The Internet of Anything: A Virtual Assistant for Your Gadgets, From Phones to Refrigerators

Getty Images

Imagine a “smart refrigerator” that lets you order milk or soda or coffee from your local grocery store whenever you’re running low. It’s an old idea, but Mounir Shita looks at it in a new way.

Shita believes such a contraption could generate about $14,000 in revenue over its lifespan. Most of this would go to the grocer, and in all likelihood, some sort of middle-man would take a cut (think Google or Amazon). But Shita wants to replace those middlemen and share the revenues with the company that made the fridge and the ISP that provides the internet connection.

With his new company, Kimera Systems, he wants to help create all sorts of internet-connected devices without help from the Googles and the Amazons, spreading the wealth to electronics makers and broadband providers instead. For consumers, who’s actually taking a cut of all these purchases might not be important. But Shita sees it as a way to fund Kimera’s real purpose: the creation of artificially intelligent virtual assistants that can help you with just about any aspect of your life, from handling grocery shopping to scheduling meetings.

What It Is

Kimera is fashioning a technical solution it calls Nigel, and it includes three things. There’s a Siri-like virtual assistant that sits on your smartphone, letting you control your smart refrigerator. There’s a “personal cloud” service that stores data on behalf of your frig. And there’s server software that lets the frig manufacturer and ISP keep track of who what groceries you ordered, collect payments, and disperse them among all the companies involved.

The hope is that manufacturers and ISPs will use this system to build not just smart refrigerators but, well, whatever other internet-connected devices they want to build. And because they can control where the money goes, they have ample incentive to build them.

You might argue that this could give ISPs a way of taxing all transactions that happen on their networks. But middle men—ranging from credit card payment processors to marketplace sites like eBay and Amazon—are already taking a cut of so much that happens online.

For Kimera, the trick lies in building a virtual assistant that’s better than what you can get from the Googles and the Amazons of the world. And that’s where Shita’s true passion lies.

The Original Nigel

Shita has always been fascinated by the future. As a kid in Norway, he spent his time, like so many other geeks, taking things apart and trying to build new inventions. “My room looked like something out of Star Trek,” he says. “If the time machine had been invented, I would already have gone to live in the future.”

Kimera Systems CEO and co-founder Mounir Shita. Courtesy Kimera Systems

In 2012, after earning degrees in electrical engineering and computer science and moving to the US to start a few startups, he met Nigel Deighton—the virtual assistant’s namesake—and the two started spitballing ideas for what the future should actually be like, and how to get there. They decided they wanted to be able to talk to computers in a much more conversational, human-like manner than tools like Siri enable today. And they set out to make it happen.

Instead of reviewing the literature, which they worried would limit their creativity, they decided to try coming up with a way to do artificial intelligence on their own first own. Shita says he fully expected to just end up “reinventing the wheel,” but soon they had a system that Shita says worked surprisingly well.

That’s when Shita and Deighton realized they had enough to start a real company. Unfortunately, Deighton passed away in 2013. The virtual assistant Nigel was named in his honor.

The Why and the What

The idea is to understand the “why” and not just “what” of a voice command. One of Shita’s favorite examples is the statement: “I’m out of Coke.” If you’re at home, you might mean that you want to add Coke to your shopping list. If you’re at a restaurant, you might want Nigel to text your waiter. If you’re a drug deal, well, use your imagination.

Shita says Nigel is smart enough to take context like location into account while determining what you want it to do. And it goes further still. If you’re at a restaurant and Nigel sees that you have a business meeting on your calendar, it will mute your phone. If you’re running late for the meeting—and everyone else a the meeting also happens to use Nigel—you can ask “is everyone there?” and it will give you an answer.

Kimera Systems

It’s hard to tell just how advanced Nigel really is. Unlike the academics at companies like Facebook and Google who pioneered the “deep learning” subfield of AI, Kimera hasn’t published the algorithm for peer review. Shita says that’s because of where the company is in the patent filing process—and because outside experts who have seen the system are under strict non-disclosure agreements from their respective companies.

‘I’m a Believer’

But Steve Taylor, an AI expert and former VP of business development for robotics company RoboKind who consulted Kimera on its intellectual property, says the company has developed some pretty sophisticated technology. “I’m a believer. It should work and it should learn.”

