The Wisconsin Film Festival will be held through Sunday. Below, Daily Cardinal staffers preview a few highly anticipated films.
""Collateral,"" Fri., 4:30 p.m., Orpheum Main Theater
""Collateral"" is by no means a new, or even obscure film. The 2005 thriller stars Hollywood A-listers Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx and is directed by UW-Madison's esteemed alum Michael Mann. Nevertheless, the Oscar-nominated flick deserves revisiting, especially when the revisitation is being introduced by New York Times senior film critic Manohla Dargis, one of the preeminent critics of our time. The interplay between Cruise's regimented bounty hunter and Foxx's beleaguered cabbie make for compelling drama, even when the action rarely leaves Foxx's cab.
—Kevin Slane
""The Lottery,"" Sat., 11:00 a.m., Chazen Museum of Art
They say there's no such thing as a free lunch, but the Harlem Success Academy would like to convince you otherwise. But while the Academy's 475 aspiring students do benefit from the nationally celebrated curriculum, Madeleine Sackler's ""The Lottery"" tells the tale of the 3,000 applicants who put their fates in the hands of Lady Luck. The film examines the controversial aspects of charter schools and how they attempt to fit a circular population through a square hole. By the end, the story becomes less about whether the government will foot the bill for lunch and more about the 3,000 kindergarten, first- and second-graders who exhaust a hefty sum just for a chance to eat.
—Kyle Sparks
""Waking Sleeping Beauty,"" Sat., 11:30 a.m., Wisconsin Union Theater
In 1985, there were plenty of heartless execs at The Walt Disney Company counting the days to when they could shutter the animation department. There hadn't been an animated hit since Walt was alive. Their offices seemed better utilized as dressing rooms for Disney's growing stable of film stars. ""Waking Sleeping Beauty"" takes us to the animators working through this darkest hour, telling the story of how the crew of young animators, including John Lasseter and Tim Burton, went from near unemployment to creating some of the animated classics that colored our childhoods—""The Little Mermaid,"" ""Beauty and the Beast"" and ""The Lion King,"" among others.
—Mark Riechers
""Mother,"" Sun., 7:15 p.m., Orpheum Main Theater
The film festival's retrospective of Korean director Bong Joon-ho leads up to his latest work, the film noir throwback ""Mother."" The film stars Kim Hye-ja as the mother of a mentally disabled son who is accused of murdering a young girl. Determined to protect her child, she becomes an amateur detective to try and prove her son's innocence. Joon-ho is no stranger to family dynamics and the crime genre, and he has proven adept at blending the two together in films like 2003's ""Memories of Murder"" and even the B-movie monster flick ""The Host."" Joon-ho's direction and Hye-ja's performance should delve deeply into the true meanings of parenthood, both at its best and its most sordid.
-—Todd Stevens
