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.
The premise of Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem seems innocuous enough. An Israeli woman trapped in a troubled and challenging marriage wants to get out. Trying to finalize the divorce process proves more difficult than expected, thanks to religious laws that constrain the two Israelis who now live in Morocco. The woman begins the process of a Gett, a religious divorce that must be approved by the husband and completed through a religious court instead of a secular governing body.
Then things start to get interesting. Gett is a slow burn that takes a relatable situation and spins it out into a drama that reveals more about the relationship between the husband and wife than they could ever tell on their own. The husband’s refusal to allow the Gett leads his wife down a path of painful, difficult, and absurd struggle, as she tries to escape the manipulative claws of her spouse. The process proves to be more of a trial of character than of the request, and shows how ugly scorned love can be.
At this point, Doctor Who is a show that requires no introduction. The cult classic turned pop culture hit has created a huge fan base that obsesses over the Doctor, his companions, and the Tardis. The series aired through 2014 and marked the debut of the twelfth Doctor, played by Peter Capaldi. During the season, all-star writers turned in 12 epic episodes that are sure to please longtime fans, while also serving as a worthwhile starting point for newcomers who can’t stop hearing about the show.
Julia Roberts is as charming as ever in the 1997 film My Best Friend’s Wedding. In one of her most famous performances, she plays a young New York City restaurant critic upset that her friend is about to marry the wrong person. Though it probably will play as heavy on tropes now, at the time, the film subverted many of the standard romantic comedy conventions and made for a funny and smart take on the genre.
If you’re unfamiliar with HitRECord, here’s a quick summary: It’s a collaborative website led by Joseph Gordon-Levitt that creates all sorts of artistic output with people from all over the world. 2014 marked the first run of the TV show HitRECord on TV, which featured eight themed episodes with guest stars and performers. Everything on the show content-wise — from the music and the scripts, to the cast and crew — features creatives coming together to make the magic happen.
If you’re looking for a film that plays on the sometimes melodramatic style of young adult novels or maybe need a good cry, If I Stay is your flick. A family on a sudden road trip gets into an terrible accident, leaving the lives of everyone in the car in question. The main character Mia has an out-of-body experience, sees the fate of some of her family members, and has to decide on her own, as she is caught between life and death. Keep your tissue box nearby.
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?