Music
1. Listen to Balloonerism
Mac Miller’s second posthumous album.
Warner Records, January 17.
The late Mac Miller was a prodigious talent, often working on multiple albums at the same time. Now, his estate releases Balloonerism, a batch of songs that came after 2013’s Watching Movies With the Sound Off but took a back seat to 2015’s GO:OD AM, in advance of what would’ve been the Pittsburgh star’s 33rd birthday. —Craig Jenkins
Theater
2. See Cymbeline
Hardness ever of hardiness is mother.
Lynn F. Angelson Theater, January 18 through February 15.
In partnership with the Play On project of modern verse “translations” of Shakespeare’s plays, the National Asian American Theatre Company presents a new take on the rich and strange late romance. Stephen Brown-Fried directs an all-femme ensemble in Andrea Thome’s version of this lesser-known rough diamond, following an extraordinary princess’s sweeping adventure through love, betrayal, disguise, discovery, and miraculous redemption. —Sara Holdren
Movies
3. See Dig! XX
The Sundance-winning rock doc.
In limited theaters January 17.
2004’s Dig! was a defining alt-rock text of the fraught relationship between the Dandy Warhols (successful-posery) and the Brian Jonestown Massacre (disastrous-authentic). For its 20th anniversary, director Ondi Timoner has both remastered and updated her doc with previously unseen footage and a counterpoint voice-over from BJM’s Joel Gion. —Alison Willmore
Podcasts
4. Listen to Berlant & Novak
A return, of sorts.
Self-released.
For almost four years, Kate Berlant and Jacqueline Novak scrutinized and spoofed the wellness world through Poog (Goop, backward) until the show came to an abrupt end this past autumn. The duo have since launched a self-titled podcast behind a paywall, and now it’s hitting wide availability. —Nicholas Quah
Classical
5. Hear Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Led by a legendary Italian conductor.
Carnegie Hall, January 21.
Riccardo Muti is one of the last of the venerated maestri. Though he stepped down from the ensemble he’s led since 2010, he brings it to New York for a final hurrah: a couple of tastes of Italian opera and a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony. But he’ll be back! From February 28 to March 2, he conducts three concerts with the Vienna Philharmonic. —Justin Davidson
Movies
6. See Casualties of War
In 35-mm.
Roxy Cinema, January 28.
Brian De Palma used his post-Untouchables cred to make this bleak, brutal 1989 drama, starring Michael J. Fox and Sean Penn, about a war crime committed by U.S. soldiers during the Vietnam era. Audiences rejected it, but today it’s recognized (correctly) as a masterpiece. —Bilge Ebiri
Art
7. See Carroll Cloar
A southern artist in Manhattan.
Andrew Edlin Gallery, 212 Bowery; through February 15.
Before he died in 1993, Carroll Cloar fashioned a flat, colorful clarity in images of simple figures set in American situations — schools, the road, and landscapes. Everything is slightly out of scale, which lends his art magic. Part of a great flowering of so-called regional artists, Cloar showed his artwork in New York and created over 800 lucid pictures in his lifetime. Consider this show of his paintings and drawings from the 1960s and ’70s as an introduction. —Jerry Saltz
Books
8. Read Mood Machine
The smoothing of your culture brain.
Atria/One Signal Publishers.
How have the ascendancy of Spotify, the streaming economy, and the algorithmization of everything reshaped our experience of music? Liz Pelly, the veteran music reporter and critic, lays it all out in this much-needed work. —N.Q.
Classical
9. Hear Alisa Weilerstein: Fragments 2
“A piece of theater,” says the cellist.
Zankel Hall, January 21.
Top-flight cellists all find a way to make Bach’s Cello Suites their own; Weilerstein does it by interweaving the movements with new works that she commissioned. Here, she adorns the Second Suite with short pieces by Alan Fletcher, Ana Sokolovic, Caroline Shaw, Daniel Kidane, and Gity Razaz. —J.D.
Theater
10. See The Antiquities
The humans are dead.
Playwrights Horizons, through February 23.
Co-produced with the Vineyard Theatre and the Goodman Theatre, Jordan Harrison’s new play follows a gaggle of curious curators at the Museum of Late Human Antiquities. Far, far in the future, these researchers obsess over the detritus of human civilization, wondering what we wore, how we lived, and who and what we really were. —S.H.
Movies
11. See The Greeks Had a Word for Them
Featuring costumes by Coco Chanel.
Museum of Modern Art, January 21 and 28.
One of the highlights of this year’s To Save and Project festival, where MoMA screens rare restored works, is this audacious 1932 comedy about showgirls on the hunt for well-off lovers in Depression-era New York. —A.W.
TV
12. Watch Watson
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle will always be IP.
CBS, January 26.
After the finale of CBS’s Elementary, starring Jonny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu as modern versions of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson, the network is back in the Doyle sandbox with Watson. But this one is a bit more like Fox’s House, which was considered a spin on Holmes as a doctor; now, it’s Watson solving medical mysteries in a characterization more in line with his original role. Morris Chestnut stars as Watson in this present-day procedural, which is set six months after Holmes’s death and takes place in a medical clinic. Everything old is new again; such is the power of television. —Roxana Hadadi
Music
13. Listen to Eusexua
From U.K. polymath FKA twigs.
Young Recordings/Atlantic Records, January 24.
