As the breeze cools down, the culture season heats up, with many new shows confronting our current moment, alongside escapist entertainments that may just help us forget. Social media and tech billionaires seem to be on artists’ minds, with a television reboot of “Carrie” for the Snapchat age; the playwright Anne Washburn’s take on a Texan TikToker; Alex Gibney’s documentary about a certain Tesla mogul; and Aaron Sorkin’s fictional uncovering of the dark underbelly of Facebook Likes. MOMA trains a lens on both the work and the relationship of Abstract Expressionism’s most famous couple; the Australian Ballet premières a dance about an Irish literary rapscallion; new-world boundary pushers Kim Gordon and Charli XCX grace the stage; the New York Philharmonic accompanies a scary Jordan Peele classic, just in time for Halloween.
Diverting delights also abound: Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson play versions of themselves on TV; Jocelyn Bioh’s Ghanaian boarding-school satire comes to Broadway; Tom Cruise stretches his comedy wings as a schlumpy Southern billionaire in a disaster movie by Alejandro González Iñárritu; the synth-pop queen Robyn brings catharsis to the stadium; Fall for Dance diversifies brilliantly (and, as ever, affordably); the art and accoutrements of Brancusi arrive from Paris; Steve Reich turns ninety. Enjoy our critics’ picks for what to see this fall, and start making plans.—Shauna Lyon
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In the trailer for the new Russell T. Davies drama “Tip Toe” (Oct. 2), a flamboyant gay elder sums up today’s social revanchism when he says, “I used to walk into a room and just go, Ta-da! Now I tiptoe—just in case.” The TV shows that aim to capture the Zeitgeist this fall are few but brimming with potential. Davies, who came to prominence with the original “Queer as Folk,” set in Manchester, England, returns to that city’s night-life scene with the Starz series, in which Alan Cumming plays the owner of a gay bar contending with a homophobic neighbor whose bigotry is stoked by online radicalization. Internet cruelty also features in CBS’s “Cupertino” (Oct. 8), the latest legal procedural from the “Good Wife” creators Robert and Michelle King. Mike Colter stars in the ripped-from-the-headlines drama, which centers on a new law firm that sets out to advocate for the victims of Silicon Valley’s most powerful companies. In the case of HBO’s divorce drama “War” (Oct. 1), the destructive pettiness of a tech mogul (Dominic West) is matched by that of his movie-star wife (Sienna Miller).
The next few months also offer up some offbeat premises. Foremost among them is Apple TV’s meta-comedy “Brothers” (Sept. 23), which stars Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson playing versions of themselves who discover that they may be related. The pair move in together, as McConaughey contemplates a Texas gubernatorial run. The immortal disapproval of the in-laws gets a supernatural spin with CBS’s “Eternally Yours” (Oct. 8), in which a married vampire couple look askance at their daughter’s human partner. And, on the heels of the surprise popularity of “Widow’s Bay,” the Netflix thriller “Below” (Oct. 8) finds a Newfoundland fisherman (Josh Hartnett) trying to stave off an enigmatic underwater creature from his coastal village.
But just as many shows seem to be betting on familiarity and nostalgia. Muhammad Ali gets the inspirational treatment in Prime Video’s “The Greatest” (Nov. 4), starring Jaalen Best as an up-and-coming Ali. “A Different World” (Sept. 24), the “Cosby Show” spinoff set at a historically Black university, gets a Netflix reboot with returning fan favorites Jasmine Guy and Kadeem Hardison. Martin Lawrence, too, reprises his “Martin” character, in a new spinoff of that legendary sitcom; starring Tommy Davidson, Paramount+’s “The Varnell Hill Show” (Sept. 1) looks at the mayhem of TV production, from the point of view of Davidson’s local talk-show host.
