A documentary follows Benjamin Millepied’s brief, reformist stint as the head of the Paris Opera Ballet
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Gone is the series’ original vitality, replaced with predictable politeness.
This Frontline documentary looks at the deepening conflicts in American society from the Obama presidency to the election of Donald Trump.
In this revival of the 1971 play, a talentless songwriter considers trading in his life in Queens with a depressed wife for a shot at Hollywood with his gold-digging neighbor.
On its ambitious new album, the xx has created a vital, magnetic blend of electronica, balladry and pop.
A far cry from today’s scene, there once existed a New York art world marked by grit and character.
At 88, Hal Prince returns to direct a close recreation of the opera-house staging he originated.
A birthday, love triangles and a pistol drive the story in this updated ‘Platonov,’ starring Cate Blanchett in her Broadway debut.
A chance to explore the Wadsworth Atheneum’s rarely seen Japanese holdings, including a wall-size ukiyo-e painting exhibited only once before at the museum.
The first major survey of Degas in nearly 30 years tries to give shape to an artist notoriously hard to define.
Though he couldn’t play a note, Mr. Hentoff made indispensable contributions to jazz.
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In his ‘In a Station of the Metro,’ Ezra Pound tried to change the way poetry worked.
This world premiere tells the story of the Dutch-born exotic dancer and courtesan who was executed as a spy by the French in 1917.
Kim Allen Kluge and Kathryn Kluge’s score may have been ruled ineligible for an Oscar, but it is an important part of Martin Scorsese’s new film.
A selection of the artist’s earliest works presages how the painter would master the play of light in his later career.
Largely forgotten by the time of his death in 1950, Chareau was a master of contrast, taking the cold hardware of industrial modernism and combining it with velvety textiles, alabaster light fixtures and exotic woods.
Having written for and performed with some of the biggest names in country, Natalie Hemby is releasing her own album.
The story of timekeeping’s evolution—from disparate calendars to more standardized waterclocks—in the ancient world.
There were New Year’s Eve fireworks of a different kind in this production of Charles Gounod’s opera at the Met.
In a musical landscape as diverse as the one in 2016, the biggest commonality was noteworthy artistry and technical expertise.
Used to a nomadic existence thanks to his lengthy touring schedule, Simon Green—working under the Bonobo name—considers what it means to be settled..
The multimedia artist’s respect for European music and art shines through in this tightly focused midcareer retrospective that mixes absurdity, warmth and melancholy.
Jazz musicians are returning to the hybrid style, putting their own twists on the 1970s genre in records with crossover appeal.
How Jasper Johns drew from the work of Edvard Munch to push his own art forward.
Previously unreleased live recordings of two jazz titans are charged with intimate immediacy.
Before he was a titan of color theory, Albers explored people and the passage of time in his photographic experiments.
A contemporary of Rodin and a fellow pioneer of the modern movement, Rosso combined sculpture’s solidity with painting’s evanescent illusionism.
History, politics, art and, of course, religion are explored in an illuminating exhibition.
Exhibitions celebrate the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther nailing his 95 Theses to a church door in Wittenberg.
Day for Night offered its own take on presenting contemporary music and featured acts like Björk, Run the Jewels and Aphex Twin.
Tchaikovsky’s Christmas classic gets a Chicago-centric staging from Christopher Wheeldon.
Performances at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the Met Fifth Avenue continue to explore the potential of staging opera in new contexts.
The country star’s double album fits her image as both an arena-filling rock girl and a subtle, experienced singer-songwriter.
Both bold innovation and thoughtful renovation defined the year in architecture.
Despite the deaths of iconic artists, there remains an abundant supply of good music.
Yale’s natural history museum is unique in the field, a point the trove of objects in its anniversary exhibition drives home
Emiliana Torrini teams with the Colorist to reinvent her own songs—and create a couple of new ones.
An exhibition at the Museum of World War II commemorates the 75th anniversary of the attack and humanizes a larger-than-life historic event.
