"Artificial," Luca Guadagnino's long-gestating drama about the founding and near-collapse of OpenAI, had its world premiere Monday night at Alice Tully Hall as part of the 64th New York Film Festival, and the reviews that followed by Tuesday morning made clear the wait was worth it. Andrew Garfield stars as OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman in a film critics are already calling one of the sharpest pieces of filmmaking yet made about the artificial-intelligence boom.
Written by Simon Rich, the film traces the company's turbulent arc from Altman's ouster by OpenAI's board in November 2023 to his reinstatement five days later, and reaches back further still, opening in a Toronto classroom in 2003 where a teenage Ilya Sutskever, played by Yura Borisov, first meets artificial-intelligence researcher Geoffrey Hinton, played by Mark Rylance. Monica Barbaro plays former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati, Ike Barinholtz appears as Elon Musk, and the supporting cast includes Cooper Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman and Chris O'Dowd. Damon Albarn of Blur composed the score.
The film's path to the screen was almost as fraught as its subject. Amazon MGM Studios had the project largely finished when it dropped "Artificial" in June, months after Amazon closed a reported $50 billion investment in OpenAI. Neon picked up worldwide rights days later for no money upfront and is now mounting an Oscar-qualifying theatrical run beginning Christmas Day, with a wider release to follow in 2027.
Critics Call It Guadagnino's Best Film in Years
The first reviews landed within hours of the Alice Tully Hall screening, and they were strikingly positive. In Variety's review, Owen Gleiberman argued the film is the real successor to "The Social Network," praising Borisov's performance as Sutskever as possibly "the performance of the year" and writing that Garfield plays Altman as a "corporate seducer" whose charm curdles as the story unfolds. The Hollywood Reporter's David Rooney was similarly enthusiastic in his own review, calling the Garfield-Borisov pairing a riveting study in ethical opposites set against the real-world scramble that produced modern AI. Variety's roundup of early audience and critic reactions out of the festival described the film as "provocative," "downright horrifying" and, for several viewers, Guadagnino's best work in a decade.
"The most remarkable thing about Luca Guadagnino's sly and sobering new film is that it finds the perfect tone to tell the story of how we arrived at the AI precipice. If ever there was a movie for its moment, this is it."
Dennis Lim, Artistic Director, New York Film Festival
An Awards Push Already Taking Shape
Neon has mapped out its campaign strategy before the film has even opened commercially: Garfield will be pushed in the supporting actor race, while Borisov, whose Sutskever carries much of the film's moral weight, will run in lead. At the premiere, Garfield described studying Altman closely before filming. "I remember seeing Sam testifying to Congress for the first time, way back when," he told reporters on the carpet, recalling his early, more admiring impression of the executive before deeper research complicated the picture he carried into the role.
The film arrives in the same week as Aaron Sorkin's "The Social Reckoning," a belated follow-up to "The Social Network" that revisits Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, a coincidence that several critics, Gleiberman included, have already seized on. Where Sorkin's film looks backward at the damage wrought by social media, "Artificial" is pitched as a story still being written, tracking an industry that, in Gleiberman's words, invented "a genie, and maybe a very dark one," without fully reckoning with what it had built.
For Guadagnino, the premiere marks a return to the festival after his 2025 opening-night film "After the Hunt," and a sharper swing at topicality than that film managed, according to several reviews. "Artificial" now heads toward its Christmas Day awards-qualifying run in New York and Los Angeles, before expanding into wide release early next year, setting up what is likely to be one of the more closely watched award-season entries of the winter, not least because its subject is still very much shaping the news.
