'Grace' star Paul Rudd

Chaplin

Barrymore Theatre

Opens September 10

In the footsteps of the Judy Garland biographical play End of the Rainbow tramps Chaplin, a musical about the life of Chaplin. Unlike other attempts to illuminate the lives of showbiz legends--a subgenre that also includes Master Class’s portrayal of Maria Callas--Chaplin is to have a cast of 22 in what surely will be splashy musical numbers. Rob McClure, previously of Avenue Q and, well, the La Jolla out-of-town tryout for Chaplin, takes on Charlie in a production that is likely to showcase every element of the actor’s legendary film career but for the silence.

Grace

Cort Theatre

Opens October 4

Paul Rudd, suddenly more prolific than he’s ever been with TV and film gigs, is headed back to Broadway. (He previously played second fiddle to Julia Roberts in Three Days of Rain--but now he’s the star!) Mr. Rudd is to play one-half of an innocent couple moving to Florida in order to start religious-themed motels; his better half is to be played by Kate Arrington, whose real-life partner, Oscar nominee Michael Shannon, joins the fracas as the pair’s new neighbor, while legendary TV fixture Ed Asner plays an exterminator. (With all these mainstream stars, is this a Broadway show or the SAG Awards?)

Cyrano de Bergerac

American Airlines Theatre

Opens October 11

It’s been five years since the last Broadway production of Cyrano de Bergerac, and theater writers have been storing up nasal puns since then. (Who nose if this will be a success? We’ll be sniffing for hints from the producers! Etc.) Tony-winner Douglas Hodge straps on the prosthetic nose for the title role of the lovesick, prohibitively ugly French nobleman, while Clémence Poésy is to allure as Roxane, the not-so-obscure object of desire, and onetime Spider-Man villain Patrick Page makes us all glad he survived that production as he plays Cyrano’s erstwhile ally Comte De Guiche. We smell a good night at the theater!

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Booth Theatre

October 13

To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Edward Albee’s rollicking domestic nightmare, the New York stage welcomes a production by way of Chicago and Washington. Tracy Letts, who moonlights as a Pulitzer-winning playwright, is to take on George, while Steppenwolf star Amy Morton (previously, too, a Tony nominee for Mr. Letts’s August: Osage County) has been honing her piercing shriek as Martha. Both actors appeared in the original production, which earned raves from local critics--and surely they’re ready for the big time--the three-hour play is the sort of marathon you can only really train for by two years and three cities’ worth of practice.

'Dead Accounts' star Katie Holmes

The Heiress

Walter Kerr Theatre

Opens November 1

Taking over the role of Olivia de Havilland and Cherry Jones? That’d be ultra-fast-rising starlet Jessica Chastain, who, like Paul Rudd, is taking a break from her prolific film career to portray Catherine Sloper. Catherine, originally a character in Henry James’s novel Washington Square, possesses that Jamesian fragility, shyness, and moth-to-flame attraction to callous villains; the character is set to inherit an enormous fortune, but is so taken aback at the love of a churlish fellow that she may just squander it all. Ms. Chastain’s Broadway debut will be watched closely by all those who love and/or envy her, but with support including castmate David Straitharn and director Moisés Kaufman, Ms. Chastain may not return to her day job anytime soon.

Annie

Palace Theatre

Opens November 8

Little girls of New York, begin beseeching your parents for tickets. After a long search, the producers of what may become the season’s most lucrative revival found their girl--preteen brunette Lilla Crawford is to strap on the red wig and belt out “Tomorrow” in the latest Annie. Though it’s toured the U.S. frequently, the saccharine show hasn’t been seen on Broadway since its 1997 revival. It’s not entirely for kids: James Lapine, a frequent collaborator of Stephen Sondheim’s, is to direct the production, while two-time Tony winner Katie Finneran assays the role of Miss Hannigan. Ms. Crawford, get former red-wig-wearer Sarah Jessica Parker on the phone to discuss how to be deal with newfound fame!

Glengarry Glen Ross

Schoenfeld Theatre

Opens November 11

Al Pacino, who starred in the film production of Glengarry Glen Ross as young, robust Ricky Roma, is showing his age: he’s coming to Broadway this season as Shelley Levene. Levene, scholars of David Mamet will surely recall, is the once-great real estate salesman who has grown unable to generate good leads (much as an actor of Al Pacino’s caliber has, for years until just now, been unable to get a lead on a role that required much more than senseless bellowing). The cast is rounded out by the high-toned likes of Bobby Cannavale and Richard Schiff; the “Coffee’s for closers” monologue is from the film and not the play, but we can dream it’ll be included.

Rebecca

Broadhurst Theatre

Opens November 18

Daphne du Maurier via Alfred Hitchcock via Christopher Hampton! The well-loved playwright and screenwriter has adapted into English the book of a musical that played Vienna in the mid-2000s, recounting the twice-told tale of a second wife who must confront the ghost of her new, controlling husband’s former wife. As in du Maurier’s novel, the naive protagonist is never named but for “I”; Jill Paice is to attempt to make a name for herself in the role. The directors are about as prestigious as Mr. Hampton; Michael Blakemore won two Tonys for directing a play and a musical in the same year back in the day, while Francesca Zambello is an opera director with, one presumes and hopes, a flair for the dramatic.

Dead Accounts

Music Box Theatre

Opening Date November 29

When we think about Broadway’s breakout ingenues of the past decade, our minds don’t immediately leap to Katie Holmes’s turn in All My Sons in 2008. She was... fine? Certainly her time in New York, and exposure to paparazzi therein, engendered a high-water mark in the sales of “boyfriend jeans” nationwide. But the stage is apparently a safe place for Ms. Holmes, as it’s to Broadway she returns for her first new role post-extremely-notable-divorce. The midwestern woman trying to start over while living with her parents is to play a midwestern woman trying to start over while living with her parents. Well, Ms. Holmes is from Toledo and her character’s from Cincinnati. And her parents, we read, are in off and on. No matter--the play’s by super-prolific Theresa Rebeck, and could allow for a Kidmanian career renaissance.

The Anarchist

Lyceum Theatre

Opens December 2

A new work on Broadway playing blocks away from a revival of his best-loved work, and a daughter who’s one of those TV Girls? Could things get sweeter for David Mamet? Well, there was the little matter of actress Laurie Metcalf dropping out of the role of a women’s-prison warden in The Anarchist, the newer of his two currently produced plays--but no matter. Debra Winger removed herself from exile to drop in for the role, and Patti LuPone, playing a radical prisoner pleading for her own parole. Mr. Mamet’s neoconservative bent may well inform just how we see the role of the anarchist played out onstage, but we’d forgive Mr. Mamet anything!

Jennifer Garner in 'Butter'

The Master

Paul Thomas Anderson

Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams

September 14

This long-deferred movie actually couldn’t have been better timed. An apparent allegory for the creation of Scientology, The Master comes along just as public interest in the (alleged!) money-grubbing cult is at an all-time high, post-Tom/Katie divorce. In this telling, Philip Seymour Hoffman is the L. Ron Hubbard-like figure who snares untold numbers of believers into his thrall. Plot details, per Paul Thomas Anderson’s standard, are hazy, but the trailer reveals simply that Mr. Anderson has kept up his keen attention to aesthetic compostion--and that Amy Adams, playing a devoted cult wife, may be this film’s MVP. Can we arrange for Katie Holmes to present her the Oscar?

Killing Them Softly

Andrew Dominik

Brad Pitt, James Gandolfini, Sam Rockwell

September 21

Andrew Dominik’s follow-up to the much-loved, little-seen Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford jumps forward in time--it’s a modern-day store of mobland America, based on a pulp crime novel. The movie was a hit at Cannes, and may be yet another feather in the cap of good-looking weirdo character actor Brad Pitt, who plays a hitman’s assistant, or “point man.” The whole thing promises to be a real boys’ club, with costars like Richard Jenkins, James Gandolfini, and Ray Liotta, who knows a thing or two (actually, just one thing) about mob movies.

