Maggie Gyllenhaal gives a powerhouse performance as the title character, a young woman fresh out of prison whose craving for heroin is held in check only by her love for her three-year-old daughter. Sherry’s brother and sister-in-law have been caring for the little girl during the mother’s absence, and when Sherry returns she finds to her anguish that her sister-in-law has fallen in love with the child and has no intention of giving her back....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I finally got a chance to check out the new location of the used bookstore Selected Works (big thumbs up; I love sweet-natured bookstore cats), and in their treasure trove of midcentury paperbacks I found the best guide to Chicago ever: Chicago Confidential (1950) by yellow-journalism geniuses Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer, two former Chicago newspapermen who moved on to become the editor and Broadway columnist, respectively, of the old New York Daily Mirror....

Sweet Collective Slated to open in early October, Sweet Collective is actually three businesses under one roof, sharing a small, clean white storefront with a single cash register and one table. Cathay Rayhill, operating as the Sugar Syndicate, makes cakes and miniature pastries. Lauren Pett, under the banner Rich Chocolates and Candies, is all about truffles. Alison Bower’s Ruth and Phil’s Gourmet Ice Cream produces high-end ice creams and sorbets. Though the businesses are legally separate, each woman says she’s prepared to sell and answer questions about the others’ creations....

Since Rea Frey moved to Chicago four years ago to attend Columbia College, the 22-year-old Nashville native has taken up boxing, undergone brain surgery, gotten married, been named valedictorian of her graduating class, and written her first novel, A Woman’s Ring, which will be published this summer by Dare2Dream Publishing, a small South Carolina press specializing in poetry and fiction by and about women. She lives with her husband and two cats in a spotless high-rise apartment a few blocks from Michigan Avenue....

friday20 magda After years of sponsorship from god-of-all-techno Richie Hawtin, who handpicked her to open multiple tours, it’s surprising Magda isn’t better known stateside. Her first official mix CD for Hawtin’s label, She’s a Dancing Machine (M-nus), proves she’s definitely got chops–she hustles through 71 tracks of wordless clicks, propulsive plinks, and frosty ticktocks in just over an hour. Berlin’s subtle, cool bounce is her main inspiration these days, but she breaks up some of the quiet stretches with flashes of microhouse and (true to her roots) Detroit acid....

Rick Snyder’s production of William Inge’s 1955 classic offers fresh, meaningful portraits of loneliness, compassion, and hope while flawlessly maintaining period authenticity. Some of the ideas in this play about people waiting out a snowstorm in a small-town diner may be outdated–who expects to marry a virgin anymore? But the ensemble finds a timeless vulnerability in the passions and self-doubts of these stranded souls: a boisterous cowboy (Cliff Chamberlain), wayward lounge singer (Suzanne Lang), pedophile professor (William Brown), childlike waitress (Linsey Page Morton), and simple townspeople....

The old Dale Watson is back: the recent Dreamland (Koch), a snappy suite of clever, hard-core honky-tonk, is as much fun as anything the singer and guitarist has recorded in the past ten years. Watson’s 2001 studio album, Every Song I Write Is for You (Audium), made Lou Reed’s Berlin sound peppy–he wrote the disc’s maudlin ballads while deep in mourning for his fiancee, who’d been killed in a car accident the year before....

A few years ago trumpeter Dave Douglas was asked to write music to be played at high altitude (around 10,000 feet) for a festival in Italy’s Dolomites; band and audience would hike to the performance spot. The organizers sent along a recording of Ladino music from the region, and taking its emotional range–Douglas would later describe it as “veer[ing] between solemn devotional calmness and riotous drunken celebration”–as inspiration, he composed a dazzling suite of chamber jazz....

Benjamin Britten’s valedictory opera, written three years before his death in 1976, is perhaps his most personal work for the theater. Adapted from Thomas Mann’s 1912 novella, it’s the tale of an aging writer, Gustav von Aschenbach, wrestling with spiritual malaise and his obsession with a beautiful adolescent boy he encounters during a vacation in cholera-infested Venice. The themes–the conflicts between Apollonian discipline and Dionysian sensuality, the creative and destructive power of love–are universal, but the material’s homoerotic aspects signaled a belated coming out for the discreet English composer: is there any other opera in which the hero sings a romantic aria to a handsome youth, set to text from Plato’s Phaedrus yet?...

All I want for Christmas is a new album by Dee Alexander. Alas, she’s still working on her debut studio disc, but for anyone who’s heard her onstage lately–or heard her contributions to recent albums by local trumpeters Orbert Davis and Malachi Thompson–even the promise of one is enough to trump everything else on the wish list. A true jazz diva in the mold of Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington, and Dianne Reeves, Alexander has an innate theatricality and enough pure musicality to overwhelm most of the instrumentalists with whom she shares the stage....

