Congrats to both Luca Guadagnino and Neon regarding the just-announced NY Film Festival premiere of Artificial on Mønday, 10.5. Ditto the forthcoming gala screening at the 2026 BFI London Film Festival on Sunday, October 11.
I’ll bet Venice’s Alberto Barbera felt slighted by this, not to mention Julie Huntsinger at Telluride. Not personally, of course, but professionally or reputationally. I love, however, what NYFF honcho Dennis Lim has written about Artificial.
“Read Pre-Guadagnino Draft of ‘Artificial'”, posted two months ago (7.1.26):
Yesterday I read an early 2025 draft of Simon Rich‘s Artificial. Pic was helmed last year by Luca Guadagnino; Neon will distribute later this year. The script has since been revised, massaged, rewritten, punched up, refined and re-textured, but at least Rich’s version acquainted me with the basic bones.
It’s basically an innocent genius vs. corrupt tech bro origin story — about the journey of OpenAI brainiac Ilya Sutskever (Anora‘s Yura Borisov) and how OpenAI became a formidable industry player under CEO Sam Altman (Andrew Garfield), and also how the potential culture-killing malevolence of AI was foreseen early on.
Altman’s indifference to the latent evil eventually resulted in a November 2023 boardroom coup in which Altman was abruptly whacked, but then reinstated days later.
Without getting into specifics I found the first 45 or 50 pages of Rich’s Artificial well-ordered and absorbing as far as they went, but it starts to get much better starting around the 50-page mark, and then it really pulls you in starting around page 60. The last 45 pages are top-tier and suitably climactic. The genius-nerd, savant-like Sutskever is a socially fumbling dweeb; Altman, of course, is an agreeably smooth and manipulative bastard…an excellent villain.
I can at least say that it’s fun to hang with OpenAI CTO Mira Murati (Monica “Joan Baez” Barbaro), Geoffrey Hinton (Mark Rylance), Elon Musk (Ike Barinholtz), Anthropic founder Dario Amodei (I was guessing he might have been played by Chris O’Dowd but perhaps not).
From Clayton Davis‘s 7.1. Variety story titled “Could Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial Be This Oscar Season’s The Apprentice?”: “What makes Artificial so fascinating is that the film is reportedly very good. Conversations with industry professionals who have seen an unfinished cut that currently runs north of two hours describe it as Guadagnino’s answer to The Social Network. That is its own irony, given that Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, a standalone follow-up to the 2010 best picture-nominated drama, is set to open Oct. 9.
“Two Silicon Valley sagas in a single season could either feed off or eat into each other,” Davis concludes. HE response: Only the idiots will shrug off the idea of seeing two Silicon Valley dramas within the same award-season window.
