Le Journal

Governor Janet Mills speaks with the press at Portland City Hall Thursday, January 22, 2026. (Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Staff Photographer) " data-image-caption="Gov. Janet Mills speaks with reporters at Portland City Hall Thursday, January 22, 2026. (Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Staff Photographer) " data-medium-file="https://www.pressherald.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2026/01/43384844_20260122_GovMills003.jpg?w=300" data-large-file="https://www.pressherald.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2026/01/43384844_20260122_GovMills003.jpg?w=780" />The U.S. Senate campaign spokesperson for Mills only confirmed she was out of the state Tuesday.

Maine School Administrative District 75 offices. (Katie Langley/Staff Writer) " data-medium-file="https://www.pressherald.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2026/01/IMG_9911.jpg?w=300" data-large-file="https://www.pressherald.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2026/01/IMG_9911.jpg?w=780" />The district is evaluating several options for its buildings and may close, rebuild or rehab some aging schools.

As AI invades more creative spaces, whether we ask it to or not, a coalition of actors, musicians, writers, and other artists have shared a new statement with a blunt message: stealing isn’t innovation. “America’s creative community is the envy of the world and creates jobs, economic growth, and exports. But rather than respect and protect this valuable asset, some of the biggest tech companies, many backed by private equity and other funders, are using American creators’ work to build AI platforms without authorization or regard for copyright law,” reads the statement. “Artists, writers, and creators of all kinds are banding together with a simple message: Stealing our work is not innovation. It’s not progress. It’s theft – plain and simple. A better way exists – through licensing deals and partnerships, some AI companies have taken the responsible, ethical route to obtaining the content and materials they wish to use. It is possible to have it all. We can have advanced, rapidly developing AI and ensure creators’ rights are respected.” The letter has already received about 700 signatures, according to Deadline. Some of the names we recognized, in no particular order, include Vince Gilligan, Winnie Holzman, OK Go, Olivia Munn, Cyndi Lauper, Jennifer Hudson, They Might Be Giants, Sean Astin, George Saunders, Scarlett Johansson, Kristen Bell, R.E.M., Alex Winter, Cate Blanchett, Chaka Khan, Bonnie Raitt, Aimee Mann, and Fran Drescher. The question of AI theft has been circulating for years now and likely isn’t going away any time soon. While massive companies like Disney have the option to enter into lucrative deals with OpenAI (after dubbing a rival AI company a “bottomless pit of plagiarism”) the majority of actors, novelists, and whoever else does not have this option. Last year, a group of writers brought a lawsuit against Anthropic AI, alleging that the tech used their copyrighted writing without permission or payment to train its Claude model. The company settled that lawsuit in August.

Typically, reunion tours are reserved for beloved acts getting up in front of fans old and new in order to, hopefully, instill something aside from pure nostalgia into their playing of the hits. A bit of age-earned gravitas, or time-honed virtuosity, or at least some erosion of self-seriousness might add depth to the fan service. But that can sometimes be wishful thinking, and the trip down memory lane can be a sobering one—a depressingly staid and cynical attempt to recapture a fleeting magic, every failure to do so exposed by the glaring house lights and an extra-attentive audience. This is what befalls writer-director Christophe Gans, who shuffles his way back to the Silent Hill franchise two decades after first bringing the games to the big screen (the series’ on-screen hopes later fully dashed by the messy production of its sequel, Revelation). Somewhere between a reboot and a remake, Return To Silent Hill is the worst film of the franchise so far, and a reminder that you can’t go home again—even if your home is the haunted hamlet of Silent Hill. While Return To Silent Hill takes most of its plot from Silent Hill 2—where James Sunderland (Jeremy Irvine) is summoned to the spooky town by his late love Mary (Hannah Emily Anderson)—it never strays far from the images of Gans’ original adaptation. This is the film’s biggest mistake: Somehow, 20 years of technological development and filmmaking experience has made every single facet of this film uglier and duller than 2006’s Silent Hill, probably because this time around, Gans’ team worked with a fraction of that movie’s $50 million budget. When drunken pseudo-punk painter James, looking a bit like if Tim Robbins was in Supernatural and hadn’t slept for a month, stumbles back to the idyllic lakeside town where he first met Mary, he finds it a rotted, ash-covered, hyper-digital wasteland. But it doesn’t feel abandoned, per se, just empty—like how so many green-screen-heavy films can’t shake the sense that they were predominately shot inside a warehouse. Each frame is so sparsely filled and every shot is so wide that there’s no creepiness or claustrophobia in its bare monotone; when James crashes over a trashcan, it’s not a tension-breaking shock, but the obvious bumblings of a fool. This style evokes late-era Stranger Things, where each new shot is entirely disconnected from the preceding one, where an actor’s only direction is to stand on a dot and trust that FX artists will salvage things in post. It is through this blurry and ugly blizzard of blue-gray mush that James trudges, driven only by his need to run through a list of recognizable touchstones—a staticky radio, for example—from the game. Yet, Easter eggs only go so far when they’re planted in what looks like a fan film, where Pyramid Head and Bubble Head Nurses at least only come off as cosplay and not, like the other monsters, completely unfinished. Where the towering, musclebound avatar of guilt and the contortionist healthcare providers are simply a little more cartoonish and a lot less scary than their previous on-screen iterations, other creatures are hilariously janky, like they needed another round of textures applied to their too-smooth placeholder models. Poor James often looks like he’s being attacked by badly animated production logos. But gamers have been forgiving bad graphics for as long as there have been graphics, as long as other qualities—mood, story, gameplay—coalesce into a compelling experience. In Return To Silent Hill, though, this slapdash aesthetic is representative of the whole. Co-written by Gans, his Beauty And The Beast collaborator Sandra Vo-Anh, and Will Schneider (of The Crow remake), the plot follows a similar tack as the visuals, one reminiscent of an old punchline: Terrible, and such large portions! Guided by Irvine’s incessant voiceover, James’ exploration of the town dips in and out of reality, a cascading series of dismissively handled fake-outs, hallucinations, and bad dreams,…