Some films age quietly. Others sit in the dark, waiting for the format to catch up. The Man Who Wasn’t There lands in the second category. Shot in black and white by the Coen Brothers, this 2001 noir has always been more about mood and control than plot momentum, and the jump to 4K from the Criterion Collection finally gives its visual look the kind of presentation it needed.

The timing isn’t accidental. Billy Bob Thornton is back in the conversation thanks to his performance in Landman, and it’s a reminder that his turn as Ed Crane remains one of the most restrained and quietly devastating performances of his career. He barely raises his voice, barely moves the needle emotionally on the surface, and still manages to pull the entire film into his orbit. It’s control bordering on suffocation.

Across from him, Frances McDormand does what she always does; make it look easier than it is. She’s sharp, cynical, and completely believable, even if her work here doesn’t quite reach the level of Fargo. And then there’s James Gandolfini, gone far too soon, reminding everyone that while The Sopranos defined him, it never boxed him in as an actor.

This isn’t a noir that grabs you by the collar. It just stands there, lights a cigarette, and lets the smoke do the talking. Compared to sharper, more aggressive classics like The Asphalt Jungle, Double Indemnity, or even Out of the Past, it doesn’t have the same edge or narrative snap. There’s no real jolt, no clever turn that resets the stakes and forces you to lean forward. Instead, it moves at its own pace, more interested in mood and control than tension.

That’s not a flaw, but it does change how it lands, especially if you’re expecting the kind of bite those earlier films delivered. The Coen Brothers aren’t Billy Wilder. Not even a distant relative with a suspicious accent and a better third act.

Ed Crane is a quiet barber who suspects his wife is having an affair. Rather than confront it, he tries to use the situation to fund a small business opportunity through blackmail. It seems simple enough, but the plan quickly leads to complications he doesn’t fully understand or control.

It goes wrong in the way these things always do. Not all at once, and not with much warning. One decision leads to another, each one a little worse than the last, until Crane is in over his head and still acting like he has a handle on it. He doesn’t. And by the time that becomes obvious, it’s already too late.

Image & Sound Quality

Criterion keeps this one simple. The 4K Ultra HD disc is region-free, the included Blu-ray is Region A locked. The new restoration comes from the original 35mm camera negative and is presented in native 4K with Dolby Vision and HDR. I watched most of it in Dolby Vision and then checked in on the Blu-ray to see how much you’re really missing.

Not a lot, but it’s there.

The image looks clean and properly resolved without any heavy-handed processing. Grain is present and stable, detail is consistent, and the overall presentation feels natural. Depth is better than expected for a black-and-white title, with solid separation between foreground and background elements.

Grayscale is the real strength. Blacks are stable, whites stay in check, and the midtones carry the weight without getting muddy. Dolby Vision helps a bit with control, but this isn’t a dramatic HDR showcase. It’s more about refinement than range.

The standard Blu-ray holds up well. On a modest setup, you could live with it and not feel shortchanged. On a larger screen, the 4K disc has the edge; slightly better clarity, a bit more stability, and cleaner fine detail. Most certainly one of their best reissues in awhile in the genre.

Audio is limited to a single English DTS HD Master Audio 5.1 track with optional English SDH subtitles. The original 5.0 mix is presented in a 5.1 format, but this is not a film that makes aggressive use of surround channels. It is primarily dialogue-driven, with a restrained sound design that reflects the Coen Brothers’ usual approach.

Dialogue and narration are clear and easy to follow throughout. The track handles quieter scenes well, where small shifts in volume and tone are more noticeable than any large dynamic moments. There are a few louder sequences that open things up slightly, but they are not the focus.

Criterion splits the extras across both discs, with one key item carried over on each.

Both the 4K and Blu-ray include the same archival commentary featuring Joel and Ethan Coen and Billy Bob Thornton, recorded in 2004. It’s a measured track that focuses on structure, tone, and character behavior rather than production trivia. There’s also some discussion about visual choices and how certain scenes were shaped, which ties back to the film’s overall look.

The Blu-ray adds the rest of the material. The new 37-minute conversation between the Coens and critic Megan Abbott is the most substantial piece. It covers the film’s origins, its place within noir, and how they approached its restrained style. It’s direct and stays on topic.

There’s also an older 13-minute segment with Roger Deakins that focuses on the cinematography. He walks through the visual approach and some of the decisions behind the black-and-white presentation.

The remaining extras are brief. A 10-minute behind-the-scenes piece offers raw footage from the set without much structure. Two short deleted scenes are included but don’t add much context. The package also comes with a printed leaflet featuring an essay by Laura Lippman and standard technical notes.

Overall, the extras are focused but not extensive. The commentary and the new Coen/Abbott discussion carry most of the weight.

