Welcome back to The Big To-Do. Astronomical fall is on our doorstep — the autumnal equinox is Wednesday — and the weekend weather forecast is all about falling temperatures and, eventually, rain. The streaming  forecast calls for “a ton of new TV shows and movies” and a big change for Howard Stern. The Globe’s Matt Juul has the lowdown. Football season continues to unspool, with the Ivy League finally starting play tomorrow and the Patriots  hosting the Steelers Sunday. And with just over a week left in the regular season, the Red Sox are battling for a spot in the playoffs.

This week’s One Special Thing is a theater experience that “makes you want to get up and shout and also burst into tears.” The arts brief section The Rundown includes the winners of this year’s New England Book Awards, among them Belle Burden’s “Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage,” set partly on Marthas Vineyard. National Hispanic Heritage Month starts Tuesday, and Globe correspondent Daisy Levine has the scoop on “festivals, educational events, and family-friendly celebrations.”

Former Globe TV critic Matthew Gilbert is now an advice columnist, with a twist. The new Globe column “Entertainment RX” will use readers’ questions as the jumping-off point for Gilbert to “prescribe things to read, listen to, or watch that somehow address — or, in some cases, distract from — the issues you’ve written to me about.”

Movies

“Resident Evil” earns 3½ stars from Globe reviewer Matt Juul, who says it “may be 2026’s best horror film.” Director and co-writer Zach Cregger “smartly leans into humor as a way to lull audiences into relaxing before hitting them with truly frightening jump scares.” His “comedic sensibilities ... help make ‘Resident Evil’ more than just the typical zombie survival tale.”

The derivative period drama “The Weight” is “neither really good nor really bad.” Starring Ethan Hawke as a Depression-era prisoner driven to reunite with his young daughter and Russell Crowe as the warden standing in his way, it’s reminiscent of a slew of other movies, Globe reviewer Mark Feeney writes in a 2½-star review.

David Kittredge’s documentary “Boorman and the Devil” is a deep dive into “Exorcist II: The Heretic.” Director John Boorman’s sequel to “The Exorcist” is “a movie that will forever live in film lore infamy,” writes Globe film critic Odie Henderson. The 3½-star postmortem — emphasis on “post”; the movie came out in 1977 — is a big slab of “cinematic schadenfreude.”

At the Toronto International Film Festival, Henderson got an early look at the awards bait that’ll be filling theaters between now and the end of the year. Films with naughty and naughty-adjacent titles are in the spotlight in Henderson’s second dispatch from Toronto. Wrapping up, Henderson piles on the big names, including Mike Leigh, Julianne Moore, Helen Mirren, and Darlene Love.

What is the Harvard Film Archive? “The answer depends on who you are and what you’re looking for,” writes Globe critic Chris Vognar, who recently stopped in for part of a marathon of movies from 1977. Archive director Haden Guest helped introduce him to what Vognar calls “a gateway to films that might have never before been on your radar.”

TV & Streaming

“Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story” is no documentary. It’s “sort of [an] irreverent, punk-rock period piece,” says Rebecca Hall, who plays the title character’s stepmother. With Ella Beatty as Lizzie and Charlie Hunnam as her father, the latest installment in the anthology series explores “female rage [and] female repression,” Beatty tells the Globe’s Matt Juul. He talks with all three stars.

Lizzie Borden was acquitted of murder, but that didn’t spare her from playground immortality. The rhyme that starts “Lizzie Borden took an ax” is technically a “doggerel,” reports Globe correspondent Celine Hijazi, who goes deep on what turns out to be a two-verse rhyme.

Among the non-celebrities in the cast of “The Traitors: New Blood” is Massachusetts native Tomica Adams. “There’s nothing like a Bostonian,” the United Airlines captain, who grew up in Mattapan and Framingham, says in a Q&A with Juul. “I don’t really believe in, ‘let me sugarcoat this for you to make you feel comfortable.’”

Tom Brady is technically a TV story these days, and an exhausting one. The Globe’s Beth Teitell set a Google Alert for Brady last month and quickly realized that the former Patriots quarterback’s “energy on the gridiron was nothing compared to his approach to retirement.” This story has a little of everything, including the hilarious suggestion that Tom Brady eats carbs.

Music

Ed Sheeran is on tour all by his lonesome — his band and all of his opening acts, notably including Macklemore, are out of the picture. What happened, and how is Patriots owner Robert Kraft involved? You may be sorry you asked, but the Globe’s Mark Shanahan and Michael Silverman have the latest on the rapidly unfolding story.

