Who knew Bud Selig likes fabulist movies spoken in Farsi? There he was, sitting directly behind me during a 2010 Milwaukee Film Festival screening of Shirin Neshat’s “Women Without Men,” a work of magic realism about four Tehran women. I’ve often had the good fortune of bumping into public figures at festivals—Harold Ramis, Susan Sarandon […]
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Topping my Netflix queue today are “The Forbidden Room,” an absurdist ode to early cinema from Canada, and “Winter Sleep,” a prizewinning drama from Turkey. If we scroll past the blockbusters, the relentless, rotating inventories of streaming services remind us that unique movies are always being made all over the world—and that filmgoers seldom have
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Perhaps there are too many movies. When I started writing professionally about cinema 24 years ago, seeing all the key films that received North American distribution—blockbusters, indies, foreign releases—was a feasible proposition, but now that technology has democratized the medium and swelled access to motion pictures of all stripes, it’s impossible to stay ahead of
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You’ve heard of sing-along movies, but what about the dance-along? Milwaukee Film Festival patrons are encouraged to unlock their bodies Saturday night during “Stop Making Sense” (Oriental Theatre, 11 p.m.), Jonathan Demme’s euphoric 1984 concert film about the Talking Heads and the ever-expanding big suit worn by frontman David Byrne. Playing for the third consecutive
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After six years of launching with undercooked comedies, pint-sized documentaries, and one scorching drama made by relative unknowns, the Milwaukee Film Festival will for the first time kick off with a movie directed by a major international figure. Paolo Sorrentino’s “Youth,” which stars Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel as entertainment legends trading jokes and wisdom
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Film festivals are about seeing tons of movies, sure, but they’re also about hanging out with people who love talking about all those movies. Not long after the curtain fell on the 2014 Milwaukee Film Festival, Critic Speak contributor Eric Beltmann and The Cinemaphile blogger Shelly Sampon decided to continue a dialogue that started between
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“I’m going to yell at him when I go back to Iran,” Maryam Sepehri said while we chatted in the lobby of the Downer Theatre. She was referring to Mohammed Rasoulof, whose risky new feature “Manuscripts Don’t Burn” screened at this year’s Milwaukee Film Festival. Maryam, a documentary filmmaker from Tehran, knows Rasoulof but was
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Guitar gods, of course, only play after the openers are through. No wonder the Milwaukee Film Festival saved its Centerpiece selection, a biopic starring Outkast’s André Benjamin as legendary musician Jimi Hendrix, for its final week. “Jimi: All Is by My Side” is written and directed by Mequon native John Ridley, who earned an Oscar
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For the Milwaukee Film Festival, the Times they are a-changin’. The festival is shaking things up for its sixth year, most notably by adding the Times Cinema in Washington Heights to its roster of sites. The cozy, single-screen theater has been a community treasure since 1935, making it a natural fit for a festival that
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