Brainless

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeThere was once a time when a film as nakedly terrible as Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom would become its own spectacle. It’d be celebrated, ironically, as another Highlander II: The Quickening or Battlefield Earth – a banquet of nonsense for future inebriated university students to feast on. But the superhero market has thoroughly annihilated that joy. Now, it’s somehow possible to watch…

via Prime Video What do you get when Jennifer Lopez, Josh Duhamel, Jennifer Coolidge and a bunch of other celebrities head off on a paid vacation and make a movie at the same time? Normally, you’d be right to say, “A late-career Adam Sandler picture,” but this time you’d get Shotgun Wedding. Lopez’s latest dip into rom-com waters is a dumb, but fun time. There’s a rollicking adventure, attempts at romance, and plenty of beautiful scenery for anyone looking to pass an hour and change, but not a lot of substance…

SEONGNAM, South Korea — The new workers zipped around the office completing mundane tasks like fetching coffee, delivering meals and handing off packages. They did not get in anyone’s way or violate personal space. They waited unobtrusively for elevators with unfailing politeness. And, perhaps most enticingly, they did not complain. That’s because they were robots. Naver — a soup-to-nuts internet conglomerate in South Korea — has been experimenting with integrating robots into office life for several months. Inside a…

The new staff flew around the office, performing regular tasks like obtaining coffee, delivering meals, and passing off stuff. They didn’t get in the way of anyone or breach anyone’s personal space. They waited for elevators unobtrusively and politely. And, perhaps most importantly, they did not complain. For some months, Naver, a South Korean internet company, has been experimenting with incorporating robots into office life. A fleet of roughly 100 robots drives around on its own within a futuristic,…

David Hayter has got to have one of the most fascinating careers in entertainment, with the multi-talented actor and filmmaker having voiced Solid Snake in the Metal Gear Solid video game series, written two X-Men movies, penned The Scorpion King, and executive produced Netflix hit Warrior Nun. He even directed a feature film, but 2014’s Wolves wasn’t up to much. Attempting to put a fresh spin on the werewolf subgenre is a tough task as it is, but the end product proved to be every bit as derivative and uninspired as its…

Tiny single-celled critters obviously don't have room for a brain to tell them how to move in complex ways, so to get about, they usually roll, slither or swim.But microscopic pond dwellers called Euplotes eurystomus have mastered a way to walk brainlessly – scurrying about like insects, with their 14 little appendages.They appear to move a bit like the Dutch-designed kinetic sculptures called Strandbeasts, with clockwork-like connections cycling them through a pattern of set states that can be adjusted in response to…

There are plenty of big, dumb action movies that can deliver thrills without exactly taxing the brain. And then there are films that are so thunderously stupid they bypass guilty-pleasure status and end up as a danger to themselves and all around them. Bullet Train falls into the latter camp. It’s so imbecilic, you wouldn’t trust it to cross the road unsupervised, let alone negotiate Japan’s Shinkansen high-speed rail network.The premise, adapted from Kōtarō Isaka’s 2010 novel, is simple: Brad Pitt plays a privately…

Given the fact that Dall-E 2 has been trained over 12 billion parameters, the results arrived at should be a surprise For AI to be called sentient it has to think like an average human being. Humans have evolved into thinking beings by taking inputs from their surroundings and putting them into action in a cyclic fashion. The logical connections they make are hardwired in their heads by virtue of repeated exposure to their environment. If we apply similar logic to AI image generators which are trained over…