Cinebuds

Special episodes happen on the regular around here, but this one is something extra special: our live recording right after a screening of the 1988 holiday classic, Scrooged ! We gathered an amazing audience at the Oriental Theatre to watch the movie and have a chat about Bill Murray’s performance as Frank Cross, the youngest network president in television history who’s got a long night ahead of...

This week, our cinematic buddies tackle Guillermo del Toro's latest masterpiece: the new Frankenstein film currently streaming on Netflix. It's a movie he wanted to make since he was 8 years old, and we explore how this master of dark genre handled the classic Mary Shelley story. Dori and Kpolly discuss the film's unexpected body-horror elements and how it manages to balance the unsettling effects...

The divide between people who review things for a living and regular folk has existed since before Robert Green called Shakespeare “an upstart crow” back in 1592. The years since have brought us Mozart (“too many notes”), Psycho (“ falls quite flat ”) and Taylor Swift’s discography, post- folklore . It sounds like we can add Wicked: For Good to the list. The second half of the movie based on the B...

Milwaukee Film’s annual “Season’s Screenings” holiday movie series just got underway this week, and if you're listening to this episode on its release date, that means you’ve only missed one of the 22 selections that will run at the Oriental Theatre between now and Jan. 1 (if you really love The Holiday , you can always fork over $3.99 to stream it). With our resident Milwaukee Film-ite Kpolly, it...

It’s always preferable to have our usual dynamic duo piloting the podcast. But when that’s not the case, it usually means we’re making room for some special guests. For this episode, we’ve got two who know their way around movie making and are using that knowledge to make a positive impact on all of Wisconsin. Writer/director Nathan Deming, who hails from the northern reaches of the state, is smac...

When is a concert film not a concert film? It's an existential question that's particularly fitting for this episode, as we focus on a movie that is literally about death. And also new-wave-slash-electronic-music legends Depeche Mode. The unfortunate intersection between those two subjects is the death of the band's keyboardist, Andy Fletcher, in 2022 and subsequent release of 2023 album Memento M...

In this episode, we take a very special trip … to the Bizarro World. Imagine a place that is the opposite of the Cinebuds universe. A place where the two main characters are awful to their very core. A pair of people who hate everything, including each other. A couple who are … gulp … married. The duo at the center of Roald Dahl’s novel-turned-Netflix-movie The Twits are truly the Bizarro version...

The only thing more plentiful than Halloween candy is Halloween watchlists. Our favorite fall holiday (you heard us, Thanksgiving) was celebrated for the first time more than 2,000 years ago, possibly to recognize the first batch of Circus Peanuts ever manufactured. Fun fact: They haven’t needed to make any more, because no human being has ever actually eaten a Circus Peanut. We’ve just been passi...

Have you ever played a two-player game where the other person keeps getting in your way, inadvertently knocking you into the nearest lava pit or spiky enemy? Anyone who has ever played any of the Super Mario games knows the phenomenon. Well, this is the podcast version of that — except nobody rage quits. To clarify, our hosts didn’t exactly see eye-to-eye on Tron: Ares , Disney’s latest attempt to...

It's another special guest episode! Getting the big welcome this time around is one of our wonderful return vistors: Julie Lookatch from the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center, who drops by to drop some knowledge about the 28th annual Milwaukee Jewish Film Festival . She's got all the who, what, when, where and why for this year's event that runs from Oct. 26-30 at the Marcus N...

Being the hosts of a big-time podcast like this one gets you access to some pretty cool stuff. It also turns out that being a fan of a big-time podcast like this one can pay off from time to time — like getting the chance to see the most talked about movie in the country before anyone else! We like exaggerating now and then, but for One Battle After Another , our cinematic trio (yes, trio) got the...

We've gotten more than a few chances to talk with special guests about a particular film they're involved in, but this episode takes things to a wonderful new level. At the center of our discussion is the beautiful new documentary, It's Never Over, Jeff Buckley , which received overwhelmingly positive reviews after its Sundance premiere. Through never-before-seen footage of Jeff, as well as interv...

This week, we’re talking all about The Roses , the new film starring the delightful Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch. It's a modern remake of the '80s classic The War of the Roses , telling the story of a lovely couple whose marriage begins to unravel, leading to a hilariously escalating divorce. Join us as we compare this updated version to the original, discussing how its deeper character...

