Welcome back to The Big To-Do. After one more steamy day, expect snappy weekend weather as we count down to the autumn equinox on Monday. At this time of year, you can’t go more than a couple of blocks on a weekend day without stumbling over an outdoor event, and Saturday brings one of the biggies: the 20th annual Fluff Festival. The splashiest (ha!) event of the weekend is the finals of the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series at the ICA, and Globe correspondent Isabella Bernstein has the dizzying details. And if you’re staying in, the Globe’s Matt Juul has streaming picks, from “the new ‘Superman’ movie to Bad Bunny streaming his final residency concert in Puerto Rico.”

Movies

Writer Ben Shattuck sits in the book nook at Davoll's General Store in South Dartmouth. Shattuck, who co-owns the country's oldest general store with his brother, Will, has adapted his acclaimed short-story collection, "The History of Sound," for the screen. The store, in operation since 1793, serves as a community gathering place in Shattuck's hometown of South Dartmouth. ERIN CLARK/GLOBE STAFF

Ben Shattuck adapted his own short story into “The History of Sound,” his first screenplay. “It felt like I’d picked up an instrument I could just play. It felt very natural,” he says. The Globe’s Mark Shanahan profiles the South Dartmouth (for now) resident — also a general store co-owner and Jenny Slate’s husband — whom actor Chris Cooper calls “a gentleman, first and foremost, and very, very intelligent.”

“The History of Sound” stars Josh O’Connor and Paul Mescal in “a tragic period-piece love story between two men.” Sounds like “Brokeback Mountain” — a comparison Mescal doesn’t care for — but this 1½-star effort “seems unwilling to address the big gay elephant in the room,” writes Globe film critic Odie Henderson. “I’m tired of movies like this one, even if they are made by a gay director such as [Oliver] Hermanus.”

“A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” is “its own thing, different and original.” After meeting at a wedding, David (Colin Farrell) and Sarah (Margot Robbie) find themselves on a road trip. “That noun in the title, as you might assume, is meant as a metaphor for life and love,” the Globe’s Mark Feeney writes in a 3-star review. “[T]he movie has an unforced, accommodating rhythm that makes weirdness seem, if not natural, then markedly less weird.”

“HIM,” somehow both a horror movie and a sports movie, is also “the worst movie of 2025 so far.” Starring “a very miscast” Marlon Wayans as a pro football player, it’s loaded with Christian imagery. “I knew Jesus was a Capricorn, but I had no idea He was a master of the West Coast offense, too,” Henderson writes in a one-half-star review.

One of the last great Hollywood movie stars, Robert Redford, died Tuesday at 89. Henderson singles out a deep cut of a scene “to honor and mourn a legend” — it’s from “Legal Eagles,” for crying out loud — and the Globe’s Matt Juul tracks down five Redford films available to stream, including his last major starring role, in “All Is Lost.”

TV & Streaming

From left: Forrest Weber, Chris Coy, and Jason Bateman in episode two of "Black Rabbit" on Netflix. COURTESY OF NETFLIX

Jude Law and Jason Bateman play brothers in “Black Rabbit,” which dethrones “The Bear” as “the most anxiety-inducing restaurant drama on TV.” The series is “less concerned with what goes on in the kitchen than with the moral decay that wafts through the hot restaurant/nightspot that gives the show its name,” writes Globe TV critic Chris Vognar. “With few exceptions, these aren’t very nice people.”

As Jake in “Black Rabbit,” Jude Law demonstrates that he’s “a protean character actor with adventurous instincts for both roles and projects.” The two-time Oscar nominee “has done TV before, notably in ‘The Young Pope’ and ‘The New Pope,’” Vognar writes. “Never did I look at the screen and think, ‘There’s Jude Law again.’”

Junior in “Black Rabbit” is a “dream role” for BU grad Forrest Weber. He knows ASL because his sister is deaf, and portraying the son and henchman of gangster Joe Mancuso, played by Oscar winner Troy Kotsur (“CODA”) “is a cool, full circle, ‘you gotta be kidding me!’ life moment,” Weber tells Globe correspondent Isabella Bernstein.