Late autumn reliably brings Halloween programming. The “Friday the 13th” franchise gets an A24-produced prequel in Peacock’s “Crystal Lake” (Oct. 15), starring Linda Cardellini. And, despite three prior screen adaptations of “Carrie,” the Stephen King character—a maladjusted high-school girl who takes bloody revenge on her bullies—anchors a new Prime Video series (Oct. 7) from the horror honcho Mike Flanagan, set in the present day. This time, Carrie’s harassment is amplified by technology—but her rage remains timeless.—Inkoo Kang
Fall is arguably the biggest season for New York’s museums, the time when they mount their most ambitious and scholarly shows—and this year does not disappoint. The highest-profile shows can largely be grouped into two categories: exhibitions that engage with canonical figures and those which spotlight long-working living artists.
Among the former, the Museum of Modern Art’s “Brancusi: The Artist and His Studio” (opens Oct. 25) looms large. The modernist sculptor worked in the same studio, in Paris, for more than forty years; when he died, he left its contents to the French state, which built a replica of the space to display them. That site is temporarily closed, and many of the items—pedestals and furniture, photographs and tools—are coming from Paris for this show, giving Brancusi’s cool, abstract sculptures a rich, human context.
The Whitney Museum is betting on a big name, too. “Roy Lichtenstein: Like New” (Oct. 11) reëxamines the prescience of the renowned Pop artist in our digital world. Lichtenstein’s paintings are highly recognizable, but many people may not realize how much labor went into re-creating images from mass media by hand. This exhibition surveys the breadth of his practice, and includes a reproduction of his first Pop-art show, in 1962. A small companion exhibition at the Whitney, “Roy Lichtenstein: 1997” (Sept. 5), focusses on the last year of his life.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is taking a slightly different approach to revisiting history. “Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous” (Oct. 4) isn’t the first exhibition to put the storied Abstract Expressionist couple side by side, but it may be the most comprehensive. Jackson Pollock was more famous, but Lee Krasner outlived him by almost three decades. The show navigates these complexities while moving through their lives, including the twelve years that they were married. It places them on equal footing—a feminist corrective that’s been a long time coming.
In the contemporary camp, the New Museum leads the charge with “Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony” (Sept. 24), the artist’s largest exhibition yet. Jafa started out as a cinematographer, working on films such as Julie Dash’s “Daughters of the Dust,” from 1991, before transitioning to his own projects. He broke through in 2016 with the short video montage “Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death,” which captures the painful contradictions of African American life. This expansive show features not just moving-image work but also paintings, sculptures, and installations.
Though they come from different backgrounds, Jafa and Teresa Margolles are kindred spirits of a kind: artists of similar ages transmuting sociopolitical realities into potent art. MOMA PS1 is mounting a survey of Margolles’s work (Sept. 24), which is rooted in her training as a forensic pathologist. The exhibition’s centerpiece, “La promesa” (2012), is a neat rectangular sculpture made of rubble from an abandoned house in Ciudad Juárez, a place infamous for high rates of femicide. In tandem with the show, MOMA is displaying a new work by Margolles in one of its collection galleries (Sept. 17).
Taryn Simon takes a similarly conceptual approach to complex subjects. This fall, she’s filling the Guggenheim Museum’s rotunda with “Father Country I Do Love You” (Sept. 18), a project that’s been in the works for nearly a decade. It tracks the life and times of a bureaucratic federal agent, but obliquely, in Simon’s typical style, using photographs, text, and other works to reveal a refracted narrative. If you prefer more straightforward storytelling, visit the Brooklyn Museum’s “Art of Manga” (Oct. 3), which explores the popular Japanese comics form primarily through the work of eight seasoned artists.—Jillian Steinhauer
This fall’s stages brim with families, each exquisitely disconsolate in its own way. The parents in Jon Robin Baitz’s drama “Other Desert Cities” (Hudson; previews begin Sept. 29), which stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Ed Harris, and Allison Janney, face a threat to their social standing in the form of a daughter’s forthcoming memoir. The new musical “Wanted” (James Earl Jones; Oct. 15) adapts the story of outlaw twins on the lam. Simon Stone’s reupholstered “The Cherry Orchard” (Park Avenue Armory; Sept. 16) transposes Chekhov’s squabbling aristocrats into Korean tycoons in Seoul. Daniel Fish directs Anne Carson’s translation of Sophocles’ grimmest masterwork, “Elektra” (Polonsky Shakespeare Center; Nov. 10), based on the ancient tale of familial revenge. A young woman chases her mysteriously vanished father (Frances Jue) through San Francisco’s Chinatown in Lauren Yee’s surrealistic comedy “King of the Yees” (Signature Theatre; Oct. 6). In Nick Payne’s “The Unbelievers” (Manhattan Theatre Club at City Center; Oct. 13), with Lauren Ambrose, a family reckons with the disappearance of a beloved son, while “2:22: A Ghost Story” (Lucille Lortel; Oct. 20) suggests that empty houses are rarely as vacant as they appear. Richard Nelson adds another installment to his Rhinebeck political play cycle; “We’ll See” (Public; Oct. 25) follows the Apple family on Election Night of the 2026 midterms.
