Neeson and Ed Harris in Run All Night I’m glad to have caught Run All Night at Lincoln Square’s Davis Theater. No other movie house in Chicago is better suited for this unpretentious (but assured) genre item, the third collaboration in four years between Liam Neeson and Spanish director Jaume Collet-Serra. The film harkens back to the years before Redbox (which already feels like a distant era), when thoughtful genre movies for adults regularly got made on big budgets and opened in wide release....

Just a few hours after Mayor Rahm officially apologized for the sex predator scandal that’s hit Chicago Public Schools, three of the city’s leading school beat reporters joined for the monthly talk show Mick Dumke and I host at the Hideout. Karp is the reporter who broke the troubling story late last year about how CPS under Rahm had been shortchanging its special education program with a double-cross that was devious even for Chicago....

Imagine watching a class of preschoolers hopped up on cupcakes, acting out their dreams from the night before. This is the world of The Raveling, 60 minutes of utter self-indulgence that means absolutely nothing. Everyone onstage talks at once, so you can’t really hear any of them. Sometimes they whisper in unison, for no apparent reason. They also spend a lot of time rolling around on the floor, also for no apparent reason....

The Reader‘s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. The most-read Reader story of all time is a 2012 Savage Love column with the headline “My husband violated the ground rules I’d set for our threesome.” For some reason, this regularly pops up on the weekly list of top ten most-read posts. The husband promised his wife he would not stick his penis into the other woman, but he did it anyway....

This spring Berlin-based British bassist Hayden Prosser released his debut, a quartet album called Tether (Whirlwind), and its aesthetic is unmistakably European: though the record is modern jazz played on a high level, it dispenses with the tried-and-true “theme and string of solos” structure. Prosser’s compositions develop elegantly, but rarely in straight lines—instead they flow through the sort of amorphous forms that thrive in European jazz these days. One member or another might sideswipe a moody melodic passage with a new idea, creating a musical interrogation that reroutes the whole band....

Bex Chilcott, aka Ruby Boots, left her mother’s home in Perth, Australia, as a teenager in the mid-90s, and by age 20 she was working on a pearl-fishing boat on the northwest coast—a job that let her develop her singing voice. After getting fired from a short-lived job on chartered yachts in the south of France and busking in England to make enough money to get home, she set about establishing herself as one of her homeland’s most promising country talents: she was named Best Country Act by the Western Australian Music Industry Awards each year from 2011 till 2015....

The idea for Snubfest originated like so many others: over cocktails. Comedian Angie McMahon, her husband, Tom, and Robert Bouwman, the cofounder of improv theater the Cornservatory, were a few drinks deep at a Christmas party in 2005 when they drunkenly joked about starting a “fuck you for not picking me” event for comics who’d been rejected by stand-up, improv, or sketch festivals. But unlike most booze-fueled notions, this concept hit the ground running....

For over a year, the Harris Theater has loomed like an abyss in the center of the Loop, darker and more cavernous than it’s ever been: no drinks in the lobbies, no coats in the checkroom, no tickets ripped, no programs leafed and loosed on the floor. No hum of human gathering, no line out the restroom door, no echo of exhaust in the parking structure, no us. Though it has opened its rehearsal studio and its stage for artists to create digital works and hosted a steady stream of virtual content, its 1,525 seats will remain empty until (according to the latest calendar) October....

You can say this for director Mary Zimmerman’s staging of Meredith Willson’s multiple Tony winner, The Music Man: like the titular con man in the 1957 musical, she sure knows the territory. From the corrupting influence of the bawdy humor magazine Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang to the Isadora Duncan-inspired modern-dance ode to a Grecian urn, Zimmerman packs the story (by Willson and Franklin Lacey) with as much charm as you’d expect from the tale of a flimflammer colliding with truculent Iowans in 1912....

The Reader‘s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds.

