F for Fake This week the Gene Siskel Film Center screens a brand new DCP print of Orson Welles’s Shakespeare adaptation, Othello. Scanned from the controversial 1992 restoration that toyed with the film’s sound design, this 2K digital version is said to retain the film’s visual qualities, which is encouraging considering how many subpar digital versions of classic movies are currently exhibited. As fate would have it, Othello is one of two Welles blind spots I need to remedy (the other being his TV movie The Immortal Story), and though I’d have liked to have seen this infamous 1992 version in the flesh, I’m excited nonetheless to finally catch up with what “may well be the greatest Shakespeare film,” according to Jonathan Rosenbaum....

48 Hrs. Tomorrow, the University of Chicago’s Doc Films screens Walter Hill’s The Warriors, the cult classic that’s gradually become a classic in general, a cornerstone of American genre filmmaking whose influence is as far reaching as anything in the canon. Alas, a lofty reputation doesn’t precede all of Hill’s work. He’s made some very bland and forgettable movies—Brewster’s Millions, yeesh—but at his best he’s as personal, emotional, and intellectual as any other great American auteur....

Zola Jesus, aka Seattle-based singer-­songwriter Nika Roza Danilova, has come a long way since the haunting, gloomy, artfully damaged postpunk she started recording at home (and eventually releasing) in the late aughts. The brand-new Taiga is her fifth full-length album, and the first since she departed chic New York indie label Sacred Bones for Mute Records; it’s as much of a culmination of her past work as it is a confident step forward....

Nemec’s A Report on the Party and the Guests screens twice next week. Starting in the mid-1950s, the Soviet Union entered into a period of cultural thaw, easing up on censorship and other repressive practices. Many of the Eastern Bloc nations followed suit, resulting in a flourishing of arts movements. One of the most internationally renowned was the cinematic new wave of Czechoslovakia, which produced works of social satire that would have been impossible during the Stalin era (such as Milos Forman’s The Fireman’s Ball and Ivan Passer’s Intimate Lighting) and more fantastical works that incorporated elements of literary and visual surrealism (like Vera Chytilova’s Fruit of Paradise and Jaromil Jires’s Valerie and Her Week of Wonders)....

Empire! Empire! (I Was a Lonely Estate) members Keith and Cathy Latinen with their dog A slew of fourth-wave emo bands are descending upon Chicago this weekend to perform—some call Chicago home, others are from Missouri or Florida, and most have a connection to a small Michigan town about an hour outside of Detroit called Fenton. It’s the headquarters of Count Your Lucky Stars, a small label run by Keith and Cathy Latinen, the husband-and-wife duo behind gorgeously melancholic outfit Empire!...

Years back I was excited—and then crushed—to come across fermented mare and camel milk at Mundelein’s great Russian Alef Sausage & Deli. The stuff turned out to be fake, and my dreams of drinking shubat like a proper Kazakh were deferred. But dreams never die, as I learned when Friend of the Food Chain Dr. Peter Engler reported that he’d found raw pastured camel milk for sale on Devon Avenue....

For the past couple months the National Trust for Historic Preservation has been conducting a public campaign around three flood-mitigation ideas for architect Mies van der Rohe’s modernist icon Farnsworth House. There’s a website, farnsworthproject.org, and in May the trust held a few town-hall meetings cosponsored by Landmarks Illinois and other interested groups. The favored proposal so far? A contraption that would allow the house to be jacked up like a jalopy in a garage whenever there’s a threat of seriously rising water....

The members of Boston’s Bent Knee came together in 2009 while attending the Berklee College of Music, and there’s no question that the wildly ambitious sextet absorbed a lot of lessons and ideas while in school. As heard on its forthcoming fourth album, Land Animal (due June 23 from InsideOut Music), the group melds styles with breathless precision, putting a sparkling pop veneer on its elegant prog-rock grooves, thanks largely to the rangy vocals of keyboardist Courtney Swain....

Scott Herring is not a hoarder. He watches shows like Hoarders with the same appalled fascination as the rest of us. But Herring is also an English professor who specializes in American cultural studies, which means it’s his job to think about why shows like Hoarders appall and fascinate Americans to the degree that they do, and how hoarding has become transformed in the eyes of the public from an eccentricity to a mental disorder....

The Incredible Hank In the fictional city of Sandicago, superheroes and supervillains are running rampant. All except Hank, who would rather be the world’s greatest file clerk than even admit to possessing any special powers, much less use them to fight bad guys. But when his loudmouth superhero-wannabe boss, Carl, shoots the city’s greatest supervillain, Dr. Manticle, Hank is forced to step in and save the day. What makes this hour-long comedy from New Millennium Theatre Company work is that it’s sincere without being cloying and self-referential without being smug....

