The best science fiction blends reality and imagination, so a viewer walks away contemplating the limits of human possibility. The worst take leaps of faith that toss a viewer into an oblivion of head scratching. Passengers, a space thriller directed by the Imitation Game's Morten Tyldum and starring Hollywood mainstays Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence, begins in the first category before rocketing into the second. In the film, Avalon -- a commercial starship -- ferries more than 5,000 colonists on a voyage from Earth to a new home world called Homestead II. To survive the 120-year trip, the travelers are placed into induced hibernation, but an accident rouses Chris Pratt's character -- mechanical engineer Jim Preston -- 90 years early.

Arrival Amy Adams stars in this elegant, involving science-fiction drama that is simultaneously old and new, revisiting many alien-invasion conventions but with unexpected intelligence, visual style and heart. The Eagle Huntress A portrait of a 13-year-old Kazakh girl from Mongolia who defies eons of tradition by learning to hunt with fierce golden eagles is a documentary so satisfying it makes you feel good about feeling good. The Edge of Seventeen Hailee Steinfeld gives a superb performance as a high-school misfit in Kelly Fremon Craig's disarmingly smart teen dramedy, the rare coming-of-age picture that feels less like a retread than a renewal. Elle Paul Verhoeven's brilliantly booby-trapped thriller starring Isabelle Huppert is a gripping whodunit, a tour de force of psychological suspense and a wickedly droll comedy of manners. The Handmaiden The most absorbing feature in years from the South Korean director Park Chan-wook ("Oldboy") is a teasingly witty and elegant puzzle-box of a thriller about two women (played by Kim Tae-ri and Kim Min-hee) pursuing their destinies in 1930s Japanese-occupied Korea.

All of this, on paper, is kind of bananas--and would have been better treated by a bananas movie. Instead, Assassin's Creed is cold in the service of its plot and dutiful in the service of its action. It feels, in other words, like a movie that may check off plenty of gamers' boxes. Unfortunately, no one behind the camera bothered to locate much heart. The only other exception comes during a brief moment when Callum, beginning to lose it after a rough ride in the Animus, begins singing some Patsy Cline. "I'm crazy for trying, I'm crazy for crying," Fassbender cackles, channeling a bit of the gonzo outsider frontman he portrayed in the wonderful 2014 film Frank.

The piano ditty below, which ascends jauntily, then finishes with a tuneful flourish, sounds a bit like a jingle composed for the latest toothpaste campaign. The tune was, in fact, dreamed up by a musical AI program developed at Google. And the program's latest compositions show how combining a powerful machine-learning approach with simple musical rules can produce creative works that sound remarkably human. Music composition is an enigmatic form of human creativity. Songwriting programs already exist, but they typically follow a specific set of rules, and they tend to produce tunes that feel rigid and mechanical.

I ran the 100 meter dash, and broke across the finish line in record time. As I danced around in victory, my enthusiasm was not diminished by the fact that I was 8-years-old, and my only opponents had been my asthmatic neighbor and a few action figures that hadn't moved from the starting line. By this metric, Assassin's Creed has also won a gold medal. It's the best video game movie I've seen to date, but as everyone knows, that's quite a low bar. Stacked up against the larger world of weird sci-fi outings and action blockbusters, it just doesn't hold up, and yes, once again we still are stuck at merely "decent," rather than becoming that eternally out-of-reach "great" video game movie adaptation.

The main difference between data analysis today, compared with a decade or two ago, is the way that we interact with it. Previously, the role of statistics was primarily to extend our mental models by discovering new correlations and causal rules. Today, we increasingly delegate parts of our reasoning processes to algorithmic models that live outside our mental models. In my next few posts, I plan to explore some of the issues that arise from this delegation and how ideas such as model interpretability can potentially address them. Throughout this series of posts, I will argue that while current research has barely scratched the surface of understanding the interaction between algorithmic and mental models, these issues will be much more important to the future of data analysis than the technical performance of the models themselves.

Virtually everywhere you look, Bay Area tech businesses are running into walls. Smartphones were revolutionary and lucrative, but the U.S. market is saturated, and Apple's iPhone sales have fallen for three quarters. The "app economy" has matured, with more people using existing apps than downloading new ones. And Facebook, which has filled users' news feeds with so many ads it can barely add more, is predicting its revenue growth will slump next year. Silicon Valley needs its next big thing, a focus for the concentrated brain power and innovation infrastructure that have made this region the world leader in transformative technology.

Year 1999, The Matrix introduced your neighbor, your dad, and pretty much every hacky-sacking college kid in the country to the idea that the real world around us … might not be so real. In the film, our trenchcoated protagonist Neo discovers that the world as he knows it is only an illusion, piped into his brain while his body sits submerged in a gooey chemical broth. The idea that we are not really here at all -- that life is just an illusion – is as old as Plato's Allegory of the Cave. But The Matrix had that special sauce that made this mind-bending concept palatable to high schoolers shuffling around in JNCO jeans: guns, Keanu Reeves, and a soundtrack anchored by Rage Against the Machine. "Entering the Matrix" became pop-culture shorthand for the notion that technology could eventually deliver us from our mind-numbing reality and allow us to live in a faux universe of our own creation. Want to learn kung fu in seconds? Just take the red pill. A kid born in 1999 is just now old enough to rent the R-rated Matrix -- or more likely, stream it. Yet in those intervening 17 years, entering the Matrix has gone from a dystopian sci-fi dream to a waking reality. These days, a pair of $800 goggles can convince you to duck as dinosaurs shamble over you, drop the pit of your stomach as you peer off the ledge of an artificial skyscraper, and make you puke -- in real life -- after one too many loops in a computer-generated space fighter. And yup, you can freeze time and stop bullets, too.

Much has been made of A.I.'s potential to destroy jobs by automating away routine and bureaucratic tasks. But when I think about what makes a job fulfilling, regardless of industry, a few things come to mind: consequential decisions, meaningful personal interactions and challenging problems to solve. It's not fun to do nothing or nothing important. So while we worry about A.I. reducing the job supply, it's also true that those that remain will be better. A.I. is a powerful engine of job inequality. The best example of this I've seen is at a major medical benefits management company here in the U.S. The company sits between payers and providers, determining whether procedures are medically justified and covered by a given insurance policy.

There's nothing more dispiriting than when you line up what you think is the perfect photo, snap the shot and end up with an image where all the vibrant colors you saw in the real world have been washed out in the digital realm, thanks to backlighting, bad white balance or any one of a number of mishaps that can mar a photo you tried capturing casually. And the company wants to provide you with a camera capable of producing shots that match what you thought you were capturing in your mind's eye. The trick, as it turns out, is not to load the camera with features -- the newly unveiled Relonch 291 has nothing but a shutter button -- but rather to supplement the camera with an algorithm-based approach to processing images that's part of a $99-a-month membership you get along with your Relonch camera. It's an unconventional -- and pricey -- approach to photography, but the people behind Relonch are betting that it's one that will appeal to people who want to be able to capture vivid photos of everyday life without having to mess around with a camera's sittings. Before showing me the Relonch 291 camera, co-founder Yuriy Motin flipped through a coffee table book of presidential photos, noting how much more compelling the candid shots of assorted presidents in their day-to-day lives were compared to official shots and staged photo opportunities.