Japanese auteur Kore-eda Hirokazu returns to competition at Cannes with “Sheep in the Box,” a thorny yet sensitive meditation on the encroachment of AI on our ability to let go of those who are no longer with us. In the film, Otone (Ayase Haruka) and Kensuke (Yamamoto Daigo) adopt a humanoid android (Kuwaki Rimu) who resembles their late son, Kakeru. “To think about AI is to think about humanity,” Kore-eda tells Variety. “My earlier film, ‘Air Doll,’ was also about the dynamics between humans and non-humans, but here the non-human is also the dead. I was interested in AI before I began, but I found myself gravitating towards it as I developed the project.” Kore-eda came across an article about a Chinese business that brings people “back to life” by feeding information about them into a computer. “I have my own regrets about things that I was not able to tell my mother, so I understand people who regret not having been able to communicate enough,” he says.…