The ninth European Union Film Festival continues Friday, March 10, through Thursday, March 30, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800. Tickets are $9, $7 for students, and $5 for Film Center members. Following are films screening through Thursday, March 16; for a full festival schedule visit www.chicagoreader.com. Attila Janisch directed this 2004 feature. In Hungarian with subtitles. 120 min. a Sat 3/11, 5:30 PM, and Tue 3/14, 7:45 PM...

Boo hoo, Jay Whittaker! In “Shut Up and Starve” [The Business, September 8] Jay speaks of “pinching pennies” and not having enough money left for food. He’s no different than the millions of other Americans working for billion-dollar corporations also not being able to make ends meet. A lot of those Americans don’t have health insurance or a pension, but you do! At least acting is something you enjoy. (I assume....

Jamie O’Neal might disappoint anyone who expects a Nashville superstar to inhabit a single coherent persona. On her second disc, Brave (Liberty), the Australian-born, Vegas-bred singer-songwriter is all over the place, both stylistically and in terms of subject matter: she’s a gritty Shania Twain on the poppy “Naive,” a Gretchen Wilson stand-in on the shit-kicking “Girlfriends,” and a faux Faith Hill on the sound-track-ready ballad “When Did You Know.” Yet each impersonation is warm enough to reward your attention, and eventually a theme does emerge: the tension between wanting to live an extraordinary life and resigning oneself to an ordinary one....

Opening night was June 16, but seven programs remain in this excellent festival, now in its 17th year and running through Sunday, June 19, at Chicago Filmmakers. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The festival is surprisingly somber this year: some of the best pieces document self-entrapment, many are haunted by terrorism and war. In Program 2 (Fri 6/17, 7 PM, 69 min.) Leslie Thornton’s Let Me Count the Ways Minus 10, 9, 8, 7… (2004) pairs a long voice-over interview with a Hiroshima survivor and aerial footage of New York, hinting at a horrific future....

Prodigal Soul In the late 70s and early 80s he played drums in a series of R & B show bands with his brothers, opening for the likes of Deniece Williams, Carl Carlton, and Amuzement Park. In 1983 he got a job at the local Black Hole label, run by south-side R & B impresario Kenny Welles, working as a songwriter and studio hand. A decade later he opened his own studio, Early Park Limited, which he’d go on to run for eight years....

Warner Brothers is promoting this World War II drama as high-toned Oscar bait, but it’s best appreciated as a big-budget experiment: adapting a contemporary novel, director Steven Soderbergh set out to re-create the look of classical Hollywood filmmaking with old-school equipment (boom mikes, incandescent lighting, vintage wide-angle lenses) and production techniques (filming a scene shot by shot rather than covering a single take with multiple cameras). Set in postwar Berlin, the story involves prostitution, black marketeering, and the death camps, and the tension between the visual style and the adult story makes the movie pretty engrossing–it’s an R-rated Casablanca....

Monarchs of Minstrelsy: Historic Recordings by the Stars of the Minstrel Stage By late 1998 he had the help of Meagan Hennessey, who was also a grad student at Indiana; they married in 2001, and together they own about 4,000 78s and a few hundred wax cylinders. Though they met many collectors like themselves, they noticed that little effort was being made to preserve acoustically recorded music–material dating roughly from 1890 to 1925, when musicians played not through microphones but machines that captured the vibrations of the playing and etched them onto discs or cylinders....

During a breakfast stop prior to a recent day of skiing, my husband chided our teenage son for requesting coffee, saying that “caffeine stunts your growth.” When challenged both my husband and I were obliged to concede that we did not know if there was any scientific backing for this common parental admonition. So we put it to you, Cecil. Does caffeine stunt your growth? –Jane Ebisch, Golden, Colorado Best of Chicago voting is live now....

As a veteran consumer of butter, jam, and toast, I find it a continuing source of irritation that the side of the toast upon which I put the jam and butter is almost always the side that hits the kitchen floor when the toast slips off the plate. What I’m curious to know is, is there a statistically larger chance of the toast’s falling on its buttered side rather than the plain side?...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Among other things, he said that when you do restoration work, there’s no obvious answer to the obvious question: What state do you restore a given landscape to? What’s “natural”? The way it was in your childhood? Before European settlement? Before Indian settlement? “Sometimes it is even unclear whether a species is alien or native. . . . There is also the question of how far back one takes ‘human’ activity in determining whether a species is native or alien....