The string orchestra A Far Cry is turning 20 and celebrating with a big name. J.S. Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” with pianist Simone Dinnerstein, opens the season Saturday. “There’s not a single variation that’s the same as it was in the original version,” violinist Alex Fortes, co-arranger with violinist-violist Sarah Darling, tells the Globe’s A.Z. Madonna.

The “funky family foursome” the Wooten Brothers plays Boston Sunday. It’s familiar territory for Berklee visiting scholar Victor Wooten, “one of the most famous and influential electric bassists of modern times.” He chats with Globe correspondent Noah Schaffer about the family’s six decades in the business, his medical challenges, the group’s forthcoming album, and more.

Recording his latest album, “Thrasher,” Brandon Flowers says, “I was totally humbled.” The Killers frontman cut his third solo record in Nashville “with nine seasoned, top-shelf musicians who have played on thousands of recordings going back to the ’50s.” Ahead of a date in Boston Wednesday, he tells Globe correspondent Ken Capobianco all about it.

The Grand Point North festival returns to Burlington, Vt., this weekend, 15 years after Grace Potter founded it. “I’ve just met so many people that are ... so inspired that the festival is trying to revive, and even pump up, the heartbeat of a community that really needs it right now,” the singer-songwriter tells Globe correspondent Victoria Wasylak, writing for Sound Check.

At 70, Legs McNeil “knows his legacy is inextricably linked to his presence at the foundation of punk.” But “I didn’t want to be known as the guy who wrote ‘Please Kill Me’ for the rest of my life,” the Connecticut native says of the seminal oral history he co-wrote with Gillian McCain. He discusses his new memoir, “Resident Punk,” with Globe correspondent James Sullivan.

Fall is the perfect time to bust out of your Boston-area rut and hit the road to music venues farther afield. Trips to Nova Arts in Keene, N.H.; Stone Mountain Arts Center in Brownfield, Maine; and South Deerfield’s Tree House Brewing Company are “as much a treat for your eyes as they are for your ears.” Wasylak and Globe correspondent Stuart Munro explain.

Theater

The characters in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s “Purpose” “constitute a pretty vivid gallery.” The play finds the family of civil rights leader Solomon Jasper (think Jesse Jackson) at “a fraught moment,” Globe theater critic Don Aucoin writes. He says the Huntington production of the Pulitzer and Tony winner is “overstuffed and, at nearly three hours ... overlong.”

The final scene of “John Proctor Is the Villain” is “wonderful. It’s excruciating.” In writing about Kimberly Belflower’s play, this week’s One Special Thing, the Globe’s Lisa Weidenfeld gives away the ending. Far from being a spoiler, however, her spellbinding celebration of the power of the scene will leave you searching for a live performance.

In Mark St. Germain’s “Eleanor,” Eleanor Roosevelt shares her story from beyond the grave. The solo show, at Central Square Theater, stars Paula Plum as the first lady and covers a lot of ground, writes Globe reviewer Bob Abelman. But “we never get truly immersed in her depiction of Eleanor or her world despite the actor’s hard work.”

An early work by James Ijames, “Moon Man Walk” “provides glimpses of Ijames’s blossoming talent.” Predating the acclaimed “Fat Ham,” it blends “memory, fantasy, and reality,” Globe reviewer Terry Byrne writes. The Gloucester Stage production, directed by Lyndsay Allyn Cox, “overcomes some of the play’s weaknesses, while highlighting some talented performers.”

Museums & Visual Art

In the video artwork “Out Into Us (Slow Down),” “the marriage of image and sound is seamless, deepening the experience of both.” The band Son Lux and director Alex Cook created the Mass MoCA installation. “Neither pedantic nor entirely opaque, its emotional force lies in its invitation: This is your world, if you allow it to be,” Globe art critic Murray Whyte writes from North Adams.

Books

Set in postwar London, Kate Atkinson’s “Our Noble Selves” is “a comedy, not a tragedy, but there are plenty of tragic moments.” The plot turns on the real-life 1951 Festival of Britain. “And what a delightful plot it is — convoluted, confounding, at times harrowing, at times hilarious, laced with references to Shakespeare and shadowed by the aftermath of war,” Globe reviewer Laurie Hertzel writes.

The first Miss Marple novel in a half century, Lucy Foley’s “Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel,” is “a deft homage” to Agatha Christie. After the titular death, “Foley traps her increasingly distraught suspects in a snowbound hotel,” writes Globe reviewer Malcolm Forbes. “She keeps us guessing in more ways than one by ensuring the book is as much a whydunit as a whodunit.”

Annie Dillard, who died Tuesday at 81, “cut her own path on the page and in her life.” The South Wellfleet resident, who won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” was “a unique writer,” says Globe obituaries editor Bryan Marquard, who surveys “her decades-long career writing nonfiction books, essays, novels, and poetry.”

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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