(Photo: Patrick McMullan (Minaj); Jeff Daly/Courtesy of NBC (One Direction); The Kobal Collection/Warner Bros./First National/Courtesy of Film Society of Lincoln Center (Bogart); courtesy of GKIDS Films (Song of the Sea))

Movies
1. See Let There Be Light: The Films of John Huston
The man who would be king
John Huston was never too popular with hard-core auteur critics, who found his style and subject matter too elastic for deconstruction, and there are, frankly, a fair number of turkeys in his oeuvre. But the chance to see the stiletto-lean Maltese Falcon, Beat the Devil (the MF’s quasi send-up), The Dead, The Man Who Would Be King, the underappreciated Reflections in a Golden Eye, and the mangled near-masterpiece The Red Badge of Courage on the big screen should not be passed up. —David Edelstein
Film Society of Lincoln Center, starting December 19

Pop
2. Hear Nicki Minaj’s The Pinkprint
Fly girl
Innumerable delays and countless butt-memes later, The Pinkprint is finally upon us. Find out if Minaj’s star-studded (Beyoncé! Drake! Ariana Grande!) third album lives up to the hype. —Lindsay Zoladz
Young Money/Cash Money/Republic

Opera
3. See The Merry Widow
Gay in Paris
If there’s one director who you’d hope can bring Lehár’s operetta to the Met’s huge stage with its lightness, joy, and wit intact, it should be Susan Stroman. Renée Fleming, who has been muttering ominously about retiring, stars in the title role of a woman who throws herself with relish into her life’s second act. —Justin Davidson
Metropolitan Opera, opens December 31

TV
4. Watch One Direction
Ask the nearest 14-year-old girl about it
The band’s first prime-time special gives them the Beatles-in-America treatment, mixing behind-the-scenes footage of them recording their album Four, embarking on their �Where We Are Tour,� and cavorting at a theme park while wearing disguises. Lisa Simpson, the original subscriber of Non-Threatening Boys Magazine, would squeal throughout. —Matt Zoller Seitz
NBC, December 23 at 8 p.m.

Art
5. See Takashi Murakami
Ultra-Technicolor
Seeing this show take shape over the last few months on Instagram made me unexpectedly predisposed to like it, as hundreds of Murakami’s assistants worked diligently around the clock, doing something that it seemed only a Japanese artist could do in terms of labor, verisimilitude, post-Pop, and wackiness. The show left me wowed yet empty; still, its all-out drive can’t help but impress. —Jerry Saltz
Gagosian Gallery, 555 W. 24th St., through January 17

Books
6. Read Butterflies in November
Northern exposure
Anyone who’s fallen in love with a Euro-road-trip story will be vulnerable to Audur Ava Ólafs�dóttir’s fictional journey around Iceland’s Ring Road, as taken by a recently divorced, childless translator and her friend’s deaf 4-year-old. Between the high jinks and before the book’s coda of 47 recipes (sheep’s-head jelly?), the dark weight of the novel creeps in as our narrator confronts her own youthful traumas and learns to reattach herself to the world. —Boris Kachka
Black Cat

Theater
7.-10. See Once, Pippin, This Is Our Youth, and The Real Thing
Everything must go!
In the first weekend of the year, Broadway’s fading long runs and played-out limited engagements skedaddle to make room for spring arrivals. So it’s your last chance to see the four fine shows closing on January 4: the emo Once, flippin’ Pippin, This Is Our Youth (featuring a great turn by Michael Cera), and The Real Thing (starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and Ewan McGregor). —Jesse Green
Closing January 4

Dance
11. Watch city.ballet.
Steps behind the scenes
As the December Nutcracker-o-rama passes, consider the second season of this addictive AOL series�an illuminating and fairly raw look at the lives of New York City Ballet dancers on- and offstage, from injury recovery to navigating an in-company romance�as a palate-cleanser. It’ll give you a new appreciation for the artistry of ballerinas like Sara Mearns and Lauren Lovette and may even help you envision them as �Sugarplums. —Rebecca Milzoff
On cityballet.com

TV
12. Watch Black Mirror
Finally!
Technology pessimists: Have you met the BBC’s Black Mirror? At long last available to legally stream (oh, the irony!), British satirist Charlie Brooker’s incredible anthology series is like a couple of seasons of The Twilight Zone mixed with Twitter, and it’s so good that it might even scare you off the internet for a few days. Now’s the time to get familiar: Mad Men’s Jon Hamm will be in an upcoming one-off holiday special alongside Game of Thrones’ Oona Chaplin.
Netflix; special on DirecTV, December 25 at 9:30 p.m.

