Elon Musk and the online right convinced themselves that Christopher Nolan's "woke" epic would go down in flames. For months, Elon Musk and the right-wing cranks he caters to on X have whipped themselves into a raging froth over the supposed desecration of an ancient Greek poem by one of the most successful movie directors alive. Now that their manufactured backlash has bombed, they're searching for ways to cope with the reality that they are increasingly divorced from popular opinion. Christopher Nolan's artistic crimes in bringing to the screen, according to Musk and others in a furor, were instances of what they called "historical inaccuracy" in a lavish fantasy teeming with monsters, witches, and undead spirits--mainly the casting of Lupita Nyong'o, who is Black, as Helen of Troy, and Elliot Page, who is trans, as Sinon. The grand total of approximately 10 minutes of screen time between these actors in a three-hour saga, combined with the general hysteria over "wokeness" in Hollywood, a rejection of Americanized dialog, and lingering misogyny regarding scholar Emily Wilson's 2017 translation of Homer's epic (the first by a woman), resulted in countless teeth-gnashing posts and calls for a boycott that never materialized.

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For all the hysteria over "woke" casting and ahistorical choices, Christopher Nolan's epic is on track to make $200 million globally during its opening weekend. On the day of its release, I woke up at dawn and drove 25 miles to the Philadelphia suburbs to see Christopher Nolan's, at one of the few remaining cinemas in the northeast equipped to screen large-format, super-high-resolution 70mm IMAX movies . I arrived to find clusters of idlers in "NOLAN" sweatshirts and Letterboxd dad hats shifting their weight, grousing outside the theater. The power had gone out. And the 8 am screening of would have to be cancelled.

This remarkably vivid home projector has deep inky blacks, without a five-figure price tag. Premium home theater projectors often come at premium prices, usually north of $10,000. The Xgimi Titan Noir Max is different. It's priced at $5,999, well under five figures, but it supports IMAX Enhanced mode and has outstanding picture quality, a 10,000:1 native contrast ratio, 7,000 lumens brightness, and a unique dual intelligent iris system that makes on-the-fly adjustments. Even though Xgimi has been around for more than a decade and is known for affordable home cinema models, the company ran a Kickstarter campaign for the high-end Titan Noir Max home theater projector and raised $19 million.

Summer is firmly here and the temperatures are feeling borderline apocalyptic in much of the northern hemisphere. Why not avoid the angry sun and stay inside where it's (hopefully) cooler and distract yourself with some of the best movies on streaming right now? Your choices are notably rich too. The spring hit sci-fi movie, about the global freeze threatening Earth as a result of the sun mysteriously going out, is now on Prime Video, after winning theater audiences over with the help of an adorable pile of pebbles. If, however, you want to embrace the flames, you'll find some like minds in on Disney+, where a violent new tribe of Na'vi just want to see the world (well, a semi-sentient living moon) burn.

The actor, who died at age 78 on Monday, embodied a passionate approach to research and positive masculinity in his role as paleontologist Alan Grant in the 1993 blockbuster . Sam Neill, the New Zealand actor who died at age 78 in Sydney, Australia, on Monday, had a long and varied résumé. He played everyone from an international spy () and a detective chief inspector () to a legendary wizard (). He even played the literal spawn of the devil (). But throughout his career, Neill was also known for scientist roles in films like and, with none more celebrated than Dr. Alan Grant, the rugged paleontologist and undisputed hero of .

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Amazon-owned MGM Studios' decision to drop the OpenAI movie is just part of AI and film industries becoming increasingly intertwined. On, we take a look at where this is all headed. This week on Uncanny Valley, our hosts discuss Amazon's controversial decision to drop Luca Guadagnino's film about OpenAI's Sam Altman--which reportedly did not paint him in a favorable light. Alongside Google DeepMind's $75 million brand new partnership with indie film studio A24, how much of a dent is AI actually having in the films we see? They also dive into the recent upheaval of workers--from electricians to software engineers--against data centers. Plus: Meta's program to track employees' data gets paused after a massive leak, and Anthropic is now getting along with the government thanks to CEO Dario Amodei no longer being in the room. Write to us at [email protected] . You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how: If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link . Before we start, two quick things. If you've been enjoying listening to the show, we would appreciate it if you took a second to rate it in your podcast app of choice. It really helps us reach more people. And second, if you have any questions related to tech, privacy, or politics that you would like me, Zoë, and Leah to take on, now is the time to submit them to [email protected] . It doesn't matter how big or how small, we want to hear from you and get you answers. We're discussing Amazon's MGM Studios' sudden decision to drop the OpenAI biographical movie just as they were wrapping up production.

Temperatures may be soaring, but there's an unseasonable chill on screens right now--at least when it comes to some of the movie offerings hitting streaming services this month. Director Yorgos Lanthimos delivers a twisted take on in on Netflix, while Shudder digs up painful family secrets and adds a side of demonic possession in If you fancy some summer scares that are a bit more Halloween-grade, Netflix also has a mesmerizing tour of a world of monsters and living nightmares, brought to life in stunning stop-motion. There are also plenty of retro delights surfacing on streamers this month that are more than worth a rewatch. Hulu reinstalls Spielberg's, which lands very differently in 2026; Criterion Channel is declassifying Sean Connery's first outings as 007, with, and coming to the specialist platform; and Prime Video brings all three films back to the future (sorry). Here are WIRED's picks of the best movies to watch right now.

Many domain experts do not have the time or expertise to write formal Bayesian models. This paper takes an informal problem description as input, and combines a large language model and a probabilistic programming language to define a joint distribution over formal models, latent variables, and data. A posterior over latent variables follows by conditioning on observed data and integrating over formal models. This presents a challenging inference problem. We suggest an inference recipe that amounts to generating many formal models from the large language model, performing approximate inference on each, and then doing a weighted average. This is justified and analyzed as a combination of self-normalized importance sampling, MCMC, and importance-weighted variational inference. Experimentally, this produces sensible predictions from only data and an informal problem description, without the need to specify a formal model.