A local artist’s horrifying/inspiring life story, already the subject of a well-regarded documentary, gets the Hollywood treatment in a film starring Steve Carrell opening Friday, Dec. 21.

Dafoe portrays Vincent Van Gogh as a man alternately stretched on the rack of his own genius and the world’s rejection and blissed out by nature’s extravagant beauty.

Friday-Thursday, Dec. 14-20: Check out this award-winning documentary film about Alex Honnold’s astonishing solo climb of Yosemite’s 3,000-foot-high El Capitán Freerider wall. With no ropes or safety gear, Honnold (who has also climbed at the Mohonk Preserve) completed one of the greatest feats in rock climbing history in just under four hours.

Friday-Sunday, Dec. 7-9: Ready for your annual visions of sugarplums? Two top-shelf regional productions of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker are in the works for this weekend.

Friday/Saturday, Dec. 7/8: The Baryshnikov-lauded dancer and cellist Maya Beiser join forces with seminal modern dance choreographer Lucinda Childs to create The Day, an evening-length work with music by Pulitzer Prizewinning composer David Lang. This bold new work explores themes not easily grappled with – memory, aging, death, the survival of the soul.

Live theater, Lipstein said, can be subversive in a powerful and positive way. People enter a theater hoping merely to be entertained. But if a truthful moment happens, if the connection is made between what and who is onstage, people leave the theater feeling more empathetic, less encumbered by those personas, than when they entered. You can see the world premiere of Hannah Benitez’s Adaptive Radiation at the new Denizen Theatre in New Paltz on Wednesdays-Saturdays, December 6-30.

Friday, November 30: The Party is a special night of Gothic celebration, featuring a full live set from Weeknight, deejay sets from Mon Amie and a special guest appearance by your host Amanda Palmer: singer/songwriter, Dresden Doll, playwright, filmmaker, music-business theorist and author.