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With films from more than a dozen countries screening at venues from Evanston to Pilsen, you wouldn’t be wrong to count “Ism, Ism, Ism: Experimental Cinema in Latin America” (“Ismo, Ismo, Ismo: Cine Experimental en América Latina”) among the most wide-ranging festivals of its kind to appear in Chicago in recent years. “In the end, we never really came up with a hard definition of what’s Latin American cinema,” said Jesse Lerner, who with Argentine filmmaker and critic Luciano Piazza curated the essays and images in the coffee-table-worthy print catalog for “Ism” ($45, University of California Press)....

Villalobos infused the turmeric into milk and cream simmered over low heat. It takes a few minutes for the liquid to pick up the turmeric’s orange color, he says, but if you leave it long enough it’ll get so bright it looks like it’s glowing. “Turmeric has that effect: if you use too much, everything looks neon—not good.” Then he whipped together eggs and sugar, tempered them with the hot milk mixture, and added the eggs and sugar to the pan with the milk, cream, and turmeric....

The federal government’s getting ready to unleash a flood of coronavirus relief cash, much of which will, as usual, end up in big corporate coffers. The Trump administration has asked for a trillion dollars so far, reportedly including $50 billion for the airline industry and $150 billion for businesses like cruise ships, casinos, and shopping malls. Americans for the Arts thinks some of this windfall should go to nonprofit arts organizations which, they estimate, have already lost $3....

The thought of publicly airing painful events from your past may make you cringe, but soul baring can also be cathartic or even necessary. Brittany Howard, the guitarist and front woman of Alabama Shakes, shares a glimpse into some of the challenges she’s faced on her new solo album, Jaime (ATO), named for her sister, who died of the rare eye cancer retinoblastoma at age 13, when Howard was nine. Howard has said she wanted to create the album—and speak about painful things, such as saying her sister’s name—as a way to heal and to help others feel better about themselves....

The Chicago rockabilly scene has been fairly dormant for the past several years, though touring acts such as Big Sandy and Deke Dickerson still attract huge local audiences. Along with Tammi Savoy, singer Bailey Dee is among the vanguard of those making the scene exciting again. Dee’s musical background is fairly diverse, and though she often plays with progressive-folk band Jonas Friddle & the Majority, her own music is solidly in the roots-rock vein....

The “Pray 4 Rose” mural and shrine In early March, shortly after Derrick Rose suffered his umpteenth knee injury, a cartoon likeness of the Bulls point guard appeared beneath the Kennedy Expressway overpass on Fullerton Avenue—the same place where ten years earlier the religious convened in droves to admire a splotch of salt runoff that some thought resembled the Virgin Mary. The Rose image, complete with a crown of thorns and a “Pray 4 Rose” banner, was made by human hands—specifically those of local artists Brendan Carroll (aka “Joking Noah”) and David Beltran (aka “Bae Cutler,” who also produces ecstatic electronic tracks as Starfoxxx)....

Ever since B.B. King died, there’s been a lot of unnecessary talk about Buddy Guy being the Last Bluesman Standing From the Golden Era. This isn’t strictly true, but among that generation of blues musicians, Guy does seem to have the highest profile. With reason: though he’s now going on 81, his singing and guitar playing are still in top shape, as is his energy level. Once a year, he continues to play a month-long stint at his club, Legends—proving that the man pictured on the sign outside is no myth....

Chicago-raised, Atlanta-based rapper Lil Wop loves Gucci Mane so much he replicated the trap king’s iconic ice-cream-cone face tattoo on his right cheek. As Lil Wop told the Fader, Gucci Mane “taught me you can’t sound like nobody . . . To have the sauce, you gotta have all the ingredients. It ain’t all about wordplay.” Gucci clearly thinks his acolyte gets it, because last year he signed the emerging rapper to his Interscope imprint, 1017 Eskimos, and collaborated with him on a tune called “Paid in Full....

Guerilla Toss are down with the Grateful Dead. In an impassioned Facebook post from July 2015, the New York-based band threw laurels upon a group they called “the first ‘DIY’ band,” noting that the Dead used harsh noise in the 1960s and brandished modular synthesizers throughout the ’70s. Like the Dead, Guerilla Toss combine a spirit of experimentation with a rugged DIY ethos and a penchant for lobbing undeniable hooks into unsuspecting ears....

Beginning with Rushmore (1998), the films of Wes Anderson have seemed to sit outside of time, combining elements of past and present culture to create environments that belong entirely to themselves. This started to change somewhat with Moonrise Kingdom (2012), which situated the action in the middle 1960s, but its vision of the past was too fanciful for the film to be regarded as a straight period piece. History played a more prominent role in The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), as the movie commented obliquely on eastern European politics throughout the 20th century as well as the life and work of famed author Stefan Zweig....

