Make a movie-related resolution with some help from UW Cinematheque’s spring 2024 calendar

The campus-based program will once again host a wide array of free screenings through May 4, starting with “The Zone Of Interest” on January 25.

In the matte-gray doldrums of the brand-new year, aspiring to watch more movies makes for an easy and rewarding resolution. It’s just that the lack of commercial theaters (or simply, one moviehouse chain) in Downtown Madison might give you pause to commit to that in writing. However, the UW Cinematheque has been tossing the community a cinematic life-preserver, keeping the traditional moviegoing experience afloat while reducing many barriers to entry at its main screening room at 4070 Vilas Hall.

It’s reassuring to recognize how steadily the free and open-to-the-public institution on campus has reflected a shared vision of its curators, who continue to feature and reappraise films of American masters like Francis Ford Coppola, John Carpenter, and Sidney Lumet, as they did last year. And you can expect to see their names and many more, from South America to East Asia, January 25 through May 4.

Established in the fall of 2022, Cinematheque’s Thursday premiere series has aimed to provide at least a lone theatrical screening for eclectic new titles that otherwise wouldn’t secure a weeklong run here (or at AMC Fitchburg or Marcus Palace in Sun Prairie). Amidst awards season, consider the opening night selection of Jonathan Glazer’s historical art-house drama The Zone Of Interest on January 25, at 7 p.m., to be among the urgent best-of 2023 fare for those who pore over Letterboxd listmaking.

Subsequent Thursdays through February 29 include (in order) Wim Wenders’ art documentary Anselm (in proper 3D), returning genre champion François Ozon’s social satire The Crime Is Mine, Um Tae-hwa’s post-apocalyptic drama Concrete Utopia, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s psychological coming-of-age tale Monster, and Felipe Gálvez Haberle’s revisionist Western The Settlers. The annual winter LACIS series also boasts Kleber Mendonça Filho’s essay film, Pictures Of Ghosts, about Filho’s hometown in Brazil, on February 23. And as a bonus, Cinematheque is preceding a restoration of the late Jean-Luc Godard’s postmodern tech-noir Alphaville (1965) with his last “short film,” the 20-minute experimental trailer, Phony Wars, on March 30.

And that’s just scratching the surface. All the aforementioned films are screening in digital packages, but there are also 14 celluloid prints on 35mm for all sorts of repertory classics, one of which includes King Hu’s thrilling three-hour wuxia, A Touch Of Zen, on April 27. The most current among them is 2024 Best Picture-contender and new addition to the Christmas canon, The Holdovers. Director Alexander Payne will visit for an in-person Q&A on April 12, at 7 p.m., the night after the 2024 Wisconsin Film Festival concludes. The following evening, Payne will also introduce William A. Wellman’s underseen Westward The Women (1951), which he has called “really brutal, you could almost say pitiless film, but it’s deeply moving and deeply emotional. It’s a Western in which I cry about three times, and you just can’t believe how good this movie is.”

It’s been a bit more of a rarity for the Cinematheque to skirt over the Chazen Museum of Art across the street since their full-time return in the second half of 2021, and so it’s worth taking advantage of the three sci-fi films in their “Cinematic Messages From Our Planet” (on February 25 with John Carpenter’s Starman, March 24 with Joe Dante’s Explorers, and April 28 with Nicolas Roeg’s quite-surreal The Man Who Fell To Earth). This trio of 35mm Sunday afternoon screenings is being featured in conjunction with the Chazen multimedia exhibit, Message From Our Planet, which looks at the evolution of media technologies and communication (also contained in the means of projection of these films themselves). It runs February 19 through June 2.

UW Cinematheque and Wisconsin Film Festival Project Assistant Lance St. Laurent has helmed the three-Friday series in March that prestigiously pairs up director Sidney Lumet with actor Henry Fonda. It kicks off with the legal drama benchmark, 12 Angry Men (1957), on March 15, and continues the following two Fridays with romantic drama Stage Struck (1958) and Cold War thriller Fail-Safe (1964).

If you happen to miss out on the return of Cinesthesia at Madison Public Library’s Central branch on January 17 at 6 p.m. with Kathryn Bigelow’s prescient, underrated, and still hard-to-see Strange Days (1995), Cinematheque is offering another opportunity less than two months later, on March 8, to catch it on 35mm. The following day, March 9, they’re also bringing back Park Chan-wook’s “twist-filled take on the vampire genre,” Thirst (2009), which WUD Film screened last February at Union South Marquee.

For the cinephiles stuck on pictures of the Golden Age, the influence of poetic realism of 1930s France can’t be overstated. One of the movement’s most notable names, Jean Grémillon, was last featured way back in the summer and fall of 2015. If you haven’t made other plans on April 20 🌿, they’ll be screening a newly restored double feature of Grémillon’s Lady Killer (1937) and The Strange Mister Victor (1938) starting at 6 p.m.

And the list could, and does, go on. If Cinematheque’s fall 2023 programming set its sights on the broader Madison community, going all-out in terms of booking regal big-name flicks and a plethora of distinguished guests, this spring is a bit more tempered and less flashy. And yet it’s still packed with old and new treasures that will largely be projected in the 170-seat campus space that harnesses a warm, inviting feeling of discovery every weekend. Which should make it a little easier to stick to that new year’s resolution.

^{_{Editor’s note: A quote by Alexander Payne has been corrected in his reference to “Westward The Women” (1951).}}