Gene Shalit, a movie critic and arts reporter for the Today show over four decades who was known for his puffy hair, oversized handlebar mustache and affection for groan-inducing puns, has died. He was 100.

Shalit’s family announced the death Friday to NBC News, saying in a statement that he “passed away peacefully today after 100 years of an amazing life”.

Shalit joined Today as a contributor in 1970 and became arts editor in 1973, later settling in for his segment, Critic’s Corner. When he left the show in 2010, he was one of the last high-profile film critics on a major network.

“What resonated above his unusual appearance was his incredible wit, his remarkable intelligence. But he didn’t pound you over the head with it. He amused you. He enlightened and amused whatever subject he was on,” Guy Ludwig, Shalit’s producer for more than 20 years, wrote in an essay.

It was no coincidence that Chicago critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel’s local “thumbs-up, thumbs-down” movie-review program, Sneak Previews, went national on PBS in the late 1970s and that Today show’s ABC rival, Good Morning America, hired Joel Siegel to be its movie critic in 1981.

“Shalit was instrumental in changing the balance of critical power in America. When he began his ‘Today’ tenure, newspapers and magazines were the primary sources for movie reviews. That’s where cinematic opinion was sparked and shaped,” the Plain Dealer wrote in 2010, calling Shalit “Daniel Boone in a bow tie and Groucho glasses”.

Earlier this year, former President Obama made waves in an interview when he said that he believed aliens were real, though he hadn’t seen any evidence of them during his time in office. President Trump accused Obama of revealing “classified information,” but then said that he would direct government agencies to release a number of images showing alien and extraterrestrial activity. The Pentagon rolled out those photos last month, but they were largely deemed fuzzy and inconclusive.

All this might sound like free publicity for Steven Spielberg’s new thriller, Disclosure Day, which is about a massive U.S. conspiracy to hide the fact that aliens have been visiting Earth for decades. If anything, though, the movie’s pleasures feel more retro than timely. It harks back to Spielberg’s greatest alien-themed hits, like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. and War of the Worlds. But it also feels like a throwback to the ’90s and early 2000s — the era of conspiracy-minded sci-fi series like The X-Files and M. Night Shyamalan’s eerie crop-circle thriller, Signs.

Disclosure Day stars Josh O’Connor as Daniel Kellner, a cybersecurity expert who decides to blow the whistle on his employer, Wardex. That’s a powerful agency, operating outside the boundaries of the government, that, for decades, has suppressed evidence of alien visits to Earth. Daniel has stolen video footage of these creatures, and he feels duty-bound to disclose it to the public — and to expose the sinister Wardex for having captured, detained and even tortured its share of aliens.

Meanwhile, in Kansas City, Mo., something strange happens when a TV meteorologist named Margaret Fairchild, played by Emily Blunt, tries to deliver her morning weather report. She freezes up on the air and begins making strange, guttural clicking noises, speaking what appears to be a kind of alien language. Around this time, Margaret also finds that she can read the minds of the people around her — a gift that comes in handy once she, too, goes on the run, with Wardex agents in pursuit.

Although Margaret and Daniel don’t know each other, they share a mysterious connection. Noah Scanlon, the head of Wardex, played by an unusually terrifying Colin Firth, is determined to stop them before they can make contact.

One of Scanlon’s deadliest weapons is a form of mind-control technology that he uses to try to get Daniel’s girlfriend, Jane, played by a very good Eve Hewson, to betray him. Whatever aliens might be capable of doing to us, the movie suggests, we have far more to fear from some of our fellow humans.

The mind-control bit is one of the movie’s cleverest sequences; a scene in which Margaret stages an almost Houdini-level escape is another. At 79, Spielberg is still the nimble filmmaker who delights in treating cinema as a magic trick. He’s also as skilled with actors as ever. Firth injects a palpable sense of anguish into the role of the movie’s big villain, and O’Connor brings an Everyman likability to his truth-telling tech whiz. But the most dazzlingly inventive work comes from Blunt.

Often a tough, sardonic screen presence, as in The Devil Wears Prada 2, Blunt gets to flex her proven action and comedy muscles in a more earnest emotional register. Like Richard Dreyfuss’ obsessed alien seeker in Close Encounters, Margaret is the kind of madly eccentric character Spielberg instinctively gravitates toward — someone who has little idea where she’s headed, but is convinced, rightly, that the truth really is out there.

There are other memorable characters, too. Colman Domingo gives a warm turn as a fellow whistleblower, who steers the operation from afar. And Elizabeth Marvel delivers a fine performance as a Catholic nun who, in one of the film’s more thoughtful asides, claims that the existence of aliens doesn’t threaten her belief in God. If anything, she says, it affirms that God, like the universe he created, is far bigger and more complex than humans like to acknowledge.

That’s a profoundly beautiful idea, though I wish Disclosure Day itself were a more complex movie. Spielberg’s storytelling is often described as overly sentimental, which isn’t always fair; his previous work, the semi-autobiographical The Fabelmans, was one of the most genuinely moving films of his career.