Shita was willing to say that like deep learning systems, Kimera is based on creating networks of artificial neurons that share information with each other. He says Kimera’s approach isn’t in competition with deep learning, but is rather something that could actually prepare a data set to be passed along to a deep learning system for further processing.

Of course, we can’t truly judge Nigel’s talents until it’s out in the wild. It must compete head-to-head with other virtual assistants from companies like Microsoft, Google, and a whole host of startups, such as Viv, a company founded by Siri’s creators that aspires to create a smarter artificial intelligence that, like Nigel, can weave together data from many sources to intuit the context and purpose of a request. But Kimera has something that no everyone else has: a business model that could appeal to some of the world’s largest companies.

Why You Need a Jet to Prep for a 1,000-MPH Car Race

Bloodhound SSC

It’s really, really hard to drive a rocket-powered “car” at extremely high speeds. Just ask Top Gear’s Richard Hammond. It takes loads of preparation, funding, and special equipment, plus a lot of communication to make sure everything’s going as planned.

That’s why the folks behind the Bloodhound SSC—a rocket-powered car that’s aiming to break both the world’s land speed record and the sound barrier—trekked into the South African desert last autumn with a Jaguar F-Type and an L39 jet.

The 135,000-brake horsepower Bloodhound SSC (as in supersonic car) is the result of a decade-long engineering project, and should make its first attempt to reach 1,000 mph in September or next year. Part of that 10-year span went into making custom communications equipment, to transmit data from the car’s 300 sensors and three 720p video streams, in real-time.

The team has built a custom LTE network to talk to the car when it’s traveling at speed. Using directional antennas, pointed towards the car, they can stream four megabytes of data per second. To test their design, they installed the antennas built for the Bloodhound SSC in the F-Type. Then the team measured signal strength at speed from the plane.

It’s not clear how much of the show was actually necessary to test the equipment. But, as an awesome bonus, they did get a magnificent photo op. Jaguar is, after all, a Bloodhound sponsor.

The team isn’t providing a whole lot of info on the technical side, but it did release this video, and we’re not the kind to complain about watching Jaguar’s best car in decades and a plane rocketing through the desert.

Here Are the Films We’ve Caught in the First Three Days of Sundance

Ramin Bahrani

We may not be able to see every movie at the Sundance Film Festival, but we’re doing our level best to track down what’s new and what’s next. Here’s how it’s gone so far:

Day 1

99 Homes (above)

Right before its opening curtain on day one of the festival, director Ramin Bahrani described the film as a mob thriller. And he wasn’t wrong. This story about a man evicted from his home (Andrew Garfield) and the morally dubious relationship he forms with the man who seized it from him (Michael Shannon) carried a weight of danger the entire time. Strong lead performances by Shannon and Garfield propelled the film, while expert utility player Laura Dern brought a soft strength as its quiet moral center.

Strand Releasing

Girlhood

No, Richard Linklater had nothing to do with this movie. Director Céline Sciamma’s portrait of growing up poor, black and female in a housing project outside Paris was stark and honest (and very much not about a boy who just hangs out for 3 hours). It’s stripped down exploration of sexual, racial and socio-economic identity was set off by bursts of electronic dream-pop that boosted both the urgency and emotional impact.

Aaron Epstein

Stockholm, Pennsylvania

This is the first feature film from writer/director Nikole Beckwith, tackling light topics like the nature and capabilities of human connection. We talked with co-star Jason Isaacs and while he readily agrees this movie isn’t for everyone, if you can endure the claustrophobic character study you’ll be rewarded with outstanding performances. Beckwith eschews the dichotomy of heroes and villains, preferring to let her actors vacillate between their angels and demons and forcing the audience to decide what love really looks like. Saoirse Ronan’s outwardly minimal performance is an emotional wrecking ball, and Cynthia Nixon goes all in as a mother coping with the return of her daughter after she was abducted 17 years ago.

Day 2

Fresh Dressed

This directorial debut of ego trip founding editor Sacha Jenkins is a documentary in partnership with CNN Films that tells the story of contemporary black identity as it relates to fashion and hip-hop culture. Jenkins interviewed more than 70 people for the film, getting input from fashion industry icons like Riccardo Tisci, street fashion pioneers like Harlem’s Dapper Dan, and hip-hop legends like Nas. Going from the days of Melle Mel up through to the current reign of King Kanye, Jenkin provides a vibrant, passionate explainer on the antecedents of black fashion and culture.

