Welcome back to The Big To-Do. The weekend weather forecast looks — well, worthy of non-newsletter-friendly language, so let’s just say perfect for curling up on the couch with a mug of something warm. Fortunately, your streaming options include “all kinds of new movies and TV,” and the Globe’s Matt Juul has the high points. One is the season premiere of “Saturday Night Live,” with Knicks point guard Jalen Brunson hosting, musical guest Katseye, and a sky-high chance of a Mariska Hargitay cameo. And a high point downtown, at a mighty nine stories, is this week’s One Special Thing.

Movies

“Primetime” uses “the rise and fall of ‘To Catch a Predator’ host Chris Hansen” to consider “the ethical wasteland of the 2000s reality-TV boom.” Director Lance Oppenheim is “far from a passive filmmaker ... but he also trusts the material’s capacity for absurdity,” drawing 3 stars from Globe critic Chis Vognar. As Hansen, Robert Pattinson “has never been better.”

The musical “Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!” earns 3 stars from Globe film critic Odie Henderson, who says it “unfolds like a good beach novel.” Starring Oscar nominee Rinko Kikuchi as a recent widow whose husband/dance partner appears to her dressed as a raven, it’s “a raunchy cross between ‘Truly, Madly, Deeply’ and ‘Shall We Dance,” plus “a layer of Latin American cinema’s magical realism.”

The star of “Heart of the Beast” is “variously noble, loving, stalwart, attentive, fearless, trusting, intelligent, alert, good-humored, loyal, resourceful, protective, uncomplaining, and beautiful.” Brad Pitt is the human star, but that description applies to the four German Shepherds who play retired military dog Odin. The Globe’s Mark Feeney gives them all 2½ stars.

Before playing Ted Kaczynski as a Harvard undergrad in “Unabomber,” Jacob Tremblay says, “I just didn’t realize that this story even existed.” “The Ted Kaczynski we’re portraying is a young idealist,” says director Janus Metz. “Jacob is young, he’s curious. He has that unspoiled quality to him that comes with youth.” Tremblay and Metz talk with the Globe’s Matt Juul about the new film.

John Wilson’s documentary “History of Concrete” is about concrete — and “Italy, Hallmark movies, affordable housing, music, personal rituals, and celebrity.” “How To with John Wilson” (2020-23) put him on the cultural radar but wasn’t much help in financing the new film. “It definitely took care of some ego problems I had,” he says in a Q&A with the Globe’s Meredith Goldstein.

Ken Carter — the Canadian analogue to Evel Knievel — is the subject of the biopic “The Stunt Driver.” Jay Baruchel “commits to the trash-talking, egomaniacal persona Carter dragged out for show whenever a camera was on, but we never really know who this guy is,” Henderson writes in a 2-star review.

Ken Carter and Evel Knievel enjoyed their heyday in “the car stunt crazy 1970s.” As “The Stunt Driver” hits theaters, Henderson susses out “10 movies about stunt drivers, car chases, and existential races into nothingness.” Burt Reynolds makes the cut twice, alongside “Russ Meyer’s most famous pre-MPAA ratings movie” (you know the one).

TV & Streaming

“A Different World” is back, and so are Whitley Gilbert and Dwayne Wayne — their daughter, Deborah, drives the rebooted series. The show “is still mostly a comedy,” writes Globe TV critic Chris Vognar. “But the real world makes more than a few cameos.” Jasmine Guy and Kadeem Hardison play Whitley and Dwayne, with “a magnetic Maleah Joi Moon” as Deborah.

Two decades after “Survivor” first piqued his interest, Rhode Island’s Rob Antonson is in the battle for the $1 million prize. “I said, ‘Hey, let me just put in for it. Let me just see what happens,’” the “huge reality TV junkie” says in a Q&A with the Globe’s Matt Juul. They talk sports, tattoos, sports tattoos, and how working at Logan Airport helped him prep for intrigue in the South Pacific.

From “character-driven meditation to fast-paced thriller; from comedy to drama to that hybrid known by the ungainly moniker ‘dramedy,’” women’s friendships are in the spotlight. “Cumulatively, the series have offered a wide array of perspectives on the life stages and life choices of women while creating an overall TV picture that is at least somewhat more diverse,” writes the Globe’s Don Aucoin.

Music

T Bone Burnett helped Ringo Starr find his way back to country music. “He sent me this most beautiful country track, and that put me in the mood — ‘Yeah, why don’t we do a country record?,’” the former Beatle tells Globe correspondent Victoria Wasylak. Ahead of a show with his All Starr Band in Boston Wednesday, Starr looks back and forward.

