The backstory on Cruella de Vil, the villainess so indelible in Disney’s 60-year-old “One Hundred and One Dalmatians” franchise, is a dark one, but with high-end style, a banging soundtrack and a kitschy snazziness of caricature from Emma Stone and Emma Thompson.

Upper Crust has proven a solid addition to pizza on “The Avenue,” and is a crowd pleaser that can satisfy diverse palates across diverse age groups and varying dietary choices and restrictions.

This coronavirus edition of movies to shelter with includes Michel Franco’s dystopian “New Order” and newer fare such as “Those Who Want Me Dead,” but the real news is that the waning of the coronavirus pandemic is bringing The Brattle Theater back to life.

Fallout from a report about quick-build separated bike lanes continued Thursday at a virtual meeting of the Porter Square Neighborhood Association, with concerns from residents and business owners that parking would be eliminated along Massachusetts Avenue north of Cambridge Common.

Russell House Tavern has been grinding it out the whole way through the pandemic with a brunch offering everything from cinnamon buns to oysters, eggs Benedict and a breakfast pizza. Opt for a smoked housemade andouille sausage hash and you’ll find it spicy and satiating, yet light.

There’s film ahead! This coronavirus edition of movies to shelter with includes Robert Machoian’s taut portrait of an unconventional marriage, “The Killing of Two Lovers”; another love triangle in “Touch”; and less memorable screenings of Netflix’s “Oxygen” and “Woman in the Window.”

In “Army of the Dead,” Zach Snyder delves back into his bag of zombie tricks, and in the process turns the Vegas strip into a hive of hidden horrors counting down to a mushroom cloud.

Cambridgeport’s Rebecca Richman Cohen presents her country- and culture-spanning documentary “Weed & Wine” on Saturday at the Independent Film Festival Boston. After five years in the making, “in the end, it was about family,” the filmmaker finds.

What exactly are tequeños? If you embrace the warm, filling comfort of mozzarella sticks with a chunky marinara sauce for dipping, you’re halfway there. But Orinoco’s cheese is a soft, salty, white cow’s milk product from the Guayana region of Venezuela, and it is fried almost tempura light.

“Gunda” follows the seasonal cycle of a sow on a farm, a “Charlotte’s Web” or “Babe” sans the anthropomorphic cuteness that turns the mundane into a riveting, can’t-turn-away event.