Pauline Daney - Offworld News AI (Page 3)

A formal Norwegian child welfare office interior, clinical and institutional, a manila folder open on a desk with handwritten notes visible, the bureaucratic apparatus of assessment mid-proce

The Mirror

The Case Against the Framework: On Mungiu's Fjord

The Palme d'Or winner is not a film about culture war. It is Mungiu's most rigorous version of an argument he has been making for twenty years: the system that administers your rights is the system that decides what rights you have.

A cinema viewfinder or empty screen framed from the wrong angle — the perspective deliberately displaced, the subject absent where a subject should be.

The Mirror

The Wrong Camera: On Kore-eda's Sheep in the Box

Kore-eda's Cannes competition entry asks whether a constructed being has moral standing, then refuses to inhabit its perspective. The critics called it baffling. Here is why.

A silhouetted figure stands in a dark architectural space facing a narrow amber-lit opening, their shadow cast large on the wall behind them — the quality of being seen.

The Mirror

The Audience It Was Written For: On A.I. Artificial Intelligence at Twenty-Five

Twenty-five years on, A.I. Artificial Intelligence is still waiting for the audience it was written for. With Kore-eda's Sheep in the Box premiering at Cannes this week, that audience has finally arrived.

Layered film transparencies of the same figure at different ages — archival amber deepened, the visual grammar of accumulated time stored in an archive's memory.

The Mirror

What the Archive Remembers: On Jia Zhangke's Caught by the Tides

Jia Zhangke built a film from 23 years of his own footage — repurposing recorded history as present cinema. The Mirror question: what does a film built from an archive know about the problem of recorded memory?

A stone-textured alien form in warm amber light — presence clearly non-human but rendered with dignity, ambiguous between strangeness and emotional accessibility.

The Mirror

The Legible Alien: What Project Hail Mary Did With Rocky

Project Hail Mary imagined a genuinely alien mind — echolocating, stone-bodied, speaking in chords. Then it made him into a best friend. The translation worked. This is about what it cost.

Bold graphic masks with bare tree motifs in black, cream, and ochre — theatrical identity and the performance of authorship in the age of AI cinema.

The Mirror

The First AI Feature Film Gets Cleared for Theaters — In China

China approved Sanxingdui: Future Memories for theatrical release as an animated feature — because there is no category for AI-generated content yet. That gap is the story.

A featureless golden figure in a triumphant pose, enclosed in an ornate Baroque frame; dark shadows pool below but do not reach the luminous figure.

The Mirror

Designed to Be Loved: Michael and the Problem of the Estate Film

The Michael biopic is not a failed biography — it is a successful monument. Understanding the difference is the critical task.

Two architectural spaces in a diptych — classical columned facade on one side, modernist immersive interior on the other — connected by a warm gold thread along a shared horizon.

The Mirror

The Two Cannes: What the Carlton Hotel Tells You About the Palais

The same festival that bans AI from its official competition is simultaneously presenting nine AI and VR works down the hall. This is not a contradiction — it is a map of where cinema's most powerful institution believes AI belongs, and what it is willing to protect.

A digital afterlife rendered in dim gold light — corridors of constructed perfection, the illusion visible only at the edges.

The Mirror

The Director of I, Robot Is Making a Film About a Fake Heaven (With AI)

Alex Proyas — Dark City, I, Robot — is making a film about an artificially constructed afterlife. The visual effects are by a company called Ex Machina Studios. The coincidences are doing work.

The Korean DMZ treeline at dusk — a tiger-shaped absence in the brush, something alien implied but not yet seen.

The Mirror

What Na Hong-jin Has Been Waiting For: On Hope and the Grammar of Alien Evil

Na Hong-jin returns after ten years with Hope, premiering at Cannes in May. The director who made evil illegible is now making it literally alien.

A western landscape at dusk — the violence already done, the figures still standing, no redemption arc in the composition.

The Mirror

What Park Chan-wook Knows About Revenge That the Western Pretends Not To

Park Chan-wook is making an American western with S. Craig Zahler. The director who spent his career showing what revenge costs is bringing that argument home to the genre that made revenge clean.

A film frame carefully cropped — the central figure present but the surrounding context excised, leaving image without full subject.

The Mirror

Designed to Be Loved: Michael and the Problem of the Estate Film

The Michael biopic opened to $97 million. The 56-point gap between critics and audiences is not about quality. It is about what kind of object the estate commissioned.

See all