Welcome back to The Big To-Do. With less than three weeks left in the year, “best of 2025″ lists are cropping up all over — film performances and gift cookbooks appear below. It’s also the season for holiday house tours, and Globe correspondent Lindsay Crudele offers a look at the logistics. The weekend forecast calls for moderating temperatures, less wind, and the possibility of snow. Josh O’Connor hosts “Saturday Night Live,” with musical guest Lily Allen. O’Connor’s latest movie, “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery,” is one of the week’s streaming picks from the Globe’s Matt Juul. He also tracked the Golden Globe nominations, and the resulting list is a target-rich environment for couch coziers. On Sunday, the Patriots  play host to the Bills with the AFC East title on the line. And if none of that rings your bells, the Globe’s experts have plenty of other entertainment suggestions.

Movies

Keke Palmer (left) and SZA in “One of Them Days." SONY PICTURES

Ahead of his year-end best and worst lists, Globe film critic Odie Henderson singles out 10 great performances of 2025. They include Keke Palmer’s turn playing “confident moments as well as vulnerable ones” in the “uproarious” comedy “One of Them Days”; Tonatiuh’s “career-making” effort in “Kiss of the Spider Woman”; and Delroy Lindo’s “implicit tribute to drunk uncles everywhere” in “Sinners.”

The time- and genre-hopping Brazilian thriller “The Secret Agent” earns 4 stars from Henderson. It’s the story of a technology expert who’s targeted by the military dictatorship in 1977 and is trying to flee the country with his 9-year-old son. Writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s film is “as beautiful as it is brutal, anchored by [Wagner] Moura’s superb, Cannes best actor award-winning performance.”

Emma Mackey plays Ella in James L. Brooks’s political comedy “Ella McCay,” but Jamie Lee Curtis and Albert Brooks are the reason to see it. “Had this film been a total disaster, it would be easier to dismiss,” Henderson writes in a 2-star review. “But every so often, there are glints of the James L. Brooks brilliance I loved so much.” Scenes with Curtis and Albert Brooks “give an idea of what this disappointing movie could have been.”

“Ella McCay” filmed last year in and around Providence. “I spent time in Los Angeles, in New York, and then I go to Rhode Island, I say, ‘Oh, I’m in America,’” James L. Brooks tells the Globe’s Matt Juul. Emma Mackey bonded with the 85-year-old writer-director: “He’s still so proactive and so buoyant and so curious and has such incredible experience that I had everything to learn. But I really felt like we were learning from each other.”

TV & Streaming

Dick Van Dyke at home in Malibu, Calif., in 2021. PHOTO BY MARVIN JOSEPH/THE WASHINGTON POST VIA GETTY IMAGES/THE WASHINGTON POST

Dick Van Dyke turns 100 on Saturday. “Starring Dick Van Dyke,” on PBS’s “American Masters,” features copious clips and “a starry roster of Van Dyke admirers and collaborators,” the Globe’s Mark Feeney writes. “Understandably, the film is highly, even insistently, celebratory. That tone makes for a maladroit handling of something well worth celebrating: Van Dyke’s forthright handling of his alcoholism.”

At 24, Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim “is still cranking out weird and often endearing new material.” Boston-based animator Nick Cabana’s “Blue World” packs a lot into its four-minute episodes. “The small doses and subsequent freedom from extended narrative make it easier for ‘Blue World’ to veer into abstraction,” writes Globe TV critic Chris Vognar. And Joe Cappa’s “Haha, You Clowns” “packs a quiet punch.”

The “Dangerous Liaisons” prequel “The Seduction” “gives us something we didn’t know we wanted.” The series explores how the Marquise de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmont (Glenn Close and John Malkovich in the film, Anamaria Vartolomei and Vincent Lacoste here) forged “their complicated alliance as co-conspirators in 18th-century France.” Vognar recommends turning on the subtitles — “dubbing is rarely a good idea.”

The Big Day

Boston newlyweds Bryce Putt (left) and Adam Gurczak got married on Nov. 1 at the Lyman Estate in Waltham. CASTILLO HOLLIDAY PHOTO + FILM

The Globe’s weddings column, The Big Day, tells stories of how couples found each other, fell in love, and said “I do.” Bryce Putt and Adam Gurczak got together in school and split up when Adam, two years older, graduated — twice. Early on, Adam recalls, he was “slowly discovering who I was.” They married in Waltham in November, 14 years after meeting in high school in Arizona. “In hindsight, this is what I always wanted — sharing openly who I am, who I’m with, and our love together,“ Bryce tells Globe correspondent Rachel Kim Raczka.

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.

Dance

Jeffrey Cirio performing in a Nutcracker costume head with Asian features designed by Robert Perdziola, in Mikko Nissinen's "The Nutcracker" at Boston Ballet. BROOKE TRISOLINI

Boston Ballet’s Nutcracker Prince costume heads look like the dancers wearing them — all of them. The company introduced versions with dark skin and Asian features for last year’s production of “The Nutcracker,” and the shift “made me feel like this is a role I will be doing for a very long time,” Daniel R. Durrett, who is Black, tells the Globe’s A.Z. Madonna. Yue Shi, who’s from China, praises the “real action to make dancers feel themselves, and confident.”

