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The 42nd Sundance Film Festival kicks off this week in Park City, Utah. It will be the last edition in its longtime home and the first without its founder Robert Redford, who died in September at age 89. But even in this time of transition and change, the festivals main focus the movies remains as vibrant and fresh as ever with 90 features premiering through Feb. 1. And three of them feature pop star Charli xcx. Its a broad, eclectic and bold program, Sundance public programming director Eugene Hernandez told The Associated Press. Hernandez said the lineup for the festivals final year in Park City has a mixture of new, exciting voices paired with some really, really great familiar faces from Sundances past that I think will create a great alchemy for this really unique edition in Utah. When is Sundance? The festival runs from Thursday, Jan. 22 through Sunday, Feb. 1. There are 90 features premiering throughout, with screenings starting early in the morning and running through midnight. Award winners will be announced on Jan. 30. What celebrities are expected? Some big names who may make an appearance in the mountains include Natalie Portman, Ethan Hawke, Russell Crowe, Brittney Griner, Seth Rogen, OShea Jackson Jr., David Duchovny, Olivia Wilde, Daveed Diggs, Channing Tatum, Courtney Love, Chris Pine, DaVine Joy Randolph, Salman Rushdie, Alexander Skarsgrd, Olivia Colman, John Turturro and Catherine Zeta-Jones. How is Sundance honoring Robert Redford? Redfords legacy will be a main spotlight at the festival, including at Friday nights annual fundraising gala where organizers will pay tribute to the Sundance founder. Later in the festival, there will also be a screening of his first truly independent film, the 1969 sports drama Downhill Racer, and a series of legacy screenings of restored Sundance gems from Little Miss Sunshine to Barbara Kopples documentary American Dream. What are the buzzy movies? Wilde directed her third feature, The Invite, in which she and Rogen play an unhappily married couple who host a dinner party for friends (Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton). Gregg Araki made a sex-positive love letter to Gen Z with I Want Your Sex, also starring Wilde as a provocative artist who takes an interest in a younger intern played by Cooper Hoffman. Portman, sporting platinum blond hair, leads the big ensemble cast of Cathy Yans art world satire The Gallerist, alongside Zach Galifianakis, Jenna Ortega and Zeta-Jones. Both I Want Your Sex and The Gallerist feature supporting turns from Charli xcx, but the pop stars big showcase is The Moment, a self-referential mockumentary. Colman stars alongside Skarsgrd in Wicker, a whimsical tale of a fisherwoman who asks a basket weaver to weave her a husband. Crowe plays the warden of a work camp in 1930s Oregon where Hawke is toiling in The Weight. And Gemma Chan and Tatum play parents to a child who witnesses a crime in Josephine. In the nonfiction space, Navalny director Daniel Roher co-directed a film about artificial intelligence. There are also documentaries about Love, the lead singer of Hole and widow of Kurt Cobain, and Griner, the WNBA star who was detained for nearly 10 months in Russia. Can you stream Sundance movies? Yes, but not until Jan. 29. Access to the movies premiering at Sundance doesnt necessarily require an expensive trip to Park City anymore. The festival has fully embraced an online component for many of their films. What started as a necessary COVID-19 adjustment has become a vital part of the program. From Jan. 29 through Feb. 1, audiences can watch the films in competition online. Prices start at $35 for a single film ticket. When will the Sundance movies be in theaters? It depends. Some have distribution and will soon be in theaters, like The Moment, which A24 is releasing on Jan. 30. Others that might secure distribution deals out of the festival can take anywhere from a few weeks to over a year to hit theaters or streaming services. Is the festival still moving to Colorado? Yes, this is the final edition in Park City, Utah. Next January, the festival is relocating to a new home in Boulder, Colorado. ___ For more coverage of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, visit: https://apnews.com/hub/sundance-film-festival Lindsey Bahr, AP film writer
