The holiday blitz seems to be creeping up earlier every year—and there’s plenty of cheer to go around at venues across the city in the next couple of months. (We see you, “A Kidman Carol.”) But winter is also a time to settle in for serious entertainment. Big theatre stars mix with big movie stars on the boards—including Adrienne Warren in a reimagining of Douglas Sirk’s “Imitation of Life,” from Lynn Nottage and John Legend, plus Paul Rudd and Julia Roberts in a gem of a play by Bess Wohl (“Liberation”). In the art world, the eternal, ever-new project of rethinking the past continues with an exhibition at the Met which considers the vast influences on ancient Greek art; New York City Ballet brings us a fresh look at Shakespeare’s most tragic romance. Stevie Wonder graces us with a performance of the still ground-shaking sounds of his landmark album from 1976. Claire Chase has a new installment of her quarter-century-long flute project.

The movie studios save many of what they believe to be their most Oscar-worthy films for a late-year release, and this time the lineup shimmers with what promise to be riveting turns from Julianne Moore, Miles Teller, and Andrew Scott—and perhaps even from Brad Pitt, in a reunion with the director David Fincher, for a sequel, on IMAX only (at least at first), to Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood.” If all you really want is to curl up under a weighted blanket at home, there’s plenty to catch on the small screen, too, including an ambitious William Gibson adaptation, a return of the “Parks and Recreation” duo Mike Schur and Amy Poehler, and a new rom-com starring Ayo Edebiri, some very good excuses to hibernate.—Shauna Lyon

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Television

Illustrations by Guillaume Denaud

Tech-Bro Backlash, Amy Poehler

Tech billionaires are inescapable this season, as the backlash against Silicon Valley gains momentum not only in our politics but in our entertainment. The documentary “Elon,” the Sam Altman bio-pic “Artificial,” and the Facebook feature “The Social Reckoning” spotlight the bros, while the Elizabeth Holmes-centered “You Can See Every-thing” and the crypto-focussed “The Altruists” (Nov. 19) take on the bilkers. In the latter, Anthony Boyle and Julia Garner star as Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison, the romantically linked execs whose mismanagement of funds at the crypto exchange FTX led to an eight-billion-dollar hole in the company’s balance sheet.

Audiences seeking a more traditional love story will find it in the latest page-to-screen rendering of “Pride and Prejudice” (Dec. 3), one of several literary adaptations to début this winter. The Jane Austen drama, a six-part miniseries on Netflix, features Emma Corrin and Jack Lowden as pop culture’s most beloved enemies to lovers, and Olivia Colman as the silly Mrs. Bennet. Rose Byrne and Meghann Fahy star as two estranged sisters forced to revisit a violent turning point in their childhoods in Peacock’s “The Good Daughter” (Nov. 12), based on the novel by Karin Slaughter. Controversy is already dogging “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” (Dec. 25), HBO’s TV reboot of the Hogwarts franchise.

There are also less conventional picks for series adaptation. Jhumpa Lahiri’s best-selling short-story collection “Unaccustomed Earth” (Dec. 17), about first- and second-generation Indian Americans navigating cross-cultural dynamics, is the unlikely source material for a Netflix series. William Gibson’s landmark cyberpunk novel “Neuromancer,” from 1984—long considered “unfilmable” because of its virtual setting and its fragmented narration—will get its first screen adaptation (Jan. 22). Callum Turner stars in the dystopian Apple TV thriller as a traumatized superhacker named Case who partners with an assassin, played by Briana Middleton, to steal from a corporate dynasty; the title refers to an artificial intelligence that threatens to indefinitely trap Case in a comforting simulation.

