Alternative Summer Flicks

It’s the middle of June, and the Cornell Cinema summer season rapidly approaches — a fantastic time when all the cinema staff work twice as often to provide you with filmic entertainment even more obscure than usual. We reopen on this Sunday (the 17th) and run through the first week of August. Readers who live in Ithaca should come, and those who don’t, well, sorry.

Highlights:

• Cinema under the Stars: Two special outdoor screenings on the Willard Straight terrace — The Triplets of Belleville (June 28) and To Have and Have Not (July 12). A lovely way to spend a languid summer evening. I hear there is some form of cash bar, but bring your own snacks, and arrive early for good seats. Video purists note: these will be video projections, not film. Also, if you deeply care about this fact, you suck.
• Old-ish Things: beyond the aforementioned To Have and Have
  Not, there will be Psycho, Lattuada’s Mafioso, Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her, and, uh, Thelma and Louise.
• In Case You Missed It: Pan’s Labyrinth, Letters From Iwo Jima, 300, Hot Fuzz.
• This Sounds Interesting: Reviewers seem to have gone gaga over Black Snake Moan, and the review has the phrase “cure her hysterical nymphomania.” Red Road is a noir thriller involving the British closed-circuit camera obsession. The Lives of Others makes the point that life wasn’t really all that fantastic in East Germany. Any comedy described as “Jim Jarmusch meets Aki Kaurismaki” (Whiskey) sounds perfect, if you’re into empathetic cringing.