Movies
1. See Meiko Kaji: A Retrospective
A rare chance to see this idol in person.
Japan Society, March 27 through April 4.
The genre icon will make her first public appearances in New York in over four decades during this retrospective of her work, including at a screening of 1978’s The Love Suicides at Sonezaki. In that film, she plays a courtesan whose lover is set to marry someone else. —Alison Willmore
Art
2. See Domenico Gnoli
Objects of attention.
Lévy Gorvy Dayan.
Gnoli, an Italian painter of strangely magnified ordinary things — hair parted at a scalp, a buttoned collar, a mattress seam — died too young to gain the recognition he deserved. (He lived from 1933 to 1970.) This uptown emporium of great taste features a selection of his meticulous surfaces and soft sandy textures, which seem almost sculpted.
Hovering between Pop Art and Surrealism, Gnoli slows vision to a near-hypnotic stare. —Jerry Saltz
TV
3. Watch Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen
Monogamy as a horror story.
Netflix, March 26.
Nightmarish marriages are a cornerstone of the horror genre. In this show, that theme gets pegged to the week before one couple’s wedding: At what point in a relationship does it become clear that vowing to stay together forever is a terrible idea? Camila Morrone and Adam DiMarco star as the bride and groom, and Stranger Things’s
Duffer Brothers, who have since announced their departure from Netflix for Paramount, are
co-producers. —Roxana Hadadi
Theater
4. See Uncle Vanya, scenes from country life
He shoots! He misses! (Again.)
La MaMa, March 28 through April 12.
The wildly inventive director Dmitry Krymov and his company, Krymov Lab NYC, return with an interpretation of Chekhov’s story of stagnancy and longing in the Russian countryside. Their Vanya, they say, is “a grotesque elegy, a wasteland vaudeville” made for a world on fire. —Sara Holdren
Music
5. Listen to Sexistential
Here’s your dopamine.
Konichiwa/Young, March 27.
The long-awaited album from Swedish icon Robyn delivers the expected interlocking synth lines and ebullient dance-pop grooves alongside a dollop of Kraftwerkian robo-rock. —Craig Jenkins
TV
6. Watch The Real Housewives of Rhode Island
Next up … Delaware?
Bravo, April 2.
Andy Cohen’s vast imperialist project continues, this time with a gilded-age sheen to it. The cast includes Ashley Iaconetti, formerly of Bachelor world, and Liz McGraw, described as Rhode Island’s cannabis queen. Who will jockey for the coveted villain role? Who will be the first to make a Breakers pun? —Kathryn VanArendonk
Classical
7. See Emi Ferguson and Exquisite Corpse
From the halls of power.
Morgan Library and Museum, March 29.
If there’s one quality of Louis XIV’s that ensured his lasting reputation (besides absolute power, that is), it was his taste. And among the composers he admired was Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, one of several female musicians in the Sun King’s court. Echoes of that unknown Versailles come courtesy of the ensemble Exquisite Corpse. —Justin Davidson
Movies
8. See Stand by Me
Revisit the prime of your youth.
In theaters March 27 through April 3.
The late Rob Reiner’s 1986 coming-of-age drama, based on a Stephen King novella about a group of young boys on a quest to see a dead body, became an instant generational touchstone on debut, and it still holds up. It’s back in theaters for one week to celebrate its 40th anniversary. —Bilge Ebiri
Theater
9. See Seagull: True Story
It’s a Chekhovian spring.
The Public Theater, March 22 through April 26.
The Russian director Alexander Molochnikov, who fled the country after speaking out about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, stages a play about a Russian director who also gets into hot water while trying to put together a production of The Seagull. —Jackson McHenry
Music
10. Listen to Distracted
Thundercat is back.
Brainfeeder, April 3.
Vivacious singles with Mac Miller, WILLOW, and Tame Impala presage a coolly accomplished fifth full-length from bass wizard and anime historian Thundercat, who has just as much of a blast saluting the soured heroism of Darth Vader as he does in tracks about real-world love and loss. —C.J.
TV
11. Watch The Testaments
We’re not out of Gilead yet.
Hulu, April 8.
Chase Infiniti, not content with one major role associated with revolution and radical politics, leads the cast of the new Handmaid’s Tale spinoff. Ann Dowd’s Aunt Lydia is the only returning character; whether there will be a returning audience for Handmaid’s style of political commentary is yet to be seen. —K.V.A.
Opera
12. Hear Innocence
Mourning at scale.
Metropolitan Opera, April 6 through April 29.
The composer Kaija Saariaho, who died in 2023, tackled a subject that seems almost too troubling to put onstage: a school shooting and the gashes it leaves in its wake. Simon Stone directs the Met’s premiere production, mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato sings the role of a devastated mother, and the Finnish ethno-pop singer Vilma Jää is the daughter she recalls. Saariaho’s close friend Susanna Mälkki conducts. —J.D.
