The 2018 Wisconsin Film Festival, running April 5 through 12 at Madison's AMC 6 and several venues on the UW-Madison campus, rolled out its schedule today online and in print. (The latter is tucked into this week's Isthmus.) Tickets go on sale on Saturday, March 10, so as usual festival-goers have a pretty tight window to make their choices from among almost 150 feature-length and short films.

After taking a quick spin through the festival lineup, here are some of the standouts: A documentary about Fred Rogers, Won't You Be My Neighbor? (which might just be the hottest ticket of the fest); Don Hertzfeldt's animated sci-fi follow up to his fantastic World Of Tomorrow short, World Of Tomorrow Episode Two: The Burden Of Other People's Thoughts; mumblecore progenitor Andrew Bujalski's exploration of titular double entendres, Support The Girls; the Ruth Bader Ginsburg documentary RBG (a film that will surely go over like gangbusters); Studio Ghibli's Harry Potter-ish homage Mary And The Witch's Flower; Claire Denis' most recent feature, Let the Sunshine In (which earned Juliette Binoche a Best Actress nomination from the European Film Awards last year); something old (1978's Blue Collar) and something new (First Reformed) from occasionally embattled director Paul Schrader; a one-two punch of early Kubrick short features (1951's Day Of The Fight and 1953's Fear And Desire); a Jean-Luc Godard biopic, Le Redoutable, from Michel Hazanavicius (the Oscar winning writer/director of The Artist); and a whole lot of Hal Ashby in the form of two lesser-known films (The Last Detail and The Landlord) and Hal, a whole feature-length documentary about the director behind classics like Harold & Maude and Being There.

As we work to digest the festival alongside you, here are further thoughts on a few more selections that stand out.

Beauty And The Dogs

The latest thriller from Tunisian writer-director Kaouther Ben Hania stands as urgent advocacy for women's rights in North Africa. With its basis on true events and the source text of Coupable D'avoir Été Violée [Guilty Of Being Raped] by Meriem Ben Mohamed, the film chronicles, in nine extended and immersive takes, a traumatic night in the life of Mariam (a fearless Mariam Al Ferjani), who is sexually assaulted by policemen following a university party she helped plan. Hania and her co-director Khaled Walid Barsaoui craft an unrelenting psychological portrait that details the inherent misogyny and tragic bureaucratic corruption currently instituted in Tunisia. As Mariam cannot be admitted to a hospital without proper identification, she also realizes that she requires a police station statement from the very men who violated her. What makes Beauty And The Dogs' sharp socio-political analysis even more potent is the narrative's turbulent emotional framework within the fluidity of its cinematic construct, one that has earned comparisons to another contemporary feminist Tunisian film, As I Open My Eyes (dir. Leyla Bouzid), which premiered in Madison last year as part of the Directress Film Festival, and to Cristi Puiu's The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. —Grant Phipps