Terence Davies is one of England’s most important living filmmakers, having directed two seminal British films, Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992). His subsequent films—among them The House of Mirth (2000) and The Deep Blue Sea (2011)—are just as rich as these, combining vividly realized settings, balletic camera movements, and exquisitely understated performances to create visions of the past that resonate in your memory long after you watch them....

John Moore, Getty Images Europe Aid workers stage an Ebola awareness event in Monrovia, Liberia. The Reader‘s “Did you read about?” feature drew my attention Tuesday to an article that compares Ebola to Enterovirus D68 (which gives children respiratory problems and is occasionally fatal) as a public health menace, but refuses to panic over either. “In reality,” says James Surowiecki on the New Yorker website, “we’re worrying too much about both Ebola and EV-D68, and too little about an infectious disease that is much more likely to inflict serious damage on the U....

The fictitious high school play The Gallows isn’t very good, judging from what we see of it during the real horror movie The Gallows. The dialogue is thin, bordering on cryptic; the characters’ motivations are unclear; and most important—at least for the school’s liability insurer—it climaxes with an execution on a fully functioning gallows, which has already resulted in one student’s accidental death back in 1993. Remounting the play 20 years later is morbid at best and negligent at worst, but then again, bad decisions are the foundation upon which the horror genre was built....

When the name Edwin Eisendrath surfaced a few weeks ago as someone putting together a team to buy the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Reader, I said it was good news. The former 43rd Ward alderman’s younger brother John had been a Reader staff writer in the early 80s and most likely he retained some affection for the paper. Perhaps that affection might save the publication. Minutes before Edwin and I spoke by phone I’d been reading “Why is this man running?...

A pioneer of alternative stand-up in the late 90s, Patton Oswalt treads familiar ground on his latest live album, Tragedy Plus Comedy Equals Time (Comedy Central)—but he also wades into uncharacteristically conventional territory, a sign that the snide malcontent whose jokes once came at the expense of red-staters and KFC has grown up. Still, the material remains as insightful and idiosyncratic as ever, showcasing Oswalt’s knack for shaping the mundane into a highly personal expression....

The Santaland Diaries at the Goodman is a hilarious adult romp through the holiday season. This one-man show, adapted by Joe Mantello from David Sedaris’s 1992 This American Life essay, delivers an uncensored tour through the dark heart of retail, told through the eyes of Crumpet, one of Santa’s elves at Macy’s. This show offers desperately needed catharsis: someone finally admits that maybe the dog-and-pony show we call Christmas isn’t really for the kids after all....

In 1869 a one-armed Civil War veteran named John Wesley Powell led a party of explorers down the Green and Colorado Rivers, traversing what Powell would later tag the Grand Canyon. Never mind that the local Paiutes already had their own, way better name for the place—”Mountain Lying Down”—the trip was a big deal from a manifest-destiny point of view: the first time white men of European heritage had laid eyes on and mapped out that particular stretch of geological magnificence....

Since January Richard D. James, aka Aphex Twin, has filled a Soundcloud account attributed to user18081971 with nearly 300 previously unreleased tracks and remixes. Late last month he dropped a remix of “I Want to Be With You,” a decades-old Chicago house track credited to Street Side Boyz. On the extended edit James removes the original’s sensual, snarling vocals and darkens its late-night thump—the shuddering synths and needle-sharp hi-hats take on a monstrous form....

Q: I’m a 47-year-old virgin straight man. What advice can you give me on losing my virginity? —Wanting and Hoping Q: I was involved with a straight man who enjoys cross-dressing and taking explicit photos. The problem is that the props he uses belong to his three children, all under age 12. For example, he dressed up as a slutty schoolgirl and wore his daughter’s backpack. He dressed up as a slutty cowgirl and posed with his son’s stuffed horse....

The winter of our political discontent brought Chicago some incongruously mild weather. The National Weather Service logged no measurable snowfall in the city during the months of January and February for the first time in the 146 years it’s been keeping such records. In place of regular seasonal flurries, a shitstorm of turmoil swept the country. Russia had effectively shoveled out a spot in the U.S. electoral system and plunked down an orange traffic cone with a bad combover into the White House, as if Vladimir Putin were a neighborhood jagoff calling “dibs” on our democracy....

