The Mexican art film La Tirisia screens three times next week at the Chicago International Film Festival. The other day, I wrote about the thrill of watching filmmakers fail spectacularly—a post inspired by the recent revival of Nagisa Oshima’s Diary of a Shinjuku Thief, as well as the half-dozen unspectacular failures I’ve previewed for this year’s Chicago International Film Festival. Thinking about Oshima made me feel so good that I refrained from writing about the latter category, which would have reminded me of the disappointment I’d been trying to shake for the past couple weeks....

Ribfest Chicago 773-525-3609

1140 W. Jackson, 312-543-6246 In the basement of the Mercy Home for Boys and Girls, at the GLeonard Boxing Club, you’re liable to run into such pols as state rep Christian Mitchell, Alderman Will Burns, Chicago Teachers Union field rep Joseph McDermott, and Alderman Walter Burnett. But the main attraction is Glenn Leonard, who runs the gym. The 56-year-old son of Vic, who operated the boxing program at Scottsdale Park (4687 W....

San Soo Gab San 5247 N. Western

2609 W. Fullerton 773-342-2309 Runner-Up Bernice’s Tavern

Runner-Up Clark Street

Girls Rock! Chicago 1530 W. Superior Runner-Up Lillstreet Art Center

Eraldo Peres/AP Photos Eduardo Campos (left) died in a plane crash on Wednesday. As the Tribune and Sun-Times think about ways to improve their product, they might want to consider discontinuing some lines of news altogether. We the readers have a right to know, but that doesn’t put our dailies under a moral obligation to tell us. News they can’t report competently they might want to leave to NPR and the New York Times....

This past summer Chicago lost one of its most distinctive and acclaimed composers when Marcos Balter—the Brazilian native who was previously the director of musical composition studies at Columbia College—moved to New York to assume a position as associate professor of music composition at Montclair State University. Of course, he continues to write new music, and in that sense his presence will live on whenever someone performs one of his pieces....

American industry disproportionately affects the health of minority and low-income communities, and East Chicago, Indiana—which boasts of having been the country’s “most industrialized municipality” during the industrial revolution—offers a glimpse into the kinds of environmental injustices now plaguing the rust belt. In July 2016, nearly 1,200 people in the West Calumet Housing Complex of East Chicago learned their children’s blood carried levels of lead that tested as much as six times higher than the Center for Disease Control’s cutoff for lead poisoning....

Hrebejk’s Honeymoon screens again tomorrow at the Gene Siskel Film Center. I may have panned his latest, Honeymoon, in this week’s issue, but Jan Hrebejk is still my favorite working Czech filmmaker. A gifted director of actors and a perceptive chronicler of domestic life across all social strata, Hrebejk exhibits a warm (but seldom sentimental) understanding of character regardless of whether he’s working in comedy or drama. He’s also one of the most prolific figures in contemporary Czech cinema, having directed about 15 films for theaters and TV since Divided We Fall became an international success in 2000....

Runner-Up Jonathan Toews, Chicago Blackhawks

Whether you’re celebrating your singledom or looking for a romantic night out with a significant other, there’s plenty to do this Valentine’s Day. Here’s some of what we recommend: Celebrate Chicago History Skip the traditional Valentine’s Day celebrations and go back in time to the evening of February 14, 1929, with a Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre-themed chef’s dinner. A cocktail reception, featuring era-specific drinks, precedes dinner. Tue 2/14, reception 5 PM, dinner 5:30 PM, Raised Bar, 1 W....

The emotional impact of plays about musicians tend to have a high floor and a low ceiling. Heartbreak Hotel, Hank Williams: Lost Highway, Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill, Always . . . Patsy Cline—it’s a category of theater that’s by and large informative and unchallenging and, at best, an excuse for a solid live revue. These shows also usually feel like they’ve been pressed out of the same Mold-A-Rama with a different name and songbook....

Few rock albums have retained a place in my heart and head like The Days of Wine and Roses, the 1982 debut album by LA’s Dream Syndicate. At the time the band was lumped in with other players from the city’s Paisley Underground scene, a neopsychedelic movement that produced the Bangles, the Three O’Clock, Long Ryders, Rain Parade, and Green on Red—but that record, which borrowed more from the Velvet Underground than any flower power combo, didn’t exactly fit the mold (its name was taken from the mighty drone project of composer La Monte Young, which included future Velvets member John Cale)....

Street gangs are one of the nation’s greatest scourges but also one of its greatest shames—imagine a life so bereft of opportunity that you’d take a bullet defending your nonexistent ownership of a street corner. But Lord Thing, a bold 1970 documentary recently restored by the Chicago Film Archives, revisits a period when the Conservative Vice Lords, one of Chicago’s oldest and largest gangs, aspired to something better, launching numerous initiatives to empower people in the Lawndale neighborhood....

Cooking with the grossest foods imaginable wasn’t the original premise of our long-running food feature Key Ingredient—that’s just how it worked out. The idea was that we’d ask a chef to create a dish with a certain ingredient, then that person would pick another ingredient and chef to pass on the challenge to, and it would go from there. And so it did, for 177 episodes, beginning in 2010 with Grant Achatz of Alinea and ending (next month) with Joe Frillman of Daisies....

Authors say writing a book is like going on a popular ride at Disneyland. There’s a two-hour wait, followed by about 45 seconds that are pretty exciting. On the other hand, a writer can’t write his own reviews. And a publicist can’t assign them—hard as she might try. “I am always fairly aggressive with the New York Times,” Stephanie Elliott of Wesleyan University Press tells me, “sending galleys and review copies to a variety of columnists and freelancers in addition to sending books to the [Times] Book Review editor....

John Sturdy Local garage-pop outfit Bare Mutants released a video yesterday for “Crying With Bob,” a slow-build single from their 2013 debut on In the Red, The Affliction. Directed by Reader contributing photographer John Sturdy, the video features plenty of your favorite, cozy Chicago cool spots—Logan Hardware, Empty Bottle, the Burlington, the stretch of sidewalk under a dilapidated portion of the Bloomingdale Trail—as well as a guest spot from a bourbon-spitting, always-colorful Mike Lust....