The subjects of the mockumentary “The Paper” and Ethan Hawke’s “truthstorian” in “The Lowdown” have something in common. The fictional journalists, Vognar writes, “are a strange breed for our strange times, when journalism as we knew it fights an uphill battle against social media influencers, bullying from the highest office in the land, and the onslaught of what Stephen Colbert once prophetically proclaimed ‘truthiness.’”

The Big Day

Bostonians Erica Bibby and Sam Rosmarin wed Aug. 1 in Boston with a multi-day celebration that began with an intimate ceremony in the back garden of a South End flower shop. MAHA SHAHID PHOTO

The Globe’s weddings column, The Big Day, tells stories of how couples found each other, fell in love, and said “I do.” Erica Bibby and Samuel Rosmarin had trouble connecting on Hinge, but when they finally met, they were on the same page: “we wanted someone to share a life with,” Sam says. Less than two years later, they married in the South End. Globe correspondent Rachel Kim Raczka tells the story of two world travelers who found each other back home in Eastern Mass.

To apply to be featured, recently married and engaged couples (vow renewals and commitment ceremonies, too!) with ties to New England can click here for the application form.

Music

Singer Shaun Cassidy, pictured here performing at a 2021 fund-raiser, has turned his attention back to music. KEONI KEUR

Onetime teen idol Shaun Cassidy is “a seemingly normal person with an interesting backstory.” While attempting to turn that story into a memoir, he hit on the idea of a solo show. “I thought ‘I’ll just go out and tell stories,’” he tells the Globe’s Christopher Muther. “And people said, ‘No, dude, they’re going to throw shoes at you if you don’t sing a song or two or three.’” The resulting tour reaches New England next week.

Bad Bunny’s summer-long residency in his native Puerto Rico drew fans from near and far, including the Boston area. “When artists like Bad Bunny perform, they don’t just fill stadiums — they create jobs, move tourism, and generate billions in economic activity, and that’s what is so genius about him,” says Josiane Martinez. Globe correspondent Victoria Wasylak works the local angle of the residence, which wraps up Saturday.

Singer-songwriter Mary Gauthier didn’t turn to music until she was in her 30s and “able to access the kind of truth required for deep songwriting.” Today, streaming services “shove me onto playlists with Tyler Childers, Sierra Ferrell, Jason Isbell — young, cool artists,” the 63-year-old tells Globe correspondent James Sullivan. “When a younger artist looks up to me, I’m always surprised. ... I mean, I’m not obscure, but I’m fairly obscure. I’m obscure-ish.”

Boston emcee Red Shaydez has a new platform, and she plans to use it to benefit the local music scene. “We might be a stop on people’s tours, but nobody’s really looking in with a magnifying glass to see what we have going on here,” says Shaydez, one of 14 members of the Sound Board, the Recording Academy’s effort to “elevate the voices” of its members. Victoria Wasylak, writing for Sound Check, offers a look at the new initiative.

Lindsey Buck’s debut album, “The Laundry & The Ecstasy,” took almost 10 years — from when she first signed up for piano lessons. Her piano teacher turned out to be a musician and impresario who helped the professional photographer grow into a singer-songwriter. “To do that is, like, the hardest thing there is — to write a simple, unique, beautiful song," Elan Mehler says in an interview with James Sullivan. “That’s the Shangri-la.”

Theater

Kai Thomani Tshikosi plays the roles of Hercules Mulligan and James Madison on "Hamilton"'s North American tour. AUSTIN RUFFER/BROADWAY IN BOSTON

Boston native Kai Thomani Tshikosi plays Hercules Mulligan and James Madison when “Hamilton” returns to Boston next week. “I’d argue it’s one of the best-constructed pieces of musical theater of all time,” the Emerson grad tells Globe correspondent Ryan Yau. “I’m incredibly excited to just be back in the city, to get on the Orange Line and be in Nubian Square, to ... take in the beauty that is Boston in the fall.”

