The A.V. Club's random fall cinema guide

Downtown Madison has only one theater that shows new movies on a consistent basis (that's the Orpheum), so anyone with an appetite for cinema here needs to either have a car, take a bus, or start getting creative. Luckily, the free and cheap stuff offered on campus and elsewhere is often a lot more fun than what's at the multiplex anyway. The A.V. Club rounds up some of the season's most promising and/or odd art-cinema events.

As always, campus' Cinematheque program in Vilas Hall's screening room is holding it down with a variety of themed series. The 1944 musical Meet Me In St. Louis (Sept. 4) kicks off both the season and a program of films by Vincente Minnelli. In perhaps a strange parallel, the "Red Hollywood" series will showcase four Russian musical films from the same period, including The Shining Path (Oct. 24). Cinematheque's "Border Series," which includes Billy Wilder's 1961 comedy One, Two, Three (Oct. 30) (about an East Berlin-West Berlin kind of romance), coincides with a conference about the Berlin Wall, and two Indian films, The Chess Players (Sept. 12) and Lagaan (Sept. 18), tie in with the Chazen Museum Of Art's current exhibit of silverware produced in India during British rule.

A few Cinematheque events fall outside of the usual series, though. The Kid Brother, a silent comedy from 1927, will screen with live piano accompaniment (Sept. 5), and Dutch artist Joost Rekveld is slated to come share some of his films (Oct. 9).

The Tales From Planet Earth film festival debuted in 2007 with an impressive lineup of environmentally themed documentaries, features, and animation, so its return this year (Nov. 6-8, multiple venues) is exciting. The schedule already ranges from John Ford's powerful 1940 John Steinbeck adaptation The Grapes Of Wrath to Trouble The Water, a documentary made amid people trapped in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. The annual Polish Film Festival (Nov. 20-21, Vilas Hall) might not have the same international appeal, but always makes for a cool little window into that country's recent cinema anyway.

It's a bit of a bummer to note that the Madison Museum Of Contemporary Art won't be bringing back its always-compelling Spotlight Film And Video series this season. That said, MMOCA's upcoming exhibition of Robert Rauschenberg's work (Sept. 13-Jan. 3) will incorporate Rauschenberg's short film Open Score, a documentary about a tennis pro and an artist playing a tennis match as part of a daring piece of performance art.

The Madison Horror Film Festival (Oct. 2 through 4, Market Square Cinema) gets a little boost this year from the twisted world of Troma Entertainment—if only because Troma president and trash-film legend Lloyd Kaufman appears briefly in the Wisconsin-made Incest Death Squad, which will première at the festival alongside many other small-budget gore-a-thons. Still, there was a time when horror movies weren't quite so self-consciously ridiculous, and Cinematheque will commemorate that with a Halloween screening of Roger Corman's The Masque Of The Red Death starring Vincent Price (Oct. 31).

If cleavage and buckets of movie blood aren't your idea of a good time (for shame!), the Overture Center offers a much more friendly escape in the form of its Duck Soup Cinema series. In an attempt to re-create the experience of vaudeville shows and old-timey silent-film viewing in the ornate Capitol Theater, Duck Soup will screen Buster Keaton's Sherlock, Jr. (Oct. 24) while an accompanist plays a score on the theater's historic pipe organ, and a variety of entertainers (think jugglers, etc.) will perform beforehand.

The students who curate the Wisconsin Union Directorate Film Committee's programs usually don't have their schedules lined up just yet by this point in the year, but they've consistently managed to pull together a diverse selection of free films. WUD's Starlight Cinema series, which focuses on the obscure and the experimental, has particularly been stepping it up over the past year, bringing in filmmakers, video artists, and more from around the country to share their work in compelling multimedia performances. The dates are still up in the air, but Starlight's organizers say they hope to feature such guests as video artist Mike Smith and multimedia artist Ben Russell. Also keep an eye out for WUD's International Cinema (what it sounds like), Real To Reel (documentaries), and Midnight Movies (weird stuff, screened at midnight) series.

Finally, viewers who enjoy taking risks will be drawn to local short-film group Wis-Kino's Fall Kabaret (Nov. 20-22), in which participants are challenged to make a short within the span of 48 hours. The final screening always has some ups and downs, but usually with enough wit and resourcefulness that a good chunk of it is memorable for the right reasons. At the very least, it's a bit of randomness to tide people over until the annual Wisconsin Film Festival (April 15-18, 2010, multiple venues), whose website and e-mail list are also handy resources for keeping up with independent film screenings and one-offs year-round.