On the anniversary of the composer’s death, a massive collection spanning 240 hours, 4,000 tracks and 200 CDs offers all of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s known works.
An overlooked modernist sculptor from the West Coast scene gets her moment at the Crocker Art Museum.
A five-decade sampling from an iconic minimalist dancemaker
The affecting story of a troubadour who sends his music across the Mediterranean to his lover is only the second opera by a female composer to play the Met.
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The 1993 coming-of-age movie directed by Robert De Niro is now a Broadway musical
Fond of self-portraits, he was a painter who shifted from acclaimed German modernist to an exile and then to a hopeful émigré.
In London, a larger and more ambitious Design Museum
An exhibition at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery explores the work of Napoleon’s architect.
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An ambitious exhibition explores contemporary art’s relation to cinema.
The artist who spent his life continually reinventing himself while thumbing his nose at tradition defies definition to this day.
Musicians should stop covering ‘Fever,’ the 60-year-old song made famous by Peggy Lee.
The world premiere of Christopher Rouse’s ‘Organ Concerto’ also celebrated the 10th anniversary of Philadelphia Orchestra’s prized organ.
Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra fights for the environment on a new recording.
Three albums from rising roots stars that deserve a listen
The National Music Centre in Calgary is part hall of fame and musical-instrument collection, part recording studio and performance space.
The influential hip-hop group’s final album has all the punch of their earlier work.
One of the greatest songwriters of the folk-rock era died just weeks after releasing his final album.
Renovations stay true to monumental modernism.
Actress-turned-MP Glenda Jackson returns to the stage.
A look at the musical impact of Ray Conniff 100 years after his birth.
The Uffizi Gallery hopes its changes will provide a better visiting experience for tourists and connoisseurs alike.
The collectors have a reputation for getting the finest iteration of each particular image they acquire.
Two recordings offer new sounds coming from big bands.
Political upheavals paralleled bursts of artistic progress.
Bootlegs reveal the inner workings of Miles Davis’s creative process.
In her first full-length album in four years, the singer’s eagerness to experiment shows that she’s still determined to grow.
Looking back at a natural disaster that devastated Florence
A theater company tries to be fashionable—and pays the price.
Giving visibility to a vastly under-represented group in the history of Western painting.
A mixed bill from the Mark Morris Dance Group and an all-male troupe’s intense costuming make for striking encounters.
Howard Fishman’s new musical drama, ‘A Star Has Burnt My Eye,’ takes inspiration from Connie Converse’s life and music.
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The sculptor’s ‘Penitent Magdalene’ is surrounded by a sense of timelessness.
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Piet Mondrian’s ‘Composition in Black and Gray’ finds the spiritual in the abstract.
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The piano piece by Ferruccio Busoni is the ultimate statement of the Romantic concerto.
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‘Brighton Rock,’ Graham Greene’s first Catholic novel, rejects absolutes.
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Among the structure’s many oddities is a Renaissance church built in the middle of the mosque’s prayer hall
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Erich von Stroheim’s 1924 silent ‘Greed’ raises the question of whether genius can come from many hands.
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Constantin Brancusi’s sculptures at Târgu Jiu create a complex of abstract forms and spirituality
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George Caleb Bingham’s ‘Lighter Relieving a Steamboat Aground’ was a response to what he saw as the halting of commercial progress.
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Pablo Picasso never sold ‘Crucifixion’ (1930), proving that even though he declared himself an atheist he couldn’t escape his religion.
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Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’ is a poem that’s loved for the wrong reasons.
This year, the most compelling productions were off-Broadway and out-of-town.
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Its status as Broadway’s first a cappella musical is the only original note in this second-hand confection.
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The New York Theater Workshop’s production, starring Daniel Craig and David Oyelowo, reduces Shakespeare’s portrait of the human soul in extremis to an off-the-rack buddy flick.
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An Egyptian orchestra’s fumbles in Israel propel this big-hearted, small-scale musical.
