By Taryn Phaneuf | NerdWallet

Memorial Day weekend promises to be a big one for road trips, and that means gas prices are going to jump.

As of May 20, a gallon of regular gas costs $3.58 on average in the U.S., according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). Through the summer, gas prices are expected to average $3.70 per gallon nationally.

Summer driving season kicks off

Memorial Day marks the unofficial start of the summer travel season in the U.S. Factoring in all forms of transportation, AAA predicts 43.8 million people will travel this holiday weekend, making it the busiest Memorial Day since 2005, according to its travel forecast released May 13.

Most of those travelers will go by car. AAA expects a record-high 38.4 million people will roadtrip 50 miles or more over the holiday weekend. That would make it the biggest crowd of roadtrippers since 2000, when AAA started tracking.

A surge in demand for fuel will play a role in rising prices ahead of the weekend.

Expect prices to look like last year

There are several reasons why gas prices go up, but a big one at this time of year is seasonal demand. In a normal year, drivers can expect to see a summer spike in prices just because there are more people on the road.

It’s worth noting that recent memory puts a different spin on “spike.” Just two years ago, inflation and super-high oil prices (because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) contributed to sky-high gas prices. On Memorial Day in 2022, a gallon of regular gas cost $4.62 on average, according to a review of EIA data. Just two weeks later, the national average hit a record $5.01 per gallon.

At that time, the consumer price index for all goods and services showed an annual inflation rate of 9%. But prices for all types of gasoline had risen 60%.

Gas prices haven’t fallen all the way back to levels seen before 2022, but they’ve made progress in that direction. They also seem to have resumed a more predictable annual cycle.

The national average price on Memorial Day in 2023 was $3.57 — more than $1 per gallon less than the previous year. Drivers out and about over Memorial Day this year can expect to see similar prices to last year, AAA says in its holiday weekend travel forecast.

That national average masks a huge range in state-by-state prices, from just a shade over $3 in Mississippi to more than $5 in California.

There could be bumps in the road ahead

Besides consumer demand for gas, prices depend on a complex set of variables, including:

The cost of raw crude oil.
The cost to refine crude oil into gasoline.
Taxes, which vary state to state.

That makes gas prices volatile all the time. But there are factors at play in 2024 that could undermine current expectations for summer gas prices.

First, ongoing wars in the Middle East and Ukraine could disrupt the oil market and lead to higher oil prices.

Additionally, higher standards for summer fuel blends, as well as closures that reduced refinery capacity, have led to higher prices during the past few years. The EIA thinks that could be a factor again this summer, according to a May 14 report.

If production reached a five-year low, as simulated in the EIA report, gas prices could be 10 cents higher this summer than originally predicted.

Taryn Phaneuf writes for NerdWallet. Email: tphaneuf@nerdwallet.com.

The article Hitting the Road? Expect Higher Gas Prices Over Memorial Day originally appeared on NerdWallet.

Katie Walsh | Tribune News Service (TNS)

With summer movie season already in full-swing, thanks to “The Fall Guy,” “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” and “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” bringing big-screen spectacle to theaters, it’s also a time to look back on the best films from the first half of the year and catch up with some of the titles that you may have missed.

Two of the biggest movies of 2024 so far happened to star Zendaya, and also happened to open this spring after their fall release dates were pushed back to accommodate the actors strike last year. Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi epic sequel “Dune Part Two” dropped on Max this week, so if you missed the adventures of Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet) on Arrakis, now is the time to catch up with it at home. Zendaya stars as Paul’s Fremen love interest, Chani, who remains suspicious of his messiah-like ascent to power.

She’s also the center of Luca Guadagnino’s certified cinematic phenomenon “Challengers.” Though the sexy tennis movie is still in theaters (and it deserves the big-screen experience), the film is now available for premium rental on Amazon Prime, iTunes and Google Play. Zendaya stars as a teen tennis phenom who finds herself caught up in a steamy love triangle with a pair best friends and doubles partners, played by Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor. With a pounding techno score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, and dizzying direction by Italian director Guadagnino, “Challengers” is the movie event of the spring, so catch up with the hype if you haven’t already.

