Your Chicago Curated First Weekend of 2024 and Beyond
It’s a brand new year! Of course we’ll be accidentally writing 2023 for the next few day/weeks, but that doesn’t mean that 2024 isn’t here and ready to delight with […]
Recap: Fargo (S5, Ep3) — Series’ Third Episode Takes Its Time Setting Up Conflicts
Oh, I missed this show so much. I don’t think I can properly articulate how much I missed it, but if I could interpret the feeling that the claustrophobic, nightmarish […]
Review: Centered by Authentic, Devastating Performances, All Of Us Strangers Confronts Grief, Passion and Connection
There’s a magic to writer/director Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers, the kind that sneaks up slowly at first before becoming so powerful it’s impossible to ignore its pull. A […]
2023 in Review: Best Narrative Films of the Year
It’s the last Friday of a pretty great year for film, so it’s time to reveal my Best of the Year list. As always, I was able to squeeze in […]
2023 in Review: Best Documentary Films of the Year
As I am prone to do every year, I separate documentaries into their own Best of the Year list, not because I feel they should be judged any differently than […]
Recap: Invincible (S2, Ep4) — Mark and Nolan Fight Their Toughest Battle in a Brutal Mid-Season Finale
Where do we really come from? Invincible has been asking this question since its beginning. At first, Earth’s superpowered defender Nolan Grayson (J.K. Simmons) told his family he came from […]
Review: Raging Grace Finds More Horror in the Immigrant Experience than Its Jump Scares
This article was written by Zachary Lee. I did not realize the clever double meeting of the title of writer-director Paris Zarcilla’s Raging Grace until the credits rolled. The film […]
Your Chicago Curated New Year’s Eve Weekend 2023 and Beyond
Well this is it. 2023 is coming to a close this weekend and there’s a TON of things going on. Concerts, parties, light festivals, and so much more are waiting […]
Review: Searching for Meaning in the Absurd World of Rajkamal Chaudhary’s Traces of Boots on Tongue and Other Stories
The late Indian writer Rajkamal Chaudhary (1929–1967) came to prominence in the first two decades of independent India in the 1950s and ’60s, producing a prolific number of works in […]
Review: An Artist/Photographer Analyzes the Wanderlust of Stray Shopping Carts
The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification By Julian Montague Second edition, 2023, University of Chicago Press Julian Montague published his first edition of The […]
Review: American Fiction Is a Smart Satire That Sends Up Race, Relationships and Literary Ambitions
I have not read Percival Everett’s Erasure, the book on which Cord Jefferson’s hilarious and sharp send-up of literary culture and the Black experience, American Fiction, is based. But if […]
Review: In Adapting Alice Walker’s Classic Novel (Again), the Latest The Color Purple Boasts an Impressive Cast If Chaotic Story
Since Alice Walker’s The Color Purple was first published in 1982, it has been adapted into a film (in 1985, directed by Steven Spielberg), a stage musical (in 2005, which […]