Finally, in a comedy-starved television landscape, lighter fare offers some warmth in the coming months. More than a decade after the end of “Parks and Recreation,” Amy Poehler returns with “Dig” (Nov. 23), a Peacock sitcom about a team of archeologists in Greece whose latest discovery sets off a far-reaching plot; co-created by the “Parks” showrunner Mike Schur, it co-stars Hugh Laurie and Geraldine Viswanathan. A different set of brainiacs get themselves into trouble in “Prodigies” (Feb. 10), an Apple TV romantic comedy about two former wunderkinds, played by Will Sharpe and Ayo Edebiri, reëvaluating the relationship that they’ve been in since they were nine. Beneath all the precocity might be a more consoling idea: that falling short is its own kind of charm.—Inkoo Kang

The Theatre

Dolly’s Musical, a Rocking Galileo

As fall whirls into winter, bracing depictions of people accused of horrific crimes hit Broadway. Bruce Norris’s “Downstate” portrays convicted sex offenders (Booth; in previews); Tectonic Theatre Project’s documentary play “Here There Are Blueberries” examines Nazi life at Auschwitz during the Second World War (Barrymore; previews begin Nov. 2); and Suzie Miller’s “Inter Alia” examines the fallout of a rape accusation against a teen-ager whose mother is a criminal-court judge (Music Box; Nov. 10). In this dark wake come frothier crowd-pleasers, including the magic show “Now You See Me Live” (Hirschfeld; Nov. 11), inspired by the eponymous film franchise, and “Galileo” (Shubert; Nov. 10), a rock musical starring Raúl Esparza as everyone’s favorite anti-authority scientist. The latter is followed by two other bio-musicals: “Dolly,” for which Parton wrote new songs to accompany her standards (St. James; Dec. 7), and the West End transfer of Jamie Lloyd’s stripped-down “Evita” (Winter Garden; Feb. 27), the 1978 Andrew Lloyd Webber–Tim Rice megahit, with Rachel Zegler as Argentina’s galvanizing former First Lady.

There’s also such limited-run holiday fare as “It’s a Wonderful Life” (Broadhurst; Nov. 4), an adaptation of the Christmastime staple, with a cast featuring Andrew Rannells, Megan Hilty, and Tituss Burgess; and the Blue Man Group’s “A New Holiday Surprise” (Lunt-Fontanne; Nov. 12)—time will tell whether the surprise is that the troupe is painted red and green.

In the New Year, two star-powered solo shows spotlight moments from the past: in Jessica Dickey’s “The Amish Project,” Jonathan Groff plays several members of a rural Pennsylvania community coping with a 2006 school shooting (Broadhurst; Feb. 10), and Manfred Karge’s “Man to Man” sees Tilda Swinton reprise a role she originated in English, in 1987—a widow who begins passing as her dead husband in nineteen-thirties Germany (Lucille Lortel; Feb. 21). Clifford Odets’s 1935 “Awake and Sing!” (Friedman; Dec. 15) dramatizes the same period in New York, via a family of Jewish immigrants; this revival’s powerhouse cast includes Danny Burstein, Jessica Hecht, and Jeremy Shamos. The complexities of family life in early-twentieth-century N.Y.C. also shape “Imitation of Life” (the Shed; Nov. 21), a musical adaptation, by John Legend and Lynn Nottage, of the eponymous Fannie Hurst novel and Douglas Sirk film. It juxtaposes two single mothers, one Black and one white (Adrienne Warren and Jessica Vosk), each raising a daughter.

Winding the clock back further is a remounting of “Spring Awakening” (Studio Seaview; Nov. 27), about frisky teens bucking authority in an eighteen-nineties German town, with music by the late Duncan Sheik. Youthful passions also flummox the elders in “Dirty Dancing” (Horne; Feb. 12), a musicalization of the iconic eighties film. The script flips in Sarah Ruhl’s “Faydra” (New York City Center Stage 1; Feb. 2), a reimagining of the mythical princess (played by Julianne Moore) stricken with lust for her stepson-to-be. If only she could decompress at the silent meditation retreat in Bess Wohl’s “Small Mouth Sounds” (Barrymore; Feb. 18), getting a starry revival with Julia Roberts, Paul Rudd, Sarah Paulson, and Greta Lee.

