Comedy
1. See Dave Chappelle
It’ll cost you.
Yes, he sold out eight shows in about as many minutes. Time to dig deep and pay the scalpers or the StubHubbers: He really is one of the greatest comics alive, and who knows when he’ll come out this way again?
Radio City Music Hall, June 18 through 26.
Photography
2. See Garry Winogrand
The Met’s retrospective.
More than 175 images by one of the two or three best American photographers, full stop.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, June 27 through September 21.
Pop Music
3. Listen to Parquet Courts’ Sunbathing Animal
Indie nerd-rockers return.
Indebted to Pavement and the Modern Lovers, Parquet Courts’ third album will be recommended to you at every North Brooklyn barbecue this summer.
What’s Your Rupture?/Mom + Pop.
Art
4. See Olive Ayhens: Interior Wilderness
Unsweet candy.
Intertwining postapocalyptic narratives and prelapsarian bliss infuse Olive Ayhens’s fantastical, almost panoramic paintings. In saturated cake-frosting and nail-polish colors, we see upheaving cities, superhighways, and bestiaries in her collapsing, corkscrewing space. Part Bosch, part Coney Island of the mind’s eye, these works place us inside scenes of destruction as curious gods look into and down on widening worlds. Really trippy. —Jerry Saltz
Lori Bookstein Fine Art, through June 28.
Pop Music
5. Hear Hamilton Leithauser’s Black Hours
Former Walkman steps out.
Back in November, indie-rock mainstays the Walkmen announced they were taking a “pretty extreme hiatus” in part to focus on solo projects. The most anticipated of which comes from the band’s lead singer Hamilton Leithauser: Black Hours is slightly more diverse and mellow than his former band’s records, but Leithauser’s songwriting and gnarled tenor are unmistakable.
Ribbon Music.
TV
6. See Orange Is the New Black
Season two. Commence binge.
Because it has more Taystee, plus an intriguing new character played by Lorraine Toussaint who has history with both Taystee and Red.
Netflix.
Theater
7. See The Nance Onscreen
Summer camp.
Douglas Carter Beane’s dark comedy lasted only a few months on Broadway last year, despite Nathan Lane’s terrific turn as a vaudeville performer caught in the contradictions of pre-liberation gayness. Happily, the Lincoln Center Theater production was preserved (and no doubt clarified) on film; it’ll be shown on 300 screens around the country this summer, timed to Gay Pride. (PBS broadcasts it in the fall.) —Jesse Green
Chelsea Cinemas and Symphony Space, starting June 25.
TV
8. See Dominion
TV that feels like an action movie.
Sick of high-toned dramas and confrontational comedies that satirize conventional bourgeois morality while taking clever risks with form? Of course you are! Sometimes you need to see supernatural creatures kick each other in the face, and that’s what Dominion—a TV spinoff of the likewise movie Legion—delivers. An army of lower angels under the leadership of Gabriel wages “a war of possession” against humankind; standing in their way is a defector, the archangel Michael, who has sided with the humans in the battle of Vega (formerly Las Vegas). There’s nothing new here, dramatically speaking, but the explosions, car wrecks, gunplay, and gigantic flapping CGI wings all look great. —Matt Zoller Seitz
Syfy; premieres June 19, 9 p.m.
Classical Music
9. Dip Into Make Music New York
The longest day of the year isn’t long enough.
The sheer size of this festival—its venues scattered like poppy seeds on a bagel—makes each installment almost beside the point, but a few interactive megaevents stand out. One is “And Death Shall Have No Dominion,” in which participants walk through lower Manhattan singing along with a smartphone accompaniment and finally converge for a rousing choral finale. —Justin Davidson
Various venues, June 21. Schedule at makemusicny.org.
Theater
10. See Michael Shannon in The Killer
Absurdly good.
Theater for a New Audience’s production of Ionesco’s existential head-scratcher is one of the most beautifully lit and aurally compelling shows in New York right now. But it’s Shannon’s tirelessly honest performance as a weather-beaten zhlub desperate to stay human that makes it more than an intellectual game. —J.G.
Polonsky Shakespeare Center, through June 29.
TV
11. Watch The Musketeers
One for all!
This is the eleven-zillionth adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’s tale of Athos (Tom Burke), Aramis (Santiago Cabrera), and Porthos (Howard Charles), personal guards for King Louis VIII who have a thriving amateur side business (with their buddy D’Artagnan, played by Luke Pasqualino) righting wrongs and saving days. This BBC import strives to be stylistically up-to-the-minute, featuring quick-cut swordplay and zippy banter; it’s infectiously good-natured. Peter Capaldi plays Cardinal Richelieu, as if you weren’t in already. —M.Z.S.
BBC America; June 22, 9 p.m.
TV
12. Watch Comedy Bang! Bang!
Off your phone, onto your TV.
After getting its start as a radio show and a podcast, Comedy Bang! Bang! is in its third season and finally coming into its own, settling into its irreverent, occasionally childlike style. Created and hosted by Scott Aukerman—who wrote for and directs and produces “Between Two Ferns”—it uses the device of a fake talk show to execute incredibly funny sketch comedy. Upcoming guests: Fred Armisen, Bob Odenkirk, Nick Offerman, Zach Galifianakis.
IFC Channel; Thursdays, 10:30 p.m.
Movies/Video
13. Revisit Batman
The Michael Keaton years.
