Mack Bates

Moviegoers recently spoke with Milwaukee Film’s Education Director Susan Kerns about the launch of a new filmmaking showcase for youth (18 and under) entitled The Milwaukee Youth Show that’s a part of this year’s Milwaukee Children’s Festival which itself is an annual fixture of the Milwaukee Film Festival. The Milwaukee Youth Show, a youth-skewing offshoot of the festival’s The Milwaukee Show, an annual showcase of the best shorts from local filmmakers, makes its inaugural bow at the 2012 Milwaukee Film Festival this Saturday, Sept. 29 at 11 a.m. at the Oriental Theatre. Kerns, an educator, and filmmaker in her own right…

Fellow film enthusiasts take note: The official start of the 2012 Milwaukee Film Festival is mere hours away.  Fifteen days, 220 films (comprised of 91 features and 131 shorts), playing at three local theaters (the Oriental, the Downer and the Fox-Bay Cinema). And that’s not even counting tonight’s sure-to-be memorable opening night soiree at Discovery World  following the festival’s 6:30 p.m. opening night screening of the French-Canadian sperm donor comedy sensation Starbuck (try saying that five time fast) at the Oriental Theatre on Milwaukee’s East Side. Nor does that count the various film panels and discussions, post-screening Q & A…

The Milwaukee Film Festival logo projected onto Discovery World. Even though we’re in the midst of a renaissance of sorts regarding over-the-top comedy on both the big and small screen with comedy kingpins Judd Apatow and Seth MacFarlane leading the charge, it’s not every day one hears universal praise about a foreign-language film centered around a 40-something slacker with an expectant girlfriend who learns that copious sperm donations of his made 20 years ago have contributed to the births of 533 children, some of whom are interested in knowing the identity of their birth father. That’s the odd premise for…

Ostensibly ripping a page from the well-publicized Bernie Madoff case, the new film Arbitrage from writer-director Nicholas Jarecki is not only timely, it’s a thoroughly satisfying drama with a terrific lead performance by Richard Gere, his finest on-screen work since he played a corrupt L.A. cop in the 1990 film Internal Affairs which got overshadowed by his other 1990 film, the wildly popular (still) Pretty Woman. Robert Miller (Gere) is a billionaire hedge fund magnate living the life of luxury in Manhattan with his gorgeous, philanthropist wife Ellen (Oscar winner Susan Sarandon). Their enormous Manhattan digs are straight out of Architectural Digest. They fly around in…

Summer is officially over. Kids are back in school. The leaves are starting to change. And before too long, we’ll all be breaking out our long sleeve shirts, jeans, and parkas to brave another typically cold Wisconsin fall and winter. But one thing that remains constant – no matter the season – is figuring out what upcoming films are likely to deliver the biggest bang for your hard-earned dollars. With that in mind, here are five films scheduled to be released in the Milwaukee area this month that based on several criteria – star power, available film trailers and buzz…

Writer-director Peter Hedges third feature film, The Odd Life of Timothy Green, a fable which casts the appealing duo of Jennifer Garner and Joel Edgerton as a childless married couple in small-town USA with insurmountable fertility issues calls upon its audience to suspend their disbelief from the beginning straight through the predictable end.  Framed around scenes of Cindy and Jim Green (Garner and Edgerton) telling a justifiably skeptical adoption agency director (solidly played by Oscar nominee Shohreh Aghdashloo, The House of Sand and Fog), the increasingly preposterous, yet entirely factual account of how they came to be the one-time parents of the…

Earlier this year in January, Beasts of the Southern Wild, (which opens in Milwaukee exclusively at the Landmark Downer Theater this Friday), a whimsical film about a resilient little girl named Hushpuppy, played by spirited newcomer Quvenzhané Wallis, who’s literally and figuratively trying to stay afloat alongside her ailing father (played by newcomer Dwight Henry) in Louisiana bayou country, rocked the crowd at Utah’s Sundance Film Festival. Cinematographer Ben Richardson’s lush, evocative camerawork was cited by the festival’s jury with the Cinematography Award, and writer-director Benh Zeitlin was awarded the festival’s top prize for narrative film – the coveted Grand Jury Prize.…

By popular demand, the father-son bonding film, WaterWalk, starring veteran character actor Robert Cicchini and newcomer Chase Maser, will show in Milwaukee this week* at the historic Oriental Theatre, located at 2230 North Farwell Avenue on Milwaukee’s East Side, in a one-time engagement this Tuesday, June 26 at 7 p.m. Directed by Cicchini, from a script by Richard Harris and Roger Rapoport (the latter of whom is also the film‘s producer), WaterWalk is a film adaptation of the book of the same name by Steve Faulkner. The film, like the book, chronicles Faulkner’s (played by Cicchini) attempt with his college-bound…

Earlier this year in January, Beasts of the Southern Wild, (which opens in Milwaukee exclusively at the Landmark Downer Theater this Friday), a whimsical film about a resilient little girl named Hushpuppy, played by spirited newcomer Quvenzhane Wallis, who’s literally and figuratively trying to stay afloat alongside her ailing father (played by newcomer Dwight Henry) in Louisiana bayou country, rocked the crowd at Utah’s Sundance Film Festival. Cinematographer Ben Richardson’s lush, evocative camerawork was cited by the festival’s jury with the Cinematography Award, and writer-director Benh Zeitlin was awarded the festival’s top prize for narrative film — the coveted Grand…