Movie Details

• STUDIO: Criterion
• FORMAT: Ultra HD 4K Blu-ray
• THEATRICAL RELEASE YEAR: 2001
• ASPECT RATIO: 1.85:1
• HDR FORMATS: Dolby Vision, HDR10
• AUDIO FORMAT: DTS HD Master Audio 5.1, English SDH Subtitles
• LENGTH: 116 mins.
• MPAA RATING: R
• DIRECTOR: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen 
• STARRING: Billy Bob Thornton, Frances McDormand, Michael Badalucco, James Gandolfini, Katherine Borowitz, Jon Polito 

Our Ratings

★★★★★★★★★★ Picture

★★★★★★★★★★ Sound

★★★★★★★★★★ Extra

Where to buy:

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Snabbit, an Indian on-demand home services startup, has closed a $56 million funding round, confirming TechCrunch’s earlier report.

Co-led by Susquehanna Venture Capital, Mirae Asset Venture Investments’ Unicorn Growth Fund, and Bertelsmann India Investments, the company’s Series D round values the Bengaluru-based startup at around $350 million, according to a person familiar with the matter. That’s up from $180 million about six months ago. Existing investors Nexus Venture Partners and Lightspeed also participated, alongside FJ Labs. The company has raised about $112 million in total.

Founded in 2024, Snabbit said it is now processing over 40,000 jobs daily across a network of more than 15,000 workers in five cities, offering services such as cleaning, dishwashing, and laundry as demand for rapid, on-demand home services grows in urban India.

The startup said the amount it loses on each order has fallen about 50%, while its customer acquisition costs have shrunk roughly 65%.

Snabbit’s fundraise comes as investor interest in India’s on-demand home services sector heats up, with rival Pronto also in talks to raise fresh capital and publicly traded Urban Company reporting more than one million monthly bookings.

Even Realities has rolled out the v2.2.0 update for its Even G2 smart glasses, with Terminal Mode as the headline feature. The update is now live, giving developers a new way to monitor and interact with coding agents without staying glued to a laptop screen.

Your terminal has entered your eyeballs

Terminal Mode is built around the idea of putting the coding terminal in front of your eyes. Developers using AI coding agents can track what the agent is doing, check progress, give commands and respond when needed through the glasses’ built-in microphone. The feature reduces the need to keep jumping back to a laptop, giving users more freedom to move around, handle chores, or even work out between coding sessions.

CEO Will Wang said in an interview that the idea for this feature came after a recent visit to Silicon Valley, where he noticed developers increasingly speaking to AI agents through microphones instead of typing every command. These agents can now complete most of the work on their own, which made Even G2’s built-in microphone and virtual terminal display feel like a natural fit for this workflow.

Sure, it’s nerdy. But so is wearing a computer on your face. Terminal Mode leans into what G2 already does well, surfacing just enough information to keep you moving, and applies it to code.

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Terminal Mode fits into Even Realities’ push to make the G2 useful for more than basic notifications. The glasses recently added tools for meeting prep and running apps directly in front of the wearer’s eyes.

The nerdy stuff does not stop there

The v2.2.0 update also includes a few other additions. Conversate and Translate records can now be exported. Even AI now supports continuous conversations, so users no longer need to repeat a wake-up command during an ongoing interaction. Even Realities also mentions sleep algorithm improvements and better connection stability.

Terminal Mode may sound like a feature built for a very specific crowd, but for coders already using AI agents, it could become a useful second screen for quick updates, approvals, and progress checks. It is a niche feature for now, but it gives the Even G2 a clearer role in developer workflows beyond basic smart-glasses notifications.

Although it’s currently only available to buy in Malaysia, we’re keen to see how the top-end Honor 600 Pro compares to the Samsung Galaxy S26.

Ahead of our review, we’ve compared the specs of the two Android phones and highlighted all the noteworthy differences between them below. Keep reading to learn more about what separates the Honor 600 Pro from the Samsung Galaxy S26. 

Not sold on either handset? Our best Android phones and best mid-range phones should have you covered.

Price and Availability

At the time of writing, the Honor 600 Pro is only available to buy in Malaysia although it will see a more global launch in the coming weeks.

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The Galaxy S26 is part of Samsung’s 2026 flagship S-series. With a starting RRP of £899/$899, the S26 is the most affordable of the line-up. 

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Snapdragon 8 Elite vs Exynos 2600

Samsung caused something of a stir when the S26 series first launched, as it was revealed that while US customers see Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy across the entire line-up, elsewhere the Galaxy S26 and S26 Plus are fitted with Exynos 2600.

Even so, Samsung promises there shouldn’t be any differences in performance between Exynos 2600 and Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. In fact, we found that the phone benchmarked strongly against the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5-equipped Ultra variant.

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Otherwise, and as expected, the S26 runs brilliantly for everything from scrolling and taking photos to even intense gaming sessions too. So, although it may not boast a Qualcomm chip, it’s still a solid performer.

Instead, Honor 600 Pro runs on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite – the brand’s 2025 flagship. With this in mind, while it will likely struggle to reach the heights of Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 and Exynos 2600, it is still a great chip that powered many of the best Android phones last year. 

Honor 600 Pro has a larger battery

Samsung isn’t known for equipping its phones with mighty batteries, and the Galaxy S26 is no exception. In fact, with a 4300mAh cell, it’s actually on the smaller side. Having said that, we still found the S26 to be a solid all-day phone, especially for those who average around three to four hours of screen time a day.

