Last week, the University of Chicago’s Doc Films presented a screening of Frank Borzage’s A Farewell to Arms, an adaptation of the Ernest Hemingway novel. Borzage is a great filmmaker, but the general consensus surrounding him seems to argue that he is a neglected director, even though his work does not lack for incisive and important critical commentary, particularly here in the pages of the Reader. And yet his films have never really captured the public’s imagination, perhaps because they deal so closely with matters generally considered sentimental, frivolous, or—for lack of a better word—uncool; stuff like love, romance, hope, and emotion....

A memorial all too familiar to cyclists sits at the southeast corner of Addison and Damen in Roscoe Village: a white-painted “ghost bike” covered with silk flowers and surrounded by plants and candles. At the base is a plaque that reads anastasia kondrasheva: she will shine forever. Attached to the cycle’s head tube by a maroon-and-gold Harry Potter-style scarf, there’s a snapshot of the young crash victim, bespectacled and smiling. A laminated spoke card reads “Nastya, always an angel ....

The more I think about Frankenstein the more it awes me. As I’ve said elsewhere in this issue, Mary Shelley’s 1818 epistolary novel addresses all kinds of modern anxieties. But that’s mostly because its themes have power without regard to time. The story of Victor Frankenstein’s all-too successful experiment in biochemistry speaks, tragically, to questions so big I feel awkward writing them down: What is life? What is death? What is the source of being?...

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Monday, March 13, 2017. Immigration officials are now detaining deportees in Kankakee County U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials in Chicago have been holding deportees at the Kankakee County Detention Center before they are sent to Mexico. Until March 3 immigrants being deported to Mexico were held in suburban Broadview, which is closer to Chicago than the facility in Kankakee County. The change will “make better use of ICE resources,” an ICE spokeswoman told WBEZ....

Mutual Benefit | 1:00 Artists’ names are in the color of the stage they’re appearing on. See our previews of the bands playing on Friday and Saturday. Pitchfork main » Diiv | 1:45 On 2013’s Sunbather (Deathwish Inc.), San Francisco’s Deafheaven launch black metal out of dungeonlike clubs and gray arctic wastes and send it screaming across a cloudless summer sky. Spindly tremolo picking and chest-rattling blastbeats piggyback on soaring postrock riffs that rocket toward the sun, while George Clarke’s larynx-­searing shrieks reach desperately after them....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, August 22, 2017. CPD expands body camera program to three more districts The Chicago Police Department is expanding its body camera program to officers in the Grand Central, Grand Crossing, and Chicago Lawn districts, the mayor’s office announced Monday morning. By the end of 2017, every police officer on the streets will have a body camera, according to DNAinfo Chicago. “Body cameras offer a firsthand look into the dangers face officers every day and will allow us to see what we’re doing right and where we can improve our training and tactics,” Chicago Police Department superintendent Eddie Johnson said....

At 7 PM this Friday at the Stony Island Arts Bank, Black Cinema House will present a program of two superb short documentaries, Sparky Greene’s American Shoeshine (1976) and Eleva Singleton’s Shinemen (2015). Both films consider the social significance of shining shoes, particularly in Chicago. American Shoeshine offers a panoramic view, interviewing a number of shoe shiners and addressing the history of shoe shining as an industry. Shinemen, on the other hand, focuses on one individual, Bill Williams, who owned a few shine shops in town and worked for the Chicago tourism bureau for three decades....

Sleight—which opened in wide release last Friday to little fanfare—is a minor film with major virtues: tenderness, imagination, and a strong grasp of character and setting. It takes place in working-poor Los Angeles, and one of its strengths is how it grounds the story in a palpable sense of economic desperation. The story features a young hustler who winds up in over his head—a conflict familiar from classic film noir—yet J....

There is a beautiful framed sepia-toned photograph hanging in each of the restrooms at Dove’s Luncheonette, the new Mexican diner from One Off Hospitality. They feature the interior and exterior, respectively, of a very busy Moon’s Sandwich Shop, the 81-year-old Lawndale institution that is as pure an expression of a classic American neighborhood diner as anyone could hope for. No one’s ever supposed to eat a torta ahogada by hand, though Dove’s is a lot neater than the typical drowned-in-chile-de-arbol-salsa variety....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Thursday, August 3, 2017. Illinois Obamacare providers want to raise health insurance rates by up to 43 percent Health insurance companies want to “raise rates by up to 43 percent for Illinois customers who receive health care coverage under the Affordable Care Act,” the Sun-Times reports. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois, which covers nearly 310,000 of the 351,000 state residents who have insurance through the ACA, anticipates rate increases averaging 38....

Ernest Hemingway once said that writers selling the screen rights to their work should arrange something like a ransom payment at the California state line: “You throw them your book, they throw you the money, then you jump into your car and drive like hell back the way you came.” “The Killers” embodies an idea much noted in Hemingway’s fiction, that a real man is one who can stare down his own death with honor and dignity; anyone who can’t is going to spend his entire time on earth either living in fear or living in denial....

Liz Lauren A scene from Smokefall, a New Stages success story If, in a year or two, you want to brag that you were among the first people to see the Goodman’s new production—and if you don’t want to pay for a night at the theater—you should most definitely check out the New Stages Festival, which opens tonight and runs through November 16. The festival, now in its eleventh year, features six new works, three as staged readings, three as full productions, and functions as the Goodman’s farm system: since its inception in 2004, about a third of the plays featured in New Stages have gone on to productions on the Goodman’s main stages, including the recent Smokefall and The World of Extreme Happiness, last season’s Buzzer and Ask Aunt Susan, next spring’s The Upstairs Concierge, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ruined....

On June 1, 2016, singer-songwriter Phil Elverum, who records somber, wispy antifolk as Mount Eerie, launched a GoFundMe page to benefit multidisciplinary artist Genevieve Castree Elverum (née Gosselin), his wife since 2003. The couple, who lived in the quiet seaside town of Anacortes, Washington, hoped the money would help cover the costs of treating Genevieve’s inoperable pancreatic cancer; she died on July 9. Just shy of nine months later, Mount Eerie’s A Crow Looked at Me (P....

Back in the late 80s, John Zorn famously crammed many of his disparate musical interests into the work of a single ensemble. His quintet Naked City embodied his rapid-cut aesthetic; every couple of bars the ensemble abruptly and precisely switched tone and style, communicating a short-attention-span ethos that foreshadowed the age of information overload. In recent decades he’s expanded his work as a composer, writing music to address specific styles including extreme rock music, hardcore, and prog....

More than 100 supporters of the Hideout piled into the auditorium of Park Community Church last night for a public meeting held by the city’s Department of Planning and Development (DPD) that was rumored to be about the 70-acre Lincoln Yards development, which would engulf and threaten the existence of the beloved music venue. Although it was the Hideout that brought many people to the meeting, most of the discussion was about the proposal for the designation of the Cortland/Chicago River TIF that Mayor Emanuel introduced last year, which would likely divert tax money to help pay for the $5 billion Lincoln Yards development....

There are plenty of shows, films, and concerts happening this week. Here’s some of what we recommend: Mon 8/6: The Cakemaker. In this astounding debut from Israeli writer-director Ofir Raul Graizer, a German pastry chef (Tim Kalkhof) moves from Berlin to Jerusalem to bond with the widow (Sarah Adler) and young son of his recently deceased boyfriend, writes the Reader’s Pickett. NR. 104 minutes. 7:30 PM, Facets Cinematheque1517 W. Fullerton Ave....

Alison Green Weezer Leor Galil: Thirty minutes into the Cure’s set, people began to peel off and move east en masse—it was kind of like the way birds fly south for the winter, but instead of seeking warmer weather, these flocks were going to hear Weezer play their self-titled 1994 debut, aka the Blue Album. The band didn’t seem quite ready for an audience, though: they flubbed the first part of the 2001 single “Island in the Sun” while playing a selection of favorites that led backward in time to the main event....

A patio in summer is a beautiful thing. Chicagoans are so desperate to be outside on the few days a year when the weather is perfect that we’ll wedge ourselves into the chairs that certain restaurants cram between the sidewalk and the street—and consider ourselves lucky to have the privilege. Then there are the real patios, set back from the street, with enough room to move around. Logan Square already has its fair share of good ones, but at 6,000 square feet, the patio at Park & Field—a “vintage sports club” that opened last winter on Fullerton between Kimball and Central Park—is one of the biggest in the city....

In October 2012, U.S. Border Patrol agent Lonnie Swartz shot and killed unarmed Mexican teenager José Antonio Elena Rodríguez through a border fence while responding to an incident in Nogales, Arizona. According to an autopsy, Rodriguez was struck ten times in the back with gunshot wounds to the head and arteries. Prosecutors questioned why Swartz would remember details like throwing up and injuries to other officers yet fail to recall shooting at a subject....

Tonight at Thalia Hall Pilsen-based nonprofit San Jose Obrero Mission hosts Music to End Homelessness, a concert to raise funds and awareness for some of Chicago’s most vulnerable people. The goal of San Jose Obrero Mission, which was founded in 1981, is to provide a safe haven for families and individuals who struggle with permanent housing and work to improve their lives in the long term. Headlining the event is local jazz-folk wunderkind Ryley Walker, who’s been a favorite around the Reader for years now....