This summer was pretty great for movies, wasn’t it? Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 was the best Marvel movie in years, and the latest installments of Mission: Impossible and Insidious proved to be the best yet. And of course, there was the social phenomenon known as Barbenheimer, which still has its grip on the world.
September is just around the corner, and while there are fewer must-see movies on the horizon (is anyone excited about watching The Nun 2 or The Expendables 4?), there are a few films that are worth your time and money. Here are the three best movies you should check out in September.
Carrie. Christine. Cujo. The Green Mile. The Shawshank Redemption. It. Chances are, you’ve seen a Stephen King movie. One of the most prolific writers of the late 20th century has seen many of his works adapted for the big screen, and this documentary looks at the volume of work written by King and turned into films by such famous directors as Brian De Palma, Stanley Kubrick, George Romero, and John Carpenter. King himself even directed an adaptation of one of his stories, the sentient-machines-run-amok cult classic Maximum Overdrive.
Featuring interviews with King collaborators Mike Flanagan, Frank Darabont, Taylor Hackford, Mick Garris, and the late James Caan, King on Screen shows just how some of the most famous movies of the last 50 years were made, and what impact they had on the greater culture. It also shines a light on just why King is so effective as a storyteller both on the page and on the silver screen.
Despite being dead for decades, Agatha Christie remains one of the hottest writers in Hollywood. Her mystery stories have been adapted time and again, with the most recent ones, Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile, having been helmed by Academy Award winner Kenneth Branagh. Branagh is back, both as director and star, with another adaptation, A Haunting in Venice, which is based on the relatively obscure Christie novel Hallowe’en Party.
The movie assembles an all-star cast — including recent Oscar-winner Michelle Yeoh, Heart of Stone hunk Jamie Dornan, and Tina Fey of all people — in mid-century Venice to look equal parts menacing (to be credible as a suspect) and innocent (to be sympathetic as a potential victim).
In the film, a grieving mother holds a séance for her missing child, but of course, something goes wrong, a murder occurs, and Branagh’s master detective Hercule Poirot is on the case. While Death on the Nile was a bust (too much CG plus Gal Gadot’s awful acting equaled an abysmal picture), A Haunting in Venice looks intriguing enough to give hope that Branagh has made a mystery movie that’s both fun and clever.
AI is all the rage these days. From publishing to technology to the courts, the concept of AI as a sentient tool used for various purposes has consumed the imagination of the public. Cinema is not immune to this phenomenon, and there’s already a visually dazzling sci-fi epic about AI headed to the multiplexes.
In the future-set sci-fi movie The Creator, John David Washington (Amsterdam) plays Joshua, a widowed ex-special forces agent who is recruited to hunt the Creator, an elusive architect of advanced AI who has developed a mysterious weapon with the power to end humanity as we know it. Complications ensue when Joshua discovers the AI is housed in the artificial body of an innocent-looking young child.
The director, Gareth Edwards, is known for being a skilled sci-fi craftsman, having helmed the underrated Monsters and the Godzilla movies from a decade ago, as well as a small movie called Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. The Creator looks to be an interesting marriage of a classic sci-fi story asking fundamental existential questions (what is humanity? is technology inherently evil?) and big-budget action flick (dig those explosions) that could make it a breakout hit.
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.