Welcome back to The Big To-Do. The weather forecast for the long weekend looks promising, with Hurricane Isaias likely steering clear of New England. Should showers send you indoors, your weekend streaming options include “a number of new titles featuring notable Boston stars,” and the Globe’s Matt Juul has the specifics. And the arts brief section The Rundown includes information about a brief theatrical run of “9 to 5” (1980), programmed in honor of Dolly Parton and benefiting her foundation.

One thing almost everyone can agree on is that pizza is good. But which pizza, and from where? Globe restaurant critic Devra First designated 12 Boston-area pizza purveyors as “essential eating,” and the readers went wild. Head to the comments to have your say, or click here to tell us what we missed.

Movies

In “Animals,” Ben Affleck plays a candidate for mayor — of Los Angeles. Not Cambridge or Boston? “I’ve lived here as long as, maybe longer than, I lived in Boston,” the director and co-screenwriter tells the Globe’s Matt Juul. The kidnapping drama costars Kerry Washington as his character’s wife. “The themes that really were interesting to me were the questions around who are we,” he says. “Are we fundamentally moral beings?”

“Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother,” with a “towering performance” by Mahershala Ali as a devout Muslim hitman, earns 3½ stars from Globe film critic Odie Henderson. Unexpectedly widowed, sword-wielding assassin Latif must care for his kids while tangling with murderous clergyman Hwan Yoon (John Cho). Bassam Tariq’s film is “an action movie that gives equal weight to its scenes of carnage and its family drama.”

Aaron Sorkin’s “The Social Reckoning” is “somewhat inferior” to its predecessor, “The Social Network” (2010). On the plus side, “everyone in the cast is very good.” Mikey Madison, as Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, stands out, and as Mark Zuckerberg, Jeremy Strong is “delightfully vicious.” “My biggest problem with ‘The Social Reckoning’ is that it feels like too little, too late,” Henderson writes in a 3-star review.

Much of the romantic drama “Love of Your Life,” starring Margaret Qualley and Gabriel Basso. is set in Boston and Cambridge. “Time away has made me really appreciate the seasons, and we were fortunate enough to shoot in the fall,” director Rachel Morrison, who grew up in Cambridge, says in a Q&A with the Globe’s Meredith Goldstein. “[W]e came to Boston, and it was fall, and it was windy — and there’s just something so alive about that.”

Following the merger of Warner Bros. and Paramount, “the old Warner Bros, which helped build the Hollywood of today with decades of genre-defining films, no longer exists.” Henderson lists 20 of his favorite films from the 103-year-old studio, unranked except for the last one, “the greatest WB movie ever made.” Can’t argue with that.

The 1982 concert film “Urgh! A Music War,” featuring 34 punk, post-punk, and New Wave bands, never had a theatrical release. That didn’t stop podcaster Chris Slusarenko from becoming “something of an evangelist for the film,” writes the Globe’s Mark Shanahan. “It makes me so happy to see it with an audience, with people clapping and laughing,” says Slusarenko, who cohosts a screening tonight in Boston. “They find so much joy in it. It’s really kind of lovely.”

TV & Streaming

In the hands of Mike Flanagan (“The Life of Chuck”), Stephen King’s “Carrie” becomes “a sharp-fanged cyberbullying cautionary tale.” Globe TV critic Chris Vognar writes, “This approach is certainly relevant to the day and age, but it also dilutes the directness of King’s focus on an ugly duckling pushed past her limits.” Summer H. Howell plays Carrie as “a demure wisp of a girl,” opposite Samantha Sloyan as the “fierce mama bear.”

Zoe Kazan’s adaptation of “East of Eden” has “an emotional depth and intimacy that shines through the vastness of the multiple time frames.” The seven-episode series is “marvelously full,” Vognar writes, with Florence Pugh delivering a “dynamic, wide-ranging” performance as antiheroine Cathy Ames. “I’m really not inventing anything,” says Kazan. “I’m just holding it up to the light.”

Season 2 of “Boston Blue” premieres tonight, with Dorchester’s Donnie Wahlberg playing — gasp! — a New Yorker. Shot largely in Toronto, the “Blue Bloods” spinoff visited Boston over the summer, and Vognar stopped by the set. “I like to share history and stories and things like that. It would be very easy for a group of actors to tune out and be like, ‘Shut up already,’” Wahlberg says of his costars. “But they’re so awesome about it all.”

As “Slow Horses” winds down — seasons are six episodes —no one is safe. Killers played by Kyle Soller and MyAnna Buring are stalking the misfit spies, and “everybody’s a possibility,” Christopher Chung, who plays Roddy Ho, tells the Globe’s Matt Juul. The end of the season is “a lot darker. It’s a lot more exciting,” says Soller. “It’s a lot more, I’d say, visually and action oriented to a degree that we haven’t seen in ‘Slow Horses’ before.”

