Two Stars in the Milky Way (1931) Films from mainland China have arrived steadily in the U.S. since the mid-80s, when such “fifth generation” filmmakers as Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou broke onto the international scene. Yet there have been few serious attempts to introduce American audiences to the first several decades of mainland Chinese cinema, which has existed since the beginning of the 20th century. Prior to the Japanese invasion in the late 1930s, the Chinese film industry developed along similar lines as national film industries in the west....

A first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. “Magic is the ability to work in harmony with natural energies to bring about a needed purpose. In our group we had a situation where one of the member’s sisters found out she had an ovarian cyst that was literally the size of a baseball. They were gonna do surgery to take it out, and we did a ritual to help ease whatever she was going to go through....

AP Photo/Seth Perlman Bruce Rauner, speaking to supporters in August at the state fair in Springfield. The candidate for governor recently told a downstate radio station he favors lowering the Illinois minimum wage to $7.25. Bruce Rauner, the multimillionaire venture capitalist who wants to be governor, thinks Illinois should do something about its minimum wage of $8.25. He thinks the state should reduce it by a dollar. Rauner’s proposal comes as President Obama and Democrats in Congress are pushing for increasing the federal rate to $10....

Though The House on Mango Street is classified as fiction, it’s also a sideways glimpse into author Sandra Cisneros’s Chicago childhood. Cisneros based much of the book on her experiences growing up on Campbell Street in Humboldt Park. More than three decades after Mango Street was published, we get another look at Cisneros’s life in A House of My Own, a collection of stories about the places she’s lived and how they’ve shaped her idea of home....

This Friday two new films shot in the south of France by prominent auteurs will open in Chicago: Alain Guiraudie’s Staying Vertical (which plays for a week at the Film Center) and Christophe Honoré’s Metamorphoses (which plays for a week at Facets). In addition to featuring similar geography, both films exhibit a sense of narrative liberty, shifting shape in a manner that befits the characters’ shifting lives. Staying Vertical is a dream narrative wherein characters change suddenly and frequently, while Metamorphoses, a modern-dress adaptation of about a dozen tales by Ovid, is very much about the joy of storytelling, containing playful digressions and tales within tales....

Chicago’s laws can be confusing, even to the folks who make them. And in a city scraping for pennies to stay afloat, a pair of grand palaces of culture can attract attention. Like glittering Fabergé eggs, just sitting there looking rich. The caucus submitted a motion that struck the whole paragraph out. Which suggests that he hasn’t been hanging out with the music lovers in the $30 seats in the upper balconies....

Tucked between a Payless and a branch bank in Uptown, there’s a tiny glass storefront, the most distinguishing features of which are the sacks of brown teff flour stacked by the dozens in the window. This new, unnamed bakery specializes in the tangy, spongy, fermented flatbread injera, milled from that grain native to the Ethiopian highlands. Have you ever had Ethiopian breakfast? There are some nine dishes falling in that category, most of them cooked in the herb-spiced butter kibbeh, like the “inqulal be-avocado,” or eggs scrambled with avocado....

Vincent Macaigne and Maud Wyler in 2 Autumns, 3 Winters Romantic comedies about white, college-educated thirtysomethings are a dime a dozen, which is why I had fairly low expectations for 2 Autumns, 3 Winters, despite having read Michael Castelle’s laudatory write-up on CINE-FILE over the weekend. Yet this buoyant French indie, which plays again tonight at 6 PM and tomorrow at 8:30 PM at the Gene Siskel Film Center, has little of the smugness or complacency I’ve come to associate with the genre....

When Ed Devereux opened Unabridged Bookstore on November 1, 1980, with two business partners and $18,000, he had no idea if the store would last. Though, to be honest, he wasn’t thinking very far ahead at all. “When you’re 27,” he says, “you don’t ever think you’re going to be 62. When you’re young, you’re fearless.” Eventually the store not only survived but thrived, expanding to fill two more neighboring storefronts and a basement....

