Your weekly guide to staying entertained any day of the week

February 21, 2025

Welcome back to The Big To-Do. The weather forecast calls for warming temperatures, but City Hall Plaza is covered in snow. Blame or thank the Red Bull Heavy Metal snowboarding competition, and get the lowdown from the Globe’s Matt Juul. Juul also has the scoop on “a smorgasbord of streaming offerings on the menu this weekend,” including “The Brutalist,” which is up for 10 Academy Awards. The NAACP Image Awards are on Saturday and the Screen Actors Guild Awards on Sunday, just a week before the Oscars.

If none of that piques your interest, stick around — the Globe’s experts have a ton of other good ideas.

Film & Movies

A scene from "The Monkey." Neon via AP

“The Monkey,” adapted from a Stephen King story by director Osgood Perkins, abounds with “extremely gory carnage.” In the story of a toy monkey that causes people to die, “[t]he director’s penchant for head trauma is in full effect ... as is his attention to visceral detail that’s both hilarious and gross,” Globe film critic Odie Henderson writes in a 3-star review.

The live-action shorts competing for the Academy Award, all screening at the Coolidge, “cover a wide variety of real-world topics.” Henderson’s mini reviews include star ratings as well as his pick to snag the statuette. In “A Lien,” he says, Sam and David Cutler-Kreutz “do an excellent job generating unbearable suspense.”

The Oscar-nominated documentary shorts are also playing at the Coolidge. Henderson says it’s “a very good batch of films, even if one of them was so upsetting that I could barely watch it.” He briefly reviews each one and predicts the winner — not the upsetting one but Molly O’Brien’s “The Only Girl in the Orchestra,” which he calls “quite enjoyable and informative.”

TV & Streaming

Robert De Niro as George Mullen in "Zero Day." Courtesy of Netflix © 2024

Robert De Niro’s first serialized TV show, “Zero Day,” makes the “weird choice to cast him in a role that essentially sands off all his edges.” He plays a former president deputized to investigate a catastrophic cyberattack, and his “central performance feels like it’s stuck in first gear,” writes Globe reviewer Caroline Framke.

The documentary series “The Americas,” narrated by Tom Hanks, “visits locales throughout the Americas, offering glimpses of critters large and small.” Executive producer Mike Gunton tells the Globe’s Lisa Weidenfeld, “This series could not have been made without one significant piece of technology, which is drones.”

The “bloody, vibrant” boxing drama “A Thousand Blows,” from “Peaky Blinders” creator Steven Knight, is “killer television.” Set in London in the 1880s, it follows a pair of Jamaican immigrants, ferocious fighters, and a female gang leader. “Each confrontation ups the stakes of the dramatic arc, while providing tense scenes of carnage, victory, and vanquishment,” Globe reviewer Thelma Adams writes.

“Grosse Pointe Garden Society” aims “to recapture some of the soapy spark that ‘Desperate Housewives’ brought to primetime television.” Set in two timelines — before and after a murder — it’s “consistently a fun, breezy watch in that classic network TV way,” writes Globe reviewer Caroline Siede, but “the overall narrative balance hasn’t quite gelled yet.”

Jack Edwards isn’t on TV anymore, but the retired Bruins announcer “tunes in to every game. ... And he still gets excited.” The Globe’s Mark Shanahan visits Edwards at his Vermont home and returns with a wonderful story of rolling with the punches of “a disorder diagnosed as apraxia [that] began to impair his ability to speak and retrieve words quickly — a necessity when calling a sport played at breakneck speed.”

The Big Day

Vanessa (left) waited two weeks to swipe right on Meytal's Tinder profile, remembering the decision feeling as though it carried more weight than her usual experience with the dating app. When they finally matched in late spring, the romance took off. They married at City Hall in Lowell in December. Photos By Arlinda

The Globe’s weddings column, The Big Day, tells stories of how couples found each other, fell in love, and said “I do.” Vanessa Paiano and Meytal Kotik connected online last March, were engaged by September, and married at Lowell City Hall in December. “Time was going by slowly, but it felt like we were together for longer than our relationship had been going on,” Meytal 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.

Museums & Visual Art

Hugh Hayden, "Hedges," 2019. Sculpted wood, lumber, hardware, mirror, and carpet. Mark Waldhauser

The pieces in “Hugh Hayden: Home Work,” at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis, are “extraordinary craft, perfectly hand-hewn to a level of believability that crosses easily into the uncanny.” The exhibition “showcases the artist’s bleak, affecting world view,” writes Globe art critic Murray Whyte, who calls Hayden “a virtuoso of meticulous craft and blunt intent.”

