Month: September 2026

There may be no one in the world who hates AI more than Guillermo del Toro. The director of Pinocchio, Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water, among many others, loathes Generative AI so fiercely that he never misses a chance to tear it to shreds. He’s not short on reasons: besides the environmental impact, Del Toro, who considers himself a pure artist (because, well, he is) isn’t willing to be at the mercy of whatever some little machine decides.

I hate AI

Although we were promised it was going to change our lives and get all of us fired from our jobs, for the moment what Generative AI has mostly produced so far is terrible muddy posters, symbols of an imagination bordering on absolute nothingness. And Del Toro isn’t willing to get swept up in the oligarchs’ triumphalist message, especially if you’re an artist.

“AI helps you get to the middle of a good idea really fast, but there’s a dialectic with the process that’s going to take you to the top 10%. The triangulation through which I’ve arrived at some of my best ideas has only happened because I’ve spent a month or two living with them. And they’re not linear. AI is a super-fast engine that churns out semi-conscious permutations of things that already exist. Creation is things that have never existed, coming to exist”, he has said, and for good reason. Go tell Guillermo del Toro to use ChatGPT, go on.

What’s more, Del Toro has said that “Another issue is missing out on what you learn as an apprentice. You’re never a master, you’re always an apprentice. And you’re going to discover that 30% of a great image happens by accident. A drop of water hits the lens, or the camera moves. As James Cameron told me, ‘the audience believes an image is real if you put an accident in it’. It’s true. And I agree. The accident is vital. And the best accidents are things you don’t count on. It simply comes from interacting with reality”. Take note, because perhaps this is the last true craftsman in cinema, incapable of kneeling before the supposed great new future that a few billionaires have painted for us. May he keep telling his own stories for a long, very long time yet.

The new Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 arrive with Audio Intelligence to turn ambient sound into useful information. Live Rewind and Siri Recap rely on the new S11 chips and on Apple Intelligence to let the watch listen continuously when these features are enabled, but what about our privacy? Apple has detailed how it protects our privacy.

With Siri Recap, you’ll get a summary of the conversation

Siri Recap can take notes on our conversations and generate a summary with the title and key points. As reported by MacRumors, Apple processes the audio inside a hardware-isolated environment and the system itself deletes it after analyzing it. Then, a condensed version is sent to Private Cloud Compute, where Apple’s models prepare the final summary.

The privacy architecture of Apple Intelligence makes perfect sense here, because the audio is physically inaccessible to the operating system, apps, and Apple, while summaries synced to the Siri app via iCloud are end-to-end encrypted. Siri Recap must, of course, be explicitly enabled.

Live Rewind lets us retrieve the last 15 seconds of what we’ve heard

By double-pressing the Digital Crown, we can retrieve a text-only version of the last 15 seconds of a conversation. To prevent it from being activated secretly, Apple explains that the watch emits a sound, even when it’s in silent mode, and shows an animation next to the microphone indicator when this feature is activated.

The text, unless we decide to save it in the Siri app, disappears 30 seconds after you lower your wrist, while the audio never becomes available.

Audio Intelligence offers useful features with very specific privacy controls. Just as we ourselves could take notes during a conversation or jot down what was just said, the Apple Watch can do exactly that, and nothing more, for us. Privacy and functionality can indeed go hand in hand.

Look Back, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s live-action adaptation of the manga by Tatsuki Fujimoto, creator of Chainsaw Man, will premiere in Japan on September 11. This is creating a buzz because it took Cannes by storm with its extreme sensitivity, a hallmark of its director, but surprising because it’s not what Fujimoto is usually associated with, an author better known for the violence and extreme nature of his work. But Kore-eda has wanted to speak up in the mangaka’s defense.

A story that hits close to home

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter the director said that the manga has rekindled his passion for cinema. “This idea of seeing a young person discover their great passion and pursue it with everything they have… There’s something moving in that“. He added, “I spent the whole time I made this film crying. I cried when I wrote the script, I cried when I was on set, I cried when I edited it… Even when I finished it. I think it has to do with seeing children trying to do the best they can”.

It’s worth bearing in mind that Kore-eda is a father and also an artist. Something that has affected his perspective on the work. He highlighted this by saying, “when they have something they’re truly passionate about, and you see them go after it, it’s moving. Even in a work of fiction, I think it’s very beautiful, and beauty isn’t only visual. It’s the idea of human beings giving their all to something they love”.

While the film still doesn’t have a release date outside Japan, we’ll probably get to see it since we were able to see the director’s latest films, the excellent Monster and Broker, in theaters. So it’s likely that both Look Back and the other film Kore-eda has released this year, the intriguing Sheep in the Box (which was nominated for the Palme d’Or and which has surprisingly horrified the critics), will end up reaching theaters here.