After stripping off my blazer and picking up the same sweats and oversized T-shirt I’d slept in the night before, I crawled back into bed and queued up Netflix. A COVID exposure scare had kept me home from work, so I propped my laptop on my spare pillow and pressed play on the Chicago-based Holidate. Less than 20 minutes into Netflix’s holiday rom-com original, our female lead, Sloane (Emma Roberts), bares her trope:...

Nicole Wiesner directs Karel Čapek’s 1937 parable (translated by Peter Majer and Cathy Porter) about the clash between fascism and pacifism. In an unnamed country the citizenry is stricken with an illness which manifests in white spots on the skin and fells anyone over 45. As panic takes over, a young doctor appears to have found a cure, but he will only treat the poor; his condition for treating the rich is that they renounce war (which the government is fomenting)....

In the late 90s and early 00s, a wave of indie reissues brought 70s psychedelic music that had been made all over the world to new generations of American fans. In Turkey, for instance, a regional style called “Anatolian rock” emerged in the late 60s when mind-blowing artists such as Erkin Koray, 3 Hürel, and Bunalım mixed traditional folk with full-tilt, electrified acid rock. The 1999 compilation Love, Peace & Poetry: Asian Psychedelic Music introduced me to one of the other wellsprings of this sound, the band Moğollar....

[content-1] It’s become a Reader tradition for illustrator Jason Wyatt Frederick to draw detailed, immersive, and wonderfully punny cartoon overviews of the Pitchfork Music Festival for the cover of our fest-week issue. This year his illustration reflects more of the weekend’s cultural offerings: not just Pitchfork but also ComplexCon Chicago and the Silver Room Block Party. Every year I look forward to identifying the festival performers and famous Chicagoans in Frederick’s exuberant drawing almost as much as I look forward to actually attending Pitchfork....

Dennis Kelly and Tim Minchin’s musical adaptation of Roald Dahl’s 1988 novel about a precocious five-year-old (she reads difficult books, understands grown-ups at a deep level, and has telekinetic powers a la Stephen King’s Carrie) is a dark, troubling work. Matilda is a profoundly lonely child living in a cruel world and surrounded by addled adults, notably her shallow and materialistic parents and a school headmistress so selfish and sadistic she makes Miss Hannigan from the musical Annie seem kind....

Poster by Tvordis Veeler Each year, as summer approaches, University of Chicago’s WHPK hosts its Summer Breeze festival in the quad of the school’s Eckhart Hall. Steering away from the usual party-friendly sounds of typical outdoor college music festival, the acts booked for Summer Breeze are always a little weird, loud, and heavy; past performers have included Austin acid punks Spray Paint and noisy psych freaks Bunnybrains. This year’s Summer Breeze takes place on Saturday 5/16, from 11 AM until 5 PM, and is headlined by local art-rock collective Ono....

Every few years, the always-active, always-killing-it Wu-Tang Clan explode out of the trenches and back onto the front page of the zeitgeist. In 2015, they released the one-copy-only double LP Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, which was infamously bought for $2 million by pharma douche Martin Shkreli (and later seized by a federal court). Over the past year or so, the Clan have been thrust back into the spotlight for a far better reason: 2018 was the 25th anniversary of their debut record, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)....

January is a time of celebration and mourning for David Bowie fans. Today would’ve been the Starman’s 71st birthday, and Wednesday is the second anniversary of his death. Since debuting five years ago, Chicago-based Bowie tribute band Sons of the Silent Age have been throwing occasional fund-raisers for cancer patients and cancer research, and their efforts feel even more pointed since their inspiration’s death from the disease. Front man Chris Connelly and drummer Matt Walker brought their nine-person group to Metro on Saturday, focusing this time on the Berlin trilogy—that is, the three albums Bowie created after he moved to West Berlin in 1976....

After years as one of the most prolific and unrelenting noise artists in the U.S., veteran LA experimentalist John Wiese seems to have deliberately altered his modus operandi. His discography lists more than 400 items under his own name as well as projects like Sissy Spacek, Leather Bath, and others, but over the last half decade his output has screeched to a near halt. That said, if he only intermittently drops a title like the recent one-sided record Escaped Language (Gilgongo), I’m OK with it....