A longtime friend in Los Angeles used to groan whenever I would gasp at each artfully designed course that arrived at our table in some fancy eatery. I was always mystified by his reaction, but after seeing Paris Can Wait, Eleanor Coppola’s paean to French cuisine, I understand his point: It’s just a meal, honey—get over it. The filmmaker, wife of Francis Ford Coppola and mother of directors Sofia and Roman, long ago established herself as, if not exactly an artist in her own right, one in tandem with her family....

The dark, haunting sound of Chicago band Beat Drun Juel reminds Gossip Wolf of Belly, PJ Harvey, and other 90s alt-rock classics from MTV’s Buzz Bin—never a bad thing! On Mon 7/20 they’ll release the seven-­inch “This Is How I Get Over You” b/w “That Boy Musta Stole Something of Mine,” their first new material since 2014’s stomping Off Your Face EP. Last week they posted the B side on Bandcamp, and this wolf can’t shake off the spell of its swirling, overdriven guitars!...

When they’re not onstage, the Nerdologues can often be found collaborating at the 10,000-square-foot shared working space in Bucktown that serves as headquarters of Cards Against Humanity. In November, the Chicago sketch team will release its own unconventional card game that members have spent the last year and a half crafting. Why would a seven-member sketch comedy group with no game-making experience try to compete with the Katnisses of the game-making world?...

Pardon me for sounding paranoid, but it sure looks as though the three most powerful politicians in our universe are teaming up to drive our schools into bankruptcy. Each year Chicago gets hundreds of millions of federal dollars—most funneled through the state—largely intended for schools with high concentrations of low-income students. If you recall, last year Mayor Emanuel finally tried to make good on obligations to the Chicago teachers’ pension fund....

Kevin Warwick, Reader associate editor The Radio Dept., Passive Aggressive: Singles 2002-2010 Overcast skies and dropping temperatures mean seasonal depression looms—and what better to pair it with than fuzzy, ambient dream pop from Sweden, one of the planet’s most seasonally depressed countries. This collection of the Radio Dept.’s deeper cuts shows off the band’s knack for tucking a glowing guitar or synth melody deep within a listless haze. Ralph Rivera, CEO and employee of the month five years running at Not Normal Tapes...

Chicago moviegoers are glad to have the Northwest Chicago Film Society back in business. The venerable screening series has seen its share of upheaval over the last couple of years, but after a brief hiatus, things are up and running at Northeastern Illinois University’s Fine Arts Auditorium, where quality 35mm repertory screenings await. This week, the NWCFS presents Ingmar Bergman’s Summer with Monika, a slow and low ode to teenage love that marked the director’s first major stateside success....

After local music-booking company MP Presents (sometimes known as MP Shows) parted ways with Township in Logan Square late last year it soon after started putting on a multitude of punk shows at Fizz Bar & Grill in Lakeview. That is, until recently: last week MP Presents moved many of its shows from Fizz to 1st Ward, the venue attached to Chop Shop, a combination restaurant, butcher shop, and bar on North Avenue near the heart of Wicker Park....

The pinnacle of Bone Thugs-N-Harmony’s artistry and commercial success was their 1995 album E. 1999 Eternal, a smooth and spooky smash hit dedicated to the death of the group’s mentor, gangsta rap pioneer Eazy-E. Anchored by the unstoppable and timeless singles “1st of tha Month” and “Tha Crossroads”—an instant classic that probably even had your squarest middle-school teacher musing about how badly the Cleveland group missed their Uncle Charles—E. 1999 Eternal showcased the wide range of personas and voices of Bone Thugs, from the unhinged Krayzie Bone to the beyond smooth Layzie Bone to the rapid-fire rhyming of Bizzy Bone over smoky, snappy DJ U-Neek beats....

Even viewers with the heartiest intellectual appetites may grow tired of chewing through the nearly three hours of overcoats, dirges, and sorrowful lamentations that make up Chris Hannan’s new adaptation of Crime and Punishment, presented by Shattered Globe Theatre. Beyond just the sheer inviting challenge of staging Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1866 novel, it’s not hard to see why his provocative, radical ideas would appeal to artists and audiences in 2018 America. The philosophical parable interrogates the thresholds of mankind’s moral relativism and its inclination toward utilitarianism, particularly when it’s squeezed by poverty....

Last week I was lifted from obscurity to semiobscurity when the website Vocativ announced that I was the most reliable movie critic in the country. “Screening for Hacks: America’s Movie Critics, Rated” is based on a formula that writers Adam K. Raymond and Matan Gilat concocted using numerical data from Metacritic, one of those sites that harvests reviews, converts them into number values, and averages these to rank new releases. I’ve always thought such sites are ridiculous, not to mention a little demeaning: as film editor I try to persuade my contributors that we’re writing literature, not consumer advice....

