Nick Cave began making last year’s quietly intense Skeleton Tree (Bad Seed Ltd.) well before his son Arthur’s tragic fall from a cliff in July 2015, but its brooding tone and crushing, inescapable darkness were clearly heightened by the impact of his passing. The opening couplet on the first song, “Jesus Alone,” features Cave intoning solemnly, “You fell from the sky / Crash landed in a field.” It’s hard not to interpret every line and sound—like the distant cries that emerge at the ends of tracks—as by-products of Cave’s loss....

About halfway into Sinister 2, there’s a scene in which two lonely people share a drink on the porch of a country house late at night. One (Shannyn Sossamon) is a young mother who recently fled her possessive, abusive husband. The other (James Ransone) is a former deputy sheriff who lost his job after he was falsely accused of a horrific crime. He’s since become a private detective, and his most recent investigation led him to the abandoned farmhouse where the mother is temporarily living with her twin boys....

When iO opened its new facility on Kingsbury Street, one of its most exciting aspects was the Mission, a theater that would be independent of iO’s typical programming structure and left completely in the hands of improv greats TJ Jagodowski and Dave Pasquesi. Last week the duo decided the pressure of the production side of things wasn’t their style, so they relinquished control, handing it back to iO founder Charna Halpern....

Mise-en-scene, the art of telling a story through visual composition more than editing, rarely comes up in discussion of Hollywood blockbusters. In the age of green-screen technology and computer graphics, it’s increasingly difficult to distinguish production design from special effects, and even when you can, the settings of these films are typically uninspired. In Peter Jackson’s Tolkien adaptations and in most of the Marvel Studios output (to name two popular examples), the environments never look quite inhabitable, however impressive they may be on a technical level....

If you got through last winter without looking at least once at real estate listings in San Diego, you’re made of sturdier stuff than I am. But we both have a leg up on lifelong Chicagoan Tony Fitzpatrick, who announces in his latest collagelike show—the fourth and final installment in a series that began with This Train in 2010—that he’s decamping for New Orleans. What he longs for is the Chicago of Nelson Algren, Studs Terkel, and Mike Royko—a gritty, noisy, built-from-nothing sort of place inhabited by a colorful cast of hustlers, charlatans, bar-stool philosophers, and salt-of-the-earth types....

“When I was growing up, all I would eat with cottage cheese were these really syrupy, densely packed peaches,” says Kiel Schelich, bar manager at Eight Bar (the previously nameless bar/restaurant downstairs from Maple & Ash). But when Steve Gleich of Luxbar challenged Schelich to use cottage cheese in a cocktail, his mind didn’t immediately go there. Schelich’s first thought was to make a drink modeled after a cement-mixer shot, where lime juice is added to Bailey’s to curdle it....

Warning: This review contains spoilers. Decker never shows her characters discussing how an audience might respond to their work—or, for that matter, whether they intend to present their work to an audience. This omission has the perhaps unintended consequence of making the performers seem self-indulgent, especially when the art making we do see looks ridiculous and childish. Like the actors’ awkward posturing (which suggests a sort of dance therapy for people who can’t dance), Decker’s filmmaking consistently walks a line between exuberant and embarrassing....

947 Garfield, Oak Park, 312-772-3257, waynebeals.com If you’re the type of home buyer with buckets of money to put down and the means to bid significantly over the asking price for that perfect West Loop loft or Logan Square two-flat, this is the real estate market for you. If you’re not that person, be prepared to hustle—and to have an open mind. Real estate agent Wayne Beals might be based in Oak Park, but the man knows every corner of Chicago (and beyond) inside out, and he will patiently explore your housing options in any of them....

Chicago alt-rock four-piece Post Child celebrate the release of their second full-length, Wax Wings, this Thursday, January 26, with a free show at Wicker Park’s Emporium Arcade Bar. Post Child’s members also play in several other local bands (Elephant Gun, High Priests, the Peekaboos, the Brokedowns), and together they’ve been dabbling in fuzzy, 90s-flavored indie rock since 2012. On their previous full-length, 2014’s New Age Whatever, they added insanely catchy hooks to their midtempo, wall-of-buzz guitar stomp, and Wax Wings takes this sound to the next level....

Dave Attell, patron saint of after hours, has some thoughts on women who mix hard alcohol with diet sodas: “You’re drinking whiskey, the wildest drink known to man. Are you really counting calories when you’re drinking whiskey? . . . ‘I don’t want to look puffy as I’m screaming the N-word at an eclipse. ‘” It’s been more than a decade since Comedy Central’s cult hit Insomniac last aired, but based on his most recent special, Road Work, the New York-based stand-up veteran seems only to have sharpened in the interim....

