This week, the panel is joined by Slate writer and senior editor Sam Adams to dissect Poor Things, director Yorgos Lanthimos horny, steampunk Frankenstein tale about Bella Baxter (played by Emma Stone), a pregnant woman who commits suicide then is brought back to life by a brilliant scientist (Willem Dafoe), with an eccentric caveat: She now has the brain of her unborn fetus. Then, the three remember Norman Lear, the late television pioneer and American icon who died at the age of 101 and who was responsible for ushering in a new era of character-driven, comedic, topical, and morally serious TV with hit sitcoms like All in the Family, The Jeffersons, Maude, and One Day at a Time. Finally, they are joined by Slate's books and culture columnist, Laura Miller, who shares her top ten books of the year, and along with Dana, discusses the joys and challenges of year-end listmaking. In the exclusive Slate Plus segment, the panel reunites with Sam Adams to spoil Poor Things, detailing what is arguably the film's weakest portion: the final ten minutes. The deadline to submit is Wednesday, December 13.

Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos has made a handful of very different movies over the past decade and a half, but his pet themes have a way of recurring in every one. To take a just a few examples: His breakthrough movie, 2009's Dogtooth, was a hermetic fable about a tyrannical couple who keep their three grown children trapped in a locked compound, feeding them lies about the world beyond their gates. The Lobster, from 2015, took place in an allegorical alternate reality where single adults who fail to find a romantic partner are legally compelled to be transformed into animals. The Favourite, Lanthimos' biggest international hit and the movie that won Olivia Colman a Best Actress Oscar in 2019, was a hyperstylized historical drama that played 18th-century court intrigue for the blackest of comedy. Poor Things, Lanthimos' adaptation of a 1992 novel by the Scottish writer Alasdair Gray (the screenplay is by Tony McNamara, who also co-wrote The Favourite), can be seen as the culminating expression of the filmmaker's longtime obsessions: the horror of being trapped in a closed system, the individual's often self-destructive quest to break free from said bondage, the warping effects of intergenerational trauma, and the capacity of the human body for transformation. Poor Things is a feminist recasting of the Frankenstein myth, a gorgeously designed setting for the jewel that is Emma Stone's lead performance, and not just my favorite Lanthimos movie I've seen yet but maybe the only one of his I've really liked.

A video software firm has come up with a way to prevent people from sharing their account details for Netflix and other streaming services with friends and family members. UK-based Synamedia unveiled the artificial intelligence software at the CES 2019 technology trade show in Las Vegas, claiming it could save the streaming industry billions of dollars over the next few years. Casual password sharing is practised by more than a quarter of millennials, according to figures from market research company Magid. Separate figures from research firm Parks Associates predicts that by $9.9 billion (£7.7bn) of pay-TV revenues and $1.2 billion of revenue from subscription-based streaming services will be lost to credential sharing each year. The AI system developed by Synamedia uses machine learning to analyse account activity and recognise unusual patterns, such as account details being used in two locations within similar time periods. Netflix's recommendation algorithm is pretty sophisticated these days, to the point where it can probably determine not only what you want to watch next, but what you'll eat for breakfast 13 years on Wednesday and the thread count of your sheets. And yet, it still has a tendency to spit out some peculiar recommendations.