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Ant loves funerals. He doesn’t have family left, so when he goes to funerals, he no longer fixates on the deceased. Instead, he’s fascinated by the minute observations of each spectacle: “The whole show—the bouquets and black-out drapes, the living room chapels, the organs droning out dirges to drum machine beats, the discount casket coupons thumbtacked by the phone, padlocked basement door—none of it is morbid, to me, anymore.” Some old patterns do hold up, but flimsily....

The history of documentary filmmaking is bound up with notions of ethnography, the work of Robert Flaherty serving as a pioneering and critical example. With such influential films as Nanook of the North (1922) and Moana (1926), Flaherty used cinema to understand people unlike himself and relate what he’d learned to a general audience. Many have critiqued Flaherty’s work over the years, specifically with regard to its underlying assumption that the subjects needed a third party to document them....

I fear Patricia Clarkson’s judgment. Like many moviegoers, I first took notice of the actress when she played Eleanor Fine, a conservative white housewife in 1950s Connecticut, in Todd Haynes’s revisionist melodrama Far From Heaven (2002). Eleanor’s friend Cathy has fallen in love with a black man, and a pivotal moment in the story arrives when Eleanor finally pieces the truth together and fixes her old friend with an ice-cold stare....

In the early 1970s, singer Paulette McWilliams quit ascending Chicago R&B group Rufus and recommended that her friend, Chaka Khan, take over the lead spot. The decision benefited everyone, even (and arguably especially) McWilliams, who dodged the pitfalls of limelight while continuing to work constantly in music. By the time she relocated to Los Angeles in 1977, top musicians knew what she could do with her voice: Quincy Jones added her backing vocals to Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall, Aretha Franklin extended a similar invitation (on 1982’s Jump to It and 1983’s Get It Right), and for 20 years she collaborated with Luther Vandross (they were both part of Bette Midler’s famous backing group, the Harlettes)....

Now that Steve Earle‘s career has entered its fourth decade, it’s not particularly defensible to keep calling him a country-­music maverick. In the mid-90s, after recovering from a disastrous drug habit, he began carving out his own niche of the periphery of Nashville, a bad boy learning to coexist with the industry. He’s stayed loyal to the honky-tonk, hard rock, bluegrass, and Dylan-esque folk-rock of his youth, reshuffling those sounds into different combinations with each new project; though his music won’t surprise you, it continues to satisfy....

There’s never any point in nursing a grudge, unless you’re telling a story—then it’s a great idea. Ziad Doueiri’s Lebanese drama The Insult, nominated for an Oscar in the foreign-language category, tracks the escalating conflict between two stubborn men in Beirut. Tony Hanna (Adel Karam), an auto mechanic hopped up on the nativist politics of a right-wing Christian party, is hosing down his apartment balcony overlooking the street when Yasser Salameh (Kamel El Basha), a Palestinian refugee supervising a nearby construction project, comes to Tony’s door to complain about a leaky gutter that’s dropping water on passersby....

The Joffrey unveiled its new Anna Karenina this weekend before packed houses at the Auditorium Theatre. The product of an international team of luminaries, including choreographer Yuri Possokhov, set and costume designer Tom Pye, lighting designer David Finn, and projection designer Finn Ross, it’s the Joffrey’s first commissioned story ballet and for ambition alone deserves praise. It’s heroically danced by the company to a cinematic new score by Ilya Demutsky, with sumptuous costumes flashing against the muted blue of a minimalist set enhanced by a masterful use of lighting and projections—and if the making of a new piece of theater were the manufacture of spectacle, this rendition of the Tolstoy classic would take home prizes for the way it captures the story of its title character’s adultery, downfall, and demise in a series of arresting images....

Earlier this month, when the Chicago Public Schools inspector general issued a report that CPS CEO Forrest Claypool engaged in a “full-blown cover-up” of ethics violations and “repeatedly lied” to investigators, Mayor Rahm Emanuel tiptoed into the controversy. Rather than condemn his handpicked CEO, a longtime loyal factotum and friend, Emanuel said simply, “Forrest made a mistake,” and asked that no one make any snap judgments. Board of Education president Frank Clark immediately commended Claypool for “exemplary leadership” and said the board would review the report....

Timeless is the tale of sex and suppression. And this drama from Spanish playwright Federico García Lorca offers no shortage of players looking to put the kibosh on lust. There’s a mother, snuffing out promises of marriage and passion for her five daughters following their father’s sudden death. There are the sisters, who progressively warp into sex-starved monsters, drooling and jealous. And finally, the great male manipulators, unseen perhaps because they represent more than just themselves—a whole patriarchal system, stifling in its detached greed....

Gossip Wolf has Loved the delightfully cracked musical mind of Tijuana Hercules bandleader John Vernon Forbes since the 1990s, when he fronted local noise-rock killers Mount Shasta for a sizzling run of albums on Skin Graft Records. And it seems like Skin Graft feels the same way! On Friday, July 10, the label will drop Evening Dressings, a blistering seven-song Tijuana Hercules release full of what Forbes and company call “hillbilly trance....

