally able to accumulate during the course of the movie that he is unable to ever enjoy it. Pharaohs is also basically the perfect CinemaScope movie as famously defined by Fritz Lang in Contempt since it’s essentially a slow build epic funeral for snakes rendered as Orientalist poetry. If none of that sounds like your cup of tea, watch the first few minutes anyway and drink in the site of columns of thousands of real-life human extras receding into the distance: this is one case where it is completely accurate to observe that they really don’t make ’em like they used to!
Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts canbe found here.A running list ofall of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.
Also in Theaters: I’m excited that The Phoenician Scheme is finally opening at Cinemapolis and the Regal, but we’re saving this for our next date night. As I mentioned last week, our oldest has informed us that she’s going to make Lilo & Stitch, which continues its run at the Regal, her next Family (née Friday) Movie Night selection, and I’m determined not to miss Pavements, which opens at Cinemapolis tomorrow, so I’ve got those films in my near future as well. Sinners, which is still going strong at both Cinemapolis and the Regal, remains my favorite new movie that I’ve already seen for the fourth week in a row; I also enjoyed Friendship, which is at the same two theaters. Finally, your best bet on the special events/repertory front are the two screenings of Trainspotting at Cinemapolis on Tuesday as part of their “Trains, Trains, Trains” staff picks series
Home Video: I’m still working on tying all of my thoughts on this year’s unexpectedly divisive Nitrate Picture Show together into a blog post, but hope to have it up within the next few days. A big what-if involves La Ronde, which was apparently almost picked for the “Blind Date with Nitrate” slot that isn’t announced in advance. We’ll never know for sure whether or not that would have staved off the controversy now raging (stay tuned!) about the programming decision made instead, but I likely would have mentioned it here regardless because the restored version available on DVD from the Criterion Collection and streaming on the Criterion Channel appears to be a cut above most of the other features from this year’s festival available in those formats. It’s also an ethereally suave masterpiece of form which judging from the surprisingly low percentage of people I follow on Letterboxd who have logged it may be weirdly underseen–has director Max Ophüls fallen out of style? Anyway, it’s well worth a look if you haven’t watched it recently or ever!
Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts canbe found here.A running list ofall of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.
You’d never know it from this monthly series, but My Loving Wife and I aren’t drinking as much as we used to, and the most common way I discover new cocktails these days is by trying to find novel uses for old bottles which have been languishing in our liquor cabinet and refrigerator for far too long. And so it was that I found myself mixing up The Navigator which Frederic Yarm featured on his blog in 2018 earlier this year with some of the madeira I purchase each December to make bigos, a nod to both my upbringing in Pennsylvania Dutch country where we eat pork and sauerkraut on New Year’s day for good luck and the two years of Polish I took in college. When it proved to be a perfect platform for not just that spirit, but two other household favorites, Bacardí Reserva Ocho and Rothman & Winter’s Orchard Apricot Liqueur, I immediately decided to feature it in one of my last remaining Drink & a Movie posts. Here’s how to make it:
1 oz. Bacardí Reserva Ocho 1 oz. Rainwater Madeira (Leacock’s) 3/4 oz. Lemon juice 1/2 oz. Simple syrup 1/4 oz. Apricot liqueur (Rothman & Winter)
Combine all ingredients with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with an edible orchid and a lemon twist.
Punch provided a great overview of rainwater Madeira in 2017 for their “Bringing It Back Bar” series. Once considered the most prestigious style in the category in United States, it emerged from Prohibition with a debased reputation but has recently found favor with bartenders who find it “attractive not only for its relatively low price point, but for its subtlety.” It functions in The Navigator the same way as it does in the recipes linked to in that article–as a medium-dry counterpoint to the apricot liqueur and rum, resulting in an easy-drinking concoction which is sweet, but subtle instead of cloying. That’s actually not a terrible way to describe the movie I’m pairing it with, The Strange Case of Angelica, which like Madeira and The Navigator’s presumptive namesake Prince Henry hails from Portugal. Here’s a picture of my Cinema Guild DVD copy:
It’s also available for rental or purchase on Apple TV+, and some people (including current Cornell University faculty, staff, and students) may have access to it through Kanopy via a license paid for by their local academic or public library as well.
