Halftime Report at the 2025 Wisconsin Film Festival

A modest 9 films or programs Friday through Sunday. Hopefully 7 more Monday through Thursday.

Apr 07, 2025

Recent film students were among the crowd listening to the Q & A session with filmmakers Aaron Greer (*Florence*) and Erik Gunneson (*Milk Punch*) after a Wisconsin Film Festival screening at Music Hall on Friday, April 5, 2025.

I’m tired. But it is a good kind of tired. And I didn’t even push myself very hard compared to some Wisconsin Film Festival regulars.

Man, I must be getting old. Only nine films during the Festival weekend? And failing to complete a (trademarked) “Five Film Saturday”? What has become of me?

Well, to try to regain some degree of credibility, I have fought off fatigue to post this on my usual post day, Monday (a little later in the day, of course). Not all heroes wear capes.

When writing my weekend tickets and weeknight tickets post, I failed to take a step back and ask: What kind of Festival am I going to have this year? I didn’t really think about my choices on a conceptual level, because most of the choices were driven by location and proximity of the next screening. But now that I have completed the first weekend, three common traits have emerged regarding the films I saw: Old, Indie, and Regional.

Without necessarily intending to, I skipped the new international film festival circuit films so far this year. I had Sunday tickets for The Village Next to Paradise (Somalia, 2024) and Two Women (Canada, French-language, 2024), which would have addressed this lack in my diet. But I had to make the decision to return to real-life responsibilities before the end of the weekend, so my weekend film count was reduced to nine programs. So here’s how the common traits played out:

Old: Rosaura at 10 O’Clock (1958); One Hour with You (1932); The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973); and the Heather McAdams program (1980-1991, also Regional).

Indie: Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round (2024); Dead Lover (2025). These resonated with each other in interesting ways, to be discussed below.

Regional: Wisconsin’s Own Experimental Shorts; Milk Punch (2000 also Old) and Florence (2025); The Sea (2025) with in silence is the offering presented (2024) and With Fire & Breath: A Dying Art (2024). These also overlap with Indie.

With this Substack project I’m forcing myself to keep writing and posting every week, even when I don’t think I’m completely ready to do so. So I’m going to experiment a bit below with the capsule reviews, which are more like gut level responses and preliminary thoughts. No plot synopsis, just the reaction.

Friday, April 4

Rosaura at 10 O’Clock | Mario Soffici | Argentina | 1958 | 98 minutes
I highly recommend catching the repeat screening on Wednesday, and I’m glad that I finally caught up with a Mario Soffici film. Inspired by this screening and recently watching The Beast Must Die (1952), I plan on catching more Argentinian films from the 1950s currently in the “Argentine Noir” collection on Criterion Channel.

Rosaura looks great, with crisp, vivid black-and-white widescreen cinematography. The quirky performances always keep things grounded while the plot becomes more and more complicated. The emotional anchor of the film Mrs. Milagros (María Luisa Robledo) who acts as a self-appointed maternal figure for her tenants. In the final third, the plot gets a bit too complicated and clever for its own good, and the final 15 to 20 minutes feel very rushed as Soffici tries to connect all the dots that he tossed about in the first half.

The conclusion is satisfying in terms of genre expectations (although most viewers I talked to had at least one lingering plot question on the first viewing). But the conclusion also left me a little cold. At some point Mrs. Milagros is dropped from the proceedings, and she transitions from an emotional anchor to a cog in the plot mechanics.

Wisconsin’s Own Experimental Shorts | various artists | 92 minutes
This was a strong program even though, like many Wisconsin’s Own shorts programs, the shape and tone is determined by the attempt to showcase as many films as were accepted, rather than to curate a program that coheres as a whole. Ultimately, I think it is the correct move, in this context, to show as much stuff as possible. A few filmmakers had two films (or one and a half, counting collaborations), which sometimes made the proceedings feel like there was not a wide range of work to choose from. That said, it was instructive to see how the films by the same filmmakers played off of each other.