Dominique Morisseau’s “Mix and Master” (Haimes; Jan. 5) has the all-too-rare distinction of being a new play on Broadway. It concerns a d.j. desperate to keep the Bronx’s last record store in business, and stars Kara Young and Ruben Santiago-Hudson. Cutting-edge works fill the Under the Radar festival (Jan. 6-24), including “Yoroboshi” (Japan Society; Jan. 14-16), a Japanese folktale retold through disturbing Barbie cosplay. The festival also hosts a second run of this fall’s “America, Who Hurt You?” (Public; Jan. 6), in which the Tony-winning Sarah Jones embodies nineteen characters to critique our “low-key mid-apocalyptic moment.”—Dan Stahl

Movies

Mrs. Dalloway, Narnia

Youth will be served in the season’s movies, as in “Club Kid” (opening Nov. 6), a comedy directed by and starring Jordan Firstman, in which a gay New York party promoter discovers that he fathered a son a decade ago and is given custody of the boy (played by Reggie Absolom). A teeming cast energizes Marine Atlan’s “La Gradiva” (Dec. 18), about a group of French high-school students on a field trip to Naples that exacerbates conflicts and identity crises. Yet old age, too, is a major subject of new releases, as in the octogenarian Mike Leigh’s “Tender Loving Care” (Dec. 4), which he says will be his last film, about a social worker who brings a colleague along on a visit to her elderly parents and finds them in physical decline. Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s “All of a Sudden” (Nov. 25) stars Virginie Efira as a manager of a French elder-care facility, whose new friendship with a visiting Japanese theatre director (Tao Okamoto) proves both personally and professionally rewarding.

Movies about movies are perennial enticements to filmmakers, as in “I Play Rocky” (Nov. 6), about the young Sylvester Stallone (Anthony Ippolito), a little-known actor whose signature screenplay nearly went unproduced because of his insistence on starring in the film. Quentin Tarantino wrote the script for “The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth” (Nov. 25), a sequel to his 2019 film “Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood,” but he didn’t direct the new installment; David Fincher did, and Brad Pitt returns as the titular stuntman, now working behind the scenes. Pedro Almodóvar’s “Bitter Christmas” (Nov. 13) is an intricate and passionate double melodrama, in which a 2004 tale of a filmmaker (Bárbara Lennie)—who’s written a script based on a friend’s life—is actually a movie by a current-day director (Leonardo Sbaraglia) who’s done the same thing.

Other forms of the art life figure prominently, as in “Everybody Digs Bill Evans” (Dec. 4), Grant Gee’s tightly targeted bio-pic of the jazz pianist (Anders Danielsen Lie), who, in 1961, paused his career after the sudden death of his trio’s bassist. Another bio-pic, “Elsinore” (Nov. 20), depicts the actor Ian Charleson (Andrew Scott) as he struggled to perform in a production of “Hamlet,” in 1989, while weakened by AIDS. Jesse Eisenberg wrote and directed “The Debut” (Dec. 11), in which Julianne Moore plays a community-theatre actress who approaches a bit part surprisingly earnestly. “Behemoth!” (Dec. 4), written and directed by Tony Gilroy, stars Pedro Pascal as a cellist returning to Los Angeles to care for his ailing mother (JoBeth Williams) and forced to confront his past. In Judd Apatow’s comedy “The Comeback King” (Feb. 5), Glen Powell plays a former country-music star who attempts to rebuild his life by pursuing a college degree.

The joys and troubles of family life get dramatic workouts all season, including in James Gray’s crime drama “Paper Tiger” (Nov. 13), set in Queens, in 1986, and starring Miles Teller as an environmental engineer whose business deal with his ex-cop brother (Adam Driver) embroils him in conflict with the Russian mob. The twin brothers Arie and Chuko Esiri directed “Clarissa” (Dec. 11), an adaptation, set in present-day Nigeria, of Virginia Woolf’s novel “Mrs. Dalloway,” starring Sophie Okonedo as the titular heroine, whose party preparations cause her to look back at her life choices; India Amarteifio plays the same character, in her youth, seen in flashbacks. In “Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew” (Feb. 12), Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of a 1955 novel by C. S. Lewis, a Victorian-era London boy (David McKenna) is tricked by his uncle (Daniel Craig) into entering a portal that sends him back a thousand years, to the first days of the magical world of Narnia.—Richard Brody

