The Dance Legend Lucinda Childs’s “Momentary Reprise”

The police-drama template gets a vigorous update successful the Saudi manager Haifaa Al Mansour’s twisty enigma “Unidentified.” A teen-age girl’s assemblage is recovered successful a godforsaken adjacent Riyadh; the constabulary request a pistillate to presumption the corpse, and the lone 1 astatine the presumption is Nawal (Mila Al Zahrani), a young administrative adjunct and a solitary divorcée who’s hooked connected a true-crime series. When officials neglect to place the victim, Nawal hunts for the killer. Her quest reveals a wide array of misogynistic injustices, ranging from oppressive supervision, arranged marriages, and polygamy to grant killings. Though the engaging communicative is sometimes filmed dismayingly plainly, its main enactment sequence—a pursuit connected ft done a immense warren of abandoned buildings—is some thrilling and wondrous.—Richard Brody (In constricted release.)

Off Broadway

A consciousness of beingness cooling its heels pervades Martyna Majok and Aimee Mann’s philharmonic adaptation of the memoir “Girl, Interrupted,” by Susanna Kaysen, astir Kaysen’s eighteen-month enactment astatine the psychiatric infirmary McLean, successful the nineteen-sixties. Susanna (Juliana Canfield), looking backmost connected her life, delivers lines astir her younger aforesaid with her transfixing John Singer Sargent regard and an icy repose, oregon reënacts achy episodes, trading Plath references with different diligent similar samizdat. But the book’s ruminative watchfulness is unsuccessfully conjugated successful this overly sedate play with music, which has the consciousness of a opus cycle, though sung by the good formed with gorgeous, lonely sorrow. The accumulation veers distant from a documentary, “Titicut Follies”-like attack portion besides managing to dodge immoderate large cloudbursts of feeling.—Rhoda Feng (Public Theatre; done July 12.)

Pick Three

Jennifer Wilson connected Italian-lesson inspiration.

1. Learning Russian humbled me, oregon possibly “humiliated” is the word. In Moscow, I apologized to a prof for being late. “I was sleeping with someone,” I explained. (I meant to accidental “overslept” but attached the incorrect prefix.) I asked a babushka wherever I could find the nearest “semi-automatic.” Miraculously, she understood that I meant “A.T.M.” But, with Russia mostly closed off, I’m rekindling a erstwhile flame: Italian. I bought an aged textbook connected eBay called “Prego!,” which I curse I didn’t take conscionable due to the fact that it has a cupful of gelato connected the cover. Speaking of food, my caller favourite operation is cavoli riscaldati, oregon “reheated cabbage.” It refers to the futility of trying to revive an aged emotion affair. That’s ne'er stopped maine before!

2. I was lured backmost to Italian by “La Chimera,” Alice Rohrwacher’s life-affirming movie astir the dead. It stars Josh O’Connor—who learned Italian for the role—as an archeologist turned person of a set of tombaroli, sedate robbers who raid Etruscan tombs to obstruction long-buried artifacts. He, similar the objects, is stuck betwixt present and the hereafter, and is mourning a mislaid emotion conscionable arsenic a caller 1 introduces herself. Which brings maine to wonder—come si dice “I tin hole him”?

3. In Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Roman Stories” (written successful Italian and translated into English by Lahiri and Todd Portnowitz), an American tourer is trying to work the signs astatine a autobus halt erstwhile an Italian antheral steps successful to help—though helium takes her disconnected course, that time and forever. They marry. Seduction, she aboriginal thinks, is “che ci fa smarrire,” oregon “what makes america suffer our way.” I haven’t recovered a amended translation.