I’m inspired and excited by music fanatics with very precisely defined specialties, whether in a specific style or a single region—they constantly seem to uncover sounds utterly new to me. Over the past couple decades, Africa has been the favored territory for a slew of such intrepid sleuths, and we’ve enjoyed a bounty of musical blessings thanks to the likes of Brian Shimkovitz, the Evanston native who runs Awesome Tapes From Africa; Tunisian-German crate digger Samy Ben Redjeb, the mastermind of Analog Africa; and Portland obsessive Christopher Kirkley, who’s focused a crucial lens on contemporary modes of pop-music transmission in Saharan Africa through his Sahel Sounds imprint....

Some people use social media to lash out (hello, Mr. President). Others use it to catalyze positive change. Chicago nightlife veteran Dom Brown (cofounder of Porn and Chicken) has felt pressure to do something since the minute the election was called for Trump, and his personal last straw came in late January, when POTUS issued his executive order on immigration (better known as the “Muslim ban”). Brown took to Facebook to voice his frustration and reach out to friends and colleagues who might also want to make a difference....

To me, the essence of the Chicago jazz and improvised-music community is live performance. More than records made in many other jazz cities, records made in Chicago are documents of what a band does onstage—and that’d be a fair description of almost everything on my list. An aesthetic shaped by onstage performance tends to make for an album a bit less splashy or conceptual than many of the picks that dominate year-end lists, but none of these efforts is lacking in artistry and excitement....

Back in the day, the reality that Sam Zell now owned the Tribune was hard enough to swallow inside Tribune Tower. It was even more galling on the coast, where Sam Zell of Chicago now owned the Los Angeles Times. Zell is long gone, but the occupation rages on—a great city under an imperial thumb. The other day the lead headline of LA Observed, an online news sheet published by a former metro editor of the LA Times, announced: Chicago imposing deep new cuts on LA Times, report says....

By the time you read this, Donald Trump may already have announced our withdrawal from the Paris climate change agreement. Last week the New York Times reported that the president, prodded by his senior adviser Steve Bannon and the conservative Institute for Energy Research, plans to issue an executive order scrapping the Obama administration’s regulations on coal-burning power plants, a building block to the Paris agreement. There’s a special place in hell for those who play political games with the fate of humanity—as Chinese director-cinematographer Zhao Liang might attest....

A year ago this month, iO matriarch Charna Halpern was frantically scuttling around the construction site that would become the new home of her Chicago comedy institution. She was dealing with financial stresses and a tight deadline in the final stages of iO’s move from Clark Street in Wrigleyville, the theater’s home for more than 20 years, to a cavernous new location in Lincoln Park. Today, she sits calmly in her office surrounded by her dogs Bear, Stella, and Mia....

CTA rendering of Irving Park station The station house of the Irving Park stop on the CTA’s Brown Line opens onto the northern sidewalk of Irving Park Road via two sets of double doors. Departing passengers headed east leave by the doors to the left, those headed west by the doors to the right. Irving Park is my stop, and as I exit with the hordes returning to their homes at day’s end I think about the hordes—perhaps obsessively....

Millions of people worldwide saw the June 2014 video, shot during Russian air strikes against the city of Aleppo, in which a Syrian rescue worker reaches into the rubble of a collapsed building, grabs the collar of a buried baby, and pulls it out of the wreckage to safety. But in Feras Fayyad’s moving and suspenseful documentary Last Men in Aleppo, one sees the video through particular eyes, as a little raven-haired girl watches it on a smartphone in her family’s living room....

Nothing bellows “PLAY BALL!” like a spicy tuna roll. At least that’s the case at Stella’s Batting Cages in southwest-suburban Lyons, where for most of its 31-year history batters at one of the 12 indoor fast- and slow-pitch machines sustained themselves with industrial-grade fast food: dogs, corned beef, burgers, fries, nachos, pizza puffs, a Reuben if you were fancy. His menu for the snack bar adjacent to the circular configuration of automated ball spitters riffs on the regional nouveau-signature snack foods of various major league ballparks....

Gaston Pauls and Hector Alterio in Tango Glories (Fermin) Tango Glories (Fermin), which opens the Chicago Latino Film Festival this Thursday at 6 PM, belongs to a genre of Argentinean cinema to which I’m especially partial. Light entertainment based upon the integration of improbable or supernatural events into the flow of everyday life, the genre has roots in magic realism literature and the surrealist filmmaking of Luis Buñuel. The films are generally sweet and lightweight, at times suggesting adaptations of daydreams....