The 16th annual Milwaukee Film Festival, which closed April 25, brought more than 300 films to audiences in southeastern Wisconsin. Critic Speak contributors Eric Beltmann and Shelly Sampon discuss their shared love for Gene Wilder, how the Downer Theatre returned to the festival and why virtual options should return, too. Eric Beltmann: Before we dive […]
After setting the over/under at 15 minutes, I lost the wager in my mind: It didn’t take that long for the first person to walk out. The Milwaukee Film Festival’s annual Super Secret Members-Only Screening is always a gamble. Without knowing which movie would show, hundreds of dues-paying members of Milwaukee Film, the nonprofit organization
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Trân Anh Hùng’s “The Taste of Things” is no popcorn movie. Concession stands are downright vulgar compared to the farmhouse kitchen at the center of Hùng’s tranquil story about food, art and passion. Set in fin-de-siècle rural France, the movie opens with a nearly wordless sequence in which the camera spends half an hour delicately
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Never read your reviews, goes the old adage. But maybe it’s not so easy for an actor to ignore a bad notice while being heckled by his own director during their movie’s hometown premiere. “Boo!,” bellowed Mike Cheslik from the right aisle of the Oriental Theatre’s main auditorium, which was packed April 28 for 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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