Latest news with #21stcentury
Washington Post
3 days ago
- Washington Post
‘Sex Beyond Yes' asks us to think about more than consent
The risks are often recited, the dangers enumerated. The warnings proliferate; the threats abound. One could be forgiven for regarding it as a trial or even a punishment; at best a mild embarrassment, at worst a scarring disaster. I refer, of course, to sex in the 21st century, an ordeal so perilous and disagreeable that record numbers of young people are choosing to forgo it altogether.
Telegraph
10-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Regular TV has become slow and tiresome. Watch YouTube instead
We are living at the end of the Information Age. With just a few taps on a keyboard we can instantly access data on anything that takes our interest. With AI voice assistants improving hourly, we don't even have to strain our weary fingers. We can ask out loud and get the answer in seconds. Bosh! So why are television documentaries – particularly science factual ones – so coy, and so agonisingly slow? They feel like hangovers from the analogue era, with their endless scene setting, their promises of things 'still to come' and 'coming up', the agonising device of 'we'll find out later exactly how they did it'. In the 21st-century, this is infuriating. Do they expect us to hang around for them when we can just Google? Of course, the arc of a story is part of the fun of TV in general. But this structure of flitting back and forth, promising and withholding, is deeply irritating. Recent Netflix documentaries such as Secrets of the Neanderthals and A Trip to Infinity or the BBC's Human take it much, much further. They are visually stunning, gilded with splendour – and so ponderous that they make experts of yore such as Terry Nutkins and Patrick Moore seem positively funky. Everything is in slow motion. You can have a movie-length production that contains about 10 minutes' worth of material. (Not to mention a lot of anthropomorphisation, but that's probably for another column.) What makes this glacial pace even odder is that there is an alternative. With YouTube, you can see documentaries that unfurl at a much slicker pace, but also dive much deeper. Two of my favourites are linguistics expert Geoff Lindsey and theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder – they give straightforward to-camera addresses, but use modern editing and graphics to get the information across in a simple, direct, compelling way. There are no longueurs or wallowing in production value, and no cutaways to them looking suitably gobstruck on cue à la Professor Brian Cox. If the aim of science-factual TV is to educate and entertain, I think I've learnt so much more from YouTube than I ever did from TV (or indeed from school). There is the magpie mind of Tom Scott, now semi-retired, or the inventively animated works of the channel Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell. This content – if we must use that ghastly word – is much cheaper and breezier than TV documentaries, but it gets to the heart of what you want to know (and frequently to the heart of what you didn't know you wanted to know). Meanwhile, back on regular TV, documentaries are in a state of grandeur, prettiness, superficiality and, above all, lethargy. The slowing down of mainstream documentaries seems to have infected TV more generally. Up until the release of the smartphone – which seems like the fracture moment of culture – TV seemed to be getting faster and faster. I remember watching the opening episode of Shameless back in 2004, Paul Abbott's provocative drama about the dysfunctional Gallagher family. I felt exhilarated, like I was on a rollercoaster. I recently went back to check how it stands up, and it's still fast. A hell of a lot of story was going on. It was assumed that the audience could now take in more information, more quickly, without stinting on quality. But this process stopped, and now, clearly, it is slipping backwards. But 'fast TV' does not necessarily mean that everything needs to be a jaw-dropping visual spectacle full of special effects (despite the blurring of TV and cinema as technology changed). Some of the most captivating TV drama is just people talking. The riveting third episode of Steven Moffat's recent ITV drama Douglas is Cancelled is literally just that, and it's riveting. All the best bits of Jed Mercurio's BBC police corruption drama Line of Duty were dialogue scenes. What stuck in the public's mind about the recent Netflix series Adolescence? It was the talking heads, and in particular the dialogue between teenage schoolboy Jamie (Owen Cooper) and his social worker (played by Erin Doherty). But still television-makers strive for the epic. My skin instinctively prickles when I hear about beautiful shots on TV, particularly considering its 21st-century colour palette of dull browns; beige, umber and dun. Almost everything is shot as if it contains the meaning of life – irritatingly atmospheric, and always bookmarked by endless sweeping establishing drone shots. In fact, this is as true with drama as with documentaries. We keep hearing how our terrestrial broadcasters struggle to compete with the gloss and grandeur of the streamers. And no, we can't ever match the bells and whistles of, say, Disney Plus, but mainstream TV could do worse than learn from its history – and from YouTube. Focus on simplicity and directness. And put its skates on.
