Goings on
About Town

The alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins’s second album, “The 7th Hand,” seeks Providence; the record, which he also produced, attempts to define the role that spirituality plays in Black rituals. Wilkins, who started performing the sax in church at the age of four, tried to manifest the materiality of Black...

Jack Shear—a photographer and a curator for whom connoisseurship is an art form in its own right—began collecting drawings in 2015, following the death of his husband, the unrivalled American painter Ellsworth Kelly. At a moment when so many adviser-dependent collectors rely on their ears, Shear...

Forget the soot-colored tabletop grill, the monotonous assault of appetizers, the insistent trail of meaty smoke of a typical Korean barbecue restaurant—as soon as you enter Jua’s dim, opulent interior, it’s clear that this is not that sort of place. With its high ceilings, polished concrete,...

I’m always amused by the description of film, in the context of art, as a “time-based medium,” as if painting and sculpture don’t require sustained attention. Rachel Rose, one of the brightest young artists working today, uses time as both a subject and a material throughout her dazzling,...

The Canadian Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq is among the most vocal advocates of Indigenous restoration, performing in one of her culture’s most visceral styles. Her new album, “Tongues,” which pulls poems from her 2018 magical-realist memoir, “Split Tooth,” bridges the reflexiveness of the chantlike form with more narrative...

It’s no secret that American elementary schools are in crisis: COVID-19 is spreading in classrooms, teachers’ unions are fighting for better protections, and students and staff are deeply burned out. But out of crisis comes comedy; at least, that is the approach the writer and comedian Quinta Brunson...

Sometimes innovations come from insiders who toil for years at their craft. And sometimes an untrained outsider, oblivious to the rules, tries something totally bananas, and it works. Such is the story of Chocobar Cortés, a self-styled “Caribbean chocolate restaurant,” in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico, that just opened an...

There are so many shows—and streaming services on which to watch them—that it is easy to overlook a true gem. But they are out there, glittering among the schlock, waiting to be discovered. Now is as good a time as any to hit play on the...

The celebrated touch that made the Berlin-born director Ernst Lubitsch the blithe poet of shivery desire takes on a macabre tone in the silent melodrama “Three Women,” one of his first Hollywood films, from 1924. (It’s streaming, in a sharp new restoration, on Kino Now.) This tale of the...

At most sushi restaurants, when you’re enjoying an omakase meal for which you’re soon going to pay a large sum of money, you don’t expect to hear phrases like “striped bass from a hydroponic farm in Bushwick,” “sake brewed in Industry City,” or “soy sauce made by...

The streaming service MUBI is a virtual repertory cinema, adding a movie each day alongside ongoing series. The January offerings include notable first features (Janicza Bravo’s “Lemon,” Noah Baumbach’s “Kicking & Screaming”), the new release of the 2020 documentary “There Will Be No More Night,” and a tribute...

Last summer, the journalist, author, and self-proclaimed “insufferable gossip” Kelsey McKinney wrote an Op-Ed for the Times with the headline “Gossip Is Not a Sin.” In the piece, McKinney grappled with her conservative Christian upbringing and with the way that her church leaders demonized gossiping as an onanistic and shameful...

In his decade-long career as the Weeknd, the singer Abel Tesfaye has evolved from faceless art-house R. & B. enigma into a bona-fide pop star and a Super Bowl act. The reaches of his music have expanded, too, both sonically and conceptually. His new album, “Dawn FM,” imagines purgatory as...

One of the first Mexican eateries in New York City opened in midtown in 1938. Its proprietor, Juvencio Maldonado, who had sailed over from the Yucatán Peninsula, called his place Xochitl, after an Aztec goddess. He patented a mechanical taco-shell fryer and printed a glossary of imported culinary terms for...

In 1900, when Joseph E. Yoakum was around nine years old, he ran away from home, in Missouri, and joined the circus, riding the rails around the U.S. (and, in his fantastical account, also visiting every continent but Antarctica). In 1917, he was drafted into the First World War...

If the idea of a “pandemic drama” makes you a bit queasy right now, nobody can blame you: it’s hard enough to live through one, let alone muster up the desire to consume fictional content about others doing the same. But don’t let the premise of HBO Max’...

One of the treasures of this year’s edition of the MOMA series “To Save and Project” (running Jan. 13 to Feb. 5) is a new restoration of “Blind Spot,” from 1981, the first feature by the German director Claudia von Alemann. It’s an intimate drama with a vast...

“This is bad to broadcast, but, for Hupo, COVID was at first a curse and then, well, an opportunity,” the thirty-one-year-old Jiawen Zhu said of the Sichuanese eatery he co-owns, which opened not long before the pandemic first besieged New York, in March, 2020. As many other Chinese restaurants shuttered,...

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...