West-side rapper Zernardo Tate, aka ZMoney, broke out in 2013 on the strength of two mixtapes (Rich B4 Rap and Heroin Musik) and the effortlessly euphoric “Want My Money,” which Chance the Rapper used in a short promotional video for the release of Acid Rap that April. It’s hard to believe that was four years ago. Since then the spotlight has ricocheted around Chicago’s hip-hop scene, illuminating blossoming labels such as Closed Sessions, emerging media outlets such as Lyrical Lemonade, and what sometimes seems like dozens of rising artists—Noname, Mick Jenkins, Saba, Lucki, Cupcakke, and many more....

When the trailer for Brown Girls, a new Chicago-based webseries, was released this past November, more than 20,000 people watched it over the course of a month. Writers at sites like Autostraddle, Black Nerd Problems, and Vibe were calling it their new favorite webseries of 2017 before the first full episode was even completed. A short preview of the show shared on NowThis’s Facebook page in December currently has more than two million views....

Most of the time, Christmas specials are saccharine to the point of being unwatchable. The same stable of stars sing the same holiday standards in the same disingenuous manner. When I heard that Bill Murray was creating his own holiday special for Netflix with George Clooney and Amy Poehler as guests, I expected more of the same. Thank god Murray left all the warm fuzzies in a snowbank by the side of the road and instead gave us something depressing, bizarre, and entertaining that brings a whole new meaning to what Christmas specials are all about....

Valerie Leonard still lives in the K-town two-flat where she was raised by her father, Theodis Leonard, who was principal of Paderewski Elementary at Lawndale and 22nd Street, and her mother, Essie, a retired teacher. After earning her MBA at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern—and following a stint in New York, where she worked for the Dinkins administration—Leonard returned to Chicago to form the Lawndale Alliance, a community group that has criticized the city for harsh budget cuts that hurt poor neighborhoods....

Gossip Wolf is a big fan of septuagenarian harmonica player and unsung reggae hero Charles “Organaire” Cameron as well as of Dark Matter coffee—and both turned up in the Reader‘s latest Best of Chicago issue. You can get a dose of them on Sat 8/8 at Double Door: Organaire performs at Simmer Down Sound, a vinyl night dedicated to reggae and dancehall that this time doubles as a release party for Dark Matter’s Pressure Drip, a Jamaican-­inspired coffee the roasters made with Chicago’s Jump Up Records....

The footwork music of production collective Teklife feels as indelible to the concrete curves of Chicago as it is to the rapid movements of the genre’s dancers. Even as the music’s gone global, and even as Teklife’s members have steered the hyperactive sound and its percussive panache toward different electronic aesthetics, footwork tracks carry an indescribable element that’s distinct to this city. Which brings me to “Dubby,” a DJ Spinn number the Teklife leader cut with his longtime collaborator and crew cofounder, the late DJ Rashad....

Mixtapes were once, by definition, stopgaps: collections of freestyles, new renditions of popular songs by other rappers, B sides, and whatever else you could package together and pass off to fans while they waited for a studio album. But since the digital takeover mixtapes increasingly resemble “proper” releases in quality, scope, and detail. Price has been one of the few things keeping the line between mixtapes and albums stable—mixtapes these days are essentially studio-quality releases available for free download through sites such as Datpiff or LiveMixtapes—though the line went askew the night Drake released If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, a mixtape he first posted for a fee through iTunes....

If 2016 was a year when most of us were accused of keeping cozy in our partisan bubbles, then the New Year is as good a time as any to reflect upon how we can reengage in politics. It’s prompted my own reflection too. Follow social media accounts across the political spectrum Look. Trump and his surrogates have launched an all-out assault on any news outlet that’s dared to report on him in an honest and/or critical way—from the Gray Lady to the likes of Teen Vogue....

Seven years after releasing their sixth studio album, 2011’s 100 Lovers (Anti-), folksy Gypsy rockers Devotchka have returned with their most orchestrated and gorgeous full-length yet, This Night Falls Forever (Concord). Devotchka always have made dense, multifaceted music, but on this record, singer and multi-instrumentalist Nick Urata’s film-scoring influence is most evident (not that fellow multi-instrumentalists Tom Hagerman and Jeanie Schroder make any less impact than usual). An accomplished film and television composer with 30 credits under his belt, Urata has a penchant for the cinematic, and on This Night Falls Forever, he joins epic arrangements with tales of heartbreak, longing, and devotion....

Richard Wright opens his engrossing, traumatizing 1940 novel Native Son in a run-down one-room kitchenette. Bigger Thomas, the story’s murderous 20-year-old protagonist, lives there with his mother, brother, and sister—and a marauding rat. For Wright this cramped apartment in Chicago’s black belt, the only neighborhood where African-Americans are allowed to live, epitomized the prevailing conditions in urban black America. As he wrote the following year in 12 Million Black Voices, “The kitchenette throws desperate and unhappy people together into an unbearable closeness ....