But sentimentality does ultimately overwhelm Disclosure Day, especially in the big finale, when the movie strains to bring its characters and indeed all of humanity together. Having shown us some of the terrible things powerful people are capable of, Spielberg makes a third-act lurch toward catharsis, as though desperate to suggest we aren’t beyond redemption as a species. Like the existence of alien life, our essential goodness is easy enough to believe in, but a lot harder to prove.

Speaking about the abortion storylines of the 2010s, a media researcher remarks on how “divorced” Hollywood seemed from the “political reality” of the era.

On our shows, from Parenthood to Private Practice to Better Things, characters were freely exercising their right to choose, with support from sympathetic loved ones and reassuring medical professionals. Meanwhile, out in the real world, the rising Tea Party were passing a “tidal wave” of ever-tightening restrictions, turning those same scenes into increasingly inaccessible fantasies.

Hollywood Does Abortion, premiering at Tribeca, aims to close that gap. Combining news footage, expert interviews and a dizzying array of film and TV clips, the documentary makes the case for the inextricable relationship between pop culture and politics, each side shaping the other. If it necessarily prioritizes breadth over depth, its sharp insights make for a galvanizing start to a long-overdue conversation.

It helps that despite the often dispiriting subject matter, Hollywood Does Abortion, directed by Janet Goldwater, Barbara Attie and Mike Attie, is a surprisingly easy watch. The pacing is brisk but never hurried, and its leaps between eras or topics never feels difficult to follow, thanks to writer-editor Jamie Boyle’s well-organized narrative flow. Statistics are trotted out judiciously to make a clear statement, rather than thrown at us willy-nilly.

The talking heads include academics and activists as well as creatives like Crazy Ex-Girlfriend creator Rachel Bloom and Dirty Dancing writer Eleanor Bernstein, and the film allows both their expert knowledge and their personal perspectives to shine through. (In a pointed touch, nearly all of them are women.) In one minute, they might be thoughtfully pushing back against former President Bill Clinton’s “safe, legal and rare” line, which stigmatized the choice even as it argued for the right to make it. In another, they might be laughing at their own irritated responses to a particularly irresponsible bit of storytelling.

If abortion is often regarded as a topic so complex and controversial that even the most powerful institutions and ambitious politicians are loath to go near it, Hollywood Does Abortion makes a point of presenting it as digestible and approachable.

Covering half a century’s worth of storytelling about reproductive rights — from a Maude episode that aired shortly before Roe v. Wade to Blonde, which released shortly after its overturn in 2022, and beyond — it lays out in clear and cogent detail how real-world conversations are reflected in our pop culture. Which, in turn, has the power to influence public thinking and even actual legislation around certain issues, à la the Will & Grace effect.

Like how Dirty Dancing taught the generation who came up after Roe what they stood to lose if those rights were repealed, by smuggling a back-alley abortion storyline into an irresistible teen romance. Or, on the flip side, how a particularly nasty episode of Law & Order inspired by George Tiller helped to justify his murder in retrospect, by turning the fictionalized version of him into the specter of every fervent pro-lifer’s nightmares.

And even within its limited run time, the film allows for nuance: The same Dirty Dancing clips that served as a necessary reminder of an uglier past resurface in another segment discussing how the frequent depiction of abortion as physically and emotionally traumatic helped portray it as something evil.

Hollywood Does Abortion’s biggest issue, insofar as it can even be fairly described as one, is simply the overabundance of worthy topics. The filmmakers are admirable in their ambition, touching on everything from the way male characters are depicted in these storylines (often furious at not having been allowed more say) to which types of stories remain underrepresented (basically anything that isn’t about a pretty young white woman getting a medical procedure) to Hollywood’s favorite wishy-washy plot cheats (like Cristina’s ectopic pregnancy on Grey’s Anatomy, the result of ABC refusing to let Shonda Rimes depict her going through with an abortion).

However, the doc’s wide-ranging view also means touching on things is all it has time to do. Though entire essays can and have been written about some of the individual storylines mentioned here (indeed, Slate critic Dana Stevens, who wrote one about Knocked Up’s “shmashmortion” approach, gets to reiterate some of her points here), the vast majority of referenced shows and movies appear only as out-of-context clips, and even the ones subject to more thorough discussion are allowed just a few minutes at most.

But such restraint is more a virtue than a drawback of the movie, which works precisely because it’s so judicious about recognizing what fits into its scope and what doesn’t. It’s plugged in enough to bring up, say, trad wife content on TikTok — a very modern form of pop culture — but smart enough to recognize that it’s another discussion for another day. It shows enough clips of conservative commentators spewing hateful rhetoric or prominent politicians like J.D. Vance demanding “more babies” to provoke justified fury, but leaves the hardcore history lessons for other books or docs to handle.

Very consciously, Hollywood Does Abortion positions itself as part of a larger discussion rather than its entirety. And while it can be devastatingly candid about the terror of the times we live in, it offers itself up as a call to fight rather than a concession of defeat.