Also in Theaters: If I was in Ithaca this week, I’d be prioritizing the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, specifically the screenings at Cinemapolis of Snow Leopard on Friday; Sleep with Your Eyes Open on Saturday; and Little, Big, and Far on Tuesday. The best new movies now playing local theaters that I’ve already seen are the enjoyable genre exercises Black Bag (spy film), which continues its runs at both Cinemapolis and the Regal, and A Working Man (Jason Statham), which is at just the Regal. This week’s special events are highlighted by free screenings of the movies Improper Conduct and The Accelerator at Cornell Cinema on Monday and Tuesday respectively. Finally, your best bet for repertory fare is Princess Mononoke, which is at the Regal all week.
Home Video: I’ve been digging the fact that there have been many pre-Code movies with ~60 minute runtimes featured on Watch TCM lately because they’re the perfect thing to watch when, say, we miraculously get the kids settled on Thursday night with about an hour to spare before Top Chef comes on. My favorite recent discovery is the 1933 film Female, which starts where Movie Year 2024’s Babygirl ends: with a girlboss CEO exiling an employee she has slept with to a faraway branch office. A lot of people seem to be hung up on the messaging of the climax, but the preponderance of available evidence suggests to me that whatever they say to each other in the final scene, Ruth Chatterton’s Alison Drake is much more comfortable in the board room than George Brent’s engineer Jim Thorne is ever likely to be. Anyway, the film also features delightfully profligate back projection and some outrageous wipes, so be sure to check it out before it disappears from the platform on April 9!
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: I’m a single parent for the next four days while My Loving Wife is out of town, and I’m planning to take the girls to see The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie at the Regal Ithaca Mall while she’s away. I’m also going to try to sneak in a screening of A Working Man there during the brief window of time between her return and my departure for a conference in Minneapolis on Wednesday.
Also in Theaters: This week’s highlight is definitely the beginning of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival! For the reasons described above, I won’t be able to make it to any of the initial screenings, but some titles that jumped out at me include Little, Big, and Far; Snow Leopard; and Youth (Hard Times), which screen at Cinemapolis tomorrow, Saturday, and Tuesday respectively. Eephus is the first serious contender for my Top Ten Movies of 2025 list, but it’s sadly down to its last two screenings at Cinemapolis today at 5:50 and 8:20pm. Best Picture Oscar winner Anora closes there today as well, and there’s also a screening of Best Documentary Feature Oscar winner No Other Land at Cornell Cinema tonight at 7pm. After that my top recommendation will become Black Bag, a relationship movie disguised as a spy thriller starring Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett and shot by Steven Soderbergh (sorry: Peter Andrews) to look like a sleepy child’s view of Christmas lights out a car window. Finally, your best bets for repertory fare are The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which plays Cornell Cinema tomorrow, and Before Sunrise plus its sequel Before Sunset, both of which are at Cinemapolis all week.
Home Video: Speaking of Anora, it is now streaming on Hulu! Critic Noel Vera was kind enough to engage me in a back-and-forth in the comments section of his review last November about Ani, the character Mikey Madison won a Best Actress Oscar for portraying, and whether or not it’s believable that she falls so completely for Mark Eydelshteyn’s Vanya. To him Ani “feels too smart for that; at least as Madison plays her” and thus “the ending, glum as it is, doesn’t quite hit as hard” because the film “still feels every bit the fairy tale.” To me, though, that’s precisely the point. Ani may be clever and tough, but she still has Disney princess dreams that make her vulnerable. I rewatched Cinderella, the specific one she mentions, the other day, and it’s not like Prince Charming does anything to convince his bride that he’d be willing to stand up for her against his father the king if she turned out to be unable or unwilling to have children! Anyway, the mere fact that we spent so much time talking about this is a testament to how successful Madison and writer-director Sean Baker were at creating a memorable movie heroine and a world for her to inhabit.
