The Splendid Notebooks of Picasso

In “May December,” Todd Haynes dramatizes the complex connection between an actress, Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), and a woman, Gracie (Julianne Moore), whom she’s planning to portray in a movie. Gracie and her husband, Joe (Charles Melton), are pariahs in their home town of Savannah. Their relationship began when he was just out of seventh grade and she was in her thirties; she was imprisoned, and after her release they married. Now, twenty years later, they have three nearly grown children, and they’re desperate for empathetic understanding. Enter Elizabeth, who insinuates herself into the family, gains information—and possibly disinformation—about the couple’s troubled life, and exhibits artistic intentions as dubious as her ethical judgment. Haynes deftly sketches a tangle of manipulations and power plays and, along the way, offers a useful reminder: when Hollywood comes for your life story, run.—Richard Brody (Opening Nov. 17 in theatres and streaming on Netflix starting Dec. 1.)

Off Broadway

Jerome Weidman and the composer Harold Rome’s garment-district musical, from 1962—thoughtfully reshaped by Weidman’s librettist son, John, and directed by Trip Cullman—feels like being walloped by a roll of velvet. I mean that admiringly: when slippery Harry Bogen (Santino Fontana) takes advantage of his doting mama (Judy Kuhn), his adoring sweetheart (Rebecca Naomi Jones), and his trusting business partner (Adam Chanler-Berat) to get ahead, it should feel like a slug in the gut. “I Can Get It For You Wholesale” is not just a rogue’s tale; it’s also a labor-movement cri de coeur. Julia Lester, playing Harry’s secretary, belts “Miss Marmelstein,” the song that first made Barbra Streisand famous, but it’s Lester’s glass-shattering “What Are They Doing to Us Now?” that will stamp the price of unregulated, unrepentant capitalism right onto your quaking spirit.—Helen Shaw (Classic Stage Company; through Dec. 17.)

Pick Three

The staff writer Vinson Cunningham shares current obsessions.

1. Best cinematic interior design: The more I think about Sofia Coppola’s new film, “Priscilla,” about the gilded cage inhabited by Priscilla Presley in her world-famous marriage to Elvis, the more I am enthralled and—reluctantly—seduced by its attention to sumptuous surfaces. Elvis’s heavily brocaded bedroom, and the over-the-top beauty of the Presley home in Memphis, Tennessee, is a harrowing metaphor for the claustrophobic effects of patriarchy and the subtle encroachments of abuse.

2. Best world-spanning exhibition: The MacArthur “genius”-grant recipient An-My Lê is one of my favorite artists in any medium. (She is also, I should admit, a friend.) Her photographs inspire deep contemplation at the crossroads of fiction and reënactment, politics and fantasy, the displacements of war and the feelings of home. Her truly epic career retrospective at MOMA—curated by Roxana Marcoci and Caitlin Ryan—spans, with rare rigor and rarer beauty, post-Trump America, postwar Vietnam, the Civil War, and the civic disruptions that follow the making of a nation.

3. Best album bridging today’s music to nineties R. & B.: I have been hopelessly obsessed with “The Love Album: Off the Grid,” the new record by the mega-producer Diddy (formerly known as Puff Daddy), since its September release. The East Coast R. & B. that I grew up with—by such artists as Carl Thomas, Faith Evans, and Mary J. Blige—was shepherded into being, in large part, by Diddy. Now he’s made a swoon-inducing, lovesick album that looks back at those sources, infusing them with new voices and fresh sounds.

P.S. Good stuff on the Internet: