What do Solange’s A Seat at the Table, Frank Ocean’s Endless, and Kanye’s The Life of Pablo have in common? Well, besides being some of the most talked-about releases of 2016, they all feature golden vocal contributions from London singer, songwriter, and producer Sampha Sisay, better known as Sampha. (Kanye didn’t actually add the knockout “Saint Pablo” with Sampha till months after he first dropped Pablo, but I’m counting it all the same....

Rarely have I been so ticked off by an American horror feature as I was by It Comes at Night, an arty new film written and directed by Trey Edward Shults. Shults’s script is undercooked and his direction is needlessly mannered; moreover, neither the writing or the visual approach is interesting enough to transcend the familiarity of the story, about a middle-class family’s efforts to survive in a postapocalyptic United States....

In better times than these, I’ve wondered what would happen to American journalism if it lost the tattered protections—among them the First Amendment and patchwork of shield laws—that journalists in other countries never had in the first place. Now we might find out. Trump was scornful. “It’s all fake news,” he said, though he didn’t deny seeing such a report. Jim Acosta, the CNN reporter, tried to reply. A lot of journalists expect nothing good (except for a torrent of stories) to come to journalism from Trump and his nominee for attorney general, Jeff Sessions....

Since their formation in 1985 up to and following a hiatus that stretched between 1997 and 2004, Leeds-based indie-rock outfit the Wedding Present have consistently turned over lineups, with front man David Gedge taking on the role as the band’s sole founding and constant member. After spending the majority of his career crafting urgent and earnest rock music, Gedge set out to make September’s Going, Going . . . (released on his label Scopitones) an immersive multimedia experience and the Wedding Present’s most ambitious record to date—and he succeeded....

Dolce Italian arrived in Chicago this spring with the distinction of being the second incarnation of a Miami restaurant that was named the best new restaurant in America on a Bravo reality program called Best New Restaurant. (A more appropriate title might’ve been Best New Restaurant in America of the 16 We Convinced to Be on This Show, but that’s not terribly snappy.) I didn’t watch nor had I heard of BNR—my food-related reality-TV attention remains fixed on the real garbage like Mystery Diners and Bar Rescue—but from what I gather it differs from other competition shows of its ilk in that it takes into account every aspect of a restaurant’s operations, so not just the chef and her food, but the service, the management, and the overall dining experience....

In the Town of Night Vale, hooded figures, bizarre flashing lights, and appearances by angels are parts of daily life. And they’re all explained and hypothesized about on Welcome to Night Vale, the otherworldly podcast narrated by Cecil Baldwin. Throughout, Baldwin provides updates on the conditions of the fictional southwestern desert town, including messages from secret police and gentle reminders like, “Remember: if you see something, say nothing, and drink to forget....

This past summer Chicago lost one of its most distinctive and acclaimed composers when Marcos Balter—the Brazilian native who was previously the director of musical composition studies at Columbia College—moved to New York to assume a position as associate professor of music composition at Montclair State University. Of course, he continues to write new music, and in that sense his presence will live on whenever someone performs one of his pieces....

American industry disproportionately affects the health of minority and low-income communities, and East Chicago, Indiana—which boasts of having been the country’s “most industrialized municipality” during the industrial revolution—offers a glimpse into the kinds of environmental injustices now plaguing the rust belt. In July 2016, nearly 1,200 people in the West Calumet Housing Complex of East Chicago learned their children’s blood carried levels of lead that tested as much as six times higher than the Center for Disease Control’s cutoff for lead poisoning....

Hrebejk’s Honeymoon screens again tomorrow at the Gene Siskel Film Center. I may have panned his latest, Honeymoon, in this week’s issue, but Jan Hrebejk is still my favorite working Czech filmmaker. A gifted director of actors and a perceptive chronicler of domestic life across all social strata, Hrebejk exhibits a warm (but seldom sentimental) understanding of character regardless of whether he’s working in comedy or drama. He’s also one of the most prolific figures in contemporary Czech cinema, having directed about 15 films for theaters and TV since Divided We Fall became an international success in 2000....

Whether you’re celebrating your singledom or looking for a romantic night out with a significant other, there’s plenty to do this Valentine’s Day. Here’s some of what we recommend: Celebrate Chicago History Skip the traditional Valentine’s Day celebrations and go back in time to the evening of February 14, 1929, with a Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre-themed chef’s dinner. A cocktail reception, featuring era-specific drinks, precedes dinner. Tue 2/14, reception 5 PM, dinner 5:30 PM, Raised Bar, 1 W....

