Monthly Archives: April 2014

“Cheap Thrills”: Giving the one-percenters the finger

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“Cheap Thrills” has a free screening in Madison at 7 p.m. Sunday, April 13 at the Union South Marquee Theatre, 1308 W. Dayton St. Director E.L. Katz and actor Pat Healy will be in attendance. R, 1:25, three and a half stars out of four. This review is based on a report I wrote from the 2013 Wisconsin Film Festival.

“Cheap Thrills” is, first and foremost, a hell of a lot of fun, a raucous pressure cooker that dishes out laughs and shrieks with equal measure. I am a bit of a wuss when it comes to movies like this, but I walked out of a screening feeling like I had just put my tongue on a 9-volt battery. In a good way.

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“The Lunchbox”: Lost in Mumbai, two strangers connect over a meal

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“The Lunchbox” is now playing at Sundance Cinemas. PG, 1:45, three and a half stars out of four.

First of all, I want one of those lunchboxes. Instead of the suitcase-style boxes that Americans are used to, the Indian characters in “The Lunchbox” use an ingenious contraption made up of stacking cylinders, so you can put your vegetables in one cylinder, the rice in a second and the sauce in a third.

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“Rob the Mob”: Bonnie and Clyde take on Vito and Carmine

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“Rob the Mob” is now playing at Sundance Cinemas. R, 1;44, three stars out of four.

From the outside, “Rob the Mob” looks like it’ll be a gritty slice of gangster life. But when you see it’s directed by Raymond De Fellitta, who made some ingratiating Italian-American comedy-dramas in “City Island” and “Two Family House,” you suspect that beneath the gunplay and fuhgettaboutits beats a sentimental heart. The f-bombs are hurled, but lovingly.

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Wisconsin Film Festival: The amazing, marketable cinematic poetry of “Visitors”

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Sean Weitner writes about “Visitors,” which played to a packed house at Sundance Cinemas on Tuesday night:

“Visitors” is a mesmeric, meditative film, and those aren’t subjective judgments. Stitched together from long shots of people’s faces, abandoned skyscrapers, decaying statuary, wintry swampland, the moon and a Bronx gorilla, this non-narrative film conjures a mood of ominous ruin.

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“Enemy”: Getting a hold of yourself

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Enemy” opens Friday at Sundance Cinemas. R, 1:30, three stars out of four.

It happened to me. It was 1995, and I was backpacking through Europe. At the Czech Consulate in London, while waiting to get a travel visa to go to Prague, I looked across the crowded waiting room. Slouched against the far wall was a man who looked exactly like me.

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Wisconsin Film Festival: Paul Verhoeven tries crowd-sourcing film in “Tricked”

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So, remember all that build-up to the Wisconsin Film Festival on this blog? Remember how I said over and over to check back for daily coverage of the festival? Some of you may have seen me on Twitter calling myself the “Helen Thomas of the Wisconsin Film Festival” since I had covered it every year since it started in 1999.

Yeah, about that.

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Wisconsin Film Festival: Rediscovering Ken Loach’s weird and wonderful “Black Jack”

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Sean Weitner weighs in on Ken Loach’s “Black Jack.” It plays a second time at the Wisconsin Film Festival on Thursday, April 10 at 4 p.m. at Sundance Cinemas.

“Black Jack” is the forgotten third feature of British director Ken Loach (“The Wind That Shakes the Barley,” “The Angels’ Share“), released in 1979 and based on a 1969 children’s novel of 18th century adventure. It’s a doozy.

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Instant Gratification: “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and four other good movies to watch on Netflix Instant

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It’s all classic movies this week (well, movies that are a decade old at least), in this week’s edition of Instant Gratification.

Pick of the week: “Close Encounters of the Third Kind“: Steven Spielberg’s 1977 UFO thriller stands the test of time because it’s so grounded, with Richard Dreyfuss and the other folks obsessed with Devil’s Tower seemingly like real middle-class people. Looking back, the film plays like a bridge between the personal filmmaking of 1970s auteurs and the blockbusters still to come.

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UPDATED: 38 sellouts at this year’s Wisconsin Film Festival

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Today’s the last day to buy advance tickets for the 16th annual Wisconsin Film Festival through wifilmfest.org. Starting Thursday, the first day of the eight-day festival, tickets will be available for a film at the venue on the day of the screening (meaning you can buy a ticket for an evening show that morning, which is a smart strategy). Even for the films below, which sold out all their advance tickets, a limited number of rush tickets will likely be available — just get in line at least an hour before the screening and cross your fingers.

Hopefully this list of advance ticket sellouts will help you plan out your fest. 

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Wisconsin Film Festival Spotlight: “Dangerous Acts Starring the Unstable Elements of Belarus”

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The Wisconsin Film Festival starts on Thursday, April 3, and we’re zooming in on one of the many films that still have advance tickets available via wifilmfest.org. Today, Sean Weitner takes a look at “Dangerous Acts Starring the Unstable Elements of Belarus.” Make sure to check back to Madison Movie for daily coverage throughout the eight-day festival.

“Dangerous Acts Starring the Unstable Elements of Belarus,” (Friday, 12:15 p.m, UW-Cinematheque, and Tuesday, April 8, 9 p.m. Sundance)

Neither screening of this documentary has sold out, so heads up: You can still get a ticket to what could be *the* chatter-churning title of the festival. As a piece of filmmaking it’s commendable, though not sensational, following the life and (especially) work of Belarus Free Theatre, a guerrilla avant garde troupe hounded by “the last dictatorship of Europe,” that of Alexander Lukashenko. Their work is imagination as protest, protest as art, art as guillotine. It’s agitprop to engage both sides of #wiunion, because who can’t root against Lukashenko?

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