Like Sally Potter’s Yes, this neatly drawn French drama looks at a politically charged romance between a Western woman and an Arab man, though it’s more youthful, more erotic, and a lot less pretentious. A quiet Moroccan teenager in a Parisian ghetto (Mohammed Khouas) is hopelessly ensnared by Lila (Vahina Giocante), a blond stunner whose bold come-ons leave him weak with lust. His desire is complicated by the leering of his Arab buddies, hers by the lesbian advances of her legal guardian, but their mutual attraction is so powerful it deepens into real love even as it isolates them from everyone else....

Merry Marilyn! Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It may not be enough to prove that Monroe was murdered, but it’s more than enough to refute the condescending claims often made by would-be experts ranging from Joseph L. Mankiewicz to Clive James that Monroe was some version of the dumb blonde she was so adept at playing. James once wrote, “She was good at being inarticulatedly abstracted for the same reasons that midgets are good at being short....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In October in Hendersonville, North Carolina, 24-year-old Noah Donell Brown, running from police after allegedly attempting to rob a Subway sandwich shop, was apprehended after his baggy pants snagged on a picket fence; when officers caught up with him, he was hanging upside down from the fence and his pants were around his ankles. Least Competent Criminals...

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A February article in the Columbia Missourian reported on Specialist Adam Ballard, a 22-year-old stationed at Fort Leonard Wood in central Missouri, and his plan to to eat his way out of the army. Last year 3,285 soldiers were discharged for failing to meet the army’s strict body-fat requirements; a Pentagon spokesperson acknowledged that recent increases in such discharges might be related to the ongoing war....

I’m Italian and I lived in Paris for ten years, spending my 20s there, then I moved to London for school and worked there, then moved to New York with work, then moved back to London. I’ve been in Chicago since February. London and Milan have the same sort of fun, glam, people-watching type of thing that I’ve seen here at SushiSamba. It’s not uncommon to see models, celebrities, and actors....

Kudos to Chuck Frank, president of Z Frank Chevrolet in Chicago [February 11], for his progressive views on improving the national average fuel-economy standards for vehicles, global warming, and urban air pollution. Mr. Frank is doing what he can within the “framework” of owning his dealership. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Specializing in sustainable alternative-energy technologies, I am a board member of the Nuclear Energy Information Service in Evanston....

One hundred years ago the A.C. Frost Company, which was constructing a railroad between Chicago and Milwaukee, was looking for ways to stimulate business. It hit on the idea of an amusement park, which it built on 36 acres of land along a stretch of track 24 miles north of Chicago in what was then the village of Ravinia and is now Highland Park. The amusement park had a baseball diamond, a “casino” for dancing and dining, a theater (still standing and now called the Martin), and winter sports facilities like a skating rink and toboggan run....

Face the Truth (Matador), Stephen Malkmus’s third solo album, is as pleasurable–and perplexing–as its predecessors. All tossed-off novelty narratives and chattering guitars, Stephen Malkmus (2001), his first post-Pavement release, sounded too easy. The follow-up, Pig Lib (2003), sounded too hard–the guitars got tangled in proggy knots and the words were willfully opaque. But true believers expecting the new disc to be juuuust right will be spooning their way through a whole ‘nother bowl of porridge....

Motorists on Lake Park Avenue near 39th Street have been swerving to the curb lately to gawk at a building that’s just gone up there between two vacant lots. Sometimes they ask neighbors about the elliptical concrete-block structure. The master bedroom suite on the second floor is reached by an airy open staircase of metal piping painted silver. Hidden behind a bookcase off a basement bedroom is what the owners initially intended to be a “panic room....

As if selling women’s pro basketball to greater Guyville wasn’t challenge enough, the new Chicago Sky faces another hardship. The Sky just isn’t very good. Like any expansion sports franchise, the Sky was constructed from the leavings of the other teams, their least-wanted players. So unless some miraculous chemistry develops among teammates who’d always wanted playing time and never gotten much of it (a la the Bulls’ playoff-bound inaugural squad back in 1967), they’re destined to be losers their first few seasons....

