In a bad marriage, children can become the one common interest holding the couple together. And in a good marriage, children are usually the focus, an organizing principle of their parents' lives. When the children leave, some couples feel disoriented and play for time as they regain their direction. And some marriages run out of time once the kids are gone. That could be the guiding theme of an intriguing film from Argentina, Empty Nest (El Nido Vacio). But director Daniel Burman smuggles other meanings into his story, including the sometimes-uncertain line between desire...

Disney and animals have been inseparable since Uncle Walt built an empire around animated ducks and mice. In 1948 the Disney studio expanded its scope with a series of "True Life Adventures" that brought drama and comedy to beautifully photographed, full-color travelogues of nature. Earth, a BBC/Disney co-production, updates those old nature pictures, with the resonant voice of James Earl Jones narrating a thematically linked...

For most people, gender identity is not a question. We have the parts that fit. But what does it mean to have a penis or a vagina? Ashley Altadonna, a Milwaukee transsexual filmmaker, has been exploring gender identity through films like Whatever Suits You, which has screened at LGBT film festivals such as San...

It's a Milwaukee version of the challenge "Build and They Shall Come." The passion that's driving it? Classic films. "I love to show old films to appreciative audiences," says Henry C. Landa, whose lifetime love affair with movies continues today with his Saturday night series Focus Films. After the North Division High youth entered the old UW-Extension on Fifth and State, he studied mechanical engineering...

Is it arrogant or ignorant to film a book deemed unfilmable by its author, who spits on your movie sight unseen, refuses to allow his name in the credits and famously refuses to accept money for your efforts? Director Zach Snyder (300) knew what he was getting into. Alan Moore, the comic book visionary behind League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and V for Vendetta, has never looked kindly...

By the time sound was heard in the movies, silent film had outgrown its awkward childhood to become a mature medium, an expressive art form in its own right. One of the last silent films deserves to be ranked with the great movies of its kind. The Wind (1928) was also the Hollywood finale for Swedish director Victor Seastrom (or Sjöström, as he was known in his homeland). Irked by having to add a happy ending to The Wind, which...

Since Steve Martin is one of the smartest men in show business, he must have been hard up for money when he agreed to star in the Pink Panther remake as Inspector Clouseau. Why else do it? In the original movie series the bumbling French detective was one of the funniest film characters ever, played by one of cinema's funniest actors, Peter Sellers. Surely Martin knew he could never top the best.Mediocrity often sells, however. Martin's 2006 remake made enough money to induce a sequel. Oddly, The PinkPanther 2...

The UWM Union Theatre’s free Experimental Tuesdays series tonight asks us what we think about a region of the country that, frankly, few of us ever think about. The program compiles films depicting Norway, Finland and other frozen climates from filmmakers like Patrick Beveridge, Peter Hutton and Rebecca Baron, a documentarian with an eye for still photography. She contributes stunning historical photographs taken on a 1897 expedition...

The imaginary world of books, those labyrinths of the printed page, comes dangerously to life in Inkheart. A best-selling young-adult novel by German author Cornelia Funke, Inkheart concerns a "silvertongue" who possesses the rare, wild gift of conjuring the characters and situations of books into the physical world. In the film adaptation by director Iain Softley (The Wings of the Dove), Brendan Fraser plays Mo, a silvertongue unaware of his power until the night he read aloud from a novel called Inkheart to his wife and daughter. Out from...

This weekend sees the introduction of Transmutative Cinema, a free film series with a fondness for outsider independent movies that provide more questions than answers. The series, which runs most Saturday and Sunday nights at the Alchemist Theatre and Lounge, hosts tonight an 8 p.m. screening of the 2006 drama Apart From That, which charts a seemingly unrelated ensemble of characters, including an exhibitionist who finds her audience...