Butter

Jim Field Smith

Yara Shahidi, Jennifer Garner, Ty Burrell

October 5

Little is really known about this long-delayed satirical film. How long-delayed was it, you ask? The early buzz was that Jennifer Garner’s character, a housewife and competitive butter-sculptor, was based on Presidential front-runner Michele Bachmann. Director Jim Field Smith hails from the U.K. but takes on heartland rituals in this look at the dairy-art circuit, whose protagonist is an adopted orphan daring to take on the longtime champions (Ms. Garner and Mr. Burrell). Somehow, Hugh Jackman, Olivia Wilde, and Alicia Silverstone fit into this puzzle--no word on what Ms. Silverstone, noted vegan, did around the enormous blocks of milk product.

Argo

Ben Affleck

Ben Affleck, Bryan Cranston, Alan Arkin

October 12

Ben Affleck, flamed-out Hollywood star, has had a successful second career as the director of Boston heist pictures, but his third directorial effort, Argo, finally takes him outside of the old neigborhood. Mr. Affleck stars as a CIA officer who comes up with a cunning plan to rescue escapees during the Iran hostage crisis--he fakes the production of a sci-fi movie (Iran makes a lovely moonscape, after all) and attempts to airlift out the Americans, pretending they’re crew members. Sounds fairly tidy, but we’re sure complications will ensue--and we haven’t even read the Wired article on which the whole thing’s based!

Cloud Atlas

Tom Twkyer, Andy Wachowski, Lana Wachowski

Tom Hanks, Hugo Weaving, Halle Berry

October 26

Everyone believed that the mammoth David Mitchell novel, encompassing millennia of human experience, was unfilmable. And maybe everyone was right! All we know right now is that the Wachowskis (of the Matrix films) and Tom Twkyer (of Run Lola Run) have turned all of their creative over-enthusiasm towards putting together the most rollicking movie ever to contain both a Martin Amis-style comedy of manners and a post-apocalyptic agrarian community on Hawaii. Somehow, major stars like Tom Hanks and Halle Berry fit into the equation. As you read this description, you’re already significantly behind; you’d better start reading Cloud Atlas this minute if you hope to have it finished and marginally comprehended by October!

Keira Knightley in 'Anna Karenina'

Skyfall

Sam Mendes

Daniel Craig, Judi Dench, Ralph Fiennes

November 9

The next, and long-delayed, installment in the James Bond story comes with a schmancy pedigree--director Sam Mendes has experienced diminishing returns since the 1990s, but he still, you know, has an Oscar. So too does Javier Bardem, who promises to be the most menacing villain since Dr. No. Un-bedecked by golden trophies are new Bond girls Naomie Harris and Bérénice Marlohe, but that’s hardly the point, is it? About the plot, little is known, but for the promise of spy-queen M’s past coming back to haunt her. All the better: it’s about time Judi Dench got to stretch her acting muscles in the Bond movies.

Anna Karenina

Joe Wright

Keira Knightley, Jude Law, Aaron Taylor-Johnson

November 9

Joe Wright just can’t resist the charms of Keira Knightley--and he’s hardly alone! Mr. Wright made it cool to think Ms. Knightley was a good actress by directing her in well-received roles in Pride & Prejudice and Atonement--without his attentions, she’s languished a bit. But Ms. Knightley is back doing what she does best (aristocratic hauteur, wearing elaborate garments, telling off gentlemen), and this time, she’s got a complement of men to choose from. Though all of us English majors know how it ends, let’s form factions rooting for Jude Law’s Karenin or Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Vronsky--or, at least, let’s decide after the fact who had the most convincing Russian accent.

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn--Part 2

Bill Condon

Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner

November 16

The series that launched a million magazine covers has finally ended (though the saga of its stars’ offscreen love will surely inflate the bottom line at many a media company for years to come). It’s the final installment of the Twilight series--or “Saga,” as the producers would Germanically have it--and if you waited a week to see any of the fine independent films released last week, get in line early for popcorn. Every tween and teen and regressing thirtysomething within a five-mile radius cannot wait to see just how the Bella-Edward vampire-mortal union ends--even though the book came out years ago! No matter. Fandom, like vampirism, is eternal.

Life of Pi

Ang Lee

Irrfan Khan, Gérard Depardieu

November 21, 2012

Another unfilmable novel adapted to the screen? It must be fall! Ang Lee attempts something of a comeback with his adaptation of Yann Martel’s Booker Prize-winning novel, wherein a boy and a tiger are trapped on a raft floating in uncharted waters. Mr. Lee has a lot to prove, having released a couple of films consecutively that couldn’t quite match Brokeback Mountain in terms of popular acclaim. Perhaps the transfer to a wholly new environment, with the challenge both of a dense, allusive text and of a, you know, tiger, will move him to new heights! If not, it’ll at least be the season’s most compelling misfire.

Les Misérables

Tom Hooper

Russell Crowe, Hugh Jackman, Anne Hathaway

December 14

Anne Hathaway has subjected you to her songs through lo these many Oscar ceremonies--and now she finally has the opportunity to belt it out on film! The world’s most energetic entertainer shifts down a gear to play doomed prostitute Fantine in the adaptation of the world-rattling Broadway show; her costars include Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe playing, respectively, the unfairly convicted Valjean and the doggedly devoted Javert. Other cast members in director Tom Hooper’s first post-Oscar flick include Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter as the garrulous-to-a-fault Thénardiers, but it’s Ms. Hathaway who’s likely dreaming a dream... of Oscar!

Joseph Anton: A Memoir

by Salman Rushdie

Random House, September 18

In 1989, Salman Rushdie was sentenced to death by the Ayatollah Khomeini for his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, which the ayatollah claimed was anti-Islam; instead of enjoying his rise to global fame, he was sequestered to police details, moving from house to house. His new book recounts that experience. Its title refers to a pseudonym the police used for him—a composite of his beloved writers Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov.

The Silent House

by Orhan Pamuk

Knopf, October 9

The Nobel Prize winner’s second novel, published in Turkey in 1983 with the title Sessiz Ev and finally translated into English, is set in a town near Istanbul, about a month before the 1980 military coup. It follows three siblings with divergent political beliefs—one is a failed historian of the Ottoman Empire, another a leftist and the youngest an aspirant to life in America—making their annual visit to their grandmother.

The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira

by Cesar Aira

New Directions, October 16

Argentine writer Cesar Aira has published some 80 novels in Spanish, and for six years now, New Directions has slowly been releasing these in English. The latest, written in 1996, follows a retired miracle doctor—who compares his practice to something like writing a novel—as he grimly attempts to reckon with past failures and defeats. All the while, his archnemesis—the hospital chief—attempts to trick him into performing one last miracle. Taken as either a sarcastic fairy tale or a bleak allegory for writing itself, Mr. Aira’s latest solidifies his reputation as one of the great living Latin American writers.

Back to Blood

by Tom Wolfe

Little, Brown, October 23

Tom Wolfe returns to fiction with a story about Cuban, French, Russian and Haitian immigrants in Miami. It’s Mr. Wolfe’s first novel for Little, Brown, which paid close to $7 million for it, according to The New York Times. Back to Blood has an ensemble cast that includes a 20-something  police chief, a sex-addiction psychiatrist (and nurse), a billionaire with a porn problem, a few misguided artists at Art Basel Miami Beach and a Cuban mayor.

Dear Life: Stories

by Alice Munro

Knopf, November 13

The title story from this collection, which first appeared in The New Yorker last year, is an autobiographical reflection on the writer’s childhood in Wingham, Ontario, just as Canada was preparing for war with Germany. The story culminates with the narrator not returning home for her mother’s funeral. It is a characteristic kind of story about a young girl coming to terms with her youth that feels more like Ms. Munro has perfected her craft than that she is copping it.

Sweet Tooth: A Novel

by Ian McEwan

Nan A. Talese, November 13

Sweet Tooth opens with Cambridge student Serena Frome (“rhymes with plume”), a math major with a passion for reading, being recruited by the British security service in 1972. What follows starts out as a kind of literary spy thriller, but turns gradually into a love story as Serena falls in love with the novelist meant to be the target of an MI5 scheme. Mr. McEwan’s 12th novel is dedicated to Christopher Hitchens.