Classics get a reboot at several venues. A revival of “The Fantasticks” (Hayes; Oct. 22) remixes the longest-running Off Broadway musical ever as a gay romance for Broadway. Steven Pasquale makes his directing début with Clifford Odets’s “Waiting for Lefty” (Classic Stage Company; Oct. 15), turning a Depression-era cab-strike drama into an immersive union-hall vote. A clubby “Much Ado About Nothing” (Winter Garden; Oct. 31), directed by Jamie Lloyd, stars Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Atwell as the sparring singletons. Emma Rice brings her company back to St. Ann’s Warehouse with her determinedly upbeat “Tristan & Yseult” (Nov. 1). Molière’s “The Imaginary Invalid” (Todd Haimes; Sept. 25) features Bill Irwin as the titular patient, whose gibbous self-regard and baroque health rituals are exfoliated for our looksmaxxing age. Life is both lived and understood backward in the première of a musical adaptation of “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (Public; Oct. 8), starring Andrew Durand. The cast of August Wilson’s bluesy “Seven Guitars” (Mitzi E. Newhouse; Nov. 5), directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson, includes Roslyn Ruff and John Douglas Thompson. A slick military lawyer uncovers a coverup in “A Few Good Men” (Vivian Beaumont; Oct. 8), with Bradley Whitford as the iconic antagonist.
Contemporary conversations drive many new works. Maria Dizzia directs Marin Ireland’s play “Pre-Existing Condition” (Greenwich House; Sept. 1), about the aftermath of domestic abuse, with a rotating cast that includes Susannah Flood, Hari Nef, Lupita Nyong’o, and Phillipa Soo. Else Went’s “Degenerates” (Playwrights Horizons; Sept. 16) ventures into an incel community. Anne Washburn’s “ANON—a tempest at our kitchen table” (MCC; Sept. 25) finds a TikToker at odds with her Texas neighbors after a Pride flag is unfurled on a suburban street. Sarah Jones débuts her solo show “America, Who Hurt You?” (Polonsky Shakespeare Center; Sept. 10), and Billy Crystal, in “860” (Imperial; Oct. 1), tells us about his house that was consumed by the Palisades Fire.
For those looking for a good time, “Ms. Blakk for President” (Vineyard; Oct. 15), co-conceived by Tina Landau and Tarell Alvin McCraney, resurrects the gleefully insurgent 1992 Presidential campaign of the drag queen Joan Jett Blakk (Wayne Brady). And Jocelyn Bioh’s joyous “School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play” (Samuel J. Friedman; Sept. 8) thrusts a class of Ghanaian boarding-school seniors into open combat over a beauty crown; Denée Benton, Patina Miller, and Jasmine Amy Rogers star.—Rhoda Feng
Creature features arrive from around the world, starting with the South Korean director Na Hong-jin’s science-fiction drama “Hope” (Sept. 9), in which a small-town police officer joins with local hunters to fight reptilian monsters from outer space. Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson’s comedic fantasy “Wicker” (Oct. 23) stars Olivia Colman as a medieval fishmonger who, when she can’t find a real-life husband, commissions one (Alexander Skarsgård) made of the titular material. Takashi Yamazaki’s “Godzilla Minus Zero” (Nov. 6), premièring at the New York Film Festival, brings back the kaiju icon, in a drama set in Japan in 1949.
