TV
1. Watch Orphan Black
She looks familiar.
In this culty Canadian import, Tatiana Maslany plays a set of cloned women, and it’s huge fun to watch her switch back and forth among the roles. When she’s enacting one clone imitating another, you’re in tour-de-force territory.
Season-two premiere on BBC America, April 19, 9 p.m.
Pop Music
2. Hear the Psychedelic Furs
Forever now.
The Psychedelic Furs are the also-rans of the 1980s British post-punk boom, behind Joy Division, Depeche Mode, and the Cure. They’re also, in their peak moments—Talk Talk Talk (1981), “Love My Way” (1982), “The Ghost in You” (1984)—the most lavishly listenable, with songs full of pop winsomeness and a transfixing singer, Richard Butler, whose voice perfectly matched the material’s ravaged romanticism. The old songs still stick to your ribs. —Jody Rosen
The Paramount, Huntington, N.Y.; April 12.
TV
3. Watch Fargo
Here ya are.
The TV adaptation of Fargo is less a thriller than a portrait of an eccentric community, with peeks at its violent underbelly; parts of it play like a slowed-down, plain-vanilla Justified. Policewoman Marge Gunderson is nowhere to be seen, and although some characters deliberately echo those from the movie, more are original and defiantly peculiar. The best is Billy Bob Thornton’s Lorne Malvo, a drawling, terrifying trickster demon in human form. —Matt Zoller Seitz
FX, April 15, 10 p.m.
Art
4. See Leigh Ledare
Him and him and her.
Few photographic shows are filled with as much pathos as Leigh Ledare’s pining looks at love, need, sex, and passion. In “Double Bind,” he creates an extraordinary emotional triangle, photographing his ex-wife in a retreat, then asking her current husband to shoot similar images in the same places. —Jerry Saltz
Mitchell-Innes & Nash, through April 26.
Movies
5. See Gojira
Run! Run!
Dubbed and heavily edited for its 1956 U.S. release as Godzilla, King of the Monsters, Ishiro Honda’s restored 1954 Gojira is a haunting, funereal work with an apocalyptic intensity. The 150-foot-tall monster is a scarcely disguised symbol of the atomic bomb, a fusion of ancient and modern nightmares summoned out of the dark forces of the world. This is no masterpiece, but it has the power of one. —David Edelstein
Film Forum, April 18 through 24; schedule at filmforum.org.
Theater
6. See Here Lies Love
She’s back!
At 84, Imelda Marcos is a member of the Philippine House of Representatives; if she could go home, why can’t her show? David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s brilliant disco musical returns (as a commercial production) to LuEsther Hall, where director Alex Timbers custom-built it.
Public Theater, starting April 14.
TV
7. Watch Rectify
For a post-McConaughey TV universe.
If you’re missing the dreamy swampscape of True Detective, dig into the similarly atmospheric Rectify. At only six episodes, it’s barely a single Saturday’s binge, but it’ll stay with you.
Now on Netflix.
Pop Music
8. See Betty Who
Ready for the next “Dancing on My Own”?
Like that other pixie-haired blonde Robyn, Australia’s Betty Who specializes in earwormy pop—but with more refreshing glee. Catch her belting hits in the making, like the Girls-soundtrack-ready “Heartbreak Dream,” before she’s playing bigger, more expensive stages.
Slow Dancing, on RCA Records; Music Hall of Williamsburg, April 18; Bowery Ballroom, April 19.
Theater
9. Hear “Friend Like Me” in Aladdin
Musical-comedy wish fulfillment.
Showstopping expert Casey Nicholaw (Spamalot; The Drowsy Chaperone) outdoes himself near the end of Act One of Disney’s Aladdin, building a song-and-dance number so overstuffed with jokes that it becomes a weirdly pure abstraction of fun. As Genie, James Monroe Iglehart gets a workout and then some. —Jesse Green
New Amsterdam Theatre.
TV
10. See 700 Sundays
From Broadway to TV.
Billy Crystal’s one-man show gets the HBO treatment, and it’s a reminder of what a nuanced showman he can be. The comic bypasses our memories of awards-hosting shtick and reconnects with his underappreciated early stand-up. —M.Z.S.
HBO, April 19, 9 p.m.
Movies
11. See Nymphomaniac: Volume II
Now with more …
If you finished Lars von Trier’s picaresque sex epic Nymphomaniac: Volume I with a bevy of questions—when will we see the older Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) in some skeevy hard-core action? Will her bachelor savior (Stellan Skarsgård) want into her bloomers?—then all will be answered in the second volume. It’s the more interesting half, actually, with fewer bad laughs and less Shia LaBeouf. —D.E.
In theaters and on On Demand.
Books
12. Read Every Day Is for the Thief
Teju Cole’s first book, now published in America.
