MFF

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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Documentarian Maryam Sepehri, right, interviews Hamid Naficy, the subject of “Mouth Harp in Minor Key” at his home in Chicago. Naficy, a cultural studies scholar at Northwestern University, left his home country of Iran in 1979. Photo courtesy of Sepehri.

MFF 2019 Interview: Maryam Sepehri Says Her New Documentary is ‘Very Personal’

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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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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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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