Credit: Jennifer Johnson for Milwaukee Film

Conversation: Critics Eric Beltmann and Shelly Sampon React to the 2017 Milwaukee Film Festival

The ninth annual Milwaukee Film Festival, which closed Oct. 12, hosted a record-breaking 84,000 attendees, 101 sold-out screenings, and nearly 200 filmmakers and guests participating in talkbacks. The conversation continues below, as Critic Speak contributor Eric Beltmann and The Cinemaphile blogger Shelly Sampon discuss why “The Blood Is at the Doorstep” deserved its Audience Award …

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2017 Milwaukee Film Festival: Cream City Cinema

Where should we pin the good citizenship ribbon? While some film festivals function as annual interlopers—destination events that cater to out-of-towners while largely excluding the locals—the nonprofit Milwaukee Film Festival has always been a provincial affair, inseparable from the city and its people. For nine years, MFF has invested in Milwaukee by celebrating its unique …

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"Rat Film" screens at the 2017 Milwaukee Film Festival

2017 Milwaukee Film Festival: Competition

I suppose it’s easier to sell a throwback Western starring Peter Fonda than a nonfiction look at Baltimore’s rat infestation. No wonder, then, that the Milwaukee Film Festival, which opened Thursday, screened “The Ballad of Lefty Brown” last night inside the vast, majestic Oriental Theatre but will show “Rat Film” (pictured above) in an afternoon …

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Review: “Baby Driver”

“Baby Driver” is bubblegum crime, a pop-infused whirlwind of electric thrills and fizzy romance. It’s a heckuva lot of fun while it lasts, and more than a little catchy, but don’t expect to be moved by it.

TCM Classic Film Festival 2017: Even As Nitrate Packs ‘Em In, The Audience Remains the Highlight

“It eliminates the middle men,” Academy Film Archive director Michael Pogorzelski said of the experience of watching a nitrate print before a sold-out crowd about to take in Powell and Pressburger’s towering “Black Narcissus” in the format at last weekend’s TCM Classic Film Festival. The idea being that an original nitrate print collapses the distance …

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2017 Oscars

Danny Baldwin’s 2017 Oscar Picks and Predictions

If I had two wishes for tonight’s Academy Awards ceremony–you don’t get three, contrary to popular belief, as the Ravioli Genie informs the protagonist of Le génie de la boîte de raviolis, a charming short currently playing before Best Animated Feature nominee My Life as a Zucchini–I know exactly what they’d be. One, I’d wish for host Jimmy …

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10 Years Ago Today: The San Diego Cinema That Defined Who I Am As a Moviegoer Closed Its Doors

Ten years ago today, an ordinary movie theater that looked like any other built in the 1980s—with the customary shoebox auditoriums, pink-tiled concession stand, forever ketchup-stained carpeting, hallways barely wide enough to contain the exiting masses, and a distinct absence of any of the electronic signage that has become ubiquitous in today’s megaplexes—closed to the …

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