Custer

by Larry McMurtry

Simon & Schuster, November 6

The king of the contemporary Western looks back on the battle of Little Bighorn and the failure of George Armstrong Custer, who lost his life along with all of his men in the attack during the Plains Indian War. The book is a kind of follow up to 2005’s Oh What a Slaughter, which looked at six Western frontier battles, though this new book casts Custer as a doomed tragic hero from a long-lost Greek tragedy.

Grace: A Memoir

by Grace Coddington

Random House, November 20

The longtime creative director at Vogue became something of a celebrity after the 2009 documentary about the publication, The September Issue, showed her as the only person more intimidating than Anna Wintour. Ms. Coddington started out as a model before becoming fashion editor at British Vogue at the end of the ’60s. In this new memoir, she dishes on modeling, divorce, designers and, of course, arguing ideas with Ms. Wintour.

Echo’s Bones

by Samuel Beckett

Grove Press, November 6

This story (not to be confused with Beckett’s poem of the same name) was originally intended as the final one in Beckett’s More Pricks Than Kicks collection, published in 1933 by Chatto & Windus, but the author’s editor rejected it. It is finally being brought into print by Grove Press, Beckett’s U.S. publisher since first publishing Waiting for Godot in 1954. The work has an introduction by Beckett scholar Mark Nixon, who argues that Echo’s Bones marked a key moment in the author’s early career.

Magnificence

by Lydia Millet

Norton, November 5

Magnificence is the third and final book in an ambitious trilogy that began with 2008’s How the Dead Dream and continued with last year’s Ghost Lights, in which a depraved employee of the IRS vanishes into the jungle. The new novel turns to Susan Linden, a woman who has just inherited her uncle’s estate in Pasadena and is attempting to guard it from a few other eager relatives and preserve the late uncle’s collection of taxidermied animals.

"Monument" (1980-1981) by Susan Hiller, at MoMA P.S.1. (Photo courtesy the artist and Timothy Taylor Gallery, London)

Crafting Modernism
Museum of Arts and Design
Oct. 12, 2011 - Jan. 15, 2012
Lest we forget that, as Tom Wolfe so eloquently put it once, this is the “museum formerly known as craft,” the place is putting on a mammoth exhibition devoted to craft, specifically to the relationship between it and design after WWII. This is a fascinating proposal because while craft slowly became a four-letter word during that period, design became uber-fashionable, to the point where, today, it sells to the same crowd that buys Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, and constantly prompts questions like, “Is it design, or is it art?” But forget the concept. Go for the pieces. The show, which is organized by MAD curators Jeannine Falino and Jennifer Scanlan, who are continuing a series of exhibitions presented at the museum in the 1990s, includes stunning pieces by George Nakashima, Isamu Noguchi and many, many others.

De Kooning: A Retrospective
Museum of Modern Art
Sept. 18-Jan. 9.
On the heels of its show of Abstract Expressionism, MoMA has turned its full attention to Willem de Kooning, a central figure in that group of artists. In many ways, de Kooning and his cohorts planted the seeds of the New York art world as we know it today. (Warhol would put the finishing touches on it, but that is another story.) And so the show will be important to MoMA’s base audience not just for the paintings, but for what the painter represented. De Kooning was an artist’s artist; a painter’s painter. Go for the scary and brilliant series of “Women”; stay for the gorgeous late paintings, with their shimmering hues. (For more on the show, read an interview with its curator, John Elderfield, in the culture pages of this week’s Observer.)

Maurizio Cattelan: All
Guggenheim
Nov. 4, 2011-Jan. 22, 2012
The pope felled by a meteorite. A squirrel that committed suicide. A horse with its head stuck in the wall. A pair of upside-down policemen. Twinned miniature self-portraits in miniature coffins. Maurizio Cattelan’s artworks have been playing pranks on the art world since he began making them some 20 years ago. The Italian’s work has only been seen piecemeal in New York, so this will be an opportunity to figure out when he’s joking, and when he’s being serious. Be careful: he is almost always doing both at the same time.

September 11
MoMA P.S. 1
Sept. 11, 2011–Jan. 9, 2012
It takes a certain amount of audacity to call your art exhibition simply “September 11,” without any of the usual embellishments encouraging remembrance and forbidding forgetting, and it is probably to P.S. 1’s advantage that its relatively new chief curator Peter Eleey, who is responsible for this exhibition, was willing to cut to the chase. Well, not quite. In fact, his title’s a bit sly. What you won’t see here are any images of the attacks themselves. Nor will you see any art made directly in response to them, save for a long Ellsworth Kelly. What does that leave us with? There are more than 70 works by 41 artists and many of them were actually made prior to 9/11. What Mr. Eleey appears to be up to is creating a portrait of the cultural moment in which certain horrific events took place, and he defines that cultural moment broadly: there is, for instance, William Eggleston’s haunting photograph of what could be either soda or Scotch sitting in a beam of sunlight on an airplane food tray, from a portfolio dating to 1965-1974. The show has an intriguing roster of artists ranging from Diane Arbus to John Chamberlain to Bruce Conner to Thomas Demand, Jane Freilicher, Thomas Hirschhorn, Alex Katz, James Turrell and many more. Yoko Ono and John Lennon are also on the bill.

Picasso’s Drawings, 1890­-1921: Reinventing Tradition at the Frick Collection
Oct. 4, 2011-Jan. 8, 2012
We hear a lot about Picasso these days, and, in a way, it has ever been thus. He is, after all, the quintessential modern master, modern art’s game changer. But what we mostly pay attention to are the paintings, and lately our eyes have been on them not least because they change hands for astounding sums. Currently holding the record for most expensive painting ever sold at auction is Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, which went for $106.5 million last year. His works on paper generally get short shrift, but they shouldn’t. There is nothing more fascinating than poring over an artist’s drawings, as there is no better way to see how the artist’s mind works, and what, precisely, gave birth to those beloved paintings. In other words, if you want to understand not simply that Picasso changed the art game but how he did so, make your way to the Frick this fall and see him, per the title, reinvent tradition in the crucial first decades of the 20th century. See him go from ambitious student to swashbuckling genius, and from classicism to Cubism and back to classicism again, at once breaking with tradition and cleaving to its bulwark.

Diego Rivera: Murals for The Museum of Modern Art
Nov. 13, 2011–May 14, 2012
MoMA is such a behemoth that it is hard to believe it was young once. But it was, and in its scrappy youth it gave an enviable opportunity to a politically engaged Mexican painter: you make five giant “portable murals,” we’ll give you studio space on site. Diego Rivera’s murals were on show from December 22, 1931, to January 27, 1932, and comprised the museum’s second one-man exhibition. (The first was Matisse.) He started out with Mexican subjects—like the famous Agrarian Leader Zapata but decided, while in town, to take on New York, stricken then with the Great Depression. There may be some resonance with our current economic crisis.

New Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Opens Nov. 1, 2011
The reopening of the Met’s Islamic galleries in vastly expanded form will be the hands-down highlight of the art season. The $50-million project, which puts back on view some much-loved objects that have been hidden in storage for eight years now, and others that have been stowed away for many more, features a medieval Maghrebi-Andalusian-style courtyard meticulously created by Moroccan craftsmen. Thirteen hundred years of history will be on view, and while anything to do with the Middle East always seems to provoke controversy, these galleries will have much to tell us about the cultural roots we all share.

Carsten Höller: Experience
New Museum
Oct. 26, 2011-Jan. 15, 2012
Are you experienced? You will be after you get the Carsten Höller treatment. The museum-spanning show devoted to the Belgian artist and former scientist features artworks that seem a lot more like research experiments. In a way, you, the viewer, are the subject (double, or perhaps triple entendre entirely intended) of Mr. Höller’s work. Slides, carousels and a sensory deprivation pool are just some of the things you’ll find in this fun ride of an exhibition. Mr. Höller, who has never before been given full-scale museum treatment in New York, wants to yank you out of your usual routine, and you should let him.