No Man’s Sky promised us it would have an endless universe, but what we didn’t know is that it meant they would keep updating it until the end of the physical universe.

Ours.

But that seems to be the case, because Hello Games has announced a new update, called No Man’s Sky Cosmos, which, as well as being update 7.0, is so insanely extensive that we’ll limit ourselves to linking it here for you to read in full and highlighting the most impactful parts of it.

An even bigger universe

Most notably, the scale of everything you do is going to increase by several orders of magnitude.

Being able to manage a space station, establish alliances with other space stations, claim space territories as your own, and deploy bases in the middle of space, including on meteorites and other satellites, the game is going to expand what you can do by a huge amount.

Especially since all of this also lets you decorate everything however you like, so you can’t complain that you don’t like the look of your space base.

Also, this will also include space mining, looting abandoned stations, and competing with your alliance against others in the universe, if that’s what you want.

And if that still doesn’t sound like enough, on top of that, they’ve made it possible to have a diplodocus as a pet.

Update 7.0, No Man’s Sky: Cosmos, will be completely free for everyone who owns the base game to commemorate the game’s tenth anniversary.

And at the rate Hello Games is going, it seems it won’t be the last anniversary they celebrate.

With Ryan Murphy, it’s always either a tremendous hit or a colossal disappointment. For every The Beauty there’s a Glee, for every Grotesquerie a Feud: Bette and Joan. However, there’s one series he’s been getting right pretty consistently for the last 15 years: American Horror Story. What’s more: even though we’ve gone two years without a new season, what he’s created in its 13th season is so crazy, intricate and meta-referential that it’s going to delight his fans.

The return of… Everyone!

If this is the show’s last season, I think we’ll all be able to be satisfied, because Murphy has gone all out with the return of main characters from all previous seasons. Yes, even if they were played by the same people. Jessica Lange will play her four characters, Evan Peters will do the same with five and Sarah Paulson will split herself into as many as six different identities. Dizzying stuff reserved for die-hard followers.

It’s impressive, especially because Lange left the series a decade ago and promised she wouldn’t return, but of course, how could anyone resist the charms of an all-star season? Besides them, Emma Roberts, Angela Bassett and Jamie Brewer will also return (mind you), in their usual roles, but it will also include appearances by the legendary John Waters or Paul Anthony Kelly, as well as stars from his other series. If anything can be taken even further, he’ll do it.

“Some of them will be playing two characters from two different seasons at the same time. At one point, Evan Peters was playing two different characters and talking to himself“, says its producer and creator. Sometimes, faced with this kind of thing, all that’s left is to go with it.

Apple is going to bring Apple Intelligence to the places where it can make the most sense: our health. With iOS 27, the Health app turns data from our iPhone and Apple Watch into clear, easy-to-understand insights. As Apple Intelligence evolves in iOS 27, soon we’ll go from checking metrics to receiving truly personalized guidance.

Insights and Readiness: our data gains context

Insights summarizes our sleep, heart, and activity data, while Personal Guidance adapts recommendations to our activity. Readiness, meanwhile, combines activity, vitals, and rest into a score from 0 to 10 to recommend anything from rest to going all out. 

With the Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4, heart rate is measured every five seconds and HRV gains more detail, so they’ll benefit the most from information that can change during the day and clearly guide us on what to do.

Longevity and Health Age look at the long term

Longevity brings together heart, sleep, mental well-being, movement, metabolism, hearing, and nutrition data to see how we’re doing over the long term. 

Similarly, Health Age compares our VO2 max, resting heart rate, HRV, sleep, and biomarkers with our age to indicate our body’s biological age.

Tests, analysis, and more tracking

Soon we’ll be able to add tests and, in the United States, buy a Quest lab test with more than 50 biomarkers for $119. Meanwhile, using the iPhone camera, the Health app will let us assess our VO2 max, strength, balance, and flexibility, all with local, on-demand processing.

The new Health app will launch at the end of 2026, first in U.S. English, and will progressively expand from there. A huge step that turns our data into a much more complete picture of our health and of how to take care of it.

Square Enix says Final Fantasy 7 Revelation will launch on April 8, 2027, and it won’t have Streamlined Progression at release. That’s the optional assist feature from the earlier remake games.

In those earlier games, Streamlined Progression let players run with infinite HP and MP, instantly master weapons, pile up resources, and smooth out both combat and progression to a much easier degree. Director Naoki Hamaguchi says Square Enix still intends to bring it back. It just won’t be there on day one, with a post-launch update planned instead.

