Online streaming is bigger than ever, and with so many streaming services adding new shows and movies every week, it can be nearly impossible to sort through the good and the bad. If you need something to watch and don’t want to wade through the digital muck that washes up on the internet’s shores, follow our picks below for the best new shows and movies to stream on Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Amazon, and other services.
On the list this week: Tom Hardy gets violent, and a pair of documentaries tackle two very different icons of the music world, John Coltrane and Rolling Stone.
A dark, bizarre period drama, Taboo takes place in England circa 1814, as the War of 1812 winds down. James Delaney (Tom Hardy), long believed dead, returns to England following his father’s death. Delaney inherits a stretch of land in North America, and the East India Company wants to buy it from him, but Delaney knows that with the war ending, the land’s value will jump. As Delaney tries to re-establish himself in England, the company tries to eliminate him. Little do his enemies know, Delaney’s time abroad has made him a dangerous man. Taboo is a grim, often grotesque story built around Hardy’s fiendish performance.
The Lego Movie, a CGI adventure set in a world made of Lego toys, proved to be a surprisingly big hit in 2014, and now that film’s breakout character, Will Arnett’s cocksure, rasping Batman, has his own stand-alone sequel. The Lego Batman Movie follows Batman as he tries to stop the latest plot by his enemy, The Joker (Zach Galifianakis), who is disappointed to learn Batman doesn’t consider him his archnemesis (or at all). The crime-fighter also has his hands full training his young ward, Dick Grayson (Michael Cera), aka, Robin. A charming, funny take on the Batman mythos, The Lego Batman Movie is great for families or adult Batman fans who are looking for a change of tone from DC’s films.
Maria Bamford’s manic, personal comedy is back for a second season that builds on the first’s strengths while ironing out its weaknesses. The shows follows Bamford (playing herself), a stand-up comedian trying to manage her bipolar disorder and get her career back on track. The show’s story takes place across multiple time periods, creating a chaotic feeling that matches the protagonist’s frantic life. Season 2 focuses on Bamford’s relationship with her boyfriend, Scott (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson), and her new show on Tesla founder Elon Musk’s new, AI-driven streaming service. Lady Dynamite is a surreal, often wacky comedy, but with some honest emotions underneath.
John Coltrane was one of the biggest forces in the development of jazz, and it would be hard for a documentary to capture the mystical nature of Coltrane’s playing, but Chasing Trane does at least shed light on the life of the man himself. It does so through interviews with the people who knew him and those he influenced, as well as Coltrane himself, whose letters are narrated by Denzel Washington. Chasing Trane is a great resource for those hoping to learn about Coltrane’s life, his religious views, and his influence. And if you don’t know Coltrane, it very well may lead you to explore his music.
It’s been 50 years since the founding of Rolling Stone, and the occasion has been marked by a number of works about the magazine itself, including Joe Hagan’s incisive book Sticky Fingers and HBO’s new documentary Rolling Stone: Stories from the Edge. Rolling Stone co-founder Jann Wenner aided in the production of HBO’s documentary, so it’s not as critical as Hagan’s tell-all, but it still tells a comprehensive history, exploring the magazine’s journey from countercultural pamphlet to pillar of the media establishment. Beginning with the magazine’s wild days in the late ’60s and running up through its expansion into all areas of pop culture, including its disastrous article “A Rape on Campus,” Stories from the Edge is a detailed documentary, one that doesn’t shy away from difficult material.
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?