Your weekly guide to staying entertained any day of the week

June 27, 2025

Welcome back to the Big To-Do. The weekend forecast has only one rainy day in it and no three-digit temperatures, which feels like a win. With next Friday being July 4, expect weird traffic patterns and surprise fireworks all week. If you prefer to stay in, the Globe’s Matt Juul has a look at “the latest movies and TV shows available on streaming.” For that — and lots of other things — you may want some candy, and who better than Globe restaurant critic and food writer Devra First to point you toward candy stores that “are a child’s wildest dream, but they are here for the adults”? Bonus: Jonathan Wiggs’s photos are a feast for the eyes.

Movies

M3GAN in "M3GAN 2.0," directed by Gerard Johnstone. Universal Pictures

“M3GAN 2.0” is “bigger, louder, sillier, and more violent” than the original. The killer-robot flick scores the same 3-star rating from “trash-loving” Globe film critic Odie Henderson, who writes, “I would be much harder on this movie if I didn’t have such a good time watching it. Admittedly, it’s ridiculous, but I absorbed all of its haphazard chaos with a huge smile on my face.”

Brad Pitt’s new Formula One movie — fine, “F1® The Movie” — earns 3 stars from the Globe’s Mark Feeney. “The way the movie is shot ... you see the speed,” he writes. “The way the movie is edited you feel it. Paying extra for IMAX is worth considering.” Whether or not you’re planning on seeing for yourself, the first two paragraphs of this review will get your engine running.

Rewatching “Brokeback Mountain” after 20 years, Henderson stands by his 3-star review. “Despite its technical proficiency, the chemistry between the two leads, and [Heath] Ledger’s amazing acting, the movie ultimately harkened back to the old studio system days, where if you were gay, you had to either die horribly or suffer for your ‘depraved’ sins.”

Asked if she’s good with a knife, Danielle Deadwyler responds, “Oh, hell yeah.” In “40 Acres,” her character battles cannibals threatening her family’s farm. “The fight scenes are exhausting, but ... we just rolled with the punches,” the star of “Till” and “The Piano Lesson” says in a wide-ranging Q&A with Globe correspondent Stuart Miller. “It’s a dance — this is choreography.”

Eva Victor’s award-winning “Sorry, Baby” is “a very personal story, and there’s a lot of emotional truth in it.” The first-time director plays Agnes, a trauma survivor. “I got to build a world around this character, so the whole story supports her journey, and her attempt at survival is the center of the story,” they tell Stuart Miller.

“Jaws” turned 50 recently, and Henderson made the pilgrimage to Martha’s Vineyard to witness the celebration. He found that “everybody had a story about, or a connection to, Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece.” From day players to the guy who kept Bruce the mechanical shark in working order, there are indeed a lot of stories.

Reminder: The Roxbury International Film Festival runs through Friday. The closing-night feature is Holland Randolph Gallagher’s “May the Lord Watch,” and the RoxFilm wrap party is also the kickoff event for BAMS Fest (see below).

TV & Streaming

Ayo Edebiri as Sydney Adamu, Arion King as TJ. FX

Season 4 of “The Bear” dropped all at once, and even if you’re bingeing, you’ll want to pause at episode 4. Co-written by Ayo Edibiri and Lionel Boyce, it’s “my favorite kind of ‘Bear’ episode,” writes Globe correspondent Chris Vognar: “one that lets you catch your breath ... and focus on a single character in relative repose, away from the series’ scrambling chaos and perpetual crisis.”

Mariska Hargitay’s documentary “My Mom Jayne” focuses on “its director’s reckoning with her unresolved maternal issues.” Hargitay was 3 when her mother, Jayne Mansfield, died. “Though the film gives Jayne Mansfield her much-deserved due, it far too often feels like we’re flies on the wall during a slew of therapy sessions,” writes Odie Henderson.

“Ironheart” stars Dominique Thorne as the title character, the alter ego of a cash-strapped engineer. “There’s an intriguing sci-fi story bubbling under the surface” of Marvel’s latest, writes the Globe’s Matt Juul. But “it’s too often overshadowed by the messy magical elements that the Marvel machine shoehorns into the show.”

Dennis Lehane’s “Smoke” centers on two arson investigators pursuing two serial arsonists. Whether the pairs overlap is the big question. The series is “one of those nine-episode stories that could have easily fit into a five-hour container, or even the two-hour running time that has treated so many Lehane tales well,” writes Chris Vognar.

The Big Day

Holly Nichols and Adrian Pablo Sosa wed on May 23 at the New England Botanic Garden at Tower Hill in Boylston. The pair met at Endicott College, where Sosa would later propose, and settled on the North Shore. Kasey Canzano Photography (Lead), Gina Tremblay (Assist)

The Globe’s weddings column, The Big Day, tells stories of how couples found each other, fell in love, and said “I do.” Holly Nichols and Adrian Pablo Sosa met as students at Endicott College. When the time came to propose, “I figured, bring it back to where it all started,” Pablo tells Globe correspondent Rachel Kim Raczka. And as her parents walked her down the aisle in Boylston in May, Holly recalls, “I have never been happier in my life than in that moment.”

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

Guests attend BAMS Festival in 2024. Katy Beth Barber | KBarber Photo

The Boston Art & Music Soul (BAMS) Festival isn’t until Saturday, but it already has Momentum. That’s the event series that “will fold film, fashion, and poetry into this year’s festivities,” writes Globe correspondent Jeffrey Kelly. “For us, it’s about saying, ‘We’re not one thing. We’re not one identity. We’re multiple identities,’” says the festival’s Toki Wright.

