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(Photo: Jojo Whilden/HBO (Olive Kitteridge); Chuck Zlotnick/Focus Features (Kill the Messenger); Patrick McMullan (Taylor Swift); Robert Viglasky/Origin Pictures 2013 for Masterpiece (Death Comes to Pemberley); Oliver Look (Kontakthof)) |
Pop Music
1. Listen to Taylor Swift’s 1989
Unshakable.
Only a few things are certain in this life: Players gonna play play play play play, haters gonna hate hate hate hate hate, and this is gonna sell sell sell sell sell a truly staggering number of albums in its opening week. —Lindsay Zoladz
Big Machine Records, October 27.
Theater/Movies
2. & 3. See Skylight and Frankenstein
London stage, onscreen.
You can wait until March to see David Hare’s Skylight move to Broadway, or you can see the National Theatre Live’s prerecorded broadcast of the London production—starring Bill Nighy and Carey Mulligan as ex-lovers rekindling their affair—on October 29 for $23. Two nights later, return for the screening of Danny Boyle’s Frankenstein, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller. —Jesse Green
Symphony Space; see symphonyspace.org for schedule.
Books
4. Read The Book of Strange New Things
Genre-hopping to the final frontier.
Michel Faber, the author of the neo-Victorian romance The Crimson Petal and the White and the recently filmed sci-fi creeper Under the Skin, is an expert genre traveler, and this time he’s on an interplanetary run. He’s certainly more comfortable on alien turf than is his protagonist, a far-future missionary set on civilizing the natives of a new colony for Earth exiles. Faber’s potent new amalgam of sci-fi and spirituality puts him within rocket range of David Mitchell. —Boris Kachka
Hogarth, October 28.
TV
5. Watch Olive Kitteridge
Curiouser and curiouser.
In fiction, all small towns are secretive and twisted; the one in this mini-series, adapted by Jane Anderson from Elizabeth Strout’s novel and directed by Lisa Cholodenko (The Kids Are All Right), is maybe a six on the Diane Arbus scale, with adultery, crime, generational dysfunction, nosiness, and hypocrisy. Frances McDormand and Richard Jenkins head an all-star cast banked with Bill Murray, Rosemarie DeWitt, and Zoe Kazan. —Matt Zoller Seitz
HBO, November 2 at 9 p.m.
Opera
6. Hear Joyce DiDonato
Double dose of diva.
Mezzo Joyce DiDonato would be worth hearing even if she were singing nothing but ringtones. Happily, you’ve got two chances to hear something better: first, Baroque opera in a concert performance of Handel’s Alcina; then songs for, from, and about Venice in a recital that’ll make you homesick for the Grand Canal, even if you’ve never been. —Justin Davidson
Carnegie Hall, October 26 and November 4.
Movies
7. See Kill the Messenger
Not quite Network.
In the mid-’90s, after the journalist Gary Webb broke the story of the CIA’s Reagan-era cocaine-smuggling allies who helped fund the Nicaraguan contras (and also flooded poor communities with crack), he was actively discredited, his career destroyed. Not by the CIA—you’d expect that—but by fellow-journalists at the L.A. Times, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, apparently for no reason beyond jealousy. Said editors should all be frog-marched to watch Jeremy Renner as Webb in Michael Cuesta’s film. —David Edelstein
In theaters.
Art
8. See Bill Lynch
Gallery today, museum tomorrow?
From the deepest heart of the art world comes this beautiful show of the late unknown painter. Glowing with verve and spiritual depth and curated by Verne Dawson—himself a great artist—this show gives us florets of oil paint, plant forms, exotic birds, and winds gathering on stormy plywood with whites as brilliant as Marsden Hartley’s. —Jerry Saltz
White Columns, through October 25.
Pop Music
9. Listen to FKA twigs’s LP1
A weird and wonderful debut album.
I sometimes wonder what ever happened to the baby who was sampled in Aaliyah’s “Are You That Somebody?,” and I sometimes imagine she grew up to be Tahliah Barnett, the Londoner known as FKA twigs. Her collection of twitchy, breathy, cyborg R&B is one of the best albums of the year. —L.Z.
Young Turks.
Books
10. Read The Secret History of Wonder Woman
Truth, justice, and the feminist way.
Even non-comix-nerds (or those too young to remember Lynda Carter) will marvel at Jill Lepore’s deep dive into the real-world origins of the Amazonian superhero with the golden lasso. The fact that a polyamory enthusiast created her partly as a tribute to the reproductive-rights pioneer Margaret Sanger is, somehow, only the fourth or fifth most interesting thing in Ms. Woman’s bizarre background.
Knopf.
Dance
11. See BalletCollective
Stepping out.
At the recent City Ballet gala, Troy Schumacher’s frisky Clearing Dawn broke out of the traditional ballet box to show a choreographer’s original, if still developing, viewpoint; good reason to see what he’ll do in All That We See, made with the artist David Salle for Schumacher’s own collaboratively minded company. —Rebecca Milzoff
NYU Skirball Center, October 29 and 30.
Theater/TV
12. Watch The Apple Family Plays
Four of a kind.
