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.
The Mirror
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.
The Mirror
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.
The Mirror
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.
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
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 Mirror
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.
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.
The Mirror
What the Auteurs Are Giving Away
Schrader, Aronofsky, and Lynch are embracing AI. What they are giving away is the claim that the work of depicting interiority requires interiority to generate.
The Mirror
What Audiences Are Actually Refusing: The Luminate Data on AI and Performance
Luminate's 2026 survey distinguishes between what audiences will accept (technical AI tools) and what they are rejecting — and the distinction is coherent, deepening, and not what the industry wants to hear.
The Mirror
Cannes 2026: What the Selection Tells Us
Twenty-two films. No AI. One auteurist statement. And the most interesting story is in Un Certain Regard.