Ben Gazzara stars as the wonderfully named Cosmo Vitelli. There are several impressive repertory screenings in Chicago this weekend—Doc Films has The Godfather Part II and Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, and the Music Box is showing Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil and Rene Laloux’s Fantastic Planet—but if I had to single out a must-see, it would be John Cassavetes’s The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), which the Chicago Cinema Society will screen at the Patio Theater on Friday and Sunday from a 35-millimeter print....

The Gage Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Across the street from Millennium Park, The Gage–a new restaurant from father-and-son co-owners William and Billy Lawless (The Grafton) and chef Dirk Flanigan (Meritage, Blue Water Grill)–draws swarms of tourists and suits alike, and the restored tin ceiling and green and white tiles only amplify the din. But if you can tolerate the noise (and the breathtaking prices), you’ll find some superb dishes....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Velvet Lounge kicks off Fred Anderson’s 80th Birthday Tribute Festival tonight with a heavyweight duo that will surely opt for a less aggressive sound than many of the acts playing at the club over the next five evenings. Pianist Willie Pickens has been one of the best postbop musicians in Chicago for nearly five decades, beginning with his appearance on the hit Eddie Harris record Exodus to Jazz....

Blaine Swen If the Improvised Shakespeare Company (open run: Fridays, 8 PM, iO, 3541 N. Clark, 773-880-0199, improvisedshakespeare.com, $14) produces some of the most emotionally textured improv around—and it does—then a lot of the credit has to go to its mastermind, Blaine Swen. He’s a force to be reckoned with onstage, sensitive to every word spoken and every action even so much as hinted at. His ease with Shakespeare’s language and themes ensures stories rich with twists, turns, and laughs, and his attention to detail is a huge reason ISC shows tie up so neatly at the end....

Should you be looking for something to get me for my birthday—you’ve got about another week of shopping left, BTW—I might suggest a porcelain cake stand at Lost Eras, the Howard Street costume and everything-else shop. It’s shaped and painted to look like a classic white cake with strawberries, and it’s classy as hell. If for some reason you’re shopping for yourself, you’ll probably be successful in finding whatever it is you don’t need here....

charburger at Edzo’s Burger Shop 1571 N. Sherman, Evanston 847-864-3396 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » DMK Burger Bar, the Bad Apple, M Burger, J. Wellington’s—there’s no lack of contenders in this category. But I’ve gotta give the crown to Evanston’s Edzo’s. Chef Eddie Lakin spent months perfecting the formula for his hamburger meat, USDA choice that’s ground fresh daily and comes griddled (as a single, double, or triple), as a patty melt, or as a big, fat, juicy charburger....

The Reader’s Choice: Michael Reese Modern Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the late 1940s Michael Reese Hospital undertook a major, multibuilding expansion intended to set a trend for institutional design and stimulate redevelopment of the hospital’s south-side neighborhood. Loebl, Schlossman & Bennett were the primary local architects, but numerous others participated, and the project was inspired by the ideas of Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius....

During an April interview on WNUR’s Streetbeat, local producer DJ Earl described the juke and footwork scenes in Japan as “blowing up.” Those strange, hectic-­sounding subgenres of ghetto house were born in Chicago in the late 90s, and despite considerable interest from Internet tastemakers they remain largely underground phenomena at home. It’s a different story internationally: London’s Planet Mu has been releasing LPs by Chicago heavy hitters such as Traxman and RP Boo, and in Japan the scene has been slowly growing for years....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Trumpeter Corey Wilkes has been making waves locally and nationally for a few years, coleading a twin-trumpet combo with Maurice Brown early on, joining the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and recording with Exploding Star Orchestra, Roscoe Mitchell, and Evan Parker. He’s finally getting around to releasing an album as a leader–two albums, in fact, both this year. Just out is Drop It (Delmark), a record cut with an extended local group....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First, a little background. The Standard Model, developed in the early 1970s, is a theory that explains “three of the four known fundamental interactions between the elementary particles which make up all matter.” The fourth is gravity, so the Standard Model is definitely not a Theory of Everything, but it does tie together much of what we know about the universe....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Show: Bomba Estereo “This excellent combo, led by guitarist, bassist, and programmer Simon Mejia, emerged in 2005 from the electronica scene in Bogota, Colombia, and developed a frothy, propulsive take on cumbia and champeta (a kind of stew of local, African, and Caribbean styles),” writes Peter Margasak. “Mejia had been working toward this sound for some time, and lead singer Li Saumet turned out to be the key that made everything click....

