AMC River East 21 322 E. Illinois 312-683-0121 chicagofilmfestival.com Runner-Up European Union Film Festival

mind art core Pilates Performance 1830 W. Foster Runner-Up Roots of Integrity, Holistic Fitness & Wellness

Mary Bartelme Park 115 S. Sangamon 312-746-5494 www.chicagoparkdistrict.com/parks/Bartelme-Mary-Park @MaryBarelmePAC

I’ve always loved these heavy riffers. What began as the duo of Mat Davis and Elizabeth Blackwell has expanded to include drummer Al McCartney, and as a trio Castle continue to possess an eerie and uncanny ability to tap into the late-60s/early-70s occult-rock vibe made famous by Black Sabbath—but also represented by Pentagram and the likes of Coven and Black Widow (whose “Come to the Sabbat” remains a goosebump-raising earworm). As far as contemporaries go, maybe only the original Witch Mountain comes close in the same way....

At 19, Oak Park native Tavi Gevinson has experienced more than most people do in a lifetime—but that doesn’t mean she’s going to slow down anytime soon. The teen blogger continues to run Rookie magazine, is gearing up to star in The Crucible on Broadway, and just released Rookie Yearbook Four. So this is the last yearbook? I don’t think it’s the end for Rookie in print, but it felt like it would be good to have one for each year of high school....

Inside the Gothic steeple of the Chicago Temple, which boasts the world’s tallest church spire soaring 568 feet above the corner of Washington and Clark, Philip Blackwell lives happily with his wife, Sally. The sky-high parsonage is just one of the perks of being the Loop Methodist congregation’s senior minister. After 45 years in the ministry (13 of them at the Chicago Temple), Blackwell will retire on June 30. The 70-year-old and his wife are moving to a cabin off of a lake in Wisconsin....

Todd Rosenberg/Lyric Opera Jenn Gambatese as Maria, about to meet her future I’d like to say this Mariaesque flub-up wasn’t my fault, but it was. As bad career moments go, it’s right up there. Like the warhorses of the opera repertoire, The Sound of Music, which opened on Broadway in 1959, is very familiar to its audience, most of whom can hum nearly every tune. Chalk that up to the 1965 movie version, which the stage show now competes with, but also complements....

The “true meaning” of Christmas has likely been debated since the holiday was first invented. Is it a holy celebration of the birth of Christ or a capitalist cash grab? Both? Neither? Something else entirely? We’ll probably never truly get to the bottom of it. In 1993 Patrick Griffin skirted around the issue to explore an even deeper layer of the holiday madness: “The True Meaning of Xmas.” Xmas, he says, has a weedlike vigor, making its staying power even stronger than that of Christmas....

Pequod’s Pizza 2207 N. Clybourn Runner-Up WestEnd

I have a longtime friend of a certain fleshy girth who, one Saturday morning, stood outside the window of Pilsen’s great Carnitas Don Pedro, in front of its famous mountain of steaming, glistening porky goodness, and thoughtfully observed, “This is what I look like when I get out of the shower.” Earlier this summer I was introduced to jackfruit “carnitas” at Mini Mott, and the less said about those the better....

For this year’s Reader Key Ingredient Cook-Off, we asked some of Chicago’s top chefs to create a dish to honor a person who influenced their cooking. The exercise stirred many kitchen memories. Dish: Asparagus puree with puffed grains and chamomile

The Works Progress Administration was an anomaly in American cultural history. It was formed in 1935 by President Franklin Roosevelt with the intent of providing jobs for people who had been left unemployed by the Great Depression. But it didn’t just give work to skilled laborers and industrial workers. It also created paid jobs for writers and artists. Perhaps because there was so much collaboration—or because the artists wanted to keep their patron, the WPA, happy—most of the prints remained representational and accessible, as Lincoln puts it, “very focused on the present and engagement with the human experience....

Time hasn’t been especially kind to Camper Van Beethoven, the 80s band from Santa Cruz, California, that was a veritable showroom model of what used to be called “college rock” (before it was rechristened “alternative rock”). To the extent that they’re remembered, it’s usually as the group that eventually gave birth to Cracker, which lead songwriter David Lowery formed when CVB split up in 1990. While I enjoyed the easygoing strum of their 1985 college-radio hit “Take the Skinheads Bowling,” CVB’s first few records did little but irritate me, because the flip side of that song’s absurd charm was silliness and gee-aren’t-we-clever self-regard....

On Benny Latimore’s latest album, A Taste of Me: Great American Songs (Essential Media), the soul-blues veteran wraps his smoldering baritone around standards from the Great American Songbook (“Smile,” “The Very Thought of You”) as well as contemporary classics (“What a Difference a Day Makes,” “At Last,” “You Are So Beautiful”). He adds reworkings of his own “Dig a Little Deeper” and “Let’s Straighten It Out,” both of which prove themselves fully worthy of such august company....

Revolution Brewing 3340 N. Kedzie 773-588-2267

Empty Bottle 1035 N. Western Runner-Up Small Bar

On a sunny Saturday last April, a small crowd gathered in a Calumet City park to mourn the loss of a black child. “I want you to realize we have tragedies every day, black families,” 58-year-old Steven Watts told the crowd. His voice was worn and somber, barely eclipsing the hum of passing cars. “I saw it. I watched it. And for three years now, this is what I see every single day: I see my son dying....

Trouble is brewing in Oakland, California. Two weeks ago Annapurna Pictures released the surreal, satirical Sorry to Bother You, shot on the streets of Oakland last summer by rapper turned filmmaker Boots Riley. The movie begins as a simple workplace comedy along the lines of Mike Judge’s Office Space (1999) but ripens into a nightmare of capitalist exploitation. If that doesn’t shake you up enough, this week Summit Entertainment opens Carlos López Estrada’s bitterly funny drama Blindspotting, which was filming in Oakland at the same time as Sorry to Bother You....