The Milwaukee Film Festival keeps growing and getting better each year – just ask MovieMaker magazine, which just named it one of the 25 coolest film festivals in the world. And today, it got even bigger, as Milwaukee Film announced the festival will expand its footprint and add two new venues to its fleet for 2019: the Rivoli Theatre in Cedarburg and the Broadway Theatre Center in the Third Ward.

"We’ve always had ambitious dreams of expanding our festival throughout the Greater Milwaukee Area," said Milwaukee Film CEO and artistic director Jonathan Jackson. "It is thrilling, thanks to several incredible new sponsors, that we are able to introduce our film festival to two new neighborhoods and audiences this year."

The two venues join the Times Cinema, the Avalon Theater, last year's newly added Jan Serr Studio Cinema pop-up screening room and the Oriental Theatre, still the event's anchor, as the festival's six screening locations.

The Fox Bay Cinema Grill in Whitefish Bay will no longer serve as one of the participating venues for the festival, but with the additions of the Rivoli Theatre and the Broadway Theatre Center, Milwaukee Film will actually have more screens to play with – eight in total – than last year's edition.

It'll be interesting to see how the Milwaukee Film Festival uses the two unique new venues – one traditionally a space for theater performances, the other located 30 minutes away from the festival's East Side hub – and how they will gel with the rest of the event. But utilizing unconventional spaces and spreading screens across sizable distances is nothing new for large film festivals – and in general more screens, and therefore more showtimes and potentially more movies, is never a bad thing. 

The ever-expanding 2019 Milwaukee Film Festival will run Oct. 17-31. Stay tuned to OnMilwaukee for more announcements and updates. After all, now that they've announced where the movies will play, what those movies are can't be far behind ...