Goings on
About Town

The American Conceptualist Lutz Bacher, who died in 2019, at the age of seventy-five, built a brilliant career from evasive, challenging gestures, including adopting her German, male-sounding pseudonym in the early seventies. (The artist never publicly revealed her identity.) A new show, “The Lee Harvey Oswald Interview,” at Galerie Buchholz...

John Cameron Mitchell will soon play Joe Exotic in a Peacock miniseries derived from the Netflix docu-hit “Tiger King.” But he’ll forever be known for his alter ego, Hedwig, the saucy Teutonic punk goddess with mangled genitalia and a bulging corn-colored wig. Mitchell based the character on a German...

Mysterious connections of political history and family drama are unfolded by the filmmaker Alan Berliner in “Intimate Stranger,” his 1991 personal documentary (streaming on the Criterion Channel starting Jan. 1). It tells the story of his maternal grandfather, Joseph Cassuto, a Jewish cotton dealer in Alexandria, Egypt, who worked with...

Some of the best things in life are not sought out but thrust upon us. Hungary, for instance, was introduced to coffee by way of its occupation by the Ottoman Empire. At Agi’s Counter, in Crown Heights, the chef Jeremy Salamon’s childhood memories of his grandmother sparked the...

Since the mid-two-thousands, the Miami rapper Rick Ross has established himself as a kingpin-like figure, first patterning his persona after the L.A. drug trafficker whose name he adopted and then evolving into a music mogul. In recent years, success has dulled Ross’s edge; his work has grown a...

Looking at the exhilarating hand-carved and dyed sculptures of Matthew Ronay at the Casey Kaplan gallery, I found myself thinking of octopuses—and not just because, under the American artist’s blade, wood can appear as undulant as a tentacle. The psychonautic ethnobotanist Terence McKenna championed cephalopods for the...

The premise of “Yellowjackets”—a new mystery series on Showtime—is “Lord of the Flies” meets riot grrrl meets the 1993 film “Alive.” A New Jersey high-school girls’ soccer team boards a private plane to the 1996 national championships and crash-lands in a remote forest in the Canadian...

In “Being the Ricardos,” Aaron Sorkin locates mighty currents of history and politics beneath the rippling surfaces of the seminal nineteen-fifties TV comedy series “I Love Lucy.” The drama involves the making of a single episode in the show’s second season, in 1952, as its two stars, Lucille Ball...

Sometimes, in New York City, a laundromat is a restaurant and a restaurant is a concept and a concept is a culinary playground in the shape of a chef residency. Such is the case with Fulgurances Laundromat, which is tucked into a refurbished laundromat in Greenpoint and features meals from...

In 2007, Robert Plant, the Led Zeppelin front man, and Alison Krauss, the decorated bluegrass singer, released the collaborative album “Raising Sand,” which not only defined a moment in modern roots music but won a Grammy for Album of the Year. More than a decade later, the two seemingly varying...

One of Robert Battle’s most significant acts as the director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre was to name Jamar Roberts as choreographer-in-residence just before the pandemic. Roberts, who joined the company in 2002, is a dancer of great power and stature, as well as surprising delicacy and vulnerability....

Bruno Dumont, who has been on a tear of uproarious and politically trenchant inventiveness since making the 2014 drama “Li’l Quinquin,” rips furiously into the Internet-juiced mediascape in his new film, “France” (opening in theatres on Dec. 10). The title refers both to the country and to a TV...

With the original Barbuto, Jonathan Waxman nailed the formula for a great neighborhood restaurant: cool location, lack of pretension, seasonal pastas, killer chicken. It opened in 2004, pre-meatpacking-district mania, on a quiet West Village corner below the photographer Fabrizio Ferri’s Industria studio—it didn’t hurt that models...

The plight of the Afghan civilians who helped U.S. forces during the past two decades—and were repaid with life-endangering apathy—dominated the headlines all too briefly earlier this year, as many Afghans scrambled to escape the country amid the war’s turbulent end. But Americans should...

Bathhouse, a ten-thousand-square-foot restaurant and underground spa that opened in Williamsburg in 2019, is not a Turkish hammam, a Russian banya, or a Korean jjimjilbang, though it integrates elements from all three. Jason Goodman, one of its founders, wanted to create a bath complex unconstrained by any particular tradition. He...

After a lengthy delay, the singer Bruno Mars and the drummer Anderson .Paak finally share their long-awaited collaborative album, “An Evening with Silk Sonic,” which finds comfort and warmth in the earnestness and fidelity of throwback soul. Originally conceived during the pandemic as a tonic for an extended period without...

Johannes Vermeer and the aerospace industry rarely come up in the same conversation. But they connect in the celestial sculptures of Helen Pashgian, who should be as acclaimed as James Turrell or Robert Irwin. All three artists were part of a loosely affiliated (and mostly male) group, based in L....

Going to therapy always involves some level of transference between the analyst and the analyzed, but it does not often become as toxic, let alone as criminal, as it does in “The Shrink Next Door,” a new AppleTV+ black comedy that covers thirty years of a disastrous relationship between a...

Mike Mills’s tender and turbulent new melodrama, “C’mon C’mon” (in theatrical release), amplifies its emotional power with a documentary current that runs throughout the action. When Viv (Gaby Hoffmann), a Los Angeles writer, has a family emergency, her brother, Johnny (Joaquin Phoenix), a New York radio producer,...

There’s something at once jovial and jarring about Soothr, the rare restaurant born in the age of COVID that has not only survived but thrived, by adjusting to the erratic rhythms of pandemic dining. Securing a table begins on the pavement, where patrons line up to flash proof of...