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 …
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 …
MFF 2019 Interview: Maryam Sepehri Says Her New Documentary is ‘Very Personal’ Read More »
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Throughout my first year of teaching in West Bend, my paychecks always misspelled my name. Forgiving others for overlooking my surname’s very German second “n” has always been easy—after all, I have more than four decades of practice—but for me that doubled consonant is an unforgettable part of my identity, a family keepsake that, in …
The great French film director François Truffaut had a simple rule: If you want to know what a story’s really about, reflect on what’s changed by the end. By that metric, the story of the Milwaukee Film Festival’s first decade—its 10th edition opens Thursday—has a classic Hollywood theme. It’s the story of ragtag movie enthusiasts who …
Celebrating 10 Years: The 2018 Milwaukee Film Festival Read More »
After a decade in the making, John Travolta’s passion project, a biopic of my lifetime’s most infamous gangster, hits screens with a splat. Already infamous for its 0% Rotten Tomatoes score, “Gotti” is sure to be listed alongside “Battlefield Earth” as an example of Travolta’s lack of cinematic acumen when it comes to flexing his …
