A still from animated film La Sélection Mécanique, directed by Jules Blachier. A still from animated film La Sélection Mécanique, directed by Jules Blachier. While emerging technology is banned from the Palme d'Or, an upstart movement is gaining investment and attention I n Cannes' darkened screening rooms, the supposed future of cinema flickered into life this week and it was strange. The first edition of the World AI film festival (WAIFF) showcased visions of men with fish scales erupting from their necks and seaweed from their mouths, a heroine with a heart beating outside her body and so many massed armies of AI-generated tanned men sweeping across battlefields that David Lean would have blushed. Last week the Cannes film festival, entering its 76th year, banned the emerging technology from its Palme d'Or competition, insisting "AI imitates very well but it will never feel deep emotions".

Loud eaters and phones nearly spoiled my cinema trip - and it's not just me The cinema lights are low and you're cocooned in your seat, ready for the film to transport you to another world. But just as you settle in, you're jolted back to reality. Audience members around you are scrolling on their phones, talking and munching loudly. Cinemas do clearly ask everyone not to disturb those around them - through the use of adverts, announcements and signs - but is behaviour in getting worse? I experienced disruption a few weeks ago while watching Ryan Gosling's sci-fi movie, Project Hail Mary, at a cinema in London.

Humour and science fiction may not seem obvious bedfellows but a history of cinema will tell you different. Think Spaceballs, Mars Attacks! and Everything Everwhere All At Once to name but a few. And now Ryan Gosling is hopping on board. The 45-year-old is both the lead actor and producer of Project Hail Mary, a space adventure film based on the 2021 Andy Weir novel of the same name. While Gosling has showcased his comedy chops in films such as Barbie and Nice Guys, he tells the BBC he's always struggled as an actor because I would want to bring humour to something but has found opportunities to be funny limited with some projects.

Kleber Mendonça Filho wants his films to reclaim lost history. For Kleber Mendonça Filho, filmmaking is an act of both provocation and preservation. Mendonça was born in 1968, in the early years of a ruthless military dictatorship--a time when cinema, like much else, was harshly constrained. His mother, Joselice Jucá, was a historian who studied Brazil's abolitionist movement, and she taught him that filling gaps in the cultural memory was a way to expose concealed truths. His relationship with film is inextricably linked with his home town, Recife--a port city where attractive beaches and high-rise developments coexist with sprawling favelas and rampant crime. In his youth, Mendonça was fascinated by the city's grand cinema palaces. He carried a Super 8 camera to the tops of marquees and shot dizzying images; he spent hours in projection booths, learning the mechanics of how films reached the screen. Over time, Mendonça watched those theatres fall into decline, an experience that he likened to being aboard a ship as it wrecked. But even as Recife lost its allure, he made the city a fixture of his films--a way of vindicating its place in history. His first narrative feature, "Neighboring Sounds," takes place on a street where he lived as a child, a setting that he spent years documenting. Later, he made "Pictures of Ghosts," a documentary about Recife told largely through its cinemas.

In the largest cinema at the Venice film festival, guests gather for the premiere of Frankenstein, Guillermo del Toro's lavish account of a man who dared to play God and created a monster. When the young scientist reanimates a dead body for his colleagues, some see it as a trick while others are outraged. "It's an abomination, an obscenity," shouts one hide-bound old timer, and his alarm is partly justified. Every technological breakthrough opens Pandora's box. You don't know what's going to crawl out or where it will then choose to go.

