Welcome back to The Big To-Do. Bundle up for the Head of the Charles this weekend — the weather forecast looks chilly, with gusty winds kicking up tomorrow. If you’re feeling more indoorsy, among this week’s streaming picks from the Globe’s Matt Juul are “a Boston-themed season of a hit reality series” and the return of “The Diplomat.” Tomorrow’s Boston Book Festival is mostly indoors, with exhibitor booths in Copley Square. This week’s One Special Thing touches on film, TV, comedy, and “profound truths.” And the arts brief section The Rundown includes

The latest Entertainment RX column, with former Globe TV critic Matthew Gilbert advising readers on what to watch, listen to, and read in difficult times, is a heartbreaker. “Each person’s anguish is unique, of course, and tolerances vary,” he writes in response to two parents who have lost children. “When someone makes art out of grief, often just witnessing the act is moving; their release becomes ours.” His recommendations include an on-the-nose podcast, gentle comedy, and live music.

Movies

“You Can See Everything,” Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s “through-the-looking-glass” documentary about convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes, earns 4 stars from Globe critic Chris Vognar. The filmmakers’ choices “blow up our expectations of the documentary form,” creating “a hard film to write about, mostly because its entire second half could be considered a spoiler. And it’s the best kind of spoiler.”

Nathan Fielder is, “to put it mildly, a total weirdo. Or maybe that’s what he wants you to think.” The documentarian/comedian’s “dedication to crafting a permeable boundary between real and staged is a durable thread. ... The line between fiction and reality is so blurred that you can’t find it, or trust it,” Globe art critic Murray Whyte writes about this week’s One Special Thing. And why “You Can See Everything”? “Good question.”

Georgia Oakley’s “Sense and Sensibility” earns 3 stars from Globe film critic Odie Henderson, who dings it for “a muted color palette and a pacing that doesn’t exactly drag so much as linger.” In this adaptation of Jane Austen’s first published novel, “everything feels stately and formal, like a prim and proper version you’d watch on PBS in an attempt to avoid reading the book. I kept waiting for the film to loosen its corset and live a little.”

The veteran Irish actress Fiona Shaw plays Mrs. Jennings in “Sense and Sensibility.” It’s her second Austen adaptation (the third, “Pride and Prejudice,” is due out in December), but she says she’s “not part of the cult of Jane Austen.” In a Q&A with the Globe’s Meredith Goldstein, Shaw discusses the 1995 Ang Lee adaptation, how Mrs. Jennings’s husband made his money, and Austen’s “absolutely devastating” sentences.

The setting of a large chunk of “Whalefall” is “gross, dangerous, and very, very tight.” It’s the inside of a sperm whale, which has swallowed protagonist Jay Gardiner (Austin Abrams) as he searches for the body of his father, Mitt (Josh Brolin). Henderson gives the movie 2 stars, writing, “I’m sick and tired of the trope of using an abusive paternal relationship as a useful tool in the development of male characters.”

“Misty Green,” written and directed by Chris Rock, “does Misty Green wrong at every turn.” Rosalind Eleazar (“Slow Horses”) plays the title character, a washed-up TV star, and “it’s disappointing to see her as the lead in a subpar production,” Henderson writes in a 1½-star review. The big problem is that “Rock cannot write female characters with any depth.”

The “fearless debauchery and provocation” of Ken Russell’s work reached a turning point in 1971, when “The Devils” was released without a controversial scene believed to have been lost after that. The “Rape of Christ” sequence is back, the 1½-star film is “a still-timely rage against the machine,” and Henderson still doesn’t care for it. “I didn’t like it the other two times I saw it, so no added footage was going to change my mind.”

Henderson checks back in from the New York Film Festival, which closed with Ava DuVernay’s documentary “14th,” the follow-up to “13th” (2016). In a couple of weeks, he’ll make the case that “The Only Living Pickpocket in New York” is to the city what “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” is to Boston. The schedule also included the latest from “Spotlight” director Tom McCarthy, Pedro Pascal, and “Pauls Rudd and Giamatti.”

GlobeDocs Film Festival

The GlobeDocs Film Festival launches Wednesday with Sam Pollard‘s “Tutu,” a portrait of Desmond Tutu. Globe correspondent Natalia Winkelman offers a look at the 30 films — half features, half shorts — screening during a festival that “continues to shine a light on worthy nonfiction filmmaking by assembling an array of the year’s best documentaries from near and far.”

TV & Streaming

The sitcom “Eternally Yours” is just the latest illustration of the fact that vampires, though scary, “are also quite funny, and have been for some time.” There’s “What We Do in the Shadows,” of course, plus a classic Richard Pryor routine, Eddie Murphy in “Vampire in Brooklyn,” and much more. Globe TV critic Chris Vognar considers the phenomenon, including the way “horror and humor often feed on the same set of responses.”

