TV, Movies, Music and Art to Look Forward to in 2025

Jim Poniewozik

Everybody Back to Work at Lumon Industries

The dystopian thriller “Severance” premiered in 2022, telling the story of an alternative reality in which workers can have their brains surgically “severed” into two consciousnesses, one for work hours, one for off-work hours. Nothing has matched it since — including “Severance” itself, which went on a hiatus that was long even by the standards of modern TV’s between-season breaks. It finally comes back in January, with a second season that promises to build on the dark humor and offbeat world-building. (Will we finally learn more about the goats?) This is one return-to-office plan we can all get behind.

Zachary Woolfe

A Landmark 20th-Century Opera at the Met

The best show of the Metropolitan Opera’s fall season was a revival of Strauss’s sprawling, opulent “Die Frau Ohne Schatten,” the success of which has only raised expectations for the company’s upcoming new production of another Strauss classic: his earlier opera, “Salome.” The soprano Elza van den Heever, a shining star of “Frau,” and its conductor, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, reunite in this lusciously overripe score, a landmark of early-20th-century Symbolism with its collision of religious fervor and sexual awakening. The director Claus Guth, a veteran of the European opera scene, makes his Met debut, updating the story from biblical times to the Victorian era.

Jon Pareles

Latest Transmission From the Weather Station

The Canadian songwriter Tamara Lindeman leads the Weather Station, a band that supplies a jazzy, riffing, electroacoustic, evolving backdrop to Lindeman’s lyrics; the songs seem to bubble up out of live jams. Lindeman shows influences from Joni Mitchell, Fiona Apple, Beth Orton and Van Morrison, among many others. But the perspective in the songs is entirely her own, full of the 21st-century experience in all its disorientation and fleeting epiphanies. The album “Humanhood” is due on Jan. 25, and the songs should open up even further on tour. The Weather Station plays Bowery Ballroom on April 1 and Music Hall of Williamsburg on April 2.

Jason Farago

New York Welcomes Back a Trio of Museums

The old joke about New York — a nice city, one day, when they finally finish it — has not seemed such an exaggeration lately in the art world, where expansions and renovations have left Manhattan three museums short of a full deck. In 2025, the hard hats come off and the pictures go back up. First to reopen, in April, will be the Frick Collection, where visitors can at last enter the private living quarters on the Gilded Age mansion’s second floor. (Still no public access, I’m afraid, to Mr. Frick’s basement bowling alley.) Later in the year should see the reopening of two of the city’s leading contemporary art museums: the New Museum, with a cunning extension by the architecture firm OMA, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, moving into its first purpose-built home since its opening in 1968.

Gia Kourlas

Taking Ballet to the Extreme

The Austrian choreographer Florentina Holzinger pushes the body to extremes, and in “Tanz,” she delves into well-known, increasingly beloved territory: ballet horror. The work, which has its North American premiere at NYU Skirball on Feb. 14-15, opens with a ballet class led by Beatrice Cordua, a German ballerina in her 80s; the cast, all female, ranges in age from 30 to over 80. Soon clothes come off. It gets witchy. But the female part of this dance equation, especially as it relates to the suffering experienced by dancers, is full of possibility. How much can a body endure until it attains mastery? Performers, instructed on masturbation, are suspended in the air as they rock and writhe on suspended motorbikes. One gives birth to a rat. There will be blood.

Jesse Green

‘Strangers’ Stars Onstage

If you enjoyed weeping at the 2023 film “All of Us Strangers” as much as I did, you’ll be there for the coincidental New York reunion of its stars in 2025. First comes Paul Mescal as the brutish Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” (Brooklyn Academy of Music, March 5 through April 6). Andrew Scott follows in “Vanya,” a one-man version of the Chekhov classic about boredom and uselessness (Lucille Lortel Theater, March 11 through May 4). The two great works are nearly opposites — but as the characters Mescal and Scott played in the film quickly proved, opposites attract.

