For cord cutters, the anticipation of watching an event live gets transferred over to the weekly dumps of content on the various video streaming platforms. What’s dropping when becomes important knowledge to have, as you organize your queue. If you don’t have time to comb through all the content coming down the series of tubes that make up the Internet, don’t worry — we do.
Here are our picks for what you should watch this week.
Most big adventures start with a small, simple decision. In the case of Travis and Harrison, two kids who come across a police car hidden in a secluded area, the decision is to touch the vehicle. From there, it becomes a contest to see who will go further in interacting with the car, cumulating with the two driving off in the car and speeding recklessly through the empty field.
What the two boys don’t realize is they’ve stolen the car of Sheriff Kretzer (played by Kevin Bacon), a cop with a bad temper and some behaviors to hide. He’ll do just about anything it takes to get the car back and to keep his partners in the force from learning why he left the vehicle in the first place. He’ll even steal cars of his own, call in fake police reports, and use his weapon. The entire film has a dramatic build and an attention-grabbing opening act that will make you want to see what comes of the increasingly maddening situation.
Alike, a 17-year-old African American girl living in the Bronx, is the primary focus of Pariah. She’s starting to come to terms with her sexual identity, as she spends more time with her openly lesbian friend and embraces who she is. Her mother is not so willing to accept her daughter’s decision. She demands Alike behave more like she believes a woman should, and pushes her to spend more time with her church-going friends. The film, a 2011 Sundance award winner, follows Alike’s struggle to be accepted and find herself in the already trying teenage years.
As an asteroid bears down toward the Earth and threatens to destroy humanity, Dodge Petersen (played by Steve Carell) doesn’t seem all that affected. He goes about his business, living his life as he always would, despite the news that everything will end in just three weeks’ time. He meets Penny (Keira Knightley) and learns the two have an accidental connection. Both are stuck without their partner during the little time they have left, so they make the most of each other’s company, while they still have it.
Usually when we think about war, it’s either about the people on the ground fighting or the politicians who make the decision to send them. Maybe we should be thinking about the people who are truly enabling warfare to continue: the arms dealers. That’s who Lord of War focuses on, with Nicolas Cage playing the role of an illegal arms dealer who does deals with all sorts of unsavory characters and the human cost that his work has.
The most recent of ESPN’s impressive documentary series 30 for 30 is one of its most peculiar yet. Usually, the series takes an in-depth look at forgotten stories or sheds new light on famous moments in more traditional sports, but Angry Sky puts its focus on an interesting subject: a parachutist who failed to ever achieve his goal. His failure to meet his goals doesn’t make the character of Nick Piantanida any less worth examining, and putting the spotlight on his life reveals some incredible stories.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?