Moviegoers

Friday, August 15: The Expendables 3, The Giver and What If open in wide release Check local listings for showtimes and pricing. Ugh, these Expendables movies. It should not be that hard to make serviceable action movies with an all-star cast, but you wouldn’t know it based on the two previous movies, each of dubious quality. The first movie suffered from a meaningless plot alongside bland, non-distinct action sequences (although it should be noted, there’s an amazing Mickey Rourke monologue stuffed right in the middle of the inanity that makes the first worth seeing based solely on its existence) whereas…

STATE FAIR (1945, dir. Walter Lang) Available on Amazon Prime. While it not might feature as wide a variety of deep-fried options as our own state fair, this State Fair is a great State Fair. There’s no worries about missing it or being late, it’s waiting there for you through the Amazon Prime service. State Fair isn’t the best Rodgers and Hammerstein big screen translation (Oklahoma!, South Pacific, The Sound of Music would top my list), but the songs are catchy and it’s very nice to see Dana Andrews play a softer character given all of his other career highlights…

Film as a medium has been uniquely obsessed with time for the entirety of its existence – bending, shaping, conquering – allowing us to experience its passage in any number of ways other than the inextricably linear way we experience it. And while projects in the past have chronicled the passage of time over the course of multiple films (Apted’s series of Up documentaries, Linklater’s own Before trilogy) or through various means in a single film (makeup or separate actors portraying a character at different ages), Boyhood is a true original in terms of concept and execution. Returning annually over…

Still from Workers, screening as part of “Passport Mexico” at the Milwaukee Film Festival. Photo courtesy Milwaukee Film. Milwaukee Magazine is proud to be the media sponsor of “Passport: Mexico” at the 6th Annual Milwaukee Film Festival. Today, Milwaukee Film has announced the eight “Passport: Mexico” films that will be screening at the festival, which runs from Sept. 25 through Oct. 9. These are the first films yet to be formally announced for this year’s festival. The full festival lineup will be announced Thursday, Sept. 4, and the Program Book launches Saturday, Sept. 6. This is the fourth year of Milwaukee…

***CRITIC’S CHOICE*** Monday, August 4 through Sunday, August 10: See Boyhood at the Oriental Theatre Check the Landmark Theaters website for showtimes/pricing This space will be updated when my review goes live tomorrow, but I highly encourage you to check out the Linklatest work from Richard at any point this week. I feel confident this will be hanging around the Oriental for quite some time, but this is a film where you can surely believe the hype: a beautiful exploration of the passage of time with beautiful performances that move at the speed of life. Tuesday, August 5 and Thursday,…

There are many ways in which Guardians of the Galaxy is a high watermark for the Marvel moviemaking machine. To those hindered by the visual sameness of previous pictures, you’re given colorful sci-fi landscapes one after another and gorgeously-rendered spaceships that look as though they were pulled straight off the cover of a vintage A.E. van Vogt paperback. If you feel like the previous films relied too much on one another and felt like they needed an annotated edition to keep up with all of the interconnectivity, this movie (more so than most of its predecessors) succeeds largely on its…

In May 2013, Moviegoers’ staff blogger Mack Bates wrote about the Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign thrown by South Milwaukee native and award-winning filmmaker Kyle Olson and the family of Ashleigh Love (a local teenager whose still-unsolved murder made local and national headlines in the fall of 2009), to film an anti-violence documentary short with the working title Letters to Ashleigh. In the film, family members, friends, and strangers would read letters (to Ashleigh) that they had written to her following her death. The goal was to raise at least $3,000 of the film’s proposed $3,500 production budget by the end of…

Tuesday, July 29: WISCONSIN’S MINING STANDOFF 7 p.m. @ Riverside Park Urban Ecology Center 1500 E. Park Place (Free!) Kick off your week with some local flavour from our very own 371 Productions. Director Brad Lichtenstein (As Goes Janesville) has made a short documentary (for the Al Jazeera series ‘Fault Lines’) surrounding the contentious battle over potential iron mining in the pristine Penokee mountain range in Northern Wisconsin. With our polarizing governor signing legislation that paved the way for mining to take place, Native American tribes, local residents and local politicians worried about environmental and water damage clashed with those…

How much enjoyment you derive from Lucy, out in theaters today, largely depends on how badly you think the world was in need of an ersatz 2001 based on specious science. There are those who will react to this film’s hybrid metaphysical thriller state of being poorly, but for those who have appreciated director Luc Besson’s raison d’être (beautiful women meting out justice to hordes of lecherous/villainous men) and cinematic acumen in the past, there is plenty of pleasure within the propulsive narrative he’s created here. Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) finds herself placed directly in the middle of a shady transaction…

It’s hard to believe that its been 10 years since actor Zach Braff took the indie film scene — and the rest of Hollywood, for that matter — by storm with his well-received, award-winning feature directorial debut, Garden State, co-starring Oscar winner Natalie Portman (Black Swan) and Peter Sarsgaard. In Garden State, Braff played a struggling young, single actor at an existential crossroads who has a fundamental disagreement with his father, played by Ian Holm. In his sophomore directorial effort, Wish I Was Here, Braff plays Aidan Bloom, a struggling, married 35-year-old actor with kids at an existential crossroads who…