Sherrie Levine: Mayhem
Whitney Museum
Nov. 10, 2011-Jan. 29, 2012
Surely by now you know what re-photography is, not to mention appropriation, if only from the many legal disputes it’s caused of late. (Paging Richard Prince.) Not long ago, the lifting of images from other artists’ work or the wholesale copying of them in the name of art was something of a novelty. It was conceptual copiers like Sherrie Levine, who has been doing this for 30 years, most notably in pieces like After Walker Evans: 1-22 (1981), the result of photographing a catalogue by the famous photographer Walker Evans, who gave the practice currency, and it’s been far too long since we’ve seen a serious presentation of her work. This is a serious presentation—a survey of old and new pieces curated by art historian Johanna Burton in collaboration with Whitney curators Elisabeth Sussman and Carrie Springer. It is also more that that: Ms. Levine considers the exhibition to be itself an artwork. Mayhem, indeed.

The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League, 1936-1951
Jewish Museum
Nov. 4, 2011-March 25, 2012
Like drawing, photography (as opposed to re-photography) is a medium that is sometimes overlooked. Overlooking this particular exhibition would be a mistake, as it promises to be one of the most compelling displays of work by street shutterbugs in history. Founded by a group of politically radical photographers, the Photo League became a hotbed of talent—Richard Avedon, Robert Frank, and Arthur Fellig (the crime-scene photographer better known as Weegee) were all members. So were Berenice Abbott, Lisette Model, Aaron Siskind and Paul Strand. Much of the work was politically inclined; what will stay with you after seeing it is a sense of the vibrant personalities who populated New York in the years during which these photographs were taken, captured as they are in all their gritty humanity.

sdouglas@observer.com

Paul La Farge. (Photo: Carol Shadford)

Later this month, Paul La Farge will publish his fourth book, Luminous Airplanes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 256 pages, $25.00), a novel of fewer than 250 pages of words on paper but quite a bit more than that on a website specially designed to extend the story, with new chapters continually added over the next year or so. By the time it’s done, the site will contain a work “about three times larger than the book,” according to Mr. La Farge, who discussed the project with The Observer over email.

Mr. La Farge has always been something of a trickster. His previous three books featured various intellectual and stylistic conceits, like narratives of dreams in both English and French, relief-block illustrations, and the earnestly presented (if transparently false) notion that Mr. La Farge had translated a text rather than written it himself. Luminous Airplanes, as you will find it in a three-dimensional bookstore, is a departure from such experimentation. Set in San Francisco and upstate New York near the turn of the millennium, it’s full of incident but largely old-fashioned in its telling. The narrator is a young computer programmer pulled away from California at the height of the dot-com bubble to sift through his recently deceased grandfather’s house in the fictional upstate town of Thebes, N.Y.

The book’s episodes in the Catskills wouldn’t be out of place in a Richard Russo novel, and the evocation of the dot-com era captures the zeitgeist without strangling it to death, lacking the heavy-handed cultural signposting of, say, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. Having been raised in Thebes by his mother and her sister (he refers to them as “my mothers”), the narrator is spurred to remember his upbringing and the mysterious story of his father, a lawyer with a rebellious streak who came through town in the 1960s and then disappeared. He also happens upon Yesim, a Turkish-American childhood flame who may or may not be reigniting, and spends time flipping through a book his grandfather read to him when he was a child: Progress in Flying Machines, a real-life book published in 1894, a “catalog of failures” that extensively detailed experiments in human flight up to that time. The ungainly flying contraptions are one of several elements in Luminous Airplanes that subtly speak to the tragedy of visionaries, the way their ideas can inspire and enchant but still be wrong or dangerous or simply and sadly lost forever. Imagining the fate of his grandfather’s books, and all the ideas inside them, the narrator writes: “More likely the books would be pulped. They would dissolve in a slurry of acids, fall fiber from fiber, until not a word of their advice remained, then they would be put together again in a new shape, cradling white, unbroken eggs.”

The online material takes this already kaleidoscopic story many steps further. It includes extensions of scenes from the book, and also follows the story into the future. From the new material that’s already up, it’s clear that Mr. La Farge’s more playful side is running free online, collapsing the space between the reader and the narrator, who is now very self-consciously addressing us.

Clicking “help” on the website, for example, you find a passage that starts like this: “My god, you think you need help? You’re not the one sitting in his room in New Haven, Connecticut, right now, wondering what the hell happened to your life.” Elsewhere, the narrator bristles at the idea that his tributaries of text are comparable to the Choose Your Own Adventure series: “Every time I tell someone that I am working on a hypertext that branches in many different directions, they say, ‘Oh, like those books where you turn to page 45 if you open the treasure chest.’” This tone is jarringly different from the book, where the narrator is more confessional at some points than at others, but mostly has a traditional, sealed-off relationship to the reader.

“Direct address seemed like a natural way to proceed [online],” Mr. La Farge said, “because there are fewer layers between the writer and the reader—no editor, no publisher, no bookstore, just a kind of screen-to-screen contact, or at least the fantasy thereof.” Whether that address comfortably fits with the rest of the work, time will tell, but it makes clear that the website is not just a dump for B-roll footage; it’s a project all its own, distinct from the bound pages.

Mr. La Farge is launching his novel’s website against an industry-wide backdrop of, depending on your perspective, innovation or desperation. Conventional wisdom these days has books dead, with only the precise form of their afterlife left to be determined. Will they exist only as curios for art collectors? Will they simply migrate as is onto e-readers? Or will they be absorbed into other media in a way that makes the very idea of sustained reading antiquated?

A recently launched company called Booktrack sells customized soundtracks that add “synchronized music, sound effects and ambient sound to the text of your favorite e-books.” (Simply add visuals to that mix, and you’ve got a thrilling new invention called the movie.) Booktrack is not just meddling with contemporary books like those by James Frey, an early supporter of the company’s mission. It will also pump up the volume on such swooning classics as Pride and Prejudice and Romeo and Juliet, suggesting the venture could be a boon for the royalties of dewy alt-rock bands like Snow Patrol, if nothing else. The soundtrack “really … enhances your imagination,” Booktrack co-founder Paul Cameron recently told The New York Times, presumably with a straight face. For anyone who thinks the other way around—that one’s imagination should do the enhancing—times are tough.

On a more promising note, independent publisher Melville House recently introduced its line of “HybridBooks.” The name might conjure dreary images of books passing nights plugged in next to the Prius in the garage, but the product is a digital batch of smart material related to the book— maps, essays, historical facts, reviews—that can be enjoyed as obtrusively or unobtrusively as you like.

Ticking off influences for the project, Mr. La Farge cited mostly innovative books on paper, like Tristram Shandy, Pale Fire, and Jacques Roubaud’s The Great Fire of London, which he called “essentially a hypertext in print form.”

He avoids calling his own work hypertext, preferring the term “immersive text.” The word “hypertext” has already fallen largely out of circulation (Mr. La Farge first conceived of this project in 1999), and the use of the form for literary purposes has been spotty at best. “With the exception of Geoff Ryman’s excellent 253, [hypertext fiction is] mostly pretty tough going,” Mr. La Farge said. “I think the early enthusiasm for the technology might have given writers a feeling of needing to do less writing work, because the form would carry the work. Whereas my sense is that the opposite is true: you have to pay as much attention to the writing of a hypertext as you would to the writing of a novel, or more attention, really, because novels produce a kind of natural engrossment, whereas online you’re always struggling to hold the reader’s attention.”

Mr. La Farge offered his “highly uninformed prediction” about authors increasingly exploring the formal possibilities of e-books: “It’s like when people started making automobiles: first they looked like horseless carriages, then as people got comfortable with the new form, they started to do more of the things cars could do. But since the economic value of fiction is many orders of magnitude smaller than the economic value of the automobile, I’m guessing the transition will happen more slowly.”

In his own writing career, he is content to go slowly on the tech front. He doesn’t rule out the possibility of another digital foray, because “it’s a lot of fun … to be in the position where you get to ask yourself a lot of questions that writers don’t usually have occasion to ask.” But his next planned project is a novel set in the 1930s and 1960s, with no online component attached. For now, he waits to see what the world makes of his latest trick.

