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/

THE LAST SHOWGIRL***

THE LAST SHOWGIRL is a slight film at just shy of 90 minutes and slighter still in plot and characterisation.  The pull is that Pamela Anderson gives a lovely performance as an ageing Vegas showgirl called Shelly whose long-running and old-fashioned Revue is being shut down.  This prompts her to attempt to connect with her estranged daughter Hannah (Billie Lourd).  Hannah is resentful that Shelly put her "nudie show" ahead of being a good mother, but Shelly rightly points out that she was doing the best with what she had. It's an exchange that drips with sincerity from Anderson's Shelly but Lourd is just not giving anything as her scene partner.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, in a script that never surprises, Shelly is more of a mother to her "found family" - two younger dancers played beautifully by Kiernan Shipka and Brenda Song. All three have to some extent bought into Shelly's myth of following one's passion and being a dancer, but in a brief and heartbreaking scene, Shipka's character hints at what happens when you take on an unconventional job to your family's disapproval. We feel that the younger girls may have a future, but what of Shelly? She shouts to an uncaring but honest producer (Jason Schwartzman) that she's 57 and beautiful but we know her career is basically done.  Is her delusion dancing on stage any better or worse than that of her best friend who waitresses and gambles and is now homeless? Jamie Lee Curtis was nominated for a Bafta for her role, and it's vulnerable and bold, but as with so much of this film never really moved beyond the obvious.  I just wanted more depth from Kate Gersten's script and more from the lo-fi direction from Gia Coppola.

THE LAST SHOWGIRL is rated R and has a running time of 88 minutes. It played Toronto 2024 and was released in the USA in December 24.  It will be released in the UK on February 28th 2025.