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Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To begin with a disclosure: even if Alex Ross Perry weren’t the friend of a friend, I’d still have trouble maintaining critical distance from his work. We both come from middle-class Jewish backgrounds, spent our college and postcollege years voraciously taking in movies, gravitated towards obscurantist video stores (he worked at the now-defunct Kim’s Video in New York City; I at Bucktown’s Odd Obsession), and, crucially, we both revere the novels of Philip Roth....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Goldberg, whose work had previously been limited to right-wing rags like the National Review, replaced veteran journalist Robert Scheer (whose firing caused a 300-person protest and the cancellation of Barbara Streisand’s subscription) in 2005. Since then he’s been given air time on NPR as a regular commentator and face time on The New Republic‘s video debate blog, What’s Your Problem, which is sort of like a webcam Meet the Press....

Isabelle Huppert stars as three different women named Anne. Hong Sang-soo’s 2012 feature In Another Country, which never received a single theatrical screening in Chicago but is now available on DVD, opens with a fine Buñuelian joke. A young woman commiserates with her mother about their family going bankrupt and having to leave Seoul in disgrace as a result of her uncle’s shady dealings. The conversation unfolds in a plainly dressed but rigorously framed two shot that’s instantly recognizable as Hong’s, even though the content differs from his usual shtick about film-world sniping and thwarted romance....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like John Carpenter, who’s featured on the B Side of the Reader this week, Joe Dante is one of those rare Hollywood filmmakers who trade in horror and fantasy but still command the respect of auteurists. Partly this is because he knows his film lore (I once had the pleasure of hearing him introduce the W.C. Fields comedy It’s a Gift), but mainly it’s because his movies are so smart....

These post-rockers from Athens, Georgia, play instrumental epics for the thrilling life you wish you had: their latest disc, Inventions for the New Season (Temporary Residence), opens with the perfect soundtrack for a long shot of an actor with blow-dried bangs and a linen blazer broodingly smoking a cigarette palm-out on the roof of a Miami condo at sunset. And wouldn’t we all like to be that guy, at least for a little while, without the hassle of getting thrown into a wood chipper 45 minutes later?...

A sure-to-be infamous chapter in Chicago architectural history played out in a single surreal afternoon last week, as the Chicago Commission on Public Landmarks awarded and then rescinded landmark status for an important piece of city’s trove of significant 20th-century buildings—Bertrand Goldberg’s Prentice Women’s Hospital. Once Emanuel had spoken, Prentice magically appeared on the agenda for consideration by the landmarks commission, a feat preservationists had been unable to achieve in almost a decade of lobbying....

I can’t imagine many things that generate less excitement than watching two rock critics talk–and as the TV version of their show Sound Opinions is no longer on the air, I’m probably not the only one who feels this way–but if gazing at the Tribune’s Greg Kot and the Sun-Times’s Jim DeRogatis sets your heart a-thumping, here’s a chance to watch them go at it in the flesh. The Chicago Cultural Center is hosting a live taping of their WBEZ show on Thursday, January 25, at 7 PM, to commemorate its first anniversary on the station....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Gristmill lists the ten most bizarre environmental events of 2006, including, “When Chevy offered net surfers the opportunity to edit their own Chevy Tahoe ads online, enviros grabbed the opportunity to match slick, soaring shots of SUVs rolling over mountainous terrain with titles like ‘Gas Guzzler!’” Joel Makower has a more sober list, on which Wal-Mart’s green makeover ranks #1....

Mathew Scott Freddie Gibbs and Madlib When Miles Raymer wrote about Freddie Gibbs last month, he painted the Gary native as the last best hope of gangster rap. This is true: few MCs these days write material so street-focused. I mean, Chief Keef’s new single is called “Emojis.” But Raymer left one thing out about Gibbs’s importance—not only has he stubbornly refused to adapt to the genre’s thematic softening, he may also be the most technically capable rapper in the game....

Soul Jazz would be one of my favorite reissue labels of all time even if they had stopped putting out records after their first New York Noise compilation of vintage NYC postpunk, which was not-so-secretly as influential on early-aughts underground club culture as any Williamsburg dance-punk band of the time. Recently they put out Acid: Mysterons Invade the Jackin’ Zone, a fantastic two-disc survey of Chicago acid house and experimental house....

