‘Atlas’: J.Lo’s New Movie Spits in the Faces of AI’s Critics

There are roughly 47,000—oh, wait, a new Netflix Original just dropped; make that 47,001—TV shows and movies coming out each week. At Obsessed, we consider it our social duty to help you see the best and skip the rest.

We’ve already got a variety of in-depth, exclusive coverage on all of your streaming favorites and new releases, but sometimes what you’re looking for is a simple Do or Don’t. That’s why we created See/Skip, to tell you exactly what our writers think you should See and what you can Skip from the past week’s crowded entertainment landscape.

Skip: Atlas

Atlas isn’t just a train wreck, it may very well be the worst movie Jennifer Lopez has ever made. It’s a limp sci-fi movie with questionable support of AI, leaving a bad taste in your mouth, considering that the nefarious push for the tech could ruin the movie industry as we know it.

Here’s Coleman Spilde’s take:

“As a creative, I am constantly worrying myself with questions about artificial intelligence. Will my job be obsolete one day? Can AI as we know it ever be regulated in a way that serves both forward-thinking developers and artists? Will AI develop a voice singular and humorous enough to replace a gorgeous young entertainment critic who has stunning features that stop cars on the street and send rubbernecking cyclists smashing into trees? The answers are out there, and no one is more qualified than Jennifer Lopez to pursue them.

Excuse me, did I say Jennifer Lopez? I meant counterterrorism analyst Atlas Shepherd, the titular character in Lopez’s latest film, Atlas, which premieres on Netflix May 24. In the film—directed by the auteur behind the 2010 surrealist masterwork Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore, Brad Peyton—Lopez plays a government employee with a deep distrust of artificial intelligence. Atlas toils away evaluating data to assess whether or not an invasion of AI bots, led by their commander Harlan (Simu Liu), is likely. After an uprising 28 years earlier led to a devastating war between humans and bots, Harlan fled Earth to forge an AI-led spacy colony, but not before promising to return to finish what he started.”

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See: Queen of the Deuce

Queen of the Deuce is a fascinating and bold documentary worthy of the nerve of its subject, Chelly Wilson: the empress of ’70s pornography. It's a tale of family and fornication, one that is told with a heaping helping of reverence for its prolific subject.

Here’s Nick Schager’s take:

“Survival often requires boldness, and no one proved that more than Chelly Wilson, a Sephardic Jewish Greek grandmother who became the empress of Times Square pornography during the 1970s. Queen of the Deuce is an affectionate portrait of Chelly as a one-of-a-kind trailblazer who lived life to the fullest, and always on her own iconoclastic terms, all while also providing a vivid snapshot of New York City during its daring and dangerous pre-sanitized era.

Directed by Valerie Kontakos with warmth and humor, it’s a documentary that celebrates its subject and the metropolis she loved—and which loved her back in kind—with the very sort of warts-and-all acceptance that Chelly herself showed to everyone in her orbit.”

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See: The Big Cigar

The Big Cigar, the Don Cheadle-directed series about a planned ’70s biopic made about Black Panther founder Huey P. Newton, avoids all the wrong tropes when telling Newton’s sprawling story, aiming for a meta-textual narrative that’s as tense as it is lively.

Here’s Leila Latif’s take:

“Making a piece of work about Black liberation starring an abundance of white actors is an uneasy prospect. Films about the triumphs of pianist Don Shirley (Green Book), the African American mathematicians at NASA (Hidden Figures), the Mende tribesmen (Amistad), and football star Michael Oher (The Blind Side) have inserted white saviors into Black struggles in ways that have aged extraordinarily poorly.

Commencing The Big Cigar is, for that reason, slightly nerve-wracking, as it’s adapted from the article by journalist Joshuah Bearman, whose most high-profile project, the Wired story that helped to inspired the Oscar-winning Argo, featured orientalist depictions of the Iranian population in its screen adaptation. But Bearman’s latest project affords empathy and humanity to its central crew of freedom fighters and doesn’t diminish the legacy of Black Panther founder Huey P. Newton (André Holland) in order to heap credit on white associate Bert Schneider (Alessandro Nivola).”

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Skip: Tires

Tires finds comedian Shane Gillis recycling his anti-woke bit once again, this time in a disappointing Netflix workplace sitcom. The show is an insipid slog to get through that invokes point-and-laugh comedy that will only be funny to its juvenile star immature audiences.

Here’s Jesse Hassenger’s take:

“From a distance, Tires looks like a sitcom, maybe even enough to inspire some knee-jerk nostalgia for a time when comedies had a familiar shape, undistorted by atypical streaming models or low-laugh dramedies.

The bona fides here are instantly recognizable. Episodes run around 22 minutes. The show stars Shane Gillis, popular stand-up comedian who parlayed being ‘canceled’ and fired from Saturday Night Light into folk-hero mega-success. Here, he plays a character who shares his first name, like any number of ’90s-era vehicles. It’s set at a workplace, in this case an auto center, allowing the show to throw a handful of eccentric, underdog personalities together and bumble through some easy-to-digest situations. At the same time, Tires avoids the corny, predictable rhythms of a pure throwback: It’s a single-camera show with a little bit of handheld quasi-verisimilitude. It resembles a little of The Office, a little of Taxi, and a more blue-collar Home Improvement.”

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