Adapted from the 2017 play The Pope and written by Anthony McCarten (The Theory of Everything, Darkest Hour, Bohemian Rhapsody), The Two Popes is an imaginative take on a pivotal moment in the modern history of the Catholic Church. Pope Benedict XVI unexpectedly announced his resignation in 2013—the first pope to do so in nearly 600 years—citing a “lack of strength of mind and body” due to age. The conclave to select his successor occurred a month later, with Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio elected as the new pontiff, taking the name Francis....

Content warning: Graphic descriptions of physical and sexual abuse In February, the state’s auditor general reported that the Illinois DCFS failed in myriad ways to adequately care for LBGTQ+ kids. The report found “a lack of reliable and consistent information regarding LGBTQ youth in the care of the department” and “a lack of monitoring and oversight of private agency compliance” with its policies and procedures related to LGBTQ+ youth. “The number of LGBTQ youth in care provided by the department is only a fraction of the possible population as predicted using available literature,” the report states....

The great improviser Joe McPhee is 76 years old and shows no signs of slowing down. In fact, ever since his career was energized in the mid-90s by a group of players (including Chicago’s Ken Vandermark) who were half his age, McPhee’s been more active that at any other point in his vaunted career. He’s old enough to be the grandfather of the members of the high-energy European trio called Universal Indians, with whom he performs Wednesday at Constellation—but on the pairing’s recent album Skullduggery (Clean Feed) there’s zero generation gap....

Chef Boyardee’s line of prepared pasta is not a standard to which most chefs aspire. That includes Christopher Thompson of Coda di Volpe, who was challenged by Kevin McCormick (Beacon Tavern) to create a dish with Chef Boyardee Beef Ravioli in Tomato & Meat Sauce. “It’s kind of the antithesis of my philosophy on Italian cooking,” Thompson says. That philosophy includes “buying amazing ingredients and processing them as minimally as possible, leaving them true to their natural form,” he says....

Michael Gebert Sinangag (garlic rice) with igado, binagoongang baboy, and papisik (chicken in salt and lemongrass) Filipino food continues to make inroads into the mainstream in Chicago, though it’s still a long way from the near-universal acceptance of Thai food or sushi. If you want to get a taste of another side of the cuisine, sign up for Filipino Kitchen’s No Guts No Glory dinners this Friday and Saturday at Ampersand, the pop-up space next to Kinmont....

American Blues Theater presents the Chicago premiere of this 2016 play by James Lecesne (best known as screenwriter of the 1994 film Trevor and cofounder of the Trevor Project, an organization focused on suicide prevention among LGTBQ youth). In this engaging work of theatrical storytelling, originally performed off-Broadway by Lecesne himself, ABT ensemble member Joe Foust portrays multiple roles under Kurt Johns’s astute direction. The anchor character is Chuck DeSantis, a hard-boiled, middle-aged detective in a small working-class seaside town in New Jersey, who is investigating a missing person report that, tragically, turns into a homicide case....

In 1987, free-jazz originator Ornette Coleman named an album In All Languages; fellow alto saxophonist Steve Lehman, who began his career around 15 years later, seems to have taken that title as a challenge to be met at every turn. On his own records, Lehman has crossbred jazz with spectral and minimalist composition, English and Senegalese rap, and electroacoustic improvisation. As a sideman, he has lent his pungent tone and thoughtful responsiveness to the music of artists as diverse as Anthony Braxton, Jason Moran, and Meshell Ndegeocello....

Courtesy of Alexander Duvel Andy’s Music, soon to be Worlds of Music Chicago Last week, we reported on local institution Andy’s Music changing hands and turning into Worlds of Music Chicago. Andy Cohen, who currently owns the Roscoe Village shop—which specializes in a huge variety of exotic musical instruments from all over the world—decided he would be closing its doors this summer. Longtime manager Alexander Duvel and his wife Suzzanne Monk have stepped up, and with the help of some investors and a crowdfunding campaign, are going to buy the shop and keep it alive....

In this day and age, police violence—particularly against African-Americans, LGBTQ people, youth, people with mental illness, and undocumented immigrants—is impossible to ignore. As people who have little personal experience with these tragedies become conscious of the frequency and pervasiveness of assaults and killings by law enforcement officers, some are starting to wonder: In an emergency, are there alternatives to calling the police? “The content here can really push us and our boundaries, and our understanding of safety, and therefore it can lead us to some difficult conversations,” Steph, one of the workshop leaders who didn’t want to be identified by her last name, told the group....

For the fourth year in a row, Barcelona-based guitarist Aaron Feder brings his Alma Afrobeat Ensemble on a U.S. tour. The group, which Feder founded in Champaign-Urbana in 2003, consists of members from several nations, and as is customary when they travel in the States, they’re joined by their American touring musicians—Matthew Engel on keys and backing vocals, Cody Jensen on percussion, Joshua Thomson on alto sax, Eddie Quiroga on trombone, and Dr....