Mike Faist stars as Art and Josh O’Connor as Patrick in director Luca Guadagnino’s “Challengers.” (Niko Tavernise/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Inc./TNS)

If more Josh O’Connor is what you desire post-“Challengers,” rent or buy Alice Rohwacher’s beautifully poignant “La Chimera.” The English actor stars as a grieving archaeologist who falls in with a group of Italian grave robbers, who steal and deal in antiquities. This poetic and lyrical film is almost impossibly beautiful, like the artifacts themselves. A wholly unique film and a turn from O’Connor that proves he indeed has the range, “La Chimera” also co-stars Isabella Rossellini. Rent or buy it on all digital platforms for $5.99.

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Also available on premium VOD rental is Rose Glass’ mesmeric, fantastical desert noir “Love Lies Bleeding,” starring Kristen Stewart as Lou, a gym manager name in a Southwestern town who falls in lusty love with a transient bodybuilder, Jackie (a star turn from newcomer Katy O’Brian). The star-crossed pair find themselves in a desperate situation, and attempting to elude Lou’s entrenched crime family, led by her father (Ed Harris). Sexy, gory and strangely funny, “Love Lies Bleeding” must be seen to be believed.

There are a few smaller indie titles that have gone under the radar as well, like Goran Stolevski’s sensitively observed portrait of a queer found family in North Macedonia, “Housekeeping for Beginners,” which is available on premium VOD on all platforms.

Julio Torres’ “Problemista” is a delightfully absurd and surreal film about a young El Salvadoran immigrant who falls in with a chaotic New York City art critic, played by Tilda Swinton. This quasi-memoir takes a fantastical tack to the exploration of the Sisyphean task of gaining U.S. citizenship, and while Torres’ film is hilariously funny, it is also incredibly moving, and grounded in its exploration of work and belonging. Rent it on all platforms at a premium VOD price.

And Adam Rehmeier’s incredibly charming slice of nostalgia, “Snack Shack” is the perfect way to kick off the summer, with this coming-of-age story about a couple of teens in 1990’s Nebraska who run a pool snack shack for their summer get-rich-quick scheme. “The Fabelmans” star Gabrielle LaBelle co-stars opposite Conor Sherry and Mika Abdalla as the intriguing girl next door. Rent or buy it on all platforms for $5.99.

(Katie Walsh is the Tribune News Service film critic and co-host of the “Miami Nice” podcast.)

©2024 Tribune Content Agency, LLC

The screenplay for “Atlas,” a new Netflix science-fiction movie starring Jennifer Lopez as a woman desperate to save humanity from a dangerous artificial intelligence, is the work of Leo Sardarian and Aron Eli Coleite, whose respective IMDb credits include the TV series “StartUp” and “The Spiderwick Chronicles.”

If we didn’t know better, we’d guess “Atlas” was composed by an AI.

It feels as though the movie’s producers instructed one of today’s intriguing (but also at least vaguely frightening) programs built on large language models — maybe OpenAI’s ChatGBT, maybe Google’s Gemini — to spit out a script about a future in which humanity is at war with robots that once served them. That would help explain why “Atlas” feels like it consists of bits and pieces from so many other movies and why it is plagued by such subpar dialogue.

Regardless, it’s a bit of a slog.

Directed by Brad Peyton, “Atlas” is set in the future, when humanity’s needs-attending robots have rebelled.

“For years,” says a TV newswoman, “we have been told they would never harm us, but tonight, all of that has changed.”

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We get images and sounds of chaos around the world. Many people perish. You know the deal.

This robot revolution has been led by Simu Liu’s Harlan, who flees to Planet GR39 in the Andromeda Galaxy after his war with the International Coalition of Nations tilts humanity’s way.

