The Outfit review - threadbare tailor-gangster yarn

★★ THE OUTFIT Mark Rylance lifts tale of cross-stitches and double-crosses in Fifties Chicago

Mark Rylance lifts a tale of cross-stitches and double-crosses in Fifties Chicago

“A man walks in,” Leonard (Mark Rylance) begins. “What about him can you observe? What does a man like to be? And who is he underneath?” Leonard is, in common parlance, a Savile Row tailor – “a cutter from the Row,” he insists – fetched up for murky reasons in 1958 Chicago, where his shop’s best customers are sharp-dressed Mob clan the Boyles.

Clybourne Park, Park Theatre review - excellent revival of Bruce Norris's award-winner

★★★★★ CLYBOUNE PARK, PARK THEATRE Excellent revival of Bruce Norris's award-winner

The 2010 satire about race and the realities of real estate remains blistering

Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park arrived at London’s Royal Court like a blazing comet in 2010, a bold kind of satire about race relations that was both sassy and savvy.

Candyman review - Nia DaCosta's clever sequel to the 1992 slasher movie

The horror of the art world: urban legends, racial politics and gentrification in Chicago

Anaphylactic shock, anyone? Candyman, both the 1992 original, directed by British director Bernard Rose and based on a story by Clive Barker, and its stylish, sharp sequel by Nia DaCosta, co-written and produced by Jordan Peele, features an awful lot of bees.

Bette Howland: Blue in Chicago review – the city on trial, with the writer as witness

★★★★★ BETTA HOWLAND: BLUE IN CHICAGO The city on trial, with the writer as witness

Short stories with a terrifying talent for the damning summing up

You feel at times, while reading the collection Blue in Chicago, that Bette Howland might have missed her vocation. In another life, Howland – until recently almost completely lost to literary history – could have made a name for herself as a distinctly unnerving judge; one feared by criminals and lawyers alike. She has a terrifying talent for the damning sum-up.

Dangerous Lies, Netflix review - slick silliness

★★ DANGEROUS LIES, NETFLIX Hoary inheritance hokum is Dickensian in worst way

Hoary hokum about a dodgy inheritance is Dickensian in the worst way

When not dipping into its bottomless debts to write Scorsese blank cheques, Netflix tends to favour old-school TV movie potboilers such as this slick, silly thriller, in which young couple Katie (Camila Mendes) and Adam (Jessie T Usher) have their moral flaws picked apart by financial temptation.

CD: Califone - Echo Mine

Chicago's finest rock experimentalists return after seven years

Inevitably expectations were high, given that this Chicago experimental rock band are one of my favourite groups of the 21st century, and this is their first album for seven years. And at first it’s hard to know what to make of Echo Mine. There are only three traditionally structured songs (and one of those comes in two versions), while the surrounded tracks are largely meandering minimalist instrumentals of various shades and angularity.