Welcome back to The Big To-Do. With just eight days to go before the 250th anniversary of the United States, it’s fireworks season. Local celebrations peak with the Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular, which is even more star-studded than usual. And this week’s One Special Thing is the Frederick Douglass speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” The 1852 address, Globe critic Chris Vognar writes, “takes a blistering approach to a theme that always feels ripe this time of year: the wide chasm between American ideals and American reality.”

The weekend weather forecast predictably but unpleasantly includes the word “muggy.” A comedy starring John Cena and Eric André is just one new option in a week notable as “‘Avatar’ time in the world of streaming,” and the Globe’s Matt Juul has the details. And the arts brief section The Rundown includes good news for fans of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Today is the next-to-last day of the knockout stage of the World Cup, with France and Norway facing off in Foxborough. Both are already through to the round of 32, which starts Sunday, meaning the main draw is the “heavyweight matchup” of Kylian Mbappé and Erling Haaland. In other grass-based sports news, play at Wimbledon starts Monday. Grand Slam this, top seeds that, Serena Williams is back and competing in both singles and doubles.

Movies

Milly Alcock is “excellent” as the title character, but the muddled “Supergirl” earns just 2 stars from Globe fil​m critic Odie Henderson. With three days to save her poisoned dog, Kara Zor-El “embarks on a mad quest to find the antidote.” Among the obstacles is Jason Momoa. “Lobo the bounty hunter is a fan favorite, but as someone unfamiliar with the DC Comics Universe, I had no idea if he were friend, foe, or frenemy.” Consider yourself warned.

In 1984, “a camp classic was born.” The original “Supergirl” starred Helen Slater, but Faye Dunaway is the reason to seek it out. “The film arrived smack dab in the middle of the period in her career where she was chewing scenery the way Cookie Monster eats a cookie,” Henderson writes. “After ‘Mommie Dearest’ and ‘The Wicked Lady,’ ‘Supergirl’ presented a ‘can you top those performances’ challenge that Dunaway accepted with gusto.”

Julian Schnabel’s star-studded “In the Hand of Dante” imparts some knowledge of the titular poet’s nine circles of hell. “An eternity spent in any of them would be more enjoyable than this heavy-handed hot mess,” Henderson writes in a 1-star review peppered with burns. Just one: “Schnabel has Louie [Gerard Butler] kill a lot of people in a failed attempt to keep you awake.”

TV & Streaming

Larry David’s “Life, Larry, and the Pursuit of Unhappiness” encompasses “the entirety of American history.” The sketch comedy series deposits its creator in a wide variety of scenarios, but “in the end, Larry is always playing Larry,” writes Globe TV critic Chris Vognar. “This isn’t always a bad thing; we know Larry, after all, and some of us love him, perhaps against our better judgment. But dramatic or even comedic range isn’t really his forte.”

The fifth and final season of “The Bear” is streaming, and in hindsight, its peak is clear. Season 2, episode 6, “Fishes,” is “every explosive, boozy, resentment-fueled holiday gathering you’ve ever attended,” Vognar writes. In an Emmy-winning performance, Jamie Lee Curtis plays Carmy and Sugar’s mother, Donna, “a raging narcissist and sloppy alcoholic who insists that everyone look at her so she can tell them to go away.”

Cast members of “The Real Housewives of Rhode Island” hit town recently, and the takeaway was “something oddly real.” Paying customers flocked to Beacon Hill, “desperate to bond, to gush, to express support for the wives in their on-show feuds.” And in due time, Beth Teitell writes in one of the best Globe stories of the week, “it felt like we were in the presence of something rare: human connection.”

Theater

“Who knew pervasive dread could be so much fun?” Arlekin Players founder Igor Golyak adapted Eugène Ionesco’s “Frenzy for Two, or More” into the “uproarious, head-spinning” two-hander “Delirium.” It incorporates “elements of slapstick, pathos, and mystery” as well as “echoes of Chaplin, the Marx Brothers’ ‘Duck Soup,’ Ridley Scott’s ‘Blade Runner,’ and, inevitably, Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot,’” Globe theater critic Don Aucoin writes.

Mfoniso Udofia’s “In Old Age” is “an enchanting and often hilarious pas de deux.” The eighth of nine plays in the Ufot Family Cycle finds matriarch Abasiama (Ebony Marshall-Oliver) alone in her run-down home when contractor Azell (Marvin Bell) arrives and “shakes Abasiama out of her torpor.” The result, Globe reviewer Terry Byrne writes, is an “intimate story of two people attempting to step out of old habits.”

“Eureka Day” is “a portrait of life in the Berkeley bubble; for local comparison, think Cambridge.” The Huntington production struck a nerve with Globe critic Chris Vognar, a Berkeley native now living in, you guessed it, Cambridge. The characters in Jonathan Spector’s “barbed send-up of identity politics” “all mean well — there I go, trying not to offend — but they try so hard that their tolerance ends up bleeding into something like intolerance.”

