Many hits, few misses at the 2024 Wisconsin Film Festival

You may not realize it, but Madison, Wisconsin is a hub for Midwestern cinephiles. This is owed in large part to the University of Wisconsin-Madison and their Department of Communication Arts, whose Film program is considered by many in film academia to be among the most prestigious in the country. Even one of its core faculty, the recently departed David Bordwell, is a God among men in the field.

For the past 25 years, the school has presented the Wisconsin Film Festival with the mission to “curate, promote and exhibit programs that showcase the art and the history of world cinema.” The festival’s ethos is not unlike the St. Louis International Film Festival, our very own hallowed local yearly cinematic feast. Also similar to SLIFF, the Wisconsin Film Festival showcases new and old, local and international, and narrative and documentary films.

The 2024 edition of the fest was a veritable delight for any movie fan, from the casual film buff to the more serious connoisseurs. Largely centered around the dense hub of the university’s campus, festival-goers were as likely to find themselves lining up to see an original 35mm print of a Jerry Lewis classic, “The Disorderly Orderly,” as they were to see an upcoming A24 release like “Janet Planet," the charming and disarming debut feature from renowned playwright Annie Baker. Both screenings of William Castle’s “The Tingler," starring our hometown hero Vincent Price, were near blockbusters, likely from being presented in the huckster director’s original Percepto, which rumbled the rigged seats of unsuspecting audience members at key moments in the film.

Alas, there’s inevitable duds like the French dark-web psychological horror “Red Rooms," which, judging from my audience’s effusive reaction, could be a small-scale sensation when it actually deserves to languish at the end of your least favorite streaming services horror row. To this end, by keeping their slate selective and small, each screening at the Wisconsin Film Festival is bound to elicit some sort of strong reaction.

The aforementioned highlights from this year’s edition joined a few upcoming releases that are sure to be among the year’s best. Spanish director Victor Erice’s first film in 30 years, “Close Your Eyes," is a head-spinning and heart-wrenching meta-movie investigation into the life of an actor who’s also been M.I.A. for 30 years. Ryuseke Hamaguchi, who had a banner year in 2021 with the Oscar-winning “Drive My Car," is back with “Evil Does Not Exist," a contemplative ecological thriller that’s one-part Werner Herzog, one-part Dostoyevsky, and yet wholly Hamaguchi. Finally, an absolute masterpiece, Radu Jude’s “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World," is a nearly three-hour traffic jam, like Jean-Luc Godard’s apocalyptic “Weekend" for the TikTok generation. The Romanian director’s “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” played SLIFF just two years ago, but this is his most playful and urgently direct work yet. This densely layered polemic made the nearly six-hour traffic jam from St. Louis to Madison worth the trip. For more information you may visit the Wisconsin Film Festival website.