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In comparison, the Honor 600 Pro sports a mammoth 7000mAh cell. We’ll have to wait until we review the Honor 600 Pro to see how its battery life really measures up, however we’d hope that such a large cell will result in at least a full day, or even a two-day charge.

Honor 600 Pro is IP68, IP69 and IP69K rated

Durability should be a key consideration when you’re buying a new phone, and it’s fair to say that Honor doesn’t want you to take any chances with the 600 Pro. In fact, with IP68, IP69 and IP69K ratings, not only is the handset dust-tight but it can survive water submersion and even exposure to high pressure and high temperature water jets too. 

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That undoubtedly sounds impressive on paper, but we’d argue that perhaps IP69 and IP69K ratings aren’t that necessary. After all, how often will your phone realistically be exposed to water jets?

Samsung takes a more realistic approach, as the Galaxy S26 is equipped with a simple IP68 rating instead. That means it’s dust-tight and can survive water submersion too. 

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Honor 600 Pro has a 200MP main lens

Both phones are fitted with three rear lenses, including a main, ultrawide and a telephoto, however they differ with their exact resolutions and offerings.

The Galaxy S26’s camera hardware may seem a bit familiar, as Samsung hasn’t made any major changes in the last few series. This is a shame as, although overall the camera hardware is solid, it’s starting to show its age – especially as it needs to compete with the likes of the best camera phones. 

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While the main 50MP lens is the strongest of the three, and can cope across most lighting conditions, the ultrawide is easily the weakest of the bunch. It’s fine in bright conditions, but image quality drops quickly in difficult lighting situations, with images looking grainy and rough. Finally, the 3x telephoto works well in specific scenarios, but it can struggle to completely lock focus with an object.

The Honor 600 Pro is instead fitted with an impressive sounding 200MP main camera that’s supported by a 50MP 3.5x zoom and a 12MP ultrawide. As we’re yet to review the Honor 600 Pro, we’ll have to wait and see how the hardware really performs. However, Honor promises that the camera set-up should offer true-to-life colour reproduction, impressive stability and better shots taken at night too. 

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Honor AI vs Galaxy AI

Is it even a smartphone in 2026 if there isn’t a sprinkling of AI features? Both the Honor 600 Pro and Galaxy S26 are equipped with plenty of AI tools, including access to Google Gemini too. 

You’ll likely have heard of Galaxy AI, as the toolkit is arguably one of the most fleshed out available, with genuinely useful features including an array of photo editing capabilities, Live Translate and more.

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In comparison, the Honor 600 Pro has its own dedicated AI button that opens up what’s arguably Honor’s headline feature: AI Image to Video 2.0. This tool allows you to turn up to three images into a short video, with just a few prompts.

Otherwise, like Galaxy AI, there are photo editing features to remove unwanted objects from images, plus the Honor 600 Pro includes AI scam and deepfake detection too. 

Early Verdict

It’s difficult to compare the Honor 600 Pro and Samsung Galaxy S26 fairly, as we don’t know how much the former will cost in the UK. Having said that, if you want a phone with a larger battery, a fairly recent Qualcomm chip and an intriguing camera set-up, then the Honor 600 Pro could be the one for you.

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On the other hand, if you want to play around with a more established set of AI features, want a reliable camera set-up and are in Samsung’s ecosystem, then the Galaxy S26 remains a tough one to beat.

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We’ll be sure to update this versus once we review the Honor 600 Pro.

The two USB-C ports are on the left side, alongside HDMI and a USB-A port. The second USB-A port, a microSD card slot, and a headphone jack are on the right. It’s not a nice assortment of ports overall, and I just wish Acer had split the USB-C ports up so the laptop could have a charging port on either side.

Acer is using a top-notch 16-inch OLED touchscreen display on the Swift 16 AI. It has a resolution of 2880 x 1800, a refresh rate of 120 Hz, and color saturation as close to perfect as I’ve seen. Like most OLED laptops, it has a glossy, highly reflective display that maxes out at 315 nits of brightness, according to my testing. It’s nowhere near as bright as IPS or mini-LED displays, but the trade-off in brightness is to achieve that unbeatable contrast that only OLED can deliver.

A Risky Touchpad

Photograph: Luke Larsen

The full-size keyboard and oversized touchpad are definitely the most notable elements of this laptop. The first thing you notice is the touchpad, which is certainly the largest I’ve ever seen. You might think it looks a bit silly, but I always like it when companies leave as little wasted space on a product as possible. I really wanted to like this touchpad, but unfortunately, it could deter most people from buying this product.

On large laptops like the Swift 16 AI, which have a number pad to the right of the keyboard, the touchpad is typically below the keyboard, making it visually off-center. While it’s functional, this arrangement looks odd, and some 16-inch laptops get around this by omitting the number pad entirely. That’s what you see on the MacBook Pro, the Dell XPS 16, and most gaming laptops these days, too.

Rather than removing the number pad, Acer expanded the touchpad and centered it. This makes good use of the space below the keyboard, preserves the number pad, and solves the aesthetic annoyance that typically plagues full-size laptops.

