Kiss of Death With David Caruso, Samuel L. Jackson, Nicolas Cage, Helen Hunt, Stanley Tucci, Michael Rapaport, and Ving Rhames. With Peter Gallagher, Alison Elliott, William Fichtner, Adam Trese, Joe Don Baker, Paul Dooley, and Elisabeth Shue. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A taste for heartless, sociopathic hoods and sultry femme fatales–a desire to laugh at them and appreciate their outrageousness even as we flinch from them–is certainly part of what links several Hollywood crime thrillers of the 40s with many of those being made today, including such recent favorites as Pulp Fiction and The Last Seduction....

Actor Jason Wells grimaces as he hunches over to get through the doors onto the el. “They don’t build these cars for me or Abraham Lincoln, do they?” he asks of no one in particular. He sits awkwardly. “Hard to find a place for these long legs. Are my feet hitting you?” he asks concernedly of another passenger. All relatively normal, save that Wells is of average height. This is the curious beginning of S....

Pope Joan Based on a tale that’s been floating around for the past thousand years, inspiring writers from Petrarch and Boccaccio to Caryl Churchill and Lawrence Durrell, Pope Joan tells of one John Anglicus, a British friar whose great learning and charisma have won him fame throughout the Holy Roman Empire. Arriving in Rome in the company of King Louis II–the great-grandson of Charlemagne who seeks his ancestor’s imperial title–John proves he’s not only a teacher but a miracle worker who can raise the dead; when Louis’ puppet pope, the librarian Anastasius, is assassinated, John is elevated to the papal throne....

In their earlier piece Fierce Love, with which they made their Chicago debut last year, this San Francisco-based performance trio used a comedy-sketch format to hilariously skewer stereotypes blacks and gays have of each other and themselves. Their follow-up show Dark Fruit, here for a two-week run, is less tightly structured than its predecessor, less insistently funny, less concerned with external images–it’s deeper, more personal, and often more painful in its ambivalent perspective on racial and sexual matters....

Scott McCaughey–onetime Young Fresh Fellow, solo artist, and friendly icon of an almost forgotten, pregrunge Seattle–is taking advantage of a night off from the R.E.M. tour, for which he’s serving as second guitarist, to drop in at Lounge Ax. With the Fellows on hiatus, McCaughey pursues his off-kilter but dependably pop-based muse into all sorts of this-side-of-absurdist ventures; the latest is a loose organizaton called the Minus 5, which, on a new album, Old Liquidator, consists of him with new neighbor Peter Buck and various members of the Posies, NRBQ, and the Walkabouts....

Dear Reader, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I don’t know why it took me so long to write this letter but I’ve been thinking about doing it for years, literally. Let me first say that I love the Reader and look forward to picking it up every Friday morning. The Reader actually plays a very big part in my life when I really get down to thinking about it....

The local movie house was once a hub of life, the place where we saw our first movie or our last one, where we fell in love or met our friends and neighbors. We shared a common experience in the dark. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Those who go against the grain face an uncertain future. In 1989 Kenilworth lawyer Barbara Salmeron happened upon the closed 70-year-old Hub Theatre, located on Chicago Avenue in West Town....

The Life and Times of Forrest Chump, A Red Orchid Theatre. It’s high time someone exploded that meretricious Oscar winner Forrest Gump and its equation of stupidity with virtue and pigheadedness with patriotism. The dogged parody Forrest Chump, penned by Chicagoan D.H. Robinson, goes beyond an extended skit to spoof the entire film–and It’s a Wonderful Life, too. Mean and funny, it’s an apt lampoon. Forrest Chump, Gump’s cousin, endures a miserable life that’s the opposite of the smug Gump’s easy success: Chump is a naive genius whose fate is to get ripped off because he asks too many questions and owns too many books....

As I was slogging through yet another interesting assignment for medical school, I happened upon this interesting tidbit: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If they can promote the work of Michael Bolton as aesthetically desirable, I don’t see why they’d have any problem with hair balls. Actually, if you can suppress the thought of where they came from, bezoars are said to be kind of pretty....

I never begin watching a new TV season without a pious acknowledgment of how hard it must be to make a series–any series. It’s a rare show these days that carries itself with any grace. There aren’t even all that many shows on the air right now that look professional. The new shows are as lame a collection of befuddled losers as I can remember, and several of the returning elite shows, the ones you figure should at least have some passing idea of what they’re doing, have exploded in midair....