“I feel like one of the people who were trying to invent flying machines,” he said. “I’ve been futzing around in my workshop for 10 years or so, and now maybe I’ve got something that flies, or maybe I’ve got a giant steam-powered bat which is going to break into a thousand pieces the first time I turn it on.”

editorial@observer.com

Nina Arianda. (Photo: Jason Bell)

The first time Nina Arianda walked on the stage at the Cort Theatre, she broke into tears.

“I was having a conversation with somebody, and I got onto the stage, and I looked out, and it was—I just started crying,” she said a few weeks ago over an afternoon cappuccino in Soho. “Because you’re there. It’s happening to you. And I can ignore that as much as I want to, to keep myself calm and focused. But when you have to actually go and look at the space, you have to face the magnitude of the theater, and the history, and the ghosts. It’s beautiful. And it’s really—it was overwhelming.”

Ms. Arianda can be forgiven for feeling overwhelmed.

She took that walk on the Cort stage near the start of this year, when she was preparing for Born Yesterday, in which she played opposite Jim Belushi and Robert Sean Leonard. She was 26, a year and a half out of N.Y.U., where she earned an M.F.A. in acting, and she was about to take on her first Broadway role, the role that made Judy Holliday famous. She’d landed the part after a single meeting—director Doug Hughes knew he wanted her—and she ended up with a Tony nomination for Best Actress in a Play.

A year earlier, in January 2010, when she was 25 and only six months out of N.Y.U., she bowled over audiences and critics in the debut of the David Ives two-hander Venus in Fur, off Broadway at the Classic Stage Company. She’d nailed that role in a single audition, too. This fall, Venus will open on Broadway, and Ms. Arianda—directed once again by Walter Bobbie, but with a new co-star—will likely earn a second Tony nomination.

The play is an intriguing, amusing and very intense 90 minutes of shifting power dynamics and charged sexual dynamics, in which we watch Vanda, Ms. Arianda’s young and desperate actress, audition opposite the author and director of the play-within-the-play, a dramatization of the 1870 novella “Venus in Furs,” by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, for whom masochism is named. There are, suffice it to say, some weird scenarios in Sacher-Masoch’s story, and therefore in Mr. Ives’s play, and Ms. Arianda’s part required her to be by turns timid and controlling, manipulative and manipulated, funny and frightening.

“The play is every single thing you can imagine,” she told The Observer in Soho. “It’s romantic. It’s scary. It’s hilarious. And there aren’t a lot of plays like that, or a lot of opportunities for a female lead to have that kind of thread. I love that. And I love that I can’t figure Vanda out completely.”

Vanda was her first real role, and it won Ms. Arianda rapturous reviews. “Remember the name—Nina Arianda,” wrote Joe Dziemianowicz in the Daily News. “In Venus in Fur, she proves herself to be a comic goddess.” In The Wall Street Journal, Terry Teachout even more enthusiastic: “She has star quality oozing from every pore.”

As Billie Dawn in Born Yesterday, a gangster’s moll who discovers within herself a mind of gold, Ms. Arianda stole the show from her more famous co-stars and earned even better notices than she had for Venus. “Forget yesterday: A star is being born right now at the Cort,” Adam Feldman proclaimed in Time Out New York. In Entertainment Weekly, Melissa Rose Bernardo wrote that Ms. Arianda was “giving a performance that could be called breakout, although breakout seems somehow insufficient.” “I hereby nominate the luminous laugh-goddess Nina Arianda for president,” gushed New York’s Scott Brown.

Somewhere along the way, she also filmed parts in Win Win, with Paul Giamatti, which opened around the time Born Yesterday did, Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, which arrived in late spring, the recent Higher Ground and Brett Ratner’s Tower Heist, with Eddie Murphy, Ben Stiller and Casey Affleck, which opens at the beginning of November.

Four days after Tower Heist arrives in theaters, Ms. Arianda will be opening in Venus at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Broadway house, the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.

“I don’t like relaxing too much,” she said, somewhat redundantly, as she sat restlessly in her seat and carefully folded the empty wrappers of the two Splendas she’d used. “Sometimes it’s necessary, but it’s more that I force myself to.” She was fully in character as the comic ingénue that afternoon, bright, bubbly, and quick to laugh, her heart-shape face topped by blond, loosely curly hair coiled at the top of her head in a loose bun that bounced as she spoke but always fell precisely back into place.

“I’m forcing myself to take some down time before we start Venus,” she said. She was preparing to leave for a few days on the Jersey Shore with her parents—she grew up in the Garden State, with her doting mom and dad shuttling her to acting lessons and auditions and to see shows in New York. “It’s nice to take a couple of days and really just center,” she continued. But she also seems to find it nice not to take that time. “All summer last summer I was working,” she said. “Which was great; I loved it.”

A lot of things, in Ms. Arianda’s telling, are great.

On this spring’s Tony Awards, when she lost her category to Frances McDormand: “The category! It was Vanessa Redgrave! I still don’t believe that my name was next to hers in any way. And that was—that was just, in itself, thrilling. And I was pumped. It was a celebration for everybody, you know? It was amazing.”

On Born Yesterday closing after only 70 performances: “It was disappointing. But not so disappointing, because I got to be on Broadway! And work with Doug Hughes and Robert Sean Leonard and Jim Belushi!”

On her very busy 2010: “I like being a part of good stories; I like being a part of good work. Midnight in Paris is a really great story. Higher Ground, it’s a great story. Venus is an amazingly complicated, layered story.”

On working with Hugh Dancy, who will replace Wes Bentley for the Broadway run of Venus, and whom she she’d met only once: “I’m genuinely excited to work with him. I had a really, really great time with him for those, what, four minutes we were together. It clicked. It was great.”

On the constant stream of rapturous reviews and fawning profiles: “I like saying thank you. Really. This is all a dream come true, and not in a Disney way. In a really true way for me. I pinch myself every day, and I’m like: ‘Oh my God, the show you love, that’s so personal to you, Venus? Yeah, you get to do that on Broadway.’”

Talking to Ms. Arianda, an interviewer is at first tempted to dismiss all these greats and amazings as the programmed responses of a professional actress. But listening to her, the interviewer also entertains another possibility: for a young actress living a dream come true, why shouldn’t everything be great and amazing?

It should be.

But how, then, to explain her excellent, convincing performance as Vanda, an actress for whom things are going much less well? The character arrives late for her audition, soaking wet, desperate, and demands a chance to read. Vanda starts off a needy supplicant, and she ends up an angry dominatrix.

“The rage?” laughed Ms. Arianda. “Oh, it’s there.” And what brings it out? “Having somebody—like in the play—putting you in your place,” she said. “Testing you.” She was claiming that things aren’t always great and amazing—but she’d shifted to the second person, distancing herself from it. She remained clinical and removed as she went on: “There’s a lot in the play to connect to female rage. And I’m fascinated by female rage, because it’s so—it’s wild. There’s almost a messiness to it, with women, that is fascinating to me.”

On stage, she can access it. “When we did it at CSC,” she recalled, “I went so far into the rabbit hole one time that I got home and I was scared of myself. It’s scary to be that angry.”

Then Ms. Arianda stopped herself. “Remember when I said I don’t like feelings in my real life?” she said. “That’s why I do this.” She was done talking about rage. “There’s nothing better than having a terrible day and knowing that you get to do Venus in Fur at night. By the same token, if you’re having a great day, there’s nothing better than doing Venus. You get to work things out—and with someone, which is great. Mood stabilizer, therapist, partnership.” And there it was again: “It’s great.”

And, in truth, suppressed rage aside, everything for Ms. Arianda is great. “There’s nothing really dark,” she told me. “I’m stoked to be part of this community. I’ve wanted it my whole life. It’s happening. No dark cloud.”

