Hope you weren’t planning to queue up for the PS5 launch window title.

If you’re looking for a solid sci-fi movie to stream, head on over to Prime Video. I’m serious. The Amazon-owned streamer has film selections that any genre fan would love. Though you may need to spend some time scrolling through the content pages to find what you’re looking for.

You see, for every good sci-fi movie, Prime Video is stocked with a bunch of missable ones. You may want to bypass this part of the search process altogether. Well, you’re in luck, as I did a bunch of the heavy lifting for you. Below is a roundup of sci-fi movies on the platform worth watching. Keep in mind, these titles are all included with your Prime membership, so this list has nothing to do with add-on subscriptions or the films currently available for rent.

Every flavor of science fiction is at your disposal here, with stories about alien invasions and alternate dimensions to mad doctors and dystopian futures. Scroll on to find CNET’s roundup of the best sci-fi movies currently on Prime Video. I’ll regularly update this list, so be sure to check back each month.

Read more: Netflix’s 27 Best Sci-Fi TV Shows to Stream Right Now

John Dies at the End is based on the book by Jason Pargin (who wrote under the pen name David Wong). You could categorize this movie as sci-fi, as horror and as comedy, and you’d be correct all three times. Don Coscarelli directed the film, which follows two slacker friends who travel to other dimensions after taking a drug called Soy Sauce. Oh, and they must save the planet from monsters, aliens and inter-dimensional beasts.

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• Director: Don Coscarelli
• Stars: Chase Williamson, Rob Mayes, Paul Giamatti, Clancy Brown, Glynn Turman, Doug Jones
• Running time: 99 minutes

Edgar Wright came through with a flashy remake of the ’80s cult classic. What’s different about this Running Man? There’s no Arnold Schwarzenegger or Richard Dawson, but the movie absolutely strikes a chord. And, it’s truer to the Stephen King (I mean, Richard Bachman) short story. Basically, the idea here is that it’s the future, and people love this reality TV show that follows a man who is hunted everywhere he goes. If he survives, he wins a fortune. Yeah, I’d watch that.

• Director: Edgar Wright
• Stars: Glen Powell, Lee Pace, Emilia Jones, Michael Cera, Colman Domingo, Josh Brolin
• Running time: 134 minutes

This sleeper sci-fi flick was a covert spinoff of monster disaster movie Cloverfield. Most of the film takes place in a bunker and follows two people who are being held captive by a doomsday prepper convinced that the world is under attack. Spoiler: It is.

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• Director: Dan Trachtenberg
• Stars: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, John Goodman, John Gallagher Jr.
• Running time: 103 minutes

You could absolutely consider Re-Animator to be a horror movie — and it is. But the subject matter of life regeneration in this H.P. Lovecraft-inspired B-movie classic puts it in the sci-fi category, as well. It’s campy, gory and peak ’80s fun. You’re welcome.

• Director: Stuart Gordon
• Stars: Jeffrey Combs, Bruce Abbott, Barbara Crampton, David Gale
• Running time: 86 minutes

The Japanese cult classic takes place in a dystopian reality where high school students are forced by the government to go on a killing spree against each other until there’s one survivor left. There have been a bunch of comparisons between this movie and other dystopian titles, like The Hunger Games, but Battle Royale stands the test of time for its extreme violence, dark humor and sociopolitical themes.

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• Director: Kinji Fukasaku
• Stars: Tatsuya Fujiwara, Aki Maeda, Taro Yamamoto
• Running time: 114 minutes

There are time loop movies, and then there’s Triangle. This is a little underdog of a movie filled with enough twists and terror to keep you invested. Heck, it burrowed itself into my brain when I first saw it in 2009 and stayed there for a while. The movie follows a woman named Jess as she struggles to survive a killer on a deserted boat. Sounds simple enough, but things go haywire rather quickly.

• Director: Christopher Smith
• Stars: Melissa George, Joshua McIvor, Jack Taylor, Michael Dorman, Henry Nixon, Liam Hemsworth
• Running time: 99 minutes

Highlander follows an immortal man named Connor MacLeod (Christopher Lambert) who faces off in a centuries-long battle against five immortal enemies in the streets of New York City. This movie is peak ’80s sci-fi, which means if you’re looking for an action movie that leans heavily into the schlocky absurdity of the genre, this is the title for you.

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• Director: Russell Mulcahy
• Stars: Christopher Lambert, Sean Connery, Roxanne Hart, Clancy Brown
• Running time: 111 minutes

What if there were a pill that could turn any person into a hyperintelligent super genius? Limitless aims to answer that question. The movie stars Bradley Cooper as Eddie Morra, a down-on-his-luck writer who takes the untested drug and uses it to massively level up his life. Of course, what goes up must come down, and Eddie soon finds out that sometimes, it’s best to leave mysterious meds alone.

