From to: TIFF's Films on Power, Creation, and Survival Are a Warning These are WIRED's picks for some of the most urgent and unsettling films from the 50th annual Toronto International Film Festival. Some of the most urgent films at this year's Toronto International Film Festival aren't here to soothe. Together,,, and play like sizzle reels of caution, and at their best, they're award-worthy symbols of alarm. These films, the first two of which are documentaries, don't just entertain--they confront fractured humanity, closeness and distance under Israel's siege of Gaza, and a creation we've set loose, growing beyond our control. That's the one muscle of film--to interrogate rather than facilitate.

Although the Cannes Film Festival is the world's most prestigious movie showcase, its spotlight rarely falls on nonfiction film. Years go by without a single documentary competing for its biggest honor, the Palme d'Or, and there is no separate documentary prize. Juliette Binoche, the president of this year's jury, devoted part of her opening-night remarks to Fatma Hassona, the Palestinian photojournalist who was killed in an Israeli airstrike the day after it was announced that her documentary Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk would be premiering at Cannes. But the film itself was slotted into a low-profile sidebar devoted to independent productions. The festival did, however, roll out the red carpet for The Six Billion Dollar Man, Eugene Jarecki's portrait of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, which premiered out of competition on Wednesday evening.

Forty years ago this week, on 22 January 1984, a stunning advertising video was screened during the Super Bowl broadcast in the US. It was directed by Ridley Scott and evoked the dystopian atmosphere of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Long lines of grey, shaven zombies march in lockstep through a tunnel into a giant amphitheatre, where they sit in rows gawping up at a screen on which an authoritarian figure is intoning a message. "Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the information purification directives," he drones. "We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology."

On Sunday, 22 January 1984, the Los Angeles Raiders defeated the Washington (then) Redskins 38-9 in Super Bowl XVIII. With the exception of a few aging Raiders' fans, what we all remember better from that evening 40 years ago was one advertisement that set the tone for a techno-optimism that would dominate the 21st century. The ad showed an auditorium full of zombie-like figures watching a projection of an elderly leader who resembled the Emperor from 1980's The Empire Strikes Back. A young, athletic woman in red and white (the colors of the flag of Poland, which had been engaging in a massive labor uprising against the Soviet-controlled communist state) twirls a hammer and throws it through the screen framing the leader's face, just as armored police rush in to try to stop her. The ad explicitly invoked George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

A half-formed thought feels worse than an empty head--the tip-of-the-tongue sensation, the inkling of a there there without the foggiest notion of how to get, well, there. Especially dire is when the "what" that we wish to articulate feels half-formed itself, something observable yet emergent, for which the masses have yet to find language. But all we have is language, of course, and so we must muddle through, reaching for a word to serve as a placeholder for our idea until something better comes along. Some would say that finding new language is the work of scholars, but in the age of the Internet we may have lost track of who is leading whom. However provisional, the placeholders sometimes stick.

'Woke Inc.' author Vivek Ramaswamy called the relationship between Big Tech and the government threat to liberty because'each can do what the other cannot.' The political fable, "Animal Farm," written by visionary George Orwell, was published on this day in history, Aug. 17, 1945. The plot of "Animal Farm" is based on the story of the Russian Revolution and its betrayal by Joseph Stalin and is deemed an allegory, according to Britannica.com The novella tells the story of a group of barnyard animals that overthrow and chase off their exploitative human masters -- and set up an egalitarian society of their own, the same source chronicles. As "Animal Farm" opens, Mr. Jones, the owner of Manor Farm, is intoxicated and heading to bed.

'The Big Weekend Show' panelists discuss Elon Musk offering to pay users' legal bills if they are'unfairly treated' by employers for likes or posts on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. That's what George Orwell would say if he could visit our world, 75 years after he wrote his final novel, "1984." Orwell sought to demonstrate the dangers not just of totalitarianism but of a world where words lose their meaning. Many of the terms he coined for the novel have since entered common discourse -- "thought police," "Big Brother," "doublethink," and the "memory hole," to name a few. And of course the adjective "Orwellian" comes to us because of this book.

A novelist responds to Jeff Hewitt's "The Big Four v. ORWELL." For the first time in history, a machine is capable of crafting flash fiction stories, poems, parody Bible verses, and spoof My Little Pony episode summaries, to everyone's delight (or horror). Narrative art, once thought the sole province of humans, has been invaded by large language models. Hollywood writers have told me they're terrified that studios will fire them all and fill writers' rooms with robots in a few years. Before we've even had a chance to absorb the fact that the Turing test (used to determine if an artificial intelligence can pass as human) has been demolished, it seems we writers are being handed pink slips.

This story is part of Future Tense Fiction, a monthly series of short stories from Future Tense and Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination about how technology and science will change our lives. THE COURT: Please be seated. Let's try to keep the temperature down in here. We don't need a repeat of yesterday. It'll just be Mr. Blatz and myself today. Sorry, it's hard to tell with … are you with us? ORWELL: Omni-dimensional Recursively Written Entity for Language Learning present and ready, Your Honor. THE COURT: You can just say ORWELL. Are we ready to proceed? LIU: Your Honor, we'd like to call the Defendant to the stand. Mr. Blatz will handle examination. THE COURT: We have the wiring sorted out? Please refrain from using the monitor on the Defendant's table until you're off the stand.

Strive Asset Management founder Vivek Ramaswamy responds to the federal response to a derailed train in Ohio releasing toxic chemicals and discusses the growing list of potential GOP candidates as he weighs his own presidential bid. George Orwell envisioned the dangers of monolithic government armed with artificial intelligence in his famous novel of a future dystopia, "1984," published in 1949. The Party, led by Big Brother, uses omnipresent technology to monitor constantly and to propagandize to the docile citizens of Oceania. The terrifying tandem of technology and the human intoxicant of power is used in Oceania to rewrite history, control society, crush the human spirit and keep the Party entrenched forever. Protagonist Winston Smith works for the ironically named Ministry of Truth, a job he hates.