When she got up to leave, escorted by her publicist, she seemed genuinely surprised that The Observer didn’t want her to pay for her coffee.

editorial@observer.com

Pitt and Hill in "Moneyball" (Photo: 2011 Columbia Tristar Marketing Group)

Moneyball (Bennett Miller)
September 23
Scott Rudin, of last year’s movie-of-the-fall The Social Network is back with Moneyball, his latest attempt to prove that while a million dollars may be cool, what’s really cool is a Best Picture Oscar. The pedigree on this one’s impeccable—based on a Michael Lewis book (like The Blind Side!) it intelligently (not like The Blind Side!) looks at the Oakland A’s’ attempt to surmount their lack of money with a smarty-pants statistics system. (What is it about Mr. Rudin and computer geeks? Even his sports movies are about guys who probably listen to too much Radiohead.) Anyway, this movie stars Brad Pitt and a newly slender Jonah Hill, and is the first outing for director Bennett Miller since his Capote made everyone we know buy a copy of In Cold Blood.

Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan)
September 30
It’s been a long eleven years since Kenneth Lonergan’s last directorial effort, You Can Count on Me—but the years have probably felt even longer to Mr. Lonergan. The director was reportedly served with lawsuits due to his own inability to finish the film. (The high-powered producing team, including Mr. Rudin and the late Sydney Pollack, apparently couldn’t help expedite the process.) Well, as our dear great-aunt used to tell us, haste makes waste—and the years Margaret spent in development hell saw the rise of its lead actress Anna Paquin to superstar status off her role on the TV series True Blood and the continuation of America’s love affair with its male lead, Matt Damon. We’ll try to focus on the onscreen plot, not the offscreen drama. What’s it about, anyhow? Well, Ms. Paquin plays a high-school student (sorry, this was just filmed a long time ago!...)

The Skin I Live In (Pedro Almodóvar)
October 14
Pedro Almodóvar’s latest movie goes lowbrow—it’s based on a Thierry Jonquet horror novel about plastic surgery! After his previous film Broken Embraces, and its surprisingly sober meditation on the role of fantasy and cinema, The Skin I Live In promises more visceral thrills from the Spanish master. Antonio Banderas stars as a plastic surgeon who’s developed a miraculous unburnable skin—and the film has twists and turns, viewers in Cannes reported, that allow Mr. Almodóvar to indulge in the psychosexual madness he does better than anyone. We’re excited for Mr. Almodóvar’s return to his old preoccupations, but especially for his reunion with Mr. Banderas, with whom he worked in the 1980s. There have been some wilderness years for Mr. Banderas (albeit lucrative ones: the animated Puss in Boots comes out November 4), and perhaps only Mr. Almodovar knows quite what to do with the Andalucian actor.

In Time (Andrew Niccol)
October 28
After the summer during which we fell in love once again with Planet of the Apes comes a fall in which we’re expected, it seems, to swallow the concept of Logan’s Run. That lovable 1970s schlockfest posited a future in which humans die at 30: in In Time, humans stop aging at 25 and get a set number of remaining days. After his summer, during which he starred in the resolutely unlovable Friends With Benefits and Bad Teacher, star Justin Timberlake’s days in the acting game may be numbered as well, but his director here is The Truman Show and Gattaca writer Andrew Niccol, who knows a few things about dystopian futurescapes.

The Rum Diary (Bruce Robinson)
October 28
Hunter S. Thompson’s biggest fan finally gets the vanity project that makes all those Pirates of the Caribbean movies seem worthwhile. Johnny Depp, who had previously starred in the Thompson-themed Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, here plays a Thompson fictional character named Paul Kemp, a journalist who travels to Puerto Rico and drinks a lot of rum (perhaps the Pirates movies were Method preparation in tropical liquor consumption). This film has a storied, awful production process, one that reportedly drove its writer-director, reformed alcoholic Bruce Robinson, to drink. (He says he stopped as soon as work was completed.) We’re sorry it was so miserable but are eager to see Mr. Depp here, in something about which he and others were passionate, before the next Pirates of the Caribbean or Burton-by-numbers!

J. Edgar (Clint Eastwood)
November 9
It’s been a while since the last Clint Eastwood joint—a whole three years, an uncharacteristic gap for the hyper-productive senior member of the American auteur club. He’s teaming up, here, with Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays the longtime FBI honcho J. Edgar Hoover. Sure, the performance will be Mr. DiCaprio’s typical glower-and-be-brilliant shtick, but the film’s most likely Oscar should be for costumes—we’re already imagining the Hoover negligees and nighties! Okay, fine, screenwriter Dustin Lance Black (previously of Milk) has suggested that there’s no cross-dressing in this flick, so we should expect a tasteful, elegant, Eastwoodian take on Hoover, though the casting of the rising star Armie Hammer as Hoover’s rumored lover gives us hope that there’ll be more here than FBI procedure.

Melancholia (Lars von Trier)
November 11
It’s time for us to move past Lars von Trier’s insane, provocative statements at Cannes this year—not because they were forgivable, but because Mr. von Trier should be judged by the insane, provocative statements he makes in his films. He seems to have done it again with Melancholia, the story of feuding sisters at a wedding (so Bridesmaids!). The wedding gets quite literally eclipsed by an extraplanetary body threatening to destroy Earth—and the film becomes another artful iteration in Mr. von Trier’s series of films about women destroyed by unchangeable circumstance. Poor Kirsten Dunst must have had to consult with Mr. von Trier’s other leading ladies—Bjork, Nicole Kidman, Emily Watson, and her Melancholia costar Charlotte Gainsbourg among them—to prepare for the apocalypse. It’s paying off for the former teenybopper, though: she won Best Actress at Cannes.

Carnage (Roman Polanski)
November 18
The play God of Carnage lit up Broadway in 2009—apparently, bickering helicopter parents are a zeitgeisty subject! (Who would have guessed?) The play depicted two couples meeting up to discuss their children’s respective fight at school. It was both mundane and terrifying. Now the master of imputing the everyday with undercurrents of horrific dread, Roman Polanski, puts Brooklyn mommies under the microscope. The prospect’s made yet more appealing by the ladies playing the Brooklyn mommies—try imagining Jodie Foster or Kate Winslet doling out organic fruit snacks!—as well as their dear husbands, John C. Reilly and Christoph Waltz. Don’t try looking for familiar playgrounds, eagle-eyed Brooklyn viewers: due to Mr. Polanski’s longstanding legal troubles, the film was shot in Paris, but the domestic rage is pure outer-borough.

Hugo (Martin Scorsese)
November 23
Martin Scorsese, New York’s most New York-y director—well, after the one who made Midnight in Paris—makes the transatlantic trip to the Champs-Élysées. As though the man’s long sojourn in Boston-mob cinema weren’t betrayal enough! Hugo is a true oddity in the long career of Mr. Scorsese: post-Oscar, he’s evidently unburdened by the type of self-consciousness that precludes making a 3-D children’s film about a magical toy shop. The film stars Sasha Baron Cohen, Jude Law, and Ben Kingsley as the grown-ups and young Asa Butterfield (all of 14!) as the young Hugo. If this Hugo thing takes off, perhaps Master Butterfield should consult with Daniel Radcliffe about growing up under the spotlight. But we hope it’s just a middling hit: Mr. Scorsese needs to come back to New York! The city’s conspiracy-minded weirdos won’t make films about themselves.

The Descendants (Alexander Payne)
November 23
It’s been a while since Alexander Payne graced us with a movie. His sun-dappled ode to Napa oenophilia Sideways was in 2004 (we’re not counting his writing work on the gay fantasia on Adam Sandler themes that was I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry). The master of small, darkly comic American stories returns with a vacation story we know will warm us up in November—George Clooney in Hawaii! Okay, okay, so it’s a tearjerker (Mr. Clooney’s character is reconnecting with his daughters after his wife enters a coma).But still! Clooney! Hawaii! We’d take that trip—especially with a guide as able as Mr. Payne at evoking the humor and sadness of the weird corners of the human experience.

ddaddario@observer.com

Amber Heard. (Photo: Michael Buckner / Getty Images)

Amber Heard
The Rum Diary and The Playboy Club
It can’t be easy to be Amber Heard. The 25-year-old actress is in possession of the sort of smashing beauty that gets one featured on Maxim lists and offered parts in the likes of The Playboy Club, and charisma that goes unnoticed. The upcoming NBC drama, in which Ms. Heard is to play the most valuable Bunny at one of Hugh Hefner’s sex-and-Scotch nightspots, will create the sort of sensation Ms. Heard (previously best known for a string of near-mute girlfriend parts in films like Pineapple Express and The Stepfather) has thus far not experienced, but the part still demands more from her appearance than her thespianic skills. Thankfully, Ms. Heard’s talents are to be tested in the Hunter S. Thompson adaptation The Rum Diary, in which she plays the object of obsession for Johnny Depp’s alcoholic journalist character. Sure, it’s another girlfriend part, of sorts, but based on the epically terrible shoot and the evident artistic ambitions of Mr. Depp and director Bruce Robinson, Ms. Heard might soon be able to add line items to her resume that don’t include Maxim or Playboy.