From Olivier Assayas’s Les Destinees, released a couple years before the Walkmen’s first album I’m still mourning the loss of the Walkmen, one of my favorite rock bands, who went on “indefinite hiatus” earlier this year. Few musicians have done more to increase my enjoyment of movies. That might sound odd, considering the band never recorded any music for films and that their albums lack those qualities (orchestration, sound effects, spoken interludes) that inspire people to describe certain albums by, say, Pink Floyd or Scott Walker as cinematic....

Rapper Maria Kelly, better known as Rico Nasty, is transparent to a fault. When XXL recently asked her why she signed to Atlantic, she said, “Because I have a 2-year-old. And these bitches don’t! See y’all in five years, when y’all bitches is burnt and broke. I will be sitting cute and clothed, fuck all that.” Born in D.C. and raised in the DMV (that’s the D.C. Metro area that spans Maryland and Virginia; she grew up in Prince George’s County, Maryland) Rico forged her superstar-on-the-rise persona across six mixtapes and the usual social media suspects....

Song to Song may not be the best movie playing in town this week, but it’s surely the most important. The film is the latest by Terrence Malick, one of the handful of working narrative directors who has created what critic and director Paul Schrader once termed a transcendental film style. Like Yasujro Ozu, Robert Bresson, and Carl Dreyer (the directors Schrader considered in his 1972 study of transcendental cinema), Malick operates in a unique cinematic language that evokes a spiritual presence in the material world....

Brian O’Mahoney/For Sun-Times Media The Great Chicago Fire Fest experiencing “technical difficulties” After its pathetic fizzle last Saturday, I thought I’d never again have to write about the Great Chicago Fire Festival. A failure like that speaks for itself. But as the week wore on, I saw that I was wrong. The Fire Festival, like some unholy ghoul, was rising from its watery grave, resurrected by a different kind of spectacle, the Great Chicago Spin Machine....

Katyn Each Friday, we recommend seven Old Movies to Watch Now, all of which come recommended by one of our critics and can currently be screened online. Read the review, watch the movie, feel accomplished. • The Piano Teacher, Michael Haneke’s character portrait starring Isabelle Huppert.

There’s nothing written in stone about improv comedy being a young person’s game, but more often than not it turns out that way. For actors who’ve reached a certain level of prominence in their careers, it would seem that the prospect of stepping into the semi-masochistic world of show shirts and class levels and 10:30 PM midweek showtimes could be prohibitively off-putting. Upcoming guests such as Amy Morton (9/8) and Michael Shannon (9/15) need little promotion, but audiences would also do well to nab tickets to the sets featuring spectacularly funny actors Atra Asdou (8/31) and Sadieh Rifai (9/14)....

Michael Gebert Majestic time-lapse views of day and night play over the real thing at Sixteen. Once restaurants had floor shows full of dancers and strolling Gypsy violinists and waitstaff dressed like they were in the Habsburg army. Then suddenly such things were gauche, and dining was straight faced and serious for a couple of generations. In the last couple of decades this began to change again; the conceptual games of Alinea and the magic tricks of Moto and, more recently, the whole-meal concept dinners of Next were efforts to bring entertainment back into dinner, to make the table itself a show, art exhibition and personal vision and mind bender....

Courtesy the artist Lykanthea Even after taking Carnatic vocal lessons for a decade during childhood, Lakshmi Ramgopal didn’t really start to think of herself as a singer until she found herself on an isolated island off the coast of Greece. She was visiting Delos to do research for her dissertation when, with no Internet or phone service, she started singing into her laptop microphone to pass the time. “Being on this little island surrounded by the sea caused me to approach songwriting in this way that I’ve never approached it,” she says....

Looking for something to do today? Agenda‘s got you covered. For more on these events and others, check out the Reader‘s daily Agenda page.

Satan formed in 1979 and went on to become one of the biggest names of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. The band brought a meaner, faster sound to the movement than their peers, operating closer to the vein that thrash bands would come to dominate in the metal world a short time later. Satan broke up and got back together a couple times following their initial ten-year run—at different stretches they even transformed into the bands Blind Fury and Pariah—but since officially reuniting in 2011, they’ve maintained the same lineup that recorded their 1983 debut, Court in the Act, and throughout this decade they’ve been releasing a steady stream of totally great records....