Match Point Movie gossip writer Peter Biskind described Woody Allen in the December 2005 Vanity Fair as “an artist without honor in his own country” (apparently Biskind’s ecstatic write-up in Vanity Fair doesn’t count). He went on to compare Allen’s fate to those of some of Allen’s heroes, including Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Orson Welles, and Charlie Chaplin (assuming Chaplin’s “own country” was the U.S.). He added that Allen, who’s released 35 features to date, has made at least ten masterpieces “that can hold their own against” any of the four he credited to Robert Altman or the three he assigned to Francois Truffaut....

This Scandinavian quintet stars some of the most exciting and flexible players in the revitalized Swedish and Norwegian jazz scenes–they can jump from free improv to postbop or electronics-augmented settings without breaking a sweat. But in the context of Atomic, the group’s three composers–reedist Fredrik Ljungkvist, pianist Havard Wiik, and trumpeter Magnus Broo–take inspiration mostly from the early days of American free jazz, like Ornette Coleman’s deceptively simple Atlantic recordings or the inside-out brilliance of mid-60s Blue Note works by the likes of Andrew Hill, Jackie McLean, and Grachan Moncur III, on which brooding harmonics collided with indelible, complex melodies....

If you invite a critic to a workshop performance, should you expect a review? Theatre Building Chicago marketing director Tom Ballentine admits he solicited Hedy Weiss’s attendance at Stages, TBC’s annual weekend-long festival of semistaged new musicals last month, providing her with tickets, a hefty press kit, and photos. But after Weiss published capsule reviews of the eight nascent musicals she sampled during a 12-hour day, Ballentine, TBC executive director Joan Mazzonelli, and apparently the entire membership of the New York-based Dramatists Guild were incensed....

Nostalgia for the Russian and American space programs haunts this richly melancholic comedy drama produced, written, directed by, and starring (in a dual role) Quebecois theater director turned filmmaker Robert Lepage (The Confessional, The Polygraph). The lumpy hero, bedeviled by an acute sense of the universe surrounding him, works as a telemarketer to support himself while perfecting a doctoral thesis about the narcissism of the space race. His resentment of his gay younger brother, a successful TV meteorologist also played by Lepage, intensifies as the two men deal with their mother’s death and the older brother is invited to Russia to present his theories....

It was last July that fledgling writer Julie Saltzman and her business partner, Susan McLaughlin Karp, first heard they might have competition. They were three months into converting a 1,200-square-foot office on Broadway into Uptown Writer’s Space, which they thought would be Chicago’s first and only fee-based shared workspace for writers, when Karp, who lives in Evanston, heard rumors of another space opening on the same street, run by an Evanston soccer mom and a partner....

Twin Cinema (Matador) is easily the least immediate album that Vancouver’s New Pornographers have made–nothing on it leaps out and grabs you like, say, “Letter From an Occupant” or “All for Swinging You Around.” But the record has abundant pleasures for anybody willing to spend time with it. On 2003’s Electric Version, the band began shifting from an ad hoc conglomeration led by Carl Newman and took on a genuine group identity, and now it’s even harder to tease out the individual personalities of members like Newman, Dan Bejar, and Neko Case....

Lead Story Super-Recidivists Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » During the 17 months he spent in a minimum-security federal prison in Atlanta for mortgage fraud between 2002 and 2004, Wayne Milton bribed guards and sneaked out at night at least 50 times to set up further fraud operations that authorities said ultimately took in nearly $20 million. In May the 32-year-old Milton was sentenced to 20 years for the new fraud plus the escapes; according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, he was reportedly recorded earlier that month making a phone call from jail to try to get another mortage loan....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Seattle in October, Neelesh Phadnis was convicted of murdering his mother and father. The 24-year-old Phadnis had insisted on conducting his own defense, though he’d had no legal training, and the story he told the jury changed repeatedly throughout the trial. Initially he said he and his parents had been kidnapped and tortured by a small gang of 400-pound Samoans and their girlfriends; later the gang’s roster grew to include two whites, two blacks, a Native American, and possibly a transgendered person; on the final day of his testimony, Phadnis said he’d just remembered that there were about 15 more Samoans than he’d previously claimed, or about 30 armed Samoans in all....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While celebrating her mother’s birthday last year at her parents’ home in Darlington, Wisconsin, Carriel Louah slipped on ice in their driveway and broke her ankle; this July a judge in Madison ruled that the 25-year-old Louah could proceed with a $75,000 lawsuit against them for negligence. (She claims that her parents failed to adequately maintain their property, citing an apologetic letter sent after the accident in which her mother wrote that they should have made repairs “years ago....

I’ve been here for dinner several times. I really love the food, but tonight I have to hurry because I have to get to the bingo hall where I call the numbers every Monday evening. I’ve been doing it for 18 years for mostly senior citizen women–a lot of cookie-baking grandma types, 200 of them each week. Some of my regulars are Sally, who buys pizza for the other volunteers, and Mary, who’s ornery and gives me a bit of a hard time....

