UW Cinematheque, WUD Film Summer 2025 Schedule Reactions
David Lynch, Claude Lelouch, Gene Hackman, and more at Cinematheque!
Hello, and welcome to a special summer preview for UW Madison’s film programming! The UW Cinematheque Summer 2025 calendar is now live, allowing a full reaction to this year’s summer programming alongside WUD Film’s Monday night Memorial Union Terrace Lakeside film program. Hopefully, I can provide some context for these films (and maybe even give you direction toward some homework.)
UW Cinematheque
David Lynch
As promised by the preview image on their site this past month, David Lynch’s The Elephant Man will be the first UW Cinematheque film playing this summer on June 25th. The story of Jonathan Merrick, as played by John Hurt, is told with an intense emotional range. If I can ever convince him to publish his Cinesthesia notes online, I’d be able to share Jason Furhman’s wonderful write-up on David Lynch’s popular breakthrough film, a film which netted eight Academy Award nominations (including Best Picture) and earned Lynch his interviews for Revenge of the Jedi and Dune.
There will be two other Lynch screenings this summer, both attended by Madison local, Lynch’s longtime editor and friend, Mary Sweeney. Lynch fans will be familiar with the shorts program of Six Figures Getting Sick, The Alphabet, The Grandmother, The Amputee Versions One and Two, and Premonitions of an Evil Deed, as they’re the six restorations presented on the Criterion Collection disc for Eraserhead. These shorts, all fairly abstract, will be paired with the season two Twin Peaks episode “Lonely Souls,” arguably the show’s best episode, in which the killer of Laura Palmer is revealed - if you haven’t started watching Twin Peaks in the six months since Lynch’s death, you may want to get cooking. “Lonely Souls” is the show’s 15th episode, so watching roughly three a week starting in June will just get you there in time for July 2nd.
Lastly, on July 23rd, Cinematheque and Mary Sweeney will present Mulholland Dr., generally considered to be Lynch’s greatest masterpiece. The film stars Naomi Watts and Laura Harring as fast friends who seem to be caught in some grand L.A. conspiracy. An acidic look at Hollywood and the way dreams, love, and kindness can sour into desperation, the film ranked eighth in 2022’s Sight & Sound Poll of the greatest films of all time, and its voters included Lynne Ramsay, Zach Cregger, David Sims, and Rose Glass. Many of Lynch’s other films have played fairly recently at Cinematheque - Blue Velvet, The Straight Story, Lost Highway, and Wild At Heart have all played their regular program since Mulholland Dr.’s last screening in 2021, and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and Inland Empire played the Wisconsin Film Festival in the last few years as well. If there’s any more Lynch programming to come in the fall, I’d expect it to be Eraserhead or Dune.
Gene Hackman
I am nowhere near a Gene Hackman completionist - it’s a large body of work, outpacing contemporaries like Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty. But I have seen William Friedkin’s Best Picture winner The French Connection starring Hackman as abusive cop “Popeye” Doyle, famous for its innovative chase sequence and its antiheroic approach to characterization. I’ve not seen Frankenheimer’s sequel, playing July 2nd, a film infamous for bringing Popeye even lower into the darkness. I’m excited to see Frankenheimer’s take on the character and trust the director of The Manchurian Candidate, Ronin, and Grand Prix can bring the excitement Friedkin brought to his film.
I’ve also heard of the drifter drama Scarecrow, co-starring Al Pacino and winning the Palme d’Or. It’s very much in the second tier of 70s classics, where its accolades and ubiquity never quite soar to the heights of The Conversation or Young Frankenstein - but any fan of 70s film will be the first to tell you that second tier is still essential viewing. I’m certainly excited to see the film for the first time on the big screen. One I’m not previously familiar with is Peter Hyams’ Narrow Margin, though I’ve heard of Hyams (2010: The Year We Made Contact, Timecop, Running Scared.) Cinematheque has a strong track record of booking this sort of movie, with films like Quick Change and In the Line of Fire being two of my favorite recent programming choices. I’m excited to catch up with this train thriller combining murder and the mob.
I’m a little curious about the decision to avoid some of Hackman’s more auteurist collaborators - not that cinephiles won’t recognize John Frankenheimer, but they’ve set aside popular films like The Conversation, the original The French Connection, The Royal Tenenbaums, and Unforgiven. There’ll be one more chance to see Hackman on the big screen, as well, in the Mike Nichols directed/Elaine May scripted The Birdcage, playing as part of WUD’s Pride programming for June. If you’re looking for any more Hackman homework, I really love his performance in Sam Raimi’s tournament arc western The Quick and the Dead - compared to Little Bill Daggett from Unforgiven, Hackman plays the evil mayor Herod with the camp Raimi’s over-the-top approach demands. And if you’ve never seen it, his Lex Luthor is a highlight in the original 1978 Superman.
Claude Lelouch
I’d honestly not recognized the name Claude Lelouch when reviewing the schedule - to be honest, I’d transposed his landmark film A Man and a Woman to a fuzzy “was that Godard or Truffaut?” This filmmaker’s reputation is fairly unknown, even among the critics and cinephiles I follow. On Letterboxd, his most seen films after A Man and a Woman are largely anthology films with several, generally more famous directors. And yet he worked alongside Godard, Milos Forman, Agnes Varda, Kon Ichikawa, on and on. The video above of Lelouch visiting the Criterion Closet is only two weeks old - he is a rediscovery still in the making.