The season’s wide-ranging documentaries include John Wilson’s first feature film, “The History of Concrete” (Sept. 18), an idiosyncratic exploration of the ubiquitous substance, which leads him from Queens to Rome, Ohio, and Las Vegas. The first part of Julia Loktev’s “My Undesirable Friends” showed the filmmaker’s journalist friends in Moscow facing persecution; in “Part II—Exile” (Oct. 9), she shows many of the same people continuing their work outside Russia. “Once Upon a Time in Harlem” (Oct. 16), filmed in 1972, by the late William Greaves, gathers many of the then elderly luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance for discussions and reminiscences that bring the era’s personalities and achievements to light; the film was completed posthumously, in 2025, by his son, David Greaves. Little is known about “Musk” (Oct. 16), Alex Gibney’s investigative portrait of Elon Musk, other than its four-hour running time.
New literary adaptations include “Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day” (Sept. 4), based on the author’s 1919 novel, about a wellborn woman (Haley Bennett) who, in order to pursue a career as an astronomer, rejects an arranged marriage; Tina Gharavi directed. Georgia Oakley’s “Sense and Sensibility” (Oct. 16) gives Jane Austen’s novel, about the romantic tribulations of the financially straitened Dashwood daughters, a fresh workout; the cast includes Daisy Edgar-Jones, Esmé Creed-Miles, Caitriona Balfe, and Bodhi Rae Breathnach. The thriller “Verity” (Oct. 2), based on a novel by Colleen Hoover, stars Dakota Johnson as a writer who comes to suspect that a successful author she’s been hired to ghostwrite for (Anne Hathaway) has committed murder.
Comedy is joined with the megawatt celebrity of Tom Cruise in Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s “Digger” (Oct. 2), about an oil tycoon who is summoned by the President (John Goodman) to head off an environmental catastrophe. In Josef Kubota Wladyka’s “Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!” (Sept. 25), set in Tokyo, a widowed ballroom dancer (Rinko Kikuchi) becomes infatuated with a married dance teacher (Alberto Guerra). Maude Apatow directs her mother, Leslie Mann, in “Poetic License” (Oct. 16), about a middle-aged woman who audits a class at a local college and becomes romantically entangled with two younger students (Cooper Hoffman and Andrew Barth Feldman).
The season’s bio-pics veer between mind and body, modern times and history. “By Any Means” (Sept. 4), directed by Elegance Bratton, is based on the true story of the mobster Gregory Scarpa (Mark Wahlberg), who, in 1966, collaborated with an F.B.I. agent (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) to investigate the murder of civil-rights activists in Mississippi. Michael Dowse’s “The Stunt Driver” (Sept. 25) stars Jay Baruchel as the daredevil Ken Carter, who sought to drive a rocket-powered car across the St. Lawrence River in the nineteen-seventies. “Primetime” (Sept. 25) dramatizes the development of the TV program “To Catch a Predator,” featuring Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson); Lance Oppenheim directed. Aaron Sorkin’s “The Social Reckoning” (Oct. 9), a sequel to “The Social Network,” stars Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg, whose former employee (Mikey Madison) discloses internal workings at Facebook to a journalist (Jeremy Allen White).—Richard Brody
Much of the excitement coming to dance stages this fall arrives via visiting companies and artists; New York is, after all, a crossroads. A case in point: the season’s opening salvo, the Fall for Dance Festival (New York City Center; Sept. 22-Oct. 3), features a bulería (a joyful, fast-paced solo), performed by the spectacular young flamenco star Juan Tomás de la Molía, a proponent of the raucous side of the Spanish dance. It also includes an appearance by Miami City Ballet, in Alexei Ratmansky’s “Roses from the South,” a playful and tender new ballet set to Strauss waltzes.