FKA twigs couldn’t lift last year’s The Crow out of the remake doldrums, but her new album Eusexua, teased via a careful trickle of audiovisual spectacles like the lustful if liminal clip for the title track, is shaping up to be a delight. —C.J.
Movies
14. & 15. See Dying and Pilgrim, Farewell
Films by Michael Roemer.
Film Forum, January 24 through 30.
Unheralded in his time, the American independent auteur Michael Roemer has been slowly rediscovered over the past couple of decades. Now, here are two more devastating films: The first is a 1976 documentary about three terminal patients and how they choose to live their last days; the second is a fictional 1982 drama about a dying widow (Elizabeth Huddle) raging against her surroundings as her lover (Christopher Lloyd) struggles beside her. —B.E.
Classical
16. Hear Rhapsody in Blue
With a star pianist.
David Geffen Hall, January 23 through 25.
Yuja Wang banishes the New York Philharmonic’s strings and, leading the winds and brass from her perch at the piano, performs the original jazz-band version of Gershwin’s classic plus a concerto by Stravinsky and a capriccio by Janácek. —J.D
The Short List
Sundance Film Festival
Some early intriguing titles from this year’s lineup.
GEN_
A documentary following a Milan doctor who specializes in in vitro fertility treatments and gender-confirmation surgeries, Gianluca Matarrese’s film seeks to portray (and perhaps demystify) the real-life experiences surrounding some of the more controversial medical issues of our time.
Mr. Nobody Against Putin
A teacher in a remote Russian town picks up his camera and depicts the way his school is being sucked into a vortex of political propaganda and militarism in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore
Sundance often has celebrity-driven docs, but this one, focusing on the life and career of Oscar winner Marlee Matlin, is one of the more promising titles of recent years.
Two Women
In director Chloé Robichaud’s comedy-drama, two women neighbors, frustrated with their homebound lives, find themselves becoming more impulsive as they explore their sexual desires. Canadian cinema is totally having a moment.
Kiss of the Spider Woman
Director Bill Condon (Dreamgirls, Gods and Monsters) returns with this film, based on the stage musical, about an imprisoned hairdresser (Tonatiuh) and a political prisoner (Diego Luna) bonding over tales of a classic screen vixen (Jennifer Lopez!)
—Bilge Ebiri
Books
17. Read Blob
Getting gooey.
Harper, January 28.
The latest in the small yet invigorating subgenre of human-object romance, Maggie Su’s debut novel is the tale of a down-on-her-luck woman, Vi, who finds a pitiable blob of goo with eyes in the alley behind a bar. She gradually molds it into a dreamy human-shaped love interest but finds her own angst harder to contain. —Emma Alpern
Theater
18. See English
Tossed in translation.
Todd Haimes Theatre, in previews January 3.
Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer Prize–winning comedy comes to Broadway after a much-lauded premiere co-produced by Roundabout Theatre and Atlantic Theater Company. Knud Adams returns to direct the story set in an Iranian classroom where a group of adult English learners study for their proficiency exam, revealing aspirations, frustrations, and the slipperiness of language along the way. —S.H
Art
19. See Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg
Contemporary fairy tales with stop motion.
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, 521 West 21st Street; through February 21.
Collaborating for 20 kinky years on fantastical animations that have featured, for example, a tiger licking a woman’s butt, these Swedes excel at their own macabre aesthetic set in imaginary situations or in enchanted gardens. —J.S.
Opera
20. See Primero Sueño
First dream.
The Met Cloisters, January 23 through 26.
Magos Herrera sings the role of the 17th-century Mexican poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in a roving opera by Paola Prestini. The audience follows as the character moves from room to room; directed by Louisa Proske. —J.D.
Movies
21. See Her
A warning.
Film Forum, January 16, 17, 18, and 23.
OpenAI’s Sam Altman may see Her as an end goal, but the 2013 Spike Jonze drama — in which Joaquin Phoenix plays an imminent divorcé who falls in love with an operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson — is screening as part of a series of films about artificial intelligence that are more cautionary than aspirational. —A.W.
TV
22. Watch The Night Agent Season Two
An advertisement for landlines.
Netflix, January 23.
This conspiracy thriller about an FBI agent whose sole responsibility is to pick up a phone if it rings at night and signal an emergency was a surprise hit for Netflix. The streamer renewed it, but details about what Peter Sutherland (Gabriel Basso) is getting up to now are scarce. Real ones know, though, that the true mystery is whatever’s going on with Hong Chau’s wig. —R.H.
Music
23. Listen to Hurry Up Tomorrow
The Weeknd’s sixth studio album.
XO/Republic, January 24.
The new set by the Weeknd promises the usual disconcertingly cherubic raunch and crystalline synth textures — which singles “São Paulo” and “Dancing in the Flames” each offer in edifying excess. —C.J.
Movies
24. See The Ascent
An iconic Soviet filmmaker.
Museum of the Moving Image, January 19 and 24.
Larisa Shepitko was one of the most exciting filmmakers of the Soviet era when she died at 41 in 1979. Her last feature, a WWII drama about Soviet partisans fighting the Nazis and the elements, won the Berlin Film Festival’s Golden Bear in 1977; it must be seen on a big screen. —B.E.
Classical
25. Hear Les Arts Florissants
Period music.
Zankel Hall, January 28.
William Christie celebrates turning 80 by conducting the ensemble he founded in music of the French Baroque: Charpentier, Rameau, Lully. —J.D.