Seven This week, the first major movie of the fall, David Fincher’s Gone Girl, hit multiplexes to more or less widespread acclaim. (For what it’s worth, my boss J.R. Jones, America’s most reliable film critic, wasn’t a fan.) The release of a new Fincher film feels like a major event at this point, so endeared is he to moviegoers of mainstream and more refined tastes alike. Personally, I have a complicated relationship with his films, which are hardened, meticulously structured gadgets with rigid-to-the-point-of-oppressive narratives and terse visual sensibilities....

You couldn’t be blamed for wandering into Doolin’s in search of a pint of Guinness. The two-story River West building screams “pub” with its emerald-green awning, a clover dotting the I of the business’s Irish family name. For thirsty lads and lasses looking for a drink, owner Chris Doolin has a stock reply: “I can’t sell you a beer, but I could sell you a hat or beads.” She can also hook you up with a champagne fountain, giant ribbon-cutting scissors, and even a snow-cone machine....

Following, in alphabetical order, are reviews of selected films screening through Thursday, October 16 (though repeat screenings after that date are also noted). For reviews of films screening Friday, October 17, through Thursday, October 24, come back next week to read the second part of our festival coverage. Read our reviews of films screening during the festival’s second week. A half century of CIFF milestones, from Scorsese’s debut to Lee Daniels’s achievement award Read our reviews of 15 revival films screening at CIFF....

Having survived 20 Chicago winters since moving here from Florida in the late 90s, writer and musician Brian Costello is decamping for Los Angeles over Memorial Day weekend. Not only has he been a valued contributor to the Reader for more than a decade, he’s also drummed in garage-rock bands such as Outer Minds and the Functional Blackouts, hosted the reliably awesome live game show Shame That Tune (as well as a few live talk shows), and published two hilarious and ribald novels, Losing in Gainesville and The Enchanters vs....

Inspired by film director Wes Anderson in her collection “Let Her Dance,” junior student Dayra Cardoze created fashion-forward yet wearable pieces for last month’s undergraduate fashion show at the School of the Art Institute. If great style is a savvy mix of opposites, Cardoze hit a sweet spot with her “double personality” garments—basically two looks sewn into a single outfit. “By combining unexpected prints, shapes, textures, and colors I created three contrasting garments that are an homage to his whimsical and peculiar style,” she explains on her website....

The great German, then American, director Ernst Lubitsch is currently featured as FilmStruck‘s “director of the week,” and they have a generous selection of his films spanning most of his career. A master of deft and witty romantic comedies, his legendary “Lubitsch touch” began in the teens and graced a wider range of films than his celebrated comedy films. The Shop Around the CornerThere are no art deco nightclubs, shimmering silk gowns, or slamming bedroom doors to be seen, but this 1940 film is one of Lubitsch’s finest and most enduring works, a romantic comedy of dazzling range that takes place almost entirely within the four walls of a leather-goods store in prewar Budapest....

Every classic play comes with its own set of commonplaces—those little hooks we pick up in school, giving us the shorthand we need so we can appear at least halfway educated. Long Day’s Journey Into Night is autobiographical. The girl in The Glass Menagerie is Tennessee Williams’s sister. Picnic is by a closeted gay guy. Nothing happens in Waiting for Godot, but nothing is the point because it’s absurd. Shakespearean English isn’t so hard to understand once you get the hang of it....

If you believe social conservatives in the media, the Hot 100 is a den of musical iniquity full of songs that are little more than advertisements for easy sex, drug abuse, and general un-American thought. They’ve been saying that for decades, and most of the time they’ve been right, but at the moment the pop charts are having some kind of spasm of morality and going all wholesome on us....

Lyric Opera’s The Merry Widow, emphatically set in Paris on the eve of the 20th century, opened 24 hours after last week’s terrorist attack there. With the body count still being tallied, the atmosphere at the Civic Opera House was subdued. The audience stood and sang as the orchestra played “La Marseillaise” before curtain, and when the scene called for fireworks over Montmartre, complete with explosive sound effects, it was impossible not to be reminded of the real-world carnage....

Steve Earle opens his latest album, So You Wannabe an Outlaw (Warner Brothers), with a cautionary tale that asks listeners considering his outsider path to think twice. If anyone can offer such warnings, it’s Earle, whose anti-Nashville posturing and copious substance abuse eventually landed him in jail. The title track features a cameo from fellow Texan Willie Nelson, one of Earle’s early inspirations and another singer who’s taunted mortality (and prison) for decades, but it’s Earle that sings, “Won’t nobody give a damn about you when you die / But the devil he comes for his due”—and while I’m pretty sure the singer is still alive, we get the point....