Company’s coming, and the house is a mess. Thirtysomethings Mike and Deb have no matching patio furniture, and their collective greatest accomplishments are the deck Mike built in the yard and a single published short story, the meager fruit of Mike’s creative writing degree. Unable to cook and despairing of the central role a beanbag chair plays in their interior design concept, the hapless couple decides charring meat outdoors is the least humiliating way to entertain their friends....

Considering that director John Huston was related to three noted actors (his father, Walter Huston; his daughter, Angelica Huston; and his son Danny Huston) and acted in more than 50 films himself (including Chinatown and The Misfits), it’s no surprise that his films offer consistently strong performances. The streaming channel FilmStruck is currently featuring a selection from Huston’s nearly 50-year career, and we’ve picked five with some particularly fine acting....

In 2010, three years after the Reader had been sold by its original owners, two years after the next owner had declared bankruptcy, and one year since the paper had fallen into the hands of a hedge fund, our excellent editor, Alison True, was fired. Dorsch told a persuasive story, True says, but what grabbed them was “not that there’s necessarily human remains at that northwest side corner, but that the police didn’t want anyone to think there were—that they knew about the possibility, and were actively suppressing this information....

Marc Walker I’m not too sure what’s supposed to be happening in this Dengue Fever photo. It doesn’t look the guys even told front woman Chhom Nimol about their little tableau. Los Angeles-based six-piece Dengue Fever devote themselves to Cambodian pop of the 60s and 70s, which combines traditional singing with a playful riot of Western flavors, most prominently bluesy garage rock, organ-soaked psychedelia, and reverb-crazed surf music. It was nearly driven to extinction by the genocides of the Khmer Rouge, but it’s hardly been forgotten by Cambodians, for many of whom it represents a sunnier, more innocent time in the country’s history....

This review contains spoilers. As the film begins, Rey is disappointed to find that Master Luke Skywalker, the purported “last Jedi” in the galaxy, has no intention of leaving the island where he’s been hiding out for years. He refuses to join the fight against the First Order, the sinister regime that rose from the ashes of the original Empire, or to train her, insisting that the ways of the Jedi should die with him....

At the intersection of Ashland and Foster in Andersonville sits a striking art deco building spanning an entire city block. There’s no signage out front, save for “You are beautiful”—a recent public-art installation—spelled out on the marquee outside the main entrance. This building, once home to Trumbull Elementary School, was sold last September to Svigos Asset Management, a private developer, for $5.25 million, according to Chicago Public Schools. Trumbull was one of nearly 50 schools the district closed in 2013, and its sale price is the highest price the district has fetched for any of the shuttered buildings....

Actors of Asian descent have long been underrepresented in mainstream American movies, but indies help pick up the slack, as evidenced by the Gene Siskel Film Center’s long-running Asian American Showcase. Opening the festival, the formally ambitious Fish Bones (Fri 4/6, 8 PM) stars model Joony Kim as a lovely but vacant Korean student who tends her family’s New York restaurant when she’s not landing fashion photo shoots and attracts the romantic attentions of a Latina music producer....

Nebraska native Charlie Curtis-Beard attends Columbia College, where he’s built a budding rap career with a couple ambitious, heartfelt albums that are grounded in Chicago themes but exploratory in their musical and lyrical focus. On November’s Existentialism on Lake Shore Drive, Curtis-Beard broadens his amiable soul- and R&B-influenced hip-hop into new styles (quite successfully with electropulse of “Can’t See Clear”) while ruminating on what it means to be a young person of color living in the city at this moment in time (the kind of topic that can sustain late-night conversations in university dorm rooms and elsewhere)....

This morning Chicago art gallery Corbett vs. Dempsey—which also runs a superb record label under the same name, focusing on jazz and improvisation—announced the winners of the first Instant Award in Improvised Music. The honor, which includes an unrestricted prize of $50,000, is the first of its kind celebrating improvised music. Major awards such as the MacArthur Fellowship or the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts have occasionally gone to musicians who work extensively in improvisation, among them Ken Vandermark, Matana Roberts, and Nicole Mitchell, but never has such a lofty prize focused exclusively on the practice....

Seeking: men for intellectual, emotional growth and stimulation Occupation: Reader graphic designer; I make invisible art. What do you do when you’re not working? Her friend says: “Relegating Sue’s beauty to a single quote rivals tweeting a summary of War and Peace.” Cooking, kickboxing, sketching, conversing, and documenting dialogue. Smoker? No. Pets? I live with an anxious puppy called Moo. Dietary restrictions? Dietary restrictions are against my culture. Children?...