David Moir

Dope

Fitting that we’d catch this on the heels of Fresh Dressed, as our heroes in Dope are three current-day high school seniors obsessed with ’90s hip-hop. Director Rick Famuyiwa (The Wood, Brown Sugar) captures the optimism of the decade he’s paying homage to while celebrating the nouveau chic of nerd-dom and why it’s hip to be square—even in a tough LA neighborhood like The Bottoms. (It’s also the feature acting debut of rapper A$AP Rocky, whose old-school cred begins with the fact that his parents literally named him after Rakim.) The soundtrack, with a handful of original tracks produced by Pharrell Williams, is beautiful mashup of nostalgia and dance party, and the characters are genuine and deeply lovable.

RADiUS

It Follows

This one had a lot of buzz coming into Sundance (including landing on our most anticipated list) and it did not disappoint. At a midnight screening on Saturday, director David Robert Mitchell (The Myth of the American Sleepover) was on hand to introduce the film, and put simply, it scared the goddamn life out of us. The score, the cinematography, the concept—everything worked. We’ll leave the hype superlatives to others. Just find this when it comes to theaters if you want to have a great time at the movies.

Day 3

Jason Robinette

Experimenter

From start to finish, Michael Almereyda spent more than five years directing, writing and producing this movie about social psychologist Stanley Miligram (Peter Sarsgaard)—and it shows. While not the most riveting movie we’ve seen so far, Almereyda presents a uniquely styled portrait (at times it feels like a documentary with actors playing the subjects) of a controversial researcher, and he does so with meticulous care and respect for Miligram the person as opposed to Miligram the monstrous myth. The hitch here is that monstrous myths make for more outright compelling cinema, but if you want a low-key, well-acted walk through one man’s life that doubles as a rumination on human nature, Experimenter should suit you just fine.

Magnolia Pictures

White God

This is one from the festival’s Spotlight section, meaning it’s already had its global premiere elsewhere, but the committee was so impressed they wanted to give it special attention at Sundance. Everyone knows that animals are the best part of every movie; even if it only shows up for like 30 seconds, no one can resist a puppy. But what happens when the beloved house dog is kicked to the street for being a low-brow mixed breed and has to survive horrid abuses before rising as a revolutionary? White God is what happens. Look, it’s a metaphor, okay? If you have a beating heart, it will be really hard to watch Hagen the dog’s painful journey without sobbing openly (we did), but this is a special, strange social allegory, and very deserving of its place in the Spotlight.

Still to Come

The Tribe

Knock Knock

Turbo Kid

Reversal

The Bronze

Uber Pressured Into Capping Surge Pricing During the East Coast Snowstorm

Cars drive on a Manhattan Street in heavy snow on January 26, 2015 in New York City. Spencer Platt/Getty Images

A “potentially historic” snowstorm just hit the Northeast coast, and it’s expected to affect more than 40 million people, dumping up to three feet of snow in places. But it’s also a chance for Uber to make nice with the critics.

On Monday, with an email sent to the press, the San Francisco ride-hailing startup said it would limit prices during the storm, following a policy developed with New York Attorney General Schneiderman last year. In the email, the company said prices would not exceed 2.8-times the normal fare, and that all proceeds would be donated to the American Red Cross to support relief efforts.

In a separate release, Schneiderman issued a warning shot against possible price gouging during the storm.

Typically, Uber imposes what’s called surge pricing during times of peak demand or short supply. It’s an automated process that the company paints as a way to get more drivers on the road during critical times. But many have criticized the practice, saying it exploits crises for profit.

Most recently, users protested Uber’s surge pricing during Sydney’s hostage crisis this past December, in which passengers saw a minimum of $100 for a ride, four times the normal fare. And similar complaints popped up another snowstorm last year and during Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

Uber is particularly primed to mollify the critics this time around, because it spent the past several months dealing with all sorts of other bad press, lawsuits, and clashes with regulators across the U.S. as well as overseas. The cap is certainly nice to see. But people are still finding things to complain about.

This Turbo-Diesel Snow Blower Will Make You the Town Hero

One awesome thing about a massive Nor’easter: You get to bust out the riding snow blower.

It’s one of those power tools you’ll use a handful of times a year if you’re lucky. But on those rare days when Mother Nature dumps a foot or three of the fluffy stuff, you wake up to something like Christmas morning. Pulverizing those soft white mounds of snow? Talk about good old American fun.

