Night after night, young Kenyan scholars sweat blood writing academic essays — on practically any given subject, often to gruelingly tight deadlines — for paying college students in far-away countries to pass off as their own work. The credit is non-existent, the pay pitiful given the expertise involved. But many of these tireless ghost writers […]

Most films want their audiences to suspend disbelief. “About a Hero” would prefer they keep it close at hand. “Viewers are advised to exercise caution in trusting its visual and auditory components,” runs an onscreen disclaimer near the beginning of Polish filmmaker Piotr Winiewicz’s irreverent exercise in AI-enabled storytelling — a knowingly contentious opening film […]

The fall of communism in Bulgaria wasn’t a clean break, exactly: With the country’s Communist Party having relinquished its political monopoly in 1989 to make way for a parliamentary democracy, it still won the country’s first free elections the following year. The panic brought on by unfamiliar liberties spirals to chaotic effect in “Triumph,” a […]