Majical Cloudz at National Sawdust, The Christians at Playwrights Horizons, and more New York events.   (Photo: Courtesy of Amazon Studios (Red Oaks); Courtesy of Matador Records (Majical Cloudz); Jasin Boland/Courtesy of Universal Studios (Everest); Tim Gutt (Hamlet))

TV
1. Watch American Horror Story: Hotel
Fifth season, still a fright.
The horror anthology returns with a narratively (and geographically) tighter focus: the Hotel Cortez in L.A., owned by guest star Lady Gaga and possibly the center of action for the mysterious Ten Commandments Killer. Look for connections between new stories and earlier ones: The Murder House from season one makes a cameo, along with regulars like Kathy Bates, Angela Bassett, and Sarah Paulson. —Matt Zoller Seitz
FX, October 7 at 10 p.m.

Pop
2. Listen to Chvrches’ Every Open Eye
Like Pat Benatar in another galaxy.
This Scottish synth-pop trio stormed the scene about two years ago with their sleek, infectious debut. Their latest improves on that winning formula, marrying the aerodynamic sheen of modern electronic ­music with the huge, open-hearted hooks of ’80s rock. —Lindsay Zoladz
Glassnote.

Art
3. See Maureen Gallace
Stunning simplicity.
For years, even art’s muckety-mucks have been unable to explain Maureen Gallace’s simple depictions and painterly techniques. Long known for juicy images of beaches, seascapes, barns, flowers, and the like, Gallace here is beautifully in touch with the deepest aspects of observation and light-infused color; her new work stands on its own, noble, to be savored. —Jerry Saltz
303 Gallery, through October 31.

Theater
4. See Hamlet
Starring an especially sweet prince.
For some, Lyndsey Turner’s direction is the draw that has turned the Barbican’s Hamlet into London’s hottest ticket this fall; for others, it’s more likely the star, Benedict Cumberbatch. The run is basically sold out, and the theater is 3,500 miles away, so catch the National Theatre’s live broadcast. —Jesse Green
See ntlive.nationaltheatre.org.uk for venues; October 15 at 7 p.m.

Pop
5. Listen to Demi Lovato’s Confident
Pop conqueror.
This aptly titled album just might be the fall’s best pop. Take a listen to the first two singles: the slinky earworm “Cool for the Summer” and the title song, a boisterous Max Martin production about letting your freak flag fly high.
Hollywood/Island, October 16.

Movies
6. See The Final Girls
Don’t go up that staircase!
Ever since Carol Clover ID’d the archetype in her 1991 book Men, Women, and Chainsaws, the idea of the “final girl” — the one who faces the monster after all her friends have been hacked up — has been a cliché. It’s an archetype that comes in for a ribbing in this macabre meta-horror comedy, in which a high-school senior is whisked back in time to an ’80s slasher movie starring a handful of potential “final girls,” among them her mother. Who will remain intact? —David Edelstein
In theaters October 9.

TV
7. Watch Fargo
It’s a doozie.
Season one had its guilty pleasures (we miss you, Billy Bob Thornton!), but Fargo digs deeper in season two, giving us Solverson-family history, the Sioux Falls incident, and new cast members like Kirsten Dunst, Patrick Wilson, and Ted Danson.
FX, October 12 at 10 p.m.

Opera
8. Hear Elektra
Watch the baton.
As the Philharmonic mulls its future, the city is caught in a pincer of conductorial excitement. Shortly after Yannick Nézet-Séguin finishes Otello at the Met, Andris Nelsons brings his Boston Symphony Orchestra for another operatic tour de force. Christine Goerke headlines a big-lunged cast for this concert performance. —Justin Davidson
Carnegie Hall, October 21.

Movies
9. See Everest
Reaching great heights.
Imax-worthy vistas notwithstanding, this latest dramatization of the 1996 catastrophe portrayed in Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air is notable for its tragic intimacy. The Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur doesn’t lose sight of the real, small, sad story at his big movie’s heart. —Bilge Ebiri
In theaters.

Books
10. Read Sloane Crosley’s The Clasp
The genuine article.
The breezy New York essayist hasn’t radically altered her voice in transit to fiction. That’s good, because Crosley’s skittery wit and polished warmth make her first novel worthy of its metafictional basis, de Maupassant’s “The Necklace.” —Boris Kachka
Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Theater
11. See The Christians
A megachurch worth attending.
Lucas Hnath’s good-strange new play, about a pastor who no longer believes in hell, is most extraordinary in the way it wrestles seriously with a fundamental (not just a fundamentalist) question: How do we change and yet remain faithful? —J.G.
Playwrights Horizons, through October 11.

Pop
12. See Majical Cloudz
Make eye contact.
The Montreal electropop duo have one of the simplest and most affecting live shows currently touring; the airy and pristine new National Sawdust space should be the perfect backdrop for this musical theater of vulnerability. —L.Z.
National Sawdust, October 21.

