James Garner and Jon Winokur, The Garner Files: A Memoir (Simon & Schuster, $25.99). Most ghostwritten celebrity autobiographies are a waste of time. Not so The Garner Files, which is unselfconscious, unpretentious, and ungossipy–but frank. If, like David Thomson and me, you esteem the star of Maverick, The Rockford Files, and Support Your Local Sheriff! as one of Hollywood’s outstanding on-camera craftsmen, you’ll gallop through it with delight. I only wish it were twice as long (TT).

Edouard Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890-1940 (Jewish Museum, up through Sept. 23). A wide-ranging, thoughtfully curated, and unusually beautiful show of fifty paintings and works on paper by the most underappreciated of post-impressionist masters. Very strongly recommended, especially if you suffer from the sorely mistaken notion that Vuillard’s later portrait were created merely to please his high-society clients (TT).

Mr. Charles Laughton. Now on home video for the first time, an ultra-rare kinescope of a Christmas special originally telecast by NBC in 1951 in which Laughton presented a shortened version of the much-admired program of prose and poetry readings that he performed throughout America during the Forties and Fifties. Not only is it hugely entertaining, but it’s touching–almost hurtfully so–to see what network TV executives once thought suitable for mass consumption (TT).

Man and Superman (Irish Rep, 132 W. 22, now extended through July 1). George Bernard Shaw’s marvelously excessive 1905 philosophical comedy, skillfully trimmed from five hours to three and staged by David Staller with the kind of propulsive comic force that makes a long evening feel short. The cast is first-rate, but the play’s the thing (TT).

Damsels in Distress. At long last, Whit Stillman is back, this time with a poignant little low-budget romcom about college life whose protagonists, a band of invincibly innocent young women led by Greta Gerwig, endeavor to socialize and redeem the young men they love by starting an international dance craze. (Well, sort of.) Fey, whimsical, talky, and quintessentially Stillmanesque, Damsels in Distress proves that the writer-director of Metropolitan, Barcelona, and The Last Days of Disco didn’t lose his feather-light touch by taking a twelve-year-long vacation (TT)

Charlie Louvin with Benjamin Whitner, Satan Is Real: The Ballad of the Louvin Brothers (Igniter/HarperCollins, $22.99). A hair-raisingly frank memoir by half of the greatest vocal duet in the history of country music. Ira Louvin was the hell-raiser with the sky-high tenor voice who got all the ink, but it was his brother Charlie who lived to tell the tale of how the Louvin Brothers went from picking cotton in Georgia to singing on the Opry–and how Ira cracked up along the way. Satan Is Real may be ghostwritten, but it sounds completely authentic, and every page will hold your attention (TT).

Saint Joan (Access, 380 Broadway, reopening Apr. 24-May 13). George Bernard Shaw’s history play about Joan of Arc runs for three and a half hours and calls for a pageant-sized cast of twenty-four. How to make it doable in a tiny off-off-Broadway theater? By reconfiguring the script for a woman and three men who switch from part to part à la The 39 Steps. It may sound gimmicky, but Eric Tucker’s vest-pocket staging, mounted in a house so small that one scene is played in the lobby, fuses Shakespearean speed with Brechtian directness. It’s the most exciting Shaw revival I’ve ever seen (TT).

Renoir, Impressionism, and Full-Length Painting (Frick Collection, 1 E. 70, up through May 13). A miniature show of nine full-length portraits, all of them stunningly persuasive, painted between 1874 and 1883 by a painter who could be too easy and likable but is here shown to be the master he (sometimes) was (TT).