A shy nerd finds sudden popularity thanks to a lie in a Broadway musical that lives up to the buzz.
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A scaled-down revival of ‘Sweet Charity’ has a new authority and immediacy.
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Electro pop helps untangle a knotty Russian tale
A drastically tightened version of the story about a biracial community of sharecroppers who thwart a racist senator fixes many of the problems that plagued the original.
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Christopher Hampton’s theatrical adaptation of the epistolary novel about a pair of high-born immoralists returns to Broadway.
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Lynn Nottage shows what it feels like to be unemployed in a dying factory town in her play about striking union workers struggling with a shifting economic landscape.
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The William Finn-James Lapine musical about a father who leaves his wife for another man lacks the same sizzle it did decades ago.
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After spying on the Nazis as a teenager, a woman struggles to find excitement as an adult in this David Hare play.
Nathan Lane is the second-act saving grace of this toothless revival of the classic newspaper comedy.
Mike Bartlett skewers baby boomers in the best stage comedy since ‘The Real Thing.’
A master of groundbreaking comedy reflects on television, bigotry and what to value in life
Slang, progressive politics and noisy acting are just a few of the problems that plague this revival.
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A revival of Horton Foote’s triptych of intertwined one-act plays about the melancholy that pierces the souls of women who can’t go home again.
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An under-appreciated Bernstein musical about two small-town girls who discover the magic of Manhattan
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A synthetic take on the beloved 1942 Bing Crosby-Fred Astaire film
How three black women in the segregated South helped put a man into orbit
A father, a daughter and the father’s alter ego figure in Maren Ade’s German-language comedy, which is outlandishly funny and improbably moving
Ben Affleck’s prohibition-era gangster film is a technically proficient effort in which feeling is forgotten
Mike Mills’s comedy, set in 1979, follows a diverse group of family and friends in a story about coming of age and coming into feminist awareness.
The six-film collection, recently released by the Criterion Collection, follows a shogunate executioner and his toddler son who roam the countryside, leaving destruction in their wake.
Damien Chazelle’s “La La Land” and a handful of other films lit up an otherwise unremarkable year.
A collection of largely forgotten movies made by black filmmakers for black audiences, from the silent era till after World War II.
Martin Scorsese’s film follows two Portuguese Jesuit missionaries who travel to Japan in the 17th century.
A sagacious monster helps a sleeping boy with his waking-life nightmares.
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After awakening early from hibernation on an intergalactic journey, two passengers have the ship to themselves.
Pedro Almodóvar’s film, based on stories by Alice Munro, reflects on fate, generation gaps, and a mother’s quest to find her daughter.
A dramatization of the Boston Marathon bombing depends on an unusual density of detail
Denzel Washington and Viola Davis star in August Wilson’s play about the struggles of a black family in 1950s Pittsburgh
Pablo Larraín’s film follows a Pablo Neruda on the run from a cop who might be an invention of his literary mind
Will Smith plays a devastated father who corresponds with Love, Time and Death
Joe Morgenstern reviews the latest entry in the “Star Wars” universe, which follows the rebel forces on a mission to steal the plans for the planet-destroying machine.
Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling star in a joyous musical that evokes Hollywood’s golden age.
Natalie Portman stars as Jacqueline Kennedy in the period during and after her husband’s assassination.
Recently freed from many of life’s responsibilities, a still-vital philosopher confronts her future.
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An Indian boy adopted by a Tasmanian couple uses Google Maps to discover who he is and where he’s from.
A trove of primary sources sheds new light on the attack and the country’s response to the outbreak of war.
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A 16-year-old princess must defy tradition by venturing beyond her island home of Motunui to save her people.
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In his first feature in 15 years, Warren Beatty plays a majestically eccentric Howard Hughes in midcentury Hollywood.
A janitor in New England suddenly finds himself responsible for his brother’s teenage son in Kenneth Lonergan’s stirring third feature.