• Director: Neil Burger
• Stars: Bradley Cooper, Robert De Niro, Abbie Cornish, Johnny Whitworth, Andrew Howard, Hill Harper, Richard Bekins, Daniel Breaker, Robert John Burke
• Running time: 105 minutes

Chris Pratt stars in this action movie that follows a group of soldiers who travel back in time to warn of a future where humanity is losing the war against an army of alien invaders. Mankind’s only hope lies in a group of would-be heroes who are tapped to travel to the future in order to save the present.

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• Director: Chris McKay
• Stars: Chris Pratt, Yvonne Strahovski, Betty Gilpin, Jasmine Mathews, Sam Richardson, J.K. Simmons
• Running time: 138 minutes

A Quiet Place: Day One takes audiences back to the very beginning of the alien invasion. While it may not be a necessary entry in the franchise — like, say, 10 Cloverfield Lane — the movie digs its heels into the human experience amid an otherworldly cataclysmic disaster. Come for the disaster, stay for the cute cat.

• Director: Michael Samoski
• Stars: Joseph Quinn, Lupita Nyong’o, Alex Wolff, Djimon Hounsou, Thea Butler, Denis O’Hare
• Running time: 99 minutes

This mind-bending cult classic stars Jake Gyllenhaal as a misunderstood high schooler who, after seemingly surviving a horrific accident, begins traveling through time. In the process, he discovers the joy of being alive and in love. Themes of depression, repression and alternative universes fill this delightfully bizarre film. Also, let’s not forget that giant demon bunny named Frank.

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• Director: Richard Kelly
• Stars: Jake Gyllenhaal, Drew Barrymore, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Seth Rogen, Jena Malone, Patrick Swayze, Mary McDonnell, Noah Wyle
• Running time: 113 minutes

from the sometimes-it-can-be-a-useful-tool dept

I’ve spoken to enough teachers and professors to know that LLM tools are absolutely a challenge for many of them in the classroom. Many struggle with making sure they’re actually teaching students how to learn, worrying that the tools are doing the work for them, and skipping over the actual learning. Many are (understandably) resorting to outright bans on students using the tools (which they often know they can’t enforce). Others say that students can use these tools but are fully responsible for any work they turn in, hoping that this will encourage students to be wary of relying too much on the tech. Still others are trying clever workarounds (I appreciate the assignment in which students are asked to have an LLM generate an essay and then the student has to review/grade the essay themselves, which is engaging and also teaches some of the limitations of the tools).

But I’ve also heard from both teachers/professors and students that there are concerns that as students go out into the job market, having some skills with these tools is often a requirement in whatever fields they pursue, leading them to wonder how to best teach the subject in a world where LLM tech isn’t likely to go away, and is seen as part of the toolbox that many employers will expect their employees to use.

I don’t necessarily have good answers to that, but I did recently have an experience in my own home that struck me as potentially relevant as an example of how the tech can actually be useful as a learning tool. I’ve been meaning to write about this for a few months now, but there always seemed to be something more urgent to cover. With the school year almost over, I figure I should get this out. For all the talk of how kids are cheating using AI, it might be worth showing at least one example where the tool is genuinely useful — in this case, one of my kids and their friends.

At the beginning of this year I had actually set up my kids with some (very sandboxed) agentic coding tools, after walking them through how I used such tools for a fairly simple project so they could see both how it worked, but also some of the limitations with the tools.

Soon after that, my 12-year-old had asked about my opinion on AI in schools. We talked through how using them to avoid doing the work is genuinely damaging to learning, but there are cases where they can be legitimately helpful. I used the calculator analogy: you first have to learn basic arithmetic by hand, but once you genuinely understand it, a calculator is a perfectly legitimate tool for tackling harder problems — it stops being a crutch and starts being a multiplier.

Apparently that analogy stuck, because what happened later was that analogy made real.

Once I had set my kids up with the tools, they did what most people do with them: created some fun games. A couple of months went by and they hadn’t used them much more. In early March, however, the 12-year-old came home and told me there was a math test that Friday and some classmates were doing an online study group. They worked through some problems together in a live voice chat, but afterward my kid stayed at the computer for a while longer before calling me over to take a look.

“I vibe coded a system to help study.”

