Veering wildly between satire, psychological thrills, and moral drama, Nightcrawler attacks the seediness of contemporary TV journalism like Network on steroids. Dan Gilroy, a veteran Hollywood screenwriter making his directorial debut, delivers his outrage bluntly and aggressively, often resorting to outlandish, violent complications to emphasize the urgency of his message. His social commentary is never really convincing—like most industry professionals, he seems unable to critique media sensationalism without succumbing to it himself—but if you don’t think about this too hard, Nightcrawler is thoroughly compelling....

Philip Montoro, Reader music editor Jute Gyte, Discontinuities Adam Kalmbach, aka one-man Missouri avant-garde black-metal project Jute Gyte, has released 16 full-lengths since 2010, and on the most recent, Discontinuities, he uses guitars retro­fitted to play 24-tone equal-tempered scales—meaning he’s got twice as many notes in an octave as an ordinary guitarist. His songs teem with unearthly clusters of seasick dissonance, so that they sometimes sound like early Sonic Youth with blastbeats and shrieking....

Way back in the early clinic-and-school closing days of Rahm’s mayoral reign, I had a friendly debate or two with a leftie I’ll call Chris over whether our mayor truly believed all the trickle-down nonsense he was spewing, or whether he was only spewing it ’cause he thought it might advance his political career. Just as he’s done with gay rights, immigration, and even the legalization of marijuana—if you recall, in 2014, Rahm declared he would always resist any attempt to legalize reefer....

The Right Brain Project presents the world premiere of Michaela Heidemann’s comedy-thriller based on true accounts of shakedowns and other illegal activities in the labyrinthine catacombs beneath the titular Ukrainian city. A sniveling American journalist (Logan Hulick) wakes up bloody and disoriented by the pitch black of his new surroundings. Soon he is blinded by a flashlight carried by a young Ukrainian woman named Dariya (Hannah Williams). She orders him to follow her if he has any interest in getting out of the caves alive....

Far be it for me to give advice to the Republican Party, whose candidates I’ve not voted for since my Disco-dancing days back in the late `70s. Not only did the Democrats sweep every statewide race—from governor to treasurer—by landslide like margins. But they bounced Peter Roskam and Randy Hultgren, two Trump rubber stampers, from their congressional seats. And they picked up seats in the state senate and state house—so Speaker Madigan will have even more power than he had before the election....

The New Year began in much the same horrifying way the old one unfolded—with stories of murder splashed across the pages of our papers. I realize the economic gap between haves and have-nots isn’t the only reason for the incomprehensible violence, most of which is concentrated in, as Mitchell notes, several impoverished, largely black south- and west-side communities. “We must invest in these communities to eradicate poverty,” added state senator Kwame Raoul, “and in eradicating poverty, we will eradicate violence....

In a divey bar in Williamsburg, 24-year-old Chicago vocalist James King, aka the GTW (“Greater Than Wealth”), folds himself carefully into a booth across from me. He looks exhausted—he’s on a whirlwind tour of New York, hoping for a break—and he’s already regretting the effect that the $5 fries he ordered for lunch will have on his budget for the trip. Two nights ago he played to a small but enthusiastic crowd at the Glasslands Gallery, a nearby launching pad for up-and-coming underground talent....

Michael Gebert Henry Adaniya (right) at the Aviary, with Acadia chef Ryan McCaskey Grant Achatz’s time at Trio, from 2001 to 2004, is the subject of Next’s latest menu, but if Achatz got his start as a head chef there, Trio didn’t start with Achatz by a long shot. The Evanston restaurant was already ranked among the most creative and innovative fine dining restaurants in the Chicago area—along with Charlie Trotter’s, Ambria, Cafe Provencal, Carlos, and others of its day—and the job Achatz got was open because it had just lost Shawn McClain (Spring, Green Zebra), who’d replaced Rick Tramonto and Gale Gand when they left to start Tru....

The opening of Grant Achatz and Nick Kokonas’s fourth restaurant, Roister, a long-awaited first foray into something other than fine dining, has already been pushed back a few times. Now, because of construction delays, Achatz says the launch is scheduled for sometime around Thanksgiving. Plans for the space, the former Ing, at 951 W. Fulton (adjacent to Next), will include a la carte open-hearth cooking, though the style of food—described by the chef as “rustic but refined”—is as yet unknown....