Music

The BSO performs Carlos Simon’s new Double Concerto Suite for violin and cello this weekend. It’s the sixth piece by the orchestra’s first composer chair since his appointment in 2024. “That just goes to show how fruitful the relationship has been,” he tells Globe correspondent Jon Garelick. “I wanted to write absolute music without any programmatic element. Not inspired by a story or a concept, just music for music’s sake.”

To inaugurate its new wing, the Museum of Science has tapped “[g]enre-breaking English polymath Jacob Collier.” He plays the William and Charlotte Bloomberg Public Science Common tonight. “The composer, multi-instrumentalist, and one-man band says he’s been ‘scheming and dreaming’ about the design of this special show while he’s been on tour across Europe and North America this fall,” Globe correspondent Victoria Wasylak writes for Sound Check.

Museums & Visual Art

“A Life in Photography,” at the Danforth Art Museum, is an “impressive retrospective of some six decades of work” by Neal Rantoul.  “What most stands out are the multiple examples of Rantoul’s aerial work,” the Globe’s Mark Feeney writes from Framingham. “Striking in and of themselves, these photographs also provide a visual continuity with his early days as an abstract painter.”

Painter Katie Christensen has a great eye for local color. The Somerville resident “has carved out a niche selling watercolors of Boston-area staples and landmarks, with a touch that feels lifted from a Beatrix Potter storybook,” writes Globe correspondent Lauren Daley. They chat about her work, from commissions of first-date destinations like The Beehive to a rendering of Gillette Stadium that turned out to be Tartan Army bait.

Theater

“Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird” is really Aaron Sorkin’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.” In his 2018 adaptation of the 1960 novel, his “over-caffeinated, pedal-to-the-metal verbal velocity is slowed down,” writes Globe theater critic Don Aucoin. In The Huntington’s production, “Absent a truly compelling Atticus [Finch], the holes and contradictions in Sorkin’s adaptation are more apparent.”

As the title character in “Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors,” Paul Melendy “has no off switch.” Playing the undead count as “a flamboyant slice of Eurotrash, blissfully aware of his killer body but a little bored with this eternal life business,” he propels the Actors’ Shakespeare Project’s production of the “relentless farce,” Globe critic Chris Vognar writes. “‘Dracula’ is one freaky tale, and it deserves every freaky variation it inspires.”

The musical “Operation Mincemeat” “will leave you either energized or exhausted. Maybe both.” Based on a true story of World War II espionage, it’s “it’s a straight-up comic farce, albeit with a strain of sentimentality running through it, patriotic and otherwise,” Globe reviewer Ty Burr writes. And “the five actors playing the 10 or 12 or 16 characters (I lost count) are without exception tremendously gifted hams.”

“Bark of Millions,” the “sprawling queer musical opus,” is “an ever-changing thing.” “Taylor Mac and Matt Ray: Songs From Bark of Millions,” is the “theatrical concert version of the four-hour epic that premiered in 2024,” Globe correspondent Christopher Wallenberg writes. Mac says the show is “a little bit about liberating everybody that’s in the room from this historical oppression that we’ve all been living under.” Through Sunday.

Books

In “Redemption: Faith, Justice, and Sisterhood on Death Row,” Lawrence Wright “finds drama of the deepest kind.” The sisters of the title are death row prisoners in Texas and the nuns committed to saving their souls. “It may be Wright’s most personal work of journalism,” writes Globe reviewer Kate Tuttle, “a truly moving and thoughtful book that will challenge readers’ assumptions about guilt, justice, and transformation.”

“Peck & Peck,” Bonnie Garmus’s follow-up to “Lessons in Chemistry,” features “a big Ferris wheel of characters and plot twists that all kaleidoscope together at the end.” Poetry-obsessed Batter Gray works at a fictional journal in a “nicer, shinier version” of 1980s New York. The result is “a rollicking good story,” Globe reviewer Carolyn Kellogg writes. “But for me as a reader something is missing — some layers of complexity, deeper internality.”

Charlotte Lillie Balogh says her new YA novel, “Capsized” is “really my life condensed into one story.” It’s set in the Boston-area rowing community, familiar territory for the daughter of a crew coach, but was written in LA. “I wrote a ton in lockdown — it was wish fulfillment, dreaming of home,” says the Lincoln-Sudbury grad. “Since moving to LA, I am obsessed with Boston.” She sits for a Q&A with Globe correspondent Lauren Daley.

The anthology “Living, Together” looks at housing from a variety of perspectives, with an emphasis on “alternate routes” to shelter and community. “The essays and Q&As in the book cover 14 states and every region of the country, and feature people ages 25 to 91,” editor Samantha Paige Rosen says in a Q&A with Globe correspondent Gina Tomaine. “[T]he desire and the need for communal living is not location-specific.”

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.

 View in Browser | Unsubscribe |  Manage Your Account | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | Help Center

You're receiving this because you signed up for the newsletter or attended a related Globe event.