We are in the midst of an unprecedented, intergenerational phone-game renaissance. Wordle has become a pillar of the New York Times brand, newspapers everywhere are resurrecting their crossword backpage, and Words With Friends has essentially transformed into a dating app. These games are designed to be approachably mainstream--every English speaker alive can deduce a five-letter word with six chances--but unfortunately, I am a man of unconventional taste. If I'm going to entertain a daily dose of potpourri, I need something weirder, more challenging, and better suited for the precise category of useless knowledge that occupies my brain. That's why the sports-trivia game Immaculate Grid has become a fixture of my morning routine.

It took a while, and a rather bumpy false start with the Star Wars franchise (his Rogue One was plagued by rumours of studio interference and extensive reshoots), but with The Creator, the British director Gareth Edwards finally gets to make the sci-fi spectacular he was always destined to tackle. And with this ambitious, ideas-driven, expectation-subverting, man-versus-machines showdown, he has co-written and directed one of the finest original science-fiction films of recent years. It can be a little misleading, that word "original", when it comes to science fiction. At its most basic, it just refers to any picture that isn't part of an existing franchise or culled from a recognisable IP – be it a book, video game or television series. But very occasionally the word is fully earned, by a film so distinctive in its world-building, its aesthetic and its unexpected approach to well-worn themes that it becomes a definitive example of the genre.

By all appearances, Foe is a beautiful movie. Beautiful people -- Saoirse Ronan, Paul Mescal, and Aaron Pierre -- explore beautiful landscapes, talking about beautiful human emotions like love and loss. There is indeed some attempt at substance here, but it's buried under layers of nonsensical storytelling and clumsy dialogue. Not even its prestigious stars can sell it. Ronan and Mescal play Hen and Junior, a married couple living through the climate crisis. The year is 2065, and water and habitable land are scarce.

Adventure awaits in even the most mundane of tasks in Riddle of Fire. The enchanting feature debut from writer/director Weston Razooli celebrates childlike wonder by turning a series of familiar chores into a magical romp through moonlit forests and villains' lairs. With its nostalgic quality and plucky children protagonists, Riddle of Fire feels right at home alongside classic kids' adventure films like The Goonies. However, its dreaminess still sets it apart from its predecessors, making for a fiercely original fantasy tale. You can't have a fantasy adventure without a group of heroes, and in Riddle of Fire, our heroes take the form of scrappy kids: brothers Hazel (Charlie Stover) and Jodie (Skyler Peters) and their friend Alice (Phoebe Ferro). They call themselves the Three Immortal Reptiles, and they ride around their hometown of Ribbon, Wyoming, on mini motorcycles, wielding their paintball guns against anyone who stands in their way.

It's impossible to avoid Elvis Presley in Las Vegas: his image appears on street art and photographs, while impersonators can be found all over the strip. But starting on Friday, the King of Rock and Roll will get possibly his largest tribute yet: a video collage that renders him hundreds of times, projected hundreds of feet into the air, in incarnations young and old, gyrating and reclining, in bas relief and gold, all thanks to a technology created long after his death: generative AI. The video collage is the creation of the artist Marco Brambilla, the director of Demolition Man and Kanye West's "Power" music video, among many other art projects. Brambilla fed hours of footage from Presley's movies and performances into the AI model Stable Diffusion to create an easily searchable library to pull from, and then created surreal new images by prompting the AI model Midjourney with questions like: "What would Elvis look like if he were sculpted by the artist who made the Statue of Liberty?" The kaleidoscopic result, called "King Size," will make its debut as part of U2's concert performance at the opening night of the Sphere, a $2.3 billion entertainment venue that sits a block from the Las Vegas Strip and hopes to be the city's latest colossal entertainment mecca.

Equal parts Terminator, The Golden Child and The Matrix prequel, The Creator is yet another sci-fi epic about a war between humans and AI, one told by someone who just can't shut up about their time backpacking across Asia. Director Gareth Edwards clearly understands the power of scale and spectacle, something he demonstrated with his indie knockout Monsters, as well as his big-budget efforts, Godzilla and Rogue One. But The Creator, like those films, also suffers from a disjointed narrative, weak characters and a surprisingly shallow exploration of its (potentially interesting!) themes. It's a shame -- at times, the film also proves he can be a genuine visual poet. The Creator stars John David Washington, fresh off of Christopher Nolan's Tenet, as Joshua, an American soldier embedded among a group of AI rebels as a double-agent. When an operation goes wrong early on, he loses his rebel wife Maya (Gemma Chan) and the will to keep fighting the war between the anti-AI West and the AI-loving country of New Asia.

There are countless science-fiction movies about humanoid robots, but so far robot actors are yet to step up and star in their own films. Luckily for human actors, that future may still be far away as'the world's most advanced' humanoid robot shows off its acting'skills' in this uncanny clip. Ameca, a product of the engineers at Cornwall-based startup Engineered Arts, was asked to provide an impression from a film. 'All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain', Ameca said, quoting Blade Runner as it moved through a series of human-like expressions. In the background, a faint movie soundtrack could even be heard playing, adding some much-needed drama to the robot's delivery.

The "America's Got Talent" judge tells Fox News Digital why he doesn't like AI technology in songwriting. Country music legend Lee Greenwood knows the importance of creating from the heart. The "God Bless the USA" singer has more than half a century of experience in the entertainment world, with dozens of hit songs and albums under his belt. When it comes to artificial intelligence and figuring out if AI has a place in the ever-changing landscape of the music industry, Greenwood took a cue from the past. "I approach this just like when guitar players first got a wah-wah pedal and the chorus on an organ – it's like, it's kind of a new thing," he told Fox News Digital.

Undeterred by its many detractors, Meta is still trying to make the metaverse happen. This week, the company held its annual Connect developer conference at its headquarters in Menlo Park, California. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to the stage to announce a new mixed reality headset, the Meta Quest 3, as well as new smart glasses made by Ray-Ban that let the wearer livestream videos and interact with an AI-powered voice chatbot. Meta also showed off an array of celebrity-infused AI chatbots that can mimic big-name folks like Snoop Dogg and Kendall Jenner. You'd be forgiven for thinking all this feels a little bit like an episode of Black Mirror.

Stories about artificial intelligence have been with us for decades, even centuries. In some, the robots serve humanity as cheerful helpers or soulful lovers. In others, the machines eclipse their human makers and try to wipe us out. "The Creator," a sci-fi film that hits theaters Friday, turns that narrative around: The United States is intent on wiping out a society of androids in Asia, afraid the artificially intelligent beings threaten human survival. Do any of these stories reflect our real-life future?