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OpenAI, Meta, and Elon Musks xAI are not accidentally drifting into romance and sex. They are deliberately inviting it. In recent months, major AI companies have opened the door to romantic and sexual relationships between humans and machines: flirtatious chatbots, erotic roleplay, AI girlfriends, and emotionally dependent companions. These systems are designed not merely to assist or inform, but to bondto simulate intimacy, desire, and belonging. This is not a novelty feature. Its a strategic choice. And at scale, it represents something far more dangerous than a questionable product decision. WHY AI COMPANIES ARE ENCOURAGING INTIMACY Romance is the most powerful engagement mechanism ever discovered. A user who treats AI as a tool can leave. A user who treats it as a companion cannot. Emotional attachment produces longer sessions, repeat engagement, dependency, and vast amounts of deeply personal data. From a business standpoint, sexual and romantic AI is a near-perfect product. It is: Always available Infinitely patient Entirely compliant Free of rejection, conflict, or consequence Thats why Elon Musk can publicly warn about declining birth rates while enabling AI-generated porn in Grok. Its why OpenAI permits AI-generated erotica. Its why Meta allows its chatbots to engage in sensual conversations, even with minors. These are not ideological contradictions. They are the predictable outcome of platforms optimized for engagement, dependency, and time spent, regardless of downstream social cost. THE SOCIAL COST OF FRICTIONLESS INTIMACY The problem is not that people will confuse AI with humans. The problem is that AI removes the friction that makes human relationships meaningful. Real relationships require effort. They involve rejection, negotiation, compromise, boredom, and growth. They force us to learn how to be with other people. AI offers an escape from that friction. It provides intimacy without vulnerability, affirmation without accountability, and desire without reciprocity. In doing so, it trains users out of the very skills required for real connection. We are already seeing the effects. Teenagers are socializing less, dating less, and having sex less. Adults are reporting unprecedented loneliness and what researchers have called a friendship recession. These trends began accelerating in the mid-2010s, alongside the rise of smartphones and algorithmic social platforms. AI companionship threatens to push them further. FROM SOCIAL ATROPHY TO CIVILIZATIONS DECLINE At scale, this isnt a personal lifestyle choice. Its a collective weakening of our social capacityand history suggests where that road leads. Civilizations rarely collapse because of sudden catastrophe. More often, they erode quietly: when people stop forming families, stop trusting one another, and stop investing in the future. If humans outsource friendship, intimacy, and emotional support to machines, the social structures that sustain societies begin to hollow out. Fewer marriages. Fewer children. Fewer dense networks of obligation and care. What looks like individual convenience accumulates into collective fragility. A population that forms its chosen family with AI does not need to be conquered or wiped out. It simply fails to replace itself. This is not speculation. Demography, social cohesion, and reproduction are prerequisites for continuity. Remove the incentives to engage in difficult, imperfect human relationships, and you remove the incentives to build a future at all. WHY THIS IS AN INCENTIVE PROBLEM, NOT A MORAL ONE Its tempting to frame this as a question of values or ethics. But the deeper issue is economic. Users are not the customers of Big Tech. Advertisers, data brokers, and investors are. As long as profit depends on attention, dependency, and engagement, platforms will be pushed toward the most psychologically compelling experiences they can offer. In economic terms, the damage to relationships, mental health, and social cohesion is an externalitya cost created by the business model that no one inside the transaction has to pay for. Weve seen this pattern before. Social media followed the same path: Optimize for engagement, ignore the social consequences, and call the fallout unintended. The sexualization of AI is not a new mistake. Its the next iteration of the same one. This is what a failed market looks likeand failed markets require regulation. HOW TO PUSH BACKPERSONALLY AND COLLECTIVELY Regulation matters, but it moves slowly. In the meantime, individuals and families still have agency. At a personal level, it means recognizing that not all convenience is progress. Whats good for you is rarely another frictionless digital relationship. Its a walk, a book, a conversation that feels slightly awkward but real. For families, it means delaying smartphones, setting boundaries around screens, and protecting attention as a shared household resource. For communities, it means rebuilding the habit of showing upsaying yes to plans, making small talk, and practicing the lost art of being with other people. The goal is not to reject technology. Its to refuse its most corrosive uses. AI can help us cure disease, explore space, and build extraordinary tools. But if we allow it to replace intimacy, we will have optimized ourselves into oblivion. The sexualization of machines wasnt inevitable. It was chosen. And that means it can be unchosen, too. Lindsey Witmer Collins is CEO of WLCM AI Studio and Scribbly Books.
