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Much has been made over “Succession’s” love for literary references. From the poem that’s inspired titles for each of the three finales, to the HBO series’ many ties to Greek mythology, showrunner Jesse Armstrong and his incredible team are always eager to pay their respects to the master storytellers who preceded them — including, in Season 3, Stan and Jan Berenstain. Just take a look at the opening lines of their 1986 children’s book “The Berenstain Bears and Too Much Birthday....

Tarik Saleh directs “The Contractor,” which reunites “Hell or High Water” stars Chris Pine and Ben Foster as two former Special Forces operatives who turn to contract work after being involuntarily discharged from the Army. James Harper (Pine) is desperate to provide for his family, and turns to a private underground military force, led by a mysterious coordinator (Kiefer Sutherland). When the very first assignment goes awry, the elite soldier finds himself caught in a dangerous conspiracy and on the run for his life....

Hosted by Kal Penn, the virtual ceremony contained exclusively pre-taped material — which made for a succinct if slightly airless event — and it was one that did little to disrupt the current narrative with regards to Emmy favorites. Which is to say that “Ted Lasso” lasso’d and “The Crown” crown’d and everything was copacetic. Setting aside the series awards momentarily, let’s look at a few categories that didn’t have locked-in frontrunners and see what kind of insight they’ve brought to the Emmy conversations....

The spy vs. spy movie blew away its closest competition, “The Sea Beast,” by nearly 55 million more hours viewed last week. The kids’ movie was in its third week and thus had seven days of viewership counted. Last week, its second one of availability and first full week on the platform, was the best one to-date for “The Sea Beast” with 68.11 million hours viewed. “The Gray Man” enjoyed the most-watched opening weekend for a movie on Netflix since “The Adam Project” accumulated 92....

Where to Watch ‘The House’: Netflix An anthology that works as a whole is a singular kind of thrill. Watching a collection of stories come together, while wildly different and only connected in tenuous ways, is incredibly satisfying when all of it feels of a piece. That’s certainly the case with “The House,” the new Netflix Special (by their description) that brings together three diverging stories. Boasting different directors but the same writers, the segments feel distinct far beyond the fact that each of them are set in the same house during wildly changing eras....

But the two-story, ground-level duplex is actually a pretty cush Lower East Side unit, and for Karam, who wrote and directed the film from his own 2016 play, it’s not so bad. That’s because he more or less lived in this place during his starving-artist days in New York City. “The reason I was able to afford it as a playwright [with a] day job working as an assistant [was because] I lived in the basement....

After Brett Kavanaugh was appointed to the Supreme Court in 2018, Pildes approached Oscar-nominated documentarian Tia Lessin (“Trouble the Water”) to co-direct; HBO Documentary Films agreed to back “The Janes,” which started filming in 2019 and debuted at Sundance 2022. It’s currently streaming on HBO Max and Hulu. Slowly but surely the filmmakers found Janes willing to speak on the record. Even though the Janes’ leaders Ruth Surgal and Jody Parsons had died, and other Janes had never come forward even to their own families, it didn’t take long for participants to jump on board....