Jean Dujardin
The Artist
Cannes’s Best Actor winner can finally be seen stateside once The Artist makes its big, Weinstein-backed bow in October; the silent film depicts the change in fortunes of a silent-cinema star upon the advent of the “talkies.” Per Sunset Boulevard, it’s the pictures that got small, as everything about Jean Dujardin’s performance is said to be big—with an inborn star quality not requiring speech to communicate both swashbuckling in films-within-the-film and deep pathos once the last swash has been buckled. If enough of us are able to appreciate the virtue of a wordless performance, Mr. Dujardin could well be the next European unknown to land at the Oscar ceremony—an unusual next step for a French comedian.

Elizabeth Olsen and Sean Durkin
Martha Marcy May Marlene
The lead actress in Martha Marcy May Marlene and her director both got the kind of reviews, when their film played Sundance, about which an emerging star dreams. Ms. Olsen plays a young woman who leaves behind her cult compound to join her family, despite carrying with her untold emotional scars. The performance has a high degree of difficulty, which might be perceived to be compounded by Ms. Olsen’s youth and relative inexperience. (Her biggest previous screen credits were two cameos in mid-1990s films starring her sisters, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, who went on to name their fashion line Elizabeth and James after her.) But it was her low profile that attracted Mr. Durkin, who told The Observer: “I auditioned every unknown actress that I could in New York and L.A.—and she came in and there was just something happening that wasn’t happening with anyone else. There was a quiet intensity, an intelligence, and some real turmoil quietly going on in her head.”

Ms. Olsen has already begun making fashion-icon-ish appearances on red carpets to promote the film, but on set she was just one of the guys. This was perhaps aided by Mr. Durkin’s laissez-faire policy: “It’s always good vibes, and good people... and everyone becomes friends, and we hang out at the bars.”

As for the more formal gathering ahead, as Oscar season looms and its star prepares to go the way of ingenues past: “We’ve got a long fall of events and things. We’re ready for it!”

Ezra Miller
We Need to Talk About Kevin
Tilda Swinton soaked up the oxygen at Cannes, and director Lynne Ramsay is both beloved and given to long absences (her last film, Morvern Callar, came out in 2002). But the star of We Need to Talk About Kevin may well be Kevin, as played by Ezra Miller. Kevin is a sociopathic bad-seed whose parents struggle to understand his brutal actions. Early reviews from Cannes indicated that Mr. Miller, all of 18, struck the note of inscrutable evil that the script required: the purpose of the film is to indicate that, while his parents need to talk, they know not what to say about their violent son.  Mr. Miller, who previously portrayed a disaffected teen nasty beyond his years in the sleeper Afterschool, has a future ahead of him playing young men in the thrall of vaguely sinister, obscurely-motivated desires—he’s next portraying a corrupted high school senior in the sure-to-be-teen-smash The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

ddadarrio@observer

Bjork. (Photo: Dominique Faget/AFP/Getty Images)

Panic of Girls, Blondie
September 13
The iconic Deborah (not Debbie!) Harry-fronted band is releasing its first album since 2003, and is on-trend with current monster-movie vogues: the first single, “Mother,” came with a video depicting zombies coming to life and taking over a dance club. (Vampires are so 2010.) Could Blondie itself be the band of zombies taking over the dance floor? Well, that presumes they’ll take over in a music scene glutted with a panic of girl-pop queens (Deborah Harry may have influenced Lady Gaga, but it’s the younger diva who runs the world). Whether you see Ms. Harry as a vital part of the pop scene or a reanimated 1980s relic, the nostalgia quotient of putting on this album and pretending the Odeon’s still a thing beats downloading a Jay McInerney novel to your Kindle any day.

The Sea of Memories, Bush
September 13
Hey, remember Bush? This album’s title may well refer to all that’s evoked in the music consumer’s mind when first hearing the name “Bush”: “Wait, the guys who did “Glycerine”? We remember the mid-1990s, kind of... And where have they been since Gavin Rossdale married Gwen Stefani? Their name has all those political valences, but their music was the soundtrack to our Clinton Administration lost years! The post-grungers set out to discover whether piecing together half-remembered ephemera—“Glycerine” is good, if not exactly a classic on which to build a decades-long career—will bring them the fame they enjoyed before a decade-long hiatus.

Night of Hunters, Tori Amos
September 20
Ms. Amos, at 48, hasn’t outgrown the cheeky weirdness for which she was always known—ever reinventing herself, the queen of the concept album is putting out an album on the German classical label Deutsche Grammophon. The new project, per a statement Ms. Amos made to her fans, is a “song cycle” that tells the story of a woman who “goes through an initiation of sorts that leads her to reinvent herself allowing the listener to follow her on a journey.” The album’s also about how “the hunter and the hunted” exist within every listener. For a listening public used to pop-star “reinventions” comprised entirely of tossing on a new costume, Ms. Amos’s adventurism (did anyone see the Tori Amos experiment ending at Grammophon?) is invigorating.

Duets II, Tony Bennett
September 20
Tony Bennett is no fool—you don’t stay in-demand at 85 by ignoring current trends. The classic-American-songbook master, who had a late-career renaissance in the 1990s prompted by embracing MTV—is doing the Ray Charles thing. Charles, late in his career, released Genius Loves Company, a not-too-shy-to-brag album that featured popular current artists duetting with the master. Mr. Bennett has followed suit with a second disc of collaborations: his first came out in 2006. This round features suspects usual (Natalie Cole, Norah Jones), unusual (Lady Gaga? What’re you doing here?), and tragic (Amy Winehouse’s final recording is here—a duet on “Body and Soul”).

Biophilia, Bjork
September 27
The Icelandic dynamo has returned to music, albeit not really to the studio: Biophilia is garnering early hype in the same manner as those smeary New Yorker covers. It was created on an iPad! Well, at least in part—and it exists for iPads, too, as each song on the Biophilia app will have its own individual app. We’re not Luddites clinging to LPs, but weren’t MP3s just... easier? We don’t want to have to drag our iPad with us if we want to listen to some Bjork while on the treadmill! Then again, it doesn’t quite sound like treadmill music: the album’s concerned less with pop music than the music of the spheres, using extended metaphors about dark matter, gravity, and bodies even more celestial than that of a certain gamine Nordic oddball.

The Whole Love, Wilco
September 27
The alternative icons have set up their own label, dBpm, on which they’re releasing their eighth album. Freedom seems to agree with them—a “deluxe edition” features a track entitled “I Love My Label.” Perhaps they love their label so for the ambition it allows them to uncork: never a bunch of slouches, Wilco’s outdone themselves with a seven-minute opening track and a twelve-minute closing. We were wondering what “November Rain” done by Jeff Tweedy might sound like!

Metals, Feist
Oct. 4
The cutie whose “1234” taught everyone how to count to four and showed her how to count to “millions sold” gifts us with a fourth record. It’s her first release since breaking out to a sort of fame not achieved by a Canadian chanteuse since Céline Dion, or Anne Murray. And unlike her countrywomen, Feist is cool! Well, cool in the Starbucks-music, Apple-ad sense, which isn’t quite cool at all, but the album’s first single is a bit edgier and rougher, more Alanis than Céline, and Feist has a gig lined up for November 2 in Brooklyn, which counts for something, coolness-wise!