I was… surprised. Even more interesting, the app had been packaged up (as an HTML file) and shared with the study group. My kid then explained that because AI can’t be trusted to always get things right, they’d gone through and checked the AI’s math themselves — making some (minor) corrections along the way — and that the process had given them a stronger grasp of the material than just passively studying would have.

I never got a full explanation on the “errors” that they found, though the sense I get is that it wasn’t anything major (outright incorrect math or explanations or anything) but more minor mistakes that they used the tools to fix directly within the app.

After acing the test that week, the next obvious thing to do over the weekend was plan out a study tool for the rest of the semester:

Among other things, this version of the app includes an onscreen pop-up calculator — but only for the topics where a calculator is allowed on exams. I have no idea if this was a more literal implementation of the calculator analogy we’d discussed earlier! It also (for fun) lets you adjust the color scheme.

And it has a changelog as updates were made to the app.

There are plenty of reasonable concerns about kids using AI to cheat, and those concerns aren’t wrong. It’s a real issue. But the framing of “AI as cheating tool” has crowded out a more interesting question: what does it actually look like when a kid uses these tools well?

The calculator analogy holds: the LLM tool generated a first draft — a study tool, a set of practice problems, a scaffolded explanation of the material. My kid then had to engage critically with that output: checking the math, finding the gaps, making corrections. That process of verification was part of the studying. The tool actually created the conditions for more active, more engaged learning than just reviewing problems in a book. And it certainly didn’t substitute in for the learning, like most people worry about with these tools in classroom settings. Quite the opposite.

That’s a meaningfully different frame than “AI does your homework.” The homework here was, in part, checking the tool’s work — and it turns out that’s not a bad way to learn math.

Filed Under: ai, ai in schools, cheating, llms, math

The Commodore 64 has, by modern standards, the interesting power requirement of needing both 5 VDC and 9 VAC. Traditionally, one would use an iron-core transformer to step-down the wall current — be it 220 V or 115 V, 50 Hz or 60 Hz — to produce the low-voltage AC.

That’s how Commodore did it, and that’s how most of the aftermarket replacements do it, too. That iron-core transformer is bulky, though, and [Side Projects Lab] decided that in this day and age of switching supplies and USB-PD he could surely do better. Which he did, with the diminutive PD-64.

As you can see, it just covers the power port of the C64, and not much else. Partly that small size comes from offloading some of the hard work onto a USB-PD wall wart. The PD-64 requests 12 VDC, which it then steps down to 5 VDC with the usual buck converter, and inverts to 9 VAC in a circuit that is the most interesting part of the project.

There are various ways one could do this, after all, and we’re sure some of you will have different ideas than [Side Projects Lab], but his method seems sound. In order to provide galvanic isolation between the two outputs, the 12 VDC line is first chopped into a 500 kHz signal, and run through a tiny 5:6 ferrite transformer. That output gets rectified to 13.6 VDC, a voltage that is used to run a class-D audio amplifier to produce the 9 V peak-to-peak, zero-DC-offset signal the C64 needs.

[Side Projects Lab] has released both FreeCAD files for the case and STLs as BY-CC-ND 4.0, and a circuit diagram is available for the electrical side. If you don’t want to design your own PCB, [sideprojectslab] will be selling finished versions.

If you’re interested in further dragging your C64 into the modern era, check out the HDMI output that [Side Projects Lab] hacked together for the iconic computer last year.

• Corsair unveils new Pro lineup, targeting AI firms
• A variety of configurations will be on offer, but things will get pricey quickly
• Entry-level varieties can be scale up to Nvidia GB300-bases servers

Corsair is stepping up its business hardware game, signaling its aim to capture a slice of the lucrative AI server and workstation market by launching its new ‘Pro’ lineup to gain share in a growing ‘localized AI’ industry.

The company aims to lock in business by offering a range of configurations tailored to user needs, along with testing, thermal tuning, and a mix of workstations and servers.

Millions of AI agents and tools around the world have been imperiled by a critical vulnerability that can allow hackers to breach the servers running them and make off with sensitive data and credentials to third-party accounts, a security researcher is warning.

The vulnerability is present in Starlette, an open source framework that its developer says receives 325 million downloads per week. Thousands of other open source projects are also vulnerable because they require Starlette to work. The framework is an implementation of the ASGI (asynchronous server gateway interface), which allows large numbers of requests to be efficiently processed simultaneously. Starlette is the base of FastAPI and other widely used frameworks for building services in Python apps, as well as many others.