The end of Richard Nelson’s tetralogy “Scenes From Life in the Country,” produced at the Public Theater from 2010 through 2013, has left an empty space in the Off Broadway ecosystem. The new “Theater Close-Up” series salves the loss, broadcasting filmed performances of the plays (That Hopey Changey Thing has already aired, but the other three stand strongly on their own). —J.G.
PBS, Thursdays at 10 p.m.; see thirteen.org for more airings. Sweet and Sad, October 23; Sorry, October 30; Regular Singing, November 6.
Film
13. See Force Majeure
Beta test.
In Sweden’s 2015 Oscar entry, an avalanche threatens a young family on their ski vacation, and the terrified husband runs away. Moments later, everyone’s fine, but the comedic repercussions of that moment make for a wryly observed meditation on the male role in modern marriage.
Opens October 24 at the Angelika Film Center.
TV
14. Watch Mr. Dynamite
Get on up.
Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) is one of the most prolific and versatile documentary directors around. Using never-before-seen photos and footage from James Brown’s family, and commentary from the likes of Mick Jagger, Questlove, and Chuck D, the film gets into the Godfather of Soul’s early years (without skipping his foul wife-beating side), showing how he transformed himself from an abandoned boy into a superstar and activist. —M.Z.S.
HBO, October 27 at 9 p.m.
Theater
15. See Seagulls
Taking flight.
Caryl Churchill’s rarely seen 1978 one-act is about a young woman whose telekinetic powers desert her just as she becomes famous for them; it’s presented here by the Public Forum in a reading led by Cynthia Nixon. —J.G.
Public Theater, October 26 at 7 p.m.
New Music/Film
16. See Maya Beiser and Bill Morrison
Continued post–Yom Kippur atonement.
The solo super-cellist gives a live performance of soundtracks for three of filmmaker Morrison’s meditative silent shorts, including All Vows, a wordless, music-and-film rendering of the anguished year-end Jewish prayer Kol Nidre. —J.D.
Museum of Modern Art, October 23.
Pop Music
17. Hear Ex Hex
Let the good times roll.
We last heard from indie legend Mary Timony in the way-too-short-lived supergroup Wild Flag. Her new power-pop trio Ex Hex is here for a good time: kick-the-door-down percussion, T. Rex–worthy hooks, and take-no-prisoners ’tude. l.z.
Glasslands and Mercury Lounge, November 1 and 2.
Photography
18. See Abelardo Morell’s Some Recent Pictures
Interior views.
Morell works by turning a room (often in a hotel, or even a tent) into a camera obscura, covering the windows save for a tiny opening. That pinhole, sometimes augmented with simple optics to flip the image right-side-up, wallpapers the room with a view of the outside world, which he then photographs with a view camera. The result takes a moment for the eye to parse: You gradually see both layers, plus the technology, plus the resonant echoes of its Renaissance roots.
Edwynn Houk Gallery, through December 20.
TV
19. Watch Matthew Rhys in Death Comes to Pemberley
The non-American from The Americans.
Pride and Prejudice fanatics will swoon over Masterpiece’s sequel, based on the P. D. James novel in which Lizzy and Darcy must solve a murder; other humans will just swoon for Rhys, the chameleonic, smoldering Welsh actor whose Darcy is reason enough to tune in.
PBS, October 26 at 9 p.m.
Film
20. Watch Turner Classic Movies for Halloween
Round-the-clock theremin and bloodbaths.
Halloween again, nyah-hah-hah. Usually I stay home, give out candy, and watch hours of Turner Classic Movies. The night before, there’s a focus on haunted houses with House on Haunted Hill, The Haunting, 13 Ghosts (the amusingly tacky original), and Burnt Offerings. Comes the day and you can see Repulsion, Carnival of Souls, and the original Night of the Living Dead. —D.E.
TCM, October 30 and 31.
Movies/Dance
21. & 22. See Pina and Then Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch
Stepping off the screen.
Wim Wenders’s elegiac 2011 documentary caught the witty genius of Pina Bausch and her dances, like 1978’s Kontakthof, on film. It’s the perfect way to reacquaint yourself with all things Pina before that piece—a nuanced exploration of the interactions between men and women, set in a dance hall—gets a live performance by Bausch’s company. —R.M.
On Netflix streaming; BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, October 23 through November 2.
Pop Music
23. Listen to Annie Lennox’s Nostalgia
Looking back, and forward.
When an established artist puts out a standards album, it’s often a sign of career decline, a hint that the creative well has run dry. Not so with Lennox, who’s not only still in crystalline voice but digs into the haunting, bluesy heart of songs like “I Put a Spell on You” and “Strange Fruit.”
Blue Note Records.
Classical Music
24. Hear Curlew River
Britten’s boys.
Benjamin Britten’s church parable, with an all-male cast inspired by Noh theater, gets a rare full staging as part of Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival. Even better, it features Britten’s champion-in-chief, tenor Ian Bostridge. —J.D.
Synod House at Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, October 30 through November 1.
Art
25. See Daniel Gordon
Bring sunglasses.
Culling bits of old and new media (ripped magazines, internet downloads), Gordon builds and photographs hypercolorful, multidimensional assemblages. The results feel like still lifes turned inside out, glorious guts on display.
Wallspace, October 30 through December 20.