Art

Ancient Greece, Two Triennials

This winter in New York’s art world is, more than usual, a season of extremes: you can see works that are incredibly old and others that are brand new—and, of course, much in between. One end of the spectrum is represented by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Across Wine-Dark Seas: Art and Identity Beyond Ancient Greece” (opening Dec. 20). The exhibition aims to reconsider ancient Greek art by asking: Who were the Greeks interacting with as they sailed throughout the Mediterranean? How did they view those people, and how did those cultures influence them? If recent “Odyssey” mania was a bellwether, then this show of roughly a hundred and eighty objects, with sources including some twenty-nine international lenders, should be a hit.

Not as old but still classic is the Neue Galerie’s collection of twentieth-century Austrian and German art. The museum was closed all summer for renovation, and “25th Anniversary Exhibition: Masterworks from the Neue Galerie” (Nov. 12) marks its full reopening. A trip to the Neue is an experience of exquisite comfort: you can feast your eyes on works such as Gustav Klimt’s glittering “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I” (1907) and then treat yourself to a delicious tart at the museum’s Viennese-style café.

If novelty is more your thing, contemporary art is also on the menu. The Museum of the City of New York puts on “The Photography Triennial: After Dark” (Nov. 20). Last time, the focus was turned inward toward the home; this time, thirty-three artists train their lenses on New York City’s night life. A few months later, the New Museum opens “The Outside Expands” (Feb. 4), the sixth edition of its triennial, which spotlights early-career international artists. The show’s themes, listed in the press release, are impenetrably vague, but it should be eye-opening to see work by thirty-six up-and-coming artists, most of whom are exhibiting in a U.S. museum for the first time.

Two of the season’s most enticing exhibitions offer micro-histories of specific categories of art. MOMA PS1’s “Hard Art” (Nov. 5) traces Black abstract painting from 1969 to the present—a subject ripe for critical inquiry. It features still underappreciated artists from a pioneering generation alongside more contemporary practitioners, taking an expanded view of painting in the process. Meanwhile, the Whitney Museum is devoting an entire floor to digital art—a feat not often attempted at brick-and-mortar institutions. “Artport: A History of Internet Art” (Nov. 21) is a retrospective of the Whitney’s online gallery of the same name, which has featured more than a hundred commissions in the past twenty-five years. This exhibition includes multiple cohorts of practitioners who have navigated a field that remains marginalized by the mainstream art world.

Of course, no art season is complete without solo shows. The most substantial of these is “Jess: A Dialogue of Presences” (Feb. 19), a survey, at the Drawing Center, of the hermetic artist Jess Collins, who went only by his first name. The exhibition concentrates on his dizzyingly complex collages—which he called “paste-ups”—along with the community that he and his partner, the poet Robert Duncan, formed around their home, in San Francisco. Meanwhile, several museums are homing in on niche aspects of canonical artists’ careers. The Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum offers “Frederic Church in Jamaica” (Oct. 30), showcasing the artist’s rarely seen sketches from an 1865 trip to the Caribbean country; the Noguchi Museum’s “No Ordinary Light: Akari at 75” (Nov. 4) looks at the history of Isamu Noguchi’s once controversial, now beloved paper lamps; and the Morgan Library’s “William Blake: Paradise Lost” (Feb. 26) examines the influence that the poet John Milton had on the visionary artist.—Jillian Steinhauer

Dance

Nigerian Roots, “Romeo and Juliet”

The dancer-choreographer-actress Okwui Okpokwasili is a magnetic performer whose gravelly voice, challenging gaze, and physical intensity make it impossible to look away. Her recent work, of which “Adaku, part 2,” a collaboration with Peter Born, is the second installment, has turned to her prehistory: her family’s Nigerian roots, the slave trade, the rituals of survival and displacement experienced by African and African American women. Okpokwasili brings her piece—half mythology, half excavation—to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Nov. 11-15.