Director Manoel de Oliveira was 101 years old and had 30 features under his belt when The Strange Case of Angelica debuted at Cannes in 2010, and it has a stately mien and pacing befitting such a remarkable resume. The film begins with an epigraph by Antero de Quental: “yonder, lily of celestial valleys, your end shall be their beginning, our loves ne’er more to perish.” This is followed by two languorous minutes of titles accompanied by Portuguese pianist Maria João Pires performing the third movement of Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 3 in Bi Minor which unspool over a nighttime cityscape of Régua from a vantage point across the Douro River:
The action begins with a 3:30 single take street scene also shot with a stationary camera and featuring a “strongly diagonal” (per James Quandt on the DVD commentary track) composition that will accrete significance as the movie progresses. A man inquires as to the whereabouts of the photographer who lives above the shop is car has stopped in front of:
And is told that he’s out of town, but a passerby helpfully offers directions to the home of a young “Sephardi emigrant” he knows who “takes photos all over the place.” This turns out to be Isaac (Oliveira’s grandson Ricardo Trêpa), who we meet bent over a malfunctioning wireless in what J. Hoberman identifies as a reference to Jean Cocteau’s Orphée in an essay collected in his book Film After Film:
Unable to make the “static-garbled radio transmissions” any clearer, Isaac shoves the device forward in frustration, knocking a pile of books onto the floor. When one volume falls open to this page:
He picks it up and begins to read. “Dance! O stars, that in constant dizzying heights you follow unchanging. Exalt, and escape for an instant the path that you are chained to.” Suddenly, there’s a knock at the door.
“It’s the angel!” Isaac exclaims and returns to the book. “Time, stand still, and you, former beings, who roam fantastical, celestial ways. Angels, open the gates of heaven, for in my night is day, and in me is God.” As he finishes the passage, there’s another knock, now accompanied by a voice calling his name. Shaken at last from his reverie, Isaac puts the book down and answers the door to find that it’s his landlady Madam Justina (Adelaide Teixeira), who Quandt describes as “like a kind of one-woman Greek chorus,” bearing a message that he has been summoned by a “very important lady” to take pictures of her daughter.
Upon arrival Isaac is greeted outside at the foot of a staircase by a nun (Sara Carinhas) who turns out to be the sister of the woman he is there to photograph (Pilar López de Ayala) and her maid (Isabel Ruth).
They inform him that his subject Angelica has just passed and that his commission is to create “one last souvenir, even if it is very sad” at the behest of her mother. Isaac asks for a stronger bulb for the room’s only light, which Hajnal Király characterizes as “a historical memento of the Oliveira family, owners, at the beginning of the twentieth century, of a factory manufacturing electric devices” in her book The Cinema of Manoel De Oliveira:
Then sets to work in a photo shoot depicted through a combination of long shots of Isaac:
And point-of-view shots complete with frame lines showing us exactly what he’s looking at as he focuses his camera:
He moves in for a close-up:
When suddenly Angelica appears to open her eyes and smile at him:
He is obviously shocked:
But upon realizing that no one else has noticed anything strange hastily finishes up and departs. The next day as he’s developing the pictures he took, an image of Angelica again comes to life, causing him to once more jump back in surprise:
Moments later he spies some laborers tilling the soil in a vineyard across the river:
And resolves the photograph them, much to the chagrin of Madam Justina, who laments the fact that “hardly anyone works like that these days”:
As Quandt notes, “Oliveira’s materialist appreciation of sound is wonderfully apparent” in the sequence that follows, which features more slanted lines:
And a charming call-and-response working song about a shabby suit of clothes. It ends with Isaac appearing to hear bells calling mourners to Angelica’s funeral, for he next appears in the church where one of the friends gathered around her coffin comments that “she looks like an angel from heaven”:
Which inspires him to recite the snippet of poetry he read earlier. That night in a scene which begins with what we soon realize is a shot of his reflection in a mirror, Isaac wakes up and walks over the photos hanging on a line in front of his balcony:
As he stands there an apparition materializes behind him:
He passes through the doorway and becomes translucent himself. The two of them embrace and rise into the sky:
Leading forthwith to my favorite image from this movie, the epically goofy grin plastered on Isaac’s face as he floats supine through the air:
Which he wears right up until the moment when a strikingly topographical overhead shot of the Douro abruptly gives way to one of him in freefall:
He awakens the next morning with a start and lights a cigarette:
“That strange reality . . . perhaps it was just a hallucination? But it was just as real as this. Could I have been to that place of absolute love I’ve heard about?” Then: “I must be out of my mind.” The second half of the film chronicles his self-deportation from the land of the living, which Daniel Kasman read as reminiscent of the director of my September, 2024 Drink & a Movie selection History is Made at Night in a dispatch filed from Cannes 2010: “as in Borzage, escape from the world’s ails to the bliss of an otherworldly love is at once the most cowardly and most heroic of actions.” As part of The Strange Case of Angelica‘s very first wave of viewers, Kasman understandably focuses specifically on the titular character’s role in precipitating Isaac’s withdrawal from his fellow lodgers:
Growing frustration when Angelica remains tantalizingly out of reach even in his dreams::
And increasingly public erratic behavior:
But as Rita Benis notes in a paper collected in the book Fearful Symmetries called “The Abysses of Passion in Manoel de Oliveira’s The Strange Case of Angelica,” the film’s fantastical elements like Isaac’s visions of Angelica are strongly linked to its realist sequences like his efforts to document the “old-fashioned” ways of the vineyard workers visible from his apartment and “their contrast is what generates the real fear implicit in the film,” such as in “the distressing sequence where he desperately follows a tractor working the rocky soil, taking furious snapshots to the fading traces of an ancient world (the connection between man and earth)”:
These shots are, of course, immediately followed by one of him thrashing around in his bed, haunted by the sounds of hoes striking the earth over and over again, and they finally unlock the secret to all those diagonals: each of Isaac’s impossible loves are a step on what is ultimately one long stairway to heaven.