The annual dance party that takes over the streets around Cambridge City Hall on Friday is revolutionary. Part of statewide observations of the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, that is. “What we’re celebrating in Cambridge is not just the Revolution, but everything we’ve done since,” Matt Nelson of the mayor’s office tells Globe correspondent Victoria Wasylak, writing for Sound Check.

If the sounds of the late 20th century are more your jam, Boston’s annual Donna Summer Dance Party returns to City Hall Plaza Friday.

Kes the Band “mixes rock, R&B, and Afrobeats into soca.” Once a Carnival mainstay, soca is now “a year-round staple,” writes Globe correspondent Noah Schaffer. Says frontman Kees Dieffenthaller, “As we started to tap into more of the R&B and the Afrobeat and mixed with that soca feel, it was the beginning of the development of our sound.” The band plays Boston Thursday.

The genre-defying trio Khruangbin plays Boston Friday. To guitar, bass, and drums, the band sometimes adds what drummer Donald “DJ” Johnson calls a “fourth instrument.” “[W]hen we get to the end of the process and it feels like we need something else or something’s missing, then vocals are usually a nice texture to play with,” he tells Globe correspondent Marc Hirsh.

Singer-songwriter Benmont Tench is touring in support of his second solo album, “The Melancholy Season.” An original member of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, “rock’s most in-demand session keyboardist” sits for a Q&A with Globe correspondent Lauren Daley. The Florida native says of his time at Phillips Exeter, “I got a huge musical education, not formal, but cultural, up there.”

Museums & Visual Art

Artist Diane Dwyer with one of her creations as it is projected on the wall of a vacant Dorchester tire store on June 24, 2025. Dwyer is part of a group of artists called Silence Dogood. Ken McGagh for The Boston Globe

Add “temporary graffiti” — projections of provocative text onto prominent buildings — to Boston’s legacy of public protest. Artist activists make up Silence Dogood, “the small collective that has staged about a dozen acts of protest with stealthy nighttime projections in and around Boston.” Globe correspondent James Sullivan explains the mission and the source of the name.

“June Leaf: Shooting from the Heart,” at the Addison Gallery of American Art, captures “a heartfelt polymath bursting with feeling.” Leaf, who died last year at 94, spent 75 years “making everything — sculpture and collage, drawings and paintings, dioramas, contraptions, projections, and I’m sure I’m missing something,” Globe art critic Murray Whyte writes.

Most of the photographs in “The Gospel of the Negro Leagues” were taken at Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Ala. The show’s appeal “for anyone who cares about baseball history is obvious,” writes the Globe’s Mark Feeney. “More important, its appeal to anyone who cares about goodness and humanity ... may be even greater.” At the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center.

The Boston artists group Illuminus is planning “a wholly original and new kind of public exhibition.” Set for Roxbury in October, the project “will be large and immersive,” reports Globe correspondent Jacquinn Sinclair. Artists are working with community residents to create something “multimodal and experiential and invite people into that world,” says founder Jeff Grantz.

Puppeteer Sarah Nolen creates puppets and universes. “With puppetry, you’re building a world that is not human-centric,” this week’s Working Artist tells Globe correspondent Cate McQuaid. “That world has its own rules, it has its own aesthetic, and it has its own needs.” See her latest show, “Party Animals,” at Emerson College’s UnCommon Stage on July 5. It’s free!

Theater

From left: De’Lon Grant as Tom, Liza Giangrande as Laura, and Adrianne Krstansky as Amanda. Shawn G. Henry

If you want to see “The Glass Menagerie” done right, you have just a short time to get to the North Shore. “It’s not often that the elements of direction, design, and performance merge as powerfully as they do in this Gloucester Stage Company production,” writes Globe theater critic Don Aucoin. Through Saturday.

Comedy

Demetri Martin performs at the Wilbur on Saturday. Brian Kelly

Demetri Martin’s wife once told him, “Your brain is a non-stop barrage and you can’t stop.” She’s not wrong. “I direct the stream into something positive and productive by writing jokes — I get to have a job but also prevent my thoughts from turning back on me,” he says. Ahead of two shows in Boston on his “Quick Draw” tour, Martin talks with Globe correspondent Stuart Miller.

Books

Nell Stevens and the cover to her novel “The Original.” Celey Williams/W. W. Norton & Company

“What if you could disappear, or step into the shoes of someone else?” In “The Original,” Nell Stevens “wittily updates many Victorian novel tropes, weaving in art, fakery, secrets, and queer romance.” Plus a long-lost cousin — or is he? — mental illness, face blindness, a media frenzy, and more. “While it feels grounded in research,” writes Globe reviewer Carolyn Kellogg, “the book has a breezy approach to historical fiction.”

“The Satisfaction Cafe,” by Kathy Wang, is “profoundly satisfying.” The novel tackles “the perpetual riddle of universal loneliness” as it takes its protagonist, Joan, from her 20s to old age. “In no way the Hallmark-card rom-com its title may suggest, this deft, sharp, funny, poignant chronicle delights and surprises: modern, complex, credibly absurd,” writes Globe reviewer Joan Frank.

Dance

Michael Manson Jr. in "The Center Will Not Hold" at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival on Wednesday. Jamie Kraus Photography

Dorrance Dance’s “The Center Will Not Hold” opens the Jacob’s Pillow season. “Dorrance Dance has been blending tap with contemporary dance forms for years, but the meat has been percussive movement,” writes Globe reviewer Sarah Knight. “This evening’s vocabulary is just as much hip-hop as tap.” Through Sunday.