There is always a positive charge to Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre’s seasons at City Center (Dec. 2-Jan. 3). Who can resist “Revelations,” or “Cry,” Ailey’s tribute to Black womanhood? This year, the company adds a mood boost of a groovier sort—the former Ailey dancer Jamar Roberts’s “Power of Love,” set to the soulful, upbeat songs of Luther Vandross and made in collaboration with the Vandross estate. Later in the season, the Ailey dancers take on William Forsythe’s über-arch, technically dazzling “In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated,” originally made in 1987, for the Paris Opéra Ballet.

The dancer, choreographer, and recent MacArthur Fellow Shamel Pitts creates worlds of almost painful intimacy, in which arduous encounters leave his dancers raw, vulnerable, exhausted. (He danced for years for the choreographer Ohad Naharin, whose technique seems to turn his dances inside out.) A recent work, “Touch of RED,” locked two men in a battle that suggested violence, love, and the ecstatic release of club dancing. Pitts’s latest, with his company, TRIBE, “Marks of RED”—part of the new Lincoln Center Contemporary Dance Festival (Alice Tully Hall; Jan. 17-18)—is for a cast of six women. Pitts has described it as “primitive, wonderful, groovy, wild,” which also describes his over-all vibe.

There is an infinite appetite for balletic versions of “Romeo and Juliet,” driven by the headlong rush of its love story and the cinematic sweep of Sergei Prokofiev’s score. New York City Ballet, at the start of its winter season (David H. Koch Theatre; Jan. 19-Feb. 28), replaces its current, rather soulless production, by Peter Martins, with a poetic one by Alexei Ratmansky, in which the characters explode with life, and the streets of Verona erupt in kaleidoscopic formations. At the end of the season, Taylor Stanley, a dancer whose fluidity and delicacy have always set him apart, will give his farewell performance, which includes Jerome Robbins’s otherworldly “Opus 19/The Dreamer” and a new solo by Kyle Abraham.—Marina Harss

Contemporary Music

Stevie Wonder, Tyla, Olivia Rodrigo

The winter slate in contemporary music traces the many tendrils of modern rhythm and blues. The U.K. pop artist Jorja Smith veers from soft soul into club music (Kings Theatre; Nov. 21); the neo-soul singer Jamila Woods celebrates ten years since her début, “HEAVN” (Music Hall of Williamsburg; Nov. 22); and Victoria Monét upgrades to a stately, string-laden sound that honors her forebears (Infosys Theatre; Nov. 24). At Brooklyn Paramount, Nov. 28-29, the Afro-pop star Tyla synchs amapiano, a house music of South Africa, with American R. & B. And at Webster Hall, on Jan. 16, the Womack Sisters, birthright inheritors of soul tradition, carry a vintage sound into the future.

In jazz, the uprising of a boundary-testing vanguard continues. At Blue Note, the flutist, composer, and reputable utility player Elena Pinderhughes unveils her long-awaited solo début (Nov. 2-3), and the drummer Karriem Riggins partners up with the producer Liv.e for the genre-hopping project GENA (Dec. 7). The British quintet Ezra Collective (Webster Hall; Nov. 18) doubles down on its fusionist mission with “Here Because of Hope,” melding Afrobeat, reggae, and grime into a diasporic storytelling exercise. At the other end of the spectrum, the experimental saxophonist Josh Johnson (Public Records; Dec. 10) uses electronic effects to manipulate the sonic world of his instrument.

On Dec. 18, the Carnegie Hall “Perspectives” artist Esperanza Spalding puts on a multidisciplinary performance at the venue, analyzing the history and science of musical anthems. On Feb. 5, Zankel Hall hosts Caroline Shaw and the Attacca Quartet for Mendelssohn’s String Quintet No. 2 and original works sung by Shaw. Folk and country are headlined by first-rate singer-songwriters backing energized new albums. Julia Jacklin delves deeper into pop-rock for her pub-inspired LP, “The Gem” (Music Hall of Williamsburg, Nov. 18; Brooklyn Paramount, Nov. 19). At Irving Plaza, on Jan. 16, Jess Williamson sustains a career-redefining turn in support of “A Mile South of Heaven.” Meanwhile, the Americana iconoclast Rhiannon Giddens plays songs from “Hope Is the Thing with Feathers,” a new live-recorded work navigating community and tradition (Kings Theatre; Feb. 27).