This kid takes us for a ride on his Ventrac diesel tractor with a snow blower attachment. It’s a compact all-wheel-drive tractor—pretty badass in its own right—but the snowblower attachment instantly turns this thing into the Batmobile of snow. Seriously, this kid is the hero of his neighborhood. He clears half the driveways on his block. People come out to chit-chat. He’s all smiles. He’s probably swimming in hot cocoa offers.

If you’ve spent over $10,000 on a pro Ventrac rig like this and your part of the world doesn’t get enough snow to meet your fancy, you can still put it to work smashing (and forcefully ejecting) pumpkins.

BMW’s Hilarious Super Bowl Ad Recalls Life at the Dawn of the Internet

On that fateful day in 1994, Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric were seated side by side on the set of The Today Show, attempting to sort out the translation of the “@” symbol. It was between takes, and Gumbel and Couric wondered aloud what in the world that symbol was supposed to mean. At? Around? About? A puzzle for the ages, indeed.

Then, as if as a gift to the Ghost of YouTube Future, Gumbel uttered the words that would—somewhat ironically—become internet gold: “What is internet anyway? What, do you write to it like mail?”

It was a simpler time.

Now, BMW is using this little gem of recent history in a hilarious new Superbowl commercial promoting its i3 electric vehicle. Titled “Newfangled idea,” the ingenious ad juxtaposes the 21-year-old clip of Gumbel and Couric with a scene of the twosome driving along in the present day, trying to figure out how the electric vehicle works.

It’s a nice encapsulation of the i3’s tagline: “Big ideas take a little getting used to.” But it also shows how far we’ve come in just 20 short years.

The Internet of Anything: A Virtual Assistant for Your Gadgets, From Phones to Refrigerators

Getty Images

Imagine a “smart refrigerator” that lets you order milk or soda or coffee from your local grocery store whenever you’re running low. It’s an old idea, but Mounir Shita looks at it in a new way.

Shita believes such a contraption could generate about $14,000 in revenue over its lifespan. Most of this would go to the grocer, and in all likelihood, some sort of middle-man would take a cut (think Google or Amazon). But Shita wants to replace those middlemen and share the revenues with the company that made the fridge and the ISP that provides the internet connection.

With his new company, Kimera Systems, he wants to help create all sorts of internet-connected devices without help from the Googles and the Amazons, spreading the wealth to electronics makers and broadband providers instead. For consumers, who’s actually taking a cut of all these purchases might not be important. But Shita sees it as a way to fund Kimera’s real purpose: the creation of artificially intelligent virtual assistants that can help you with just about any aspect of your life, from handling grocery shopping to scheduling meetings.

What It Is

Kimera is fashioning a technical solution it calls Nigel, and it includes three things. There’s a Siri-like virtual assistant that sits on your smartphone, letting you control your smart refrigerator. There’s a “personal cloud” service that stores data on behalf of your frig. And there’s server software that lets the frig manufacturer and ISP keep track of who what groceries you ordered, collect payments, and disperse them among all the companies involved.

The hope is that manufacturers and ISPs will use this system to build not just smart refrigerators but, well, whatever other internet-connected devices they want to build. And because they can control where the money goes, they have ample incentive to build them.

You might argue that this could give ISPs a way of taxing all transactions that happen on their networks. But middle men—ranging from credit card payment processors to marketplace sites like eBay and Amazon—are already taking a cut of so much that happens online.

For Kimera, the trick lies in building a virtual assistant that’s better than what you can get from the Googles and the Amazons of the world. And that’s where Shita’s true passion lies.

The Original Nigel

Shita has always been fascinated by the future. As a kid in Norway, he spent his time, like so many other geeks, taking things apart and trying to build new inventions. “My room looked like something out of Star Trek,” he says. “If the time machine had been invented, I would already have gone to live in the future.”

Kimera Systems CEO and co-founder Mounir Shita. Courtesy Kimera Systems

In 2012, after earning degrees in electrical engineering and computer science and moving to the US to start a few startups, he met Nigel Deighton—the virtual assistant’s namesake—and the two started spitballing ideas for what the future should actually be like, and how to get there. They decided they wanted to be able to talk to computers in a much more conversational, human-like manner than tools like Siri enable today. And they set out to make it happen.

