I was unfamiliar with the work of Chinese director Feng Xiaogang before I saw Youth, which is now playing in its third week at the AMC River East. But based on this film—a handsome and sweeping period drama that looks at national history from the end of the Cultural Revolution to the mid-1990s—I can understand why Feng is sometimes called “China’s Spielberg.” Youth is formally impressive and heavy-handed: it’s clearly designed to be a crowd-pleaser....

When I first wrote about vocalist and songwriter Ella Leya in 2001, she was living in the Chicago area and promoting a new CD of her own music, Queen of Night. That recording was a mix of her many influences: American jazz, blues, and pop; Russian folk and classical music; Turkish and Persian poetry; and the mugam vocal tradition of her homeland, Azerbaijan. She had emigrated from her oil-rich native country a decade earlier, divorced the husband she left behind, remarried, and lost a son to leukemia....

Nick Drnaso’s new graphic novel, Sabrina (Drawn & Quarterly), is a subtle, heart-wrenching, multifaceted look at loneliness and loss in our lunatic asylum of a country and an impressive follow-up to his 2016 debut, Beverly. Sabrina is highly relevant to the current moment, in which conspiracy theories, from the machinations of the so-called deep state to the supposed NASA slave colony on Mars, have colonized all our brains to some degree or another....

Matthew Shipp can’t have had his own playing in mind when he named his latest record The Unidentifiable. With his powerful command of the grand piano’s lowest notes, his adroit manipulation of its sustain pedal, and the complex harmonies nurtured by his prodigious technique, he obtains a massive and instantly recognizable sound. The New Yorker can create extraordinary space and movement within a dense sonic field, and it’s made him an essential accompanist to saxophonists such as Ivo Perelman and David S....

On July 27, Governor J.B. Pritzker repealed the state’s 32-year-old HIV criminalization statute—a law that overwhelmingly impacted Black people in Cook County—making Illinois just the second state in the nation to make such a sweeping change. Illinois’s HIV criminalization bill was originally passed in 1989 at the height of the AIDS crisis and has been been harshly criticized since its inception as discriminatory, anti-science, and homophobic. Research shows that laws like Illinois’s— which up until this week made exposing someone to HIV without their knowledge a felony punishable by up to seven years in prison—actually discourage testing for HIV and make people who carry the virus less likely to seek treatment....

One thing you should know about the Reader‘s year-end film rankings is that, from time immemorial, we’ve limited the candidates to movies that premiered locally between January 1 and December 31—that’s why Toni Erdmann, a big awards favorite in 2016, wasn’t eligible until this year, and a handful of highly touted films premiering on the coasts now to qualify for the Oscars (such as Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread and Michael Haneke’s Happy End) won’t be considered until 2018....

Update 1/12/20:Chicago Tribune editor-in-chief Colin McMahon controls the paper’s news pages, and was the person in charge of relocating John Kass’s column from Page 2 to an op-ed section in the middle of the paper last summer. However, since the publication of this piece I have learned that Kass is now on the paper’s editorial board, and therefore currently reports to Tribune publisher Par Ridder, not McMahon. Therefore the questions and suggestions at the end of my piece should have been been addressed to Ridder....

Singer-songwriter Lilly Hiatt, daughter of gritty roots-rock favorite John, locates a moment of regret with piercing effectiveness on her new breakup album, Trinity Lane (New West). On “The Night David Bowie Died,” the news of Bowie’s death fills her with sadness and brings up memories that she wants to share with her lover—but she’s alone. As the song unfolds, she wallows in that disappointment, but it’s unclear who ended things....

This Thursday marks the first night of the Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival, the largest annual showcase of experimental moving-image work in Chicago. Running through Sunday, the festival contains work by a number of notable artists (among them local filmmakers Melika Bass and Deborah Stratman, who are represented in Thursday’s program) as well as up-and-coming figures from the experimental community. Onion City is a welcome reminder of what a great city Chicago is to see avant-garde films and videos....

“I woke up—I took my costume, I took a bath. That day we were ready. That day we were having a performance,” recalls dancer and choreographer Rigoberto Saura. It was Friday the 13th of March 2020, and Hedwig Dances was preparing to take the stage at the Ruth Page Center for the Arts for their program Lightplay, consisting of Raum, a premiere by artistic director Jan Bartoszek inspired by the work of László Moholy-Nagy, as well as a restaging of Saura’s 2019 The Flowering Mechanisms....