Museums & Visual Art

The Cape Ann Museum, “at once art museum, history museum, and regional museum,” reopens Tuesday. Art is up first, with “Avery, Gottlieb & Rothko: By the Sea” spotlighting Milton Avery, Adolph Gottlieb, and Mark Rothko. “We’re pulled in a lot of different directions,” director Oliver Barker tells the Globe’s Mark Feeney. “I don’t see that really as a challenge, though. It’s just that it requires good planning.”

“Atelier 40,” at the Griffin Museum of Photography, unites work by 18 artists. Darrell Roak’s black-and-white images create “an alluring, almost-disorienting tension between solidity of subject ... and the look of slightly spooky ephemerality the pinhole camera bestows,” Feeney writes. William Korn focuses on Brutalist architecture. “The photographs, like the buildings, are all angles and curves. They’re theorems of seeing.”

Farmer and artist Michael Rothschild works in poultry and fruit, metal and stone. The western Maine resident draws inspiration from all around him. “I don’t feel the need of going a long way away to find the stuff that is what I want to do,” he tells Globe correspondent Sterling Davies. “Maine seems to have everything.” “Graven Images: Stone, Wood, Copper, Steel, Bone” is up at the Monson Arts Gallery.

Music

Two and a half centuries in, musicians have never stopped writing about “America and the American experience.” But what compositions best convey that experience? In the run-up to Independence Day, 22 leading lights of the Boston music scene — starting with Peter Wolf — made their picks and explained their reasoning to Globe correspondent Ken Capobianco. Missing a name you expected to see? Head for the comments.

Even while taking a year off from Franklin Park, BAMS Festival is a party. “Momentum” events run through Sunday and include Saturday’s Play Playe in Dorchester, featuring “DJs who are community-centered and play music for the people,” says founder and executive director Catherine T. Morris. “Topping the bill is hip-hop royalty DJ Jazzy Jeff,” writes Globe correspondent Noah Schaffer, who offers a preview.

The city of Boston has created “Dear Summer” playlists every year since 2023. The artists “have changed, but the project’s hyper-local ethos remains the same,” Globe correspondent Victoria Wasylak writes for Sound Check. This year’s slate “clocks in at just under 2½ hours, leaping from slow burn R&B (Worcester’s Motif Alumni) to sleek alt-rock (Boston band Bus Crush) to dancefloor-quaking hip-hop (Brockton collective Van Buren Records).”

A mere 28 years after the album release, Billy Bragg and Wilco will “perform together in the first official ‘Mermaid Avenue’ concert event.” Unpublished lyrics by Woody Guthrie (1912-67) were the jumping-off point, and the project had “a ramshackle spirit to it that was liberating for us,” Wilco bassist John Stirratt tells Globe correspondent James Sullivan. The set is scheduled for tonight at the Solid Sound festival at Mass MoCA.

A new Globe series of archival photo galleries kicks off this week. Live music in New England is an exceptionally rich vein of history, and outdoor events are particularly dramatic. Starting in 1935, The Big Picture takes a look back at a wide and wild assortment of images.

Books

In “The Hub of the Gay Universe: An LGBTQ History of Boston, Provincetown, and Beyond,” Russ López presents facts through fiction. “Everything is still true in the book, it’s still real in the book, but it’s also my interpretation of it,” the part-time P-town resident tells Globe correspondent Annie Sarlin. “It isn’t just gay people in the book; there’s straight people and bi people, lesbians and gender queer people, everybody’s in it, because everybody’s in Provincetown.”

The author’s hometown and a certain retired Patriots quarterback helped inspire “The Shampoo Effect,” Jenny Jackson’s second novel. “I love these characters and all of their foibles,” Jackson, who grew up in Ipswich, says in a Q&A with Globe correspondent Rachel Kim Raczka. “I just have this deep interest in cultural groups ... whether that cultural group is a new summer camp or a workplace or a family or a group of friends.”

Lucy Caldwell is “one of the most exciting and prolific story writers in the United Kingdom.” All four of her collections are now available here, and the latest, “Devotions,” is “genuinely ambitious and rewarding,” writes Globe reviewer Cory Oldweiler. “Its protagonists ... make broader, more existential assessments about our collective humanity, the value of art, and especially the role of fate vs. free will.”

The “Middle-Aged White Male Author afflicted with ennui and creative block” takes center stage in “The Au Pair.” Teddy Wayne “is capitalizing on his previous erotic thriller, ‘The Winner,’” writes Globe reviewer Hamilton Cain, “but ‘The Au Pair’ is really a companion piece to his earlier ‘The Great Man Theory,’ which was similarly stuffed with male vanity, publishing gossip, and resentments of other authors.”

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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