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: My top priority is On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, since it will be at Cinemapolis for one week only, and I’m planning to see Eephus there as well because I don’t want to risk missing it either. Finally, our plans for a “date night” outing to Black Bag at Cinemapolis or the Regal Ithaca Mall last week fell through, so My Loving Wife and I trying again tomorrow.
Also in Theaters: The best new movie now playing Ithaca RIGHT NOW that I’ve already seen No Other Land, but its final screening at Cinemapolis is today at 2:50pm. After that it will be Anora, which continues its post-Best Picture Oscar run at Cinemapolis and the Regal. That should definitely be your first choice if you somehow haven’t already checked it out, but otherwise it’s all about special events and repertory fare this week. Highlights on the former front include free screenings at Cornell Cinema of an experimental short films program called “Matter Falling Out of Form” tonight, The Year Between on Monday evening and a shorts program called the “Women’s Adventure Film Tour 2025” on Wednesday, as well as a double feature of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and La La Land there on Saturday. My other “old movie” recommendation is Peeping Tom, which closes out Cornell Cinema’s “Powell and Pressburger: Titans of Technicolor” series tomorrow.
Home Video: My oldest daughter Lucy recently scored the first two points of her basketball career in the final game of her second season. We’re extremely proud of all the hard work she has put in on and off (her coaches think that indoor rock climbing has had a noticeable impact on her upper body strength) the court and have enjoyed watching her improve each week. In addition to the bucket, she also fought for rebounds and let her teammates know when she was open, which she attributes to our new pre-game ritual of playing the song “Defying Gravity” on repeat in the car so that she and her sister can lustily sing along to it to warm up her voice. In honor of this momentous event (which literally brought tears to My Loving Wife’s eyes!) in our family’s history, this week’s home video recommendation is Love & Basketball, which Cornell Cinema actually screened in February and which is now streaming on Peacock.
This film was released theatrically almost exactly one year before I officially became a diehard basketball fan during my freshman year at the University of Pittsburgh when my soon-to-be-beloved Panthers went on a Cinderella run during the Big East (RIP) tournament. Although this wasn’t enough to secure an NCAA Tournament bid that year, they went on to appear in the next ten and came within a heartbreaking miracle Scottie Reynolds coast-to-coast basket of the Final Four in 2009. Throughout this run they always had great point guards, so I was delighted when this turned out to be the position that Love & Basketball‘s protagonists Monica Wright (Sanaa Lathan) and Quincy McCall (Omar Epps) both play and in heaven when the movie’s pivotal moment turns out to be Wright taking a charge. It also features one of cinema’s great one-on-one games (along with Arthur Agee’s showdown with his father in my March, 2024 Drink & a Movie selection Hoop Dreams) followed by a heartwarming final scene celebrating the WNBA, which was still only in its third year of existence during shooting.
Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts canbe found here.A running list ofall of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.
From where I’m standing the net impact of expanded legalized sports betting has clearly been negative. Research shows that it results in increased levels of debt for individual consumers, athletes are subject to unconscionable levels of abuse because of it, and the constant barrage of ads and ridiculous celebrity parlays makes the experience of watching sports on TV less fun. For all of these reasons I’d probably support more regulation at this point despite my libertarian inclinations, but as long as it remains so easy to place a bet, I will selfishly continue to enjoy doing so during certain times of year. March is one of them because of the NCAA Tournament, so lately I’ve been thinking about my favorite titular (which disqualifies Howard Ratner) movie gambler, Bob Montagné (Roger Duchesne). Here’s a picture of my Kino Lorber DVD copy of the film he lent his name to, Bob le Flambeur:
It is also available for rental from a variety of other platforms, 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.
The drink I’m pairing it with was created by Natasha David as boozy version of her favorite thing to eat, “dark, bitter chocolate.” Here, per Imbibe, is how you make her All In (which for the uninitiated is a poker term which refers to the act of pushing all of one’s chips into the middle of the table) cocktail:
Stir all ingredients with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Express a lemon twist over the top and discard.