Here we present a versatile foundation model that can perform a range of clinically-relevant image analysis tasks, including segmentation, landmark localisation, diagnosis, and prognostication. A multi-view convolution-transformer masked autoencoder, named as CineMA, was trained on 15 million cine images from 74,916 subjects. The model was validated on multiple image analysis tasks and compared to existing models on >4,500 images from eight independent datasets with diverse population characteristics, representing the largest benchmark study for cine CMR so far. CineMA consistently outperformed conventional convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in delineating ventricular boundaries and estimating ejection fraction, a key measure of cardiac function. The improved performance was preserved, even when the model only used half of fine-tuning data. CineMA also surpassed CNNs in disease detection and matched their performance in long-axis function measurement. Interestingly, we found that CineMA can also detect cardiac changes in systemic diseases, such as diabetes, hypertension and cancer, and can also predict mortality. Finally, we assessed model fairness and demonstrated consistent model performance across demographic subgroups. These findings highlight CineMA's accuracy, learning efficiency, adaptability, and fairness, underscoring its potential as a foundation model for automated cardiac image analysis to support clinical workflow and cardiovascular research. All training and inference code and models are made publicly available at https://github.com/mathpluscode/CineMA.

Last year, filmmaker Paul Schrader--the director of Blue Collar, American Gigolo, and First Reformed, and writer of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver--issued what seemed like the last word on artificial intelligence in Hollywood filmmaking. A few days after the release of Denis Villeneuve's sci-fi blockbuster Dune: Part Two, Schrader asked his Facebook followers: "Will Dune 3 be made by AI? And, if it is, how will we know?" Schrader is well regarded not only as a director, but one of cinema's top-shelf curmudgeons, quick with a wry burn or baiting shit-post. But his Dune tweet seemed like more than another provocation. It spoke to a mounting feeling among many filmgoers, myself included: that Hollywood had stooped to producing sleek, antiseptic images so devoid of personality that they might as well have been made not by a living, breathing, thinking, feeling artist, but by a computer.

New Delhi, India – What if Michael had died instead of Sonny in The Godfather? Or if Rose had shared the debris plank, and Jack hadn't been left to freeze in the Atlantic in Titanic*? Eros International, one of India's largest production houses, with more than 4,000 films in its catalogue, has decided to explore this sort of what-if scenario. It has re-released one of its major hits, Raanjhanaa, a 2013 romantic drama, in cinemas – but has used artificial intelligence (AI) to change its tragic end, in which the male lead dies. In the AI-altered version, Kundan (played by popular actor Dhanush), a Hindu man who has a doomed romance with a Muslim woman, lives.

Magnetic resonance imaging of fetal and neonatal brains reveals rapid neurodevelopment marked by substantial anatomical changes unfolding within days. Studying this critical stage of the developing human brain, therefore, requires accurate brain models-referred to as atlases-of high spatial and temporal resolution. To meet these demands, established traditional atlases and recently proposed deep learning-based methods rely on large and comprehensive datasets. This poses a major challenge for studying brains in the presence of pathologies for which data remains scarce. We address this limitation with CINeMA (Conditional Implicit Neural Multi-Modal Atlas), a novel framework for creating high-resolution, spatio-temporal, multimodal brain atlases, suitable for low-data settings. Unlike established methods, CINeMA operates in latent space, avoiding compute-intensive image registration and reducing atlas construction times from days to minutes. Furthermore, it enables flexible conditioning on anatomical features including GA, birth age, and pathologies like ventriculomegaly (VM) and agenesis of the corpus callosum (ACC). CINeMA supports downstream tasks such as tissue segmentation and age prediction whereas its generative properties enable synthetic data creation and anatomically informed data augmentation. Surpassing state-of-the-art methods in accuracy, efficiency, and versatility, CINeMA represents a powerful tool for advancing brain research. We release the code and atlases at https://github.com/m-dannecker/CINeMA.

It's an interesting time to be a long-running science fantasy media property in the streaming TV age. Star Trek is in the grip of an existential crisis as it (wrongly) fears it's too old-aged to be relevant. Star Wars became a battlefield in the culture war and, to duck all future bad faith criticism, gave us The Rise of Skywalker. And then there's Doctor Who, which is somehow managing to plough a 62-year furrow and still fill it with original ideas. This week the Doctor and Belinda go up against a sentient cartoon holding the patrons of a 1950s cinema hostage.