A dead body floats on the Hudson. Then, through the darkness, you are propelled into Kill Your Darlings, the words big and bold and all caps—KILL YOUR DARLINGS—the big-screen directorial début of John Krokidas. The film that follows examines, with the bracing audacity of its brash opening, how one death shaped the Beat Generation during their formative years at stuffy old Columbia University.

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When is a Western not a Western? That’s the question Jared Moshé, the young director of Dead Man’s Burden, a neo-Western which opened on Friday, has been playing with lately. The movie’s dusty vistas, set in New Mexico and in period costume, might seem like more of the same—either a John Wayne spoof or a Tarantino bloodbath—but Moshé, a first-time director and writer, is earning high praise for a reason. “I’m interested in mythology, and the West is the mythology of America,” he says.

There’s a new kind of kick in town, and it’s hitting the pavement hard. Meet Mother, the sole product of Swedish brand EYTYS, a unisex shoe company offering a fresh take on the classic canvas sneaker. Founders Jonathan Hirschfeld and Max Schiller put their concept into action last year after a trip to Tokyo, which is, according to the duo, “perhaps the most insane and inspiring city in the world.” Schiller, Hirschfeld, and another longtime friend, Charlie Hedin, officially founded EYTYS—named because the founders were born in the Eighties and are members of Generation Y—in September 2012 in Stockholm.

Three months ago, the Culture Project stage was showered in tiny sparkling LED’s, while the actors, wearing mirrorball masks, recited lines from a Tennessee Williams play that had never been staged before. In Masks Outrageous and Austere, one of the first productions to inhabit the company’s new space at 45 Bleecker Street, was a breath of shiny air, using hundreds of tiny lights, technological flourishes, and sharp costumes that joined Southern elegance with sinister digital opulence. Set in an unknown coastal location, the play, Williams’ last, centers on the world’s richest woman and her dysfunctional allegorical neighbors, taking a more experimental route than his better-known works such as The Glass Menagerie or A Streetcar Named Desire. It’s an odd part of his output, but an eerily pertinent satire of the haves and the have-too-muches.

Just hearing the details of Nathalie Moellhausen’s jet-setting month, you’d think she was living a glamorous red-carpet life: Brazil, Cuba, a week in Europe, Nanjing, Sydney, and now Paris to “decompress.” The reality is that Moellhausen is dead tired from traveling from one exotic gym to another, training for a series of megawatt competitions that will dictate whether she finally makes it into the Olympics.

It’s hard to fall in love to Auto-Tune and modern pop music is accordingly just rebounding from a cold, mechanical dip into the overproduction pool. It takes some kind of special to dive back in and emerge with an album that is touchingly human. Toro Y Moi’s mastermind, 25-year-old Chaz Bundick, recently put out Underneath the Pine, a melancholy wash of South Carolina yarns and heartbreak. But buried within his layers of sliding keyboard and scratched funk riffs is a self-professed workaholic who’s still trying to figure out how to sing in front of his friends.

If you hear Tennis make some references to boats, beaches, or other nautical paraphernalia, it’s warranted. The Denver-based buzz band is comprised of lovebirds-turned-sailors Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley. The duo spent their cash on a small sailboat, Swift Ranger, and sailed along the North-Atlantic coastline for seven months. Their resultant debut album Cape Dory, out tomorrow, is a reverby homage and a warm kiss to life on the water. Somehow all that wanderlust produced more than a musical travelogue. Cape Dory is an expressive album of little surprises and touches of sweetness.

The Illusionist conjures up old cities, odd-shaped regulars, and places a tall, toppling magician at the crumbling center. The film follows a young naïf and her keeper, a small-time magician suffering through small-time gigs. But it also asks whether it’s possible to reanimate a life. While The Illusionist captures all the roughed-up charm and quiet isolation that brought director and animator Sylvain Chomet to light for The Triplets of Belleville, it also draws blood from its source, Jacques Tati.