Wisconsin Film Festival 2025 Preview
My picks for the films I'll be happiest to see or saddest to miss.
I attended the (very fun!) First Look at the Fest preview event this past Wednesday, and I was blown away by the quality of the films on offer this year. Since the days when I used to volunteer for the festival, I have typically limited myself to three or four screenings - I’m likely to be breaking that number this year. I apologize that I couldn’t get this out any sooner for you, friends!
Friendship, Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd’s opening night comedy, is already sold out, alongside maybe a few others when you’re reading this. I anticipate based on the marketing that Friendship, along with a few other films that have wider distribution, will be playing in our commercial theaters later this year. I might recommend The Threesome, which stars Zoey Deutch (Everybody Wants Some!!, Set It Up) and Ruby Cruz (Mare of Easttown, Bottoms) as two of the three in the titular threesome. Alternatively, the remake of Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet looks like a more mainstream comedy than the more patient original, starring great actors including Lily Gladstone, Joan Chen, and Youn Yuh-Jung.
There’s quite a diverse lineup of films this year, from horror to documentary to comedy to thrillers. Watching the trailers, one of the more striking commonalities was the two European films about black bike couriers, Anywhere Anytime and Souleymane’s Story, an interesting pairing of two films which seem to be aiming for a form of neorealism with different approaches. Anywhere Anytime, first playing at 3:15p on 4/8, seems to more directly riff on Vitorrio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (also, incredibly, playing four hours after Anywhere Anytime at La Cineteca Italiana, outside of the festival’s programming!) with reviews highlighting its more fun soundtrack, and its trailer is generally somewhat warmer in tone. Souleymane’s Story, first playing at 1:15p on 4/4, feels more tied to the work of the Dardennes Brothers, with a sadder tone and a more intense sense of the pressure cooker.
This write-up will be formatted to match my usual newsletters - first, new releases, and then repertory screenings. I will be including trailers for the films where I can find them. Films will be sorted by the earliest screening times first. There are many more worthwhile films in the festival than what I’m writing about, but I’m highlighting the ones that grabbed me personally. I recommend comparing my picks with Tone Madison’s more comprehensive coverage, which I’ll only be reading for myself once I’ve hit publish.
New Releases
-By the Stream - 11:00a 4/5 at the Bartell Theater, 2:30p 4/9 at Flix Brewhouse
The best reviewed of the recent Hong Sang-soo festival players (of his 2022-2025 films, this will be #3 of 7 playing in Madison), By the Stream reunites Hong with his romantic partner Kim Min-Hee (The Handmaiden) and sets her as a university art instructor asking her playwright uncle to write a short play for her department. A scandal envelops the department when a romantic affair grows. Hong is a master of simple stories with complex emotions, reminiscent of Ozu at his best, and Kim won the award for Best Performance at Locarno last year for this film.
-Afternoons of Solitude - 8:30p 4/5 at the Chazen Museum of Art, 4:45p 4/10 at Flix Brewhouse
Albert Serra is a filmmaker I’ve meant to explore, his Pacifiction being one of my greatest blindspots of the last few years. But Afternoons of Solitude stands apart, a documentary film about matador Andrés Roca Rey, a film with absolutely rave reviews from peers who effectively describe this as a glimpse into apocalyptic darkness. Bullfighting is a brutal sport, one that rewards a violent, dehumanized spirit. I’m intrigued to find if the filmmaking is as electrifying as the trailer indicates or if the brutality overwhelms this into a painful drone.
-The New Year That Never Came - 11:00a 4/6 at Music Hall, 11:30a 4/9 at Flix Brewhouse
This trailer blew me away during the first view event, capturing all the energy and humor of Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin without that film’s megastar wattage. This film catalogs the final days of Romania’s communist regime in 1989, and it does so with an ensemble cast of interweaving civilian narratives tumbling into chaos. I was incredibly impressed by the trailer and its cinematography, its title treatments, its pacing and management of actors - of every film by a lesser-known filmmaker, this is the trailer that immediately screams a major talent in development.
-The Shrouds - 11a 4/6 at Barrymore Theater
David Cronenberg’s newest film starring Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, and Guy Pearce, is a drama, a science fiction meditation on grief for his wife (she passed in 2017.) Using sci-fi tech, Cassel’s Karsh creates the capability of seeing the dead beyond the grave. Leave it to trailers to sell it as body horror thriller! Cronenberg’s been on a wonderful hot streak, in my opinion, and I’ve loved his last three films Cosmopolis, Maps to the Stars, and Crimes of the Future. Unlike his classic 80s run, these films have been somewhat divisive, but his fans of this late era are saying it’s just as rich and personal as anything he’s made.