Perhaps part of a deliberate trend geared at collectors of a certain demographic, the resurgence of physical media is giving us the opportunity to revisit the movies we grew up on or discover gems that slipped through the cracks–especially from that stretch when the action/adventure genre as we know it was taking shape. Whether you first encountered these heroes in a sticky-floored theater, on a dusty VHS rental, or during a wee-hours cable TV marathon (ah, the analog hum of basic cable…), these restorations carry a nostalgia not merely for a time and place, but a vibe.

In that simpler time, these adventures were all new, and we couldn’t wait to find out what the good guys would do next, how they’d get out of their latest scrape: with fists? Bullets? Arrows? Maybe even some well-timed stomach acid? Today, the answers await us in an artful slipcase or a hefty cardboard box, to explore again and again, and even pass along to a generation raised on shaky-cam and CGI.

Adventure Calls! Karl May at CCC Blu-ray (Eureka!) – 1964-1968

Based–sometimes loosely–on the pulp fiction of author Karl May, these seven films produced by Artur Brauner’s West German CCC Film combine B-movie thrills with A-movie budgets, giving escapism-hungry audiences what they wanted, and more. Dashing Lex Barker stars in all, a bigger-than-life manly man sometimes battling land-grabbing outlaws, maybe on the trail of hidden gold, tracking nefarious bandits or rescuing old friends. Showing very little blood, the stories range from lighthearted to dark, always a cinematic treat shot in exotic Spanish and Yugoslavian locations.

The stories span multiple genres, starting and finishing with tried-and-true westerns, both starring the cowboy nicknamed for his ability to knock a man out with a single blow:

• Old Shatterhand (1964)
• Winnetou and Old Shatterhand in the Valley of Death (Winnetou und Shatterhand im Tal der Toten, 1968)

also, from May’s “Oriental Cycle” of books, the same lead character was renamed Kara Ben Nemsi:

• The Shoot (Der Schut, 1964)
• Through Wild Kurdistan(Durchs wilde Kurdistan, 1965)
• In the Kingdom of the Silver Lion (Im Reiche des silbernen Löwen, 1965)

and then “The Mexican Adventures,” featuring Dr. Karl Sternau:

• The Treasure of the Aztecs (Der Schatz der Azteken, 1965)
• The Pyramid of the Sun God (Die Pyramide des Sonnengottes, 1965)

The native German audio receives newly revised English subtitles, paired with sumptuous new 4K restorations from their original camera negatives, presented here at 1080p.

Eureka!’s four-disc set is a hardbound limited edition of 2,000 copies, part of their “Masters of Cinema” series with intros to each film by author/expert Sir Christopher Frayling plus new audio commentaries on Old Shatterhand and Treasure of the Aztecs by historian David Kalat. Two new interviews shed light on CCC Film and director Robert Siodmak, these in addition to multiple archival featurettes and a 60-page collector’s book with extensive critical writing on related subjects.

Where to buy: $67.99 at Amazon

Point Blank 4K (Criterion) – 1967

In an era when big screen action was still evolving, movies often relied upon the gravitas of a leading man whose mere presence threatened an explosion of potential violence at any moment. Such was Walker (no first name), embodied by Lee Marvin in a career-defining performance.  Betrayed by the two people closest to him and left for dead, he sets off on an orgy of revenge as an unstoppable force taking down a corporate underworld and reclaiming his exact share of the loot, not a penny more. Under the brutalist direction of John Boorman, Point Blank takes its time, building real character drama without slick modern fight choreography or special effects, instead employing stylish use of the camera, of voiceover, and flashbacks. It’s also a priceless time capsule of Los Angeles, revisited in its gritty, grainy glory via Criterion’s new director-supervised 4K restoration, paired with a lean, mean uncompressed mono track. The extras are a sampler of new and old: a Boorman commentary hosted by filmmaker/fan Steven Soderbergh, a 1970 Lee Marvin interview clip from Dick Cavett, a vintage promotional short, plus several new featurettes. The insert includes an essay by Geoff Dyer titled “A Dream of Full-Color Noir.”

Where to buy: $34.99 at Amazon

Blue Thunder 4K Limited Edition (Arrow) – 1983

As we travel back in time, we discover that audiences didn’t always ask a lot of nitpicking questions, just so long as plenty of stuff was blowing up on screen. Case in point, Blue Thunder, where a principled LAPD surveillance pilot (Roy Scheider) takes control of an advanced prototype helicopter when he discovers its true, nefarious purpose. Thing is, he puts a lot of people in danger when he bravely crosses that line, and wreaks massive destruction, so is he really the hero the movie makes him out to be? No one can argue that the flying sequences aren’t spectacular, though. Arrow’s single disc proffers the movie in Dolby Vision and both restored lossless stereo and a 5.1 remix, with on-camera interviews from key cast and crew, plus archival extras from 2006 and 1983. It arrives slipcased with reversible cover art and booklet.