The only way to describe this episode is "super special" considering the person in the spotlight: Milwaukee-born director Michael Schultz!  Milwaukee Film introduced a new annual award named in his honor that recognizes luminary Black directors who have profoundly impacted culture and the film industry. Schultz himself will be the first recipient and, very deservedly, will get a full weekend of pr...

Dori is flying solo for this episode, but she made sure to keep the pod well-populated by inviting filmmakers Alex Lamb and Max Well to chat about their new documentary, The Donn of Tiki . This is a story that demanded to be told: A man living a life that makes it nearly impossible to separate fact from fiction while inadvertently creating the tiki subculture. The entire tale of Donn Beach is a wi...

When Milwaukee Film rolls out one of their carefully curated series, it gives Dori and Kpolly a chance to do two things: Highlight a bunch of great movies around a particular theme. Rest their voices by bringing in a guest host. For the organization's monthly " Cinematic Sisterhood " run of films, they decided to go straight to the top. That's right, Milwaukee Film Executive Director Susan Kerns s...

This episode sees our cinematic duo turning their attention to Kiyoshi Kurosawa's new Japanese thriller, Cloud . This film, a hit at the spring film festivals and an Academy Award nominee, explores themes of capitalism through a young man reselling goods online. While some might expect a horror film based on Kurosawa's past work, Cloud is decidedly a thriller that keeps you guessing who to root fo...

Earlier this year, we invited the filmmakers behind Cycle to the podcast for a deeper look at their document about police violence in America. In the months since, Cycle won Best Feature Documentary at the Brooklyn Film Festival and is now gearing up for more screenings and more film festivals around Wisconsin and beyond. So it seemed like a good time to revisit our conversation with directors Lau...

 Director Wes Anderson has done something just about every person in his trade dreams to do: establish an instantly recognizable and virtually inimitable visual style. He’s reached a point in his career at which a member of the moviegoing public could jump in halfway through a trailer with no prompts whatsoever and go, “Huh, Wes Anderson’s got a new film coming out.” On this episode of Cinebuds, w...

With all the enthusiasm and boundless energy of a certain super-canine, we jump all over the new Superman movie that director James Gunn controversially decided to call ... Superman . We try not to give away too much in these descriptions, but it's kind of hard to avoid the fact that our hosts do a lot of gushing in this particular episode. In that way, they took in this film the same way a lot of...

Are you ready for a deep dive into cinema history? That's certainly not the last acquatic pun you'll get from us as we hunt down one of cinema's most impactful movies:  Jaws ! The big-mouthed killing machine (literally ... the many breakdowns the "shark" experienced on set are legendary at this point) turns 50 this year and is as relevant as ever a half-century after essentially creating the conce...

Get ready for a local cinema deep dive as Dori chats with Michael Wendt from Woodland Pattern and Takahiro Suzuki from the aCinema series. Our guests demystify experimental film, explaining why its non-linear, poetic style isn't intimidating as you think and just might unlock new viewpoints you never would've seen otherwise. They share insights into the upcoming aCinema screening series , now in i...

Get ready for fireworks and film! On this special Fourth of July episode of Cinebuds , Dori and Kpolly are talking movies that scream independence. From iconic historical musicals like Hamilton and Yankee Doodle Dandy to all-American sports flicks like A League of Their Own and The Sandlot , they've got a fun list of blockbusters and hidden gems. Whether you're cheering for heroes in  Captain Amer...

In the 40+ years of box-office tracking, the numbers for North America are pretty easy to summarize: up. Almost without exception, the total gross and the number of releases that found their way into theaters rose steadily every year, hitting their peak in 2018 with 993 releases grossing nearly $11.9 billion. The next year saw a slight dip to 910 releases and nearly $11.4 billion — and we know wha...

For a podcast called Cinebuds , reviewing a film called Friendship sounds like a match made in celluloidic heaven. As you’ll hear, that depends on your vision of the afterlife. Just to get this out of the way, your beloved hosts Dori and Kpolly have a wonderful bond that would make a … let’s say questionably entertaining movie. Fortunately, the duo in Friendship — Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd — are...