2022 Milwaukee Film Festival will be in person and virtual, with screenings at the Oriental Theatre, Avalon Theater and Times Cinema

The 2022 Milwaukee Film Festival will be a mix of in-person and virtual screenings, with movies showing at three theaters when it returns April 21 to May 5: the Oriental, the Avalon and the Times Cinema. 

The latter has been closed since March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down everything, but is expected to reopen before the festival starts. The Times and the Avalon, which have been part of the Milwaukee Film Festival in past years, are both owned by Neighborhood Theater Group. 

The in-person screenings will be the first for the Milwaukee Film Festival since 2019. Last year, Milwaukee Film, the nonprofit that operates the festival and owns the Oriental Theatre, moved the festival from fall to spring.

Milwaukee Film's Cultures and Communities Festival was held in person last fall at the Oriental. 

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The 2022 film festival's full lineup of more than 200 films isn't expected to be released until April, but Milwaukee Film disclosed a few early highlights Tuesday, including: 

• A 40th anniversary screening of John Carpenter's horror classic "The Thing," showing in a 35-millimeter print. 
• A big-screen presentation of Spike Lee’s 2020 documentary "David Byrne’s American Utopia," featuring Milwaukee musician Angie Swan.
• The music documentaries "Charli XCX: Alone Together" and "For the Left Hand," the latter about a Chicago musician who, after a childhood trauma, became a piano virtuoso using only one hand.
• "892," the bank-heist thriller starring John Boyega that won a special jury award at this year's Sundance Film Festival. 

Tickets for virtual film screenings are available by purchasing an all-access festival pass (including in-cinema film screenings and other events) or a virtual-only pass. Individual tickets will also be available for all in-cinema screenings and in discounted six-packs, available through March 11. 

For more on tickets and the 2022 Milwaukee Film Festival, go to mkefilm.org/mff. 

Contact Chris Foran at chris.foran@jrn.com. Follow him on Twitter at @cforan12.