The main narrative begins 28 years later — about 150 years from now, according to the movie’s press notes — with Lopez’s heavy-handedly named Atlas Shepherd a military analyst and an expert on all things Harland, thanks in part to a shared past with the once-gentle robot that will be revealed in time.

She wants in on a mission to that unstable planet, but the operation’s commander, Sterling K. Brown’s Col. Elias Banks, prefers to have nothing to do with her, noting to a superior officer, Mark Strong’s Gen. Jack Boothe, that she failed the exam to become a ranger four times and that her psych evaluation says she’s “rigid and hostile.”

“I prefer ‘driven and determined,’” Boothe responds.

A scene from Netflix’s “Atlas,” directed by Brad Peyton. (Netflix/TNS)

Atlas does, of course, force her way into the mission, Banks deciding he does need her — only after Boothe says HE needs her on Earth. (Yeah, it’s THAT kind of script.)

Once on Planet GR39, Banks’ Rangers will wear giant mechanical Arc 9 suits, each of which is outfitted with a sophisticated AI that melds with its operator via a neural device worn near the ear.

En route, Atlas is scoffed at for showing up for a meeting with thick paper packets of information but is insistent there will be no more digital briefings. (Her distrust of all things computerized would make more sense if we hadn’t met her waking up to information provided by an AI against whom she fell asleep playing chess the night before.)

The spacecraft’s arrival on the planet doesn’t go as planned, with the rangers — and Atlas — being forced to abandon ship via the Arc 9s, leading to an action sequence that might seem more impressive were it not so strikingly similar to a better-executed version of one from the far superior 2014 science-fiction film “Edge of Tomorrow.”

Soon, Atlas is separated from the others, left to try to survive both Harlan’s hostile forces and the planet’s largely inhospitable environment with her Arc 9’s AI, Smith (voiced by James Cohan). These two intelligences argue about the best courses of action, with Smith pleading with the defiant Atlas to don the neural device and sync with him/it; she stubbornly sticks to learning to operate the Arc 9 the old-fashioned way and on the fly.

Surprisingly, the ongoing conversation between Atlas and Smith is what amounts to “Atlas” at its best, thanks largely to the pitch-perfect voice performance by Cohan.

However, this increasingly philosophical discourse, too, runs off the rails as Atlas and Smith discuss the nature of existence, the close-minded former asking the thoughtful latter if he thinks he has a soul.

“I think everything has a soul,” he says.

“But you can’t find it in your code,” she counters.

“Not any more than you can find it in yours, but I have faith it’s there.”

Lopez (“Hustlers,” “The Mother”) feels miscast in the role, but we’ll say this: She puts her back into selling the movie’s hacky lines and its key moments. You can’t help but appreciate the go-big-or-go-home approach given what the actress and pop star has to work with here.

Despite the talents of Brown (“This Is Us,” “American Fiction”) and Liu (“Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” “Barbie”), Banks and Harlan are largely background players, although rest assured Atlas and the robotic ghost from her past have their requisite climactic confrontation.

Along the way, “Atlas” offers forgettable bits of action with visual effects that more often feel cheap. (For those who care, however, the Dolby Atmos Sound mix is fairly decent.)

Based on guilty-pleasure fare including 2015’s “San Andreas” and 2018’s “Rampage,” we expect a bit more from Peyton. “Atlas” simply isn’t entertaining enough to reach even guilty-pleasure status.

It’s not quite right to compare “Atlas” to an AI’s “hallucination,” as that is the term that’s been adopted for when a program provides incorrect factual information. Nonetheless, more often than not, it plays like some kind of bad dream.

‘Atlas’

Where: Netflix.

When: May 24.

Rated: PG-13 for strong sci-fi violence, action, bloody images and strong language.

Runtime: Two hours.

Stars (of four): 1.5.