Working the night shift solo.
Geffen Records, March 28.
The first album from Lucy Dacus since the world-beating 2023 Boygenius opus, The Record, for which she teamed with kindred folk-rock spirits Julien Baker and Phoebe Bridgers, is a quieter and more reflective affair, though fuzzy guitars and bubbly hooks do show their faces. —Craig Jenkins

Into the deeps.
Vivian Beaumont Theater, in previews March 27.
Amid a very crowded and very starry spring Broadway season, Lincoln Center Theater is putting a finely wrought chamber musical on its biggest stage. It’s based on the story of a Kentucky man who was trapped in a cave in the 1920s, sparking a national media circus. Book writer and director Tina Landau and composer Adam Guettel have been with the musical, whose haunting score welds neoclassical Broadway with bluegrass, since the mid-’90s. —Jackson McHenry

Professor Plum in the cinema with a dagger.
Metrograph, April 4 and 5.
Because everyone deserves to see Madeline Kahn say “Flames … flames on the side of my face” on the big screen. —Alison Willmore

Daily life, abstracted.
Peter Freeman, Inc., 140 Grand Street; through April 19.
The artist constructs dense layers of seen reality in this large show of recent paintings and drawings. Many focus on deceptively banal subjects, like views from under a table and the backs of women’s heads; in one painting of a tree that has lost a limb, we seem to witness levels of creation and destruction. At 79, Murphy is at the top of her considerable powers. —Jerry Saltz

A return of sorts.
Netflix, March 31.
Liz Garbus’s latest nonfiction show returns to the story on Lost Girls, her 2020 feature adapting Robert Kolker’s book about victims of the Gilgo Beach serial killer. A suspect was charged in 2023, and Garbus closes the loop with this striking docuseries. —Nicholas Quah

A blistering work of election fiction.
Simon & Schuster, April 8.
With Election Day impending, Mitch Caddo, an overconfident young law-school grad, questions his childhood friend’s ethics as president of a small tribal nation in Wisconsin. Jon Hickey’s debut novel, taking place over six days, has outsize resonance with our broader political scene. —Emma Alpern

Hot doctors in the hallways.
Netflix, April 3.
This is not the best new medical drama by any stretch, but it has hot people running around a hospital worrying about their interpersonal dramas. If that plus a badly CGI’d hurricane sounds like just the weekend ticket, this will get the job done. —Kathryn VanArendonk

Watch out for Mack the Knife.
BAM, April 3 through 6.
Director Barrie Kosky, ubiquitous in Europe, is a rare presence here. So when the Berliner Ensemble brings the Brecht-Weill classic for a quick stop in Brooklyn, the show will serve as a reminder of what local audiences are missing: the work of an inventive theatrical mind. —Justin Davidson

Cosmic clatter.
Matador Records, March 28.
With producer Blake Mills in tow, the seventh studio album from the Seattle-area singer-songwriter known as Perfume Genius pokes around a plethora of moods and subgenres, from the hushed and anxious “Capezio” to the clattering, cosmic “No Front Teeth” and “Clean Heart.” —C.J.

Pierce Brosnan is perfect in this.
Paramount+, March 30.
A Guy Ritchie show about British gangsters — in our troubled times, we need consistency! Former Bond Brosnan goes dark as the patriarch of an organized-crime family co-led by his wife (Helen Mirren) and enforced by his right hand (Tom Hardy). Explosions, gunshots, car chases, a Rolling Stones needle drop — you get the idea. —Roxana Hadadi

Don’t mess with cats.
New Hampshire Public Radio.
A 19-year-old cat goes missing from the streets of Manchester, New Hampshire. This seemingly ordinary disappearance ends up yielding a strange, revealing story. —N.Q.

Ascend the Ivory tower.
The Paris Theater, April 2 and 9.
We’re all back onboard with Hugh Grant, so it’s a good time to feed the flames of that crush with a screening of James Ivory’s 1987 E. M. Forster adaptation, in which Grant and James Wilby fall in forbidden love at Cambridge. The 96-year-old Ivory will be at the Paris for a conversation with Passages director Ira Sachs on April 2. —A.W.

Double up.
Zankel Hall, April 4.
In Schubert’s song “Der Doppelgänger,” a man — maybe grieving or dead — encounters his anguished alter ego. The Danes have arranged that for string quartet, an ensemble of uncanny symmetries, and matched Schubert’s music to that of latter-day kindred spirit Bent Sørensen. —J.D.