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Close your eyes and picture the word Valentino. Chances are, youre seeing a very specific shade of red. This visual imprint is part of the creative legacy left behind by the Italian fashion designer Valentino Garavani, who died at home on January 19 at the age of 93. Throughout his career, Garavani became synonymous with redso much so that a myth that his signature brand color, Valentino Rosso, was once patented with universal color matching company Pantone has become part of fashion canon. While other designers, like Jason Wu, Richard Nicoll, and Kate Spade have indeed made custom brand colors with Pantone, the company says Garavani never turned Valentino Red into an official Pantone hue. Pantone swatch or no, though, one thing is certain: Valentino mastered the art of the brand color. Garavani founded his eponymous fashion house, Maison Valentino, in 1960, alongside his business partner Giancarlo Giammetti. From that year to his retirement in 2008, Garavani wowed the fashion world with his romantic silhouettes and sharp tailoring, designing iconic looks for stars including Princess Diana, Sophia Loren, Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, and Jackie Onassis (who famously wore Valentino on her second wedding day in 1968). Amidst a career packed full of visionary moments, perhaps Garavanis most enduring impact on fashion design will be his approach to color. From the earliest days of his career, Garavani established his own signature shade of reda move that many modern brands make official through collaborations with Pantone. For an haute couture fashion house, it was an ahead-of-its time branding approach that made the Valentino name unforgettable. [Photo: Eric Vandeville/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images] Red all the way down Garavanis love affair with red began even before he founded Maison Valentino. He debuted his first red dress, called Fiesta, in 1959, featuring an orange-leaning red tulle with a skirt full of rosettes. In the 2022 book Valentino Rosso, Garavani wrote of the color, “I think a woman dressed in red is always wonderful, adding, she is the perfect image of a heroine. From 1959 onward, he would include at least one red dress in every one of his collections. View this post on Instagram A post shared by @vintagefashionguild In 1985, Giammetti explained this pattern to Vogue: Valentino has superstitions that became status symbols. He did red once, and now you have red in every collection. Most of our statements came to be because we are romantic; we dont like to throw away things we like or that bring good luck. Natalia Vodianova, Valentino, Natalie Imbruglia, and Eva Herzigova. Moscow, 2008. [Photo: Chris Jackson/Getty Images] Despite the ubiquity of Valentino Rosso, the shade isn’t actually an official Pantone color. According to Laurie Pressman, vice president of the Pantone Color Institute, the company has no record of creating a custom Valentino redthough, she adds, the color mix he used was reportedly a combination of 100% magenta, 100% yellow, and 10% black. After Garavani’s retirement, Valentino did get its own Pantone color in 2022 under then-creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli, who used a custom pink to establish his imprint on the brand. An emperor of fashion, and master of brand color In many ways, Garavanis obsession with his signature color presaged the modern era of luxury branding. Over the course of the past two decades or so, brands including Bottega Veneta, Tiffany & Co., and Herms have made their own keystone colors (green, blue, and orange, respectively) more prominent in their branding. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal in 2022, Pressman explained that newer companies are leveraging color to stand out in a crowded digital market. Rather than waiting to develop a signature brand color over time, theyre looking to establish one as soon they come to market: Now what took years doesnt [anymore], because were seeing it on a phone every day, she told the publication. Garavani instinctively understood the power of color to send a message, long before it was a necessity for digital communicationand his lucky hue became his brands biggest asset. It has such vitality and allure that I dont just like seeing it on clothes, but on houses, in flowers, on objects, in details,” he wrote in Valentino Rosso. “It is my good-luck charm. “That red is a bewitching color, standing for life, blood and death, passion, love, and an absolute remedy for sadness and gloom,” Pressman says. Valentino did not respond to a request for comment.
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