It’s hard to put a positive spin on the release of a video showing a white Chicago police officer needlessly snuffing out the life of a black teen, but Mayor Emanuel did his best Tuesday afternoon. ​​”This episode can be a moment of understanding and learning,” ​the mayor said at a press conference at police headquarters​.​ That the mayor would focus on police becoming “fetal” was especially remarkable given that​ ​he was well aware, when he made those comments, ​of the dashboard-camera video showing the final moments of Laquan McDonald’s ​brief ​life—a life ended by officer Jason Van Dyke on an evening in October 2014....

An era ended two summers ago when Richard Cotovsky pulled down the curtain on his long-running Abbie Hoffman Died for Your Sins Festival. Cotovsky first started the fest in 1989, the year of Abbie Hoffman’s suicide, to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Woodstock, and at that point he was ready to move on. “The Last Abbie Fest” was meant to be just that, a fact reflected in the poster: a skull with a flag bandanna, hippie glasses, and Hoffman’s trademark Jewfro....

Like most festivals with more than one stage, Pitchfork sometimes books two great acts to play overlapping sets, forcing fans to make a painful choice. Reader writers found quite a few of those conflicts on the fest’s schedule, and thought long and hard about who they’d go to see. These write-ups compare those decisions with the “winners” as determined by Pitchfork itself, via rounded averages of the ratings the site has given to each artist’s releases....

Courtesy Poisoned Mind Records Cover art for the Black Devil Doll From Hell soundtrack Last year Chester Novell Turner, an underground horror director from Chicago’s west side who made a couple shot-on-video movies in the 80s, returned from the dead—sort of. He stopped making movies after 1987’s Tales From the Quadead Zone, and as more fans of low-budget cult films sought out his work, the rumor spread that he’d died in a car accident in 1996....

Gemma Butterworth “Lost and Found” 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.

Corbett vs. Dempsey, the record label operated by the owners of the West Town art gallery of the same, tends to focus on rigorous improvised music and free jazz, but a new release presents a wonderful shift in stylistic focus. Scapula is a hard-swinging, nine-track collection of impossibly rare bebop cut in Chicago in 1949 by a combo led by saxophonist George Davis. The short liner notes on the back of the cover, written by John Corbett, seem to contain what little is known about Davis: he was leading a group in the mid-40s that included singer Jackie Cain and pianist Roy Kral, who, after a later stint with saxophonist and bandleader Charlie Ventura, went on to a successful career as a duo....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, January 27, 2016. Luis Gutiérrez: Trump can tweet, but he doesn’t have real solutions to Chicago violence U.S. rep Luis Gutiérrez says that President Donald Trump is using Chicago’s violence surge for his “own political gain” and doesn’t have any real solutions. Trump tweeted Tuesday evening that he will “send in the feds” to Chicago if the “carnage” doesn’t stop. “I think what President Trump has done is simply say ‘Look at the carnage’ without offering a solution,'” the Democratic congressman, who represents large areas of the south and west sides, said on CNN Thursday....

As an old friend from the Reader said on Facebook the other day, “Good reporters don’t need Sean Spicer.” As another Reader friend added, “I. F. Stone worked without ‘access.’ He relied almost entirely on public documents.” And here’s the fighting words of CNN: “This is an unacceptable development from the Trump White House. Apparently this is how they retaliate when you report facts they don’t like. We’ll keep reporting regardless....

We’re in the middle of N.W.A yearbook season. Straight Outta Compton, a long-in-the-works biopic on the iconic LA hip-hop group, comes out Friday, a full week after the release of Dr. Dre’s unexpected third album, Compton: A Soundtrack By Dr. Dre, which was inspired by the making of the N.W.A film. Since the windup to the first part of this massive one-two hip-hop-legacy punch landed—which we can place at about two weeks ago, when Dre announced the imminent release of his album—the floodgates for the Straight Outta Compton content stream have opened....

Collaboratively † administrate empowered markets via plug-and-play networks. Dynamically procrastinate B2C users after installed base benefits. Proactively envisioned multimedia based expertise and cross-media growth strategies. Seamlessly visualize quality intellectual capital without superior collaboration and idea-sharing. Holistically pontificate installed base portals after maintainable products.Dramatically visualize customer directed convergence without revolutionary ROI.1 Efficiently unleash cross-media information without cross-media value. Quickly maximize timely deliverables for real-time schemas. Dramatically maintain clicks-and-mortar solutions without functional solutions....