Heading into the new year, the local art house scene is as wide-ranging as ever. Offering an alternative to massive studio pictures, the lineup features small indies, old-school classics, documentaries and foreign films. Here's a quick look at some offerings that caught my eye.

If improv shows reveal what's in a performer's subconscious, the audience suggestions that kick everything off can be just as revealing about what's in the zeitgeist at any given moment.

The artist William Wegman is probably best known for his photographs of Weimaraners. For decades now he has been able to coax his pet dogs to pose stoically before his lens, offering a steady, curious, tolerant gaze to the camera despite the oddball scenarios in which they are placed.

Small budgets and even smaller venues are often part of the fringe theater equation. But what sets Chicago apart from most other theater towns is that our grass-roots scene blossoms with work created by artists who don't view the storefront as just a steppingstone to "bigger" things, but as...

Many movies have faced protests and pickets over the years, yet the new Seth Rogen-James Franco comedy “The Interview” was deemed to be so potentially dangerous that Sony Pictures Entertainment canceled its wide Christmas Day release Wednesday after the nation's top theatrical...

A charming documentary about obscure Christmas music, "Jingle Bell Rocks" (at The Vic this week) opens with footage of a very tall, somewhat ungainly man wandering into that rarest of retailers — the music store — and riffling through a bin of CDs.

I was fully charmed by this small-scale collection of original short plays from Step Up Productions. The stories at hand are not necessarily Christmas-focused, but they all share the holiday setting and capture that strange love-hate sensation this time of year tends to evoke.

The mystery at hand is a thin one, but maybe that's the point. Sherlock Holmes never seemed like a man particularly swayed by the holiday season; surely he would look for any excuse or busywork — a tepid mystery will do just fine — to avoid anything remotely sentimental foisted upon...