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“Brilliant. And scary.”
That was my instant reply to a text from a friend the morning after we saw the world premiere of Luca Guadagnino’s “Artificial” at the New York Film Festival. The NYFF has not been known for world premieres, or least it wasn’t till last year, when A24 unveiled Josh Safdie’s “Marty Supreme” in a surprise screening event, launching it toward great critical acclaim, a world box office near $200 million, and Oscar nominations including Best Picture. That success reportedly inspired other distributors to see the festival as a place for world premieres, and it may have inspired the NYFF as well: this year it hosted seven.
As has been widely reported, Guadagnino’s film was produced by Amazon MGM, but then dropped and picked up by Neon. Did the larger company fear Silicon Valley’s reception of the film? While “Artificial” takes a probing approach to AI, it doesn’t come across as an indictment of the forces producing it. Rather, it is a very engaging, dramatic and sometimes quite funny portrait of a particular slice of that culture, one that developed over several years and led to a particularly notorious incident: the attempt of the board of OpenAI to oust its charismatic CEO, Sam Altman, and his fast and successful campaign to turn the tables and overthrow his opponents.
What do such boardroom machinations have to do with the promise and perils of Artificial Intelligence? Actually, “Artificial” makes a strong case that the human element, all the imponderables of personality, ego and conflicting agendas, shapes how this technology is being ushered into the world, and what it may do to it.
The film, please note, doesn’t predict anything–neither utopia nor dystopia. Yet in focusing on the recent past rather than the impending future, it shows how the rapid development of AI has posed an accelerating set of questions and problematic possibilities. At the Q&A that followed the NYFF premiere, the author of the film’s original screenplay, Simon Rich (former SNL writer and son of columnist Frank Rich), said he’d been concerned with AI since a childhood friend warned him of its dangers. He’s evidently studied the subject in depth, because the script of “Artificial” brings a sense of authenticity to a complex story even while necessarily condensing it. That Rich’s fast-paced dialogue may sometimes overwhelm viewers with flurries of tech jargon only serves the story’s immersive flow.
It begins in Toronto in 2003 when a 17-year-old native of Russia, Ilya Sutskever (Yura Borisov), enters the lab of future Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton (a terrific Mark Rylance) and so impresses the brilliant professor that a partnership is soon born, one that will take them to Silicon Valley and the hallways and workspaces of Google. A decade-plus later, their pioneering work on AI attracts the interest of Stanford dropout Sam Altman (Andrew Garfield) and his pal Elon Musk (Ike Barinholtz). The charming but morally slippery Altman recognizes the genius of upright, idealistic Sutskever and offers a corporate collaboration, one that’s meant to bring immeasurable benefits to the human race, while of course enriching the technology’s masterminds.
OpenAI is born in 2016. The boardroom battle that forms the story’s crux comes in 2023. In the intervening years, we see the emergence of a culture of fast-living, celebratory young people who are forcing the onset of a technological revolution the nature of which no one understands. For viewers who’ve followed this tale in news reports and magazine articles, it’s fascinating to see how Guadagnino and Rich bring the characters, their labors and conflicts to life. But perhaps the best thing about the film is that it doesn’t require any advance knowledge of its subject and milieu; newcomers are just as likely to be swept up in its torrent of events and emotions.
This is filmmaking of a very high order. Arguably the best thing Guadagnino has done (it’s leagues beyond his “After the Hunt,” which opened the NYFF last year), “Artificial” has a great sense of atmosphere and a constantly evolving narrative drive. As for the acting, it might be envisioned as a describing a semi-circle. On one side, there’s the film’s most focused and realistic performance (and the one that will deservedly garner the most praise), Borisov’s Ilya Sutskever. On the other side, there’s Barinholtz’s cartoonish Elon Musk, which is so broad it almost doesn’t work.
In between these extremes, and borrowing elements of both, Garfield’s Sam Altman is forceful but duplicitous, a gifted leader and a quasi-sociopath. The more the story progresses, and especially at the climactic showdown with Sutskever and OpenAI’s board, the more crucial Altman’s personal power becomes. He’s obviously not the only billionaire calling the shots in the AI game, but as a type, he makes you wonder: Do we really want the planet’s future in his hands?
The world premiere of “Artificial” at the NYFF had an eerie timeliness. Although it could not have been predicted by the filmmakers or the festival, just a month before the film’s screening, a 27-year-old AI researcher named Jacob Coxon, who had worked at OpenAI and resigned from Anthropic, issued a statement saying, “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade…[M]any executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible—but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.”
That warning has reverberated around the world, and has led to wide discussions about the dangers of AI and the need to contain them. Among other, greater consequences, it might well make “Artificial” the most important dramatic movie of 2026. And while I understand Neon’s Oscar strategy of releasing the film on Christmas Day, I came out of its world premiere not only shaken and dazed, but also wishing it could go into theaters the next day.
Notes on some of the other world premieres at the 2026 New York Film Festival:
Mani Haghighi’s “I Deserve a Lover Whose Every Rise Sets Fiery Dooms Raging Across the Skies” is a documentary portrait of a two Iranians as ecccentric as the film’s title: painter and conceptual artist Nasser Bakshi and his partner Roghayeh Najdi. The duo have assembled a vast archive of art works and found objects that chronicle the lives of ordinary Iranians across generations, and the film (which was shot just prior to the current U.S./Israel war on Iran) explores their world in an amusingly digressive and unconventional way. A leader in the post-Kiarostami generation of Iranian filmmakers, Haghighi is not primarily a documentarian (his masterpiece “A Dragon Arrives!” really deserves a belated U.S. release) but it’s great to see a film of his in the NYFF.
I imagine that Tony Gilroy’s “Behemoth!” will have its admirers, but I am unfortunately not one. Which is a shame: I’m a fan of Gilroy’s Jason Bourne scripts and especially his complex, brainy 2007 thriller “Michael Clayton,” which he wrote and directed. His new film begins promisingly, as a professional cellist (Pedro Pascal) enters a Los Angeles recording studio to work on the score of a new movie. Gilroy reportedly worked with nine composers in fashioning the musical dimension of his drama, and that element of the movie does have its pleasures and fascinations. But they merely form the aural wallpaper of a hodgepodge story that jumps around in time and space chronicling the cellist’s soap-operatic life. While Pascal, one of our best actors, gives an energetic, committed performance, the character never becomes more than a philandering boor.
Tom McCarthy’s “The Statement” is even more tiresome than Gilroy’s film. This numbing talkfest is a dramatization of a literal meeting that took place over three days in October, 1980, in a Florida hotel. The participants were 20 or so scientists and policymakers assigned by the U.S. Congress to come up with a statement about carbon dioxide and climate change. The film offers some nice performances by actors including John Turturro, Paul Rudd and Paul Giamatti, but its drama is as boring as the premise sounds.
In ranking the films of 2016, I put Ava DuVernay’s “13th” in the number one spot. This terrific documentary looked at the way the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, was misused to create a new form of slavery in the American prison system. The film got and deserved widespread critical acclaim, but that general approbation almost surely won’t greet its sequel, “14th,” which had its world premiere in the Closing Night slot at the NYFF. For the reasons why, please see Jourdain Searles’ review.
from Roger Ebert https://ift.tt/18C3Rzq
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