Welcome back to The Big To-Do. With two weeks left before Labor Day, the weekend weather forecast is on the humid-damp-rainy end of the spectrum. This week’s streaming picks , narrowed down by the Globe’s Matt Juul, feature two 3½-star movies and a docuseries about UConn women’s basketball. The One Special Thing is an 80-year-old film that “is just about never boring.” And the arts brief section The Rundown includes the lowdown on a very New England event: a Noah Kahan look-alike contest at a doughnut shop.

Finally, two cool events to put on your calendar for next week: a partial lunar eclipse and “blood moon” Thursday night into early Friday, and later on Friday, the Donna Summer Disco Party on City Hall Plaza.

Movies

“Late Fame” earns 3 stars from Globe film critic Odie Henderson, “specifically for [Willem] Dafoe’s stellar work.” As Saxberger, a poet turned postal worker tracked down by a 20-something fan straight out of “incorrigible arts major hell,” Dafoe is “the true saving grace of the film, creating a character who seems to be evolving before our very eyes.”

The ”fun time-waster” “Mutiny” stars Jason Statham as “yet another rogue hero out to right wrongs in the most violent ways possible.” It’s set mostly on a ship being used for human trafficking. “Other plot shenanigans, conspiracy theories, and the like abound,” Henderson writes in a 3-star review. “But you’re here for the carnage. On that score, ‘Mutiny’ delivers.”

For readers of Enid Blyton’s children’s books, “The Magic Faraway Tree” is a big deal. That apparently includes “a slew of familiar British actors young and old,” starting with Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy. But Henderson “had no way to tap into the film’s mythology” and gives it 1½ stars. “Fans of the books will fare best, though kids 8 and below may also find it endearing.”

“Coyote vs. Acme” opens next week, and the “superb” live action/animation hybrid has Henderson in a nostalgic mood. His look at the genre includes Oscar winners, NBA MVPs, a fascinating take on “Song of the South,” and “one of the all-time great performances in movie history” — by Bob Hoskins in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”

One of the movies’ favorite novelists is Graham Greene. Author of “both serious fiction (always highly readable) and what he called ‘entertainments’ (always morally searching),” Greene is the focus of a series at the reopened Harvard Film Archive, “The Cold Heart Is More Precious Than Diamonds.” The Globe’s Mark Feeney has an in-depth preview.

At 80, “The Big Sleep” remains “hardboiled noir in perfect abstract.” Howard Hawks directed the adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s novel. “Between Chandler’s elite wordsmith skills, and Hawks’s unflagging love for tough-talking guys and gals,” Globe critic Chris Vognar writes, this week’s One Special Thing “serves up a dialogue feast almost unmatched in the annals of noir.”

The new streaming series “My Brilliant Career” is “witty, boisterous” — and “not as good as the 1979 film adapted from the same source material.” Judy Davis and Sam Neill “smolder together at the start of their brilliant careers,” Vognar writes, and director Gillian Armstrong “applies ... a pastoral texture that finds poetry in the rhythms of everyday life.”

The Anthony Bourdain biopic “Tony” is introducing the chef and author, who died in 2018, to new audiences. The Globe’s Matt Juul, who interviewed Bourdain in 2016 and 2017, recalls “his creative genius and masterful storytelling, the empathy and honesty he showed to everyone he talked to or shared a meal with, and the strength of his convictions and moral compass.”

TV & Streaming

“Lanterns” stars Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre in “a buddy story in the form of a geopolitical allegory.” Even for “a mere comics dilettante” like Globe TV critic Chris Vognar, the DC Comics property works. “The show’s prime pleasures come from character dynamics, rather than a storyline that has a way of twisting itself into pretzel logic, and from casting.”

Books

Beach-book season is yielding to “fall, a favorite season among the bookish for its perfect reading temperatures and back-to-school vibes.” The Globe’s experts are on the case with 40 titles — 26 fiction, 14 nonfiction — mingling big names and promising debuts, thought-provoking essays and two important histories: of the telephone and of American profanity.

Emma Brodie studied theater to become a better fiction writer. “[Y]ou have the barest bones of description — everything has to come through the dialogue,” she says in a Q&A with Globe correspondent Lauren Daley. The West Tisbury resident’s second novel, “Into the Blue,” is set in Western Mass., “probably because my parents had moved to Stockbridge.”

