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A War, the third dramatic feature from Danish writer-director Tobias Lindholm, has been widely touted as the final installment of a trilogy about “desperate men in small rooms.” In R (2010) the perpetually haunted Pilou Asbæk stars as a frightened young man trying to learn the ropes in prison; in A Hijacking (2012) he plays a crew member aboard a Danish ship seized by Somali pirates; and in A War he’s a Danish officer in Afghanistan who stands trial for a war crime....

French-Malian singer Aya Nakamura expresses an effortless but firm candor in her lyrics (she sings in French) that’s cleanly mirrored in her music. Her breakout single, 2018’s “Djadja,” was a relentless kiss-off; its unwavering dancehall beat and bubbling synth percussion provided the perfect backdrop to Nakamura’s exhausted yet ferocious vocals. This synchronicity permeates her third LP, Aya (Warner). On opener “Plus Jamais” she sings, “I gave you my heart, I’ll never do it again,” then follows that confession with a spacious arrangement of pitch-shifted vocals, a soft synth wail, and a tumbling beat....

courtesy of the artist Omer Avital The 2015 edition of the Israeli Jazz & World Music Festival kicked off last night at Constellation with a performance by Tammy Scheffer’s Morning Bound, a bland pop-jazz project based in New York. The program steps up tonight when bassist Omer Avital presents his quintet for a two-evening stint at the Green Mill. The bassist, composer, and bandleader is one of the most prolific, imaginative, and active figures in the bustling community of Israeli expats working in the New York jazz scene—he leads his own strong groups and works as a propulsive sideman in many others....

The fall theater season includes several plays that incorporate narratives centered on violence against women and how they deal with that trauma. But how do these shows break away from using those stories in exploitative ways? Freelancer Kaylen Ralph (who writes frequently about feminist issues and the performing arts) and Reader theater and dance editor Kerry Reid discussed their experiences with a few of these productions. Reid: Yes. And I also thought, as I noted in the review, that the lip-synching helped embody the physical dissociation that people who have been through profound trauma like Dana’s talk about....

PAWS One Tail at a Time Finalists: Anti-Cruelty Society, Felines and Canines

Gibsons Bar & Steakhouse Bavette’s Bar & Boeuf Finalists: BoeufHaus, Swift & Sons, El Che Steakhouse & Bar

Susanne Bier’s Bird Box became a cultural phenomenon at the end of 2018. The Netflix original film had one of the most popular debuts in the streaming service’s history, with over 46 million accounts watching in the first week of its release. Bird Box is split up into two parts. The first shows the beginning of the apocalypse. The second takes place five years later, when Malorie takes a two-day journey down the river in search of refuge....

CHICAGO – Camelot Illinois has announced a new partnership with Chicago Public Schools (CPS) to fund two new school projects as part of its Computer Science for All Initiative (CS4All), an innovative computer science program that provides equity, empowerment, and opportunities that maximize the potential of every student. “As private manager of the Illinois Lottery, we work to create winners every day, by consistently contributing to educational funding and supporting good causes,” said Keith Horton, Acting General Manager, Vice President and General Counsel of Camelot Illinois....

In a recent video interview with New York City arts and culture site Lumka, Chicago producer Casper McFadden explained that he made his new second album, Stasis (Log), while his landlord renovated his bedroom over the summer. The construction took longer than anticipated, and McFadden spent months stuck on his couch, unable to access the gear he’d left in his room or make music where he was used to doing it....

In 1997, on the west side of Chicago, a group of Black boys from Manley High School made a decision that would forever shape their futures. Although they already risked their lives just walking to school, they took a different kind of risk as well: getting in a boat. The documentary A Most Beautiful Thing reunites the first all-Black high school rowing team in the nation, and the youth, now men pushing 40, who made history by being trailblazers and who now want another shot at competing....

Pick Me Up Cafe Runner-Up: Au Cheval

Nance Klehm, the Ground Rules spontaneousvegetation.net/the-ground-rules During the last year and a half, ecological systems designer, landscaper, horticultural consultant, permacultural grower, and forager Nance Klehm has undertaken an ambitious composting and bioremediation project called the Ground Rules. Each week her group collects some 1,000 gallons’ worth of food waste from local businesses like Owen & Alchemy, Asado Coffee Roasters, Avec, and Cellar Door Provisions and transports it to soil centers in community gardens in Logan Square, Garfield Park, North Lawndale, and Bridgeport, where it’s composted in giant wooden bins....

Eater Chicago recently broke the news that, to quote the headline, “A Nelson Algren-Inspired Bar is Coming to Wicker Park from Bar Deville’s Team.” The story details how the new place, the Neon Wilderness, to be located near the Polish Triangle, the convergence of Division, Milwaukee and Ashland, will serve high-end cocktails such as the Polish Broadway, an old-fashioned with Żubrówka vodka. The mixologists behind the plan are award winners, and Eater Chicago’s Ashok Selvam seemed upbeat about this addition to the near northwest side’s high-end cocktail possibilities....

Aubrey Plaza and Liam Aiken in Ned Rifle Early on in Ned Rifle, which begins a weeklong run at Facets tonight, garbageman-turned-Nobel-Prize-winning-poet Simon Grim (James Urbaniak) surprises his nephew with the news that he’s given up poetry to run a video blog in which he performs a new stand-up routine each week. In a deadpan, single-breath delivery characteristic of writer-director Hal Hartley’s work, he explains: As Hartley looks for meaning in fidelity to form, his characters are always searching for some ideological system that will give order to their lives....

The Bears really suck this year. Every other team is better than the Bears. What can we do to make the Bears great—sorry, make sure the Bears don’t suck anymore? Also, after today’s game, whom do we hate more, the Vikings or the Lions? There are some subtle differences between them. Like, the Vikings are from Minnesota and the Lions are from Michigan. Both of which went to Trump. Um, never mind....

In the late 80s and early 90s, I couldn’t get enough of a certain shambling strain of indie rock, marked by varying degrees of sloppiness and incompetence that were countered by a blend of aching sincerity, faux naivete, and catchiness. In the U.S. that aesthetic reached its apotheosis with Beat Happening, a trio from Olympia, Washington, that underlined its gee-whiz artlessness with punk-rock attitude. At the time many acts on K Records, run by Beat Happening capo Calvin Johnson, had a similar vibe....

A storm to end all storms, a battle scene to end all battle scenes—both achieved with barely more than some well-deployed tarpaulins. The Belarus Free Theater‘s King Lear is so visually inventive, so endlessly stunning that I started to doubt my own reactions. Was I being seduced by a bunch of cool but empty gestures? Or maybe by the political glamour of BFT’s backstory, rooted in resistance to Belarusan strongman Alexandr Lukashenko?...

Big Star Runner-Up: Piccolo Sogno

Chicago Athletic Association Broken Shaker at Freehand Finalists: Waydown at Ace Hotel, Cerise at Virgin Hotels Chicago