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Explore Madison’s art-house screenings and the adventurous corners of local cinema.

Simple rectangular image collage of four film stills. At the top left, teenager Willa (Chase Infiniti) practices shooting an assault rifle in an open field in "One Battle After Another." At the top right, thirtysomething parent J.B. Mooney (Josh O'Connor) scopes out the Framingham Art Museum before he plans a robbery in "The Mastermind." At the bottom left, teenager Kyle (Jackson Sluiter) skates through the suburbs of Calgary in Alberta, Canada. At the bottom right, frazzled mother Linda (Rose Byrne) stops for a moment at her motel after visiting the convenience store in "If I Had Legs I'd Kick You."

One movie meditation after another: toiling through 2025

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Film
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January 21, 2026

Nine writers processed these trying times through cinema, at the theaters and at home.

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A still taken from Nicholas R. Wootton's experimental short "Liking This Angle" shows a woman holding up a plaster mold of a human arm on an angled wooden structure in an art studio. A second image of water streaking down a windshield is superimposed over it.
“Liking This Angle” finds artistic inspiration in degrees of the edit
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January 19, 2026

Nicholas R. Wootton's experimental short, featuring sculptor Christina A. West, premieres at Art Lit Lab as part of Project Projection on January 21.

In a spacious and opulent house, two sisters stand at a medium shot in a sunlit room and look out to the right (through an unseen window). Both women have dark brown hair that is pulled back. They also both wear comfortable, long-sleeve clothing.
Evaluating tenderness and depth of family dynamics in “Sentimental Value”
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Film
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December 10, 2025

Grant Phipps and Lance Li argue in favor of and against the artistic framework of Joachim Trier's latest psychological family drama.

A photograph shows a medium close-up of different sizes of two t-shirt designs hanging on a clothing rack. The leftmost one is "Blade Runner" and the rightmost one is "The Thing." The "Blade Runner" tee prominently features Deckard's face (Harrison Ford) as well as text from the film in yellow and white, while "The Thing" tee includes small portraits of the cast arranged in two long rows with blue text and the iconic alien monster design rendered in black and white.
Movie tee envy
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Microtones
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December 5, 2025

Pondering a shirt collection, and stumbling upon Cosmic Cabin, which has the goods—at least niche ones for cinephiles.

Still image from the film "The Annihilation Of Fish" shows a rainy park scene in Los Angeles with geese along the grass and paved trail. A man in a tuxedo and black trenchcoat carries a black umbrella in the foreground. His facial expression appears pensive and perhaps a bit upset. In the middleground, a woman in a blue floral dress and red and orange floral umbrella stands still and looks at him with a sense of sympathy and concern.
“The Annihilation Of Fish” wholeheartedly renders the enchanting eccentricities of a senior romance
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December 3, 2025

Charles Burnett's long-lost love story from 1999 screens on 35mm at UW Cinematheque on December 5.

A rectangular graphic to promote the Black Film Festival in Madison shows several different images with thin black border outlines in each corner. These include a poster for the narrative film "Miss Juneteenth" in the upper left and archival black-and-white photos from the documentary film "Fresh Dressed" in the upper right above the festival text and logos for both Madison Public Library and Justified Anger: Courses. The lower part of the image contains images from video essays—a Black couple sitting in a living room (at the bottom left) and Kendrick Lamar's Super Bowl Halftime performance (at the bottom right)—that are included as part of the festival.
In its third year, the Black Film Festival commits to deeper regional representation
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November 11, 2025

The Nehemiah Center and Justified Anger partner with Madison Public Library to honor Black lives and culture November 12 through 15.

An angled photo at an art gallery shows a large crowd of seated people, who are all looking forward and listening to a male speaker with a microphone at the front corner of the room (who is centered in this photo). To the speaker's right is a projection screen that displays a promotional collage of stills from short films in the forthcoming program.
Local open-mic cinema
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Microtones
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October 31, 2025

Project Projection at Arts + Literature Laboratory is assembling all facets of Madison's DIY and more professional film culture alike.

A simple photo collage contains two images. On the wider left, a daytime photo of modest wooden cottage that was constructed around the middle of the 20th century. It's situated in a wooded area, painted brown with white trim around the window frames and front door. To the right, a slender vertical close-up photo of a nearby historical marker contains a simple biography of poet Lorine Niedecker. A few lines of her poetry are also printed on the sign: "Fish fowl flood Water lily mud My life in the leaves and on water My mother and I born In swale and swamp and sworn to water."
“Welcome Poets” provides a portal into the Wisconsin places that shaped Lorine Niedecker’s identity
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October 16, 2025

A meditation on the 20th-century Wisconsin poet's artistic impact, in relation to Poet Laureate Nicholas Gulig's own six-part series that screens at Art Lit Lab on October 18.

A still from the film "Welcome To The Dollhouse" shows a bespectacled pre-teen girl sitting on her pink bedspread in a shared bedroom. She wears a kitschy pastel-purple animal T-shirt with turquoise-colored pants, and holds a handsaw up to the neck of her sister's Barbie doll on her lap. She stares forward with a blank, yet distressed look.
“Welcome To The Dollhouse” cuttingly conveys the social hell of pre-teen years
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October 15, 2025

Todd Solondz's enduring cringe comedy from 1995 screens on 35mm at UW Cinematheque on October 18.

A cropped still from the film "One Battle After Another" shows a disheveled middle-aged man standing on an open desert road. He wears a plaid-patterned bathrobe over a plain grey shirt and black pants. He holds a rifle up with his right arm and holds out a small black device in his left. The man peers into the distance with a concerned expression. A sports car that he's driven is parked in the middle of the road with the driver's side door open.
“One Battle After Another” reclaims hope in its cluttered, unpretentious, momentous rhythms
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October 9, 2025

Paul Thomas Anderson's latest epic satire is currently screening at all theaters in the Madison area.