Museums & Visual Art

The School of the Museum of Fine Arts celebrates its rich history in “SMFA at 150: Looking Back.” The exhibition “shows how often its students (and faculty) could be a handful,” writes the Globe’s Mark Feeney. Work by animal sculptors including Katharine Lane Weems and Nancy Schön “is a reminder of the school’s welcoming of female students long before that was common.”

“The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt,” at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, “walks you through a bona fide pop-culture sensation.” In the 17th-century Netherlands, “the Bible was popular culture,” Globe art critic Murray Whyte writes, and the show “marries faith and a world in rapid transformation to a pop-cultural phenomenon that defined an era.”

A herd of elephant statues is an unexpected sight in Boston, and especially on Commonwealth Avenue. The Great Elephant Migration is “a good marriage of an extraordinarily special art installation in the setting of a very, very historic, profound location,” Meg Mainzer-Cohen of the Back Bay Association tells the Globe’s Niki Griswold. Get there by Sept. 13.

Becoming a patron of the arts can be as simple as buying a subscription and opening your mail. At $5 to $10 a month, snail mail print clubs are “a win-win situation for artists and consumers,” writes Globe correspondent Kelly Chan. “For artists, this is a project that enriches their passion, and consumers gain affordable access to art on a regular basis.”

An 18th-century painting is an object of fascination, but not for the usual reasons. Harvard Art Museums’ marketing department turned a portrait of Madame de Pompadour into “a talking avatar” — a deepfake. “We weren’t using AI to replace an artwork,” sats the museums’ marketing director. “We were using it, really, as an invitation.” Globe correspondent Daisy Levine looks at a divisive issue.

“Yves Saint Laurent and Photography,” at the International Center of Photography, features ads, vintage magazines, “a Saint Laurent baby photo (cute kid), and one of his passports.” And, of course, work by a who’s who of photographers. “Some of them are among the greatest of fashion photographers,” Feeney writes from New York. “A few are among the greatest of photographers, period.”

Architecture

MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning has a new home in an old building. The 1895 Metropolitan Storage Warehouse, or MET, has been “very adaptatively reused,” the Globe’s Mark Feeney writes. The transformation of the redbrick behemoth at Mass. Ave. and Vassar Street has been “almost as startling as demolition would have been.” Take a look inside.

Theater

In Phanésia Pharel’s “Dead Girl’s Quinceañera,” “teenage girls discover, bit by bit, the depth of their own inner resources and the strength of the bonds among them.” The play “is still in development,” Globe theater critic Don Aucoin writes from Pittsfield, but “it’s a distinctive work ... thanks in significant part to the sheer verve of Pharel’s authorial voice and her general fearlessness.”

Lindsay Joelle’s “Dalloway: First Love” turns back the clock on “Mrs. Dalloway.” The Gloucester Stage production centers on Clarissa Parry, a turn-of-the-20th-century teen entangled in a romantic triangle. Globe reviewer Terry Byrne writes, “Director Rebecca Bradshaw lends a steady hand to the proceedings, but can’t even out the wrinkles in the script.”

Dance

Late summer is “the best time of year to enjoy Boston’s many participatory outdoor dance events.” Every night of the week, experts and newbies get together for “salsa, bachata, swing, and tango for the partner dancers in the crowd, line dancing, Zumba, and a good old-fashioned dance party.” Globe correspondent Sarah Knight has the details.

Music

A novel approach to mental health incorporates an unconventional element: hip-hop. The Beats Rhymes and Life program for clients aged 14 to 24 combines “writing workshops, hip-hop education, and other exercises,” writes the Globe’s Auzzy Byrdsell. “Storytelling is actually what hip-hop has always been, and that is an actual form of therapy,” says BRL’s director.

The Rat****** festival returns to Somerville this weekend, a year after the name had to be changed on the fly. Co-founder Emma Caviness “says the ‘rat’ portion of the title taking center stage just emphasizes the event’s scrappiness,” Globe correspondent Victoria Wasylak writes for Sound Check. The lineup includes Boston folk duo Sweet Petunia.

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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