J. Hoberman closes his essay on The Strange Case of Angelica with a quote:
The last living filmmaker born during the age of the nickelodeon, Oliveira told an interviewer that cinema today is “the same as it was for Lumiére, for Méliès and Max Linder. There you have realism, the fantastic, and the comic. There’s nothing more to add to that, absolutely nothing.” The great beauty of this love song to the medium is that Oliveira’s eschewal remains absolute. It’s a strange case–pictures move and time stands still.
The other night at dinner we went around the table at the request of my children and all said what we’d eat if we had to subsist on just one food for the rest of our lives. Neither Oliveira’s film nor The Navigator may be the most daringly innovative creation featured in this series, but they both contain everything I’m looking for in a drink and a movie respectively, and while it would be suboptimal (to say the least) to be confined to such a limited diet, I can think of far worse answers to the cinema and cocktail versions of my kids’ question!
Cheers!
All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka My Loving Wife.Links to all of the entries in this series can be found here.
Also in Theaters:Sinners, which continues its runs at Cinemapolis and the Regal, is my top new movie recommendation for the third week in a row and fourth overall. I didn’t love any of the other first run fare that I’ve already seen, although the jury is still out on Friendship, the demented evil twin of one of my favorite American comedies of the past twenty years I Love You, Man which is also at both Cinemapolis and the Regal. That potentially just makes the screenings of The Lady Vanishes at Cinemapolis on Tuesday as part of their train-themed June “Staff Picks” series even more compelling, though! There doesn’t appear to be anything of note happening on the repertory and special events fronts otherwise.
Home Video: NPS’s opening night selection Becky Sharp is new to me, the first time in three visits that this has been the case, which is exciting! It has some big shoes to fill, though, because the last two were bangers. I called Black Narcissus “one of the most transportative films ever shot entirely in a studio” when I wrote about it last August for my Drink & a Movie series, and while there’s no way to recreate the experience of seeing on a “better than very good” (per intro speaker Graham Brown) legendary (it opened the influential 1992 Pacific Film Archive series The Primal Screen) nitrate print, the formal qualities I’m referring to shine through just fine on the Criterion Collection’s Blu-ray and DVD releases; you can also stream it via a number of other commercial platforms. Meanwhile, although I was on the fence when I logged it on Letterboxd last year, I’ve since decided that I would indeed include Intolerance on any all-time Top Ten list I might find myself compelled or moved to create. As I heard someone say on the way out of the Dryden Theatre, even after more than a century it still represents perhaps the most sophisticated use of intertwining narratives in film history, and the lavish Babylon sequences may never be surpassed for sheer monumental grandeur. As a public domain title it’s widely available, so do check it out if you’ve never seen it or if it has been awhile!
Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts canbe found here.A running list ofall of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.
Also in Theaters:Sinners is proving hard to knock off its perch as the best new movie now playing Ithaca that I’ve already seen, but maybe this is the week! It’s also pretty quiet on the repertory fare and special events fronts, aside of course from the screening of Holy Motors mentioned above.
Home Video: Speaking of My Loving Wife, she and I recently rewatched the first seven Mission: Impossible movies on Paramount+ in preparation for The Final Reckoning and I am happy to present the following definitive ranking from least to most essential:
With all due respect to Philip Seymour Hoffman, who plays the part he was given extremely well, this movie is too damn mean. But the fact that it’s last place on the list is precisely why I’m bother to compose it in the first place: these are some lofty heights for a nadir!
The one where Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is described as “the living manifestation of destiny” and “sometimes […] the only one capable of seeing the only way,” establishing him as a sort of demigod who, more than having a preternatural ability to understand and play the odds, can actually *manipulate* luck. Which, in the words of Simon Pegg’s Benji Dunn, “[takes] things too far.”
Only fifth on my list, but if it’s true that many people regard *this* as the series’ weakest link, then it may be underrated! The Ethan Hunt free-climbing Dead Horse Point opening credits sequence remains the best beginning to a M:I movie.