A painter, a photographer, and two sculptors are officially “exceptional Boston-area artists.” The ICA’s biennial Foster Prize winners are Sneha Shrestha, Damien Hoar de Galvan, Alison Croney Moses, and Yorgos Efthymiadis. Part of the museum’s goal in awarding the prize is “to encourage Boston artists to stay” in the city, curator Tessa Bachi Haas tells the Globe’s Julian E.J. Sorapuru.

Music

Jared Katz, curator of musical instruments at the Museum of Fine Arts, stands at a grand piano made in London in 1796 by John Broadwood and Son. This instrument is one of several in the museum's collection that will be heard during the annual "Art in Tune" event on Feb. 27. John Tlumacki/Globe Staff

Music will fill the MFA next week for “Art in Tune.” Once a year, the musical instrument department has “a chance to sort of do a museum takeover, and have a variety of instruments from the collection actually played in the galleries that relate to them,” says program associate Nate Steele. The Globe’s A.Z. Madonna has a fascinating preview.

Phil Kline’s song cycle “ghost story,” inspired by Isabella Stewart Gardner, has its world premiere Sunday at the museum that bears her name. “Isabella is very famous, but also mysterious,” Kline tells Madonna. “Even in her 60s and 70s, she’s very playful.” Percussion and piano quartet Yarn/Wire and soprano Nicoletta Berry will perform the piece,

The Opening Doors Project, founded in 2021 to “to facilitate conversations about race and amplify artists of color,” comes to Passim Saturday. The event “invites guests to examine their experiences within the Boston folk scene ... and share feedback about the successes and ongoing obstacles they’ve encountered,” Globe correspondent Victoria Wasylak writes for Sound Check.

When blues guitarist Joe Bonamassa plays Boston next week, expect to hear “more of the stuff I’ve put out in the last five years, because they’re just better songs.” His best songs “come straight out of my personal experiences and things that actually happened,” he says in a Q&A with Globe correspondent Stuart Miller. “[T]he names and dates have been changed to protect the innocent and/or the guilty.”

Theater

Abigail C. Onwunali in "The Grove." Marc J. Franklin

“The Grove,” the second of the nine plays in Mfoniso Udofia’s Ufot Family Cycle, is “a beautifully humane and deeply moving work.” As the daughter of immigrants faced with the choice “between living with authenticity or maintaining the loving bond she has with her parents,” Abigail C. Onwunali “nearly sets the Wimberly Theatre stage on fire,” writes Globe theater critic Don Aucoin.

Wheelock Family Theater’s production of John Glore’s “Flora & Ulysses” has a built-in audience: Kate DiCamillo fans like Globe reviewer Terry Byrne. The “delightful theatrical adventure” stars Livia Ketri as Flora and puppet-wielding Chris Stahl as Ulysses, the squirrel Flora rescues who turns out to have superpowers. Through March 9.

In “Stage Kiss,” playwright Sarah Ruhl explores what happens “when the relationship between two performers onstage spills over into their offstage relationship.” Rani O’Brien directs Psych Drama Company’s “smart, sharp production,” Byrne writes, “balanc[ing] the laughs while illuminating some of the play’s deeper themes of vulnerability, uncertainty, and regret.” Through Sunday.

Kate Hamill’s interpretation of “The Odyssey,” making its world premiere at the ART, opens with “the tonal train wreck that is Act One.” Hamill, perhaps best known for her Jane Austen adaptations, “is more than capable of tackling weighty matters, but the marriage of her voice with Homer’s voice just doesn’t work,” writes Aucoin.

Comedy

Taylor Tomlinson has six shows coming up at the Wang. Andrew Max Levy

Taylor Tomlinson says “After Midnight” is “much more similar to, like, ‘Whose Line Is It Anyway?’ than a traditional late night show.” Ahead of six shows in Boston on her “very personal” “Save Me” tour, she chats with Globe correspondent Nick A. Zaino III about the evolution of her show, her forthcoming book “Actually, Nevermind,” and her ongoing battle for work/life balance.

Books

Covers to “The Stained Glass Window,” “Holy Ground,” “Let Us March On” and “You Can’t Kill a Man Because of the Books He Reads.” Publisher Handouts

For Black History Month, four pertinent new books include three nonfiction titles and “a warm and lively historical novel.” They all sound great, especially “The Stained Glass Window,” by David Levering Lewis. The 88-year-old “brings every bit of his historian’s training and his skill as a writer to bear on this most personal story,” writes Kate Tuttle, who edits the Globe’s books section.

In Curtis Sittenfeld’s collection “Show Don’t Tell,” the stories “start well, usually with a clever premise quickly grasped ...and often end happily.” The author “wraps her comforting fictional embrace around a variety of awkward, uncomfortable topics ... with Midwestern directness,” writes Globe reviewer Marion Winik.

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