For the first time in 24 years, or since “Titanic” took home 11 statuettes a good six months before I would ultimately see it on the double-decker VHS set, I will be skipping the Oscars telecast this evening. Maybe the thought of out-of-touch gatekeepers alienating a core fanbase that has stood by them for decades […]
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Critics who write with their politics first have all too conveniently positioned “Nomadland,” the Oscar frontrunner of the case-sensitive Moment, as an indictment of individualism. But that’s frankly too easily; to position Frances McDormand’s Fern as a squeaky cog in the dirty machine of American capitalism is, frankly, to deny the real nuance of the
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Might a third dimension be too much for the Milwaukee Film Festival? That prospect crossed my mind as I accepted a pair of 3D glasses for “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” a fluorescent Chinese marvel about Luo Hongwu, a man returning home to the Guizhou province to search for a past lover. Seventy minutes into
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Two seconds and three quick cuts is all Alfred Hitchcock needed to traumatize me. Watching “The Birds” on television as an impressionable 12-year-old seemed like a good idea until Jessica Tandy discovered the farmer with his eyes pecked out. Rather than a traditional zoom, Hitchcock used three staccato shots to close in on the wounded
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While it won’t win any trophies for elegance, “Mouth Harp in Minor Key: Hamid Naficy in/on Exile” still has one of the best titles of any movie at this year’s Milwaukee Film Festival. The documentary is indeed a minor, restrained affair about Hamid Naficy, a distinguished film scholar at Northwestern University. But when he demonstrates
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Like Charlie Chaplin’s famous prospector, the Milwaukee Film Festival knows there’s gold to be found due north. By adding the historic Rivoli Theatre in downtown Cedarburg to its roster of sites, the annual festival, which opens its 11th edition Thursday, is making an unprecedented push northward. Although MFF once had an outpost in Mequon, it
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The 10th annual Milwaukee Film Festival, which closed Nov. 1, brought more than 300 films to audiences in southeastern Wisconsin. Critic Speak contributor Eric Beltmann and The Cinemaphile blogger Shelly Sampon discuss how the election and festival seasons overlapped and why “Support the Girls” was the perfect emblem for a festival dominated by gender themes.
“They’re both judges,” explained Peter Goldberg, a retired public defender, as he waved at two filmgoers seated near the front of the Jan Serr Studio Cinema. We were there to see “The Guilty,” a Danish thriller that proved to be one of the most buzzworthy movies at the 10th annual Milwaukee Film Festival, which closed
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Of all the movies I would have guessed “Sicario: Day of the Soldado” to remind me of, “Jackie Brown” wouldn’t have been one of them. Hear me out. The second installment of the “Sircario” series is, underneath its sheen of gun violence and political intrigue, a hangout movie. It takes the two primary supporting characters
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Madeleine Olnek’s latest comedy is about a poet, but it’s not really about poetry. Instead, “Wild Nights with Emily,” which screened last night as the Milwaukee Film Festival’s centerpiece film, revisits the myths surrounding Emily Dickinson to assess how women have been perceived and misrepresented throughout American history. If Walt Whitman is the great extrovert
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