Artificial

Luca Guadagnino has spent the past decade moving between registers, from the summer romance of Call Me by Your Name to the coven horror of Suspiria and the Burroughs adaptation Queer. Artificial is his first film drawn from recent headlines. Written by the humorist and former Saturday Night Live writer Simon Rich, it was developed at Amazon MGM, which dropped it in June 2026; Neon acquired worldwide rights weeks later. An American, British and Italian co-production between Heyday Films, JF Films and Guadagnino's Frenesy, it had its world premiere in the Main Slate of the New York Film Festival in October 2026, followed by a Gala screening at the BFI London Film Festival.

The setting is OpenAI in November 2023, at the height of the AI boom, when its chief scientist Ilya Sutskever and the company's board moved against chief executive Sam Altman. Andrew Garfield plays Altman opposite Yura Borisov as Sutskever, with Monica Barbaro, Cooper Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman, Chris O'Dowd, Ike Barinholtz and Mark Rylance in support. Malik Hassan Sayeed shot it on 35mm in San Francisco and Turin, Jonathan Anderson designed the costumes in his third collaboration with the director, and Damon Albarn wrote the score and original songs.

Early reviews have been warm if not unanimous. The film holds 95 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes from its first 39 notices, though some critics found the satire gentler than its subject invites; in Variety, Owen Gleiberman called it a brilliant but playful docudrama. Garfield has drawn the most consistent praise, along with a Gotham Award nomination. Major European directors have rarely tried to dramatise the people building the technology now reshaping everyday life.