The arenas program a multi-ethnic, genre-fluid coalition of young female stars. At Barclays Center: the Puerto Rican rapper Young Miko (Nov. 5), the effervescent pop-soul artist Jessie Reyez (Nov. 19), and Olivia Rodrigo with a ten-night residency (select nights Feb. 11-28). On Dec. 1, at Madison Square Garden, the shape-shifter Doja Cat concludes the world tour for her eighties-inspired album, “Vie.”

But the entire season is highlighted by the return of the icon Stevie Wonder, performing for the fiftieth anniversary of his classic 1976 album, “Songs in the Key of Life.” The LP, the last in a quick-fire series of Album of the Year Grammy winners for Wonder, remains among the most impressive creative and technical achievements in popular music. At Madison Square Garden (Nov. 19), the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer kicks off the American leg of his tour, playing the timeless double LP in full to commemorate its seismic legacy.—Sheldon Pearce

Classical Music

The Italian West, Songs for the Sea

The composer Annea Lockwood is only a bit younger than “Density 21.5”—the defining modernist flute miniature written by Edgard Varèse, in 1936. That piece marks the origin—and, in its centennial, the destination—of the flutist Claire Chase’s twenty-four-year-long commissioning program, Density 2036. Varèse’s piece is named for the density of platinum (in approximate grams per cubic centimetre). Lockwood, in contrast, has spent her life making music from more transient properties: the sounds of vibrating glass, of desiccating trees, of a burning piano. “Elwha!,” her contribution to Chase’s project, premières at the Kitchen (Dec. 11-12), with Chase playing flutes of seven kinds in concert with field recordings of Washington State’s Elwha River. Lockwood’s “Sound Map of the Columbia River,” created with the trumpeter Nate Wooley, will have its first performance two months later, at Roulette (Feb. 5).

Most composers settle for metaphor when conveying the elements. The Quince Ensemble sings a selection of water-themed polyphony at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin (Feb. 11). Britten’s Four Sea Interludes—even more aqueous, though only figuratively—open a New York Philharmonic program that also includes the Elgar Cello Concerto and the morbid song cycle of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 14 (David Geffen Hall; Jan. 21-26); the Chelsea Symphony also plays Britten’s suite, on Jan. 22 at the DiMenna Center, alongside Mendelssohn’s wave-running “Hebrides” Overture. At Carnegie Hall, the Cleveland Orchestra plays an all-Richard Strauss program, including his exquisite, anguished “Metamorphosen,” scored for twenty-three solo string players (Jan. 20); the Orchestra of St. Luke’s débuts Philip Glass’s Symphony No. 15 on his ninetieth birthday (Jan. 31); and the Vienna Philharmonic stacks Mahler’s Second, Fourth, and Ninth Symphonies (Feb. 26-28). Masaaki Suzuki conducts the Monteverdi Choir in Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion” on the same stage (Feb. 23). Through the wall at Zankel Hall, Decoda presents their version of Mahler’s “Songs of a Wayfarer,” along with pieces by Björk, Berio, and Viet Cuong (Jan. 28).

Philip Glass’s own ensemble gives a concert of his epochal “Einstein on the Beach” (Brooklyn Academy of Music; Nov. 19-21). The Poulenc Trio breathes life into the Morgan Library’s exhibition on ragtime with a selection of Joplin and Ellington (Feb. 24). Parlando, a chamber orchestra, presents Ginastera’s gaucho-inflected harp concerto (Kaufman Music Center; Dec. 4). For actual cowboys, head to the Metropolitan Opera, which opens a new staging of Puccini’s ebullient “La Fanciulla del West”—California gold miners and Wells Fargo agents can sing in Italian, too—on New Year’s Eve.—Fergus McIntosh

P.S. Good stuff on the internet:

An earlier version of this article inaccurately credited the composers of “Sound Map of the Columbia River.”