For cord cutters, the anticipation of watching an event live gets transferred over to the weekly dumps of content on the various video streaming platforms. What’s dropping when becomes important knowledge to have, as you organize your queue. If you don’t have time to comb through all the content coming down the series of tubes that make up the Internet, don’t worry — we do.
Here are our picks for what you should watch this week.
Netflix
Everyone knows Batman’s origin story by now. Bruce Wayne’s rise to the status of the Dark Knight has been well documented in almost every story about Batman ever told, usually with little variation on previous tellings. Even on the TV series Gotham, part of the plot focuses on a young Bruce as he copes with the death of his parents and learns how to handle his troubles surrounding that traumatizing night.
Despite not telling a unique story and mostly recounting Bruce Wayne’s training to become the super hero we know him as, Batman Begins holds a special place in the heart of any comic book fan. It’s not because it does such a great job with the Batman origin, but because it is the film that launched arguably the best comic book trilogy ever. The film is a strong offering and stands on its own merits, but pair it up with the sequels that followed — the Dark Knight and the Dark Knight Rises — and it feels like a classic. With the massive influx of comic-inspired media in recent years, it’s nice to travel back to a time when the market wasn’t so flooded but the quality was still top notch.
The latest Netflix original isn’t a fictional epic like House of Cards or Orange is the New Black. Instead, it’s a documentary detailing the civil unrest in Ukraine. Focusing on a 93-day period in 2013 and 2014, the film starts with peaceful protestors in the streets of Kiev, Ukraine demonstrating against the nation’s government. By the end of the film, those streets look like a devastated war zone. What happened in between, the brutality and violence the protestors and citizens faced, is front and center in Winter on Fire.
The American Horror Story series has been undeniably ambitious, though it occasionally falls short of expectations. That’s bound to happen when, on occasion, the show can reach such a high bar. The latest installation in the fright-fest series (prior to this year’s recently airing American Horror Story: Hotel) is Freak Show. The setting alone is enough to cause some screams, taking place under the big tent of the circus, making it a perfect watch for the month occupied by Halloween.
Amazon’s way of doing things is a little different than Netflix. When Amazon wants to test a show, it puts the pilot out for people to watch and listens to feedback on it. Red Oaks managed to make it past the first test, and now you can watch the entire series on Amazon’s instant video service. The coming-of-age tale set in the 1980s does its best to capture the aesthetic of the era by tapping some of the most notable directors of the era.
If there is one thing film and TV is not running low on, it’s zombies. Thanks to the popularity of the Walking Dead and other zombie-centric franchises, there are plenty of walking corpses populating the screen, but none quite like iZombie. The show centers around medical student Liv Moore, who meets her untimely demise only to return as a zombie. She’s blessed with a bit more awareness than most zombies, and does her best to blend in as a person, while getting her fix of brains at the morgue where she works.
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?