In “Riceboy Sleeps,” Choi Seung-yoon plays a single mother striving to give her son a better life.

MFF 2023: Festival Highlights

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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Natalia Solián delivers an acclaimed performance in “Huesera” as a pregnant woman who finds herself threatened by a sinister entity.

MFF 2023: Worldviews section packs plenty of global pedigree

If the Mexican horror movie “Huesera” turned over a blood sample, its genetic makeup might prove startling. There’s a malignancy inside of Valeria, the young, pregnant wife at the center of Michelle Garza Cervera’s feature debut, and not just because the fetus inside her belly seems hijacked by dark forces. Valeria says she wants a …

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Hasti Ghasemivaghar is the director of “Coming to Small Town America,” one of the nonfiction shorts being showcased in this year's Milwaukee Film Festival.

MFF 2023: Local documentary spotlights four immigrant stories

To get invited to the Milwaukee Film Festival, all Hasti Ghasemivaghar needed was a good idea and 10 bucks. Ghasemivaghar’s “Coming to Small Town America” is one of six nonfiction shorts included in a festival package called The Milwaukee Youth Show: Recording Reality. The program, which is new this year, showcases documentaries made by area …

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Movie Review: “The Whale”

“Why are you fucking with me like this?” Sadie Sink cries out to Brendan Fraser late in “The Whale,” in an exchange that can be read as the film’s climax or its resolution, depending on your outlook. As I watched the emotionally charged, dramatically over-the-top scene unfold, I wanted to be able to pose the …

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Frances McDormand plays Fern in Chloé Zhao's "Nomadland," reviewed here by Critic Speak critic Danny Baldwin.

Review: “Nomadland”

Critics who write with their politics first have all too conveniently positioned “Nomadland,” the Oscar frontrunner of the case-sensitive Moment, as an indictment of individualism. But that’s frankly too easily; to position Frances McDormand’s Fern as a squeaky cog in the dirty machine of American capitalism is, frankly, to deny the real nuance of the …

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