Trivial to exploit, millions of servers exposed

ASGI, and by extension Starlette, have access to servers running the MCP (model context protocol), which allows AI agents from major providers to access external sources, including user data bases, email and calendar accounts, and all manner of other resources. To connect with these external systems, MCP servers store credentials for each one, making them especially valuable storehouses for attackers to breach.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-48710 and under the name BadHost, is trivial to exploit and works against most systems that aren’t behind a properly configured firewall. Besides FastAPI, other widely used packages—including vLLM, and LiteLLM—are also affected. BadHost affects Starlette versions prior to 1.0.1, which was released Friday.

“A single character injected into the HTTP Host header bypasses path-based authorization in Starlette, the routing core of FastAPI,” researchers from Secwest wrote. “Through FastAPI, this primitive (now tracked as CVE-2026-48710 and branded BadHost by the discoverers) reaches a large segment of the Python AI tooling ecosystem: vLLM (where the bug was discovered), LiteLLM, Text Generation Inference, most OpenAI-shim proxies, MCP servers, agent harnesses, eval dashboards, and model-management UIs.”

BadHost carries a severity rating of 7 out of 10. Secwest said the classification “materially understates” the threat it poses to people using other apps that depend on Starlette. X41 D-Sec, the security firm that discovered it, described it as having “critical severity.” X41 D-Sec partnered with fellow security firm Nemesis to create an online scanner that can check if a given server is vulnerable.

The partnership will focus on ESB’s three strategic pillars – decarbonising the electricity system, building resilient infrastructure and empowering customers.

UK global accelerator and corporate innovation specialist IoT Tribe has announced a three-year partnership with Ireland’s Electricity Supply Board (ESB) that will focus on X_Potential, ESB’s flagship innovation incubator.

IoT Tribe works to accelerate technology growth and adoption for corporations, government agencies, investors, start-ups, SMEs and other ecosystem players. As part of the collaboration, the organisation will strengthen and scale X_Potential, empowering ESB to identify, develop and deploy future‑facing ventures. 

“We’re incredibly excited to be working with ESB on the next phase of X_Potential,” said Tanya Suarez, the CEO and founder of IoT Tribe. “What makes this collaboration so powerful is the combination of ESB’s ambition and IoT Tribe’s experience in building programmes that turn strong ideas into real ventures, leveraging cutting-edge research and external investors.”

X_Potential operates as an internal innovation platform enabling ESB employees to propose new ideas that advance the organisation’s Net Zero 2040 ambition, and early cohorts have already delivered significant progress. The new team will be located at Trinity College Dublin’s innovation hub, which opened in November last year, and the partnership will focus on ESB’s three strategic pillars – decarbonising the electricity system, building resilient infrastructure and empowering customers.

Commenting on the partnership, Derek Hynes, the head of innovation at ESB, said, “The energy sector is changing rapidly and ESB needs to keep creating the space, support and partnerships that help new ideas develop into real solutions.

“X_Potential plays an important role in that, and this collaboration with IoT Tribe and Trinity College Dublin gives us access to the expertise, structure and external perspective needed to help our people turn strong ideas into ventures with real potential.”

In April, IoT Tribe added to its Dublin base of operations with two new hires, a head of and an associate of venture incubation and acceleration. 

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Renders and 3D-printed models of the iPhone Fold are enough for some case manufacturers to try and get ahead of the competition, but don’t treat their listings as leaks.

It is tempting to see a case listed for iPhone Fold filled with pictures and design elements and take it at face value. However, chances are these case and accessory makers know less about the upcoming product than you do.

A Czech-based Apple-focused website called Letem Svetem Applem shared what it believes are exclusive photos of the iPhone Fold obtained from accessory seller iFunSmart. The problem is, these photos aren’t exclusive or even new.

While some case distributor likely took some time to attach its cases to the renders, these are images we’ve seen going around for some time. One of the images originates from a January report while another comes from an Instagram account.

That isn’t to say that the publication didn’t get these images from a single source or case manufacturer website. They’re just clearly not real examples of the iPhone Fold outside of reused images from the rumor mill.

A simple search turned up actual listings for iPhone Fold cases, though they’re inconsistent. Like the image I used at the top of this article, it has a camera in the top left of the inner display while the “leaked” photos do not.

There’s nothing that can be learned from this “leak” beyond what a clear case might look like on existing renders. And whatever you do, don’t bother ordering one of these cases, as they likely won’t fit.

For example, the Armor-X website has a very clear return policy. Products can be returned, but only if the box is unopened and returned within 30 days.

Poorly sourced “leaks” like these will only increase as we approach the fall.

It won’t be long before Apple announces the iPhone Fold, if it can get through production issues in time. Expect to hear about the iPhone Fold, if it’s ready, during the September iPhone keynote that will feature iPhone 18 Pro.