In the past month, Netflix has premiered two visually impressive historical dramas by noted directors. Aleksei German Jr.’s Dovlatov, a nontraditional biopic of Russian novelist Sergei Dovlatov, became available to stream at the end of October, while David Mackenzie’s Outlaw King, about the Scots’ armed rebellion against English occupation in the early 14th century, was made available on the site two weeks ago. Neither film is American, yet both feel like Hollywood productions in their slick stylization and blatant anachronisms....

Last year, long-dormant local rockers Owls—aka the four dudes who founded emo-punk band Cap’n Jazz in 1989—finished their first album since 2001, working with engineer Neil Strauch at Strobe Recording. Front man Tim Kinsella says it’s been in the works since the 2010 Cap’n Jazz reunion, but “schedules were very difficult to synchronize. We had a few false starts and threw the whole thing away and started over.” Asked about the album’s title, Kinsella says, “There were a lot of compromises....

One of the strange and wonderful things about history is how the same basic facts can take on an entirely different meaning depending on when you happen to be examining them. As a case in point, Jeremy McCarter began writing his new book Young Radicals, the story of five activists who spent most of the 1910s advocating and often agitating for dramatic social change, back in 2011, in the middle of the hope-and-change Obama era....

Five years ago the Brazilian singer and actor Seu Jorge made one of the best albums of his career: Seu Jorge and Almaz, a collaborative effort with members of the manguebeat-pioneering outfit Nação Zumbi that delivered loose, addictive takes on a wide range of Brazilian music from the past. The repertoire included classics by the likes of Jorge Ben, Tim Maia, Nelson Cavaquinho, and Joao Donato, as well as a killer version of Roy Ayers’s “Everybody Loves the Sunshine....

Twenty years ago Nas released his career-defining debut, Illmatic, and while the New York MC has spent the bulk of the year celebrating that anniversary—he’s played the album in full on tour—other folks have been working and building on those ideas. In Chicago 33-year-old producer Adrian Villagomez, aka A-Villa, has been waving that flag proudly. His forthcoming debut is steeped in bold, old-school hip-hop, right down to its title, Carry on Tradition—that’s a reference to a line Nas collaborator AZ raps on “Life’s a Bitch,” which A-Villa sampled for his album’s title track....

More than 30 years ago, I heard a relatively unknown west-side politician make a passionate declaration about dealmaking in Chicago that’s been ringing true for me ever since. The choice for interim mayor came down to aldermen Eugene Sawyer and Tim Evans (now Timothy C. Evans, chief judge of the Circuit Court of Cook County). As usual, the decision was streaked with racial overtones. Harold Washington was, of course, the first and only black mayor elected in Chicago....

As a noted U.S. distributor of contemporary French cinema (Tell No One, Il Divo, Séraphine, Monsieur Lazhar, Mesrine, OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies), Music Box Films has a pretty good grasp of what’s going on in la Republique Francaise, which makes this fourth annual installment of the Chicago French Film Festival, Friday through Tuesday at the Music Box Theatre, an important event on the city’s filmgoing calendar. Only four titles from the festival were available for preview, but check out musicboxtheatre....

Reaching into one of the Reader‘s bestickered yellow boxes this morning, you may have noticed something different about this week’s issue: the paper has been redesigned. Every few years, the Reader gets an itch to freshen up what we present every week to you, our dear readers. In 2004, the paper had its Wizard of Oz moment, transitioning to color after three decades in black and white. In 2007, the four-section broadsheet became a tabloid....

As fate would have it, Governor Bruce Rauner revealed his plan to fork over as much as $1.26 million a year in tax credits to ConAgra Foods at roughly the same time parents were packing a Board of Education hearing room to protest the latest CPS cuts in special education. This is the same Governor Rauner who says we have to obliterate unions in order to foster free, unfettered markets. I’m not sure how giving one corporation an edge over its competitors is fostering free markets....

There are plenty of shows, films, and concerts happening this weekend. Here’s some of what we recommend. Fri 7/20-Sun 7/22: The Pitchfork Music Festival bolsters its usual smart bookings with a strengthened commitment to inclusiveness and community: this year’s lineup has more locals than ever, and more than half the acts include women. 11 AM, gates at noon, music at 1 PM, Union Park, 1501 W. Randolph, $75 per day, three-day pass $175, +Plus pass $375, all-ages...

Few configurations have produced music more starkly beautiful and quietly ruminative in recent years than Tyshawn Sorey‘s trio with pianist Cory Smythe and bassist Chris Tordini. Last month the group released its third album, Verisimilitude (Pi), and while superficially less grandiose than last year’s ravishing The Inner Spectrum of Variables, which added three string players to the fold, without reservation I would say it’s the trio’s greatest accomplishment. Two of the pieces were commissions premiered at the 2016 Newport Jazz Festival, so it’s not surprising that the aptly titled opening track “Cascade in Slow Motion” features Sorey’s elegant drumming, a dramatic, subtly surging presence that both lifts the simple, meditative figures elaborated by Smythe and offers a rich focal point on its own, mirroring the same sort tumble of sound voiced on piano....