Movies
13. See Rocco and His Brothers
Remarkable restoration.
As part of its 25th anniversary, Milestone presents Luchino Visconti’s rare 1960 epic, a madly ambitious take on Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot that’s more operatic (and arguably less successful) than his masterpiece, The Leopard. But you need to see it to understand the bar Visconti set for those passionate Italian-American movie buffs Scorsese and Coppola. —D.E.
Film Forum, October 9 through 29.

Classical Music
14. Hear Mark Padmore
Singularly soulful music.
With his limpid voice, crystalline diction, and vast emotive range, tenor Mark Padmore suffuses Schubert’s songs with pain and bliss; he’ll perform the composer’s three song cycles at the White Light Festival. —J.D.
Alice Tully Hall, October 14 through 17.

TV
15. Watch Red Oaks
Here come the popped collars.
David Gordon Green directed this ten-episode series set at a country club in 1985, where a young assistant tennis pro is spending his final summer before college; the slam-dunk cast includes Richard Kind and Jennifer Grey as the hero’s parents, plus Paul Reiser as a yuppie corporate raider. —M.Z.S.
Amazon, October 9.

Books
16. Read Salman Rushdie
Reconsider the serial tweeter.
In Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-eight Nights, one of the godfathers of hyperrealism has his strongest novel in years: a clever, pomo-­mystical triptych stretching back to Andalusia and forward to a distant utopian future. —B.K.
Random House.

Art
17. See Keltie Ferris
Painterly reflexes engaged.
Ferris burst onto the New York painting scene with Day-Glo canvases that were perfect crosses between hazy 1970s color-field painting, pixelated digital space breaking up and reforming, and painterly abstraction; then she seemed to plateau a bit. That temporary stall is behind her; Ferris is really simmering-to-boil in this new show. —J.S.
Mitchell-Innes & Nash, through October 17.

TV
18. Watch Billy on the Street
Follow that tall, loud man!
Everyone’s favorite street-corner accoster is back, along with more high-profile guests (Tina Fey!). For a dollar: Do you agree that Billy on the Street is weird and wonderful and unlike anything else? Yes! —Margaret Lyons
TruTV, October 8 at 10:30 p.m.

Theater
19. See The Pirates of Penzance


The very model of an operetta.
Gilbert’s pearls of inconsequence and Sullivan’s sublime melodies usually get buried under decades of dull performance clichés. Expect more from MasterVoices and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, with stars from opera and Broadway, when they serve up the spoof of 19th-century notions of duty. —J.G.
New York City Center, October 15 and 16.

Art
20. See Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri
One of the best shows of the year.
Vanishing points of infinite amplitude, waving fields of concentric lines at intervals that are cosmically calibrated: These are the optical-psychic effects of the gorgeously mysterious works by Aboriginal painter Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, one of Australia’s greatest — maybe one of the world’s. Sometimes it takes simple paintings like these, abstract images rendered meticulously with an unfixed system, to make us slow down and take notice. —J.S.
Salon 94, through October 24.

Movies
21. See Diaries, Notes and Sketches
First-person filmmaking.
Thanks to digital video, “diary” films are now a cinch to make, but as BAM’s series makes clear, that wasn’t always so. Explore this exhilarating tradition onscreen, from Ed Pincus’s hugely influential Diaries (1982) to Jonas Mekas’s five-hour, 30-year As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty. —D.E.
BAMcinématek, October 7 through 14.

Books
22. Read The Art of Language Invention
Speak like Khaleesi.
Linguist David J. Peterson has created dozens of languages for television and film, most famously on Game of Thrones. He shares his trade secrets and tips for inventing and “evolving” these fake tongues so they sound natural.
Penguin Random House.

Dance
23. See Dream’d in a Dream
East meets West.
DanceMotion USA lets a few lucky choreographers and their dancers work with far-flung, unlikely creative bedfellows; the latest fruit of the program arrives in this lively new work performed by Séan Curran’s company, accompanied by Kyrgy folk musicians. —Rebecca Milzoff
BAM Harvey Theater, October 7 through 10.

Classical Music
24. Hear The Scheherazade Initiative
For just one night.
Legendary storyteller Scheherazade gives her name to an organization that fights violence against women — sometimes with music, as at this all-star concert of both Ravel’s and Rimsky-­Korsakov’s versions of Scheherazade. —J.D.
Carnegie Hall, October 19.

TV
25. Watch Manhattan
It’s the bomb.
Even though you know how this show will end, the race to build the bomb makes for engrossing television. Season two, anchored by John Benjamin Hickey’s unhinged performance, gives a tour of minds both brilliant and paranoid; you’ll start to believe one can’t exist without the other.
WGN, October 13 at 9 p.m.