Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Cookie Queens is a feature-length documentary film that follows four Girl Scouts as they navigate the big business & big feelings of Girl Scout Cookie season.

“Cookie Queens” is a coming-of-age story about the joys, pressures, and pain points woven into one of America’s most cherished rituals: Girl Scout Cookie season. Captivating, candid, and full of heart, the film follows four girls ages 5-12 as they navigate the annual whirlwind of selling, striving, and succeeding. For these Girl Scouts, selling cookies isn’t just about Thin Mints and sisterhood — it’s a crash course in commercialism. Behind the smiles lie real pressure: long hours, ambitious goals, and weighty expectations. With humor, warmth, and a keen eye for small moments revealing big truths, “Cookie Queens” shows how growing up is shaped by tensions between community and capitalism.

My favorite and also, when I think about it too much, least favorite trailer moment: “There’s no stopping point.” Amen, sister. Opens August 7 in theaters.

Tags: Cookie Queens · Girl Scouts · movies · trailers · video

There’s nothing wrong with film-makers leaving their comfort zone but the Japanese director’s latest effort just doesn’t work

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s new film is a bafflingly unsatisfying and unconvincing muddle of ideas and moods; it is a futurist fable of AI-humanoid robot children, unpersuasively performed in a returning keynote of bland serenity. It is perhaps comparable to Kore-eda’s 2009 film Air Doll, a more adult story of man whose sex doll secretly comes to life.

Otone (Haruka Ayasi) – an architect who appears to work from home, with no office scenes or colleagues visible – is an educated woman married to down-to-earth Kensuke (Daigo Yamamoto), a carpenter who likes beer and playing baseball. Two years previously, their seven-year-old son, Kakeru (Rimu Kuwaki), was killed by a hit-and-run driver who has never been caught. They are approached by a company called REbirth, whose offices are huge and white with creepy logos and designs, like all sinister corporations in the movies, although the question of whether REbirth is supposed to be sinister is one of the film’s many unanswered questions.

At annual I/O conference, company debuts a product for everyday consumers to create autonomous AI agents

Google announced Tuesday that it would expand its iconic search bar, the centerpiece of the most-visited website in the world, with a heavy dose of artificial intelligence. The tech giant is also trying its hand at hi-tech glasses again, more than a decade after wearers of its first eyewear were dubbed “glassholes” and laughed out of San Francisco.

Google executives announced at the company’s annual conference for software developers, Google I/O, that its search box would accommodate longer and more specific queries than before – questions more like those people would ask one another than Search’s idiosyncratic syntax. The changes will direct users to engage directly with Google’s chatbot. The change to search is underpinned by the company’s new artificial intelligence model, Gemini 3.5, announced the same day.