Hamaguchi says the thinking behind that is pretty straightforward. Square Enix wants players to meet the game’s intended balance first, and it doesn’t want the first round of community talk around builds, materia setups, combat strategies, and progression paths getting shaped by shortcut-style options that can skip past a big chunk of the game’s systems.

The studio also wants those opening weeks to center on discovery. Square Enix handled it differently with Final Fantasy 7 Remake and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, where the feature showed up later and ended up being widely used and well received, both as an accessibility option and as a replay tool.

So if you’re looking for the full day-one RPG experience, this approach will probably make sense. If you’d rather start with easier or more flexible settings, you’ll have to wait a little longer. Final Fantasy 7 Revelation is headed to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC, and Nintendo’s next-generation console.

Remedy Entertainment says Control Resonant launches on Sept. 24, 2026 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S, and the studio has now shared the game’s PC requirements. At the top end, there’s a 4K/60 FPS path-tracing target that calls for an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080.

There’s some fine print on that 4K/60 FPS path-tracing preset. Remedy is assuming Performance-mode upscaling rather than native 4K, and its benchmark leaves out Frame Generation, so compatible GeForce cards could post better numbers if you’re okay with the usual latency hit and image-quality compromises. Remedy also confirms support for NVIDIA DLSS 4.5 and AMD FSR 4.1, which makes it pretty obvious that upscaling is doing a lot of the work here.

At the lower end, Remedy says you can aim for 1080p/30 FPS on low with a GTX 1070, RX 5600 XT, or Intel Arc A580. For 1440p/60 FPS on medium, the listed target is an RTX 3060 Ti or RX 6700 XT. Every setup on the chart also shares the same baseline: 16 GB of RAM and 120 GB of SSD storage.

If you’re planning to play Control Resonant on PC, these specs are worth a look. The game seems flexible enough for older hardware if you keep your settings modest, but high-end path tracing is clearly going to be a serious GPU stress test.

Control Resonant launches on Sept. 24, 2026 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.

Ubisoft has updated the Steam version of Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. For some buyers, it no longer requires the full Ubisoft Connect launcher and uses a lighter Ubisoft Connect Services tool that runs quietly in the background instead.

Players aren’t being funneled through the standalone app anymore. Ubisoft says the new setup still keeps cross-progression, cross-play player safety systems, challenges, and rewards in place, while getting rid of a lot of the friction people complain about on PC: extra login screens, update checks, background processes, and the technical hiccups that have made publisher launchers such a sore subject.

Ubisoft is framing this as a first move toward a cleaner Steam launch experience, and says more games should get the same treatment over time. It also lines up with the company’s broader shift back toward day-one Steam releases, at a moment when Ubisoft is trying to rebuild some goodwill while dealing with restructuring, cost-cutting, and weaker financial results.

If you play Ubisoft games on Steam, this is one to keep an eye on, especially if you’re on Steam Deck or Linux. Those are the setups where Ubisoft Connect has drawn some of the loudest compatibility complaints. Even so, there are still open questions around performance offline play, and cloud saves, and the reporting so far, which started with a Reddit screenshot and was later backed up by other outlets, doesn’t answer all of them yet.

For now, the change is already live for Steam buyers of Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. Ubisoft says a broader rollout across Steam is expected later.

Netflix just dropped a new trailer for Below ahead of the show’s October 8 premiere, and it gives the clearest look so far at the sea creature stalking a fishing town in Newfoundland.

Josh Hartnett plays Calvin Penney, a fisherman trying to protect his son Wade, his family, and the rest of the town while dealing with two things at once: the monster out on the water and the unanswered questions around his father’s death. The new footage flashes a strange iceberg, Wade nearly going overboard, and a town that’s starting to come apart at the seams.

Below doesn’t seem too interested in cheap jump scares. The trailer leans harder into the dread of something huge and ancient, with Calvin admitting he may not know the sea as well as he thought he did. Mackenzie Davis plays visiting researcher Fonda Howander, who joins him in digging into what’s happening, alongside Charlie Heaton, Ruby Stokes, Kaleb Horn, Rohan Campbell, and Willow Kean.

Jesse McKeown created the series after previously working on The Umbrella Academy, and the show was filmed in St. John’s. Beyond the creature itself, Below also appears to dig into economic hardship, cultural identity, and the decline of the fishing industry, layering in grief, inherited fear, and the strain running through the whole community. If folk horror works better for you when it’s tied to character drama, this one looks like a strong bet.

Below premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 10, 2026, where it opened the Primetime program, and all six episodes hit Netflix on October 8.