Courtesy International Voices Project Egyptian playwright Ahmed Serag I learned a lesson from last year’s installment of the International Voices Project, even though I didn’t attend. The IVP produces an annual festival of staged readings that highlights works by playwrights from outside the English-speaking world—Germany to Japan, Egypt to Catalonia. The roster for 2013 included Noise in the Waters by Italy’s Marco Martinelli and Hamlet Is Dead. No Gravity. by Ewald Palmetshofer of Austria....

Land Ho! Dinosaur 13 tells the true story of the legal battle that followed the 1990 discovery of Sue the dinosaur in South Dakota, before she came to the Field Museum—except that it’s not the truth, or at least the whole truth. Our long review is here. Also this week, Ben Sachs considers A Summer’s Tale (1996), Eric Rohmer’s classic story of young love, and we have a recommended review of Land Ho!...

Courtesy Anne de Mare “It’s an enormous thing to be trusted with someone’s story,” says documentarian Anne de Mare. Did you know? Chicago Public Schools classifies about 19,000 of its students as homeless. CPS has appointed two employees per school—teachers, secretaries, even principals—as “homeless liaisons” responsible for keeping an eye on these kids and helping them survive. In August, during a half-day seminar for its 1,200 homeless liaisons, CPS showed them scenes and outtakes from a new documentary, The Homestretch, about homeless teenagers in Chicago....

Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Revisiting Gentlemen Prefer Blondes at the Music Box this weekend (as part of the ongoing series of classic musicals) rekindled an internal debate that I’ll likely never resolve: Who’s the greatest American filmmaker, John Ford or Howard Hawks? Every time I consider the question (it happens every couple years) I know I’m embarking upon a fool’s errand, and yet it seems vital that I do....

Emo has had trouble shedding the reputation that’s dogged it since it became a big deal in the early 2000s—plenty of people still think of it as music by and for teenage boys upset about girls. That was never a fair description, and it’s even less so now; the genre continues to broaden and evolve as it approaches its 30th year. Riot Fest’s lineup contains a sort of emo family tree in miniature, including several generations of bands and even more subgenres, plus some important outliers (sorry, Weezer ain’t emo)....

Alison Green Outkast closed out Saturday with a blast. Even—or especially—after all the shoving and puking, the tank-topped (and tanked) bros and the cheek-exposing booty shorts, there’s something undeniably extraordinary about sharing a moment with 100,000 people. Alison Green The Last Internationale Rich Homie Quan was about 20 minutes late to the stage for his set, leaving his DJ to entertain the sizeable crowd—which gave fans a chance to show off their moves (cue the twerking)....

Michael Gebert Jeff Mahin If you want to rile up the natives of Foodlandia, there’s no better way than starting the deep-dish pizza argument (Is it a pizza? A casserole? An abomination unto the Lord?) yet again. Eater yesterday did that by getting Graham Elliot and David Posey of Blackbird, as well as Andrew Zimmern and New York’s Mathieu Palombino, to cast the usual aspersions; as Chicagoist noted, this comes, ironically, just as New Yorkers are flocking to a hot new deep-dish pizza place in their city, Emmett’s, which surely means that soon we’ll have Manhattan transplants to Chicago whining on social media that there’s nowhere to get a good New York-style deep dish in this backwater burg....

Koechner (right) with Ethan Embry in Cheap Thrills Tomorrow the pitch-black indie Cheap Thrills begins its Chicago run at the Music Box. Described by at least one critic as a hybrid of Jackass and Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, it takes place over a long night as two down-and-out guys get lured by a wealthy couple into a bizarre “game” wherein they perform strange dares for cash. (Full disclosure: I used to volunteer with one of the film’s writers, David Chirchirillo, at Odd Obsession Movies in Bucktown....

When it comes to dystopian science fiction, the most ingenious conceit can be done in by the tiniest flaw in plausibility (unless you’re writing the Hunger Games trilogy, in which case no one bothers to care). So perhaps playwright Kim Z. Dale’s most impressive achievement in her dark high-tech fantasy is its airtight logic. Billionaire mogul Dr. Westmore is offering implanted “brain enhancements” to those who’ll sign over the rights to their future augmented mentations, and brilliant computer scientist Claudine, dead-ended in the unchallenging coding job she accepted years ago to make room in her life for motherhood, incautiously signs up for the procedure, hoping that she’ll finally reach her full potential by creating the perfect encrypting algorithm....

Winter is a lonely time if you’re a dog in Chicago: long hours at home with nobody to talk to except humans, when you can only find out what’s going on in the world (Dog World, the only world that matters) through quick sniffs during the daily hustle around the block while someone tugs at your leash and tells you to hurry up because it’s cold. There’s clearly a dog with considerable influence behind the scenes at the Chicago Park District, because The Secret Life of Pets is one of the most frequently shown Movies in the Park this year....

If I’d been on Two Brothers‘ press list for more than about four months, I might suspect the brewery was specifically baiting me by making a beer called “Midwestern Death Metal.” Sure, the label art will hardly have Three Floyds and Surly looking over their shoulders, but the name! Come on! The taste isn’t as sweet as you might expect from the aroma—it’s not actually very sweet at all, not for a barrel-aged imperial stout....

Losing in Gainesville By Brian Costello (10/14, Curbside Splendor). Book-release party with performances by Mannequin Men, Bobby Burg, Matchess, and the Coldies, Fri 9/19, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, 773-276-3600, emptybottle.com, $10. In line with the theme of this year’s Chicago Humanities Festival, “Journeys,” we posed a question to some of the fest’s headliners: If you could go anywhere, where would you go, and why? Eula Biss, author...

The Salem witch trials took place over the course of nine months in 1692 in a small Massachusetts village. Twenty men and women (plus two dogs) were eventually executed, most by hanging. It’s a comparatively short episode in American history, and yet we remain transfixed. The trials, in the popular imagination, have spread to encompass the entire state of Massachusetts, where witches were burned en masse. In The Witches, Schiff transports her readers back in time to colonial America and forces them to “return the humanity” to the historical figures involved....

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago. Isa Giallorenzo: What makes you such a huge Bowie fan? I’m a big fan of older underappreciated 90s Bowie, like during the Outside and Earthling albums. He reunited with Brian Eno, and his relationship with guitarist Reeves Gabrels was pushing boundaries. But Bowie is always exploring. Always interesting to see what he does next....

Seventeen photos from Chicago’s Wizard World Comic Con

JOHN STURDY Disappears For the past three years Logan Square’s the Owl has made a name for itself as a chic late-night watering hole—hell, Dave Chappelle reportedly turned up there on Saturday night. The bar’s also become hub for the local music scene thanks to talent buyer and Automatic Recordings founder Aaron Dexter, who’s brought Silver Apples, Pelican, and Wolf Eyes to the hot spot and also installed its cassette vending machine....

Knowledge is power, the saying goes, though if you look at how the world actually works, ignorant rich people have a lot more power than knowledgeable poor ones. A more precise formulation might be that marketable knowledge is power, which is why your friend in the financial services industry rolls his eyes whenever you hold forth on the subject of French medieval poetry. Two documentaries opening this week, Ivory Tower and The Internet’s Own Boy, touch on the subject of monetizing knowledge, and you’re liable to find each infuriating in its own way if you see the U....

Four-day general admission passes to this year’s Lollapalooza sold out in about two and a half hours this year, but if you’re eager to get to Grant Park that weekend you can still spring for a platinum pass. It’ll get you into two air-conditioned “hospitality lounges,” separate viewing areas for four of the stages, special restrooms, free drinks and catered meals, and you’ll be able to catch a ride to all the stages on a golf cart....