Superstitious? There’s plenty to do this Friday the 13th weekend that doesn’t involve black cats or walking under ladders (hopefully). Here’s some of what we recommend: Sat 5/14: BookCon debuts in Chicago at McCormick Place (2301 S. Lake Shore) and features panels, discussions, and signings with more than 80 authors, including Ann M. Martin (The Babysitter’s Club), Lucy Knisley (Something New), Ransom Riggs (Tales of the Peculiar), and Veronica Roth (the Divergent series)....

Northern California punk outfit Ceremony have been a vital part of the modern-day hardcore scene since their 2005 inception, but they’ve spent much of their career pushing as hard as possible to sound like anything but a hardcore band. Their earliest stuff was super aggressive, powerviolence-inspired hardcore, but by the early 2010s they’d begun making detours, diving into grimy, Stooges-style garage rock on 2012’s Zoo and making Joy Division-flavored postpunk a focal point on 2015’s The L-Shaped Man....

Ramon Gardenhire remembers being in law school at Wayne State University in Detroit and trying to give blood for the first time. He went with a group of friends and sat down with the screener. “I was floored,” says 38-year-old Gardenhire, who finished law school in 2003 and is now vice president of policy for the AIDS Foundation of Chicago. “It was the most surreal thing, going to law school and trying to do my civic duty and then hearing that....

Hip-hop was built on four basic elements: MCing, DJing, graffitiing, and breaking. Then came the fifth element, knowledge. Influential rapper KRS-One introduced four more in 2003’s “9 Elements,” but knowledge holds a place of supremacy among the elements, at least to me: it’s the circumference within which the other elements are able to coexist, the lens hip-hop devotees use to see the world. Hip-hop is a lifestyle, and those who adhere to it don’t stop living once the DJ packs up for the night or their spray-paint cans run dry....

Che “Ryhmefest” Smith has put out seven albums and three mixtapes, once beat Eminem in a freestyle battle, and is one of only three rappers in the world to have both a Grammy and an Oscar to his name—and he still lives in Woodlawn, the neighborhood he grew up in. It’s part of him living out a message of community he’s always believed in. A recent tweet from the rapper reads: “Stop teaching people 2 Leave ‘the hood’ make it, 2 escape it!...

Q: Sex-positive bi woman here. I have recommended your column to many people over the years to help them feel normal and human in their kinks, fantasies, sexuality, etc. But I’m having a more difficult time extending similar acceptance to myself. I was in a three-year relationship with a cis straight man. I recently moved across the country for graduate school and this was the catalyst for me to put my foot down about opening the relationship in order to get my sexual needs met....

AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite Congressman John Lewis holds a copy of March, Book 2, the second volume of his graphic memoir of his years as a civil rights activist. In October of 2013, 73-year-old Congressman John Lewis was arrested on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. during a rally to spur action on an immigration bill. It was hardly the first time that the Georgia Democrat had been picked up for nonviolent civil disobedience....

Here’s some of what we recommend for your Thanksgiving week: Thu 11/23: Serbia’s Goran Bregović returns with his influential Yugoslavian rock band, Bijelo Dugme, to perform at Joe’s Live (5441 Park Pl., Rosemont). The Reader‘s Peter Margasak says Bregović “displays his broad-minded ability to express the full splendor of vintage eastern European traditional and folk music.” 10 PM, $60-$100 For more things to do this weekend—and every day—visit our Agenda page....

Hank Willis Thomas, who describes himself as a “visual culture archaeologist,” was in town last week for the opening of his one-man show, Hank Willis Thomas: Unbranded, at Northwestern University’s Block Museum of Art. Thomas told an audience at an opening-day lecture Saturday that the construct of race “is a divide-and-conquer strategy,” and “advertising is the most powerful and ubiquitous language in the world.” He also answered a few questions about the show during an interview in the gallery last week....

Local artist Melina Ausikaitis is a member of Joan of Arc, but she also makes music on her own—which includes a cappella material, where she runs her poetry through idiosyncratic sing-songy ups and downs that add a chilling range of moods and emotions to her words. To create her new collaborative project, the self-released tape Aitis Music, Ausikaitis gave her raw, simple songs to nine of her prolific and talented friends, asking them to record their own takes on them....