Where to buy: $49.95 at Amazon

Blue Thunder The Complete Series Blu-ray (Sony)

The following year, ABC debuted a small-screen redux, concurrent with CBS’ own chopper-based Airwolf. For extra machismo, not one but two ex-NFL superstars joined star James Farentino and a pre-SNL Dana Carvey as his quippy co-pilot, leaving behind the government conspiracies for fairly standard weekly crime procedural plotlines. Running for only 11 episodes, this hour-long mid-season replacement failed to bring the thunder at the time, but it stands as an interesting footnote to both John Badham’s essential thriller and the broader discussion of TV adaptations.

Where to buy: $55.99 at Amazon

Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins 4K (Kino Lorber Studio Classics) – 1985

Intending to capitalize on the perceived vulnerability of long-in-the-tooth James Bond, Orion Pictures bet big on their own secret agent franchise, born of the 150+ Destroyer novels in the series created by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir. Fred Ward makes a formidable action hero, a tough New York cop turned superspy, taught mad skills by his Korean mentor, Chiun (a problematically cast Joel Grey under four hours of Oscar-nominated makeup). Although Remo is seldom given a chance to flex his awesome new prowess, the fight scene on the gleefully dated mid-renovation Statue of Liberty, recreated at full scale on a hillside in Mexico for the production, remains an absolute classic. The new 4K disc builds upon the great bonus features of KLSC’s 2022 Blu-ray with a new Dolby Vision master from the camera negative, a new audio commentary joining the producers on their own separate archival track, and porting the five great featurettes while adding a new interview with co-star Patrick Kilpatrick.

Where to buy: $30.64 at Amazon

Innerspace 4K Limited Edition (Arrow) – 1987

While the ‘80s saw no shortage of feature films from producer Steven Spielberg, this high-concept sci-fi adventure rose above the clutter with director Joe Dante’s fun and funny flourishes throughout. Innerspace has been newly restored from the 35mm negative, the better to appreciate ILM’s Oscar-winning visuals not only of Martin Short’s insides, visited by microscopic voyagers friendly and otherwise, but some inspired use of forced perspective trickery. Audio is on-point too, offering the lossless original stereo, the 70mm six-track mix presented in 4.1, plus a new Atmos remix. An archival jam commentary anchored by Dante is joined by a new critic track, alongside a new hour-long “making of” documentary, previously unseen vintage, behind-the-scenes video, and extensive stills. Arrow has given this one a slipcased fatbox, wherein we will find a two-sided poster, reversible cover art for the disc case, and a particularly well-researched booklet.

Where to buy: $59.95 at Amazon

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves 4K Limited Edition (Arrow) – 1991

Much like Robin of Locksley biding his time in a Jerusalem prison, waiting to strike, our patience has finally been rewarded with this U.S. version of Arrow’s 2022 U.K. 4K limited edition release. The movie has taken a lot of ribbing since its release, but I happen to love the character, and I think that the fresh takes on the lore, the plot and the setpieces all hit. The BD-100 disc serves up respectable 4K restorations of the theatrical and extended cuts (more with Alan Rickman’s Sheriff of Nottingham and his witchy cohort, Mortianna) with uncompressed stereo and DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1. In addition to Arrow’s own multi-part ‘22 documentary, there’s archival audio commentary by The Kevins (director Reynolds and star Costner), another from actors Morgan Freeman and Christian Slater and writers/producers Pen Densham and John Watson, a Pierce Brosnan-hosted TV special, the Bryan Adams music video, and some basic electronic press kit interviews. As across the pond, the packaging here shines, with a rigid box, a companion book, a pair of double-sided posters, reversible cover art and a set of artcards.

Where to buy: $59.95 at Amazon

The Phantom 4K (Kino Lorber Studio Classics) – 1996

Created by Lee Falk for the daily comic strips back in 1936, “The Ghost Who Walks” was in many ways the seminal superhero, an archetype for those who followed. In the footsteps of a 1943 serial and a lost 1961 TV pilot, Billy Zane tackled the swashbuckling role with great earnestness, undergoing a physical transformation not seen Christopher Reeve for Superman. It’s a terrific period adventure, released in that curious crush post-Batman and before cinematic men in tights became a staple. KLSC’s new master, approved by director Simon Wincer, is absolutely gorgeous, particularly in terms of its Dolby Vision colors, and not just the purple suit. The exclusive extras are a treat: a new Wincer commentary and excellent new interviews with Zane and composer David Newman.

Where to buy: $33.99 at Amazon

Soldier 4K Limited Edition (Arrow) – 1998

From a script by Blade Runner’s David Webb Peoples, Soldier has long been rumored to be set in the same universe, and the proof is there is you know where to find the Easter eggs. It’s also thematically similar, exploring a grim future wherein a manufactured being (Kurt Russell, who trained 18 months for the role) comes to terms with the reality that he’s just a disposable tool to his masters, a weapon and nothing more. Taken in by a group of endangered settlers, he’s Shane for a new generation, and a new genre. Visually, Soldier is a fascinating blend of extensive practical effects and late-20th-century CGI that recalls a specific, somewhat prescient moment in movie history. Director Paul W.S. Anderson is joined by co-producer Jeremy Bolt and actor Jason Isaacs for his archival audio commentary, with the vintage EPK and extensive new talent interviews too, all inside a simple slipcover with a photo-filled booklet.