In the aughts, it was possible to observe the past and future of U.S. public housing policy on the same Chicago block. After decades of deferred maintenance, lawsuits, and even a federal takeover, the portfolio of properties owned and operated by the Chicago Housing Authority was undergoing the nation’s largest public housing rehabilitation, demolition, and reconstruction project. Backed by more than a billion dollars as part of the Hope VI plan—a major federal initiative to overhaul the nation’s public housing—the authority launched the Plan for Transformation in 2000 to “renew the physical structure of CHA properties,” “promote self-sufficiency for public housing residents,” and “reform administration of the CHA....

Immigration policy can’t be painted with a broad brush. Unfortunately, that message hasn’t quite reached the likes of Donald Trump, the newly-embattled president, who has been met with intense local and national resistance to his recent executive orders. With the stroke of a pen, Trump sent people scrambling at airports around the world, with an authoritarian edict that seemed more like 1939 than 2017. Trump’s actions are only temporarily halted by a federal court challenge from the American Civil Liberties Union....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Thursday, June 29, 2017. Jason Van Dyke testifies about the aftermath of the Laquan McDonald shooting in pretrial hearing Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke testified Wednesday about the events that occurred after he shot 17-year-old Laquan McDonald to death in 2014. Van Dyke, who is charged with first-degree murder, official misconduct, and 16 counts of aggravated battery, testified for approximately half an hour about statements he made to his superiors and other officers after the shooting....

Blue Rider Press A few years ago, inspired by her boyfriend, who cared a lot about clothes, Sheila Heti, the author of the great autobiographical novel/philosophical inquiry How Should a Person Be?, decided that it was time to learn how to put more thought into her personal appearance and become more stylish. And, yes, there were a few that were boring and self-involved that I wanted to skip. But most I wanted to keep reading....

It’s a highly questionable theory, but Cajun food is often considered to be the less sophisticated rural analogue to cosmopolitan creole cuisine. If you subscribe to that idea, you might have been among the many who did a double take when you learned that the much-anticipated Logan Square cocktail bar Analogue, helmed by two Violet Hour vets, would be serving a tightly focused food menu that includes things like gumbo, po’boys, dirty rice, and biscuits....

As a kid living in Laguna, a province in the Philippines, Janette Santos always looked forward to the large cardboard boxes that her aunt sent from Chicago. These boxes were big, sometimes even bigger than moving boxes, and typically arrived at her doorstep during the holidays. As she opened them, she caught a whiff of a familiar detergent smell that Filipinos who have received boxes from the U.S. describe as the scent of “imported goods” or of “America....

Chances Dances launched a decade ago as a queer dance party with a focus on inclusivity. It’s now evolved into a multifaceted collective that not only hosts well-DJed parties (a transcendent remix of Kate Bush’s “This Woman’s Work” comes to mind) but also awards microgrants to artists and supports Chicago’s LGBTIQ communities in myriad ways. The group’s ideology and history is explored in an exhibition at Gallery 400—part of a citywide anniversary celebration entitled “Platforms: 10 Years of Chances Dances....

Local artist and author Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing is Monsters is a knotty, richly drawn graphic novel that blends memoir, pulp horror, detective fiction, and historical drama. It’s set on mock notebook pages—like Syllabus, a recent comic from former longtime Reader contributor Lynda Barry. Ferris uses panels and word balloons in My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, but an equal amount of space is given to illustrations of a type more often seen in children’s storybooks....

Never in my life did I imagine that I’d one day make arguments against hamburgers, but I have all but pleaded with chefs to stop putting them on their menus. I recognize that the notoriously thin profit margins of the typical Chicago restaurant often require the fattening properties of what’s becoming the chicken breast of the average modern American menu—the thing that timid, incurious eaters can be depended on to order....

Cole’s in Logan Square will celebrate its sixth anniversary on Sat 8/1 with sets from a slew of bands that feature the bar’s employees, including Lil Tits, the Bionic Cavemen, and Bolthorn, plus owner Coleman Brice, who’ll be “forcing all attendees to listen to his gospel music song cycle.” Let’s hope it’s worthy of praise! Proceeds will go to Carrefour Collaborative, a nonprofit that helps marginalized artists from Haiti bring their work to new audiences around the world....

One reason I was so enthusiastic about Azazel Jacobs’s The Lovers, one of my favorite movies of 2017, was that it reminded me of the work of writer-director Alan Rudolph. Employing funny, literate dialogue and graceful camera movements, Jacobs created a heightened sense of reality in which it seemed natural for people to fall in love on a whim. This effect, and the means Jacobs used to achieve it, seemed straight out of the Rudolph playbook, something few filmmakers have bothered to consult since he stopped making movies in the early 2000s....