Last week, Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino's highly anticipated 11th feature Artificial had a history-making world premiere at the 64th New York Film Festival. The film has been stirring up buzz for months, in part due to the poignant subject matter, which has caused some studios to back out from distribution amid the continual dance between Hollywood and Big Tech.
Artificial tells a story about OpenAI, specifically focusing on the company’s co-founders Sam Altman (Andrew Garfield) and Ilya Sutskever (Yura Borisov). The story tracks how their dynamic led to a mysterious yet very dramatic firing and rehiring of Altman as CEO, based on real events in 2023. It also includes the consequential fruit of their OpenAI labors: ChatGPT.
The speculation of subject-matter-based censorship do not seem so conspiratorial when faced with the fact that Amazon MGM Studios dropped Artificial from its planned release shortly after Amazon signed a $50 billion investment partnership with OpenAI. Ultimately, New York-based independent distributor NEON took the movie in.
The movie is a slice of a very wide story, the results of which we’ve all been living through ever since. Some speculated that Artificial would be awkwardly attempting to capture a moment way too early, or would consist of underbaked social commentary like Guadagnino’s last film, After the Hunt. Lucky for Guadagnino lovers (like myself) and those keeping up with AI (I try my best), Artificial’s post-premiere reception is extremely promising.
In Variety, chief film critic Owen Gleiberman wrote a glowing review that feels like listening to someone describe a delicious meal they've had to wait two months to eat (the movie doesn’t release in U.S. theaters until December 25). Gleiberman writes,
“It’s been a long time since I saw a film that attained this next-level feeling of topical charge… as you watch the film, AI comes alive as a subject. It becomes real — you touch what it is, what it means, what the stakes are. The result is a movie that’s at once inspiring and deeply chilling, and when it’s over you’re in a different place.”
Matt Neglia, editor-in-Chief of Next Best Picture, said Artificial “might be the most urgently relevant movie of our time… the movie of the moment that we may not even be able to look back on if the vision of the future it presents comes true.”
Neglia implies a truly chilling and dystopian conclusion, which is unlike most of Guadagnino’s tender, sensory, grounded works. However, I think we can breathe a sigh of relief that such heavy material—nothing short of the dread of humanity's collapse—will be presented to us by the hands of such a keen observer, who has spent a life’s work contemplating what makes our lives worth living.
All signs point to Artificial reaching high levels of both terror and entertainment and being an overall hit and potentially regarded as a sister film to the timeless and widely loved The Social Network (2010), which also stars Garfield. The cast reflects the immediacy and recency of the content: Yura Borisov, in his second English-language role since Anora (2024), Cooper Hoffman, the sought-after young actor and son of Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Monica Barbaro, a fresh face from her portrayal of Joan Baez in A Complete Unknown (2024). It also happens to arrive on the scene around the same time as The Social Reckoning—Aaron Sorkin’s sequel to The Social Network—is released, lending itself to an easy and interesting comparison of the two.
If the movie does as well as predicted in the form of critical accolades, box office success, and the general cinephile stamp of approval, it will become one of NYFF’s most successful world premieres, which will only add to the festival’s momentum from its major 2025 premiere, Marty Supreme. It would also fuel the fire of Guadagnino’s career as a filmmaker who works closely with the NYFF.
Guadagnino has been treated very well by the festival, which is hosted at and with Lincoln Center. The NYFF has presented most of the films in the later half of his filmography, including Call Me by Your Name (2017), Bones and All (2022), Queer (2024), and After the Hunt (2025). With Artificial’s rising acclaim, we can see in real time how an enduring relationship between a filmmaker and a festival is mutually beneficial: festivals provide a platform to whoever they deem worthy, and the right filmmakers will increase the acclaim of that very platform as their work gains recognition.
Then again, there is also a big risk in that exchange. Artificial tells the story of real people—extremely powerful people—who are likely to see the film and be non-too-pleased with the way they're represented and stamped into history without their input or even their consent. The festival that proudly touts a movie of that nature would be seen as guilty by association. Then again, if existentially disrupting the lives of others is a good reason for stopping what you’re doing, the story of Sam Altman and OpenAI would be very, very different.
