Review: Porchlight’s Anything Goes—Delightful… Delovely
Get your tickets and grab your seats. On the relatively small stage at the Ruth Page Center for the Arts, Porchlight Music Theatre is putting on a big, big show: […]
Review: Mother Courage at Trap Door Theatre Brings Brecht’s Anti-War Rhetoric Home to the 21st Century
Bertolt Brecht’s 1939 play, Mother Courage and Her Children, is the greatest anti-war play of all time. Anti-war, anti-government and anti-capitalism, as we learn in the opening scene of this stirring […]
Review: Tamar Berk’s tiny injuries Is Worth Your Immediate Attention
If you want to throw a music critic into a real mental tizzy, ask them what they’re listening to or what they’d recommend. I know enough other critics that I […]
Review: As Earth Devolves into War, An American and Russian Space Crew Clash in I.S.S.
More an ethical puzzle than a proper film, director Gabriela Cowperthwaite (known for the docs Blackfish and The Grab, as well as the narrative feature Megan Leavey), works from a […]
Interview: Columnist Georgia Garvey on Her Greek Heritage and New Book, Everything Is Going to Be Okay (Until It’s Not)
The phrase “it’s all Greek to me” is often used to refer to complicated things people cannot understand. Yet for award-winning columnist and former Chicago Tribune editor Georgia Garvey, her […]
Review: Dover Quartet Plays a Blustery Program on a Blustery Night
On a blustery Friday night, the Dover Quartet gave a note-perfect performance at the Northwestern Winter Chamber Music Festival at Pick-Staiger Concert Hall in Evanston. While the Chicagoland region was […]
Review: Twenty Years Later, Mean Girls Adds Music but Remains as Quotable as Ever
Rosalind Wiseman’s Queen Bees and Wannabes was published in 2002, a non-fiction guide for parents on the cliques and exclusionary behavior teen girls engage in during their formative high school […]
Review: The Book of Clarence Is a Smart, Sharp Satire of the Bible’s New Testament and Modern Race Relations
Here it is, everybody: the first truly great film of 2024 that isn’t a holdover from 2023. (A handful of movies are set for release in January and February that […]
2023 in Review: The Ten Best Television Shows of the Year
This was a big year for finality in television. A lot of amazing shows ended, and most of them stuck the landing perfectly. Similar to how packed 2023 was for […]
Review: Society of the Snow Recounts the Harrowing Events of a 1972 Plane Crash with Grace, Human Drama
If the story told in the epic, harrowing Society of the Snow seems familiar, that’s because it’s been recounted a few times since 1972, when the actual events in the […]
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 […]