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”.

The stunning victory by the New York Knickerbockers over the San Antonio Spurs on Wednesday gave ABC the most-watched NBA Finals Game 4 since 1998, the year of Michael Jordan’s last championship with the Chicago Bulls.

Nielsen data showed an average of 20.9 million viewers watched the Knicks overcome a 29-point halftime deficit to top Victor Wembanyama and the Spurs 107-106 at Madison Square Garden, the greatest comeback in NBA Finals history. The Knicks have a 3-1 lead in the series and will play Game 5 on Saturday in San Antonio, attempting to win their first NBA championship in 53 years.

Through the first four games, the NBA Finals are averaging 19.6 million viewers, also the highest since the Bulls-Utah Jazz faced off on NBC in 1998. The series is on track to become the most-watched since the NBA Finals moved to ABC and ESPN in 2002.

“The match-up is ideal from a media business standpoint, featuring the nation’s largest media market with New York, teams with robust followings and multiple all-stars, especially Wemby, the compelling new face of the NBA,” said Lee Berke, president of LHB Sports Entertainment & Media, Inc.

The Knicks-Spurs series is up 116% over the first four games of last year’s match-up between the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Indiana Pacers. But the most encouraging numbers for ABC and ESPN is the growth among younger viewers, who have become harder to reach in the age of social media and streaming. Ratings among teens aged 12 to 17 are up 138% while the 18 to 24 age group is up 147%.

ABC is also seeing spikes in viewing among women, up 121%, and the Latino audience due to its large populations in the markets of New York and San Antonio, according to Flora Kelly, ESPN’s senior vice president for audience research.

Viewing in the New York market alone is accounting for 18% of the national audience. The average price for a 30-second commercial on the telecasts topped $1 million each, according to people familiar with the figures who were not authorized to comment publicly. Some spots have gone for as much as $2.3 million.

In addition to delivering highly competitive games, the NBA Finals also had President Trump and pop superstar Taylor Swift in attendance at Madison Square Garden. Both are capable of turning a live TV event into a full-blown spectacle.

“What we’re seeing is that this Spurs-Knicks series is a tremendous cultural moment,” Kelly said.

Trump attended Game 3, making him the first sitting president to attend an NBA Finals. While Trump was a fixture at Knicks games before he entered the national political scene, some commentators, such as ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith, believed the president’s insistence on attending Monday’s contest became a distraction that disrupted the home team’s momentum. (The Knicks lost the game 115-111, ending the team’s streak of 13 consecutive wins.)

Swift showed up for Game 4, joining “Law & Order: SVU” star Mariska Hargitay and the other celebrities who regularly show up courtside at Madison Square Garden.

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.