5 of Our Favorite Picks

DANIEL ISN'T TALKING MARTI LEIMBACH

Melanie Marsh knows something is wrong with her son Daniel. He won't let go of his Thomas the Tank Engine train. He walks on his toes and collects objects, especially anything disk shaped. And he isn't talking. When the diagnosis comes--Daniel is autistic--Melanie's very proper English husband Stephen walks out, leaving her to feel her way forward with only a mysterious child and an army of (mostly) unhelpful doctors to guide her. This is a tearful, joyful novel, and Leimbach (Dying Young) comes by tears and joy honestly: she has an autistic son.

FISHSCALE GHOSTFACE KILLAH

The Wu-Tang Clan's last reliably great member hasn't exactly softened his material (fishscale is apparently slang for uncut cocaine), but then he hasn't lost his ability to tell a story either. In Ghostface's dexterous delivery, a line like "Workin' out, all I curl is my index finger" is less a boast about control than one more detail in a life of paranoia. The production puts equal value on melody and tension and even has room for nostalgia--9 Milli Bros. is a Wu-Tang reunion--but the truth is that Ghostface is better on his own.

THE COMPLETE MR. ARKADIN ORSON WELLES

"Will you let me tell it in my own way?" begs the tough-guy narrator (Robert Arden) of this 1955 crime drama. Alas, neither he nor Welles--the film's star, writer and director--got his wish. Arkadin was taken from Welles, its convoluted form ironed out and the result renamed Confidential Report. At least seven versions of the film exist, none to his specifications. This superb Criterion DVD pack offers three variations, including a new "complete" assembly. In any form, it's a rococo mix of Citizen Kane and The Third Man: a study of a rich man's power and isolation amid the seedy, greedy flotsam of postwar Europe. In a way, this is a do-it-yourself Kane. It's the viewer's job to sleuth for the real Arkadin--a film that is its own Rosebud.

BROMWELL HIGH BBC AMERICA, THURSDAYS, 11:30 P.M. E.T.

South Park meets Zadie Smith's White Teeth in this offensive, riotous cartoon about a multicultural high school in South London. The trio of main characters includes scheming, crude Keisha (imagine a black female Eric Cartman); Natella, the earnest South Asian class brain; and Latrina, the bigoted white working-class bombshell. Like many good satires, Bromwell is rooted in the idea that shallowness and venality transcend color and creed. The faculty ranges from an assortment of Anglo ignoramuses to Iqbal, the greedy, sleazy Middle Eastern headmaster. And when the immigrant students discuss their favorite foods and cultural activities for a diversity-day assembly, they all choose KFC and text messaging. Bromwell is a rude cannonball splash into the 21st century melting pot.

FESTEN DAVID ELDRIDGE Family get-togethers are hardly rare on Broadway, but rarely are they so disorienting or ominous as this one is. It's not just the revelation about sexual abuse that son Christian lays on the guests at his father's 60th-birthday party but also the eerie nonreaction to it--the way the placid surface of programmed jollity barely ripples. That, along with the stark, almost abstract staging by director Rufus Norris, gives this London import (an adaptation of the Danish film The Celebration) the hollow, haunted feel of Samuel Beckett, not Arthur Miller. With a strong American cast (Julianna Margulies and Michael Hayden, above), it's the take-no-prisoners drama of the Broadway season.