(Photo: Gregory Harris/Courtesy of RCA Recods (D'Angelo); Prashant Gupta/Courtesy of FX (Justified); Alicia Gbur/Courtesy of Syfy (12 Monkeys); N. Razina (Mariisnky Ballet); Jaimie Trueblood/Courtesy of HBO (Togetherness))

Pop
1. Listen to D’Angelo and the Vanguard’s Black Messiah
Worth the wait.
Neo-soul prodigal son D’Angelo’s first release in nearly 15 years is patient, winding, and layered—not the kind of album that reveals all its secrets in the first few listens. A comeback you can expect to keep coming back to. —Lindsay Zoladz
RCA

TV
2. Watch Togetherness
You, me, he, and she.
Stick around after Girls for this relationship drama, which follows young yet jaded married couple Brett and Michelle (Mark Duplass and Melanie Lynskey) as they try to adjust to life with new roommates: Brett’s friend Alex (Steve Zissis) and Michelle’s sister Tina (Amanda Peet). Likable, lightweight stuff.—Matt Zoller Seitz
HBO, Sundays at 9:30 p.m.

Film
3. See Predestination
Era-hopping with Ethan.
Twisty-time-travel-movie junkies like me are turning loop-de-loops over the Spierig brothers’ film, in which “temporal agent” Ethan Hawke jumps around (he’s mostly in the ’70s) to do ... something. It’s all vague, but wildly entertainingly so. Primarily, the film is a tour de force for Australian actress Sarah Snook, who plays two incarnations of one person and makes you believe she could play anyone. —David Edelstein
In theaters.

Theater
4. See Let the Right One In
Young vampire in love.
The Swedish tale of teen angst and bloodlust completes its genre trifecta from novel to film to play with the National Theatre of Scotland’s hit production. The golden team of John Tiffany and Steven Hoggett (Once, The Glass Menagerie) is in charge of direction and movement. —Jesse Green
St. Ann’s Warehouse, January 20 through February 15.

Books
5. Read Miranda July’s The First Bad Man
Crisp, colloquial wit.
Some artists get more irritating the better you get to know their shtick; July has the opposite effect. Her first novel is a test of her range, which she ably passes. Single, middle-aged Cheryl Glickman expands from a collection of eccentricities—a baby obsession, a hallucinated ball in her throat—into someone with real longings, relationships, and opportunities for genuine growth and redemption. —Boris Kachka
Scribner, January 13.

Classical Music
6. Hear Verdi’s Requiem
It doesn’t come round often.
Not being an opera-house pit band, the New York Philharmonic doesn’t get a lot of chances to play Verdi, and has performed the immense Requiem just a few times in 35 years. For this occasion, conductor Alan Gilbert has rounded up a young but powerful quartet of practiced Verdians, starting with soprano Angela Meade. —Justin Davidson
Avery Fisher Hall, January 15 through 17.

Pop/Film
7. Watch Truth or Dare
In bed with Madge.
Madonna just released six new songs from her forthcoming album Rebel Heart. Which means it’s the perfect time to revisit Alek Keshishian’s humanizing, notoriously candid 1991 documentary. Though it features history’s greatest Kevin Costner and Belinda Carlisle disses, this quintessentially ’90s snapshot has aged surprisingly well. —L.Z.
On Netflix streaming.

Film/New Music
8. Hear and See Round-Up
Sufjan Stevens and pardners.
The singer-songwriter’s cinematic orchestrations and expansive film made 2007’s “The BQE” an immersive experience; this time around, he shifts his gaze westward, to the Oregon rodeo, pairing slo-mo footage with a live score he’ll perform with the new-music ensemble Yam/Wire.
BAM Harvey Theater, January 20 to 25.

TV
9. Watch 12 Monkeys
Apocalypse now.
Twenty years after Terry Gilliam’s classic film, Aaron Stanford subs in for Bruce Willis in this new series, as a time traveler on a mission to avert an apocalyptic-level pandemic. Instead of a wonderfully batty Brad Pitt, we get an insane female patient who might be the source of it all. Cue the sexual tension!
Syfy, January 16 at 9 p.m.

Dance
10. See Mariinsky Ballet
Not so Bolshoi.
Perhaps because the Bolshoi got dinged for bringing a program of war horses on its last visit, the Mariinsky comes Stateside with a much more varied and fresh program, highlighted by a Chopin-­centric evening including Benjamin ­Millepied’s Without and Jerome Robbins’s ­gorgeous In the Night. —Rebecca Milzoff
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, January 15 through 25.

Art
11. See Killer Heels
Dig in.
Sex, death, and rock ’n’ roll, all on view in a va-va-voom survey. I fancied a pair of surreally furred calf’s hooves with a nice four-inch heel; you’ll be similarly turned on and terrified. —Jerry Saltz
Brooklyn Museum, through February 15.

