TV
1. Watch The 67th Grammy Awards
Music’s biggest night.
CBS, February 2.
The awards show’s broadcast, which is set to take place at the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles, faces more uncertainty than usual this year owing to the fires. What we know for sure: Trevor Noah returns as host, and Beyoncé has the most nominations of any artist (11) and will likely come away with a few more statuettes to add to her record (she’s got 32 so far, more than any other Grammy winner in history). — Jen Chaney
Movies
2. See No Other Land
Essential viewing.
Film Forum, January 31.
This riveting, award-winning documentary, made by an Israeli-Palestinian collective, about the yearslong dismantling of several West Bank villages by the occupying IDF, was the toast of the festival circuit for most of 2024. Now, it’s finally getting a proper theatrical release.— Bilge Ebiri
Music
3. Listen to Showbiz!
Aqueous beats.
10k, January 31.
Tristate-area rapper and producer MIKE mixes heady flows and intoxicatingly sample-based sound design on this new album, where lyrics about overcoming setbacks blend in tracks such as “You’re the Only One Watching.” — Craig Jenkins
TV
4. Watch Newtopia
Love in the time of zombies.
Prime Video, February 7.
For all those who watched Train to Busan and thought, What if there were more romance? or Warm Bodies and wondered, What if the action scenes were gnarlier? there’s Newtopia. The South Korean dark comedy walks a genre fine line, following a broken-up couple trying to navigate a zombie outbreak. Whether they find their way back to each other is the question in this Seoul-set series. — Roxana Hadadi
Art
5. See Isabelle Brourman
A graphic master.
Will Shott, 17 Pike Street; through February 23.
Isabelle Brourman is a shape-shifting magician with an impeccable sense of color. Following in the tradition of courtroom artists, she has witnessed every minute of the Trump trials in New York. Invited to Mar-a-Lago to paint Trump for this magazine, Brourman channeled the schizoid personality, animal instinct, and rampant opportunism of our own Ahab president. Her art is of our age of limbo. — Jerry Saltz
Music
6. Hear The “Kaddish” Symphony
A monument of mourning.
Carnegie Hall, January 29.
James Conlon leads the Orchestra of St. Luke’s in the Leonard Bernstein symphony that commemorated JFK’s assassination. Now, it’s serving to mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The historical past meets present drama: This performance’s narrator, Judith Piser, is both the widow of Samuel Piser, the Holocaust survivor who revised the text, and the mother of former secretary of State Antony Blinken. — Justin Davidson
Movies
7. See Titicut Follies
The ugly truth.
Lincoln Center, January 31 and February 2.
A Frederick Wiseman retrospective opens with the legendary documentarian’s 1967 debut, which depicted the deplorable conditions at Bridgewater State Hospital and led the State of Massachusetts to have the film banned for decades in what was claimed to be an attempt to protect the dignity of the inmates but looked a lot like a cover-up. — Alison Willmore
Theater
8. See Urinetown
It’s a privilege to pee.
New York City Center, February 5 through 16.
The Encores! program is moving into the aughts with a revival of Greg Kotis and Mark Hollmann’s scatalogical satire set in a water-poor dystopia where oligarchs control the bathrooms. The starry cast includes Rainn Wilson, Jordan Fisher, and Keala Settle.— Jackson McHenry
TV
9. Watch Paradise
Quick, before it gets spoiled!
Hulu, January 28.
A new drama with a nondescript name starring Sterling K. Brown, James Marsden, and Julianne Nicholson may seem relatively rote, especially given a ho-hum description about “prominent individuals in a peaceful community being shocked by murder.” But this is a Dan Fogelman show, so the thing you think is the premise is actually not. Prepare for a twist. — Kathryn VanArendonk
Video Games
10. Play Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
Bohemian rhapsody.
Warhorse Studios and Deep Silver, February 4.
Ever wanted to bump around in vividly realized Central Bohemia, a region within the modern-day Czech Republic, as you agitate against the Holy Roman emperor? Well, now you can. Grab your horse. — Nicholas Quah
Movies
11. See Armand
“What has he done now?”
In select theaters February 7.
The Worst Person in the World star Renate Reinsve, fresh off a memorable turn in the dark comedy A Different Man, gets a terrific showcase in this Norway school drama about a tempestuous single mother called in concerning a fight her 6-year-old allegedly had with a classmate. — A.W.
Music
12. Hear Blue Heron
Medieval bangers.
Saint Ignatius of Antioch, February 2.
The secular tune “L’Homme Armé” was as inescapable in 15th-century France as Taylor Swift’s “Cruel Summer” is today, so popular that church composers used it as the foundation of more than 40 masses. The Boston-based choral ensemble Blue Heron performs Johannes Regis’s contrapuntal blockbuster. — J.D.
Theater
13. See Liberation
That ’70s play.
Roundabout Theatre, in previews January 31.
Bess Wohl is a playwright who can gently, humorously cut you to the quick. Her new play, directed by Whitney White, involves a group of women meeting in 1970 and one of their daughters probing the fallout 50 years later. Features Off Broadway regulars including Betsy Aidem, Susannah Flood, and Kristolyn Lloyd. — J.M.
TV
14. Watch Super Bowl LIX
Are you ready for some Kendrick?