As a kid, I seem to remember reading on the back of a cereal box about a man who got struck by lightning seven or eight times during his life, totally at random, with no scientific explanation as to why this poor soul (the final strike killed him) was subject to these heavenly barrages. I also recall that the guy’s headstone, by an infinitesimally small chance, was hit by lightning and obliterated some years after his death, which is very spooky....

I’m automatically suspicious of a movie whose premise is that Bobby Kennedy’s campaign for the presidency may have been the last chance this country had to save itself. For one thing, Kennedy was running in the Democratic primary against Eugene McCarthy, who was much more outspoken about the Vietnam war and much more committed to withdrawing U.S. troops. I’m also wary of an attempt to drape Kennedy’s assassination in nostalgia for the 60s as a way to reflect on the present....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I don’t know what the deal is, but there are a whole lot of people who are pumping up Is This Real? on the regular. They think they’re the only ones in the world doing it, so they aren’t talking about it. I’ve found the Wipers on at least a half-dozen iPods that friends have let me rummage through in the past year....

The fifth annual Chicago Anarchist Film Festival continues Friday and Saturday, May 13 and 14, at Highschool, 1542 N. Milwaukee, third floor, 773-862-1011. Doors open at 6:30 each night, screenings are by video projection, and each program totals about three hours. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bill Stamets wrote that Slawomir Grunberg’s documentary Borderline (57 min.), screening on Friday, “examines the case against Eunice Baker, a borderline retarded woman in Owego, New York, who signed a questionable confession and was convicted of murder in 2000 after a malfunctioning furnace killed a three-year-old girl she was babysitting....

These three short films about still photography, made by Agnes Varda at different points in her career, add up to a first-rate triptych that highlights the French director’s filmmaking strengths and mercurial intelligence. For Salut les Cubains (1963, 30 min.) Varda edited and animated 1,500 photographs she’d taken during a holiday in Cuba; in Ulysse (1982, 22 min.) she investigates and interrogates a photograph taken in Egypt during the 50s; and in the haunting piece de resistance, Ydessa, les Ours et Etc ....

Blue Water Grill Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Even when it’s filled to capacity, the humongous 320-seat BLUE WATER GRILL doesn’t feel crowded. Opened in late March in Spago’s old space by out-of-towners B.R. Guest Restaurants (they own numerous seafood restaurants in New York, including the original Blue Water Grill, as well as assorted eateries and hotels all over the country), the place is gorgeous, with orange mirrors on one wall, abstract acrylic fish on another, and a spiral staircase that leads up to a jazz bar....

Live Bait Theater presents its ninth annual showcase of one-person performances. The event features work by an array of well-known fringe artists–among them David Kodeski, Stephanie Shaw, Susan Karp, and Edward Thomas-Herrera–as well as a crop of emerging talents, including real-life police officers involved in Live Bait’s Police-Teen Link program. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The festival previews on Thursday, July 29, and opens Friday, July 30, for a run through August 14....

With their third full-length, Gypsy Punks: Underdog World Strike (Side One Dummy), these New Yorkers have finally come close to capturing the manic, relentless energy of their live show. (The parts of the show you can hear, anyway–you’ve still got to see them to appreciate Eugene Hutz’s bug-eyed Iggy Pop mugging and cavalier indifference to bodily harm, or the lurid thrift-store costumes on the two troublemaking women who flank him onstage....

Local troupes are joined by national and international ensembles in this annual showcase of Latino theater, which runs through 8/20. Coordinated by Henry Godinez, the fest features staged readings (all in English) and performances and discussions in both Spanish and English, as noted below. All events take place at the Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn, 312-443-3800. Following is the schedule through 8/17; a complete schedule is available online at www.chicagoreader.com...

Some events require advance registration or reservations; please call ahead to confirm your plans. Freaky Friday Party Four psychics will perform private readings as part of the Celtic festival of Samhain. a 8 PM, Weather Mark Tavern, 1503 S. Michigan, 312-588-0230, $10 suggested donation, all-ages until 10:30 PM. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Halloween Pumpkin Express The Chicago Park District presents “kid friendly inflatables,” face painting, and pumpkin decorating for the ankle biters....