By Amina Kayani The post Settler’s Prayer to La Linda Nasca appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Watching the trailer, one would be forgiven for assuming that The Fall Guy is a vehicle for two of the most popular, attractive actors of our timeEmily Blunt (Oppenheimer) and Ryan Gosling (Barbie)to score an easy win with an action-romance film coming off their stellar Barbenheimer successes. However, what makes this film great is not […] The post ...

Astounding, vivid, and lively, this animated film directed by Chiara Malta and Sbastien Laudenbach follows a relatively simple story to deep effect. Linda (Mline Leclerc) is a little girl wrongfully accused of selling her mothers ring. After the ring is found, her mother (Clotilde Hesme) asks what she can do to make up for the […] The post Review: Chicken ...

Jerry Seinfelds directorial debut is not about nothing. It purports to chronicle the 1960s cereal wars between Battle Creek, Michiganbased rivals Kelloggs and Post and the desperate scramble to be the first to create a toastable breakfast pastry. In historical fidelity, it is about as factual as Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, which more successfully […] ...

Flannery OConnor wrote some of the most honest stories about Americans and their many flaws that anyone has ever put to paper. A woman of the south, crippled by lupus as well as the regions prejudices, OConnor created characters as funny and cursed as she was, by all accounts.  Ethan Hawke and his daughter, Maya, […] The post Review: Wildcat appeared ...

Foxx prepares for DNC showdown Kim Foxx has a message for people planning to take to the streets when the Democratic National Convention comes to town in August: dont. The outgoing Cook County states attorney told the pearl-clutching Chicago Tribune editorial board shes scrapping her offices policy of declining to prosecute peaceful protestors for the […] ...

The Moviegoer is the diary of a local film buff, collecting the best of what Chicagos independent and underground film scene has to offer. For the past several years, my moviegoing log has been a Google Sheet; only somewhat more recently have I again taken to Letterboxd to log titles (having joined and then abandoned […] The post Film logs, benshi, and ...

Reader Bites celebrates dishes, drinks, and atmospheres from the Chicagoland food scene. Have you had a recent food or drink experience that you cant stop thinking about? Share it with us at fooddrink@chicagoreader.com. The duck is better, a server might tell you if youre caught dithering between the gi g and gi vt at this […] The post Gi vt (duck salad) ...

On Friday, November 17, members of the Berlin Union and the lawyer for the beloved Lakeview queer club met for what workers didnt know would be their last bargaining session. Staff, party hosts, DJs, and patrons were riding the high from a successful four-week boycott. For months, the clubs owners, Jim Schuman and Jo Webster, […] The post Closing time ...

The phrase love letter is often overused in reviews, but when author Arionne Nettles calls her new book a love letter to the city that raised me, its entirely fitting. In We Are the Culture: Black Chicagos Influence on Everything, Nettles weaves her personal memories of growing up in Chicago with reporting and historical research […] The post Chicago is ...

Writer-director Jane Schoenbruns highly anticipated sophomore feature I Saw the TV Glow is both a tribute to millennium kid culture and a genre-defying trans coming-of-age thriller. On election night 2000, seventh-grader Owen (Justice Smith) connects with ninth-grader Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) after seeing her reading an episode guide for The Pink ...

Steel promised many immigrants the American dream, but it ultimately left them high and dry, stuck cleaning up the messes made by the mills that prospered and faded away.  If theres soot on the windows, theres food on the table. This popular saying signified the success of opportunity in the southeast side of Chicago. However, […] The post Review: The ...

Flipside is a cluttered, largely forgotten New Jersey record store thats drawn the focus of director Christopher Wilcha in this documentarysort of. Wilcha worked at Flipside as a teenager in the late 1980s. In middle age, he returns to the place that shaped his iconoclastic values out of a desire to reexamine his own life. […] The post Review: Flipside ...

Few young stars have had a rise as meteoric and seemingly inevitable as Zendaya. From an Emmy-winning turn as a drug-addicted teen in HBOs gritty high school drama Euphoria to playing the woman lead in a pair of sci-fi blockbuster epics (and finding time to be a style icon in the meantime), the 27-year-old has […] The post Review: Challengers appeared ...

MPAACT resident writer Shepsu Aakhu does something remarkable in this gentle, metaphysical play. He creates a world that successfully blends ritual and realism without succumbing to the weaknesses of either ungrounded otherworldliness or mind-numbing mundanity. Instead, Aakhu gives us a play that reveals the spiritual power in everyday life. Based in part ...

Could you call Chris Dritsass and Zach Hackers musical comedy a parody? They probably wouldnt fight you on it, but I mightthe gags, send-ups, and compositions here (music by John Love) are just too original and clever to be confused with rote, overt spoofs like Forbidden Broadway. Rather, Little Orphan Boy is a parody in […] The post Goofs, glorious goofs ...

Edging tend a joyful garden of chaos amid the decaying concrete of Chicago. On social media, the five-piece band describe themselves as landscaper punks because their three founding members connected through landscaping jobs. They also know something about how to prep soil to grow raucous rock n roll. Their music is a ravenous jungle of […] The post ...

A tormented young man is visited by the ghost of his recently slain father, who asks the son to avenge his death at the hands of his own brotherwho, to add insult to injury, has taken his job and married his wife (the young mans mother). The son has friends and enemies but mostly battles […] The post A gripping Hamlet appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Self-indulgent. A blunt word, yet little else feels appropriate for a show that ran three hours and eight minutesfrom late start to the end of curtain callwhen it is said to be two hours and forty-five minutes. An adaptation of Thomas Middletons Women Beware Women (by Kevin V. Smith and Daiva Bhandari and directed by […] The post Middleton of the road ...

This week, as demonstrations charging Israel with genocide in Gaza ramped up on college campuses across the country, the staff of the Illinois Holocaust Museum was preparing for the May 1 opening of a new permanent exhibit theyd been planning for four years. Housed in the museums towerlike Hall of Reflection, it would be a […] The post A new genocide ...

Were not trying to say that alongside every great woman is a fabulous gay bestie, but Bo Durham has certainly been just that for his mentor, James Beard Awardwinning pastry chef Mindy Segal. Over the past decade, the pair have been together at restaurant Hot Chocolate, Hot Chocolate Bakery at Revival Food Hall, and now […] The post Bo Durham is Mindy ...

Chicago Reader Volume 53, No. 15. May 2, 2024 The post Chicago Reader Volume 53, No. 15 appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Anaiet Soul (she/they)born Teiana Davisis a 24-year-old multi-instrumentalist and performer whose main instrument is piano. Primarily jazz-trained, Soul has taken part in Ravinia Jazz Mentor, After School Matters, and Harold Washington Colleges jazz programs. Through such opportunities, theyve rubbed elbows with many people they still regularly gig with ...

Every year, comedy hopefuls swarm into Chicago, hoping to find a place in classes at Second City that might lead to performing at Second City e.t.c. or the mainstagethe legendary launching pad to Saturday Night Live and stardom in other television and film projects. That possibility is embodied by the photos of past Second City […] The post Evan Mills ...

In the 1980s the Chicago art world was at the height of its authority. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago was mounting the first solo museum exhibition of work by Jeff Koons, hosting performances by pioneering sound artist Laurie Anderson, and bringing groundbreaking exhibitions like The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985 to the city. […] ...