We don’t have to call this “Part One” any more now that its sequel has a different name, right? Anyway, the golden light, hushed tones, high ceilings, and columns of the otherwise apparently extraneous DoorDash sequence near the beginning evoke a cathedral and mark black-clad Hunt as the Bishop of Bon Chance, which I hope represents the final evolution of his relationship to luck, but we’ll see! The Oriental Express sequence is also one of the franchise’s finest set pieces, and the Rome sequence contains its best car chase.
Although Hunt is still frequently bathed in light in director Christopher McQuarrie (M:I‘s first repeat helmer) follow-up to Rogue Nation, that film’s erroneously audacious suggestion that he may in fact be divine is thankfully withdrawn in favor of reconnecting with all its other predecessors, including the only two that I consider to be true must-sees:
The one where Hunt fully emerges as the Bob Montagné of the secret agent set: a legend in his own time trapped in a never ending game with rapidly escalating blinds and a growing family of followers to look after which forces him to chase longer and longer odds to keep up. The energy behind his unhinged smile in the movie that started it all (see below) is still there, but now all of it is channeled into his work, which includes keeping things light and making it look easy. Featuring my favorite combination of his teammates, two of the series’ best ancillary characters in Anil Kapoor’s Brij Nath and Léa Seydoux’s Sabine Moreau, and probably its most impressive stunt (climbing the Burj Khalifa), Ghost Protocol can make a legitimate claim to not just be number one on this list, but also an all-time great action movie. Of course, that label doesn’t really describe:
I definitely remembered this as being as not quite of a piece with the films that followed it, but the big pleasant surprise of our rewatch project is that this is more similar to the way Friday Night Lights the movie is completely different from but equally enjoyable to Friday Night Lights the TV series than it is to the way season one of The Simpsons is a very rough draft for the seven seasons that followed before the show was tragically cancelled right in the middle of its prime. The Channel Tunnel sequence is also a masterpiece of cutting–but not bleeding–edge special effects, the exploding fish tank and the Langley break-in remain among the franchise’s two most memorable single moments, and there is a stick of green light/red light “chewing gum” enshrined in my personal movie prop hall of fame. Add it all up and you’ve got one of the most entertaining movies I’ve ever seen!
Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts canbe found here.A running list ofall of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.
Also in Theaters:Sinners, which continues its run at Cinemapolis and the Regal Ithaca Mall, holds on to the title of Best New Movie Now Playing Ithaca That I’ve Already Seen for another week. I’m not super excited about the other first-run fare populating local screens, but there are a couple of decent repertory options even without Cornell Cinema (which is on summer break) chipping in. Most notably, Kiki’s Delivery Service, which might be my favorite film directed by Hayao Miyazaki, plays the Regal Saturday through Wednesday, and director Joe Wright’s lively 2005 Pride & Prejudice adaptation starring Keira Knightly in her first Oscar-nominated role is at Cinemapolis all week. You can also see Superbad there on Wednesday. Finally, special events highlights include a free “Family Classics Picture Show” screening of Snoopy Come Home and one showing only of the new documentary There Is Another Way at Cinemapolis on Sunday.
Home Video: I wasn’t planning to go in this direction with my write-up until just the other day, but the titular protagonist from week’s home video recommendation Wanda makes for an interesting contrast with Lewis Pullman’s Bob from Thunderbolts*, which is now playing Cinemapolis and the Regal. He is part of a long cinematic lineage of attractive, otherwise strong characters rendered vulnerable by a mental (usually) or physical trait who our hearts go out to when they’re exploited by others for selfish and often villainous purposes. The most prominent example is probably Giulietta Masina’s Gelsomina in La Strada, who likewise cries out for a protector who sees her as more than a mere tool. I’m wary of moments like the one in the Thunderbolts* where Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova attempts to literally rescue Bob from himself with a loving embrace, though, because they flatter us too much: Yelena isn’t treating him like a human therapy dog, she’s saving the world! As written, directed, and played by Barbara Loden, Wanda defies this tendency: Michael Higgins’s Mr. Dennis attempts to use her, but she’s such a frustrating non-entity that he can’t. Which is precisely what makes the movie she appears in memorably challenging. You can no more take care of her than you can a tumbleweed, and it would be equally unfulfilling to support her without expecting anything in return because there’s no evidence that she’d do anything worthwhile with this freedom, which I believe is the point of the opening sequence that reminds me of Pull My Daisy. And so you’re left with a puzzle in extreme long shot, a white-clad woman making her way from nowhere to nowhere through dirty dark side of the moon mountains of anthracite who you can’t just abandon with a clear conscience, but who you’ll also never have the pleasure of “saving.” Wanda is now streaming on the Criterion Channel with a subscription and is also available on Blu-Ray and DVD from the Criterion Collection where everything is 30% off through May 26. Highest possible recommendation!
Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts canbe found here.A running list ofall of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.
