No movies? No problem for the Missed Madison Film Festival

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For a city its size, Madison does pretty well when it comes to getting movies on the big screen. Between Sundance Cinemas, the Wisconsin Film Festival, WUD Film, the UW-Cinematheque, the MMOCA Spotlight Cinema series, Micro-Wave Cinema and more, we get to see films theatrically that the big boys in Milwaukee and Minneapolis have to wait to see on DVD or Netflix.

But with hundreds of movies being released every year, many of them getting the barest theatrical runs in New York and L.A. before heading straight to video-on-demand, we can’t get everything. That’s where the Missed Madison Film Festival comes in.

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Instant Gratification: “Goodnight Mommy” and four other good movies to watch on Amazon Prime and Netflix

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Pick of the week: “Goodnight Mommy“ (Amazon Prime) — My full review is here. Creepy twin boys. A mysteriously bandaged mother. A remote country house. These are the elements for a terrifically creepy Austrian horror film, which deliberately plays against genre conventions by working without creepy music, in broad daylight. Along with the descent into a nasty third act, the film never loses sight of its emotional underpinnings, its exploration into how family bonds can warp under stress.

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Sundance Screening Room Calendar returns in 2016 with “Mustang,” “Viva” and “A Perfect Day”

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The purchase of the Sundance Cinemas chain by Carmike Theaters in October doesn’t seem to have had much of a visible effect on the Madison theater. Which is a good thing for fans who have been flocking to the Hilldale Mall theater during this very busy winter movie season.

And now comes word that another favorite Sundance tradition will survive the change-over — the Sundance Screening Room calendar returns on January 29 with a new slate of foreign, documentary and independent films. The calendar locks in some terrific films on the schedule through mid-March, and I’m planning to return to do some post-show chats after some of the films. Stay tuned.

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Instant Gratification: “Uncle John” and four other good movies to watch on Netflix

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Pick of the week: “Uncle John“ — My full review is here. This 2015 Wisconsin Film Festival hit, filmed in Lodi and Chicago, is part rural noir, as a farmer (John Ashton) wrestles with the consequences of a deadly deed. But it’s also an urban romance, as the farmer’s nephew deals with love and career issues in the Chicago advertising. How director Steven Piet and co-writer Erik Crary bring the two genres in an effective way helps make for an assured debut.

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The 10 worst movies of 2015

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I was on the fence about whether to do a Top 10 worst films of the year, a) because I haven’t seen “Point Break” yet and b) because it felt like taking one last, mean-spirited kick at some films that had already taken plenty of abuse. But then friends on social media essentially began chanting “Kick! Kick!” so I decided to give the people what they wanted.

There are some very bad movies on this list. Just very bad and wrong and not good. But there are also some movies that, while not technically horrible, were just such massive disappointments, such wastes of potential, that in some ways I find them worse than the actual bad movies.

Anyway, let’s cleanse ourselves of these stinkers and leave them behind in 2015. Maybe 2016 will be nothing but great movies! Maybe.

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Instant Gratification: “Selma” and four other good movies to watch on Amazon Prime and Netflix

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Pick of the week: “Selma” (Amazon Prime) — My full review is here. Instead of a tidy history-class lesson on the civil rights movement, Ava Duvernay presents the messiness of history in all its forms, focusing in on the three-month period where Martin Luther King, Jr. (a masterful David Oyelowo) leads a savvy protest movement to sway public opinion behind his cause. The images of violence against the protesters are immediate and horrible, and one comes away with a profound sense that history does not just have to happen, but has to be worked for, step by step.

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Gone in an Instant: “There Will Be Blood” and many more great films leaving Netflix at the end of December

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If you’re a Netflix subscriber who loves great movies, by all means, spend Christmas with your family. But on Dec. 26, shut yourself off in the den with some pre-packaged meals and a jug of water — you’ve got some serious streaming to do between now and the end of the year.

Each month the “Gone in an Instant” column highlights five movies that are leaving Netflix at the end of the month, as partnerships with studios dissolve or the streaming site swaps out content to make room for new films and TV shows.

And there’s just no way to sugarcoat this — January 2016 is going to be brutal.

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“Blind”: Seeing is not believing in tricky Norwegian drama

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Eskil Vogt’s “Blind” is about a writer who goes blind while in her mid-30s. But don’t think for a moment this is your standard drama about a character dealing with her disability, her human spirit triumphant. Instead, it’s a playful and knotty puzzle of a film about what can happen inside an imaginative mind, one that’s suddenly had one of its key links to the outside world cut off. The film premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival and is now out on DVD from Zeitgeist Films.

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“Applesauce”: Not something you want to serve over the holidays

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“Applesauce” contains some potentially interesting things in a movie — New York, infidelity and severed body parts. And yet writer-director Onur Tukel throws elements of comedy, drama and horror haphazardly into an unsweetened mash of genres that’s very unsatisfying. The movie is now out on DVD from Dark Sky Films.

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“The Mend”: He is heavy, he’s my brother

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From the outset, you think you know what sort of independent movie John Magary’s “The Mend” is going to be. Two brothers, one a straight-arrow, the other a ne’er-do-well rebel type, have been estranged for years, but manage to bond over one crazy weekend in New York City. The rebel learns to be a little responsible and, hey, maybe that stuffy straight arrow learns to loosen his tie and be a little more spontaneous, right? Maybe one of them could be played by Josh Lucas, the blandly handsome actor from the NBC version of “The Firm” and doing voice over ads for Home Depot.

“The Mend” does have many of those elements in place, including Lucas. But it is a bracingly different sort of film, a funny and scabrous look at family dysfunction that lives many loose ends both narrative and visual untied. Magary always wants to show rather than tell, suggest rather than show, and it makes for a film that gets its hooks in more deeply than you might anticipate.

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