Fox, February 9.
Don’t miss one of the few remaining mono-cultural events and the opportunity to come together over football, Buffalo wings, ludicrously expensive commercials, and Kendrick Lamar — this year’s halftime-show headliner — potentially slandering Drake on the highest-profile stage imaginable. America! — J.C.
Music
15. Hear Conrad Tao
Eclectic sets.
Zankel Hall, January 31.
You never quite know what you’re going to get with Tao, a pianist who likes to stir together incongruous musical ingredients — in this case his own music, Harold Arlen’s “Over the Rainbow” from The Wizard of Oz, two books of Debussy études, and a Schumann song arranged for a digital keyboard called the Lumatone. — J.D.
The 60-Second Book Excerpt
Reading the Waves: A Memoir
I was born cesarean. I have thought about that endlessly. What does it mean? Does it mean anything? Does it mean nothing? To be born cesarean means to be born extracted from the motherwaters. Her body sliced open to free you, the creature. I’ve constructed elaborate theories at different times in my life around my own birth — I have made intense fictions about how I think I missed something important by not fighting my way through water into and out of the birth canal. About how maybe I was lifted too soon from the lifewaters of the mothergut. Or about how I didn’t want to leave her body at all, and I was pulled out too soon and thrust into some fucked-up dimension that had nothing to do with me, life on land with humans. They say I resisted extraction. That I turned my stubborn little baby back and butt to them. They say when they rolled me over and pulled me out, my eyes were already wide open. Like I had my stink eye on them from the start.
(Riverhead, February 4.)
Movies
16. See Parthenope
The burden of being beautiful.
In theaters February 7.
Paolo Sorrentino, master Italian sensualist, follows the life of a transcendently beautiful woman who finds that the way people respond to her is more a curse than a blessing. Sorrentino’s flair for the absurd and the way he invests his symbols with unlikely emotion make this a keeper. — B.E.
Theater
17. See Dakar 2000
International meddling.
New York City Center, previews February 4.
In what seems to be a tale of Americans with good (or not so good) intentions abroad, a Peace Corps volunteer gets mixed up with a State Department operative in a new thriller by Rajiv Joseph, who’s plumped similar questions of empire in dramas like Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo. — J.M.
Music
18. Hear Anthony McGill and Emanuel Ax
A first-time matchup.
Zankel Hall, February 6.
Clarinetist Anthony McGill busts out of his spot in the center of the New York Philharmonic’s ranks and joins pianist Emanuel Ax for a recital that mixes Bernstein, Beethoven, and Schubert with music by a squad of Black composers: Jessie Montgomery, James Lee III, and Florence Price. — J.D.
TV
19. Watch Common Side Effects
Not a pharma commerical.
Adult Swim, February 2.
From a creative team with credits on Veep and King of the Hill comes an animated series about the discovery of a mushroom that can heal almost anything and the fight among those trying to gain control of it. The unsettling animation style in the mode of the canceled-too-soon Scavengers Reign is reason enough to watch. — R.H.
Movies
20. See The Little Girl Who Conquered Time
It’s relative — and malleable.
Japan Society, February 8 and 14.
Best known Stateside for his horror debut, House, Nobuhiko Obayashi went on to make a slate of ’80s coming-of-age films now being given a rare showcase. This one is the first of several big-screen adaptations of Yasutaka Tsutsui’s winsome sci-fi novel about a teenager who develops the ability to hop back and forth through time. — A.W.
Music
21. See Frank Black
Classics, live.
Brooklyn Steel, February 1.
Pixies front man and alt-rock godfather Frank Black performs his acclaimed 1994 sophomore solo album Teenager of the Year, home to gems like “Thalassocracy” and “Headache,” in full for a belated celebration of its 30th anniversary; sometime-collaborator Reid Paley opens. — C.J.
Art
22. See Al Freeman
Rapture-inducing sculpture.
Broadway, 375 Broadway; through February 1.
Al Freeman makes quasi-Cubist assemblages and constructions from vinyl. Funky, enlarged torn packages of Advil, loose change, sundry Goldfish crackers, and leaves are seen on cracks in an imaginary sidewalk or on cheap linoleum tiling. The effect is to strip you of pretense. Freeman works between sculpture and poetry. — J.S.
TV
23. Watch Scamanda
Sometimes you just want one of these.
ABC, January 30.
February is no one’s favorite month; why not double down on the darkness with a docuseries adaptation of the popular podcast about a woman who scammed her whole community by pretending to have cancer! — K.V.A.
Movies
24. See Marriage Story
Including that iconic fight scene.
Metrograph, February 1.
Despite the memes, Noah Baumbach’s masterpiece about divorce — one of the best-acted films of the past decade — sort of got lost amid all the big hitters of the 2020 Oscars. It may be a Netflix production, but it’s definitely worth seeing on the big screen where it belongs. — B.E.
Music
25. See Jack White
Solo and brilliant.
Kings Theatre, February 11; Brooklyn Paramount, February 12.
On the tour for the feisty, surprise-release No Name album, pull up for scorchers like the Motörhead-esque “Bombing Out” and keep fingers crossed for tracks from the White Stripes’ 2005 Get Behind Me Satan. — C.J.