The Dance Legend Lucinda Childs’s “Momentary Reprise”

The police-drama template gets a vigorous update in the Saudi director Haifaa Al Mansour’s twisty mystery “Unidentified.” A teen-age girl’s body is found in a desert near Riyadh; the police need a woman to view the corpse, and the only one at the station is Nawal (Mila Al Zahrani), a young administrative assistant and a solitary divorcée who’s hooked on a true-crime series. When officials fail to identify 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 honor killings. Though the engaging story is sometimes filmed dismayingly plainly, its main action sequence—a pursuit on foot through a vast warren of abandoned buildings—is both thrilling and wondrous.—Richard Brody (In limited release.)

Off Broadway

A sense of life cooling its heels pervades Martyna Majok and Aimee Mann’s musical adaptation of the memoir “Girl, Interrupted,” by Susanna Kaysen, about Kaysen’s eighteen-month stay at the psychiatric hospital McLean, in the nineteen-sixties. Susanna (Juliana Canfield), looking back on her life, delivers lines about her younger self with her transfixing John Singer Sargent gaze and an icy repose, or reënacts painful episodes, trading Plath references with another patient like samizdat. But the book’s ruminative watchfulness is unsuccessfully conjugated in this overly sedate play with music, which has the feel of a song cycle, though sung by the fine cast with gorgeous, lonely sorrow. The production veers away from a documentary, “Titicut Follies”-like approach while also managing to dodge any great cloudbursts of feeling.—Rhoda Feng (Public Theatre; through July 12.)

Pick Three

Jennifer Wilson on Italian-lesson inspiration.

Illustration by Antonio Giovanni Pinna

1. Learning Russian humbled me, or perhaps “humiliated” is the word. In Moscow, I apologized to a professor for being late. “I was sleeping with someone,” I explained. (I meant to say “overslept” but attached the wrong prefix.) I asked a babushka where I could find the nearest “semi-automatic.” Miraculously, she understood that I meant “A.T.M.” But, with Russia largely closed off, I’m rekindling a former flame: Italian. I bought an old textbook on eBay called “Prego!,” which I swear I didn’t choose just because it has a cup of gelato on the cover. Speaking of food, my new favorite phrase is cavoli riscaldati, or “reheated cabbage.” It refers to the futility of trying to revive an old love affair. That’s never stopped me before!

2. I was lured back to Italian by “La Chimera,” Alice Rohrwacher’s life-affirming film about the dead. It stars Josh O’Connor—who learned Italian for the role—as an archeologist turned leader of a band of tombaroli, grave robbers who raid Etruscan tombs to fence long-buried artifacts. He, like the objects, is stuck between here and the hereafter, and is mourning a lost love just as a new one introduces herself. Which brings me to wonder—come si dice “I can fix him”?

3. In Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Roman Stories” (written in Italian and translated into English by Lahiri and Todd Portnowitz), an American tourist is trying to read the signs at a bus stop when an Italian man steps in to help—though he takes her off course, that day and forever. They marry. Seduction, she later thinks, is “che ci fa smarrire,” or “what makes us lose our way.” I haven’t found a better translation.