Cinebuds

Sound Vision at the 2026 MKE Film Festival

The 2026 Milwaukee Film Festival is coming up in just over two weeks and if you’ve never been, it’s kinda incredible! From April 16 - 30 hundreds of films will be shown across five screens at The Oriental and The Downer theaters on Milwaukee’s very fashionable East Side. So, with 250 short and feature-length documentary and fiction films from near and far to choose from, where does one even start making that schedule? Anything co-signed by Milwaukee Record, America’s #1 source of news and entertainment (#facts) will always make the top of my list. It’s great to see them back again for the 12th year as the sole sponsor for the Cinema Hooligante program. Think “Midnite Movies” and off beat films. This year’s lineup includes stories about misfit youths, a possessed vacuum cleaner and an entire story that takes place in a toilet. Check out this week’s episode as we welcome Milwaukee Record’s Matt Wild to the pod as our very special guest. Make sure you listen all the way through if you wanna find out what movie makes Matt Wild cry the most and then come hang out with the best people at a Cinema Hooligante film.

With Milwaukee Film getting ready to celebrate 414 Day by screening the Song Sung Blue documentary at the Oriental Theatre, we're taking a timely jump back to our conversation with a key player in the 2008 film about local musical couple Mike and Claire Sardina. Enjoy.#####After coming down from our Hugh Jackman interaction at the Song Sung Blue premiere at the close of 2025, we pulled back the curtain on the Milwaukee connections that inspired the recently released biopic.For that, we called in local filmmaker Jimmy Sammarco, who was instrumental (pun very intended) in the original Song Sung Blue documentary that brought the story of musical couple Mike and Claire Sardina — aka Lightning & Thunder — into the spotlight back in 2008. In his role as director of photography, he saw the ins and outs of the whole production, including a bombshell cease-and-desist order from Sony Music and an unlikely savior from one of the godfathers of grunge.

The Oscars are the Super Bowl of movies. We’re not talking about the prestige of winning, although that certainly lines up. We’re talking about how the wider world swoops in once a year to make predictions, rubberneck at the spectacle of it all and maybe even watch the actual event itself.Obviously, Dori and Kpolly are not “the wider world.” They’re unpretentious, welcoming, discerning film lovers who want everyone to join them in the fun of cinema (and in the theater itself, because watching movies in theaters is the best). So, with the Academy Awards coming up this Sunday and everyone in full-tilt prediction mode, our duo wanted to jump on board and offer a few picks of their own.This isn’t an exhaustive list. While Dori and Kpolly are as excited as anyone about discovering who will win for “Achievement in Production Design,” they stick to the big categories in this episode. Yes, most of them revolve around the showdown between One Batter After Another and Sinners. But does F1 make an appearance? You bet it does!

We use the phrase “action star” to describe the massive talent at the center of this episode, but Michelle Yeoh has demonstrated over the course of her remarkable career that she’s so much more than that.In fact, her career as a performer didn’t start with scripts or stunts. She was more focused on pirouettes and pliés as a classically trained ballet dancer, getting all the way to London’s Royal Academy of Dance before a spinal injury set her on a path to the big screen (but not before becoming a literal beauty queen).Dori and Kpolly get into Yeoh’s off-screen activities — even touching on her humanitarian work and activism — as they give her the star treatment for this episode. It’s a well-deserved spotlight considering everything Yeoh has accomplished across her 40-year career, from performing her own stunts despite zero marital-arts training to winning Best Actress for Everything Everywhere All at Once at the 2023 Academy Awards.That’s just one of the Yeoh-centric movies you can check out at the Oriental Theatre throughout March as Milwaukee Film presents its irresistibly titled “Just Say Yeoh” series. You’ll hear our dynamic duo discuss all four movies in the series, a handful of her other memorable roles and the other releases you should catch at the Oriental this week.#####Cinebuds is sponsored by Joe Wilde Garage Door Company.