ARTIFICIAL***** - BFI London Film Festival 2026 - Day 5

ARTIFICIAL is basically THE SOCIAL NETWORK but for OpenAI: it's the origin story of the company that launched ChatGPT and so literally changed the world.  What it is NOT is the story of Sam Altman. Because whatever Mark Zuckerberg's infinite failings, he at least wrote the code for Facebook. By contrats, Sam Altman is just an emotionally manipulative liar who excels at sales.  The real story of OpenAI, as penned by screenwriter Simon Rich (INSIDE OUT), is the story of Ilya Sutskever (ANORA's Yura Borisov).  

Ilya is the super smart mathmo who teams up with Nobel Prize-winning academic Geoff Hinton and basically invents AI, sells the idea to Google, only to part ways with Geoff and join OpenAI when Geoff keeps preaching patience. Of course Ilya thinks Sam Altman is his friend and believes in their mission of creating an open AI away from the control of any single corporation, only to have Sam sell that dream from under him for Microsoft's cash and compute. So Ilya famously pushes Sam off the board only to have Microsoft's CEO and half the OpenAI employees go against him and reinstall their messiah. 

ARTIFICIAL worked for me as a film because it’s really about Ilya with Sam Altman as a side character.  The actor playing Ilya is so good and his character arc is so compelling that I was captivated for the two hour plus running time. As for Andrew Garfield he just reprises his role as Jonathan Larsen in TICK, TICK...BOOM! but with the camp turned up to a thousand and some weird de-ageing shit going on that makes him look like Spock I think he mistook weird physical ticks for an actual performance. And he probably needs to stop playing gay characters like some kind of SNL skit camp kabuki that’s borderline homophobic. It's a totally weird choice but something that's not surprising given director Luca Guadagnino's fondness for excess.  If Yura Borisov is in a serious biopic, Garfield is in COYOTE VS ACME. And Ike Barinholtz's portrayal of Elon Musk is straight out of SNL.  It's just a super-weird choice.

By contrast, I really loved Simon Rich's screenplay. He tells a complicated story well and keeps a lot of the intricacies of the boardroom drama. I think he gets Altman's basic psychopathy right, but this goes against the broad performance from Garfield. Garfield got a lot of laughs from the Festival audience, but if Sam Altman were so laughable in real life, he wouldn't have been able to manipulate so may people.  I also really loved Damon Albarn’s score.

ARTIFICIAL is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 2hrs 20m. It will be released in the USA on December 25th and in the UK on January 22nd 2027/

CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE

CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE is a disappointingly piss-poor action-comedy from the director of the infinitely more amusing and heart-warming WE'RE THE MILLERS, Rawson Marshall Thurber. It stars Dwayne Johnson as a formerly fat bullied schoolkid turned muscle-bound CIA agent accused of killing his partner (Aaron Johnson) and stealing secret files.  He turns up at the house of a former high school jock (Kevin Hart) now living a banal suburban life as an accountant.  At first, his friend appears to be naive and lovable, but then morphs into something seemingly scary and unhinged, before Hart's character realises that he's actually being framed.  High-jinks ensue.  The problem with this film is that a cameo from Jason Bateman apart, it's not really that funny, and there's no convincing relationship between the two male leads as there was with, say, 21 JUMP STREET.  The result is a film that plods along in a fairly banal way, culminating in a high school reunion that's meant to be cathartic for the former fat kid. But even this wannabe emotional and uplifting moment falls flat. One to avoid. 

CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE has a running time of 107 minutes and is rated PG-13. The film is on global release.