-Critics & Cineastes - 3:30p 4/6 at UW Cinematheque
This is an outrageously good program, one so good that I already circled the lineup upon reading the short opening the series. The Critic, Ernest Pintoff’s Oscar-winning short, is carried by one of Mel Brooks’s funniest performances as a disgruntled audience member, and it’ll be a riot on the big screen. But then, there’s By Kevin Thomas, directed by fantastic filmmaker Tim Hunter (River’s Edge, three of Twin Peaks’ best episodes, six of Mad Men’s earliest great episodes, and much more) a featurette length interview with LA Times critic Kevin Thomas. And Being John Smith highlights the life of a filmmaker we might know if his name weren’t John Smith. It concludes with a film I’d have seen on its own, Leos Carax’s It’s Not Me, one of my very favorite French filmmakers (The Lovers on the Bridge, Holy Motors, Annette) creating a cinematic self-portrait that stretches from Chaplin to his own work. I actually am shocked to see it playing - I’m so excited for it.
-Pavements - 8p 4/7 at Flix Brewhouse
Of all the 90s indie bands for Gen-Z to rediscover, Pavement was never on my prediction list - the sudden supernova popularity of “Harness Your Hopes,” a forgotten b-side that went viral on Spotify and TikTok, shot them back into the algorithm and spurred a 2022 reunion. But I’m actually less a Pavement fan than an Alex Ross Perry fan, the director of The Color Wheel, Listen Up Philip, Queen of Earth, and Her Smell, four great films that I’d have followed whatever he made next. The fact that this film combines traditional documentary and concert film footage with a mock biopic starring Joe Keery and an off-Broadway rock musical is the sort of wiggly structure Perry is primed to wrangle.
-Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other - 8:15p 4/7 at Flix Brewhouse, 3p 4/9 at Flix Brewhouse
From the trailer, I found myself thinking briefly that it was a remarkably well acted, thoughtfully made drama, a late-life meditation on marriage inequity that reminded me of films like Amour and Marriage Story. I’d immediately forgotten due to the formal technique and the intelligence of the subjects that this is a documentary! Those who find themselves annoyed with the interpersonal problems of the privileged may find this intolerable - Joel Meyerowitz a famous photographer, Maggie Barrett a successful artist in her own right. But purely from a filmmaking perspective, I’m definitely looking forward to seeing this myself.
Repertory
-Cocksucker Blues - 9p 4/5 at Barrymore Theater
This is a hard-to-see film, its acidic nature so debauched a portrayal of the drug and sex culture backstage that the Rolling Stones barred the film’s release. If you find yourself the person complaining that films like A Complete Unknown or Bohemian Rhapsody sanitize their subjects too much, this is the film you’ve been dying to see - and alongside that, there are some amazing performances from the peak 70s Stones lineup mixed in.
-The Glass Web 3-D - 8:30p 4/10 at Flix Brewhouse
Here representing both Jack Arnold 3-D screenings closing the festival, The Glass Web has slightly better reviews, a more interesting 3D presentation of a TV satire noir, and the legendary Edward G. Robinson, so if I get asked to choose between this and It Came From Outer Space, I’ll be picking The Glass Web. A cuckold murders his wife and the bull suggests turning it into a TV show episode - this is the paranoid self-loathing of classic 50s film noir.
(Four wonderful films that need no introduction, but also are fairly regular films on the repertory circuit.)
-A Woman is a Woman - 8:30p 4/4 at UW Cinematheque, 12:15p 4/10 at Flix Brewhouse
-Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me - 1:15p 4/5 at Chazen Museum of Art
-Starship Troopers - 6:30p 4/6 at UW Cinematheque
-The Searchers - 2:45p 4/10 at Flix Brewhouse
(And four where all I really know is the filmmaker’s reputation and that's all I need to be interested.)
-The Wind - 1:30p 4/6 at UW Cinematheque
-Vixen! - 8:45p 4/7 at Flix Brewhouse
-Shirley Clarke: Thinking in Motion - 5:30p 4/9 at Flix Brewhouse
-Shanghai Blues - 6p 4/7 at Flix Brewhouse, 6:15p 4/10 at Flix Brewhouse
I'm with you on TWO STRANGERS -- watching the trailer I couldn't quite believe it was a documentary, it seemed so intimate. And I had glossed over PAVEMENTS before realizing it was an Alex Ross Perry movie.