Perennial Festival participant Bill Bedford bookended the program with two abstract films (Wavelength/Abstracted; Yin Yang Popcorn). Of the solo films and a collaboration by Sofia Theodore-Prince and Grace Mitchell, I particularly liked Heart Shaped, which featured texts/letters between “S” and “G” on the soundtrack, while the visuals explored various scenarios in themed rooms at the Don Q Inn. Kate Raney’s Despite had a delicate balance between expressive abstract visuals and emotional vulnerability as she discusses becoming a mother for the first time during the pandemic. And some very talented students from UW-Stevens Point, Jamison-Jupiter Clauer and Egg Goyette, really hit it out of the park with Hey Jude!, an adventurous short using a wide range of animation techniques while addressing the themes of identity and belonging.

Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round | Adrian Leary | 2024 | 91 minutes
Based on the vibe in the Marquee Theater before MMMGR started, I think everyone in the room, including me, was ready to support the filmmakers present with a strong, enthusiastic response. Unfortunately, this was the big disappointment of the weekend. The main problem with the humor in the film is that it is amusing, not really all that funny. And the problem with the horrific sequences is that we soon realize that nothing is really at stake in this fantasy world. A gaping leg wound can be fixed up with a large band-aid, which undermines any impact that the violence might have had in the first place (and as a comic payoff, the band aid is amusing, not laugh-out-loud funny). Everything took just a bit too long to develop, and most of the payoffs (whether they be humor or gore) were telegraphed so that they lacked impact.

I think many people would assume that a film that explores the theme of repressed memories framed as a fantasy children’s television program would likely reveal the repressed memory to be child abuse. While the actual traumatic memory that generates this fantasy world is not explicitly child abuse, I think that the film treats the topics of trauma and repressed memories rather cavalierly, seemingly as just a plot mechanism to alternate between Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and Nightmare on Elm Street. Overall the film conveys very little genuine interest in the topic of trauma.

I wouldn’t mind the cavalier approach if the film were more transgressively funny. Instead, the scenes have a flat, repetitive pattern of a slow ironic build punctuated by violence, followed by a dismissal of any substantial consequences of that violence. That said, the lead performance by Michael Gillio as TV host James Jensen is fantastic. He’s committed to do anything that is asked of him. I just wish that the film itself was worthy of that commitment.

I kept thinking about MMMGR while I watched Dead Lover on Saturday. More about that below.

Saturday, April 5

One Hour with You | Ernst Lubitsch | USA | 1932 | 78 minutes
This is a pure delight, completely entertaining with that effortless “Lubitsch Touch.” I want to reflect for a moment on one very simple sequence: Maurice Chevalier singing “Oh, That Mitzi.”

In what is essentially a one-and-a-half minute static medium shot, Chevalier demonstrates how very simple repetition and variation can be utilized for great comic effect. His facial expression and simple look off camera when he sings, “Oh, that Mitzi!” seems to get funnier every time as we wonder if he’s going to maintain the pattern for the entire song. There are many examples throughout the film where these simple performance choices and patterns lead to memorable comic moments.

The Spook Who Sat By the Door | Ivan Dixon | 1973 | 102 minutes
This was the highlight of the Festival weekend for me. It made me rethink my takes on films ranging from Melvin van Peebles’ Watermelon Man (1970) and Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) to the entire blaxploitation production cycle to Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq (2015) and BlacKkKlansman (2018).

One of the many interesting aspects of the film is how it blends genre filmmaking and political filmmaking almost seamlessly. There’s an early scene where the Black men who are vying to be hired as a CIA agent talk amongst themselves. They talk more casually than they do when their supervisors are present, and and so they discuss ways they could work together to keep moving forward within the training program. Of course, they can’t speak freely because the room is being monitored by their supervisors. This dynamic parallels the film as a whole, with a twist. Director Dixon and writer Sam Greenlee directly addressed the Black community with the film, but unlike the Black recruits in the scene I described, they are completely aware that white America was also watching. Some of the more audacious moments actually fit into genre expectations, making much of the film seem double coded for different audiences.

Dead Lover | Grace Glowicki | Canada | 2025 | 86 minutes
As mentioned above, I thought about MMMGM quite a bit while watching Dead Lover, because in a sense Dead Lover is the film that MMMGM wants to be. Both are shot on seemingly limited budgets with simple sets in controlled studios. Both venture into macabre themes and have wildly committed lead performances.

