Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As Loach explained, he’s always been a fan of the politically oriented Czech films that predate the Prague Spring of 1968, particularly this one and Milos Forman’s Loves of a Blonde (1966), but I was still fascinated that, of all the movies he might have chosen to introduce, he picked this buoyant, almost giddy comedy. Closely Watched Trains focuses on a virginal young man from a small Czech village who takes a job as a train dispatcher during the Nazi occupation....

Over Easy That, Cignarale says, is when he told himself, “You gotta make a move. If not, go sell real estate.” Emily’s comment kept him going during the two and a half years it took him to open the new Ravenswood breakfast-and-lunch joint Over Easy. It was a brassy move for someone whose longest previous restaurant gig had lasted less than a year. “I’ve been pretty much–how can I put this gingerly?...

Rock ‘n’ roll works so hard to be cool, but it has a dirty little secret–it’s actually about excessive, embarrassing, dorky passion. It’s the musical equivalent of costumed fanboys mobbing Star Trek extras like maenads, ripping them apart in an apotheosis of zitty ecstasy. Since 1987 this Japanese trio has been maniacally devoted to a very specific idea of what it means to be a rock ‘n’ roll band–black leather, shades, plenty of pomade, and a minimum number of chords played so heart-stoppingly loud they sound like they’re tearing apart, the way a dragster that noses up at 300 miles per hour goes tumbling end over end....

The concept is better than the execution of GroundUp Theatre’s second round of cabaret-style songs and sketches based on real-life breakup letters. Uneven on opening night, the 45-minute show featured six ensemble members from a rotating group of nine. Todd Wojcik and Laura Coleman were the strongest performers I saw, bringing humor to an interpretive dance accompanying a sad letter/song and brazenly delivering a daring ode to sexual chemistry. Otherwise director Sabrina Lloyd’s blocking is aimless, the transitions are abrupt, and the performances are just competent....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Polish Chicago: Our History, Our Recipes, Joseph W. Zurawski (G. Bradley, $37.50) This is the latest in a historical series on ethnic enclaves in midwestern cities (including our own Greektown and German Milwaukee). Dense with profiles and recipes by restaurateurs and home cooks from several generations of immigrants, the collection reflects many styles of the cuisine, from solid workingman’s fare (sauerkraut-rib soup, Kasia’s pierogies) to Old Polish Royal (venison tenderloin) to Nouveauski (hare with sour cream-caramel sauce)....

With a recurring role on Law & Order and regular bookings in east-coast regional theaters, Carmen Roman doesn’t turn up in Chicago much these days. But she’s returned for what may be the performance of a lifetime in Tennessee Williams’s tragic swoon Orpheus Descending. Roman plays Lady Torrance, an Italian immigrant stuck in a loveless marriage in a small Mississippi town. When wandering blues musician Valentine Xavier strolls into her general store, she sees her opportunity for spiritual rebirth....

Polarity Ensemble Theatre seems to have substituted masks for costumes, sets, and lighting (mainly flashlights here). Zack Brenner’s eight performers lift their masks when speaking the truth and otherwise allow their fixed facades to indicate prevarication–but facial coverings also paralyze the acting. This very raw Othello sacrifices eloquence to energy; three Cassios are two too many in a gender-neutral production. It does expose how innocence can be irrelevant. Mason Hill’s eager Iago, with his trickster persona, is almost a commedia villain, while Cliff London’s Othello is nobly trusting and Leah Morrow’s Desdemona is Kabuki-sly....

The Brooklyn label Social Registry may owe most of its cachet to the ink spilled over Gang Gang Dance (not to mention some blogger WTF over Jah Division, a dubbed-out tribute to Joy Division), but the real gem on its fast-growing roster of fine narco rock is Psychic Ills. Dins, the band’s 2004 full-length debut, was a visceral, bull-by-the-horns entropy mission that could’ve been some lost Doors session that Jim Morrison missed but Ron Asheton made: two sides of inspired space rock that nose-dived from the asteroid belt into the earth’s core, never fading in intensity even in its “mellow” moments....

This annual showcase of experimental theater, performance, and music from Chicago’s fringe, coproduced by Curious Theatre Branch and Prop Thtr, runs through 11/12. This year’s festival includes an emphasis on work by, or inspired by, Samuel Beckett. All performances are at the Prop Thtr, 3502-4 N. Elston, unless otherwise noted. Several performances will be at Roots, an offshoot of Curious Theatre Branch located in a private home; the address will be provided when reservations are made....

Back in 2000, way before Royce da 5’9″ released his first album, his single “Boom” blew me away. Hungry and witty, the Detroit MC snapped off lines like “My flow is hotter than the flash from the click / When the hammer slaps the bullet on the ass from the clip” in a crisp, emphatic style, and for a while he seemed poised for the same sort of meteoric rise his friend and collaborator Eminem had enjoyed....