Holmes/Watson fanatics may find Charles Marowitz’s dark parody a shallow misrepresentation of the detective duo’s relationship–and not quite humorous enough to justify the liberties taken. Others, though, might enjoy this suspenseful story about a bitter second banana’s plot to destroy his smug, condescending, maddeningly brilliant superior. The plot has enough twists to engage mystery buffs motivated by the thrill of the puzzle, and the performances in this attractive staging are competent....

Last week’s workshop on arts audiences at the University of Chicago’s Cultural Policy Center reminded me of something I heard at a Gold Coast dinner party a decade or two ago. The relative pleasures of attending the Lyric Opera and a Bears game were under discussion, and the Bears had the edge when the hostess, presiding from her seat at the far end of the table, settled the question. “Yes,” she said, in a flash of candor, “but it’s better to be seen at the opera....

The Traveling Salesman Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Also: Don’t Suck A panel of gallery owners decked out in the industry colors–black, black, black, and gray–reeled off a dos-and-don’ts list for an attentive audience of 120 at last week’s Artists at Work forum at the Cultural Center. Moderated by Natalie van Straaten, executive director of the Chicago Art Dealers Association, the panel consisted of fledgling ceramics specialist Dubhe Carreno, established dealer Carrie Secrist, and veteran Carl Hammer....

Rock, Pop, Etc. JOAN BAEZ, ERIN McKEOWN Fri 4/2, 8 PM, Pick-Staiger Concert Hall, Northwestern University, 50 Arts Circle Dr., Evanston. 847-467-4000 or 847-491-5441. CAMPBELL BROTHERS, CALVIN COOKE See Critic’s Choice. Sat 3/27, 7 PM, Old Town School of Folk Music, 4544 N. Lincoln. 773-728-6000. DJ RILEY spins at a swing dance. Sun 4/4, 7:30 PM, Willowbrook Ballroom, 8900 S. Archer, Willow Springs. 708-839-1000. HEAD OF FEMUR, GENIUS BRACELET Benefit for Rick Foley features a comedy showcase and a performance by Collaboraction Theater Company....

friday1 cMcCoy Tyner septet With a style at once massive and ornate, McCoy Tyner easily commands a place among the ten most influential pianists of postbop jazz. Both Tyner and Impulse Records came of age through their association with John Coltrane: Tyner played in Coltrane’s classic quartet, and the label released Coltrane’s pioneering records of the early 60s (an era chronicled in one of this year’s best jazz books, Ashley Kahn’s The House That Trane Built)....

It sometimes seems that abstract expressionists of the 1950s were recapitulating the American spirit of conquest in their works. The American artist Ezio Martinelli (1913-1980)–best known for his sculpture–knew and exhibited with some of the abstract expressionists, and his nine large, baroquely complex drawings at Robert Henry Adams, all from the 50s, do seem to seize the space. In one of them (all are untitled), a mass of swirling, interpenetrating forms seems to rise heroically from a base and flower into all sorts of cusps, twists, turns, and holes....

CTA officials say the agency is so broke they’ll have to cut service, raise fares, and fire employees unless the state bails it out. If that’s true, say Uptown residents who’ve been poring over the financial details of the Wilson Yard development, why is the CTA selling the north-side lot the development will sit on for so little? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » From the outset nearby residents have been furious that Shiller wants to cram more low-income housing into Uptown, which already has the highest concentration of subsidized housing on the north side....

As soon as my friend and I got out of the car to begin our mile-and-a-half-long walk from “Coachella: The Parking Lot” to “Coachella: The Music Festival in the Desert” a couple weekends ago, I could hear them, faint but instantly recognizable and uniquely heartwarming to a girl of a certain age: Ponies. Ponies neighing. Coachella kicks it upscale–instead of spreading out a zillion-band lineup on the sticky blacktop of a sports-arena parking lot, the fest rents 78 acres of manicured fields from the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California....

Ray Davies Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The show we saw was more than three hours long, but there was so much material for Davies to choose from that nobody with a wish list for the set could possibly hear everything he wanted. Mr. Lungs in the back bellowed for “Big Sky” and Mr. Fixated to one side kept shouting for “Sleepwalker” and everybody knew damn well that no matter how many times Davies disappeared into the wings waving, the night was simply not going to end without “Lola....

All movies are free, and, unless otherwise noted, will be screened by video projection. Ken Carter, a high school basketball coach in working-class Richmond, California, made national headlines in January 1999 when he benched his entire team (then undefeated) in midseason because some players’ grades were too poor. This dramatization of his story consistently takes the high road, stressing education over sports and responsibility over despair, and Samuel L. Jackson is good as the straightforward, maddeningly stubborn coach, who gets more static from the parents than the players....