Implausibly, the film that reinvented superhero dramas—establishing a new form of dark seriousness—is 25 years old this month. Given how high-style the sets and costumes are, it’s not too badly dated, either.
On Netflix and Amazon Prime.
Movies
14. See BAMcinemaFest
Clunky name, great lineup.
The BAMcinemaFest has evolved into one of the region’s best showcases for indie American (and world) cinema. The 2014 edition features Richard Linklater’s nearly three-hour, 12-years-in-the-making Boyhood, which centers on the actual aging of an actual boy. Among the other promising films: Approaching the Elephant, Amanda Rose Wilder’s laudably ambivalent documentary about an untraditional school, and Bingham Bryant and Kyle Molzan’s Kickstarter-aided quasi-horror film For the Plasma, in which two women isolated in a Maine cabin … analyze the surrounding forest to predict shifts in the global financial market. Eeeeek!—David Edelstein
June 18–29. Full schedule at bam.org.
Books
15. Read Arts and Entertainments
A funny novel about bad fame.
Fast-moving satire by Christopher Beha about the semi-accidental creation of a contemporary two-bit celebrity: sex tape, social networks, and subsequent media circus. There’s even a cameo (lowbrow-despicable) of “The Approval Matrix.”
Ecco, July 1.
Movies
16. See Alec Guinness 100
We meet again, at last.
He was among the oddest of movie stars, Alec Guinness—an almost private actor capable of registering infinitesimal but vivid shifts in feeling. Film Forum’s centennial 25-film retrospective predictably features those Ealing black-comic gems Kind Hearts and Coronets (Guinness plays multiple murder victims) and The Man in the White Suit along with rarities like Ronald Neame’s Tunes of Glory in which a military rivalry between Guinness and John Mills leads to tragedy. And yes, there is his Obi-Wan in Star Wars seen in a 35-mm. print of the “Special Edition.” —D.E.
Film Forum, through July 3. Lineup at filmforum.org.
Pop Music
17. Listen to 5 Seconds of Summer
Boy band, punk band, good or bad? All of the above.
Five Australian cute boys who desperately, desperately, would like to be Green Day but are a lot closer to One Direction. Hook from the first single: “She looks so perfect standing there / In my American Apparel underwear.” At once incredibly cheesy and just great, and certainly a discussion point for hanging around with your 15-year-old niece this summer. Pro tip: They’re called “5SOS,” pronounced “five-soss.”
Hi or Hey/Capitol Records.
New Music
18. Hear I Was Here I Was I
Met, orchestra.
The ensemble Alarm Will Sound has spent the better part of a year invading and intervening in various Metropolitan Museum galleries, staging musical events that harmonize with the art. The group’s residency ends with Kate Soper’s opera about a Victorian woman’s trip down the Nile, performed in the Temple of Dendur. —J.D.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, June 20.
Books
19. Read The Vacationers
While you’re on vacation, even.
Buzzy second novel by Emma Straub, riding in on the buzz built by 2012’s Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures and a very good short-story collection, is the tale of a Manhattan extended family’s Mediterranean beach vacation gone way off the rails. Funny but not trifling, poignant but not depressing. Perfect for a week away.
Riverhead.
Books
20. Read My Salinger Year
The ’90s in literary New York.
If you’re about 40 and were paying any attention to books and writers when you were young, Joanna Rakoff’s memoir has it all: the coziness of the late-typewriter-era publishing world, a vague sense that big business was about to bring it to a shuddering halt, and the fading but potent aura of mid-century authorial giants.
Knopf.
Movies/DVD
21. See Ace in the Hole
Underground classic.
About time this one got the full Criterion Blu-ray treatment: The great Billy Wilder’s dark, dark satire of pack journalism and the manipulation thereof, all built around the story of a man trapped in a cave out West. Kirk Douglas stars as a guy who’s working every angle, and was never better.
Criterion Collection Blu-ray.
Books
22. Read Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy
Be ahead of the crowd.
Why now? Because Darren Aronofsky has signed on to develop the three books into an HBO series. And don’t you want to be able to be that person, when it comes around in maybe 2017, who can say, “Oh, those books are great—I read them years ago”?
Nan A. Talese.
Opera
23. Listen to On the Threshold of Winter
From the other solstice.
Michael Hersch is the classical-music world’s leading spreader of elegant gloom. It’s fitting, somehow, that he should greet the summer with a work that invokes short, chilly days—a one-voice, two-act, two-hour setting of poems about dying of late-stage cancer. Still, Hersch is so sincere in his darkness, and so sophisticated in his expressivity, that he can make the morbid magical. —J.D.
BAM Fisher Fishman Space, June 25.
Movies
24. Consider The Fearless Roman Polanski
A comprehensive retrospective of a problematic talent.
Whatever our divided feelings about Roman Polanski, he’s a major director whose demons are exorcised on-camera. Leading up to his new film Venus in Fur, the IFC Center presents a comprehensive retrospective, featuring of course the comedy The Fearless Vampire Killers (with Polanski and the doomed Sharon Tate), his rarely seen (and barbarous) Macbeth, and his claustrophobic masterpieces: Knife in the Water, Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown, and The Pianist—for which he won an Oscar he couldn’t collect, being a sex criminal in exile. —D.E.
IFC Center, through June 19.
Books
25. Read The Madwoman in the Volvo
Sandra Tsing Loh, continued.
The messily brilliant The Atlantic essayist on menopause and other assorted adventures in post-divorce middle age.
W.W. Norton.