Zeppo (Peter Moore) is driving around the ring road in Manchester, eating Chicken McNuggets (he buys ’em by the hundred) and reeling off the entire plot of Raiders of the […]

Ah, Pitchfork Music Festival. This is honestly one of my favorite festivals thanks to chill back atmosphere, but the weather decided throw a wrench into that. Temps in the high […]

Trust Exercise Susan Choi Henry Holt and Co. If high school didn’t exist, writers would have to invent it. A writer’s job is to articulate what others feel; and what […]

For more than a decade, filmmaker Lynn Shelton has been making relationship-driven dramedies with some of the independent film scene’s most talented actors from Mark Duplass to Rosemarie DeWitt, Ellen […]

Sometimes with documentaries, you just let an incredible story unfold and don’t worry too much about the bells and whistles that surround it. Or in the case of Armstrong, a […]

Awkwafina (née Nora Lum) made a splash last year as the boisterous, straight-talking sidekick to Constance Wu’s Rachel, visiting Singapore to meet her fiancé’s family. Her performance as a say-anything, […]

Jesse Eisenberg has made a name for himself playing tightly wound, neurotic types, from future media moguls (as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network) to unsuspecting zombie fighters (as Columbus in Zombieland […]

Up Jumped the Devil: The Real Life of Robert Johnson By Bruce Conforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow Chicago Review Press Robert Johnson is a definitive legend, though the dead-at-27 bluesman […]

Like clockwork, it has stormed the day before Pitchfork, to make sure the grounds are squidgy. And it will apparently be oppressively hot the next couple of days. Perfect! That […]

Somewhere in the kingdom of my memory there’s a small village dedicated to music from my youth. This community is populated with the essence of mallcore. The denizens wear To Write […]

The play that launched Chicago’s lauded ensemble returns to the substantially larger stage for the first time since 1982. Sam Shepard’s True West propelled the Highland Park High School and […]

House of Vans is one of my favorite venues in Chicago. It’s easy to get to, the staff are always awesome, and everything is FREE: free beer, free Vans giveaways, […]