Patrick McDonald

CHICAGO – In one of the best American films of 2017, Greta Gerwig went behind the camera to write and direct an autobiographical overview of her Senior Year in high school, within a directionless town and family. The result is enlightening truth, told with laugh-out-loud directness and connective empathy. The film is a total winner.

CHICAGO – The issue of mental health is given a celestial spin in the short film “Miriam is Going to Mars,” written and directed by Michael Lippert of Cutters Studios in Chicago. The film recently was the Grand Jury Winner at the Midwest Independent Film Festival “Midwest Advertising Community Shorts Night,” and follows that up with a screening at the Ithaca (New York) Fantastik Fest on November 11th, 2017.

CHICAGO – If you hear the sound of laughter from the vicinity of the Rogers Park neighborhood in Chicago, then most likely it is coming from the New 400 Theater, the base for the 7th Chicago Comedy Film Festival. The Festival showcases features, shorts and experimental films in all styles of funny. It opens on Thursday, November 9th, 2017, with a program of Chicago Short Films at The Second City, and continues through Saturday, November 11th.

CHICAGO – The fall movie season continues in Chicago with one of the best movie-music-party celebrations of the year. CIMMfest – the Chicago International Movie & Music Festival – is back for its 9th year, and promises another blast of great sounds and movies about those sounds, in all genres.

CHICAGO – Poet and Activist Lina Ramona Vitkauskas is also a first generation Lithuanian-American. In keeping an eye on the situation in her homeland – part of the Baltic States that broke independently from the old Soviet Union – she discovered a new documentary about the Russian infiltration in the country’s political structure. “The Master Plan” breaks down the several-year campaign by Vladimir Putin to divide opinions and politics, to disrupt the region and confuse the recent independence. Sound familiar? A FREE screening of “The Master Plan” will take place on Tuesday, November 14th, 2017 (7pm) at the historic Music Box Theatre in Chicago.

CHICAGO – She has lived “One Day at a Time” and has come into a second act that really cooks. Valerie Bertinelli has gone from child star to recipe maven with her new book “Valerie’s Home Cooking,” named after her Food Network TV Show. She came to Chicagoland to promote the book on October 22nd, 2017.

CHICAGO – Her latest book is “What Happened,” and much of the U.S. shares that sentiment. Hillary Rodham Clinton promoted that book in Chicago on Oct. 30, 2017. As a former First Lady, Senator, Secretary of State and the first woman to be a major party candidate in history, Ms. Clinton has served this country.

CHICAGO – The “breeder years” are difficult on everyone, as the biological imperative becomes overwhelming and the couplings that result yield both discovery and misadventure. Nothing Without a Company’s new play “Bobby Pin Girls” highlight two such Millennial women, roommates who are having man trouble, although the argument can be made that it’s eternally “boy trouble.” The show has a Thursday-Sunday run at the Chicago Mosaic School through December 10th, 2017. Click here for more details, including ticket information.

CHICAGO – In a “mystery of faith” narrative disguised as a feminist statement, the new film “Novitiate” goes inside a nunnery in 1964 America, just as the Catholic Church was about to make some radical changes to their procedures. How it affected the church is how it affected the nuns, and the intriguing insider story is full of back room shocks.

CHICAGO – The circumstances surrounding the John F. Kennedy assassination on November 22nd, 1963, put a man into the presidential spotlight who never thought he would get there… Lyndon Baines Johnson. The story of that strange time and the man who “would be king” is told in ‘LBJ.’