Where to buy: $49.95 at Amazon

After all of these fine, aged-to-perfection delicacies, you might want a preview of a couple of recent efforts, a palette cleanser of sorts to lend contrast:

The Running Man 4K (Paramount/Alliance Entertainment) – 2025

Don’t call it a remake, think of it as the first attempt at making a faithful adaptation of the 1982 book by Richard Bachman (né Stephen King), reportedly written over a single long weekend. Glenn Powell (Twisters) stars as a desperate, impoverished everyman who enters a big-money, life-and-death game show to pay for his daughter’s medicine, if he can just survive a worldwide manhunt for 30 days. The themes of the cultural/economic divide have never been more relevant, even if the ending lacks the source material’s original impact. Director Edgar Wright has crafted a bleak alternate-present-day dystopia, its grungy nuances captured wonderfully in Dolby Vision. Likewise the Atmos audio delivers the subtlest dialogue and the wildest action–and there’s plenty of the latter–in grand style.

The two-disc set (with digital copy) is loaded with bonus content, starting with an audio commentary from Wright, Powell and co-screenwriter Michael Bacall, an assortment of behind-the-scenes featurettes and in-universe tidbits, plus deleted and extended scenes.

Where to buy: $31.99 at Amazon

Mercy 4K (MGM/Alliance Entertainment) – 2026

Chris Pratt tries again, as an accused criminal trapped in an elevator-pitch nightmare, forced to prove his innocence to an icy AI judge (Rebecca Ferguson) in just 90 minutes, or be executed. Filmmaker Timur Bekmambetov’s “Screenlife” manifesto is on full display, as the story unfolds in real time as a stream of digital data, body cam footage, and interface windows. It starts out well enough but eventually buckles under the weight of its intended social commentary, ultimately lapsing into over-the-top, borderline nonsensical action before it’s finished. The Dolby Vision picture has its moments, although much of the runtime is built from lower-res imagery for the aforementioned realism. The Atmos is where this extras-free disc excels, with near-constant overhead channel usage, notably for the holographic screens flying around our hero’s head, as well as booming bass, yet never at the expense of dialogue clarity.

Where to buy: $34.99 at Amazon

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Xiaomi, the Chinese firm best known for its smartphones and electric vehicles, has lately been shipping some incredibly affordable and high-powered open source AI large language models.

The trend continued today with the release of Xiaomi MiMo-V2.5 and Xiaomi MiMo-V2.5-Pro, both available under the permissive, enterprise-friendly MIT License, making them suitable for use in production in commercial applications. Enterprises and individual/independent developers can now download either of the models (and more Xiaomi open source options) directly from Hugging Face, modify them as needed, and run them locally or on virtual private clouds as they see fit.

The most notable attribute of these models besides the open source licensing is that, according to Xiaomi’s published benchmarks, they are among the most efficient available for agentic “claw” tasks, that is, powering systems such as OpenClaw, NanoClaw and Hermes Agent, in which users can communicate with them directly over third-party messaging apps and have the agents go off and complete tasks on the human user’s behalf, such as making and publishing marketing content, running accounts, organizing email and scheduling, etc.

As Xiaomi’s ClawEval benchmark chart shows, both MiMo-V2.5 and the Pro version in particular appear near the top left of the chart, indicating high performance in completing the benchmarked claw tasks while using the fewest amount of tokens — saving the human user money, especially in a world where more and more services such as Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot are moving to usage-based billing (charging the human behind the agents for each token used rather than imposing rate limits like Anthropic or providing an “all-you-can-eat” buffet-style subscription like OpenAI).

In fact, the Pro model leads the open-source field with a 63.8% success rate, consuming only ~70K tokens per trajectory.

This is roughly 40–60% fewer tokens than those required by Anthropic Claude Opus 4.6, Google Gemini 3.1 Pro, and OpenAI GPT-5.4 to achieve comparable results.

By combining a massive 310B-parameter architecture with a highly efficient “active” footprint and a native 1-million-token context window, Xiaomi MiMo is challenging the dominance of closed-source frontier models from Google and OpenAI, especially when it comes to the latest and greatest craze in enterprise AI deployments — agentic tasks and “claws” similar to OpenClaw.

A two-pronged pincer

Xiaomi has released two distinct versions of the model to serve different ends of the development spectrum: MiMo-V2.5 (the “Omni” multimodal specialist) and MiMo-V2.5-Pro (the “Agent” specialist).

While the base model provides native multimodality, the MiMo-V2.5-Pro is specifically engineered for “long-horizon coherence” and complex software engineering.

On the GDPVal-AA (Elo) benchmark, the Pro model achieved a score of 1581, surpassing competitors like Kimi K2.6 and GLM 5.1.

Xiaomi researchers further released data on several high-complexity tasks performed autonomously by V2.5-Pro:

• SysY Compiler in Rust: The model implemented a complete compiler from scratch—including lexer, parser, and RISC-V assembly backend—in 4.3 hours. Spanning 672 tool calls, the model achieved a perfect 233/233 score on hidden test suites, a task that typically takes a computer science major several weeks.

