Art
1. See The Last Brucennial
Echoes of the Whitney.
The art-world pranksters known as the Bruce High Quality Foundation have, since 2008, run a mildly anarchic answer to the Whitney Biennial. This final year, the call for artists solicited only work by women, presumably to draw attention to the maleness of the Whitney show. See it before New York gets a little less pleasingly weird.
837 Washington Street, through April 4.
Movies
2. See Non-Stop
It takes flight.
Big, doleful Hibernian Liam Neeson + big gun = box-office gold and a smashing good time if you’re in the mood for a tawdry mystery-thriller. Non-Stop is a taut skyjacking picture in which Neeson plays an alcoholic air marshal fighting an anonymous onboard loon who keeps texting him with threats—and the plane is swimming with red herrings. Is it too soon for a skyjacking B-movie that explicitly invokes 9/11? Maybe, but this audience won’t care. —David Edelstein
In theaters now.
Pop Music
3. Hear The Hold Steady’s Teeth Dreams
Pre-post-punk.
The sixth album from Brooklyn’s the Hold Steady is, like the previous five, based on a quaint idea: that rock songs should be loud, catchy, and short, and that loud, catchy, short rock songs can tell stories as witty and vivid as any novel can. Teeth Dreams doesn’t fuss with the basic formula one iota, but it executes it awfully well, with Craig Finn’s wry, ragged talk-singing over classic-rock riffs so big and undeniable they’re a joke about “rock” in and of themselves. —Jody Rosen
Washington Square Records, March 25.
Books
4. Read Kitty Genovese
The story you know is wrong.
Genovese’s 1964 murder in Queens—reportedly witnessed by 38 people, none of whom came to her aid—became a catchword for urban depravity and “not my problem” indifference. Fifty years on, a deep investigation by Kevin Cook reveals that virtually everything familiar about the story—from the 38 witnesses on down—was either exaggerated in the service of a good story or mistaken in the heat of the moment.
W.W. Norton; author appearance at the Astoria Bookshop, March 19, 7 p.m.
Art
5. See Pat Steir
AbEx can still have punch.
The extraordinary nerve to take on Barnett Newman and Jackson Pollock at the same time pays off big in these powerfully scaled, internally lit, beautifully engaging canvases of brushed and dripping color. Layers of washy, splattered, and otherwise lovingly applied paint gain qualities of gravity and grittiness that make those past American masters seem almost elegant and feminine by comparison. These late-late-late additions to the Abstract Expressionist canon are miles better than many similar knockoffs being churned out by younger artists. —Jerry Saltz
Cheim & Read, through March 29.
Art
6. See Fountains of the Deep: Visions of Noah and the Flood*
Animal attraction.
As Darren Aronofsky put together his forthcoming film Noah, he asked 50 contemporary artists to try their hands at this ancient story. The results come from both art-world celebrities (Ugo Rondinone, Nan Goldin) and genre stars (the comic-book artist Jim Lee, the graffiti duo Faile).
462 West Broadway, through March 29.
Photography
7. See Bill Cunningham: Facades
On location.
The Times’ charming, peripatetic street-photography legend has also made artier work, and this series—of models in period clothes, posed at historic settings around New York—was shot in the 1970s and has been rarely seen since.
New-York Historical Society, March 14 through June 15.
TV
8. Watch Vikings
Góðr!
Launching into its second season, the poor man’s Game of Thrones continues to deliver jolts of bloody, iron-clashing, delicious cheese.
History, Thursdays, 10 p.m.
Movies/Video
9.–12. Binge-Watch Animal House, Ghostbusters, Stripes, and Groundhog Day
That’s a big Twinkie.
Harold Ramis’s passing gives you an excuse to revisit his loose-limbed, underdog-loving movies. No knock on Caddyshack and all the people (from the president on down) who quote it, but these four are really his best-thought-out, most structured movies. That’s the fact, Jack.
On Netflix or Amazon Instant.
Theater
13. See Love and Information
My art belongs to data.
Fifteen actors play well over 100 roles in Caryl Churchill’s kaleidoscopic consideration of what we know and what we never can. Even if you don’t like abstract theater, it may bowl you over: Churchill, for all her intellectual knots, is a generous writer. She gets everyone, including the actors, the designers, and the audience, to do their best work. —Jesse Green
Minetta Lane Theatre, through April 6.
Pop Music
14. Hear Ennio Morricone
Wah-wah-wah.
That’s not the Mojave Desert—that’s Prospect Heights. For one night, though, you could be forgiven for mixing up the two. Ennio Morricone, the genius behind the best spaghetti-Western music ever composed, will unite rock snobs, cineasts, Italophiles, and maybe even a few classical-music aficionados when he takes baton in hand to lead a full orchestra through his sulfurous repertoire. —J.R.
Cushman & Wakefield Theater, Barclays Center, March 23.
*The original version of this article incorrectly referred to Fountains of the Deep as Foundations of the Deep.
Exhibition
15. Visit the Charles Ives Studio
Imported from Connecticut.
When the shingled house in Redding, Connecticut, where Charles Ives wrote Three Places in New England looked doomed in 2012, music lovers wringed their hands—and the house was saved. Ives’s long, narrow studio was dismantled and reassembled in upper Manhattan, complete with battered upright, crammed bookshelves, and bulletin board. —Justin Davidson
American Academy of Arts and Letters, through April 12, then May 22 through June 15.