The Bride Wore Black Today at 5:30 PM (and once more tomorrow at 6 PM), the Gene Siskel Film Center hosts a screening of Francois Truffaut’s The Story of Adele H. (It screens alongside Andrzej Zulawski’s horror classic Possession, part of a dual bill featuring films starring Isabelle Adjani.) Among a certain strand of hardcore cinephilia, Truffaut, a stalwart of the influential French New Wave, is very lowly regarded. True, he didn’t inspire the cult following of Godard or Rivette, or amass a filmography like Chabrol’s or Rohmer’s, but Truffaut played as crucial a role in the formation of contemporary film culture as any of his Cahiers du Cinema peers....

Stephen Malkmus‘s solo career doesn’t match the consistently brilliant, slack triumphalism of his work with Pavement, but it’s been better than the solo careers of many other indie-rock artists. Malkmus has a new album out today on Matador called Wig Out at Jagbags that’s just like his last two albums (Mirror Traffic and Real Emotional Trash): polished indie pop full of serpentine guitar solos, clumsy jokes, and 70s-rock melodies. One song, “Rumble at the Rainbo,” got me wondering if Malkmus was talking about local watering hole Rainbo Club, particularly with its pointed barbs at aging artists....

Last month I turned in a long-overdue review of Knife & Tine, a six-month-old Lincoln Park restaurant where the chef, Nate Park, a veteran of Moto and Ing, was doing some interesting, if problematic, things in the kitchen. Hours after I filed the copy it was announced that Park was out the door and replaced, and the review, naturally, was 86’d. All were served in short pours—three-, five-, and two-ounce wines, beers, and cocktails, respectively—which, if you were sharing food, would leave most folks a bit dry if they tried to share the pairings too....

In a recent interview with NPR Music, singer-songwriter Cale Tyson says the interest in country music he demonstrates on his new album, Careless Soul (At Last Records), turned out to be fleeting: now that he’s recorded it, he says, “What I’m finding is that I’m actually kinda going back to the indie-folk stuff that I grew up on, that I truly connected with first.” After getting his start in screamo punk bands in his native Texas—at which point he hated country—Tyson eventually got sucked into the music of Bright Eyes and decided to become a songwriter....

Dance has an implicit physics dancers grok mostly through kinetic ingenuity; the irresistible joy of dance hails from bodies pushing physical principles to their extreme. “Laws of Motion”—part of this year’s Pivot Arts Festival, themed “Art Meets Science”—takes a more cerebral approach. The Seldoms’ Exit Disclaimer: Science and Fiction Ahead focuses on the blindness and hypocrisy that surrounds the global warming crisis. Low movements in short spurts, dancers stomping and pumping vigorously side to side, caricature our unwillingness to adopt habits that are more ecologically sound....

Rock ’n’ roll is often most effective when stripped down to its essentials, and that’s what makes the Cowboys so brilliant. On last year’s self-titled debut LP, this four-piece from Bloomington, Indiana, lay out 14 unrelenting, ragged tracks that tip their hats to the Gun Club, the Cramps, and the Dead Boys. The Cowboys play simple, ramped-up, three-chord punk rock—about as far from reinventing the wheel as you can get. But while their formula has been used millions of times before, what makes these guys special is how they deliver it: they rip through their songs at top volume with a sloppy sneer, leaving all their fuck-ups and flubs on tape....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Monday, April 17, 2017. More than 1,500 people call for end to gun violence during Englewood Peace Walk More than 1,500 people led by Cardinal Blase Cupich walked through Englewood Friday to call for peace on the streets. Joined by community leaders including the Reverend Jesse Jackson and Father Michael Pfleger, the group stopped periodically to read the names of Chicagoans lost to gun violence in 2017 and prayed....

Chicago rapper and New Deal Crew leader Chris Crack was fairly prolific, averaging three major releases per year, till last June—that month he put out Troll Till They Fold and then fell silent. He didn’t return to releasing music till last week, when he uploaded Nobody Cares (Thanksforlettingmebemyself) to Soundcloud. He’s formatted the mixtape as a single 36-minute track, with no information to identify any of the songs or indicate when they begin or end....

A little more than two years ago I shared a track from the brilliant 1991 album Ask the Ages by guitarist Sonny Sharrock as a 12 O’Clock Track. It might seem excessive to post a different cut from that record today, but since the recording was reissued on November 13 (by M.O.D. Technologies, an imprint owned by bassist Bill Laswell, who produced the album and originally released it on his now-defunct Axiom label) I think there’s cause for doing so....