In the new movie Saltburn, a talented, but poor young man (The Banshees of Inisherin‘s Barry Keoghan) befriends a rich and charismatic fellow student (Priscilla‘s Jacob Elordi) and gets introduced to the British upper class. Numerous seductions ensue, and some tears (and maybe even a little blood) are shed. If that plot description sounds a tad familiar, that’s because it is.
Saltburn wears its influences on its well-tailored sleeve, with The Talented Mr. Ripley and Brideshead Revisited frequently cited in most reviews as two sources of inspiration. For all of its faults, the one thing that Saltburn does well is whet one’s appetite for other movies that are just like it. The following is a brief list of movies and shows old and new that are similar in tone and subject matter to Emerald Fennell’s new film, and that will satiate the desires of the most demanding Saltburn fan.
It’s an obvious recommendation, but it’s also the one that makes the most sense given Saltburn‘s themes of the upper class and suppressed sexual desire. Anthony Minghella’s terrific film adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s classic thriller stars Matt Damon as Tom Ripley, a poor American who is tasked by a rich shipping magnate to retrieve his wayward son, Dickie Greenleaf (an Oscar-nominated Jude Law), in Italy. Once in Dickie’s presence, Tom is seduced by Dickie’s luxurious lifestyle, Dickie’s girlfriend Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow), and Dickie himself. A murder occurs, identities are stolen, crimes are uncovered, and Tom becomes both the hunter and the hunted.
If a movie could ever seduce you, it’s this one. It assembles one of the most gorgeous casts ever (Damon, Law, Paltrow, and co-star Cate Blanchett never looked more movie star beautiful), features stunning on-location cinematography of a sun-dappled Southern Italy, and has an urgent, jazzy score by Gabriel Yared that will make you a bit paranoid. Like Saltburn, The Talented Mr. Ripley marries surface-level thrills with a poignant character study, and what was a fun, if bloody romp through decadent Europe becomes, in its final moments, a haunting portrait of a man undone by his own desire to be anyone but himself.
The Talented Mr. Ripley is streaming on Paramount+.
A movie about the privileged class at a prestigious British university? Check. Directed by a talented female filmmaker (in this case, An Education‘s Lone Scherfig)? Check. With a focus on the toxic bonds between privileged handsome young men wearing impeccable clothes? Check. While not a thriller, The Riot Club shares so many similarities with Saltburn that you’d think Fennell was remaking it.
The movie focuses on two Oxford University freshmen, snobbish Alistair (The Hunger Games: Catching Fire‘s Sam Claflin) and idealistic Miles (Max Irons, son of Jeremy), who are recruited into the Riot Club, a hedonistic private club dedicated to the pursuit of money and pleasure. One night at a bar, an incident occurs that changes the lives of Alistair and Miles forever, and jeopardizes the other members of the club. It’s not a masterpiece, but The Riot Club is superficially entertaining, with enough pretty visuals (the on-location scenery is gorgeous) and handsome people doing terrible things to pass the time pleasantly.
The Riot Club is streaming for free on Tubi.
Nearly forgotten today, this excellent three-episode BBC miniseries, which was adapted from Alan Hollinghurst’s acclaimed 2004 novel, does a better job than Saltburn in capturing a specific time and place (1980s Great Britain) and having something to say about it. The plot concerns Nick Guest (Downton Abbey‘s Dan Stevens in one of his first roles), a recent Oxford graduate who is invited to stay at the posh Notting Hill home of his wealthy friend Toby Fedden’s family. Once there, Nick becomes enamored with Toby’s sister and parents, and eventually becomes a permanent resident in their household, all the while hiding his homosexuality from his proper and posh surrogate family.
Unlike Saltburn, The Line of Beauty isn’t a thriller; the only deaths that occur are brought on by the very real threat of the AIDS epidemic, which hovers over the entire miniseries like a grim specter. Nick encounters real-life figures like Margaret Thatcher, and through his relationship with the Feddens, the viewer gets to witness England as it was under Conservative rule throughout the ’80s. While not as superficially as fun, The Line of Beauty is much more satisfying than Saltburn as both a drama and a darkly comic satire on the upper class.
The Line of Beauty is streaming on Prime Video.
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?