Diode Milliampere holds an ancient Toshiba laptop up to the camera of a more modern laptop, so that the window of our Skype conversation fills with a flickering, constantly refreshing grid of numbers and letters. The churn of seemingly incomprehensible codes, rendered in the blocky MS-DOS system font, looks like the kind of raw data you might see flashing across a monitor on a factory floor or in a water-­treatment plant, but it’s actually a musical performance of a sort....

Chris Anderson Outer Minds Logan Square’s Karissa Talanian originally launched Eye Vybe Records in 2011 simply as a method of putting out tapes by her band at the time, but at some point last year, things picked up and got serious. “I got the itch to release music by friends, including the Sueves and Dark Fog, so I purchased a tape duplicator and started putting out tapes in runs of 50,” she says....

On the 5900 block of Stewart Avenue, a quiet, grassy lot in Englewood, there’s a brick house painted from top to bottom in the teal hue of a pack of Newport cigarettes. Across the street, wildflowers grow at the base of an elevated track where freight trains periodically chug by with a low hum. The residence was painted in 2015 by the artist Amanda Williams and a small crew of helpers because it fit Williams’s main criterion: it was slated for demolition....

A federal judge just ruled that Cook County Jail’s policy of forbidding inmates access to newspapers—or even newspaper clippings—is unconstitutional. In granting summary judgment, Judge Matthew Kennelly said the sheriff’s office hadn’t made a case for the ban being “reasonably related to institutional security.” The plaintiff, Gregory Koger, who has long since left custody, was awarded nominal damages of one dollar. The newspaper ban has been in place since 1984, and the sheriff’s office (which runs the jail) justified it to Kennelly on grounds that newspapers are flammable, pile up quickly as litter, clog toilets, can stir up violence inside the jail by informing inmates of gang activity outside, and can be fashioned into papier-mache weapons....

A few of Piñeiro’s mysterious women On Sunday at 7 PM Doc Films will present the Chicago premiere of the 2012 Argentinian film Viola as part of their superb series of recent Central and South American cinema. It’s a curious film, starting out as a breezy, dialogue-driven comedy before growing increasingly mysterious and ending up in the realm of paranoid fantasy. Writer-director Matias Piñeiro (who’s made six movies since 2006) handles these shifts in tone so subtly that you might not recognize them until after they’ve occurred....

Read numbers 40 through 31 and 30 through 21. Lucas Santtana, O Deus que Devasta Mas Tambén Cura (Mais Um Discos) Lucas Santtana is a genuine auteur of Brazilian popular music, using every new album as a kind of stylistic or procedural exercise. He’s made deep excursions into funk and dub, and on his previous record all of the sounds were generated by acoustic guitars—including the beats. With his latest record he made a straight-up modern Brazilian-pop record with slick full-band arrangements wrapped around his typically gorgeous melodies and seductive singing....

Reviewers were forbidden from posting a word about this sequel until opening day, lest we give away the shocking secret that it’s a carbon copy of its predecessor, Sin City (2005). Of course the carbon is the whole point: directors Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez, adapting Miller’s black-and-white neonoir comics, take all the key elements of hard-boiled fiction and boil them down even harder, till there’s nothing left but a crusty residue of vicious thugs, cynical losers, crooked politicians, viperish women, and flying glass as people get punched out and crash through windows....

Nowhere to Hide, which is playing at Facets Multimedia for one more night, is a valuable document of postoccupation Iraq. It’s brilliantly structured and edited, but those virtues are secondary to the film’s value as a firsthand document of life in Iraq during the last several years. In scene after scene, Nowhere presents eye-opening footage of life amid war and deprivation; these images make the movie important viewing for anyone concerned about the fate of Iraq following the U....

Léos Carax’s The Lovers on the Bridge A couple Sundays back was the yahrzeit of my cousin Naomi, so I went with my parents and a handful of other relations to the Waldheim Cemetery in Forest Park for the unveiling of her gravestone. The few times I’ve gone to this cemetery, whoever’s driven has taken Harlem Avenue for the final leg of the trip. We go past the Blue Line terminus near the Eisenhower Expressway, and the mass of idle train cars makes me think of coffins converging in some sort of traffic jam of the dead....

The drama, based on Philip K. Dick’s novel, offers some chilling imagery of an alternate history. In the United States circa 1962, a giant swastika shines in Times Square, crowds of American children happily shout “Sieg Heil,” and Nazi soldiers gun down civilians in the street. The country is split into three sections: the Greater Nazi Reich, the Japanese Pacific States, and a neutral zone between them. Visually, the show is beautiful: it simultaneously captures the look of a period piece as well as a futuristic, alien world....