Comfort meets comedic craziness as a family tries to get along during the holidays following their mother’s recent death
Amy Adams stars as a linguist confronted by an alien invasion in Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi thriller
A 13-year-old girl sets out to become the first female eagle hunter in 12 generations of her nomadic Kazakh family.
In this latest Marvel offering, Benedict Cumberbatch stars as a neurosurgeon whose injured hands prevent him from practicing.
Mel Gibson’s film about Desmond T. Doss, the first conscientious objector to receive the Medal of Honor, is a tale of patriotism and faith.
Jeff Nichols dramatizes the true-life story of an interracial couple who brought down America’s anti-miscegenation laws
Tom Hanks returns as symbologist Robert Langdon in a Dan Brown thriller about population problems, Dante and the World Health Organization.
A stirring documentary about the migrant crisis plays out on a Sicilian island just 70 miles from North Africa
Werner Herzog’s new documentary looks at volcanoes in the places they loom largest and hottest.
Jûzô Itami’s 1985 Japanese-language comedy, one of the best films about food, gets a brilliant restoration
Tom Cruise stars as the nomadic ex-military hero in a sequel that turns on treason, murder and a paternity suit
Barry Jenkins has created a novelistic film about personal transfiguration and reinvention.
Little is as it initially seems in Park Chan-wook’s surprising tale set in colonial Korea
Based on the short stories of Maile Meloy, Kelly Reichardt’s film is built on some extraordinary performances
Ben Affleck plays an autistic numbers man who helps gangsters and terrorists cook their books
When a truck full of migrants trying to cross into the U.S. breaks down, a vigilante begins to kill them one by one
Nate Parker directs and stars in a film, surrounded by controversy, about Nat Turner and his 1831 rebellion.
Paula Hawkins’s best-selling psycho-thriller gets a big-screen treatment.
Puk Grasten’s haunting dramatization of Kitty Genovese’s murder offers a chance to once again reconsider her and the crime
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An HBO documentary about the recently deceased mother-daughter stars aims for fun but comes off as occasionally ghoulish.
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A reboot of the ’70s-’80s sitcom is filled with updated topical hooks, featuring a Cuban-American family headed by an ex-military matriarch.
A PBS profile of the director of such films as ‘12 Angry Men,’ ‘Dog Day Afternoon’ and ‘Network’
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Jonny Donahoe stars as a man who is compiling a list to remind his mother of everything that makes life worth living.
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A viewer’s guide to seasonal offerings.
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A dramatization of a young Barack Obama’s time in New York comes to Netflix.
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Benedict Cumberbatch, Sophie Okonedo and Tom Sturridge star in one of Shakespeare’s histories.
Spies and cults, politicians and predators brought drama to our screens this year.
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Patrick Creadon’s sports documentary revisits the heated 1988 meeting between Notre Dame and the University of Miami.
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The comedian plays arborist in this seasonal special on Adult Swim.
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‘Savage Kingdom,’ on Nat Geo WILD, is nature television as Shakespearean drama.
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A documentary about transgender persecution raises more questions than it answers.
The fourth season of the addictive drama about an upper-class Australian family.
Lucy Maud Montgomery’s classic novel gets a new screen treatment starring Ella Ballentine, Sara Botsford and Martin Sheen
On the 75th anniversary of the attacks, PBS looks at one of the doomed ships
Imelda Staunton stars as the overbearing Mama Rose in this 2015 London production of the 1959 musical.
A high-drama series on life among the Windsors
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The comedian returns with a new sketch show filled with all the absurdity and hilarity for which viewers remember her.
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A mother abandons impoverished widowhood in 1935 Britain for impoverished widowhood in Corfu.
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Both filmmaker and activist put themselves in harms way in this nerve-racking documentary about government-abetted child rape in China.
Sarah Jessica Parker stars in a dark comedy about marriage and its dissolution
In a land of oversize houses and underweight women, one mother pushes back
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