Every year, Digital Trends editors hand pick the most exciting products we’ve had the privilege of handling this year. Make sure to check out award winners in categories from cars to computers, plus the overall best product of 2017! Read on for the movies, shows and music that floored us this year.
For the second year in a row, filmmaker Denis Villeneuve has given audiences the most thrilling, thought-provoking, and genuinely beautiful cinematic experience to arrive in theaters. A film more than 30 years in the making, Blade Runner 2049 is more than just a sci-fi sequel. It’s a masterpiece of visual storytelling that looks and feels like no other movie made in recent years, and tells a tale rooted in one of the most fundamental mysteries of our existence: the nature of humanity.
No stranger to blending cerebral, inward-gazing stories with eye-pleasing visuals, Villeneuve gave us last year’s alien encounter drama Arrival – the best movie of 2016 – which took the sci-fi genre in bold new directions by exploring the way we communicate and how the choices we each make shape the human experience. In Blade Runner, he shifts his focus to the human soul and the definition of humanity, and brings audiences along for a ride that’s as exciting as it is fascinating.
Crafting the sequel to a beloved, genre-defining film that has more than three decades of nostalgia supporting it comes with a very particular – and often unforgiving – set of difficulties. Not only did Blade Runner 2049 have to honor the 1982 film that inspired it, but it had to tell a fresh story that would validate its existence while simultaneously looking, feeling, and sounding like a film made 35 years earlier.
Blade Runner 2049 makes the three-decade wait not only seem worthwhile, but intentional.
Villeneuve did all of that and more with Blade Runner 2049, shifting smoothly from hazy neon cityscapes to rusty mountain ranges of urban waste and abandoned cities reclaimed by the swirling desert, spotted with the remnants of a world we left behind. Rather than simply reconstructing the world of Blade Runner, Villeneuve explores it with a scholar’s attention to detail and expands it with a master storyteller’s touch.
With Blade Runner 2049, Villeneuve also offers a fantastic reminder of the enthralling experience that a trip to the theater can be. It’s a film that begs to be seen on the biggest screen possible, immersing its audience in the sights and sounds of its characters’ world.
Perhaps the greatest testament to the achievement of Blade Runner 2049 is that it makes the three-decade wait not only seem worthwhile, but intentional – as if this is the movie that the sequel to one of the greatest sci-fi films ever made needed to be.
Read our full Blade Runner 2049 review
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?
YouTube is changing how its Home page works, giving viewers more control over what shows up there and making some of the app’s most-used sections easier to reach. Custom Feeds are now replacing the existing topic chips for eligible users, while YouTube is also testing a redesigned top bar on mobile that moves Subscriptions closer to the Home feed.
YouTube first started experimenting with Custom Feeds earlier this year, letting you type out what you wanted to watch and turning that request into its own stream of recommendations. Now, the feature is starting to look less like a side experiment and more like something YouTube actually wants people to use as part of their everyday Home page.