Your weekly guide to staying entertained any day of the week
Your weekly guide to staying entertained any day of the week
July 17, 2026
Welcome back to The Big To-Do. The tall ships are gone, and the wildfire smoke is dissipating just in time for a mixed bag of a weekend weather forecast. Rain or not, you may want to be indoors on Sunday afternoon, when Spain and Argentina square off in the World Cup final. The out-of-nowhere hit movie “Obsession” is the highest-profile streaming pick of the week from the Globe’s Matt Juul. And this week’s One Special Thing is a live album that holds up after nearly five decades. If none of that gets your motor running, read on for plenty of other entertainment suggestions from the Globe’s experts.
Movies
Matt Damon in "The Odyssey." MELINDA SUE GORDON/UNIVERSAL PICTURES
Henderson’s list of the best movies of the year (so far) starts with a surprise. “Project Hail Mary” sneaked up on him, but along with “Disclosure Day” and “Blue Heron,” it boasts 4 stars. The rest of the list is “movies that I think deserve your attention,” including an “adorable, candy-colored musical,” a “cross between ‘Back to the Future’ and ‘Terminator 2: Judgment Day,’” and “the most fun I’ve had at the movies in ages.”
Set and filmed on Nantucket, “The Five-Star Weekend” is going over well with the locals. “You can really feel the sense of place on the screen,” says Tim Ehrenberg of Mitchell’s Book Corner. The 200-plus-person production “was something of an economic boon in the off-season,” reports Globe correspondent Sterling Davies. The series stars Jennifer Garner, Regina Hall, Chloë Sevigny, Gemma Chan, and D’Arcy Carden.
Music
Hallowed Symphony Hall has been the site of a fateful struggle over the future of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. CHRISTIAN KANTOSKY FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE
“Symphony Hall is a house divided.” With the announcement that the BSO and music director Andris Nelsons would part ways next year, “the BSO board surprised — and outraged — its own orchestra." Nelsons isn’t talking. CEO Chad Smith and board chair Barbara Hostetter aren’t backing down. The organization “isn’t merely at a crossroads, it’s in crisis,” and the Globe’s Mark Shanahan, Malcolm Gay, and Meredith Goldstein tell a banger of a story.
The Modern Lovers’ self-titled debut album is “rightly regarded as a proto-punk masterpiece.” But the record Mark Shanahan is still thinking about almost five decades after his own punk phase is “Modern Livers ‘Live.’” This week’s One Special Thing is “so sweet, so honest and openhearted, that it’s hard to believe it was recorded in 1977 — in London, no less, the epicenter of punk.”
Music meets activism at the Wokestock festival tomorrow in Allston. “This is Boston. We’re weird. We’re progressive. We have great entertainers and great art,” says Rob Potylo, who performs as Robby Roadsteamer and organized the event with Melanie Butcher. “Like much of Potylo’s, shall we say, repertoire, Wokestock’s branding is tongue in cheek, but its core concept isn’t,” Globe correspondent Victoria Wasylak writes for Sound Check.
David “Ziggy” Marley took 45 years to pay tribute to his father in song. “Many Mourn for Bob,” on his latest record, “Brightside,” “just happened,” Marley says. “I think that’s the song — I think that’s ‘the one.’” Ahead of this weekend’s Levitate Music & Arts Festival, Marley, 57, chats with Victoria Wasylak about songwriting, his work on the 2024 biopic “Bob Marley: One Love,” and his connection to the PBS animated series “Arthur.”
Theater
Cher Álvarez in "Paranormal Activity." MATTHEW MURPHY
Commonwealth Shakespeare Company is turning 30, and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is back. The original Shakespeare on the Common production established a tradition in a challenging location. “The Common is not a hospitable place to do plays,” founding artistic director Steven Maler, who’s also this year’s director, tells Globe correspondent Terry Byrne. Ahead of next week’s opening, she takes a fascinating look at the logistics.
Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal” begins after an extramarital affair and ends at the beginning. Gloucester Stage’s production features lead performances — by Michael Underhill, Liza Giangrande, and Tanner Efinger — are “as exquisitely controlled as [Shana] Gozansky’s direction,” Aucoin writes. The director allows “space within Pinter’s characteristically spare dialogue for meaning to take shape.”
Books
Cool Machine by Colson Whitehead (Diversified Publishing/Chris Close) CHRIS CLOSE
Colson Whitehead wraps up his Harlem Trilogy with “Cool Machine.” Ray Carney returns, now a small-business owner lured back into the criminal underworld by family ties. “Though doused in Whiteheadian cynicism, sardonicism, and ambivalence, ‘Cool Machine,’ the trilogy’s strongest novel, counters those sensibilities with a foundational Black American concern: justice,” Globe reviewer Walton Muyumba writes.
Three authors with ties to Massachusetts have new novels out. Emily Dickinson helped inspire one, Ralph Waldo Emerson another, and the third is “a slightly broken love story.” Kate Tuttle, who edits the Globe’s Books section, checks in with Heather Abel (Northampton, “The Emilys”), Julie Carrick Dalton (Concord, “The Forest Becomes Her”), and Benny B. Peterson (Arlington, “The Maidenheads”).
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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