A look at the Cinematheque program reveals a director with a restless imagination. He bounces out of the romantic drama of A Man and a Woman into the crime murder mystery Cat & Mouse and crime comedy movie Happy New Year, to the epic decade-spanning films And Now My Love and Bolero (a World War II musical!!) The series ends with Lelouch’s 1995 adaptation of Les Miserables, transposed to World War II and starring French New Wave star Jean Paul Belmondo. Historically, this is a director who was somewhat dismissed by critics like Pauline Kael and Dave Kehr - but as decades pass, maybe the perspective he studies in films like Bolero gives us a broader view of his career.
Last Thoughts
Of the remaining six films, the only one I have prior familiarity with is Dan O’Bannon’s Return of the Living Dead, a fun movie that balances punk rock, humor, and sex really nicely with its horror and gore. The WC Fields comedy It’s A Gift will be my second after Cinematheque’s programming of The Man on the Flying Trapeze several years ago. The two martial arts films, The Mystery of Chess Boxing and Beach of the War Gods, both look like a lot of fun - the latter is especially colorful and adventurous in its setting. Red Angel takes a hard look at Japanese service in World War II, earning comparisons to the acid black tone of Altman’s M*A*S*H* (note: not the TV show!) And The Cat strips down a heist procedural to the more realistic approach of 70s cinema.
WUD Film
Pride Programming
WUD Film’s Lakeside Cinema series begins on June 2nd with the lesbian cult classic But I’m A Cheerleader, kicking off a full month of queer films of various stripes. But I’m A Cheerleader is a teen comedy starring Natasha Lyonne (Orange is the New Black, Russian Doll, Poker Face) as a cheerleader sent to a conversion therapy camp - this quickly becomes a satire on gender mores and sexuality that holds up with modern audiences. I can’t wait to see it for the first time!
Of the remaining films, three more center on queer teen girls - Booksmart and Bottoms both take high school friends trying to connect with their classes and maybe even kiss another girl to extreme heights, and while The Mitchells vs. The Machines primarily focuses on family dynamics (while battling a legion of robots,) its lead Katie Mitchell is a canonically queer teen. The last film in the lineup, the aforementioned Hackman film The Birdcage, is focused instead on older men, and I think the overall selection of comedies was a great choice. An adaptation of the French comedy La Cages Aux Folles, Hackman plays the conservative congressman visiting his inlaws-to-be (Robin Williams and Nathan Lane) as they pretend to be straight and not break up their childrens’ wedding. While The Birdcage is certainly “the classic” of this group, I really got a huge kick out of Booksmart and Bottoms, too.
Black Filmmakers
I appreciate WUD’s decision to program Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing and Ryan Coogler’s Creed, two incredible films strongly centered in the black experience and by black filmmakers releasing films this year in Sinners and Highest 2 Lowest, as the closing of their July programming. Do The Right Thing is my pick for “the greatest American movie ever made,” and while there are films equally deserving of the title, I’ve yet to see one I think is firmly better. Creed settles for being my pick for “the greatest Rocky movie ever made,” but I do really think it’s fantastic. WUD Film has, in my estimation, displayed a consistent curiosity and effort in their programming since I returned in 2023 in terms of showcasing different kinds of movies by different demographics of filmmakers.
I do have to note that when it comes to these two filmmakers in particular, their libraries are so rewarding that I mark a mild frustration that it’s these two films being programmed again - Marcus also programmed these films for their Black History Month program in February. For the Lakeside Cinema series, I do think these are the two best choices, though Spike Lee’s Inside Man and BlackKklansman would also be a lot of fun. I just hope we continue to see these filmmakers celebrated for their excellence, and not just because I’d selfishly like to see Crooklyn, She’s Gotta Have It, or Fruitvale Station on a big screen. Two recent Spike Lee joints that probably won’t hit our rep screens because they started as streaming films are Da 5 Bloods and David Byrne’s American Utopia, both released in 2020 and both easily two of my favorite films of the decade so far.
Musicals!
Okay, look, admittedly, this is where my enthusiasm drains a little bit. I love musicals, and I’m a little sad to see a month’s programming of musicals where the oldest film is Mamma Mia! I’m not asking for Top Hat, not least of which because I prefer the four films they’ve programmed (The Princess and the Frog, Mamma Mia!, La La Land, and Pitch Perfect) to that particular film. But damn, like, Moulin Rouge was too far back? Nobody stood up for Dirty Dancing or The Blues Brothers?
All four films they’ve programmed are fun. I’m especially looking forward to an excuse to reunite with The Princess and the Frog and La La Land, which I haven’t seen since they were new releases. Still, compared to last summer, when Love & Basketball was such a wonderful screening, or the summer before where I gathered everyone I could convince to see House, I wish I were raving about the WUD Film program including Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Stormy Weather, True Stories, or even something modern but a little weirder like Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. Forgive my grousing. It’s a good program and people are going to have a wonderful time.
Last Thoughts
While UW Cinematheque’s lineup excites me with a sense of discovery mixed with a few longstanding favorites, WUD’s lineup is excellent favorites with a few discoveries mixed in. I didn’t share extended thoughts on Raiders of the Lost Ark and Mad Max: Fury Road, but they’ll be perfect Terrace films because they’re perfect entertainments we all know and love. I’m so excited to see all these movies with a beer, a loud soundsystem and a roaring crowd, and while I’ll leave the final film to the incoming and returning students as their program requests, I wonder if they’ll follow up their new tradition of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series kicking off the semester post-Roderick Rules.
We’re looking at a great summer at the movies - I hope to see you there!