This concoction’s nose is dominated by lemon from the twist, and my brain therefore immediately latched on to the citrus notes in the Campari and Dolin on the sip. There’s also a lot of burn from the rye, though, which combines to create an initial impression not unlike drinking grappa. The swallow and finish are all very dark (think 85+% cacao) chocolate. David specifies rye that is 100-proof or higher, making this a perfect place to showcase Pikesville, which clocks in at 110 and is totally my jam these days. She also described her goal being “to create a dry chocolate cocktail that wasn’t limited to a dessert drink—a cocktail that could be enjoyed any time of the day,” and in that regard the All In is a resounding success.
Bob would appreciate this beverage, as he is no stranger to imbibing during the daylight hours. Here, for instance, we see his best laid plans for breakfast being waylaid by a tempting bottle of wine:
His luxurious apartment, which has one of the best views in the history of cinema and a slot machine in the closet:
“Absolutely massive American car,” as Nick Pinkerton says in his DVD commentary track (where he also identifies it as a 1955 Plymouth Belvedere):
And the fact that he appears to have a standing invitation to join any high-stakes game in Paris all suggest that he must have been more disciplined in his youth, but he is become, in the words of his best friend Roger (André Garet), a “pitiful” compulsive gambler who squanders every big win by taking his profits elsewhere and promptly losing them.
Because he does so in style, though, and according to a moral code that includes generosity to those even less fortunate as one of its primary tenets, he nonetheless remains an idol to the young men in his circle like Paolo (Daniel Cauchy), whose late father knew Bob back in his gangster days:
A hero to young women like Isabelle Corey’s Anne, to whom he provides pocket money and a place to sleep with no expectation of repayment in any form:
And the object of fraternal or maternal affection from compatriots like Roger and Simone Paris’s Yvonne, who purchased her café with a loan from him:
As well as the recipient of professional courtesy from René Havard’s Inspector Morin of the police, whose life he once saved:
If you didn’t know this was a caper movie, you’d never guess it from the first 37 minutes, which function more as a sort of nature documentary showing Bob in his natural environment. As Glenn Erickson observes in his review of Kino Lorber’s 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray copy of the film which came out last year, the location shooting makes it “a literal time capsule of a long-gone Montmartre, a collection of nightclubs and bars where colorful, unsavory night crawlers plot their next moves.” It begins with a monologue that characterizes the Parisian neighborhood as “both heaven and . . . hell” with the image of a descending funicular and accompanying musical cue during the ellipse.
Anne is introduced as an illustration of how “people of different destinies” cross paths in the pre-dawn hours not by name, but as a girl “with nothing to do” who is “up very early . . . and far too young” who passes a cleaning lady hurrying to work on the street:
Finally, we meet Bob playing craps in an establishment featuring the first example of what J. Hoberman calls “the insistent checkerboard patterns that make the movie so emphatically black-and-white”:
They appear again on the walls of Roger’s office, where author of A History of the French New Wave Cinema Richard Neupert argues they function “to remind the viewer that Bob, with his flowing white hair, sees the world as one big board game”:
Per Neupert, Bob le Flambeur inspired the French New Wave with its “raw, low-budget style that mixes documentary style with almost parodic artifice.” My favorite examples of both tendencies can be found in the rehearsals which lead up to the attempted robbery that Bob begins to plan after he learns that the safe in the Deauville casino will have 800 million francs (which as near as I can work out is about $20 million USD today) at 5am the morning of the upcoming Grand Prix race. After he and Roger find someone (Howard Vernon as McKimmie, who insists on a 50% cut of the take) to finance their operation in the first of many scenes that the 2001 remake of Ocean’s Eleven directed by Steven Soderbergh pays homage to, the “recruitment waltz” begins:
With their team assembled, they set about casing the joint by circling it repeatedly in a car and sketching an outline in a minute-long scene that embodies the “documentary style” Neupert describes:
They also obtain blueprints and specs which they use to obtain a safe so that Roger can practice opening it:
And best of all draw chalk outlines of the casino on a grass field so that they get an accurate sense of the space:
We also see Bob’s vision of how the operation is supposed to in a casino of empty of anyone except him and his crew, a technique borrowed by my July, 2023 Drink & a Movie selection Inside Man among scores of other films:
We never see the actual heist, though, because although Bob arrives at the casino to scope things out at 1:30am as planned in a stylish low-light sequence:
Instead of making contact with Claude Cerval’s Jean, their guy on the inside, like he’s supposed to, he forgets his promise to himself and Roger not to gamble until it is over and places a bet:
He wins, so he places another, this time at odds of 38 to 1:
That hits, too:
And suddenly Bob is off on the heater of his life. The voiceover informs us although the roulette is over by 2:01, “the chemin de fer continues”:
He is successful there, and at 2:45 he enters a the high-rollers room:
It’s difficult to say for sure how much he wins there, but by 3:30 he has attracted a crowd of onlookers:
And not long after that, he’s tipping the croupier one million francs at a time:
Based on the stacks of chips in shots like this, it appears that Bob’s winnings total nearly as much as the 400 million francs he and his crew are expecting to make from robbing the casino. Suddenly he chances to look at his watch and sees that it’s 5am:
He shouts, “change all this, now!” and sprints to the entrance, but it’s too late: the police, tipped off by Jean and his wife (Colette Fleury) and an informant (Gérard Buhr) armed with details that Paolo carelessly let slip to Anne, are waiting for Bob’s crew when they arrive and Paolo dies in the shootout which ensues:
Bob arrives just in time to cradle his protege in his arms as his life expires:
As Inspector Morin places Bob and Roger in handcuffs, one of his officers removes a coin from Bob’s pocket that we saw him flipping earlier.
“I’ve known it was double-headed for ten years,” Roger tells him. “And I’ve known you knew for ten years,” Bob replies. “Paulo knew too,” he adds. Just then the somber mood is broken by a procession of bellhops bringing out Bob’s winnings:
“And don’t let any of it go missing!” Bob says as he is led into a squad car. “Criminal intent to commit . . . you’ll get five years,” Morin says as he offers Bob and Roger cigarettes.
“But with a good lawyer, you might get away with three years,” he continues. “With a very good lawyer, and no criminal intent, maybe an acquittal!” Roger adds. And finally Bob: “If I play my cards right, I might even be able to claim damages!” The movie ends with a amazing shot of his car sitting in front of the Deauville shore as the sun rises behind it:
Dave Kehr writes in an essay that appears in his book When Movies Mattered that “[director Jean-Pierre] Melville is often described as an existentialist, but to execute a scene like the finish of Bob le Flambeur, even in jest, you need to have some faith in the basic benevolence of the world–some faith in a higher, protective power, such as the ‘luck’ that Bob turns his back on and that then returns, in the end, to save and reward him after all.” I couldn’t agree more with the first part of this statement, but would quibble just a bit with the latter. Bob never *abandons* Lady Luck; rather, ever the gentleman, he tries to take a hint and move on when it seems like he has lost her favor, but when he realizes his error, he’s more than happy to come home. As the voiceover remarked earlier as the seconds ticked down to 5:00, “that’s Bob the gambler as his mother made him!” I noted last February in a post about The Young Girls of Rochefort that a friend has suggested that the theme of this series is “the human experience of trying to become a better person.” I suppose that must make Bob le Flambeur another exception to this rule.
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.
What I’m Seeing This Week: I wasn’t able to make it to Mickey 17 last week after all, so seeing it at Cinemapolis or the Regal Ithaca Mall is my first order of business. My Loving Wife and I are also planning a “date night” (we’re probably actually going to hit a matinee) outing to Black Bag at one of those two theaters as well.
