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.
When you were growing up, you surely had moment — if not entire summers — that you spent with minimal supervision. Those were the times! Left to your own devices, you got to make your own fun and live in a fantasy world. If you had siblings or friends with you, all the better — You could become immersed in your make-believe adventures together.
That’s the essence of what God Bless This Child attempts to capture. The film depicts five siblings, ranging in age from the one year-old baby to the 13-year-old girl who is left in charge, as they spend their day entertaining themselves after their mom suddenly takes off. The personalities of the kids shine through and play off of one another perfectly, as they drive the story forward with their interactions. It’s a film that will make you miss the freedom of youth and resent the responsibilities of adulthood.
Portlandia has quietly built itself into a comedic institution. Even though it’s hidden on a somewhat obscure channel (IFC), it’s found a massive audience through streaming services. Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein make a wonderful pair, and the two have somehow continued to craft hilarious sketches centered around the Pacific northwest’s quirkiest city. Built out with absurd, yet somehow believable characters and stories, Portlandia has become its own living, breathing, slightly off-kilter version of Portland.
Love is often found in unexpected places, or at least takes you to them. That’s what happens to Arnaud, a man from a coastal town in France who finds himself at a fork in the road for his future. When he meets Madeleine, he falls for her and sees promise in their relationship. Madeleine, meanwhile, thinks primarily about the apocalypse. She convinces Arnaud to go with her to a military bootcamp. There, the two will prepare themselves for what she sees as the inevitable end of the world.
The most incredible thing about South Park — other than the consistent quality the show had maintained over nearly two decades — is the fact that each episode is made in just six days. From story idea to final product, Matt Stone and Trey Parker work long days to make each show. 6 Days to Air goes behind the scenes, through the creation process, and reveals every part of how the sausage is made. It moves from the brainstorming session that kickstarts the week to the time-consuming animation process that often comes down to the wire.
Iranian film About Elly begins with a group of friends catching up on old times, as they gather for the first time in years. One of their old college buddies has just returned from Germany. Another of the friends has brought along Elly, her daughter’s kindergarten teacher, in hopes of pairing her up with the newly returned friend. And then, out of nowhere, Elly disappears. The film suddenly becomes a mystery that unravels lots of lies and half-truths, which make the group of friends question just how much they actually know about one another.
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?