“The Hills of California,” by Jez Butterworth, “follows in the long tradition of family dramas by the likes of Ibsen, Chekhov, Miller, Hansberry, O’Neill, Williams, and Wilson.” In the Huntington production of the “shattering drama,” Allison Jean White “plays two crucial roles in what adds up to an astonishing feat of performance,” writes Globe theater critic Don Aucoin.

Eboni Booth’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama “Primary Trust” is “subtle, built on craft and patience.” David J. Castillo stars as Kenneth, “a lonely guy in his late 30s who ... is uncertain how, and whether, he could expand the narrow boundaries of his world,” Aucoin says. Dawn M. Simmons directs the SpeakEasy Stage production, her first at the helm of the company, and “nimbly maintains the delicate balance ‘Primary Trust’ requires.”

Paul Melendy “clearly likes to set challenges for himself. And he keeps clearing the bar.” In Greater Boston Stage Company’s “first-rate” production of David Templeton’s “Featherbaby,” the actor “puts his turn-on-a-dime physical agility and general expressivity to good use in a portrayal of the volatile, aggressively entitled, very territorial Amazon parrot of the title,” Aucoin writes.

“We play the town like a piano,” says Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival curator David Kaplan. This year’s event starts Sept. 25 and includes five Williams plays as well as “programming designed to help attendees gain a greater understanding of Williams beyond the plays themselves,” writes Globe correspondent Terry Byrne. Says Kaplan, “These words cast spells. I hope audiences will come and be enraptured.”

“My First Ex-Husband,” by Joy Behar, isn’t the comedian and TV host’s best work. “As a longtime admirer of Behar’s wit, tell-it-like-it-is candor, and general fearlessness on ‘The View’ and elsewhere, I was expecting ‘My First Ex-Husband’ to be funny and insightful,’ writes Aucoin. “It’s neither.” Through Sept. 28.

Museums & Visual Art

King’s Chapel Memorial Sculpture "Unbound" by artist Harmonia Rosales. MASS DESIGN GROUP

Harmonia Rosales’s sculpture “Unbound,” outside King’s Chapel downtown, memorializes the enslaved people “routinely brought to the church by their enslavers.” The central figure, a Black woman, “holds a birdcage, door flung open; a handful of little bronze sparrows dot the immediate vicinity,” writes Globe art critic Murray Whyte. “The woman squats imposingly, but not wearily, inscrutable in her role as an avatar for past injustice.”

“Edward Gorey: The Gloomy Gallery,” at Harvard’s Houghton Library, celebrates the author-artist-illustrator’s centenary. “Happily overstuffed, the exhibition includes more than 130 items,” writes the Globe’s Mark Feeney. “Incongruity, a form of theatricality, is at the heart of Gorey’s art. ... In terms of motifs and settings, the Victorian (and Edwardian) influence is patent. But deeper down was Surrealism, which is the incongruous on stilts.”

Books

Patricia Lockwood and the cover to her new novel, "Will There Ever Be Another You." LEFT: GREP HOAX

“Will There Ever Be Another You,” the new novel by Patricia Lockwood (“Priestdaddy”), opens with the author in a precarious spot. A “lengthy bout of COVID at the start of the pandemic robs her of the facility with words that engenders her strength, her sense of self,” Globe reviewer Cory Oldweiler writes. The book incorporates “heavy, often ponderously existential, story lines, but Lockwood’s characteristic whimsy lightens them.”

In “What We Can Know,” Ian McEwan is “asking the right questions.” The novel spins out along two timelines, “in one, a 2014 soirée, hosted by an eminent poet; in the other, an academic sleuth from the 2120s, hot on the trail of a missing text that might unlock an enigma at the heart of our canon,” writes Globe reviewer Hamilton Cain. The result “ranks high among [McEwan’s] oeuvre ... close to ‘Atonement’ and ‘Amsterdam.’”

Today's newsletter was written by Marie Morris and produced by the Globe Living/Arts staff. Marie Morris can be reached at marie.morris@globe.com. Thanks for reading.

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