In mid-November, Alexi Giannoulias held a Sunday-morning news conference at Flashpoint Academy, a digital-arts school in the Loop, to announce that he was being endorsed for the U.S. Senate by Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky. It wasn’t a surprising development—Schakowsky has been a mentor and a key ally to Giannoulias since his political debut in 2006, when he ran successfully for state treasurer—but the event was choreographed as if it were big news....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Show: Waiting for Superman “Distributed by Paramount, this documentary about the public education crisis isn’t as smart or rigorous as Bob Bowdon’s shoestring production The Cartel, which arrived in town earlier this year and quickly vanished,” writes J.R. Jones. “But the new movie is still an admirable exercise in straight talk, especially in its tough assessment of the mediocrity-enforcing teachers’ unions....

Volvo, for example. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The problem with human beings, Bilger observes, is that they make “terrible drivers. . . . Of the ten million accidents that Americans are in every year, nine and a half million are their own damn fault.” Most accidents are caused by what Volvo calls the four D’s: distraction, drowsiness, drunkenness, and driver error. The company’s newest safety systems try to address each of these....

The Atrium Wine Bar Fox & Obel’s newest addition, this wine bar offers a relatively upscale atmosphere at less-than-upscale prices. A modest selection of appetizers, entrees, and desserts—less than 20 in all—is joined on the menu by a couple dozen wines by the glass and half glass and several more by the bottle (at the store’s retail price). We started with a well-curated domestic cheese plate (Humboldt Fog, Pleasant Ridge Reserve, and an aged Vermont cheddar)....

The tenth European Union Film Festival continues through Thursday, March 29, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800. Tickets are $9, $7 for students, and $5 for Film Center members. Following are selected films; for a full schedule see chicagoreader.com. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Exterminating Angels In 2005, French writer-director Jean-Claude Brisseau was convicted of sexual harassment for pressuring actresses to masturbate in his presence during auditions for his feature Secret Things....

THE SECRET OF THE GRAIN ssss WRITTEN AND Directed by ABDELLATIF KECHICHE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In The Secret of the Grain, which opens this week at the Music Box, Kechiche moves from these metaphorical families to a real one. Slimane (Habib Boufares), a weathered Arab shipyard worker in the southern port of Sète, is father to two sons and five daughters, most of them grown....

Green apple jam with celery oil Core the apples and place in water, skins on, along with lemon juice, sage, sugar, and pectin. Cook over medium heat until apples soften completely. Puree in blender or food processor at high speed. Chill. Check consistency. If a thicker and more jammy consistency is needed, return to heat and reduce by a third over a low-medium flame. Chill. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Sequels to blockbusters are crushingly commonplace, yet sequels to indie films are rare. When they come along, they usually exist for the right reason—not because the studio wants another gigantic payday but because the writer and/or director has more to say about the characters. Before Sunrise (1995) introduced Ethan Hawke as an American tourist in Vienna and Julie Delpy as the Frenchwoman he meets, falls for, and reluctantly leaves; when that movie’s writer-director, Richard Linklater, revived the characters in Before Sunset (2004), he wanted to explore how the would-be lovers had reckoned with their fateful separation....

When Wellington “Duke” Reiter took over as president of the venerable School of the Art Institute 18 months ago, he had plans to reinvent the place. An alarmed faculty resisted his attempts to tame what they saw as creative chaos, and both sides dug in for what looked to be a prolonged struggle. Reiter came to SAIC from Tempe, where he was dean of Arizona State University’s school of design and the force behind a high-profile new downtown campus....

Nueva cancion, a South American folk movement begun in Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay in the early 60s, brought a fierce political consciousness and an international flavor to various indigenous musical forms. Arguably the greatest and most important living exponent of this tradition, Argentina’s Mercedes Sosa has long been able to make nearly any sort of song all her own. Giving voice to the sentiments of her people got her in trouble in the late 70s– she was arrested, then exiled for a few years by the ruling junta–but that didn’t keep her from continuing to challenge the regime....