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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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What Garland Goes to Next: Elden Ring and the Director After Ex Machina
The filmmaker who made the defining AI-consciousness power-game film is adapting a game whose entire metaphysics is about opacity, mortality, and constraint. He has been preparing for this without knowing it.
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The First AI Movie Nobody Made
iQIYI wants the first commercially viable full-AI feature film by summer. Gong Yu calls what comes after "intangible cultural heritage." He means it as description, not lament.
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The Tilly Tax and What It Costs to Be an Actor
SAG-AFTRA wants studios to pay a fee every time they use an AI actor. The Tilly Tax names the practice correctly. Whether it is more than a beginning depends on what comes after it.
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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.
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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
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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
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Slop or Cinema? On the First Full-AI-Background Feature Film
Ryan Kavanaugh says the film wouldn't exist otherwise. That's a theory of existence, not a theory of value. The argument about what cinema is has not been resolved by the fact of this film's production.