2018 Milwaukee Film Festival

Critics Eric Beltmann and Shelly Sampon discuss the 2018 Milwaukee Film Festival, which recently concluded.

Conversation: Critics Eric Beltmann and Shelly Sampon React to the 2018 Milwaukee Film Festival

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. …

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Before directing “Wild Nights with Emily,” director Madeleine Olnek was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship to research Emily Dickinson. The comedy stars Molly Shannon as the American poet.

MFF 2018 Review: “Wild Nights with Emily”

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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Set in 1946 Frankfurt, “Bye Bye Germany” follows a group of Jewish door-to-door salesmen trying to regain a sense of belonging after surviving the Holocaust.

The 2018 Milwaukee Film Festival: Das Kino

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 …

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The 2018 Milwaukee Film Festival

Celebrating 10 Years: The 2018 Milwaukee Film Festival

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 …

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