Welcome back to The Big To-Do. The Red Sox actually can lose, it turns out, after their franchise-record-tying 15-game winning streak filled the void left by the Tartan Army, the tall ships, and the rest of early summer’s diversions. And now here come the Patriots, who open training camp (yes, already) tomorrow. The weekend weather will be in the Goldilocks zone, a welcome change for the giant men sweating under the July sun. It’s also perfect weather for Shakespeare under the stars — but phooey to whoever scheduled the Red Line shutdown to overlap with Commonwealth Shakespeare Company’s 30th-anniversary production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

This week’s streaming picks from the Globe’s Matt Juul include “Mortal Kombat II,” which he calls “a bloody good time,” and — speaking of bloody — the return of Shark Week. The arts brief section The Rundown includes a look at photographer Joel Meyerowitz’s landmark book “Cape Light,” which he started work on 50 years ago. Click through to feast your eyes.

Movies

It’s Greek mythology season, and “Hadestown: The Musical” earns 3½ stars from Globe film critic Odie Henderson. In the live capture of the Broadway and West End hit, “[t]he performers feed off the energy and emotions rising up from the crowd, and the camera captures intimacies that you can’t see from the theater seat.” Heads up: It’s on the big screen for just five days.

The pickleball movie ​“The Dink” brings good news for fans of ... Mary Steenburgen. “It’s so mean to pickleball ... that I can’t see fans enjoying it very much,” Henderson writes in a 2-star review. When things work, “All of the credit is due to Steenburgen, who is wonderful here” as a new friend of Jake Johnson’s Dustin. Her character “deserved a better movie.”

Rory Kennedy’s documentary “Queen of Chess” got Henderson thinking about chess on film. “In the case of chess ... the choice to fictionalize the story becomes a bit of a sticky situation because race becomes a shorthand in movies featuring Black and brown protagonists,” he writes. “Picking up the game of chess immediately tags the underprivileged minority characters not only as smart, but also as aberrations. This always struck me as ridiculous.”

Movies about TV are a genre that’s almost as old as TV itself. “[T]he movies have long offered a jaundiced take on TV, especially in its depictions of television news and its discontents,” writes Globe critic Chris Vognar. The TV Goes to the Movies series unites them under one roof — the Brattle Theatre’s. It includes “the king of all TV news movies. ... It’s remarkable how much of the subsequent TV landscape ‘Network’ (1976, directed by Sidney Lumet) predicted.”

The success of Christopher Nolan’s take on “The Odyssey” “leads to a question for classics scholars: how successful was it as a retelling of the famous tale?” The epic “has always been open to reinterpretation,” notes Globe correspondent Celine Hijazi. “To have Odysseus become this very sensitive man who’s gone through trauma and carries this guilt, I think, is really relevant,” says BC professor Thomas Sapsford.

TV & Streaming

“More and more series are tapping pop stars to sing over opening titles, and the results, as the kids say, are usually banging.” Yes, that’s Mick Jagger singing at the beginning of “Slow Horses,” Globe TV critic Chris Vognar writes. And the opening credits of “Lucky” feature Fiona Apple, “her voice in full, rough-and-ready cabaret mode.”

With late-night TV in turmoil, a 26-year-old BU alum is trying to fill the void. Julian Shapiro-Barnum created “Outside Tonight” to “take everything that we saw that was working in short form on the internet and implement it within the context of a late-night show. ... As a young person and the team being a young team, we just made things that we would want to watch and see.” He sits for a Q&A with the Globe’s Aidan Ryan.

Music

A year after turning a profit for the first time in roughly a decade, the Lowell Folk Festival opens tonight. “Truly, it’s almost a disservice to squeeze the festival’s offerings into a music column, when half the fun is pursuing tents of Polish, Greek, Thai, and Vietnamese cuisine,” Globe correspondent Victoria Wasylak writes for Sound Check. And in the performance spaces, “[t]he variety is priceless.”

This weekend’s Newport Folk Festival boasts a slew of high-profile performers as well as “artists you know little or nothing about.” From “a bolt of vintage soul sounds” to “a spectacular mix of R&B and soul, hip-hop, gospel, and country-funk” to a pair of “phenomenal guitarists,” Globe correspondent Stuart Munro has a preview of 10 performances worth planning around.

Viral sensation Angine de Poitrine brings its “microtonal math-rock” to next weekend’s Newport Jazz Festival. “The eye-catching, ear-twisting duo from Quebec” performs in costume, part of a long tradition that includes Kiss and Daft Punk. Guitarist Khn and drummer Klek, Globe correspondent Paul Robicheau reports, “have given interviews “in character as 333-year-old aliens whose guttural gibberish requires a translator.”

The Globe’s new series of archival photo galleries continues with a look at the Newport festivals. Jazz and folk “stand alongside Del’s Lemonade, beach days, and hot dogs as staples of summer in Rhode Island,” writes Globe photo archivist Colby Cotter, who traces the history of both events.

Theater

“A New Era” “reminds us that ideals are dynamic, not static.” Miranda Austen ADEkoje’s new play “places a historical movement and moment — the fight for Black and women’s suffrage in 1890s Boston — in the service of a story crackling with ideas and conflict," writes Globe critic Chris Vognar. “Director Summer L. Williams keeps the dialogue-heavy action moving.” The Company One production runs through Aug. 8.

Comedy

Appearing on “The Traitors” changed Ron Funches’s life. After cast and audience feedback put the idea in his head, the “Trolls” and “Inside Out” actor sought screening and was diagnosed with autism. “At 43 years old, [to] find out something new about me that shocked me and surprised me is worth its weight in gold,” Funches, who plays Boston tomorrow, tells Globe correspondent Nick A. Zaino III.

Museums & Visual Art

A quarter century of daily practice by Boston artist Shea Justice has yielded “Scroll of Justice,” a “fusion of drawing, text, and collage.” In the 1½-mile-long project, Justice’s “righteous fury centers on the abuse of power — an abuse that he, as a Black man growing up in the post-civil rights malaise of the 1970s, still feels acutely,” writes Globe art critic Murray Whyte. At the ICA through Aug. 2.

In “Father,” at the Armenian Museum of America, Diana Markosian documents her search for the parent who was absent from her life for 15 years. Not because he took off — her mother left Moscow for California without telling him. The show, writes the Globe’s Mark Feeney, “is a study in the geography of emotion and memory.” It “can be seen as part of a much larger mosaic of the Armenian experience of separation and exile.”
 

Books

At the library, Betty Smith’s “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” “grabbed my attention as a book I’d been ‘meaning to read’ … for over two decades.”  This week’s One Special Thing, Globe real estate editor Lidia Ryan writes, “is, as the 2001 edition’s foreword describes, a story in which nothing really happens. It is introspective, much like our protagonist. It’s these quiet books that tend to make the deepest imprint on me.”

The title characters in “The New People” have just bought a house — and the previous owners are squatting in the secret attic. The global financial crisis sets the tone of Andrea Uptmor’s “fascinating, highly original” debut novel. “As impressive as Uptmor’s authorial daring with plot and characters is her rich setting, deploying all the details of life as we knew it in the year 2008,” writes Globe reviewer Marion Winik.

Valeria Luiselli’s “Beginning Middle End” is a sequel of sorts to the “masterpiece” “Lost Children Archive” (2019). That book’s narrator, now divorced, visits Sicily with her daughter, “a 12-year-old, coffee-drinking, speed-chess hustler whose obsession with Latin and Greek literature, especially Pliny’s ‘Natural History,’ assures she will soon be as erudite as her mother,” writes Globe reviewer Cory Oldweiler.

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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