MICROTONES by Chris Lay, newsletter editor

I love that I've been able to cover the Wisconsin Film Festival for Tone Madison these past few years. Having moved to Madison in 2007, I was late to the game with the festival, only hitting a single film in 2009. In 2010, though, I spent a whole afternoon watching the three Red Riding movies back to back to back at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art and I caught the bug. Hanging out in that theater for seven hours or so (including breaks between films), a palpable esprit de corps connected the few dozen movie nerds who had decided to spend an otherwise lovely spring day locked inside away from the glorious sunshine. I've been chasing that feeling ever since and usually find it at least once per festival.

The general perception of the most recent festival, which wrapped up last week, seems to be a bit divided. The admittedly small sample of opinions I polled, limited to chatting up the people on either side of me in line, were either very happy with things or seemed to think that there was a bit of a drop-off in the quality of the films. Personally, I think it was about as good as any of the handful or recent fests I've dug into but, while it was certainly consistent across the board, there were fewer real standouts. Of the 15 films I was able to see across the whole of the festival, a couple were clunkers, a couple were home runs, and everything in between was at least above average.

It's crazy that even after putting so much time and energy into seeing as many films as I can, I can still look back and see a dozen other screenings I regret not having been able to get to for whatever reason. Fifteen films? That's a film fest completion percentage just barely in the double digits, if that. Did you do better than me? We're always trying to increase involvement of our readers, and we'd love to hear from you about which films you liked the most or which ones were the biggest let down. The 2017 fest is barely behind us and we're already talking about the exciting new ways we're going to cover the festival in 2018.