A quick look at the Paramount+ top 10 rankings tells you everything you need to know about what movie lovers hold as a priority when it comes to choosing something to watch. The supernatural horror Passenger is still sitting at the top of the list, and Joe Dirt (which we covered last week) is in the top 5—two movies that have nothing in common other than the fact that they both have appalling Rotten Tomatoes scores. People like what they like.
Everyone is always so focused on new, new, new. But Netflix's back catalog of movies has legs, too. A week after I pointed you toward Straight Outta Compton and Alien, both are still holding strong on the U.S. charts. This week, Angelina Jolie joins them with her thriller Those Who Want Me Dead, which I get into below.
With the Emmys dominating the conversation, it's a quiet week for movies being added to streaming services. That said, I still found some fun selections to add to your watchlist this week. Hulu is adding a Fast & Furious spin-off, while Kanopy adds a gritty creature feature.
We try to steer clear of politics and societal issues here at Hackaday, so a protest is not usually the sort of thing we’d cover. But we figure it’s safe enough to bend the rules a bit when the ones doing the protesting happen to be robots.
About 30 bots gathered — or at least were commanded to gather by the event organizers — in Warsaw to spur discussion about the impact AI and robots will have on the labor market. Beyond getting public and media attention, the demonstration was also designed to raise awareness of what modern humanoid robots can do. While we appreciate the idea of showing robots taking the “jobs” of the protesters, it does seem somewhat ironic that marching around and chanting for hours is exactly the sort of repetitive work that most people would be happy to see taken over by machines.
Although we hope these protests remain peaceful, there’s always a chance things can turn violent when tensions are high. Should things go south, take comfort in the knowledge that a company in Japan has introduced a robot ambulance service. It’s probably more accurate to compare it with roadside assistance, as the goal is to repair the robot on-site. That said, if the fault is more serious, they can bring the damaged bot back to HQ. Of course, the major difference between this program and a traditional ambulance service is that they’ll be able to bring along a spare robot that can take over the patient’s job while repairs are being made. Should anyone start doing that for humans, expect a few more protests.
Would you need a subscription to fix this?
Speaking of repairs, [Boone Ashworth] at WIRED recently wrote up an interesting hands-on experience he had with John Deere’s AI-driven DIY repair service at the company’s corporate headquarters. Armed with a laptop and tasked with fixing the error message showing on a ~$120,000 USD tractor, he was able to follow the instructions provided by the software to identify a sensor that had been unplugged. Reconnecting the sensor fixed the error message and elicited applause from the Deere reps who presumably had carefully unplugged the sensor in the first place for the purposes of the demonstration.
If that doesn’t strike you as a particularly impressive display for a subscription service which starts at $195 a year for each individual machine, you aren’t alone. When Boone reported his experience to critics of Deere’s repairability track record, it was met with literal laughter. You don’t have to have worked in the fields to know that a sensor becoming unplugged ranks pretty low on the list of potential problems you might face in the middle of a harvest.
We can certainly understand why Deere wouldn’t ask journalists to fix a blown clutch or a leaky hydraulic cylinder for the purposes of a media demo. Even so, they could surely have come up with something a bit more challenging if their goal was to convince customers to log into their repair service — something the company claims only about a thousand users do each day.
The idea is simple enough: make up fake disk labels for a bunch of fictional pieces of software (think the games David Lightman was trying to get his hands on in WarGames), stick them on some of the old 3.5 floppies we know you have hiding in a box somewhere, and put them in a frame.
As we’ve talked about in the past, many of us in the hacker and maker community were inspired by nerds in the media. This project strikes us as a fantastic way to show off just which examples you resonated with personally, and if any readers come up with something similar to adorn the walls of their basement, we’d love to see it.
See something interesting that you think would be a good fit for our weekly Links column? Drop us a line; we’d love to hear about it.