Yahoo
13-07-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
The best XI of the 21st century according to Artificial Intelligence
The best XI of the 21st century according to Artificial Intelligence In current times, it seems that everything is under the control of Artificial Intelligence. That is why OneFootball didn't want to miss the opportunity to ask the now-famous AI for its ideal XI of the 21st century so far. Advertisement A total of 25 years in which we have seen two of the players considered the greatest in history, like Messi and Cristiano. Besides the Argentine and the Portuguese, which other footballers form, according to the AI, the best team of the last quarter-century? This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇪🇸 here. 📸 PIERRE VERDY
New York Times
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Making Lists
What did you rank as your top movies of the 21st century? Did you include 'La La Land,' which landed at No. 16 on our list of readers' picks, despite not appearing at all on the list by actors and directors? I struggled to determine how I would rank a movie as one of 'the best.' Was it one that left me astonished when I saw it? One that stayed with me long after watching? Or should I choose films that somehow felt important in the history of cinema? And what does 'important' mean anyway? In 2000, I loved 'High Fidelity' and 'Best in Show' — but of course I hadn't seen 'Moonlight' or 'The Royal Tenenbaums' or 'Tár' yet. What did it mean if my list diverged wildly from The Times's lists? From those of my friends? I found myself inanely worrying that my picks weren't serious enough, that they didn't adequately convey my tastes or aesthetic. What is the purpose of a list ranking 'the best' of something, anyway? Is it to establish a canon, a definitive record, etched in stone? Is it to inspire questions and conversations and arguments about what makes something good? The very fact that we are stopping to consider the movies we love and debating their relative merits, interrogating what our picks say about us and the culture, is glorious. If we bemoan how the majesty of moviegoing has been diminished and replaced by slack-jawed streaming of algorithm-designed 'content,' then a project that lifts us out of the endless scroll and helps us remember why we love movies in the first place is a welcome tonic. I love the way a big list forces me to question and define my tastes, to consider what I like and don't and why, to sharpen my critical takes against those of others. But the best part of engaging with the films of the 21st century is how the list prompted a cascade of memories of the past 25 years. I remember the exact theater in which I saw 'Y Tu Mamá También' in 2002, the friends I was with, where we ate afterward. That restaurant is definitely not there anymore. I remember seeing 'Melancholia' in 2011, talking about it over drinks in a weird bar in Midtown. What was my drink order in those days? The objective quality of a film is fun to debate, but it's a lovely sort of ecstasy to think back over one's quarter-century of movie-watching experiences, to use those movies to populate a memory palace. The film is just the catalyst for a million other reminiscences. Making a list of the movies you loved over the past 25 years is a way of organizing those years, a kind of post-factum diary. If you were to riff on each of your top 10 movies, what long-forgotten details from your history might be dislodged? You might remember how 'The Hurt Locker' floored you in 2009, but you might also remember the rainy day on which you saw it, your raincoat — what happened to that raincoat? — the car you drove to the theater, the job you had then or the person you were dating. We're forever cramming our brains with more information. Take these 10 movies and use them to sift through some of the accumulated sediment, to make order out of the chaos. If I can rouse myself from reverie, I'll commit myself this weekend to some of the 11 movies on the main list that I haven't seen and want to. (How is it possible that I've never seen 'Spirited Away'?) Or maybe not — 'F1' and 'Sorry, Baby' are in theaters, and it might be more satisfying to get a jump on 2050's list. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
29-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Is this the best movie of the 21st century? 500 Hollywood power players think so.
The people have spoken, and the best movie released since Jan. 1, 2000, has been determined. And by people, we mean the 500 or so actors, directors, writers and other Hollywood power players The New York Times surveyed for its 100 best movies of the 21st century ranking, which came out with its top 20 on June 27. The likes of Pamela Anderson, Nicholas Sparks, Stephen King, Simu Liu, Sofia Coppola, Danielle Brooks, Brian Cox, Ava DuVernay, Molly Ringwald, Rachel Zegler and Mel Brooks had their say — and yes, you can even see each of their top 10 picks, Letterboxd style. Oscar-winning director Coppola apparently took a shining to the 2004 Pixar classic (and fellow Oscar winner) "The Incredibles," while Julianne Moore admitted she's not above a raunchy comedy like "Superbad" and "The 40-Year-Old Virgin." And Sparks isn't only watching soppy romances; he's also enjoying dramas like "Inception" and "Gladiator." Undeserved Oscar winners – and the ones that should have won None other than Bong Joon Ho's "Parasite," which in 2020 became the first ever non-English film to earn the best picture Oscar, ranked as the No. 1 highest-voted film in the NYT's survey. And no wonder, because it earned an eye-boggling 99% "fresh" rating from nearly 500 film reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. In 2019, USA TODAY's film critic Brian Truitt was close to giving the social commentary thriller full marks (he ended up giving three and a half of four stars). The Korean film "is expertly paced with its reveals, never falls apart (even when it descends into bloody chaos) and also features outstanding acting performances," he noted in his review. In case anyone was wondering, director Bong did not include any of his own films (which includes the recent "Mickey 17" as well as 2017's "Okja" and 2013's "Snowpiercer) in his top nine ranking. New on streaming: From 'Minecraft' to 'KPop Demon Hunters,' what to watch right now The top 20 highest-voted films were as follows: 20. "The Wolf of Wall Street," 2013 19: "Zodiac," 2007 18: "Y tu mamá también," 2002 17: "Brokeback Mountain," 2005 16: "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," 2000 15: "City of God," 2003 14: "Inglourious Basterds," 2009 13: "Children of Men," 2006 12: "The Zone of Interest," 2023 11: "Mad Max: Fury Road," 2015 10: "The Social Network," 2010 9: "Spirited Away," 2002 8: "Get Out," 2017 7: "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," 2004 6: "No Country for Old Men," 2007 5: "Moonlight," 2016 4: "In the Mood for Love," 2001 3: "There Will Be Blood," 2007 2: "Mulholland Drive," 2001 1: "Parasite," 2019 This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'Parasite' voted best film of the century by Hollywood power players