Salamishah Tillet

Beyoncé Has a Surprise For Us

I’m a gambling woman who doesn’t like to lose. So, I’d try not to speculate what will happen on Jan. 14, a date Beyoncé announced in old glory red on Instagram after her Christmas Day N.F.L. halftime show. And while I leave the guessing to others, here is what I know: “Renaissance,” her disco- and house-inspired album, was released in 2022 and followed by a “silvery, shimmering” world tour in 2023 and then a self-directed concert film. She then waited only a few months to share “Cowboy Carter,” the second part of what she called a trilogy. In March, the album and its accompanying brazen cowgirl cover paid tribute to the pioneering roles of Black artists in creating country music. Her masterful movement across multiple genres on that album only intensified the online sleuthing about what she will share next. A Spanish-language version of “Cowboy Carter”? There was that song “Flamenco.” A rock album as Act III? She dressed up as Betty Davis for Halloween. A new tour? Live Nation did repost her announcement. Who knows? She stays busy, and for a critic like me who spends too much time anticipating cultural trends, I appreciate her suspense almost as much as her surprise drop.

Mike Hale

A ‘BoJack’ Reunion on Netflix

Little is known about the Netflix series “Long Story Short” except its provenance: It was created by Raphael Bob-Waksberg, whose stellar track record in adult animation includes the ne plus ultra of melancholy talking-animal Hollywood satires, “BoJack Horseman.” His new show, billed as “an animated comedy about a family over time,” reunites him with the “BoJack” artist and producer Lisa Hanawalt, who in the meantime created a nifty show of her own, “Tuca & Bertie.” The odds seem good for something thoughtful and, in the best way, absurd. Hooray!

Alissa Wilkinson

Maggie Gyllenhaal Takes on Frankenstein

There’s so much to look forward to on the 2025 movie calendar — a new Bong Joon Ho movie, a new Paul Thomas Anderson movie, a new Kogonada movie — but right now I am eyeing “The Bride!” with excitement. Due out in September, it’s directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal (whose directorial debut, “The Lost Daughter,” was a stone-cold stunner) and stars Jessie Buckley, consistently one of my favorite actresses no matter where she shows up. Buckley plays Frankenstein’s bride. Frankenstein’s monster is Christian Bale. I can’t imagine anything more blissful.

Amanda Hess

Strange Things in a Small Georgia Town (on Broadway)

I loved the “John Proctor Is the Villain” script when I read it a couple of years ago — it’s a play by Kimberly Belflower about a group of Georgia high school girls who are studying “The Crucible” as they start to notice some parallels in their own community — and I’m excited to see Sadie Sink star in it when it heads to Broadway in March.

Jason Zinoman

A One-of-a-Kind Stand-Up Stint

The great stand-up comic Rory Scovel likes to riff, to improvise, to be in the moment. But he’s testing the limits of this inclination in January when he comes to Brooklyn for a 10-day run at Union Hall where he will make up a new hour of stand-up comedy on the spot every night. He’s calling this “600 Minutes With Rory Scovel,” and I can’t wait to see where his restlessly creative brain goes by the sixth or seventh night. Promoting the show, he says: “Come for the laughs but stay for the chance to see him lose his mind.”

Maya Phillips

The Latest From an Anime Master

Shinichirō Watanabe is undoubtedly one of the best anime directors of all time, known for such genre-bending, music-driven classics as “Cowboy Bebop” and “Samurai Champloo.” In 2025 Adult Swim will air his latest series, “Lazarus,” a stylish futuristic action-drama in which a scientist appears with a miracle cure-all drug that three years later he reveals is fatal to everyone who has taken it. A colorful task force is formed to race against time and find the now-ghosted mad scientist and his vaccine before the population is decimated. Acrobatic action sequences (designed by the “John Wick” director Chad Stahelski) and a vibrant mix of musical genres, from jazz to indie rock, all done in trademark Watanabe style, make this trenchant meditation on the pharmaceutical industry and the opioid crisis my unmissable pick for the year.