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/

MADAME WEB**

New York, 2003. A tough cynical loner paramedic resents her dead mother for conducting dangerous experiments in South America while pregnant, so dying in childbirth. After an accident, the loner discovers she can see into the future and so prevent bad stuff happening. She also finds herself taking care of three young women who are being stalked by an evil villain in a spider suit. He's also had a vision that these wastrels are gonna kill him in the future. Meanwhile, our heroine's best friend and fellow paramedic Ben Parker's sister-in-law is about to go into labour.

The well known problem with MADAME WEB is that 15 years into the Marvel revolution nobody gives a shit. Dakota Johnson - whose low-key low-energy style suits many an indie film - definitely doesn't give a shit about a lead role she is miscast in. Tahar Rahim (NAPOLEON) and Zosia Mamet (Girls) is wasted as the baddie.  The three young women are given underwritten parts that are just a bag of tropes. Spoiled rich brat, nerdy shy girl etc. The action scenes from first-time feature director S J Clarkson are uninspired. The prologue is unnecessary. And the script is overlong with too many establishing examples of how being pre-cog works. The final shot features a now blind and paraplegic Madame Web hovering, masked, with her three proteges. It's a flash forward to a film nobody wants to see. 

MADAME WEB is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 113 minutes. It is on global release.

MOLLI AND MAX IN THE FUTURE**** - BFI London Film Festival 2023 - Preview

MOLLI AND MAX IN THE FUTURE is an absolutely charming, funny, inventive romantic comedy for aficionados of the genre. Modelled on WHEN HARRY MET SALLY with a side-order of screwball comedy, this is the film for those of us who tried to forge relationships in the era of tinder and insta celebrity culture, against the backdrop of populist politics and the pandemic. The film may well be set in the future but it very much speaks to our times, and even our nostalgia for those janky 1980s video games.  The aesthetic is deliberately lo-fi, day-glo coloured, and square aspect ratio'd.  It's like playing with a first gen Nintendo, but with the quick-witted dialogue of the best Woody Allen movie. Massive kudos to writer-director Michael Lull Lutwak. I can't believe this is his debut feature: it's so assured and despite its heavy references, genuinely unique. But also kudos to the lead actors, Zosia Mamet (Girls) and Aristotle Athari (SNL), who have real chemistry.  I actually believed in their multi-year friendship / romance and was rooting for them to win.  But most of all, kudos to Erin Darke who absolutely steals scenes as the 1940s wise-cracking screwball heroine AI/mech Mar14 who seems to be channelling Barbara Stanwick. 

MOLLI AND MAX IN THE FUTURE has a running time of 93 minutes. It played SXSW 2023 and does not yet have a commercial release date.

BLEEDING HEART aka BOUND BY BLOOD

BLEEDING HEART is a surprisingly melancholy slow burning relationship drama between two newly united sisters. The former is a textbook bleeding heart liberal yoga teacher played by Jessica Biel. The latter is a sex worker played by Zosia Mamet.  Cinema cliche would have the former try to save the latter, but in increasingly antagonistic phonecalls to her boyfriend, we realise the yoga teacher needs as much saving as the hooker. The only tragedy is that writer-director Diane Bell can't think of a more narratively and emotionally interesting denouement for this tale of mutual female empowerment than the one she gives us.  Nonetheless, a nicely filmed and acted, if ultimately slight film.

BLEEDING HEART aka BOUND BY BLOOD has a running time of 80 minutes.  The movie played Tribeca 2015 and was released straight to video in the USA last year. It is now available on streaming services in the UK.