One of the hottest titles at this year’s Milwaukee Film Festival is coming to West Bend, and the wait won’t be long. “Almost Sunrise,” the festival’s Centerpiece Film, concerns two Iraq veterans now battling depression, anxiety and guilt. Together they embark on a 2,700-mile mental health march from Milwaukee to Santa Monica. Along the way, […]
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Who knew Bud Selig likes fabulist movies spoken in Farsi? There he was, sitting directly behind me during a 2010 Milwaukee Film Festival screening of Shirin Neshat’s “Women Without Men,” a work of magic realism about four Tehran women. I’ve often had the good fortune of bumping into public figures at festivals—Harold Ramis, Susan Sarandon
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Topping my Netflix queue today are “The Forbidden Room,” an absurdist ode to early cinema from Canada, and “Winter Sleep,” a prizewinning drama from Turkey. If we scroll past the blockbusters, the relentless, rotating inventories of streaming services remind us that unique movies are always being made all over the world—and that filmgoers seldom have
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Curious name, “A War.” The setting of Tobias Lindholm’s miniature combat film is very specific—Afghanistan’s Helmand Province, where a group of Danish soldiers try to keep the peace—and yet that title, with its assertive indefinite article, suggests a deliberate distancing, presenting instead a military operation that might stand in for many battles and maybe all
If no one talks about it, does a movie exist? Perhaps the real meaning of a film festival lies in its sidewalk chatter. Even though the 2015 Milwaukee Film Festival closed Oct. 8, Critic Speak contributor Eric Beltmann and The Cinemaphile blogger Shelly Sampon lengthened the festival through one more conversation. Eric Beltmann: I think
Perhaps there are too many movies. When I started writing professionally about cinema 24 years ago, seeing all the key films that received North American distribution—blockbusters, indies, foreign releases—was a feasible proposition, but now that technology has democratized the medium and swelled access to motion pictures of all stripes, it’s impossible to stay ahead of
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You’ve heard of sing-along movies, but what about the dance-along? Milwaukee Film Festival patrons are encouraged to unlock their bodies Saturday night during “Stop Making Sense” (Oriental Theatre, 11 p.m.), Jonathan Demme’s euphoric 1984 concert film about the Talking Heads and the ever-expanding big suit worn by frontman David Byrne. Playing for the third consecutive
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It’s a sorry festivalgoer that doesn’t make at least one deep cut discovery. Much of the ink spilled about the Milwaukee Film Festival, given its rising cultural cachet, is devoted to the Competition and Spotlight programming. (If you haven’t heard, Saturday’s centerpiece is the nonfiction “The Great Alone,” about four-time Iditarod champion Lance Mackey frosting
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After six years of launching with undercooked comedies, pint-sized documentaries, and one scorching drama made by relative unknowns, the Milwaukee Film Festival will for the first time kick off with a movie directed by a major international figure. Paolo Sorrentino’s “Youth,” which stars Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel as entertainment legends trading jokes and wisdom
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Film festivals are about seeing tons of movies, sure, but they’re also about hanging out with people who love talking about all those movies. Not long after the curtain fell on the 2014 Milwaukee Film Festival, Critic Speak contributor Eric Beltmann and The Cinemaphile blogger Shelly Sampon decided to continue a dialogue that started between
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