The Sex Pistols are on tour without Johnny Rotten, “the leering, snarling face of the band.” Guitarist Steve Jones says he has “nothing but respect” for his trash-talking former bandmate. He chats with Globe correspondent James Sullivan about his work since the heyday of punk rock, the Sex Pistols’ current configuration, and why the band still matters.

The year-old rock band Lazarus is already going on tour — around the MBTA. Does the group have permission to perform this weekend on the Green, Red, and Orange Lines? “We don’t do that,” frontman André Lazarus tells Wasylak, writing for Sound Check. “[W]e’re a rock and roll band here in Boston. That’s pretty much our whole thing, is we take anything as a stage, right?”

As you may have heard, the Last Ditch Bar and Arts Venue in Greenfield recently changed its masking policy. Oh, who are we kidding — there’s a nonzero chance you’ve been getting texts about “the lesbian bar” from all over the country. The Globe’s Brooke Hauser went to karaoke night on Wednesday to see how the staff and patrons are dealing with the spotlight.

Museums & Visual Art

The Fun Sized festival comes to the streets of Northampton this weekend. Celebrating “tiny public art,” the event is “about walking around a city that you may know very well, but you haven’t looked that closely,” artist Michael Crigler tells Globe correspondent Cate McQuaid. “This invites wonder.” The 16 works, all smaller than 12 inches square, will be up through October.

The John Hancock Tower turns 50 on Tuesday. All 10 of Peter Vanderwarker’s photographs in “Tilted/Straight,” at Panopticon Gallery, are of the tower. Its “vast volume visually vanishes, almost, thanks to its all-but-demure rhomboid shape and the reflectiveness of its glass facade,” the Globe’s Mark Feeney writes. “Vanderwarker’s photographs excel at capturing the Hancock as mirror.”

Architecture

The 1894 Winthrop Building in downtown Boston is a wonderful building but not a great one. “In fact, its not being a great building adds to its wonderfulness,” writes the Globe’s Mark Feeney. This week’s One Special Thing, at Washington and Water streets, was once considered a skyscraper. Today, the nine-story structure seems “almost as much piece of (very large) sculpture as office building.”

Theater

As the film adaptation of “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” turns 25, John Cameron Mitchell is continuing “to spread the gospel of the outsider.” The movie “was less representing and more just opening minds, creating a metaphor of this character that might be useful for all kinds of people,” he says in a Q&A with Globe theater critic Don Aucoin ahead of an appearance in Boston Thursday.

“All My Sons,” at the Lyric Stage, “is a powder keg of a production.” Prefiguring “Death of a Salesman,” Arthur Miller’s play is “a work of profoundly enduring resonance,” writes Aucoin. Director Scott Edmiston’s “staging is simple, straightforward, and sensitively modulated, in recognition that the high moral stakes and emotional fireworks of ‘All My Sons’ require no bells and whistles.”

Comedy

For its 150th anniversary, the Harvard Lampoon is lampooning The Hollywood Reporter. Staff writer Adrian Maydanich worked with a Lampoon alum at the showbiz industry outlet “steering the parody issue to fruition,” reports Globe correspondent James Sullivan. “Harvard is a very serious place,” says Lampoon president Kai Nelson. “This place is not like that.”

Books

In the eagerly awaited follow-up to “Pachinko,” Min Jin Lee continues “telling the concealed stories of the Korean diaspora in all of its iterations.” The family saga “American Hagwon” offers “a new vision of nuanced characters fitting into a diversity of archetypes not often afforded to Asian characters in Western literature,” Globe reviewer Mina Leazer writes.

“The Radiance,” Pulitzer-winning playwright and author Ayad Akhtar’s third novel, is “vivid, often funny, and genuinely affecting.” It’s also autofiction — the narrator “shares the author’s name and occupation” — but don’t let that put you off, says Globe reviewer Kate Tuttle. The book is “one of the most purely entertaining and fascinating novels I’ve read in ages.”

The future Hernan Diaz envisions in “Ply” is “both deeply disconcerting and oddly exhilarating.” A nameless young woman scratches out a living as a tech scavenger, and her “voice is so fresh, vulnerable, and searching that we are immediately invested,” writes Globe reviewer Priscilla Gilman. The second half of the novel is less engaging, “[y]et pleasures still appear.”

The protagonist of “The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman” is the wife of the pastor of a Black church. This is rich territory, writes Globe reviewer Caleb Gayle, “replete with all the irreverence, scandal, intrigue, warmth, and comedy I’ve witnessed and imagined.” But Deesha Philyaw’s novel “is a mess of subplots with no clear winner.”

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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