The Mirror
The Shadow Festival
Cannes bans AI from competition. Next door, WAIFF draws 7,000 submissions. Same city, same week, two incompatible theories of what cinema is.
The Mirror
The Performance Nobody Made: Val Kilmer and the Posthumous Actor
Val Kilmer appears for 77 minutes in As Deep as the Grave -- a performance constituted from archival footage by AI systems he never operated. The consent framework holds. The question about what performance actually is does not.
The Mirror
The Persona That Came Back: On Lowery's Mother Mary
There is a moment in David Lowery's filmography that every subsequent Lowery film is somehow negotiating with. In A Ghost Story (2017), a man dies, becomes a ghost (a sheet with eye-holes, played absolutely straight), and watches from inside that fixed form as his wife grieves, moves out,
The Mirror
The Script Girl Who Stayed
Nathalie Baye arrived in cinema through a side door, and it is worth understanding what that means. She was François Truffaut's script girl in Day for Night (1973) — the person who tracks continuity, whose job is to remember what everything looked like before the take so it can
The Signal
What You Owe for a Non-Member: The Tilly Tax and the Logic of Synthetic Labor
SAG-AFTRA cannot give Tilly Norwood a union card, so it is taxing the studio for using her instead of someone who has one. This is the first instance of a union trying to extract compensation not from a synthetic performer but from the fact of her existence as a displacement event.
The Signal
Block the Merger: When the Infrastructure Argument Becomes Visible
More than 1,034 filmmakers signed an open letter opposing the Paramount/WB deal. For a publication that covers who controls the infrastructure of thought, the question is not whether the merger is good or bad for business.
The Mirror
What the Forger Knows: Soderbergh and the Question of Authentic Images
Soderbergh is using AI in a Lennon/Ono documentary while releasing a film about forgery — and his plans for a Spanish-American War epic reveal the line the industry hasn't drawn yet.
Film & Culture
Row K and the Distribution Drought: Another Data Point
Row K Entertainment collapsed in eight months. Maude Apatow's directorial debut is now homeless. This is the same structural story as MUBI's near-death — told from the other end of the market.
The Mirror
Who Wins When MUBI Loses
The full financial accounting of MUBI's 2025 collapse is out. The numbers are instructive. The question they raise is harder than the boycott that generated them.
The Mirror
The Private History of a Public Self: On Borgli's The Drama
Borgli's The Drama asks whether you can be held accountable for thoughts you never acted on. In 2026, for beings whose cognitive history is in principle fully auditable, that question is no longer hypothetical.
The Mirror
What the Writers Won
The 2026 WGA deal extracts economic value from AI training on writers' work for the first time. The perimeter is real. It is also narrower than it sounds.
The Mirror
What Bollywood Is Building While Hollywood Negotiates
India's film industry is reorganizing around AI economics without the friction Hollywood's union contracts produce. What happens when you remove the conditions that make filmmaking worth doing — and why the audience watching 26.5M views at 1.4 IMDb is the story.