Home Video: It recently occurred to me that The Crowd, one of my favorite movies of all time, has now been in the public domain in the United States for more than a year. I was utterly shocked to discover that it nonetheless remains unavailable on a good R1 Blu-ray/DVD release. It can, however, be streamed on Watch TCM until March 21. Here’s what I wrote about it on Letterboxd after revisiting it there last week:
John Sims (James Murray) stars as a man who inherits the vision of exceptionalism his father (Warner Richmond) had for him and learns the hard way each time how to fall in love with first the mother (Eleanor Boardman) of his first child (Freddie Burke Frederick); then Mary, the actual flesh-and-blood woman who occupies that role; and finally the life they’ve been really living all the while he was dreaming, hopefully just in time to finally lay a foundation before the Great Depression that not even the filmmakers know is barreling down upon them hits. Mary’s brothers (Daniel G. Tomlinson and Dell Henderson) are perfectly dour avatars of bourgeoisie judgmentalism, and the depictions of the titular urban masses constitute all-time great cinema images which clearly inspired David Lynch, Jacques Tati, Orson Welles, and any number of other giants who followed.
What I’m Seeing This Week: I am excited to finally see Universal Language, which I heard great things about as it worked its way across the film festival circuit last year, at Cinemapolis! I am also going to try to catch Mickey 17 there or at the Regal Ithaca Mall on the only other evening I’m free.
Also in Theaters:Cornell Cinema has an absolutely killer lineup this week that my schedule doesn’t permit me to take advantage of, but you should if you can! If I was free on Saturday, I would definitely be going to the “unique Cornell version of Eno,” and if I was free tomorrow I’d probably prioritize Toxic ahead of Mickey 17 and Universal Language. They’re also screening Close Your Eyes, which landed at fifth place on my Top Ten Movies of 2024 list, tomorrow and my August, 2024 “Drink & a Movie” selection Black Narcissus on Sunday. Otherwise, the best new movie now playing Ithaca that I’ve already seen is newly-minted Best Documentary Feature Oscar winner No Other Land, which continues its run at Cinemapolis, as does this year’s Best International Feature Film I’m Still Here. Best Picture Oscar winner Anora is back in local theaters as well at both Cinemapolis and the Regal. Other noteworthy special events include “An Evening with John Cameron Mitchell” at Cornell’s Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts on Friday; free admission to the Streets Alive! Film Festival at Cinemapolis on Sunday, a free screening of Song Lang at Cornell Cinema on Wednesday, and a preview screening of The Friend at Cinemapolis that same evening. Finally, another repertory highlight is The Adventures of Prince Achmed at Cornell Cinema on Sunday.
Home Video: Speaking of my top ten list for 2024, the film that placed sixth on it, All We Imagine as Light, premieres live on the Criterion Channel at 9pm on Sunday! The first film from India to compete in the main competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 30 years, it won the Grand Prix there and placed fourth in theIndieWire Critics Poll, which is definitely the list of this type that I put the most stock in. Looking back on the only “Ithaca Film Journal” post where I actually had occasion to recommend this movie, I realize I didn’t say anything about it because I assumed I already had! Anyway, it’s a sumptuously photographed tale of platonic and romantic love with a delightfully poetic “plot twist” and an outstanding final shot that features a kid absolutely rocking out to headphone music.
Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts canbe found here.A running list ofall of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.
Last March I celebrated being fully back to “using cinema as a window on the world and a lens through which I can interrogate my thoughts and feelings and refine them into a more consistent and generous philosophy” with my first proper top ten list in many years. In the same post I mentioned the “mixtapes” I’ve been compiling bi-annually for the past decade and started sharing on this blog in 2022, but I didn’t quite make the connection that these are essentially the same activity.
