If you look at what’s coming out this weekend at the multiplex, you might get a little depressed. All Hollywood has to offer is a lame remake of The Crow and a #MeToo thriller directed by Zoë Kravitz. If you’ve already seen Deadpool & Wolverine and Alien: Romulus, why on earth would you go back?
Well, I hope you have a Netflix subscription. If you do, you’re in luck as the streamer has a deep library of blockbuster hits, cult movies, and underrated films that are worth your time. From a heist movie with a former James Bond actor to a ’90s action movie starring the greatest actress of all time, these three movies on this list are guaranteed to entertain you.
Have you ever fantasized about robbing a bank? Or, at the very least, of getting rich quick? Logan Lucky, Steven Soderbergh’s fun, shaggy heist movie, takes that idea and runs with it, spinning a surprisingly realistic tale about how a group of struggling working-class West Virginians band together to steal a small fortune from the Charlotte Motor Speedway.
The chief pleasures of movies like this one are seeing how the heist is methodically planned out and how it inevitably falls apart. Logan Lucky doesn’t change this formula, but what makes it so special is the care and attention the director and writer lavish on their characters. It helps that they have a stacked cast that features Channing Tatum, Adam Driver, Riley Keough, Katie Holmes, Hilary Swank, Jack Quaid, Sebastian Stan, Seth MacFarlane (!), and, in one of his most entertaining roles ever, Daniel Craig as the bleached-blonde criminal who masterminds the whole thing. Logan Lucky is always involving, and by the end, you might even be moved by it.
Logan Lucky is streaming on Netflix.
Meryl Streep … action hero? America’s finest thespian followed in the footsteps of Arnold Schwarzenegger (Last Action Hero) and Sly Stallone (Demolition Man), sort of, by starring in The River Wild, a 1994 action-drama from L.A. Confidential director Curtis Hanson. The film puts the future Mamma Mia! star on a small raft in the roaring rivers of Idaho, where she has to fend off nature, gun-toting criminals, and a crumbling marriage. Singing ABBA songs won’t get her out of this pickle!
Streep stars as Gail, a mother of two who takes her preteen son white-water rafting in Idaho. She’s unexpectedly joined by her estranged husband, Tom (David Strathairn), and they all get more than they bargained for when they encounter a trio of strange men on their trip. It’s soon revealed that they are up to no good, and they need Gail’s help to navigate down the river. If she refuses, her family could pay with their lives. Even if she agrees, she has no reason to trust that they will walk away unharmed. What’s a Boston mom to do?
The River Wild is streaming on Netflix.
Hollywood isn’t the only place that makes visual effects-heavy action films. In 2015, Norway made its own eco-disaster film, The Wave, and surprise, it’s actually pretty good. It was so successful that it spawned a trilogy, with 2018’s The Quake and 2022’s The Burning Sea completing the Earth-is-doomed trifecta.
In the seaside resort town of Geiranger, stressed-out geologist Kristian is about to leave with his family when he notices some unusual underground activity in the mountains surrounding the town. Operating on his own intellect and gut instinct, he quickly deduces that a tsunami is imminent and could drown the entire village. Now it’s a race against time as Kristian tries to warn everyone about the impending giant wave that’s about to hit land before it’s too late.
The Wave is streaming on Netflix.
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?