Welcome back to The Big To-Do. Labor Day is Monday, and the holiday weekend weather forecast is the kind we dream about on those grim New England days when the air feels like a bouquet of icicles or a clammy washcloth. If your weekend is long, carve out time for streaming something new with guidance from the Globe’s Matt Juul, whose picks range from “the latest ‘Star Wars’ adventure to a docuseries on a fan-favorite workplace sitcom.” This week’s One Special Thing takes a hyper-local look at an iconic American painter. And the arts brief section The Rundown includes the winners of the annual Massachusetts Book Awards.

Movies

“The Sun Never Sets” “might have had credibility if its plot were being enacted by college kids or people in their 20s.” But writer-director Joe Swanberg casts 48-year-old Jake Johnson as Dakota Fanning’s on-again, off-again boyfriend, and the result “sure as hell doesn’t make much sense to me,” Globe film critic Odie Henderson writes in a 1½-star review.

It’s an adorable pink handbag, but the “Devil Wears Prada 2″ souvenir popcorn bucket is only number two on Henderson’s list of movie-collectible receptacles. He ranks “11 of 2026’s most memorable, and weirdest, novelty popcorn buckets,” including an $80 number and some “Odyssey” swag that dispenses “50 ounces of popcorn out of the [Trojan] horse’s crotch.”

Mary Mazzio’s documentary “Mighty Mary” tells the story of the first all-women team to vie for the America’s Cup. The yachting competition started in 1851, and the barrier-breaking 1995 team is “a piece of history that has kind of been forgotten,” Mazzio tells the Globe’s Matt Juul. Narrated by Hugh Jackman and Elizabeth Banks, the film is “all about defying what might seem impossible.”

TV & Streaming

Season 2 of “Heated Rivalry” is in the works, and fan fervor shows no signs of abating. The series sparked “the most popular theme night in Red Sox history, with 12,000 fans descending on the ballyard,” Globe correspondent Sarah Rodman reports from Fenway Park. Sayas book series author and Red Sox fan Rachel Reid, “[B]eing able to stand here on the field is such an honor.”

Books

With “Practical Magic 2” in theaters, Alice Hoffman is in the news, and her story has a great twist. Frustrated with the publishing industry, the novelist took a detour — to Harvard Divinity School. “I think I was there to just find out what do I want to do next,” she says. Ahead of the release of her new novel, “The Witches of Cambridge,” Hoffman chats with the Globe’s Meredith Goldstein.

Patricia Cornwell didn’t plan to write a memoir. But she’s “never written anything as fast as this memoir came out of me.” The Boston-based author of the Kay Scarpetta novels sits for a wide-ranging Q&A with Globe correspondent Lauren Daley and offers some sage advice: “Nobody does it perfectly out of the gate.”

In “Taipei Story,” R.F. Kuang continues exploring beyond her signature genre, fantasy. The “succinct, sincere novel” tells the story of Lily Chen’s summer in Taiwan. It’s the latest addition to a different genre, writes Globe reviewer Hannah Bae. “[R]ecent Asian American fiction is rife with stories of young women returning to their ancestral homeland.”

Emma Cline’s “Switzy” “follows septuagenarian David Hastings on his way to end his life via euthanasia.” Diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, David heads to Switzerland, writes Globe reviewer Cory Oldweiler. “Cline makes no moral judgments about David’s behavior, leaving readers to decide how they feel. Is David’s life — despite its many missteps — redeemed by the fact that it ends with dignity?”

Your Boston Public Library card options just got a lot more interesting. Hundreds of designs illustrating the motto “Free to All” yielded one winner each in the adult, teen, and youth categories, and they’re gorgeous. Globe correspondent Janira Skrbkova has the details.

Looking for just the right book to tote to the beach over the long weekend — or to your favorite reading nook as the temperature drops? The Globe’s fall books guide includes 40 titles to help you “find warmth and comfort in literature as the weather begins its turn toward winter’s short days.”

Music

John Lennon and Yoko Ono, John Coltrane, and Melissa Auf der Maur of Hole and the Smashing Pumpkins, together at last. Three new photo books capture the artists’ “vastly different eras,” Globe correspondent Victoria Wasylak writes for Sound Check. In focus: a single day in 1980, the last 17 years of Coltrane’s too-short life, and “the grimy, glorious alt-rock boom of the 1990s.”

An often-overlooked element in the evolution of American popular music is “music made in or about jails and penitentiaries.” In “The Midnight Special,” Colin Asher profiles artists from Lead Belly to Tupac Shakur. “I see myself as a storyteller, in the great tradition of working-class storytellers,” he tells Globe correspondent James Sullivan.

Turmoil at the BSO has pulled focus from “the biggest, most existential problem: the symphony’s shrinking audience.” The Globe’s Meredith Goldstein finds a possible solution halfway across the country, where the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra, led by Tanglewood Music Center alum Delta David Gier, “has found its greatest successes in community connection.”

Theater

The Huntington season opens next week with the Pulitzer- and Tony-winning “Purpose.” Conventional in its outline, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s play “is a weighty and tightly wrought drama that also happens to be pretty hilarious,” writes Globe correspondent Alyssa Vaughn. “[F]ew things are as captivating as total catastrophe. And Jacobs-Jenkins packages this one brilliantly.”

“We need Eleanor Roosevelt right now,” says Paula Plum, who plays the former first lady in the solo show “Eleanor.” In Mark St. Germain’s play, Plum tells Globe correspondent Terry Byrne, “we learn all kinds of things about her relationships that inform our understanding about what drove her to work so hard to help others.” The Central Square Theater production opens next week.

Museums & Visual Art

Mark Rothko’s son recently donated “Untitled (wharf, Gloucester, Massachusetts)” to the Cape Ann Museum. Viewing this week’s One Special Thing, Globe art critic Murray Whyte writes, “you’re reminded, importantly, that Rothko was at one point an artist much like any other: trying, failing, and trying again to find the visual language that would give his ambitions life in the world.”

“The Way We Never Were,” at the Harvard Art Museums, is a “cornucopia of mid-century vernacular photography.” Commercial photographers captured these images of “graduations, banquets, weddings, family gatherings” and more, the Globe’s Mark Feeney writes. “The specificity the camera conveys meets the not-infrequent unreality of postwar American life.”

Put down your iPhone and try something retro — shooting photos on film you develop yourself. “In a world of Instagrams and quick selfies, the film camera is a reminder that a picture was never made to be beautiful,” Globe correspondent Celine Hijazi writes in a meditation on the pleasures of the darkroom. “It was made to capture a moment — and, somehow, make it last.”

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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