Although I’ve historically been adamant that, as I said in 2021, the songs I include on my mixes “are not necessarily the best songs of the previous six months in my opinion, but rather the ones that gave me the most pleasure and/or affected me the most,” it recently struck me that after more than a decade of listening to hundreds of new albums each year, I likely know more about music than I give myself credit for, at least on an intuitive level; conversely, although I watch hundreds of new movies each year and also spend quite a bit of time immersed in older ones, my knowledge of cinema relative to people who write about it professionally isn’t nearly what it used to be in my 20s when I was fresh out of a film studies program and could afford to live as though I did as well. Even back then I tried to embrace my amateur status: that’s when I came up with the idea of a “movie year” that starts and ends in March instead of January, for instance. Just paying attention isn’t a surefire way to avoid falling into imitative patterns, though, and I recently found myself pondering whether or not this annual list-making exercise serves any purpose for me at all. Delaying its creation makes it a truer representation of my favorites from 2024 by allowing two extra months for many of the most important titles that posterity will label with that year to reach Ithaca and the streaming video services I subscribe to, sure, but is it really worth the time and effort?
To my very great surprise, the answer to this question came from my younger self. Nearly twenty years ago I wrote the following:
I suppose that it’s possible to construct a Top Ten that would satisfy me structured around a list of films numbered from 1-10 that devotes one or two sentences to each movie, with a paragraph-long introduction and conclusion. Possible, but certainly not likely–at any rate, there are better ways. A good list might include scenes from films or lines of dialogue. It can include upcoming films, old films, ideas for films. Buildings. Political scandals. People. Why not? If you’ve explained your goals adequately it can include anything.
At the very least it can include nine films, or eleven. It can include re-releases, short films, and television episodes/seasons/series.
Or. Or the critic can accept all of the limitations of the Top Ten list and simply scribble down ten films and be done with it. Let the readers do the leg work, right? My editor wants a list? Here you go: a list. Because any list of films is interesting, just not necessarily fraught with any particular meaning.
In the 2004 Village Voice year-end poll Lars von Trier’s Dogville (2003) placed third. This did not mean that Dogville was the year’s third best film. It did not mean that it was the year’s third most important, talked about, or divisive film. All that it meant was that Dogville finished third in the Village Voice‘s year-end poll. But by finishing third in this poll Dogville set off a round of discussion about itself, Lars von Trier, the Voice poll, year-end polls in general, and the movies that was important, talked about, and divisive.
What am I saying? I’m suggesting that we don’t need to do away with year-end polls entirely, but that we need to either think more about them or give them less space. That we need to strive to make them relevant and to articulate why we think we’ve succeeded, or that we need to treat them like coffee table books: as conversation starters, and nothing more.
It pains me to see so. many. italics, but I have to admit that the kid has a point. More than one, even! Top ten lists are inherently the kind of endeavor that most people are going to spend either too much time on or too little. Like movie reviews they have value in the aggregate, too, but each individual one of them says more about the person who compiled it than the films they selected, and the list maker can’t just assume that readers already have the necessary context to make sense of their choices–they have to provide it. Professional film critics probably don’t have much say in the matter: they have to deliver whatever the publication they write for wants on deadline with a word count. There’s nothing stopping me, though, from using as much space I need in order to not just explain my picks, but also canvass the entire pool of works I was choosing from and explore how it came to be. What made it to Ithaca . . . and what didn’t? What did I decide not to watch and why? Are there movies that I think the world needs which aren’t even being made?
The problem is that I don’t actually *want* to write this post. I do this for fun, after all, and I’m impatient to move on to Movie Year 2025. And that brings me back to the idea of a playlist. I only recently started providing any commentary at all about the songs on my mixes: initially I just shared the track listing and a Spotify link and called it a day because the idea was for people to actually listen to everything. And that’s true of my favorite films of the year as well! The 13 mentioned below are my answer to the hypothetical question “what should I watch?” They’re the ones I’m most eager to talk about and I can’t resist the urge to add a bit more commentary here, but I’ve already written about everything on Letterboxd and/or this blog at least once, and frankly I’m more interested in having an actual conversation than pontificating further, so please do check them out for yourself and tell me what you think!