What a concept.
New York City Center, March 26 through 30.
Often described as the original concept musical, a genre that would swell to the likes of Cabaret and Company, Love Life is the kind of influential oddity City Center’s Encores! program excels at dusting off. The piece, first performed back in 1948, follows a married couple who don’t age as they traverse time from 1791 to the present and has intrusions of vaudeville between the scenes. —J.M.

Feel the love.
Interscope Records, April 4.
After collaborating on songs for 2021’s The Lockdown Sessions and a 2024 Disney+ documentary, Rocketman Elton John and Pacific Northwest Americana luminary Brandi Carlile team up again for this full-length album, heralded by the slow-burning title track and the strutting, rootsy “Swing for the Fences.” —C.J.

Pals and confidants.
Hulu, March 28.
Another of 2025’s entries in the category known as “What if streaming tried to make shows like network television?,” this is a Golden Girls–style sitcom about three older gay men who become Palm Springs roommates. It’s got Matt Bomer, Nathan Lane, Nathan Lee Graham, and Linda Lavin in one of her last roles. It’s created by Will & Grace alums. It’s a multi-cam! Maybe what’s old is new again? —K.V.A.

Aaron Gilbert
Peering into other people’s lives.
Gladstone Gallery, 515 West 24th Street; through April 19.
This exhibition of 11 paintings is a revelation of vision, chops, a muted sense of dusky color, and smooth, frescolike surfaces. A man sits up in his hospital bed; a woman cradles a child in her lap; a hole in a wall shows a glimpse of a convenience store. The mystery, dignity, and pathos built into these works is gripping. Gilbert should be in the next Whitney Biennial. —J.S.

TV
19. Watch The Bondsman
Like a Taylor Sheridan–Constantine cross.
Prime Video, April 3.
Kevin Bacon plays the titular bounty hunter who is brought back from the dead to track down demons for the Devil. His extremely dry affect as Hub Halloran looks like it will be a fun counter to the series’ goofy touches, like the Devil communicating via fax and Hub pursuing a country music career. —R.H.

Books
20. See Lynne Tillman
Sure to be a (literary) scene.
The Parkside Lounge, 317 East Houston Street; March 30.
To celebrate Thrilled to Deat h, a collection of stories from the early ’90s through today, the essential critic and writer Tillman is holding a reading at this Lower East Side dive. Themes will include “sex, death, memory, and anxiety.” —E.A.

Music
21. Listen to Only Dust Remains
It’s heavy.
Ugly Hag, March 28.
Backxwash is a razor-sharp Polaris Music Prize–winning rapper and producer from Montreal by way of Zambia whose work reinforces the ties uniting hip-hop and industrial metal. Her new album ponders mortality across the ominous but rousing “WAKE UP” and “9th Heaven.” —C.J.

Theater
22. See Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp.
Putting it together.
The Public Theater, in previews April 3.
A series of short works from Caryl Churchill comes, finally, in person to America after 2019’s London premiere of three of its four parts. Churchill, a relentless experimentalist, has written a quartet of pieces that deal with a girl made of glass, the gods of Olympus, a grieving man, and an elderly woman who has an imp in a bottle. James Macdonald, a Churchill regular, directs a cast that includes downtown treasure Deirdre O’Connell. —J.M.

Movie
23. See Princess Mononoke
A new 4K restoration unclouded by hate.
In theaters March 26.
A war between polluting humans and incandescent forest gods never looked so pretty. Animation master Hayao Miyazaki’s lush (at times head-chopping) film is in Imax for the first time as the real world burns. —Eric Vilas-Boas

Classical
24. Hear New York Philharmonic
All conducted by Jakub Hrusa.
Geffen Hall, April 9 through 11.
In 2020, the Philharmonic launched Project 19, commissioning 19 works by women composers to honor the 19th Amendment. That initiative continues to pay dividends with the world premiere of Jessie Montgomery’s “Chemiluminescence” in a program that includes Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto and Brahms’s First Symphony. —J.D.

Movie
25. See Paris, 13th District
Love hurts, but just a little.
L’Alliance New York, March 30.
As part of its comics festival, L’Alliance New York has brought cartoonist Adrian Tomine in for a screening of and conversation about Jacques Audiard’s 2021 romantic drama about a cascading series of misadventures in love, all based on Tomine’s drawings. —A.W.