The main difference is the manic, madcap energy that surges through Dead Lover, led by director and lead actress Grace Glowicki. Unlike MMMGM, Dead Lover does not need to alternate between normalcy and the grotesque because it is all grotesque. And Dead Lover is able to build up energy throughout the film, despite that consistent tone, by constantly being visually inventive and playful. At times Dead Lover seems like a mix of a George Kuchar class film and an even lower budget Guy Maddin film. But Dead Lover never seems derivative, it always feels like an expression of a unique vision.

Maybe what conceptually handicapped MMMGM was that it needed to imitate the visual tropes of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood and other children’s television shows for the bulk of its running time, and the variations from that norm (like playing with the piano accompaniment to James’ monologues) provided the limited humor. Dead Lover, on the other hand, while certainly mobilizing genre conventions and tropes, seems to have a free hand with inventing how its world works. The results are more engaging, and more laugh-out-loud funny.

Filmmaker (and friend) Erik Gunneson outside of Music Hall before the screening of his 2000 feature film, *Milk Punch* on Saturday, April 5 ,2025

Milk Punch | Erik Gunneson | USA | 2000 | 90 minutes
I’m going to write more about the 25th anniversary of Milk Punch after its follow up screening at the Bartell Theater, Friday, April 11, at 7:00pm. For now, I’ll just say that it was a great reunion not only with the film but with many of the people I met during its production in the mid-to-late 1990’s.

Thanks for reading Moving Image Madison! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Sunday, April 6

Scratchmen, Elvis, and You: The Films of Heather McAdams | USA | 1980-1991
Chicago-based cartoonist and filmmaker Heather McAdams presented a series of films that have been recently restored and preserved by the Chicago Film Society. Starting out by animating scratches on found footage emulsions (Scratchman, 1980; Scratchman 2, 1982), McAdams developed more ambitious and nuanced collage films like the great Holiday Magic (1985) which undermines the ideology behind beauty product advertisements by using its own imagery.

I found her portrait films, Meet…Bradley Harrison Pickelmeister (1988) and Jay Elvis (1991), particularly interesting because she takes an unflinching look at her subjects, and includes material that is not particularly flattering. The results allow McAdams to celebrate those who fly their own flag, while acknowledging the contradictions that can be seen within alternative subcultures.

The Sea | Douglas Rosenberg | USA, Sweden | 2025 | 60 minutes
in silence is the offering presented | Li Chaio-ping | 2024 | 8 minutes
With Fire & Breath: A Dying Art | Sam Maria Viji, Samia Shalabi | USA | 2024 | 8 minutes
I wrapped up my weekend with some beautiful short films that explored the essence of movement and artistic creation. Fire & Breath was an insightful portrait of Indian goldsmiths. And in silence was an emotionally resonant collaboration between choreographer Li Chiao-ping and her son, Jacob Li Dai-Loong Rosenberg.

Douglas Rosenberg’s The Sea explores manhood, masculinity, and aging, shot against the landscapes on the island of Fårö. The opening shot echoes Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, as men holding hands walk up an incline on the horizon with stylized movements. On the soundtrack, we hear male voices state who they are dedicating this work to. Sometimes they give full names, sometimes they only give first names, suggesting to us that we already share a degree of intimacy with them.

Rosenberg develops his own mythopoeia with a language of movement and touch to stage intimate tableaux. Sometimes the scenes feature recognizable rituals, other scenes seem to spontaneously create their own ritual. All of this is captured in vivid black-and-white cinematography that celebrates every crease in the men’s faces, understanding that the wrinkles are manifestations of time and experience. A particularly powerful recurring motif is touching faces and the laying of hands on heads, which simultaneously conveys blessing, caretaking, and supporting.

In the Q & A Rosenberg explained how the project evolved after he recruited men who lived on the island to participate in workshops to feel comfortable with the degree of intimacy they would share in front of the camera. That work paid off, because while watching it I genuinely thought that these men had known each other for a lifetime, and that perhaps some were in the same family.

Once more onto the breach, dear friends . . .

Okay, back to business for four more days. I hope to see some of you at Shanghai Blues and Pavements tonight, if not in the Flix Brewhouse lobby between films.