TV
16. Watch Community
In recovery.
From the moral and psychological pretzels of “Cooperative Polygraphy” to the off-center meditations on artists and audiences in “Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality,” this fifth season has already restored a lot of the luster that Community lost during its Dan Harmon–less fourth season, which had all that it needed except for that spark that turned out to be everything. The March 20 episode’s title sounds like another one of those stories that the show was put on TV to tell: “Advanced Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.” —Matt Zoller Seitz
NBC, Thursdays, 8 p.m.
Movies
17. See The Lunchbox
Tasty.
If email has taken all the fun out of epistolary romance, consider The Lunchbox, a mild and rather pleasing Indian deadpan-comedy-drama in which a young wife (Nimrat Kaur) tries to win back her frosty husband’s affection by sending to his office a beautiful multicourse midday meal—which accidentally goes to a morose widower (Irrfan Khan). Soon they’re passing notes and sharing their woes. The hands-on, old-fashioned exchange is easy on the soul. —D.E.
Angelika Film Center.
Classical Music
18. Hear the New York Philharmonic Play Carl Nielsen
Hopeful music from an unhopeful time.
To many Europeans in 1916, life may have seemed merely a difficult prelude to mass death. Yet in that despairing year, the Danish composer Carl Nielsen wrote his Fourth Symphony, The Inextinguishable, a work full of burgeoning, yearning, optimism, and ferment. You can practically hear the buds push through the blood-soaked battlefield. Alan Gilbert conducts that piece, plus the Symphony No. 1 and the Helios Overture, as part of his ongoing championship of a composer he has affectionately described as “traditional” but a“little bit odd.” —J.D.
Avery Fisher Hall, March 12 through 15.
Movies
19. See Scorsese/Walsh
One director salutes another.
Martin Scorsese has about 6,745,988 cinematic influences, and lately he wants to present every one. He and BAM are pairing six of his pictures with “their inspirations from Raoul Walsh’s seminal oeuvre.” The bootlegger shoot-’em-up The Roaring Twenties (good guy James Cagney versus bad’un Humphrey Bogart) makes for a fine contrast with the confused loyalties of Casino, and the 1947 torch-song triangle romance The Man I Love (with Ida Lupino and Robert Alda) can explain some of the dissonances in the De Niro–Minnelli bomb New York, New York. —D.E.
BAMcinématek, March 12 through 26; schedule at bam.org.
Dance
20. See Paul Taylor Dance Company
Transitional step.
Taylor recently announced that next season, his company will begin presenting the works of other modern masters after 60 years of dancing only his own. This season’s batch of 23—ranging from canonical pieces like Esplanade to two premieres—is an unparalleled look at the range of Taylor’s work, all on its own for perhaps the final time. —Rebecca Milzoff
David H. Koch Theater, March 11 through 30.
Classical Music
21. Hear Timo Andres’s Work Songs
At the Ecstatic Music Festival.
The live song was once a fixture of the genteel home. Hymns, parlor songs, German lieder, Tin Pan Alley tunes, folk songs—all demanded only a capable pair of hands, a not-too-warbly voice, and whoever happened to be in the living room. Andres expands on that tradition of camaraderie by calling on a clutch of friends—Gabriel Kahane, Becca Stevens, Ted Hearne, and Nathan Koci—to perform a new song cycle about earning a living, scored for three voices, two guitars, keyboard, accordion, and piano. —J.D.
Kaufman Music Center, March 19.
TV
22. Watch The Blacklist
The Five Reasons You Should.
Best recent moment in this FBI crime-fighting series: when Red (James Spader) explains to Madeline Pratt (Jennifer Ehle, guest-starring) that the reason he never showed up to meet her years ago was that his wife and daughter were murdered that night—then, once she’s caved and given him the information he wants, reveals that the whole story was bogus. Delicious.
NBC, Mondays, 10 p.m.
TV
23. Watch Army Wives
(Ret.)
When the history of post-9/11 television is written, viewers may be surprised by the high ranking of Army Wives. The series, which airs a sign-off special on March 16, was a rare domestic drama that treated the Stateside reality of deployment and reentry as the only reality, driving home the ways in which America’s volunteer-military model had cut off much of the population from the harsh facts of service during a seemingly endless war. —M.Z.S.
Lifetime, March 16, 9 p.m.
Theater
24. See Beauty and the Beast
Not the Disney version.
American burlesque queen Julie Atlas Muz and her husband, Mat Fraser, a British actor with flipperlike arms, undo (a) a classic fairy tale, (b) liberal sanctimony about disability, and (c) all their clothing in this song-and-dance (and puppetry-and-sex) extravaganza. —J.G.
Abrons Art Center, through March 30.
Photography
25. See Peter Arnell
Branding, architect.
The legendary (and legendarily impossible) marketing expert Peter Arnell has been a serious photographer for 30 years, shooting good pictures on everything from an Instamatic to an iPhone. For his first gallery show, he’s had a little curatorial help: His pal Frank Gehry is selecting the photos for Milk Gallery’s exhibition.
450 West 15th Street, through April 1.