The 2015 Milwaukee Film Festival runs Thursday, September 24 through Thursday, October 8. Check out our list of 13 reasons to get excited for the fest here. If you’re looking for daily recommendations and/or when and where to stalk us, look no further.
The Milwaukee Show II (6:30 p.m. – Oriental Theatre)
We’re going to be honest here: the first Milwaukee Show kind of let us down. The initial collection of homegrown shorts certainly had its highlights (the doc on the World’s Fastest Drummer competition was near-perfect), but most of the entries failed to leave much of an impression. But that’s fine—a film festival is all about throwing yourself into the unknown, and a fest with nothing but incredible films would be a bit tiring, wouldn’t it? Anyway, the second Milwaukee Show looks to be more promising: Erik Ljung’s Mothers For Justice follows the ongoing struggle of Maria Hamilton—mother of Dontre Hamilton—as she takes her cause to Washington D.C.; while Kurt Raether’s We Interrupt This Broadcast follows the fanciful adventures of a museum security guard (WC Tank) as he reenacts Orson Welles’ infamous War Of The Worlds radio broadcast.
Turbo Kid (midnight – Oriental Theatre)
If you’re still buzzing from Mad Max: Fury Road, spend most of your time watching old Power Rangers episodes and playing Contra for NES, ride a BMX bike, and drink nothing but Surge, have we got the film for you. The Canadian-New Zealand post-apocalyptic action-comedy Turbo Kid is a big, fat, gory love letter to ’80s and ’90s culture, without all the tiresome BuzzFeed quizzes. Set in the distant year of 1997, the film follows a young comic book fan who takes up the identity of his favorite superhero, Turbo Rider, and proceeds to save the world from an tyrannical overlord named Zeus. It’s the kind of soon-to-be-cult-film that begs to be discovered in a busted-up clamshell VHS case in the back of a seedy video store, though seeing it on the big screen with a bunch of inebriated festival goers should be a hoot.