The home renovation series “Maine Cabin Masters” has beaten the odds to last 10 years. “We like the traditional Maine camps, but we also like the fun, unique ones,” lead builder Chase Morrill says in a Q&A with Globe correspondent Lauren Daley, “We’re not talking crazy budgets. It’s just making a home more comfortable for owners to use and pass on to future generations.” They talk winter prep, “critter holes,” and more.

Comedy

Drummer/comedian Fred Armisen “has made a career out of highlighting those moments that seem too parochial for broad appeal but somehow work anyway.” In advance of two Boston dates, the former “Saturday Night Live” cast member talks with Globe correspondent Nick A. Zaino III about his show “Comedy for Musicians But Everyone Is Welcome.” “I’ve really been enjoying it ... it’s kind of like a nice bonding of musician weirdos.”

Theater

John Godber’s “Bouncers,” set in a Yorkshire nightclub, is an obscure play that deserves to be better known. “In its portrait of British working-class nightlife, the dialogue, the characterizations, and the production have the sizzle of authenticity,” writes Globe theater critic Don Aucoin. It’s four-plus decades old but “feels grimly of our moment,” offering a “portrait of the degradation of women in the club and beyond.”

“Horror movie” is a more familiar concept than “horror play,” but the “horror-tinged thriller has a long and illustrious history in live theater.” With “Covenant” and “Blackhollow: A Gothic Tale of Possession” opening just in time for Halloween, Globe correspondent Christopher Wallenberg gets an inside look at the “nightmare-inducing stage spectacles that have been scaring the bejesus out of Boston-area audiences recently.”

Museums & Visual Art

“I Am Not a Designer,” at the Peabody Essex Museum, presents the work of Isamu Noguchi in “a kind of standard Noguchi 101.” The exhibition “tells you who he was in sometimes fussy detail, at the expense, maybe, of why he matters,” writes Globe art critic Murray Whyte. “The Noguchi nut (that’s me) might find it a lot to wade through. But a Noguchi show can’t help but be beautiful, and even one so overcrowded as this offers moments of real grace.”

“America in the Making,” at the Addison Gallery of American Art, “probably deserves an academic thesis more than a review.” “Once you pick your jaw up off the floor at the abundance of riches here — Walker Evans, Andy Warhol, Philip Guston, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Frank Stella, the list goes on — you grasp that the Addison’s story is the one we of optimistic minds see for the country,” Whyte writes.

Music

As the Globe’s classical music critic from 1964 to 1976, Michael Steinberg saw — and heard – a lot. The new collection “Defending the Music” brings together 12 years’ worth of reviews, features, and opinion pieces. The book, writes the Globe’s A.Z. Madonna, “is a document of Steinberg’s world, his musical loves and pet peeves, his refusal to let a performer’s reputation override the reality of a mediocre result, and his adventurous ear.”

What are acts that sell out arenas doing playing the 140-capacity Cantab Lounge? “[I]t kind of gets them back to their roots a little bit,” general manager Kylie Connors says. “It’s just people who want to play the space, who recognize that it is a historic landmark.” Globe correspondent Victoria Wasylak, writing for Sound Check, looks at a phenomenon she calls “one of the few good reasons to keep an eye on social media.”

Alice Cooper’s new autobiography, “Devil on My Shoulder,” “meticulously un-spins all of the yarns that Cooper created or substantiated over the last 60-plus years.” The “Godfather of Shock Rock” comes clean in the book and in a chat with Wasylak, dispelling decades of rumors. “The reality is actually funnier than all the stories,” he says. “If they really knew what a doofus I was, they would never believe ‘Alice Cooper.’”

Books

“Music Against the Night” by Yiyun Li. HANNAH YOON/FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX

Yiyun Li’s “wonderful and bewitching” “Music Against the Night” inaugurates a trilogy. It follows John Field and Adelaide Percheron, real-life 18th-century classical pianists, as they grow into teenagers who meet just as the book is ending and Napoleon is invading Russia. “Li is in complete command of her complicated, probing narrative,” Globe reviewer Cory Oldweiler writes, “never letting the dialogue between them go completely silent.”

Fiction writer Julie Orringer “is still flying a little under the radar.” In “Luna, Phoenix, Queen,” her fourth book, she considers “many diverse and interesting things ... the relationship between humans and animals, dementia, creative theft, alliances and secrets within families, and grief.” The “compelling” result demonstrates that Orringer “remains at the peak of her powers,” writes Globe reviewer Marion Winik.

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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