ZEPHYR DANCE ENSEMBLE and CONVERGENCE DANCERS AND MUSICIANS at Wilbur Wright College, October 29 and 30 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lyn’s idea is to put musicians onstage and have them interact with the dancers–not exactly original, but her classically trained company, Convergence Dancers and Musicians, is a pleasure to watch when they have good pieces to perform. Lyn’s idea can be taken too literally, however, as Gray Veredon does in You Are the Music While the Music Lasts....

I’m not sure whether this sensitive adaptation of a novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett (author of The Secret Garden) is quite the miracle that some of my colleagues have been claiming it to be, but there’s no question that this exceptional and affecting children’s movie from Warners easily blows current Disney productions out of the water and is enjoyable for grown-ups as well. Set during World War I, it follows the adventures of an imaginative and resourceful little girl (Liesel Matthews) raised in India and then deposited by her father (Liam Cunningham) at an exclusive New York boarding school, where she soon becomes the victim of a very mean headmistress (Eleanor Bron)....

Before she moved to New York in September, artist Michele Brody left her mark on the Chicago landscape. She went to four locations and sewed fabric around trees, poles, and posts, a project she called Presencing. Each of the sites held strong memories for her. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Brody worked surreptitiously, either early in the morning or at night. Using dull red pongee, a delicate Indian silk, she encased 15 fence posts by the Art Institute, 3 streetlight poles in a north-side alleyway, 10 young trees in Grant Park, and 3 tall trees by Automatic Art Gallery, which sponsored the artistic “intervention....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Perhaps it hasn’t crossed her mind that other people do have a right to their opinions. What she considers artistically valuable other people can legitimately hold to be offensive. Additionally, volunteers cannot be made to do anything they don’t want to do; in this case, RFBD volunteers cannot be forced to look at and record material they deem objectionable....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jonathan Rosenbaum’s reviews are almost invariably intelligent and interesting and we never miss them, if possible. However, we were disheartened to read in his Critic’s Choice for the film I Shot Andy Warhol that he seemed to think it somewhat ridiculous to call Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto a “feminist classic” (as was claimed in the film’s afterword)....

The night my boyfriend moved in I had no dreams. There was a hanger shortage. Actually a closet shortage, which left him stranded, Hefty bags of boots and towels in hand, piles of dry-cleaning bags sticking to his arms. There was a scene, one involving flying sweaters and freshly cut keys, after which he went to bed. I stayed up, shuttling between the linen closet and my basement storage locker, wondering if I’d get the chance to call the dream hot line....

Subtitled 12 Movements to the Only Conclusion, this is the last feature made by virtuoso low-budget independent Jon Jost (All the Vermeers in New York, Sure Fire) before he split for Europe in 1993, and once you see it you’ll know why he left. A highly stylized, extremely sarcastic, and sexually explicit road movie about an ex-con and a former waitress on a motel-strewn path to crime and oblivion through Oregon, Idaho, Washington, and northern California, it’s a technical tour de force devoted to the shallowness of the couple and the beauty of the landscape....

Writer Alex Shakar ran into a picket line while on his way to give a reading in New Haven last month. People were protesting against the Atticus bookstore’s recent firing of a woman for wearing nose rings. “Every leather-clad, dreadlocked bohemian in New Haven was there,” says Shakar. “They were carrying signs that said ‘Atticus sells bodies, not books.’” He proposed that the group accompany him into the store. He would say what he thought, they’d get a chance to do the same, and then he would read....

A flashback to pop melodicism wholly removed from rock influence, the catchy simplicity and soft edges of this New York band’s debut album, Realistic, and its five-song EP Lately (both released on Seed) parallel the synth-washed pop grandeur of England’s Saint Etienne: both acts clearly revel in sunny, weightless melodies like the ones Petula Clark used to sing. Dominique Durand’s appealingly troubled pronunciation of English–like that of Stereolab’s French chanteuse Laetitia Sadier–adds to the breezy artifice....

By Neal Pollack Sams is glad-handing people in the back of the room. Kenny Sadjak, the band’s keyboardist, launches into a New Orleans-style rendition of Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Crazy Arms.” The crowd whistles and sings along. They play “Roll Over Beethoven.” When they swing into “Johnny B. Goode,” Sams leaps up onto the bar, pumps his fist, rips off his sweater, and throws it at Hader’s feet. Hader lifts a beer in his direction....