• Full-Featured Video Editor: Over 11.5 hours and 1,868 tool calls, the model produced an 8,192-line desktop application featuring multi-track timelines and an export pipeline.

• Analog EDA Optimization: In a graduate-level engineering task, the model optimized a Flipped-Voltage-Follower (FVF-LDO) regulator in the TSMC 180nm process. By iterating through an ngspice simulation loop, the model improved metrics like line regulation by 22x over its initial attempt.

These experiments highlight a “harness awareness” in V2.5-Pro, where the model actively manages its own memory and shapes its context to sustain coherence over thousands of sequential tool calls.

Over the API, Xiaomi is pricing the models at competitive rates for both domestic (Chinese) and international markets (like the U.S.). For overseas developers, the high-performance MiMo-V2.5-Pro is priced at $1.00 per million input tokens (for a cache miss) and $3.00 for output within context windows up to 256K.

For ultra-long context tasks between 256K and 1M tokens, the cost doubles to $2.00 for input and $6.00 for output, though the architecture’s caching capabilities offer significant relief, reducing input costs to as little as $0.20 to $0.40 per million tokens upon a cache hit.

Domestically, these rates are mirrored in yuan, with the Pro model starting at ¥7.00 per million input tokens for standard context and reaching ¥14.00 for the extended 1M range. Meanwhile, the base model starts at just $0.40 USD for overseas input per million tokens and $2.00 per million output, putting it among the more affordable third of leading LLMs globally (see our chart below):

To lower the barrier for agentic development further, Xiaomi has made cache writing free of charge for a limited time across all models, alongside a total fee waiver for the entire MiMo-V2.5-TTS suite, which includes its specialized voice cloning and design features.

This pricing logic is clearly designed to accelerate the transition from simple chat applications to persistent, long-horizon agents that can operate at a fraction of the cost of legacy frontier models.

Xiaomi has also introduced an overhauled version of its subscription offerings, called the “Token Plan,” now available in four levels:

• The Lite “Starter Pack” provides 720 million credits for $63.36 USD per year

• Standard tier offers 2.4 billion credits for $168.96 per year

• A Pro tier provides 8.4 billion credits for $528.00 per year (designed for enterprise use cases)

• Max —aimed at high-intensity coding enthusiasts—delivers 19.2 billion credits for $1,056.00 per year

Beyond credit allotments, all plans include preferential API rates, a 20% discount for off-peak calls, and “Day-0” support for popular coding scaffolds like Cursor, Zed, and Claude Code.

However, both through the API and via the Token Plan, accessing the Xiaomi models from China may present barriers or additional compliance and regulatory risks to U.S.-based enterprise customers. As such, the best bet for U.S. enterprises concerned about relying on Chinese tech but wanting to take advantage of the low cost and open source models is likely setting up their own virtual private clouds or local servers, downloading the model weights, and running the models domestically.

MoE architecture but divergent training regimens for V2.5 and V2.5-Pro

At the heart of MiMo-V2.5 is a Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture. While the model boasts a total of 310 billion parameters, only 15 billion are “active” during any given inference cycle.

Meanwhile, V2.5-Pro is 1.02 trilion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model with 42 billion active parameters.

In either case, the design functions much like a specialized research hospital: while the facility has hundreds of doctors (parameters), only the specific specialists required for a particular case (query) are called into the room.

This massive increase in parameter volume for the Pro version provides the “neural capacity” required for the deep, multi-step reasoning found in complex software engineering and long-horizon tasks, as though even more specialists are available in an even larger hospital.

According to Xiaomi’s blog post, the regular V2.5 follows a rigorous five-stage evolution:

1. Text Pre-training: Building a massive language backbone on 48 trillion tokens.

2. Projector Warmup: Aligning in-house audio and visual encoders with the language core.

3. Multimodal Pre-training: Scaling across high-quality cross-modal data.

4. Agentic Post-training: Progressively extending the context window from 32K to 1M tokens.

5. RL and MOPD: Utilizing Reinforcement Learning and Multimodal Preference Optimization (MOPD) to sharpen real-world reasoning and perception.

The backbone utilizes a hybrid sliding-window attention architecture, inherited from MiMo-V2-Flash, which optimizes how the model “remembers” long-range information. This technical foundation enables MiMo-V2.5 to see, hear, and reason natively, rather than relying on external “plug-in” tools for visual or auditory processing.

Conversely, the training of MiMo-V2.5-Pro prioritizes “action space” over sensory perception. Instead of sensory alignment, the Pro model’s training focus shifts toward scaling post-training compute.

This process is designed to instill “harness awareness,” where the model is specifically trained to manage its own memory and context within autonomous agent scaffolds like Claude Code or OpenCode.

While the base V2.5 model is trained to reason across modalities, the Pro version is trained to sustain coherence across more than a thousand sequential tool calls.

The standard V2.5 model balances local and global attention to maintain multimodal perception. The Pro model, however, utilizes an increased hybrid attention ratio—evolving from the 5:1 ratio of previous generations to a more aggressive 7:1 ratio.

This allows the Pro model to “skim” the vast majority of its context while applying high-density attention to the specific 15% of data most relevant to its current objective, a critical feature for debugging large repositories or optimizing graduate-level circuits.