On a grander scale, the Australian Ballet returns for the first time since 2012 (City Center; Oct. 8-11), now under the direction of the former American Ballet Theatre star David Hallberg. The company performs “Oscar,” an ambitious new ballet inspired by the life, writings, and notorious trial of the Irish wit Oscar Wilde. The choreography is by Christopher Wheeldon, of “MJ” fame. It is, notably, one of a very few story ballets to delve into the subject of same-sex love.
In “The Surge” (Joyce Theatre; Sept. 16-27), the choreographer Sonya Tayeh creates a different kind of homage—to an artist, Sinéad O’Connor, whom many of us associate with the angst of our teen-age years. Rather than tell O’Connor’s story, Tayeh channels the singer’s ferocious energy through the bodies of her ten dancers, all women over forty, all with something to say.
A visit by the Bangalore-based company Nrityagram—which brings “Khankhana” to the Joyce (Oct. 13-18)—is always an event, because the troupe’s resident choreographer and leader, Surupa Sen, is one of the greatest interpreters of the Indian classical dance Odissi. Sen’s choreography extends this ancient form, adding partnering and dynamic range; her dancers, all trained under her tutelage, move with extraordinary clarity and incisiveness.
Since the former company member Michael Novak took over the Paul Taylor Dance Company, he has expanded the repertory beyond Taylor, both by adding new works and by digging into the archives. At the David H. Koch Theatre (Nov. 4-22), the group performs “Tensile Involvement” (1953), an example of the latter, an experiment in electronica and physical abstraction by the now seldom-performed Alwin Nikolais. The piece is like a trippy cat’s cradle, in which the dancers become colorful parts of a machine. The company is also bringing back “Byzantium” (1984), one of Taylor’s nightmare pieces—an evocation of the folly and decadence of man, past and present.—Marina Harss
Pop music has come to encompass so many different things in the social-media age, and you can see all the ways its definition has expanded in the past decade across the fall slate of contemporary-music shows. If pop is a genre with its own sound, that sound can be heard in the tunes of Robyn, the Swedish dance-floor sensation (Barclays Center; Sept. 4, 10). If pop is an amalgamation of all things popular, its many contours are reflected in the songs of the French singer Lolo Zouaï, who fiddles with sonic and language boundaries (Blue Note Jazz Club; Sept. 9), and in those of the Pasadena performer Tinashe, who has been at the center of indie-pop’s genre-bending efforts since 2014 (Brooklyn Paramount; Oct. 24). If pop is an idea that picks apart what it means to be cool and influential, look no further than Charli XCX (Barclays Center; Sept. 14-15) and Phoebe Bridgers (Barclays Center; Sept. 24-26), artists who have parlayed relatively fringe styles and indie stardom into arena-filling cult followings.
But pop is bigger than even those confines. The realms of roots music and Americana are also rife with pop possibilities. The singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile eases through reflective folk rock that offers the personal as an extension of activism (Forest Hills Stadium; Sept. 26). The New Zealand artist Aldous Harding makes indie folk feel like a one-woman revue, her magnificent new album, “Train on the Island,” greatly adding to her cast of characters (Brooklyn Steel; Sept. 12). At Radio City Music Hall, Alabama Shakes returns with soulful Southern rock and its first album in eleven years, “I Must Be Dreaming” (Sept. 2), and Shaboozey, the country-rap fusionist whose single “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” stormed the charts in 2024, goes full outlaw (Oct. 3).
Hip-hop tilted the pop axis at the turn of the millennium and remains an arbiter of its taste. The trap melodicist Don Toliver leans into his star turn at Barclays Center (Sept. 6), and the punk-trap trailblazer Rico Nasty returns to form at Knockdown Center, on the back of her mosh-ready new album, “RX” (Sept. 13). Brooklyn Paramount welcomes EsDeeKid, a phenom of the U.K. underground scene (Sept. 15), and ScHoolboy Q, who has been reinventing gangsta rap since the early twenty-tens (Oct. 3). The same could be said of Vince Staples (Brooklyn Steel; Oct. 27); his latest record, “Cry Baby,” takes him to a more explicitly political place, while also pushing into blues rock and post-punk.