The emotional impact of plays about musicians tend to have a high floor and a low ceiling. Heartbreak Hotel, Hank Williams: Lost Highway, Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill, Always . . . Patsy Cline—it’s a category of theater that’s by and large informative and unchallenging and, at best, an excuse for a solid live revue. These shows also usually feel like they’ve been pressed out of the same Mold-A-Rama with a different name and songbook....

You may be forgiven for believing that if you’ve had a relatively ordinary, happy life—if you grew up in a middle-class suburb with parents who were kind to you and did not have any chemical dependencies, if you and your family have always been relatively healthy, if you have never lived through a war, if your personal identity has never been so out of synch with everyone around you that you’ve had to face violent retribution—that you have no business writing a personal essay....

Miss Saigon, the 1989 musical by Claude-Michel Schönberg, Richard Maltby Jr., and Alain Boublil that did for helicopters what Phantom of the Opera did for chandeliers, is back, self-conscious bombast and orientalist clichés fully intact. Though revamped for the 2017 Broadway revival, everything about Laurence Connor’s staging feels old-school, in a bad way. True, when you’re starting with Madama Butterfly as your narrative inspiration, melodramatic stereotypes of Asian women dying for love are perhaps unavoidable....

In order to keep his coalition of Republican legislators together, Governor Bruce Rauner’s apparently decided to betray his lifelong commitment to reproductive rights and throw the women of Illinois under a bus. The 1975 bill starts by stating its “intention” to “reasonably regulate abortion . . . without in any way restricting . . . the right of a woman to an abortion.” The law could even result in doctors who perform abortions getting prosecuted for murder....

Chicago proto-industrial duo Hogg use electronics, guitar, bass, and their own distorted voices to create burning beds of skronk ‘n’ awe—this wolf thinks their 2015 tape, Bury the Dog Deeper (via Andy Ortmann‘s Nihilist Records), was one of the year’s most unsettling local listens. On Saturday, January 16, Rotted Tooth Recordings releases an expanded, retitled LP version, Carnal Lust & Carnivorous Eating, that includes two new tracks. That night Hogg play at a local underground venue with noise punks Running, who are approaching the show with the same panache that earned them a Reader nod for “Best Album Packaging” in 2012—bassist Matthew Hord promises plastic palm trees, frozen tropical drinks, and reggae goth DJs!...

Three Crows Theatre has made a name for itself performing plays based on true stories, and this one hits close to home. Melanie Marnich’s one-act, directed by Kristin Davis, details the radioactive history of the “Radium Girls” of Ottawa, Illinois. Painting the dials of the watches and clocks at the Radium Dial Company was a coveted job for women in the 1920s: it paid eight cents per watch, and a worker could complete more than 100 per day....

Brown Bear, Brown Bear and Other Treasured Stories For decades, starting in the late 1960s, Eric Carle used a distinctive collage technique to illustrate his books for young children, including the three staged here by the Mermaid Theatre of Nova Scotia: The Very Hungry Caterpillar; Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?; and Papa, Please Get the Moon for Me. Director/production designer Jim Morrow has done an impeccable job of expressing Carle’s aesthetic with puppets....

Few rock albums have retained a place in my heart and head like The Days of Wine and Roses, the 1982 debut album by LA’s Dream Syndicate. At the time the band was lumped in with other players from the city’s Paisley Underground scene, a neopsychedelic movement that produced the Bangles, the Three O’Clock, Long Ryders, Rain Parade, and Green on Red—but that record, which borrowed more from the Velvet Underground than any flower power combo, didn’t exactly fit the mold (its name was taken from the mighty drone project of composer La Monte Young, which included future Velvets member John Cale)....

Street gangs are one of the nation’s greatest scourges but also one of its greatest shames—imagine a life so bereft of opportunity that you’d take a bullet defending your nonexistent ownership of a street corner. But Lord Thing, a bold 1970 documentary recently restored by the Chicago Film Archives, revisits a period when the Conservative Vice Lords, one of Chicago’s oldest and largest gangs, aspired to something better, launching numerous initiatives to empower people in the Lawndale neighborhood....

Cooking with the grossest foods imaginable wasn’t the original premise of our long-running food feature Key Ingredient—that’s just how it worked out. The idea was that we’d ask a chef to create a dish with a certain ingredient, then that person would pick another ingredient and chef to pass on the challenge to, and it would go from there. And so it did, for 177 episodes, beginning in 2010 with Grant Achatz of Alinea and ending (next month) with Joe Frillman of Daisies....