Looking for a surefire way to blow the minds of your friends? Shelve the cookbook. Drop the name-dropping. Forget that party trick (seriously, just no).
All you really need is this year’s Milwaukee Film Festival program book, which is brimming with proven strategies like How to Impress Your Friends by Seeing Movies Before Anyone Else. Today, for example, MFF is showing “Obsession” (9 p.m., Oriental Theatre) ahead of its May 15 wide release. If your friends are horror fiends, they are probably already obsessing over the film’s buzzworthy trailer, which pitches the movie’s premise—an awkward teen makes a romantic wish that goes very, very wrong—somewhere between “Swimfan” and “The Substance.”
“It’s not even out yet,” your stunned friends will say. “How did you see it already?”
“I’ve also seen ‘Hokum,’” you’ll deadpan, sending your friends into a frenzy, hands behind their heads, eyes bulging, mouths open.
Like “Obsession,” “Hokum” is among the season’s most anticipated fright flicks. Adam Scott plays an American novelist navigating a secluded Irish hotel haunted by a witch. If you missed Wednesday’s screening, the festival will share it again on Saturday (11:30 p.m., Oriental Theatre), six days before its official release. Although I was considerably cooler than most toward “Oddity,” director Damian McCarthy’s previous ghost story, advance word suggests “Hokum” represents an upgrade. Besides, who doesn’t want to see Ben Wyatt from “Parks and Recreation” wrestle malevolent forces?
Seeking out the high-profile movies with familiar faces is a natural impulse, but true fest fanatics—the ones carrying dog-eared, marked-up program books—know it’s a rookie mistake. Mainstream movies are easy to catch later. Why prioritize “Hokum” when you could instead see hard-to-find horror indies about a man stuck in a toilet (“Flush”) and a woman eating human ashes (“Saccharine”)? Where else will you see a documentary about competitive snake hunters (“The Python Hunt”) and a tragicomedy told from the perspective of a chicken (“Hen”)? Or a trippy drama about a sentient ginkgo tree (“Silent Friend”)? If those movies won’t impress your friends, you need better friends.
The Milwaukee Film Festival started April 16 and runs through April 30. So far I’ve enjoyed many under-the-radar movies about extraordinary companions, so let me recommend one for each remaining day of the festival.
Friday, April 24
For the title character of “Nino” (4:15 p.m., Downer Theatre), a young Parisian newly diagnosed with throat cancer, each encounter with family or friends becomes an awkward, vulnerable opportunity to process his own mortality. Rising star Théodore Pellerin gives Nino a rich interiority; behind his gentle eyes we can sense the earthquake within. Still, the real subject of this unsentimental drama is not disease but the refuge Nino seeks, by turns, in his mother, a loyal friend and a former classmate who proves to be, um, impulsively helpful before Nino starts the chemotherapy that will render him sterile.
Saturday, April 25
There are actually two meet-cutes between the unlikely sweethearts in “A Sad and Beautiful World” (11:45 a.m., Oriental Theatre), first as schoolchildren sent to the corner, then as young adults who reconnect in present-day Beirut. Resourceful editing keeps the time-shifting structure fast and funny, but what starts as the wittiest romantic comedy of the season eventually becomes the story of a nation, and perhaps a relationship, in collapse. Much of the surprise dissipates after a time jump—the underlying ideas about Lebanon begin to unfold in a rote way—and yet the movie stays vibrant and focused on the thin lines between pleasure and pain, between the personal and the political. “It’s fireworks, honey, not war,” one woman says, with little conviction.
Sunday, April 26
Two hard-drinking pals are at the center of “The Last One for the Road” (4:45 p.m., Oriental Theatre), but they become a trio after picking up a shy architecture student who joins them on a multi-day odyssey in search of one last drink. “It’s still yesterday for us,” they declare, which signals how this Italian road dramedy blurs the hours and places into a relentlessly casual reverie. Look closer, though, and you’ll detect enough melancholy—about aging and a changing culture—so that near the end, when these middle-aged men zestfully cheer on their new young friend, they might, for the first time, be rooting for Italy’s future.
Monday, April 27
You definitely have to be there for “You Had to Be There” (12:15 p.m., Downer Theatre), which is like reminiscing with old friends—except in this case, the friends are comedy elders Martin Short, Andrea Martin, Eugene Levy and more. This merry documentary transports them (and us) back to 1972, when a flock of not-yet-famous performers was assembled for a Toronto staging of “Godspell.” The devil has nothing on director Nick Davis, who trumpets a dubious cosmology for generations of comedy but whose greatest trick is keeping the anecdotes lively and hilarious despite having zero footage of the actual production.
Tuesday, April 28
“You are not a discovery. You are something much better. You are a rediscovery,” an agent tells Ed Saxberger, a New York mailman who was once a poet, and that reveals how “Late Fame” (7 p.m., Oriental Theatre) is preoccupied with the modern impulse to exchange authenticity for affectation. When a young literary collective tracks down Saxberger (Willem Dafoe), he can’t resist being swept into their vortex of enthusiasms, pretensions and mannerisms adopted from bygone eras. Their performative gestures are seductive, but are they real? At a time when artificial intelligence is challenging traditional definitions of artistic expression, “Late Fame” makes a human and sincere argument for why recreating is never the same thing as creating.
Wednesday, April 29
Imagine recording a real-life cast of quirky paddle tennis players who converge at the Venice Beach courts, looking at the hundreds of hours of footage and deciding, “Well, let’s only use the funny bits.” That’s “Kings of Venice” (5 p.m., Oriental Theatre), a 95-minute sports documentary that has been ruthlessly edited for maximum comedy. Cartoonish, rousing and a little mean, the movie could easily be mistaken for one of Christopher Guest’s hugely entertaining mockumentaries. When I saw this guaranteed crowdpleaser with hundreds of filmgoers in March, there was one moment of spontaneous applause, one unified “awww!” and nonstop laughter.
Thursday, April 30
Winner of the Critics’ Week Grand Prize at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, “A Useful Ghost” (6:45 p.m., Downer Theatre) is already available on streaming services. But this uncategorizable movie from Thailand ought to be seen with a large, adventurous audience. If you go, you’ll be treated to a deadpan, wholly original allegory about how the past never dies that involves a family factory, toxic dust, a mysterious repairman and a dead wife who returns by possessing a machine… which is why you’ll also be able to say you witnessed a passionate love scene between a man and a vacuum cleaner. Your friends will never believe you.
The full lineup plus ticket and venue information are online at mkefilm.org/mff.