Instead of reviewing the literature, which they worried would limit their creativity, they decided to try coming up with a way to do artificial intelligence on their own first own. Shita says he fully expected to just end up “reinventing the wheel,” but soon they had a system that Shita says worked surprisingly well.

That’s when Shita and Deighton realized they had enough to start a real company. Unfortunately, Deighton passed away in 2013. The virtual assistant Nigel was named in his honor.

The Why and the What

The idea is to understand the “why” and not just “what” of a voice command. One of Shita’s favorite examples is the statement: “I’m out of Coke.” If you’re at home, you might mean that you want to add Coke to your shopping list. If you’re at a restaurant, you might want Nigel to text your waiter. If you’re a drug deal, well, use your imagination.

Shita says Nigel is smart enough to take context like location into account while determining what you want it to do. And it goes further still. If you’re at a restaurant and Nigel sees that you have a business meeting on your calendar, it will mute your phone. If you’re running late for the meeting—and everyone else a the meeting also happens to use Nigel—you can ask “is everyone there?” and it will give you an answer.

Kimera Systems

It’s hard to tell just how advanced Nigel really is. Unlike the academics at companies like Facebook and Google who pioneered the “deep learning” subfield of AI, Kimera hasn’t published the algorithm for peer review. Shita says that’s because of where the company is in the patent filing process—and because outside experts who have seen the system are under strict non-disclosure agreements from their respective companies.

‘I’m a Believer’

But Steve Taylor, an AI expert and former VP of business development for robotics company RoboKind who consulted Kimera on its intellectual property, says the company has developed some pretty sophisticated technology. “I’m a believer. It should work and it should learn.”

Shita was willing to say that like deep learning systems, Kimera is based on creating networks of artificial neurons that share information with each other. He says Kimera’s approach isn’t in competition with deep learning, but is rather something that could actually prepare a data set to be passed along to a deep learning system for further processing.

Of course, we can’t truly judge Nigel’s talents until it’s out in the wild. It must compete head-to-head with other virtual assistants from companies like Microsoft, Google, and a whole host of startups, such as Viv, a company founded by Siri’s creators that aspires to create a smarter artificial intelligence that, like Nigel, can weave together data from many sources to intuit the context and purpose of a request. But Kimera has something that no everyone else has: a business model that could appeal to some of the world’s largest companies.

How Do You Prep for a 1,000-MPH Car Race? With a Jet

Bloodhound SSC

It’s really, really hard to drive a rocket-powered “car” at extremely high speeds. Just ask Top Gear’s Richard Hammond. It takes loads of preparation, funding, and special equipment, plus a lot of communication to make sure everything’s going as planned.

That’s why the folks behind the Bloodhound SSC—a rocket-powered car that’s aiming to break both the world’s land speed record and the sound barrier—trekked into the South African desert last autumn with a Jaguar F-Type and an L39 jet.

The 135,000-brake horsepower Bloodhound SSC (as in supersonic car) is the result of a decade-long engineering project, and should make its first attempt to reach 1,000 mph in September or next year. Part of that 10-year span went into making custom communications equipment, to transmit data from the car’s 300 sensors and three 720p video streams, in real-time.

The team has built a custom LTE network to talk to the car when it’s traveling at speed. Using directional antennas, pointed towards the car, they can stream four megabytes of data per second. To test their design, they installed the antennas built for the Bloodhound SSC in the F-Type. Then the team measured signal strength at speed from the plane.

It’s not clear how much of the show was actually necessary to test the equipment. But, as an awesome bonus, they did get a magnificent photo op. Jaguar is, after all, a Bloodhound sponsor.

The team isn’t providing a whole lot of info on the technical side, but it did release this video, and we’re not the kind to complain about watching Jaguar’s best car in decades and a plane rocketing through the desert.

Here Are the Films We’ve Caught in the First Three Days of Sundance

Ramin Bahrani

We may not be able to see every movie at the Sundance Film Festival, but we’re doing our level best to track down what’s new and what’s next. Here’s how it’s gone so far:

Day 1

99 Homes (above)

Right before its opening curtain on day one of the festival, director Ramin Bahrani described the film as a mob thriller. And he wasn’t wrong. This story about a man evicted from his home (Andrew Garfield) and the morally dubious relationship he forms with the man who seized it from him (Michael Shannon) carried a weight of danger the entire time. Strong lead performances by Shannon and Garfield propelled the film, while expert utility player Laura Dern brought a soft strength as its quiet moral center.

