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 worth a watch.
On the list this week: a Best Picture winner, a funny documentary, and the final season of Bloodline.
Winner of 2017’s Academy Award for Best Picture, Moonlight tells the story of Chiron (aka Little), who is growing up in a crime-ridden neighborhood in Miami. Over the course of the film, he struggles with his sexuality, and the abuse he endures due to his identity. The film is divided into three acts, each covering a different period in Chiron’s life: Childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. The film is sparse on plot. It plays out as a series of moments, some more directly connected than others, that come to define its protagonist. Fittingly for a story of such subtle beauty, director Barry Jenkins gives the film a graceful aesthetic, often using water in shots to reflect the metamorphosis Chiron undergoes.
Netflix’s Bloodline is a gripping Southern Gothic thriller that follows the frayed relationships between the Rayburns, a prominent family in Monroe County, Florida. The Rayburns occupy positions of power within the community: John (Kyle Chandler) is a detective, his siblings Meg (Linda Cardellini) and Kevin (Norbert Leo Butz) are an attorney and businessman, respectively, and their parents own a popular hotel. When eldest son and black sheep Danny (Ben Mendlesohn) returns after years away, old tensions begin to simmer and the family’s dark secrets threaten to spill out. Bloodline is a slow-paced, tense thriller, and a beautiful one; the show’s cinematographers expertly capture the dangerous beauty of the Florida Keys.
War Machine is a satire of U.S. military policy in Afghanistan, centering on the character of General Glen McMahon (Brad Pitt), a cocksure, macho commander based on the real life General Stanley McChrystal, former Commander of U.S. and NATO Coalition Forces in Afghanistan. The film follows McMahon and the members of his entourage as they try to manage the chaos in Afghanistan, frequently butting heads with diplomats and civilian administrators. It’s a frenetic sendup of institutions and their failure to handle crises, driven by a commanding performance from Pitt.
Few questions in pop culture inflame the passions as much as “Who is the best Bond?” Many actors have played James Bond over the decades, each with their own distinct take on the character, and while Sean Connery tends to be the overwhelming favorite, each Bond has his defenders, even the man who only played him once: George Lazenby. An Australian mechanic who moved to London and turned to modeling, Lazenby was an unlikely successor to Connery, but his one Bond film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, is regarded as one of the finest in the franchise. That makes it all the more surprising that Lazenby chose to walk away from the role. Becoming Bond, directed by Josh Greenbaum, features extensive interviews with Lazenby, who details his life before, during, and after Bond, with many events hilariously reenacted. Lazenby is a charming storyteller, and his anecdotes have a dramatic flair befitting Bond.
Few names today arouse as much disgust in American culture as Bernie Madoff’s. The former stockbroker, who eventually pleaded guilty to running a Ponzi scheme that swindled investors out of an estimated $64.8 billion, is one of the great villains of the financial industry — and villains always make for compelling characters. Thus it’s no surprise that HBO’s The Wizard of Lies, based on the nonfiction book by Diana B. Henriques, sets out to examine Madoff (Robert De Niro) and figure out who he is and why he did what he did. It’s a tense character study, made better through De Niro’s powerful performance. It also functions as a family drama. Madoff’s sons were the ones who brought his scheme to the attention of the authorities, and the show tries to balance sympathy for their role in bringing Madoff down with the privileged lives they led as a result of his practices.
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?