At another point on the pop spectrum, artists are toying with the conception of rock music in the popular imagination. At Warsaw, on Sept. 15-16, the noise icon Kim Gordon extends the reaches of the punk tradition. The virtual British group Gorillaz tests the boundaries of what a band is, as it has been for decades (Madison Square Garden; Sept. 29). At the same venue, the grungy, lo-fi pop smelter beabadoobee and the shoegaze revivalist Wisp team up for a show that puts young people at the center of those lost arts (Oct. 5), and the avant-R. & B. mold-breaker Kelela blends those sounds with her œuvre to create a new avatar at Brooklyn Paramount (Oct. 9-10). Then, on Oct. 16, at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, Phil Elverum performs as Mount Eerie, with poignant meditations on life and death perfectly reflecting autumn melancholy.—Sheldon Pearce
Time is the great mystery of music: songs and sounds are always ephemeral, yet they exist beyond their moments. The pioneering minimalist Steve Reich has done as much as any composer to bend time’s arrow into a circle, but not even he can make it stand still: he turns ninety in October, and his home town is taking note. At the Park Avenue Armory, Reich’s eponymous ensemble is joined by Alarm Will Sound for a staged, expanded version of his kaleidoscopic “Music for 18 Musicians” (Oct. 14-18). At National Sawdust, Erik Hall presents his immersive take on the same piece, paired with the more florid but equally hypnotic “Canto Ostinato,” by Simeon ten Holt (Sept. 26). Sō Percussion brings “Drumming,” in which Reich weaves pulsating rhythmic nets using techniques he learned from Ewe drummers and Balinese gamelan players, to 92NY (Oct. 28). Bryce Dessner and Nico Muhly are among the performers in an all-Reich program at Carnegie Hall (Oct. 22) which includes two U.S. premières. And Trinity Church anchors three lunchtime choral concerts (Sept. 23, Sept. 30, Oct. 7) around Reich’s settings of Hebrew Biblical texts (“Tehillim,” “Traveler’s Prayer,” “Jacob’s Ladder”), before a dedicated evening on Oct. 7.
It’s knives out at the Metropolitan Opera, where three tragic heroines sing of what drove them to murder: ambition (Verdi’s “Macbeth,” opening Sept. 22, with Lise Davidsen and Quinn Kelsey as the treacherous Scots), jealousy (Cherubini’s “Medea,” opening Oct. 30, with Sonya Yoncheva in the title role), and desperation (Puccini’s “Tosca,” which begins another season-spanning run on Nov. 1). Expect a more quixotic take on tragedy, and fewer stabbings, from Missy Mazzoli’s long-anticipated setting of George Saunders’s novel “Lincoln in the Bardo” (world première Oct. 19).
Opening night at the Chamber Music Society stays on theme with an all-American program that includes a concert version of the “Psycho” score (Oct. 13). At the Miller Theatre, a different sort of tension animates the violinist Jennifer Koh’s assault on Bach’s complete sonatas and partitas (Sept. 24). Eleanor Alberga, a subtle British Jamaican composer, will be at the keyboard to present her new piano quintet (National Sawdust; Oct. 30). Meanwhile, the New York Philharmonic celebrates having Gustavo Dudamel all to itself—finally, no sharing with Los Angeles—with several new commissions. Zosha Di Castri’s “Invisible House” and Tania León’s “Imágenes mestizas” première alongside the fifth symphonies of Prokofiev and Mahler, respectively (Sept. 16-19; Sept. 25-27, 29). And, for its contribution to the spooky season, the orchestra will play the soundtrack to Jordan Peele’s “Get Out,” while the movie screens (Oct. 28-31).—Fergus McIntosh
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