'Artificial' skewers Sam Altman at New York Film Festival

Luca Guadagnino's 'Artificial' arrives after a summer in which AmazonMGM quietly dropped the film following Amazon's $50 billion deal with OpenAI, a sequence that makes the movie's hostile portrait of the company feel less like fiction than like score-settling. The film turns the usual Silicon Valley biopic inside out: where 'The Social Network' made its subjects look like imposing builders, 'Artificial' shows them skipping, swaggering, and dousing one another with bottles of Jarritos.

The film's ethical center is Ilya Sutskever, played by Yuri Borisov as a researcher temperamentally incapable of lying, who pleads for safeguards and slower development while nearly everyone around him argues for growth. A Chinese investor seeking the technology for drones and face-recognition systems is rebuffed early by Sutskever and his mentor Geoffrey Hinton, and the film treats the resulting competition as a race no one can call off.

Whether that reading lands with general audiences is unclear, since the film is a star-studded Hollywood product premiering with Rolex sponsorship against warnings it treats as urgent. The test may be whether viewers already uneasy about AI take the film's alarmism seriously, or whether its contempt for its characters—engineers, investors, and safety advocates alike—reads as an inside joke.