Mylo Xyloto, Coldplay
October 25
Remember when albums had nice, simple names, like Abbey Road or Born in the U.S.A.? Or even Parachutes? Coldplay has left its pretense-free years long behind with an album whose name is either in an ancient Mayan language or a secret code only Gwyneth Paltrow can solve. Ms. Paltrow’s spouse, otherwise known as frontman Chris Martin, keeps his sweetie in crisp white Oxfords with a sure-to-be blockbuster album. Get your handkerchiefs out: tracks are to include “Every Teardrop is a Waterfall,” “Hurts Like Heaven,” and “Charlie Brown.” Cheer up, Coldplay boys! If you’re feeling forlorn and misunderstood, be proactive and make your next album title in the English language!

Take Care, Drake
October 25
Another depressive entertainer in the teary-Coldplay mold, Drake, has seemingly little about which to be sad: he’s rumored to have dated pop temptress Rihanna and--more pertinently--his rise to legitimate music-industry fame from beginnings as a child actor has been meteoric. But fame has its downsides, and Drake has been loudly ambivalent about all the perks that come with a hit record. His second studio album, Take Care, will only compound the number of fake friends and groupies swarming Drake; it will also very likely cement him as an artist to whom attention must be paid.

Untitled album, Florence + the Machine
November
The hyper-publicized Brit-art-pop of 2010 knows how to strike when the hype is hot: Florence + the Machine, a band whose lead singer, Florence Welch, has become a fashion industry darling, is putting out a second album. It comes on the heels of the omnipresent single “Dog Days Are Over,” the official song of chick-flick trailers in fourth-quarter 2010, and while little is known (not even a title or release date!), we’re hoping Ms. Welch indulges her loopy, ruffley visual aesthetic this cycle and pushes her yodely vocals: we’ve listened to Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” enough times to know that pop needs a British eccentric.

ddaddario@observer.com

Katori Hall, author of "The Mountaintop." (Photo: Christine Cain-Weidner)

Man and Boy, American Airlines Theatre
opens Oct. 9
Frank Langella’s back! Frost/Nixon’s Nixon returns to the stage with a drama by the beloved British playwright Terence Rattigan. Mr. Langella’s knack for being imposing, stentorian and vituperative will come in handy in Mr. Rattigan’s tale of a brutal financial wizard fallen on hard times, one who must exploit his son in order to stay afloat. Is this to be the Inside Job of Broadway—a play that exposes the vanities and degradations of the world’s financial markets? We don’t know—but with Mr. Langella involved, we’re willing to go along for the ride!

The Mountaintop, Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre
opens Oct. 13
Samuel L. Jackson is headed to Broadway. Unlike Mr. Langella in Man and Boy, he has no stage experience to draw on, unless you count decades of speaking with convincing authority to his on-screen castmates. Thankfully, Mr. Jackson’s stage debut won’t require him to move far beyond the role he’s best at—an authoritative speaker who’s right about things and knows what to do—as he’s playing Martin Luther King Jr. in Katori Hall’s play. The production, which co-stars Angela Bassett, takes place on the night before King’s assassination. Doubts about Mr. Jackson’s film-star-to-stage trajectory might be further assuaged by the fact that he is playing a reverend—which is to say, the reverend!—and anyone who’s seen Pulp Fiction is aware that Mr. Jackson knows his way around scripture.

Relatively Speaking, Brooks Atkinson Theatre
opens Oct. 20
John Turturro is a man who can do it all—he hops from Transformers flicks to directing this evening of one acts—and yet he’s the least significant draw of the evening. It’s easy to get upstaged when the plays you’re directing were written by Ethan Coen, Elaine May and Woody Allen. With few if any plot details to go on, we’re latching onto all the Hollywood names strewn around Relatively Speaking: the cast is to include Julie Kavner (the voice of Marge Simpson), Steve Guttenberg and Marlo Thomas. But we’re going for Woody Allen, even as we hope this side project doesn’t distract him from his yearly movie.

Godspell, Circle in the Square Theatre
opens Nov. 7
The long-deferred Godspell revival (it was supposed to debut back in 2008!) finally arrives with a musical take on the Jesus/Judas schism—and it’s just in time for a concurrent revival in American evangelical belief (which, to be fair, never really went away) and Lady Gaga’s single “Judas,” which tells the same story through more abrasive music. The tale of Jesus (played here by TV cutie Hunter Parrish, whose pipes haven’t really been tested in his role on Weeds) has been entrusted to director Daniel Goldstein, previously known for the Elvis jukebox musical All Shook Up. The only thing that’ll be shaking viewers is religious fervor—or, failing that, a sugar-shocked devotion to the pop tunes that underpin it!

Venus in Fur, Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
opens Nov. 8
The comedically inclined Nina Arianda rose to Broadway-baby fame this year in her ditzy role in Born Yesterday. That show has closed, and Ms. Arianda has gone back to her roots, joining the Broadway production of a show whose cast she was in off Broadway. David Ives’s play depicts a gifted young actress who’s desperate for a lead role in a new play written by a gifted and manipulative playwright (played in this production by Hugh Dancy, Mr. Claire Danes himself). Ms. Arianda, on the back of her Born Yesterday success and the coming Broadway bow of a show for which she’s already earned raves, will likely come to see the part of “striving, desperate actress” as yet more of an acting challenge, one that we assume she’ll be able to surmount.

Seminar, John Golden Theatre
opens Nov. 20
Alan Rickman is a Tony-nominated stage actor who recently performed Ibsen at BAM. Nevertheless, to a generation of magic-loving kiddies who’ve burned through their Harry Potter DVDs, he’ll always be known as Professor Snape. Mr. Rickman’s sticking to the villainous-professorial type in Seminar, in which he plays a literary prof who turns a small group of students against one another with the most potent tool in his arsenal: intellectual envy. The play is by up-and-comer Theresa Rebeck and also stars the young theater scion Lily Rabe—whose recent turn in The Merchant of Venice showed how little schooling she needs on the finer points of acting.

An Evening With Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin, Ethel Barrymore Theatre
opens Nov. 21
Patti LuPone, the best (if not the last!) great stage diva, has always known that her most compelling character was herself. Now, untrammeled by character or book, she’s finally gracing audiences with the full LuPone in a 63-night stand during which she’ll perform Broadway standards with Mandy Patinkin, her onetime Evita costar. He’s also directing—little to cry for, here, but the missed opportunity passing by the producers of next year’s Evita revival—can’t they just bring back Mandy and Patti for another round?

Bonnie and Clyde, Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre
opens Dec. 1
Is there any movie less suited for a stage adaptation than the shoot-’em-up flick fueled by jarring cuts and close-ups of Faye Dunaway’s cheekbones? Probably! But none come to mind—which is why the producers of Bonnie and Clyde are taking the fall’s most delightful risk. Laura Osnes of Anything Goes and Jeremy Jordan of Rock of Ages play the two young lovers who rob banks—and who knows, maybe their good looks and Broadway-tested voices will make audiences fall in love with the violent criminals they play. The ongoing economic crisis, too, may help convince the audience that this Depression duo, doin’ it for themselves, are heroic in their amorality.

Stick Fly, Cort Theatre
opens Dec. 8
One of many female playwrights breaking new ground in their careers this Broadway season (Seminar’s Theresa Rebeck and The Mountaintop’s Katori Hall among them), Lydia R. Diamond emerges with Stick Fly. Produced by the singer Alicia Keys, it tells the story of an upper-class black family on a Martha’s Vineyard holiday. Plays with African-American casts have spelled gold at the box office in the past decade with the likes of A Raisin in the Sun and The Color Purple, but Stick Fly is an unknown property—one that has played at regional theaters around the country in preparation for its, and Ms. Diamond’s, breakthrough.

On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, St. James Theatre
opens Dec. 11
Does Harry Connick Jr. even record albums, or whatever he used to do, anymore? The lad’s got the bug—the Broadway bug! It’s the only explanation for his perpetual rediscovery of theatrical ephemera like On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, the Alan Jay Lerner and Burton Lane musical from the 1960s better remembered for its film adaptation, if it’s remembered at all. This version will feature a new book, though Mr. Connick’s character is to remain a professor and hypnotist, swooning over his late wife. This will be one of the top musicals of the year for the standards-mad crowd that made Promises, Promises a hit—on a clear wintry night, some people may just want to see 45 years into Broadway’s past!

daddario@observer.com