Local artist-slash-troublemaker Vincent Dermody was showing off his new manicure in the hallway outside Wendy Cooper Gallery last Friday night. Former Vice magazine photo editor Tim Barber, who has work up in the gallery, and I were snickering, and Dermody warned Barber not to fuck with him. “I have a black belt in the ancient martial art of hapkido,” he warned for about the zillionth time that night, only slightly kidding....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “An inconvenient truth, not adequately addressed by Al Gore in his movie, is that environmentalism makes life complicated. If SUVs are bad and wind power is good, then we must levy a tax on gas-guzzlers and hand out tax credits for windmills. Those in the business of selling windmills are very happy with this arrangement . . . but in no time our fears of global warming have caused our economy to become littered with subsidies, credits, deductions, tax surcharges, earmarks and research boondoggles....

The Tea Party’s Over It was in Black’s interest to portray the Telegraph as the only Hollinger International property not beneath his dignity. Under the laws of Delaware, which is where Hollinger International is incorporated, a corporation cannot sell off “substantially all” its assets without the approval of shareholders–which in this case would mean the approval of Black. So Black argued that without his crown jewel, Hollinger International would be just a burlap bag’s worth of provincial rags....

From his office window Zygmunt Dyrkacz can see everything that happens at the Polish Triangle. It’s a bleak, brick-paved island at the intersection of Ashland, Division, and Milwaukee, three graffiti-covered bus shelters and a Blue Line entrance sharing space with some honey locusts and a fountain. A Polish emigre, Dyrkacz owns the Chopin Theatre, across from the Triangle on the south side of Division. He lives above the theater with his wife and their two children, and the little plaza is the closest thing they have to a front yard....

Leonard Cohen must be huge in Scotland. Scottish indie-pop bands like Belle & Sebastian, Ballboy, and Arab Strap all nick something from Cohen’s brooding melancholy and chamber-pop arrangements. But “Your Picture,” the fourth track on Camera Obscura’s sophomore effort, Underachievers Please Try Harder (Merge), sounds so much like the early, acoustic Cohen that the old poet might well be tempted to suspend his Buddhist devotions long enough to sue. Aside from that track and the similarly mournful “Books Written for Girls,” Underachievers is actually fairly upbeat for its genre: on the countryish “Before You Cry” singer Tracyanne Campbell plays the voice of reason, countering fellow vocalist John Henderson’s depressive ruminations with “I love you, baby / Oh, please don’t hate me / You’re feeling a little sad tonight / But you’ll be all right....

CELESTIAL MECHANICS–OR THE QUESTIONABLE ATTRACTION OF ENTITIES, Moving Dock Theatre Company, at National Pastime Theater. This ensemble-created piece supposedly exploring 3,000 years of astrophysics opens with the nine cast members milling about onstage, staring up in simulated wonder at a ceilingful of imaginary stars. It’s a tableau that should resonate with everyone in the room, but like almost every other self-conscious, uncommitted gesture in Moving Dock’s hour-long piece, it rings false....

Swan Lake imports this year ranged from the proverbial sublime to ridiculous. Though I’m not usually a big fan of ballet, all the white feathers and unison corps work in the Kirov’s production at the Auditorium last month made me feel snuggled in luxurious pillows. But there was no danger of falling asleep given the incisive performance of Odette/Odile. The only false note came at the alternative “happy” end (a false note in itself), when the Prince tore off the evil Rothbart’s wing and beat him to death with it....

Holding back is not a concept that Deeply Rooted dancers understand. If you make a move, you make it big. That aesthetic also drives artistic director Kevin Iega Jeff, who’s setting his Naeemah’s Room (created for River North Chicago Dance Company three years ago) on the troupe in celebration of its tenth anniversary. The piece represents a fierce and tender act of imagination, as Jeff tries to get into the head of a sister who suffered from depression and died too young....

Since 1996 this Austin trio has been staking out a middle ground between Django Reinhardt’s Gypsy jazz and Bob Wills’s western swing. They usually emphasize the latter, in part because guitarist Whit Smith is no Reinhardt–though he effectively evokes the master’s characteristic dusky mood, he can’t hope to match him rhythmically. But the more important reason by far is that they can have so much more fun with Wills: fiddler Elana Fremerman adores the caddish glee he brought to the instrument, and the band shares his love for playful reinterpretations of the Great American Songbook....

Unrelenting intimacy is what makes the 40-minute male-female duet Dyad work. Versed in the Brazilian form of capoeira, Khecari choreographer-performer Jonathan Meyer gives this piece not only martial-arts moves but the intensity of one-on-one combat. As in physics, there is no action here without an equal, usually opposite reaction. When one steps forward, the other steps back; when one tries to deliver a blow, the other parries it. Whatever he does, she does too–the dancers don’t adopt the usual male/female, active/passive roles of romantic pas de deux....