Now Playing In Madison: User’s Guide

Check the venue’s website (click venue name), especially after Wednesday for weekend openings and closings.
Brief notes under titles of interest to me are not endorsements unless noted.
Snarky comments are not negative reviews, I have not seen the films unless noted.

Wisconsin Film Festival

Continues through Thursday, April 10, mostly at Flix Brewhouse, with the important exception of The Bloody Lady at the UW-Cinematheque on Wednesday, April 9, 8:00pm.
- See “My Weeknight Tickets at the 2025 Wisconsin Film Festival” post from last week to see the decisions I made for this week.

UW-Cinematheque

THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG
ACT OF VIOLENCE

WUD Film

ANORA
MONKEY MAN
BARRY LYNDON (1975)
VAMPIRE HUNTER D (1985)
- 40th anniversary screening of the anime classic.

AMC Fitchburg

AMATEUR, THE
AMC SCREEN UNSEEN: APRIL 7
AXCN: VAMPIRE HUNTER D 40TH ANNIVERSARY
- Note that this is also playing on campus (see WUD Film above). The Anime Expo Cinema Nights (“AXCN”) screenings will be April 9, 10, and 13.
BLACK BAG
BOB TREVINO LIKES IT
CAPTAIN AMERICA: BRAVE NEW WORLD
CHOSEN: LAST SUPPER (PART 2), THE
CHOSEN: LAST SUPPER (PART 3), THE
DEATH OF A UNICORN
DAY THE EARTH BLEW UP: A LOONEY TUNES MOVIE, THE
DISNEY'S SNOW WHITE
DOG MAN
DROP
- “Fast paced thriller” produced by Michael Bay and Jason Blum (Blumhouse) and directed by Christopher Landon (We Have a Ghost; Happy Death Day)
FREAKY TALES
FRIEND, THE
HELL OF A SUMMER
THE LUCKIEST MAN IN AMERICA
- No Whammies! Dramatization of the infamous Press Your Luck game show scandal of 1984.
KING OF KINGS, THE
- Animated Easter-season programming.
MICKEY 17
MINECRAFT MOVIE, A
ONE TO ONE: JOHN & YOKO
- Eighteen months in the lives of Lennon and Ono in Greenwich Village in the early 1970s. This screened this past Friday at the Wisconsin Film Festival.
PENGUIN LESSONS, THE
PRINCESS MONONOKE 4K
- The IMAX run did end last week, but the 4K restoration has screenings through at least Wednesday.
SACRAMENTO
- Buddy road movie with director/lead actor Michael Angarano and Michael Cera. Kristen Stewart’s name is fourth on the poster, so I’m guessing she’s not driving the car.
WARFARE
- Collaboration between Alex Garland (Annihilation; Civil War) and Iraq War veteran Ray Mendoza.
WOMAN IN THE YARD, THE
WORKING MAN, A

Marcus Point Cinema or Marcus Palace Cinema

AMATEUR, THE
AXCN: VAMPIRE HUNTER D 40TH ANNIVERSARY
BALLAD OF WALLIS ISLAND, THE
- British comedy that premiered at 2025 Sundance Film Festival, starring Tim Key, Tom Basden, and Carey Mulligan
BEETLEJUICE
- Fan Faves Film Series
BLACK BAG
CAPTAIN AMERICA: BRAVE NEW WORLD
CHOSEN: LAST SUPPER PART 1, THE
CHOSEN: LAST SUPPER PART 2, THE
CHOSEN: LAST SUPPER PART 3, THE
DEATH OF UNICORN, A
DISNEY'S SNOW WHITE
DROP
FRIEND, THE
HELL OF SUMMER, A
KAIJU NO. 8: MISSION RECON
- Essentially an omnibus film, recapping the season one and adding a new episode.
KING OF KINGS, THE
MARCUS MYSTERY MOVIE (4/7)
MICKEY 17
MINECRAFT MOVIE, A
NATIONAL THEATRE: FRANKENSTEIN
PADDINGTON IN PERU
PENGUIN LESSONS, THE
SACRAMENTO
STAR TREK II: WRATH OF KHAN (DIRECTOR'S CUT)
- Fan Faves Film Series. Finally, not just Zach Snyder’s fanboys can clamor for and get a Director’s Cut.
WARFARE
WOMAN IN YARD, THE
WORKING MAN, A