Strand Releasing

Girlhood

No, Richard Linklater had nothing to do with this movie. Director Céline Sciamma’s portrait of growing up poor, black and female in a housing project outside Paris was stark and honest (and very much not about a boy who just hangs out for 3 hours). It’s stripped down exploration of sexual, racial and socio-economic identity was set off by bursts of electronic dream-pop that boosted both the urgency and emotional impact.

Aaron Epstein

Stockholm, Pennsylvania

This is the first feature film from writer/director Nikole Beckwith, tackling light topics like the nature and capabilities of human connection. We talked with co-star Jason Isaacs and while he readily agrees this movie isn’t for everyone, if you can endure the claustrophobic character study you’ll be rewarded with outstanding performances. Beckwith eschews the dichotomy of heroes and villains, preferring to let her actors vacillate between their angels and demons and forcing the audience to decide what love really looks like. Saoirse Ronan’s outwardly minimal performance is an emotional wrecking ball, and Cynthia Nixon goes all in as a mother coping with the return of her daughter after she was abducted 17 years ago.

Day 2

Fresh Dressed

This directorial debut of ego trip founding editor Sacha Jenkins is a documentary in partnership with CNN Films that tells the story of contemporary black identity as it relates to fashion and hip-hop culture. Jenkins interviewed more than 70 people for the film, getting input from fashion industry icons like Riccardo Tisci, street fashion pioneers like Harlem’s Dapper Dan, and hip-hop legends like Nas. Going from the days of Melle Mel up through to the current reign of King Kanye, Jenkin provides a vibrant, passionate explainer on the antecedents of black fashion and culture.

David Moir

Dope

Fitting that we’d catch this on the heels of Fresh Dressed, as our heroes in Dope are three current-day high school seniors obsessed with ’90s hip-hop. Director Rick Famuyiwa (The Wood, Brown Sugar) captures the optimism of the decade he’s paying homage to while celebrating the nouveau chic of nerd-dom and why it’s hip to be square—even in a tough LA neighborhood like The Bottoms. (It’s also the feature acting debut of rapper A$AP Rocky, whose old-school cred begins with the fact that his parents literally named him after Rakim.) The soundtrack, with a handful of original tracks produced by Pharrell Williams, is beautiful mashup of nostalgia and dance party, and the characters are genuine and deeply lovable.

RADiUS

It Follows

This one had a lot of buzz coming into Sundance (including landing on our most anticipated list) and it did not disappoint. At a midnight screening on Saturday, director David Robert Mitchell (The Myth of the American Sleepover) was on hand to introduce the film, and put simply, it scared the goddamn life out of us. The score, the cinematography, the concept—everything worked. We’ll leave the hype superlatives to others. Just find this when it comes to theaters if you want to have a great time at the movies.

Day 3

Jason Robinette

Experimenter

From start to finish, Michael Almereyda spent more than five years directing, writing and producing this movie about social psychologist Stanley Miligram (Peter Sarsgaard)—and it shows. While not the most riveting movie we’ve seen so far, Almereyda presents a uniquely styled portrait (at times it feels like a documentary with actors playing the subjects) of a controversial researcher, and he does so with meticulous care and respect for Miligram the person as opposed to Miligram the monstrous myth. The hitch here is that monstrous myths make for more outright compelling cinema, but if you want a low-key, well-acted walk through one man’s life that doubles as a rumination on human nature, Experimenter should suit you just fine.

Magnolia Pictures

White God

This is one from the festival’s Spotlight section, meaning it’s already had its global premiere elsewhere, but the committee was so impressed they wanted to give it special attention at Sundance. Everyone knows that animals are the best part of every movie; even if it only shows up for like 30 seconds, no one can resist a puppy. But what happens when the beloved house dog is kicked to the street for being a low-brow mixed breed and has to survive horrid abuses before rising as a revolutionary? White God is what happens. Look, it’s a metaphor, okay? If you have a beating heart, it will be really hard to watch Hagen the dog’s painful journey without sobbing openly (we did), but this is a special, strange social allegory, and very deserving of its place in the Spotlight.

Still to Come

The Tribe

Knock Knock

Turbo Kid

Reversal

The Bronze