Museum of Fine Arts

Some of Boston's best summer concerts happen behind museum walls, or in this case, inside one of the city's most beautiful courtyards. The Museum of Fine Arts' annual Concerts in the Courtyard series brings artists from Boston and around the world to the Calderwood Courtyard for Thursday night performances that span everything from Afro-fusion and Arabic psychedelic rock to Puerto Rican folk, blues rock, indie folk, and jazz. The intimate setting keeps the focus on the music, with blankets and low chairs replacing rows of traditional seats. Food, beer, wine, and cocktails are available once the doors open, making it easy to settle in before the first notes. Each week features a different artist, so the series rewards repeat visits throughout the summer. It's one of those rare concerts where the venue is every bit as memorable as the performers.

The Boston French Film Festival has a way of making a trip to the movies feel like a passport stamp. Celebrating its 30th anniversary, this year's festival brings more than a month of contemporary French cinema to the Museum of Fine Arts, with a lineup that stretches from mysteries and dramas to animated features and offbeat comedies. Many of the films are Boston premieres, offering a chance to catch acclaimed new releases long before they reach wider audiences. The selections explore everything from art and architecture to identity, family, and cultural memory, reflecting the breadth of modern French filmmaking rather than a single style or genre. Every screening is presented in its original language with English subtitles, making it just as welcoming for longtime Francophiles as curious newcomers. Whether you're there for one film or several, it's one of the city's best excuses to spend a summer evening at the movies.

If you think you know what a book looks like, this exhibition will make you reconsider. Here, the familiar format gets upended by the likes of Picasso, Miró, and Dalí, who teamed up with poets and printers to create objects that are as much art as literature. Dalí’s wild, dreamlike illustrations for Freud’s Moses and Monotheism are a highlight, but the real pleasure is in seeing how these artists played with paper, type, and image—sometimes in ways that feel more radical now than they did a century ago. The show pulls together works that rarely leave their archives, so even if you’ve seen a Picasso or Miró on a wall, you probably haven’t seen them like this. It’s a reminder that the most interesting art often happens in the margins, literally and figuratively.