Speaking of Letterboxd, one of the main reasons I can barely imagine life without it anymore despite becoming the last cinephile on earth to join little more than 18 months ago is because it makes it super easy to ascertain that I tagged 124 films “Movie Year 2024.” By way of illustrating what does and doesn’t qualify, when I watch Queer after it debuts on Max next month, I won’t tag it “Movie Year 2025” because it played Ithaca in December; however, Universal Language *will* qualify even though it was screened at the 2024 editions of Cannes and TIFF and a bunch of other film festivals because when it opens at Cinemapolis next week, that will be my first opportunity to see it. Anyway, I also saw everything in the Indiewire Critics Poll and CriticsTop10 top 50 lists except Queer and Youth (Hard Times), all of which means that, 1) my local movie theaters are awesome, and 2) this is basically the “top 10% in the class.” Here are the new releases I liked best:
10. Green Border. One of three movies I spent a lot of time thinking about this year as representative of philosophically different takes on the efficacy of depicting horrific acts of injustice. Green Border occupies the optimistic/determined quadrant: director Agnieszka Holland clearly believes that shining a light on the evil deeds desensitized people do in the dark when told enough times that it’s their job and/or their duty will eventually put a stop to them. No Other Land is similarly optimistic, but resigned to the possibility that we the viewers just don’t have the attention span anymore, while Incident is pessimistic but nonetheless keen to continue the fight.
9. Here. Perhaps the most formally audacious and emotionally satisfying film on this list and connected thematically to a number of the rest. Including:
8. La Chimera. Above-ground/beneath-the-surface cantastoria about what it means to live a good life: if your heart’s desire is buried in the dirt under your feet, do you build a shrine on it or dig?
7. About Dry Grasses. When you spend 197 minutes with an unsympathetic character and don’t tire of them, the movie they’re in did something right! Reminded me of college.
5. Close Your Eyes. Do you have to know you’re doing it for your life to be your art? Makes an interesting pairing with my first and maybe always favorite cinematic depiction of Ithaca My First Film in the way it depicts a filmmaker engaging with a work made in their youth.
4. Red Rooms. Perhaps the year’s most well-constructed movie. I am planning to write about its poker scenes after my “Drink & a Movie” series wraps in December.
3. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. History is supposedly written by the victors, but the idea of “winning” is as slippery as quote attribution and the fossil record and racial memory are harder to control than state media and schools, so if you’re thinking in a long enough timeframe, it’s more accurate to say that points will be tallied based on surviving documentation.
2. Evil Does Not Exist. Another film that explores the societal implications of the ideas about personal happiness that appealed to me so much in some of the titles on this list.
I also saw a number of terrific older films for the first time last year. Here are the ones that made the biggest impressions:
5. Whiplash. There are still a number of prominent movies released during my period of self-imposed semi-exile from “the lost continent of cinephilia” that I haven’t caught up with yet, but I’ll be surprised if I enjoy any of them half as much as I did Whiplash!
2. The Act of Killing. This is what the pessimistic/resigned quadrant in the framework I started to sketch out when talking about Green Border looks like.
1. The Long Day Closes. A legit contender for my 2032 Sight & Sound “Greatest Films of All Times” ballot!
* * *
Porcelain War played Cinemapolis for one week in January so I definitely did have an opportunity to see *all* of the films up for Oscars tonight! I guess I’ll have to settle for 48 out of 49. As always, these are the films I’m rooting for, not the ones I expect to win.
Actress in a Supporting Role: Ariana Grande – Wicked
Adapted Screenplay: A Complete Unknown.I won’t be at all disappointed if Nickel Boys wins, but I loved Pete Seeger’s strategically ill-advised speech about the “teaspoon brigade” and the placement of Joan Baez’s comment “you’re kind of an asshole, Bob.”
Makeup & Hairstyling: The Substance. Demi Moore’s Elisabeth Sparkle’s first prematurely decrepit finger was one of Movie Year 2024’s standout moments for me.
Documentary Short: Incident. The only way I won’t throw something at the television if it doesn’t win is if Instruments of a Beating Heart does instead.
Documentary Feature: No Other Land
Cinematography: The Brutalist.I’m incredulous that Nickel Boys wasn’t nominated in this category.
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 canbe found here.A running list ofall 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 canbe found here.A running list ofall of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.