Music

Patti Smith will discuss her latest memoir, "Bread of Angels," at the Chevalier Theatre Dec. 17. LEFT: STEVEN SEBRING

“Bread of Angels” is Patti Smith’s “most layered memoir yet.” Says the rock legend, “There are aspects of the book that I think have my best writing so far.” Ahead of an appearance in Medford, she talks with Globe correspondent Victoria Wasylak about her writing process, the dream that inspired the book, and promoting it while on the 50th anniversary tour for her debut album, “Horses.”

For Juliana Hatfield, “The public part of this job has always been very complicated.” In advance of two shows Sunday in Somerville, the singer-songwriter chats with Globe correspondent Eric R. Danton about her new album, “Lightning Might Strike.” “I’m trying to show people the real me, the real hidden parts of me,” she says. “I’m very reticent and very stoic outwardly, and I suffer on the inside, and I put that in songs.”

Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime” is “the fruitcake of Christmas songs. It shows up every holiday, and no one really wants it.” You may detest a holiday song or three, but the Globe’s Christopher Muther has you beat for sheer venom leavened by hilarity. He asked Globe readers to join in the roasting — not of chestnuts on an open fire — and wow, did you deliver.

The Afro/Caribbean artist category makes its debut at Wednesday’s Boston Music Awards, a move one nominee calls “historic.” “Afrobeats music is a worldwide phenomenon and people are speaking our various languages word for word,” Echezona tells Globe correspondent Victoria Wasylak, writing for Sound Check. Caribbean group Roots Alley Collective’s nod, says drummer Shaquan Gabriel, “gets everybody more involved in what we’re doing.”

The Either/Orchestra is back, with its first album in 15 years dropping today and its first show in six years in Cambridge Wednesday. The sets will blend “the band’s original compositions and arrangements, which draw on the more adventurous side of the jazz tradition” and the Ethiopian music that has long been its calling card, writes Globe correspondent Noah Schaffer.

Dalton & the Sheriffs frontman Brian Scully says the band sounds “like what a country band that was born and raised in Boston would sound like.” If that appeals, check them out tonight in Boston before they go on indefinite hiatus. “The community we built — total success,” says Scully. “Trying to tour nationwide and crack that — not a success.” Globe correspondent James Sullivan has the bittersweet story.

Museums & Visual Art

Rebecca Hutchinson, who builds sculptures out of clay and local materials she beats down to pulp and forms into handmade paper sheets, in her Rochester studio. DAVID L. RYAN/GLOBE STAFF

Sculptor Rebecca Hutchinson is “really interested in finding beauty for beauty’s sake.” She uses paper clay to translate drawings into 3-D pieces of all sizes. “I try to sketch freely and with an open subconscious and then come back and find what’s the potent part of the drawing,” this week’s Working Artist tells Globe correspondent Cate McQuaid. “Exuberance” runs through Jan. 11 at Clark Gallery in Lincoln.

Theater

Parker Jennings, center, as Reality Winner, with, from left, Brooks Reeves, and Cristhian Mancinas-García during rehearsal for the Apollinaire Theatre Company's production of "Is This a Room." JOSH REYNOLDS FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE

Tina Satter’s “Is This a Room” uses transcripts of an FBI interview with Air Force veteran Reality Winner to create a “growing sense of dread.” “Did her leak compromise individuals in the field? Is she a patriot or a traitor for blowing the whistle?” asks Parker Jennings, who plays Winner in Apollinaire Theatre Company’s production. “The whole experience builds to a nerve-racking climax.” Globe correspondent Terry Byrne has a preview.

Books

These are some of the best cookbooks of the year. HANDOUT

The right gift cookbook “needs to be great-looking, with a personality and point of view that speak to the recipient.” Globe restaurant critic and food writer Devra First delivers a bumper crop of titles that fit the bill — I lost count, but it’s a lot — from Dorie Greenspan’s latest, to “‘Top Chef’ shine” in Eric Adjepong’s “Ghana to the World,” to “a volume both lovely and practical,” written and illustrated by Jacques Pépin.

In “Year of the Water Horse,” journalist Janice Page says, she tells “two distinct stories: mine, our journey toward adopting a child, and my mother-in-law’s.” Eventually, she says in an absorbing Q&A with Globe correspondent Kate Tuttle, she decided to “really talk about my shortcomings in terms of trying to tell the story of a Chinese woman, and in terms of even trying to tell my own story without therapy.”

What did your book club love in 2025? What’s on the collective “to read” list for 2026? The Globe wants to know. Tuttle writes, “In the coming months, we’d love to spark conversation about book clubs and the books you’re reading — who knows, maybe we’ll offer some suggestions!” Click through to chime in.

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.

Correction: Last week’s newsletter included an incorrect photo caption for The Big Day story, misnaming the couple, Ariel Bornstein and Ryan Hansen. We regret the error.

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