Finally, while both models undergo Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Multimodal Preference Optimization (MOPD), the objectives of these stages differ.

For MiMo-V2.5, the RL stage is used to sharpen perception and multimodal reasoning. For MiMo-V2.5-Pro, RL is focused on instruction following within agentic scenarios, ensuring the model adheres to subtle requirements embedded deep within ultra-long contexts and recovers gracefully from errors during autonomous execution.

This results in the Pro model’s “self-correcting” discipline, as seen in its ability to diagnose and fix regressions during the 4.3-hour SysY compiler build.

Full MIT License is perfect for enterprise use cases

In a move that distinguishes it from many “open” models that include restrictive “Acceptable Use” policies, Xiaomi has released MiMo-V2.5 under the MIT License.The MIT License is the gold standard of permissive software licensing. For developers and enterprises, this means:

• No Authorization Required: Companies can deploy the model commercially without seeking explicit permission from Xiaomi.

• Continued Training: Developers are free to fine-tune the model on proprietary data and even release those derivative weights.

• Unrestricted Commercial Use: There are no revenue caps or user-base limits that often plague “community” licenses.

By choosing MIT over a custom “open weights” license, Xiaomi is positioning MiMo as the foundational infrastructure for the next generation of AI agents, effectively inviting the global developer community to treat the model as a public utility.

Xiaomi’s background: from smartphones and EVs to Chinese open source AI darling

Xiaomi’s pivot toward frontier AI agents is the logical culmination of a decade spent building one of the world’s most dense hardware-software flywheels.

Founded in 2010 as a smartphone disruptor, the Beijing-based company has executed a high-stakes transition into a vertically integrated powerhouse defined by its “Human x Car x Home” strategy. This ecosystem now encompasses over 823 million connectable smart devices unified under the HyperOS architecture.

The company’s 2024 entry into the automotive sector with the SU7 and the subsequent high-performance YU7 SUV served as a proof of concept for this integration, positioning Xiaomi as a direct competitor to global luxury marques.

By investing 200 billion yuan ($29B USD) into foundational R&D for chips and operating systems, Xiaomi has moved beyond consumer electronics assembly; it has become an architect of the “action space,” using its massive hardware footprint as the primary testing ground for the agentic intelligence found in the MiMo-V2.5 series.

Ecosystem support

The release has been met with immediate “Day-0” support from the broader AI ecosystem. The MiMo team announced that SGLang and vLLM—two of the most popular high-throughput inference engines—supported the V2.5 series at launch.

This was made possible through hardware partnerships with AWS, AMD, T-HEAD, and Enflame, ensuring the model can run efficiently on everything from cloud-based H100s to domestic Chinese accelerators.

Fuli Luo, the project lead at Xiaomi MiMo and a former key member of the DeepSeek team, underscored the philosophy behind the release on X (formerly Twitter):

“A model’s value isn’t measured by rankings alone — it’s measured by the problems it solves. Let’s build with MiMo now!”

To kickstart this building phase, Luo announced a 100-trillion free token grant for builders and creators. This massive incentive is designed to lower the barrier to entry for developers who want to experiment with the 1M context window without immediate financial risk.

The economic realignment: open source vs. metered proprietary

The launch arrives at a critical juncture for AI economics. The shift toward usage-based billing marks the definitive end of the “all-you-can-eat” buffet era for AI services, a trend underscored by GitHub’s announcement today that its AI coding assistant Github Copilot will transition all plans to metered, token-based credits.

As seat-based predictability gives way to consumption-driven costs, premium agentic workflows—which can consume millions of tokens in a single reasoning session—are becoming increasingly difficult for enterprises to budget.

User sentiment has turned predictably cynical, with developers lamenting that they will “get less, but pay the same price” as subscriptions convert into finite allotments. This pricing evolution significantly enhances the strategic appeal of the MiMo series. By releasing under a permissive MIT License, Xiaomi allows organizations to bypass the escalating “SaaS tax” and reclaim financial predictability through private deployment.

Crucially, Xiaomi has eliminated the “context tax” for its API. The 1-million-token context window is now billed at the standard rate—1 token = 1 credit for V2.5 and 2 credits for the Pro version—with no additional multiplier. This stands in stark contrast to the industry-wide move toward session-based caps, positioning MiMo as a refuge for cost-sensitive, high-volume development.

Analysis for enterprises

The launch of MiMo-V2.5 is more than just a weight drop; it is a declaration of independence for the open-source community.

By matching Claude Sonnet 4.6 in multimodal agentic work and Gemini 3 Pro in video understanding, Xiaomi has proven that the gap between “closed-door” labs and open research is effectively closed.

With the MIT license as a catalyst and a 100T token grant as fuel, the coming months will likely see a surge in specialized, agentic applications built on the MiMo backbone.

Confirming the project’s ambitious trajectory, the team noted they are already training the next generation, focusing on “deeper reasoning” and “richer real-world grounding”. For now, MiMo-V2.5 stands as a testament to the power of sparse architectures and permissive licensing in the race toward functional AGI.