TV
13. Watch For All Mankind Season Five
Martian means of production.
Apple TV, March 27.
The alternate-history sci-fi series about American and Soviet scientists racing to find life in space keeps moving into bigger, more thematically complicated, and more wonderfully jargony story-telling. Now set in the 2010s, it asks: Do the people living and working on Mars get to benefit from the natural resources found there, or should only faraway governments and corporations on Earth reap the rewards of their work? —R.H.
Movies
14. See Southern Comfort
Finding care.
BAM, March 29.
Now 25 years old, Kate Davis’s 2001 documentary about the last year in the life of Robert Eads, a trans man who has ovarian cancer and has been denied treatment by multiple doctors, is as warm and loving a portrait as it is tragic, capturing Eads’s life in rural Georgia and his relationships with his chosen family as well as his biological one. —A.W.
Classical
15. Hear Orpheus and Jeremy Denk
One highlight: an orchestration of “Pathétique.”
92NY, March 29.
There’s no such thing as too much Beethoven when it’s being sold by Jeremy Denk, who’s often at his best in light-fingered, exuberant music like the First Piano Concerto. The ensemble performs without a conductor, and, in part of the program, the pianist performs without the ensemble. —J.D.
Art
16. See Maria Lassnig
Figures that morph.
Petzel Gallery, through April 18.
The late painter, born in Austria in 1919, is having a large show at this Chelsea gallery where her works once showed more than 20 years ago. Her creamy painted beings morph from figurative to amoeba to abstract, seeming to balance on one appendage or another with a pointed shoulder blade or only an arm. Looking at her puzzle-like compositions casts a spell and soothes the visual soul. —J.S.
TV
17. Watch Henry David Thoreau
Some lessons from the pond.
PBS, March 30 and 31.
A likely place for George Clooney to be: narrating a documentary on the singular American writer, activist, and scientist. Executive-produced by Ken Burns and directed by his regular collaborators Erik Ewers and Christopher Loren Ewers, it examines the life of the man who helped pioneer this country’s versions of environmentalism and civil disobedience. —R.H.
Books
18. Go to Night of Ideas
For the high-minded night owls.
Villa Albertine, March 31.
This nighttime festival’s tenth edition, using democracy as its framing topic, features talks on Enlightenment ideals; appearances by Stephanie Wambugu, Richard Hell, and other writers; and musical performances spanning Afro-disco and improvisation. —-Emma Alpern
Music
19. Listen to Sunn O)))
Earthy drones.
Sub Pop, April 3.
A majestic self-titled tenth album from the drone-metal lifers sees guitarists Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley achieve tranquility through creeping-doom riffs that urge listeners to appreciate the beauty in dirt. —C.J.
TV
20. Watch Love on the Spectrum Season Four
It’s a date.
Netflix, April 1.
Attention, Parker Posey and other fans of the beloved reality series about dating and autism: Although it seems Pari and Tina will not be continuing in the main cast, they’re hinting about at least some involvement in the new season. —K.V.A.
Music
21. Listen to Age of the Ram
From a prolific honky-tonker.
Lone Star Rider/Island, April 3.
Country and blues singer-guitarist Charley Crockett’s latest album follows last year’s Lonesome Drifter and Dollar a Day to wrap a trilogy of stories about a “man trying to find his name in this world.” —C.J.
Movies
22. See Mars
To outer space.
Roxy Cinema, March 30.
When Trevor Moore died unexpectedly in 2021, the remaining members of the Whitest Kids U’Know (among them Zach Cregger, now one of the hottest horror directors in Hollywood) finished this animated film that the sketch troupe had written almost a decade ago — a goofy comedy about a space mission gone wrong that hits a little different owing to that context. —A.W.
Classical
23. See Golda Schultz
Singing Barber and Stravinsky (and more).
David Geffen Hall, April 8 through 10.
The American landscape unfurls in a haze of nostalgia in a New York Philharmonic program that includes Samuel Barber’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915,” an aria from Carlisle Floyd’s opera Susannah, and Ives’s contemplative “The Unanswered Question.” Kwamé Ryan conducts. —J.D.
Music
24. Listen to pompeii // utility
Meeting at the crossroads.
10k, Tan Cressida, and Surf Gang Records, April 3.
This 33-track outing contains an album-length bout of weary philosophizing from each of the rapper-producers, Earl Sweatshirt and MIKE, who mesh alluringly with the jittery drums and melodies of New York’s Surf Gang collective. The rhymers at the forefront wield complementary styles arrived at from different trajectories, like Street Fighter’s Ryu and Ken. —C.J.
Movies
25. See That Old Dream That Moves
Labor and longing.
Museum of the Moving Image, April 5.
Alain Guiraudie, maker of the erotically charged, dreamlike thrillers Stranger by the Lake and Misericordia, got his breakout with this 51–minute film about the frissons of desire that kick up among a group of men working in a factory on the verge of closing down. —A.W.