Theater
12. See A Month in the Country
Turgenev is the new Chekhov.
Having completed its cycle of the big-five Chekhov plays, Classic Stage Company turns its attention to Chekhov’s idol, Turgenev. Peter Dinklage and Taylor Schilling doff their doublets (him) and prison jumpers (her) to star in the prototypical Russian romantic comedy of boredom and passion circa 1840. —J.G.
Classic Stage Company, through February 22.

Classical Music/Film
13. Hear and See Beasts of the Southern Wild
Magically real.
Benh Zeitlin’s Oscar-nominated bayou fable wasn’t just transporting to look at; it had a wonderfully moving score as well, by Zeitlin and Dan Romer. The Wordless Music Orchestra plays it live at this screening of the film.
Symphony Space, January 23 and 24.

Books
14. Read Ben Metcalf’s Against the Country
Growing up in Goochland.
If there’s a tendency in rural American fiction toward macho reticence, the narrator of this meaty manifesto against country life will have none of it. Metcalf invents something new, which you might call the postmodern polemical novel. —B.K.
Random House.

TV
15. Watch Justified
One last trip down the holler.
The sixth and final season of the beloved modern Western reunites most of the original cast and promises to build to a long-deferred face-off between U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) and loquacious criminal Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins). Guest stars include Sam Elliot and Garret Dillahunt, who caused Olyphant’s sheriff no end of grief when they were all on Deadwood. —M.Z.S.
FX, January 20 at 10 p.m.

Opera
16. See The Enchanted Wanderer
Coming around again.
Rodion Shchedrin wrote this slow-gaited, salt-of-the-motherland concert opera for the New York Philharmonic in 2002; now it’s back in a fully staged, thoroughly Russian performance mounted by the Mariinsky Theater and led by Valery Gergiev. —Justin Davidson
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, January 14.

Art
17. See Speaking of People: Ebony, Jet and Contemporary Art
More than a show, a manifesto.
The Studio Museum’s dive into what artist Derrick Adams calls “an encyclopedia or archive of African Diaspora culture” boggles the mind, not only for its content but for the expert way in which it is displayed, couched, made available to a country in dire need of seeing cultural points of view from both sides. —J.S.
Studio Museum in Harlem, through March 8.

Pop
18. Listen to Rae Sremmurd
They know better.
Swae Lee and Slim Jimmy, the once-homeless Mississippi duo behind summer hits “No Flex Zone” and “No Type,” have done well mimicking the flow and delivery of Migos and Young Thug. Their debut album, produced by Mike Will Made-It, is guaranteed to have a few bangers.
Eardrummers/Interscope.

Dance
19. See Intermezzo Dance Company
Quite a cast.
American Ballet Theatre soloist Craig Salstein is the latest enterprising dancer to found his own troupe; this show’s five premieres will use modern ballet to interpret classical myths, with past and present ABT and New York City Ballet dancers as the onstage muses. —R.M.
Miller Theatre, January 17 and 18.

Theater
20. See It’s Only a Play
New theater, new faces.
Last fall’s biggest hit got three replacement leads when the great Martin Short, the hilarious Katie Finneran, and 30 Rock’s Maulik Pancholy took over for Nathan Lane, Megan Mullally, and Rupert Grint on January 7 (the show moves from the Schoenfeld to the Jacobs January 23). —J.G.
Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, through March 29.

Film
21. See Orson Welles 100
The big man gets his due.
How many young cinephiles have never seen an Orson Welles film on the big screen? Deprivation! Submit to his vertiginous angles at this retrospective, which includes some of Welles’s most entertaining acting jobs, as well as Joseph McBride’s rarities compilation Wellesiana. Don’t miss the “Scottish” Macbeth (pre–atrocious dubbing) or the “release” cut of Touch of Evil, which some people still like better than the recut. —D.E.
Film Forum, through February 3.

TV
22. Watch Grantchester
Buddy comedy, circa 1953.
Based on James Runcie’s novels about a priest and a cop who solve crimes together, this series has so many can’t-miss elements that it might well have been designed on Anglophile Pleasure software, and guess what? It doesn’t miss. —M.Z.S.
PBS Masterpiece, January 18.

Classical Music
23. Hear Jennifer Rivera
Cheery tunes for chilly weather.
The death of New York City Opera means that we now hear much less of many wonderful singers, like mezzo-soprano Jennifer Rivera. The company may now be lifting at least one foot from the grave, but in the meantime Rivera appears in a Salon/Sanctuary program devoted to Rossini. —J.D.
Abigail Adams Smith Auditorium, 417 East 61st Street, January 24.

Theater/Film
24. See Treasure Island
It was a dark and stormy night. A classic adventure novel gets a gender twist in Bryony Lavery’s adaptation of Stevenson’s tale of pirates, parrots, and peg legs. Catch the drama, a hit at London’s National Theatre, at this screening. —J.G.
See ntlive.nationaltheatre.org.uk for schedule; opens locally January 22.

Pop
25. Listen to Belle and Sebastian’s Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance
Scots with bounce.
The bookish Glasgow indie-poppers go full Pet Shop Boys on their lively, synth-driven ninth album, resulting in the world’s first disco song about Sylvia Plath. —L.Z.
Matador Records, January 20.