Thrillers are currently dominating Netflix's weekly top 10. The Whisper Man, which was one of our top movies to watch in August, remains at No. 1. The Secret Woman and Ready or Notalso landed in the top 10, so thrillers are of interest to subscribers at the moment.
Shooting a movie on IMAX 15/70 cameras can produce incredible film, but one of the major tradeoffs for filmmakers is how loud they can get when rolling.
Owning your own media, be it movies, music, or TV shows, is a great way to ensure that a change to a licensing agreement doesn't suddenly deprive you of one of your favorite pastimes.
Things have been a little quiet on Paramount+ lately, unless you've been deep in cover-ops land with Lioness or eagerly awaiting some renewed Harrigan madness with the coming of season two of MobLand on September 18. But on the movie side of things, things are slow, which is a perfect time for a thriller to wake you up.
Netflix is still the undisputed king of the streamers, having been doing it since 2007 and making its own shows since 2012. That means that while it has accumulated a vast number of hits, award winners, and record-breakers, it's also had its fair share of originals that once broke new ground and ruled the conversations, but have long since slipped into obscurity.
Some weeks, the easiest way to find something good on Netflix is to skip over the newest releases and instead look into its library. The platform's diverse catalog has a lot to offer, especially when it comes to movies that have swept award shows during their respective runs.
Documentaries continue to thrive on Netflix this month, as evidenced by the solid stance of the true-crime three-parter Death of the Pastor's Wife that's been holding strong in the top spot on the streamer's Top 10, as of this writing. But the hits keep on coming, with two of this weekend's picks below also occupying space on that chart, proving that Netflix knows how to doc.
Netflix's most-watched list has been in a bit of a grim mood lately. The Whisper Man still sits at the top with its chilling serial killer vibes going, and don't even get me started on Death of the Pastor's Wife, which is still giving documentary fans the shivers and making them wonder about their neighbors.
For years, Netflix remained steadfast in its belief in putting its biggest original movies on the service and only allowing small theatrical windows for its awards-season contenders. That mindset is slowly starting to change, as Netflix will allow larger theatrical rollouts for its originals. The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth will receive a two-week IMAX release this Thanksgiving, and Narnia: The Magician's Nephew will get a wide theatrical release starting in February 2027.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Telluride just managed one of its best-kept secrets in years, per The Hollywood Reporter. On Sunday night, festival-goers filed into a 650-seat theater with their phones locked away, having no idea what they were about to see, told only that it ran nearly three hours, hadn't been shown anywhere, and that its principal creators would be in the audience. The surprise premiere they went on to enjoy is a new documentary from co-directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes.
Called "You Can See Everything," the film is said to capture Holmes and her husband, Billy Evans, in the 34 days before she reported to federal prison in May 2023 to begin an 11-year sentence for defrauding investors about her blood-testing technology. Since then, her legal fight has limped along without success. Her appeals to overturn the conviction and shorten her sentence were rejected in February of last year. She then went a different route last year, asking President Trump to commute her sentence. That clemency petition is still listed as pending, meaning it's officially been opened and remains under review.
Fielder apparently lived in the couple's guest house during filming -- the access they provided sounds shocking -- but some of the buzz also ties to an A-list actress who becomes part of the story itself. A24 is set to release the film in October. You can watch a trailer for the film on YouTube.
The director discusses his debut novel, staying true to an artistic vision, and the absurd line of dialogue from Donnie Darko he believes will find its way into his obituary.
The most-watched movie on Paramount+ right now is the new Scary Movie, which critics have taken a baseball bat to. It may have a 24% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but folks keep pressing play on the Scream spoof, and honestly, I'm here for it because movie lovers can't go by critics alone.
Even though the weather's getting cooler, the movies on Netflix are starting to heat up for U.S. subscribers, with The Whisper Man still holding court at the top of the streamer's charts. If you're into documentaries, maybe you've already checked out the wild-ride story of Australian Olympic breakdancer Rachael Gunn in Untold Raygun: Breaking Badly.
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