Podcast
13. Listen to Kings of the Egg Cream
Fizzy and sweet
When you need a break from Serial, try this ten-part �new old-fashioned� radio play. Richard Kind narrates the sorta-true story of a 1920s character who ran a Lower East Side syrup racket; co-creator Justin Bartha, Ari Graynor, Ellen Barkin, and many other famous people recorded the character voices.
On iTunes and Tabletmag.com

Movies
14. See Song of the Sea
Pride of the Irish
As he proved in The Secret of Kells, Tomm Moore is one of those directors of �flat� animated films who create their own infinitely malleable �reality.� In his new movie, centered on two motherless Irish youths on a mythical quest to return to their home by the sea, the Miyazaki influence can be felt, but his own brand of whimsy is everywhere�those seemingly irrelevant but essential byways that are the essence of Hibernian charm. —D.E.
GKids, December 19

Pop
15. See Patti Smith
Back from the Vatican. Gloria Dei!
Ball drop, shmall drop. For almost two decades now, New York’s greatest New Year’s Eve tradition has been Patti Smith’s string of end-of-year shows (they also double as a birthday celebration for the punk poet laureate). —L.Z.
Webster Hall, December 29 and 30

Theater
16. Hear Kelli O’Hara and Matthew Morrison
Together again
O’Hara and Morrison, castmates in South Pacific and The Light in the Piazza, reunite for the New York Pops’ holiday concert. Aside from the usual carols and inspirational numbers (with the Essential Voices USA choir), expect a few show tunes, or at least a duet of �Baby, It’s Cold �Outside.� —J.G.
Carnegie Hall, December 19 and 20

TV
17. Watch Mozart in the Jungle
Bad backstage behavior
One of the best pilots to debut on Amazon this fall got a full-season pickup, and the result is beguilingly original: a series about music and musicians, set against the backdrop of the New York Symphony Orchestra, that gets all the technical and psychological details right amid the melodrama. Lola Kirke plays oboist-heroine Hailey; the all-star cast includes Gael García Bernal as a temperamental young conductor, Malcolm McDowell as the grand old man he’s replacing, Saffron Burrows as a jaded cellist, and Bernadette Peters as the symphony’s chairwoman of the board.
Amazon, December 23

Pop
18. Listen to Ghostface
The hardest-working man in the game
The most lyrically dexterous rapper to emerge from Shaolin, Ghostface has released an incredible four albums in the past four years. The latest is a concept album in which Ghost, a.k.a. Tony Starks, returns home after nine years to seek vengeance on a crooked cop (insanely underrated rapper AZ) who left Starks for dead; Kool G Rap and Pharoahe Monch also make appearances.
Salvation/Tommy Boy

Books
19. Read Jeremy Scott
Molto Moschino
Do fast-food wrappers belong on a runway? Is Vanna White a high-fashion muse? Can a bodega bag pass as eveningwear? No matter where you fall, opinion-wise, Jeremy Scott’s new self-titled book will delight: It’s a poppy visual record of the Moschino designer’s odyssey from Missouri farm boy to toast of Milan, illustrated with bold images by Mario Testino, David �LaChapelle, and Inez & Vinoodh�not to mention appearances from every single one of Scott’s many celebrity friends.
Rizzoli

Classical Music
20. Hear Simone Dinnerstein
Pensive pianist
The midwinter weeks of sing-alongs and carol�fests do not at first seem like an ideal time for a concert by a pianist who makes the inner workings of her brain audible in real time. But Dinnerstein takes a contemplative approach to the season, garnishing Schubert’s late, profound B-flat sonata with the subtle hues of Debussy, Poulenc, and George Crumb’s Renaissance-tinged A Little Suite for Christmas. —J.D.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, December 20

Theater
21. & 22. Listen to Into the Woods and The Last Ship
Cast albums by Sondheim and Sting
The Broadway production of The Last Ship has a garbled book, but there’s much to like in Sting’s North Country stompalicious score, and the original cast album includes an additional track of the songwriter himself singing �What Say You, Meg?,� one of the show’s loveliest numbers. Meanwhile, Disney is releasing the soundtrack of Into the Woods before the movie goes wide. Jump-start the argument over Sondheim’s brilliant, intricate score and whether it was well served/mangled by the adaptation.—J.G.
Disney and Universal

Books
23. Read Essays After Eighty
Like a fine wine
�Poetry abandoned me,� writes former U.S. poet laureate Donald Hall in the second of these astringent and vivid essays; the �blast of hormones� required for the �imagination and tongue-sweetness� of verse vanished at 85. But Hall’s prose has stayed strong, deep into a stage of life so rarely documented in a graying nation fixated on youth. Having become only more himself�impressively bearded, sedentary, sparing of action and word�Hall ponders the seasons, smoking, divorce, mourning, and death in language as laconic as his poems. —B.K.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Pop
24. See Diplo and Skrillex
Midnight madness
If bass drops rather than ball drops are your preferred way to ring in 2015, head to the Garden for Diplo’s dancehall-influenced bangers and Skrillex’s dubstep wallop. This could be the most visceral party of both this year and next.
Madison Square Garden, December 31

Art
25. See Drawings From Many Worlds
An outsider who should be an insider
With this debut solo show, a star is born in New Zealander Susan Te Kahurangi King. Her tightly knit, meticulously rendered, webbed, and woven multicolored drawings are finely composed fields of cartoony characters, slopping abstract spaces that pour from one side of the paper into piles of figures that turn into strange landscapes of the mind. —J.S.
Andrew Edlin Gallery, through December 20