The Chicago Palestine Film Festival runs Friday, April 16, through Thursday, April 29, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-828-2800. Tickets are $10, $7 for students, and $5 for Film Center members. Following are selected films screening through Thursday, April 22; for a complete schedule see siskelfilmcenter.org. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Checkpoint Rock: Songs From Palestine Javier Corcuera and Basque musician Fermin Muguruza profile Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories who use music as both a balm and a vehicle for their political discontents....

Dear International Olympic Committee One last argument for why Chicago doesn’t need, want, or deserve the games. (10/1/09) Ready, Set, (Property Tax) Hike How will Daley balance the 2010 budget? Prepare for higher property taxes—but not till after the 2016 Olympics are sited. (9/3/09) Wanna Buy an Olympics? Why is the mayor’s A team only now hitting the neighborhoods to pitch Chicagoans on the Olympic bid? (7/23/09) Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Although the Bess is in over her head and the “Summertime”‘s not so good-soundin’, there are still plenty of reasons to get yourself to Evanston for Fleetwood Jourdain Theatre’s concert version of Porgy and Bess. This is a streamlined (87 minutes), intimate, yet fully staged production of the classic 1935 folk opera by the Gershwin brothers and DuBose and Dorothy Heyward–complete with set, costumes, and live keyboard accompaniment. A hugely ambitious undertaking for a community theater, it’s beautifully directed by Ebony Joy, with music direction by June Smith and vocal direction by Vernon Clark....

“Sharply etched direction . . . and a bristling good cast of four capable of morphing on a dime.” That skepticism would be Weiss’s own, which she’s entitled to. Sometimes reality seals our hearts against entertainment. I remember being completely unable to enjoy the movie Speed because the police and media caravan following the hijacked bus looked, to me, so identical to the slow-motion nightmare I’d watched on TV a few days before, an identical caravan tracking O....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Five years ago I wrote a story about a group of obsessive weirdos canvassing the city in search of true low-and-slow-smoked barbecue. Even after Calvin Trillin famously documented the Chowhounding phenomenon in the New Yorker, it was still relatively novel to see people taking notes and photographing rib tips, hot dogs, or jerk chicken posed al trunko, and diligently typing up their findings on the Internet....

Historically the one time of year every musician in New Orleans can find work has been Mardi Gras. The fact that Crescent City trombone and tuba player Jeff Albert was in Chicago for Mardi Gras 2006, debuting this seven-piece band at the Empty Bottle, speaks volumes about the havoc wreaked by Hurricane Katrina. Albert and local trombonist Jeb Bishop conceived of the Lucky 7s as a Chicago-New Orleans partnership, but the other New Orleans musicians in the group, bassist Matthew Golombisky and drummer Quin Kirchner, moved here before the first rehearsals–only Albert is sticking it out in his hometown....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It hasn’t played out that way. Officers have barely issued any tickets—just 1,117 between August 2012 and this October. Meanwhile, they’ve made more than 13,000 arrests for misdemeanor marijuana possession so far this year, a rate of more than 44 a day—higher than in 2012, records show. As Solis put it: “I think that our expectations aren’t quite what we thought....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to an ABC News report, an official charged with overseeing Al Hurra–the Arabic-language television network operated in the Middle East by the U.S. government–admitted to a congressional panel in May that one major reason the station keeps accidentally broadcasting overtly proterrorism messages was that no top Al Hurra supervisors actually speak Arabic. (Programming in December had included a 68-minute address by a Hezbollah leader advocating violence against Israel....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A suburban family man (Steve Zissis), fat and unhappy, gets pulled into a long-simmering athletic rivalry with his younger, fitter brother (Mark Kelly), much to the dismay of their mother (Julie Vorus) and the older man’s wife (Jennifer Fleur). This indie comedy by fraternal filmmakers Jay and Mark Duplass (Cyrus and Jeff, Who Lives at Home) is their second in a row about competitive siblings, and one might easily infer a confessional element, given that in the past few years handsome Mark has become a red-hot movie actor....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chicago may be missing out on the RATM reunion tour following the fest (though I’m sure their box office take will inspire at least one more victory lap), but we’ll get a special taste of shitty-political-rock history when Libertyville’s own Tom Morello comes to town for a pair of solo shows. On April 13 he’ll be playing Lake Forest College, and on April 14 he’ll be downtown at a protest/carnival thing for the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ Campaign for Fair Food....

Space about 2,000 square feet | Rent $1,525 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The walls of Derek Erdman’s apartment are covered in an ever-changing display of his own art: bold, graphic paintings of ice cream cones, comics characters, sports legends, 80s TV stars, politicians, animals, and other pop culture ephemera. There are also letters he fashioned from scavenged wood to spell out I LOVED YOU; a transparency of a photo of a young child (not his) stuck to a huge interior window; and a pair of baggies containing a link of sausage from a Denny’s in Los Angeles and a piece of bacon Erdman fried himself in Chicago....

Cold Comforts Behind the gilt-lettered awnings and plate glass on the first floor of the landmark pink Edgewater Beach apartment building stands a soda fountain that first opened in 1927. The ambience trumps the ice cream at the original marble counter and lone table: along with coffee, a few sandwiches, salads, and homemade soups there’s a standard selection of Blue Bonnet sundaes, splits, shakes, malts, and sodas. —Elizabeth M. Tamny...

Presented by the Music Box and Movieside Film Festival, this 15-hour marathon of sci-fi movies begins at noon on Saturday, May 5, in the Music Box’s main theater, 3733 N. Southport. Tickets for the whole marathon are $16, and ticket holders may leave and reenter the theater. Showtimes are approximate; for more information call 773-871-6604 or visit musicboxtheatre.com. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Short works A Trip to the Moon (1902) is Georges Melies’s classic silent short about astromers who journey to the moon, landing their rocket square in its eye....

friday22 Friday22 Blonde RedheadCallersDeerhunterGories, Gentleman John BattlesLegendary Pink Dots Saturday23 Jeff ChanGoriesSuffocation Sunday24 The Seasons Project Tuesday26 Gary Numan Wednesday27 Bobby “Slim” James CALLERS Sara Lucas, singer of the Brooklyn trio Callers, has the kind of voice that overthrows my better judgment. She can be irritatingly fussy, she wantonly shows off her sizable range, and she ornaments her melodies with breathless curlicues, acrobatic swoops, and elasticized, quasi-jazzy phrasing—she’s like a Phoebe Snow for the post-Ani DiFranco generation or something....

Scott Olson/Getty The Chicago Tribune is sticking to its guns—kind of. And kind of not. Last week the Tribune wrote a series of editorials calling for better schools for Chicago children. The first two editorials began on the Tribune‘s front page, where both asserted that 19,000 students are waiting for places to the city’s charter schools. “19,000 kids yearn to escape their current public schools for seats in charter schools ....

Even though he’s been dead for six years, Donald E. Stephens remains the Dear Leader of Rosemont, the little patch of farmland near the airport that, as its mayor for 50 years, he developed into Chicagoland’s center for cheesy entertainment. You can’t go too far without running into something that was named for him—like, say, the Donald E. Stephens Museum of Hummels. Surely you’ve heard of Hummel figurines. Those petite, grandma-friendly ceramic sculptures, designed by a German nun, that depict small, chubby, unblinking children doing adorable things like climbing apple trees, hiding behind newspapers, and running away from home?...

It’s safe to say that Becky Anderson, of Anderson’s Bookshop in Naperville, has already expressed more regret over her decision to cancel an April 8 book signing by former Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers than Ayers has over the bombings his group carried out 40 years ago. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The school district was getting hundreds of calls and we were getting vicious, threatening calls and e-mails—a constant barrage—telling us things like to increase our insurance,” Anderson explains....

One of my favorite things about biking in Chicago is never getting stuck in traffic—there’s a certain pleasure in cruising past a lane of cars backed up a quarter mile at rush hour and hitting the light just as it turns green. Another is finding routes not open to cars, and the south end of Southport, at an industrial stretch of Cortland just east of the Chicago River’s North Branch, is my favorite....

The Reader’s Choice: Steve James and Peter Gilbert Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Apologies to Harold Ramis, a dyed-in-the-wool Chicagoan whose track record of clever, expertly paced comedies (Caddy­shack, National Lampoon’s Vacation, Groundhog Day, Analyze This, The Ice Harvest) makes him the best writer-director of the SNL/SCTV generation after Christopher Guest. (Ramis’s latest feature, produced by Judd Apatow and scheduled for release in June, is The Year One, starring Michael Cera and Jack Black as a couple of primitive hunter-gatherers....

MIRROR OF THE INVISIBLE WORLD | GOODMAN THEATRE INFO 312-443-3800 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Unlike previous Zimmerman works like the riveting Argonautika, produced by Lookingglass last fall, and her legendary swimming-pool staging of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (first performed in 1998), Mirror of the Invisible World doesn’t rely on the Western canon. First produced in 1997 at the old Goodman Studio Theatre, Zimmerman’s adaptation is based on a section of the Haft Paykar, a 12th-century romantic epic by the poet Nizami, who lived in the Persian empire in what is now Azerbaijan....