On December 17, 2025, the Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) board of directors unanimously rejected a $108.4 billion hostile takeover bid from Paramount Skydance (a combined entity led by David Ellison). Instead of accepting this all-cash offer of $30 per share, the board reaffirmed its commitment to a competing merger agreement with Netflix, valued at approximately $82.7 billion (or $27.75 per share).
Pauline Kael is one of the most provocative and consequential film critics of the 20th century. I’d heard so much about her over the years and wanted to learn more, so I was quite happy when the documentary about her life — “What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael” — appeared on Amazon Prime.
In many ways, her life story was very different from what I expected. She faced significant personal challenges, including raising her daughter alone as a single mother while navigating a male-dominated industry. She was polarizing, fiercely opinionated, and enormously talented, which led to a remarkable career highlighted by her tenure at The New Yorker from 1968 to 1991, where she penned more than 400 reviews and essays.
Her writing style was distinctive: passionate, personal, and often provocative, blending sharp analysis with visceral emotional responses to films. She championed the “New Hollywood” era of the 1960s and 1970s, praising directors like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Brian De Palma, while often taking aim at more established figures such as Stanley Kubrick. Right away, it was easy to like her as I learned more about her through this film. She was fearless, and in many ways I shared her taste in movies — especially the ones she admired.
Yet she could also be quite vicious in her criticism. While I respected that she never shied away from tearing into popular films, at times she seemed unable to appreciate genuinely great movies that simply didn’t align with her personal tastes.
Her review of “The Sound of Music” in McCall’s magazine was so scathing that it reportedly led to her firing. “The sugar-coated lie that people seem to want to eat … and this is the attitude that makes a critic feel that maybe it’s all hopeless. Why not just send the director, Robert Wise, a wire: ‘You win, I give up’?” Really? The film may not be for everyone, but as a musical, it’s undeniably brilliant.
One of the best part of the new streaming reality is binge-watching older television shows, particlularly some of the classics from the “peak TV” era of the 2000s and 2010s. Of course, that required a number of subscriptions, and few people bothered to get the AMC+ subscription. That left “Mad Men,” one of the all-time great television dramas, inaccessible to many fans who might love the show.
Now that is changing as of December 1, 2025, as “Mad Men” is now streaming on HBO Max. This arrival is part of a licensing agreement between Warner Bros. Discovery (the parent company of HBO Max) and Lionsgate (the studio that produces and owns the rights to “Mad Men”).
To make this specific run on HBO Max even more attractive, Lionsgate created a 4K remaster of the series. This was the key selling point: HBO Max can market it not just as “having the show,” but as having the best looking version of the show ever released. The have been some glitches with the 4K remaster, but overall this is a coup for HBO Max.
“Mad Men” had a huge cultural impact after it’s 2007 premiere, and it will be fascinating to see how the show impacts a whole new generation who can now more easily discover the show. We covered the show extensively here, including our “Mad Men” blog that started with the third season. The show was beloved by critcs and audiences as well.
If you haven’t seen “Mad Men” you should give it a try while the rest of us plan our rewatch binge.
The Bourne franchise returned to familiar territory in 2016 with “Jason Bourne,” the fifth film in the series and the long-awaited comeback of Matt Damon as the amnesiac super-spy. After Damon sat out 2012’s “The Bourne Legacy“—a spinoff starring Jeremy Renner that failed to ignite new life into the brand—Universal brought back the proven duo of Damon and director Paul Greengrass. The reunion also included Greengrass’s longtime editor Christopher Rouse as co-writer, signaling a conscious effort to recapture the intensity of the earlier trilogy.
The film introduces fresh faces alongside returning ones. Alicia Vikander steps in as Heather Lee, a rising CIA cyber-ops specialist with her own agenda, while Tommy Lee Jones plays the steely CIA Director Robert Dewey. Julia Stiles reprises her role as Nicky Parsons, but this time she takes on a larger, more pivotal part in the story, ultimately setting Bourne back on a path of discovery and conflict. French actor Vincent Cassel makes a memorable impression as the CIA “asset” tasked with eliminating Bourne.
It’s always refreshing to see excellent television shows wrap up there series before the show gets stale. “Succession” has been a big hit for HBO, but we saw last year that the cycle of conflict started to settle into a somewhat predictable pattern. Of course the show still packs quite a punch, and consistently delivers plot twists to keep viewers on their toes, but how many storylines can you create around family strife?
A final season also helps to generate buzz, and the first episode generated great rating according to HBO:
The season four debut of SUCCESSION garnered 2.3 million viewers across HBO Max and linear telecasts, marking a series high. Total viewing for Sunday night was up 62% compared to last season’s premiere (1.4M) and 33% compared to last season’s finale (1.7M), with season 3 episodes going on to average 7.2 million viewers per episode across platforms. Viewership figures are based on Nielsen and first party data.
The battle between Logan Roy (Brian Cox) and his three of his children is heating up as Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Siobhan (Sarah Snook) and Roman (Kieran Culkin) team up to do their own thing in the media business. Meanwhile, first-born Connor (Alan Ruck) continues to be a clown with his pathetic presidential campaign. The first episode was packed with drama as the kids find themselves in a bidding war with Logan.
This fourth and final season should end up being memorable, as opposed to a show like Showtime’s “Billions” which was equally brilliant in the early seasons but then hung around way to long, becoming a caricature of itself in recent seasons.
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