It’s unlikely that either Tim Wolfe, president of the University of Missouri, or R. Bowen Loftin, chancellor of the university’s main campus in Columbia, slept soundly Monday night, each having resigned under fire earlier in the day. But the night might have been worst of all for Melissa Click, an assistant professor of mass media in the Department of Communications and also an adjunct professor in the School of Journalism....

The title says it all. Conceived and written by librettists Michael Shepherd Jordan and Alex Garday with composer Stephanie McCullough and first presented in 2014 as a holiday attraction at the trio’s now-defunct MCL Chicago comedy theater, this is a song-and-dance send-up of the 1988 thriller Die Hard. That movie, which starred Bruce Willis as a wisecracking New York cop fighting international criminals in Los Angeles (in his bare feet, yet!...

Todd Rosenberg/Lyric Opera Jenn Gambatese as Maria, about to meet her future I’d like to say this Mariaesque flub-up wasn’t my fault, but it was. As bad career moments go, it’s right up there. Like the warhorses of the opera repertoire, The Sound of Music, which opened on Broadway in 1959, is very familiar to its audience, most of whom can hum nearly every tune. Chalk that up to the 1965 movie version, which the stage show now competes with, but also complements....

The “true meaning” of Christmas has likely been debated since the holiday was first invented. Is it a holy celebration of the birth of Christ or a capitalist cash grab? Both? Neither? Something else entirely? We’ll probably never truly get to the bottom of it. In 1993 Patrick Griffin skirted around the issue to explore an even deeper layer of the holiday madness: “The True Meaning of Xmas.” Xmas, he says, has a weedlike vigor, making its staying power even stronger than that of Christmas....

I have a longtime friend of a certain fleshy girth who, one Saturday morning, stood outside the window of Pilsen’s great Carnitas Don Pedro, in front of its famous mountain of steaming, glistening porky goodness, and thoughtfully observed, “This is what I look like when I get out of the shower.” Earlier this summer I was introduced to jackfruit “carnitas” at Mini Mott, and the less said about those the better....

The Works Progress Administration was an anomaly in American cultural history. It was formed in 1935 by President Franklin Roosevelt with the intent of providing jobs for people who had been left unemployed by the Great Depression. But it didn’t just give work to skilled laborers and industrial workers. It also created paid jobs for writers and artists. Perhaps because there was so much collaboration—or because the artists wanted to keep their patron, the WPA, happy—most of the prints remained representational and accessible, as Lincoln puts it, “very focused on the present and engagement with the human experience....

Later this week, the Gene Siskel Film Center presents a new 4K DCP digital screening of Douglas Sirk’s final film, Imitation of Life. Sirk is one of the most influential directors of his era, a master ironist with an ear for dialogue and an eye for baroque mise-en-scene. The characters in his films wrestle with feelings and conflicts familiar to the audience, but he often adds an extra thematic or stylistic dimension, an unexpected perspective on a routine engagement....

Back when I worked in the neighborhood, not a week went by that I didn’t stop at L’Appetito, the little near-north-side Italian deli on Huron now in its 33rd year. Whether it was for an espresso and panino, a cup of gelato, a bottle of good olive oil, a pound of imported pasta, or a chunk of Parmigiano-Reggiano, L’Appetito was a quick and essential part of my routine that helped me eat well during the workday and at home....

I like to direct,” filmmaker Lois Weber told Photoplay in 1915, “because I believe a woman, more or less intuitively, brings out many of the emotions that are rarely expressed on the screen.” A hundred years later, Weber’s words still apply: nearly every movie I see by an exciting new female filmmaker—Ava DuVernay (Selma), Andrea Arnold (American Honey), Jennifer Kent (The Babadook), Elizabeth Wood (White Girl), Marielle Heller (The Diary of a Teenage Girl) —takes me to emotional spaces I rarely encounter in movies....

When a quarter of a million people descended on Grant Park on January 21 in solidarity with the Women’s March on Washington, one man was curiously absent: Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. The official public schedule from the Mayor’s Press Office gave notice the night before the demonstration that “Mayor Emanuel will attend the Women’s March on Chicago” at 11:30 AM. Organized by Clinton operative David Brock—who The Nation has described as a “conservative journalistic assassin turned progressive empire-builder”—Democracy Matters is a summit billed as an attempt by the blue team to rebuild itself from the pile of smoking rubble it’s been since a certain low-rent con man beat their candidate in November....