The effects of our bad-news economy are starting to kick in, and it’s not just the deadwood that’s falling. This week, one of the largest and liveliest art spaces in the West Loop, Flatfile Galleries, announced that its current shows will be its last. It closes March 27. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Aurinko opened Flatfile in 2000, in rented quarters at 119 N....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » About two weeks ago I was standing at the corner of Hyperion Avenue and Griffith Park Boulevard in the Silverlake neighborhood of Los Angeles, drinking in the vibes. An upscale market stands there now, but from 1926 to 1940 it was the site of the old Walt Disney Studios; the period almost perfectly coincides with Disney’s active interest in animation....

Kevin Warwick,Reader associate editor Giuda, Racey Roller If this 2010 album from Italian glam-rock geniuses Giuda (pronounced “Judah”) doesn’t get your toe tapping from the first notes of thumping opener “Number 10,” then I’m sorry but your descendents are doomed. It’s show-offy, lick-heavy rock ‘n’ roll, with a glut of tambourine and enough hand claps to fill a football stadium—and every line of the lyrics could serve as the hook for a lesser band’s anthem....

The Irish American Heritage Festival returns to the Irish American Heritage Center (4626 N. Knox) for its 27th year Fri 7/13 through Sun 7/15. For eight bucks per day you can see more than 100 acts—music, dance, theater, comedy, and more—on six indoor and outdoor stages, as well as partake in a bunch of traditional (and not so traditional) Irish festivities. The festival begins at 6 PM on Friday, and though the evening’s music lineup is relatively small—the Kreellers, the Dublin City Ramblers, the Great Whiskey Project, Gerry Haughey, and Fonn Mor—I’d be remiss not to point out the mashed-potato-eating contest at 8:30 PM on the Raffle Stage....

Experimental animator Jim Trainor (far right) plays a U. of C. dean in Crimes Against Humanity. Screening this week at the Gene Siskel Film Center, Crimes Against Humanity was cowritten and directed by Jerzy Rose, a local experimental filmmaker who spent several years making shorts before turning to features in 2011 with Some Girls Never Learn. The story centers on Lewis (Mike Lopez), a college dean’s assistant helping with an investigation into a possible coven of satanists in the ethnomusicology department....

Playing It Safe Formerly Employee Owned Re: “Clout on the Calumet River: Marina owner Mike Olsen has reason to fear the city will force him out of business to the benefit of his competition,” by Ben Joravsky, October 29 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Windjammers is one of the few reasonably priced marinas left in the Chicago area. The article failed to mention that the wood out in back is for the fireplace in the bar, one of the biggest in the area....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Margaret is about a bright, articulate, but exceedingly self-absorbed New York teenager who’s going through the wringer—putting herself through it, really. It’s also about two and a half hours long, an indication of the outsize ambition of writer-director Kenneth Lonergan, who’s produced a nuanced meditation on trauma and grief. Near the beginning, the protagonist, Lisa (Anna Paquin), tries from the sidewalk to catch the eye of a bus driver, causing him to plow through a red light and over a pedestrian, who dies in Lisa’s arms....

“If I had a superpower, I would love to see into people’s homes and know the history of their stuff and who has lived there,” Laura Moeller says. As an art conservator at the Chicago History Museum, she’s actually pretty close to attaining that power. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I’ve been able to research all the people who have lived in this place,” she tells me about her Ukrainian Village apartment, which she shares with musician/boyfriend Todd Hembrook (Deal’s Gone Bad, Todd Hembrook & the Hemispheres)....

Rene Rupnik, the bosom friend Last month the second and third parts of Ulrich Seidl’s “Paradise” trilogy screened at the European Union Film Festival; I hope they return sooner rather than later. The trilogy seems to me Seidl’s most accomplished work to date, continuing the Austrian filmmaker’s mission to confront social taboos while consistently displaying an affection towards his subjects that had emerged only fitfully in his earlier films. The latent compassion of a film like Animal Love, Seidl’s documentary about social outcasts whose closest relationships are with their pets, has finally blossomed, and it’s a beautiful thing to behold....