Of the quotidian violence his narrator witnesses in Every Day Is for the Thief, the novelist Teju Cole writes, “It is an appalling way to conduct a society, yes, but I suddenly feel a vague pity for all those writers who have to ply their trade from sleepy American suburbs, writing divorce scenes symbolized by the very slow washing of dishes.” None of that here; we get, instead, scammers in a Nigerian café; the stench and din of diesel generators; the immolation of a child thief. A meditation on corruption, both outward and inner, it combines gravitas with steady motion. —Kathryn Schulz
Random House.
TV
13. See The Address
Of the people, for the people.
Ken Burns’s latest concentrates on a single document—the Gettysburg Address—and challenges every American to memorize it. We’ve all got the “Four score and seven years ago” part; only 266 words to go. —M.Z.S.
PBS, April 15, 9 p.m.
Books
14. Hear Leslie Jamison
Interviewed by writer Michelle Orange.
“Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to,” Leslie Jamison writes in the titular essay of her excellent new collection The Empathy Exams. The question at its core is what we humans should do about suffering, and Jamison reframes it again and again, in settings from the border crossing at Tijuana to a murder trial to the finish line of an ultramarathon. —K.S.
McNally Jackson, April 16, 7 p.m.
Movies
15. See Finding Vivian Maier
The mysterious woman behind the camera.
One look at the photos in Finding Vivian Maier and you know you’re seeing a major artist. John Maloof bought Maier’s thousands of abandoned negatives at a garage sale, and there’s no getting around that this movie (which he directed with Charlie Siskel) has upped the price of his prints. But the story of this enigmatic, damaged woman with no need to show her work will leave you astonished. —D.E.
In theaters now.
New Music
16. Hear Collected Stories
Lend David Lang your ear.
David Lang, Bang on a Can co-founder and now Carnegie’s resident composer, opens his six-concert series with an odd-couple program of songs from the 8th and 20th centuries. —J.D.
Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall, April 22 through 29.
Art
17. See Lebbeus Woods, Architect
Gorgeous dystopias.
The visionary architect built little but influenced many, and his ideas for traumatized cities are both horrifying and hopeful, projecting confidence that even catastrophe can be a platform for new ideas. —Justin Davidson
The Drawing Center, April 17 through June 15.
Dance
18. See Snow White
No singing dwarves, yes Gaultier.
Angelin Preljocaj brings his Ballet Preljocaj to town for a very Grimmified, wicked-stepmother-centric retelling of the tale, with a dark score of Mahler and electronica and costumes by Jean Paul Gaultier. —Rebecca Milzoff
David H. Koch Theater, April 23 through 27.
Classical Music
19. Hear the New Emerson Quartet
Just like the old one.
After more than 30 years with the same roster, the quartet experienced a shake-up when cellist David Finckel went solo—but judging by one concert last month, Paul Watkins has slipped gracefully into his place. The group’s going through Shostakovich’s late quartets, here pairing No. 13 with Britten’s Third. —J.D.
Alice Tully Hall, April 23.
Comedy
20. Download WTF With Marc Maron
Lena Dunham, in the garage.
In Maron’s well-known niche of excellence, the recent installment with the ever-smart Ms. Dunham ranks with the best interviews he’s done.
At wtfpod.com.
Photography
21. See “Touching Strangers”
Imposed intimacy.
Richard Renaldi set up his view camera in American public places and coaxed pairs of people into physical interactions. Some caress, some clasp, some clutch; all seem right on the knife edge between intimacy and discomfort. The tension is visible.
Aperture Gallery, through May 15; companion volume, Aperture Press.
Pop Music
22. Hear Mavado
Caribbean king.
The leading light of Jamaican dancehall has lately taken on the role of emissary to American hip-hop radio, guesting on records by Snoop Lion, French Montana, and Ace Hood and corralling Nicki Minaj for his own “Give It All to Me.” He’s not the deftest rhymer, but he’s got style and suavity to spare. —J.R.
Santos Party House, April 18.
Open House
23. Visit the New York State Pavilion
A rare open house.
The ruined 1964 World’s Fair structures are usually fenced off, but on the anniversary of their opening, visitors will be allowed into the New York State Pavilion for three hours. Now, Mayor Bill: Please find some money to fix up the joint.
April 22, 11 a.m.–2 p.m., Flushing Meadows–Corona Park.
Books
24. Read Visible City
Watch your neighbors.
Tova Mirvis’s graceful yet vigorous New York novel is about the half-inadvertent window-peeping that city life enables, and where it can lead.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Museum Shows
25. See Pterosaurs: Flight in the Age of Dinosaurs
What’s that shadow?
Flying, clawing dinos! Your 5-year-old wants to see this; probably, not so secretly, so do you.
American Museum of Natural History.