In the waters of the Johor strait, Indigenous communities are struggling to survive as nearby cities expand and fishing stocks dwindle

• Words and photographs by Izzy Sasada

Aween Bin Terawin submerges himself in the mangrove swamp to reach a crab cage on the riverbed below. After a moment of suspense, he lifts the cage above the water’s surface and inspects its interior. Empty.

After stowing the collapsible cage away in his boat, he continues his journey through the vast swamp to retrieve the 40 cages he set early that morning, each marked by a floating bottle tied to string.

When the streaming giant began making films guided by data that aimed to please a vast audience, the results were often generic, forgettable, artless affairs. But is there a happy ending?

When the annals of 2025 at the movies are written, no one will remember The Electric State. The film, a sci-fi comic-book adaptation, is set in a world in which sentient robots have lost a war with humans. Netflix blew a reported $320m on it, making it the 14th most expensive film ever made. But it tanked: though The Electric State initially claimed the No 1 spot on the streamer, viewers quickly lost interest. Today, it doesn’t even feature in the company’s top 20 most viewed films, a shocking performance for its most expensive production to date. It became just another anonymous “mockbuster”, crammed with the overfamiliar, flashy signifiers of big-screen film-making: a Spielbergian childhood quest, a Mad Max post-apocalyptic wasteland, Fallout-style retro-futuristic trimmings.

Another way of classifying The Electric State is as an example of the “algorithm movie”, the kind of generic product that clogs up streaming platforms and seems designed to appeal to the broadest audience possible. Directors Anthony and Joe Russo, whose style might be politely described as “efficient”, specialise in this digital gruel; they also made the similarly forgettable action thriller The Gray Man, starring Ryan Gosling.

There are increasing reports of people experiencing delusions after intensive use of AI chatbots. The phenomenon, dubbed ‘AI psychosis’, has raised concerns that features built into large language models may contribute to some users losing touch with reality. Madeleine Finlay speaks to Dr Hamilton Morrin, a psychiatrist and researcher at King’s College London, about his recent preprint exploring who is at risk and how models could be made safer

Clips: CBS, BBC, NBC

A restaurant in the English county of Cheshire has launched a water menu, as have a number of US establishments. Is it really possible, though, to tell one terroir from another?

For diners at a fancy restaurant in Cheshire, there is now a new twist to the usual routine. First comes La Popote’s menu, created by the owners, the chef Joe Rawlins and Gaëlle Radigon, who live upstairs with their children. Next comes the wine list, which includes more than 100 bottles. And then, in what is very much a first for Cheshire, a water list.

Rawlins, 32, presents the new menu as I get comfy in the dining room in a converted redbrick barn in Marton, a village halfway between Manchester and Stoke-on-Trent. A choice of seven waters ranges from a £5 bottle of Crag, which comes from the nearby Peak District, to Vidago, a mineral-rich water from a Portuguese spa town, which will cost you £19.