Luca Guadagnino’s ‘Artificial’ to World Premiere at New York Film Festival — First Look

The New York Film Festival has announced yet another world premiere — this time, it’s Luca Guadagnino’s “Artificial.” Yes, the same film they were telling us would entirely skip the fall fests.

Neon acquired the film after Amazon/MGM got cold feet, and it is now set to screen at NYFF on Oct. 5 at Alice Tully Hall. Guadagnino and the cast, including Andrew Garfield, Monica Barbaro, Yura Borisov, Ike Barinholtz, Cooper Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman and Chris O’Dowd, are expected to attend.

We also have our first-look image from “Artificial,” featuring Garfield and Borisov — see below.

“The most remarkable thing about Luca Guadagnino’s sly and sobering new film is that it finds the perfect tone to tell the story of how we arrived at the AI precipice,” says NYFF artistic director Dennis Lim.

Per NYFF, “The stakes couldn’t be higher in Luca Guadagnino’s thrilling, funny, and very human ‘Artificial,’ a drama of immense moral urgency that propels the viewer through the two decades of machine learning research and technocratic recklessness that have brought us to our current AI crisis point. In 2003, Soviet-born computer scientist Ilya Sutskever (Yura Borisov) began studying artificial neural networks under University of Toronto professor Geoffrey ‘Godfather of AI’ Hinton (Mark Rylance). A decade later, while employed by Google, Sutskever fatefully crosses paths with a young entrepreneur named Sam Altman (Andrew Garfield), the eventual co-founder and CEO of OpenAI.”

Amazon/MGM essentially sold “Artificial” to Neon for next to nothing, with the understanding that Neon would be responsible for covering marketing and distribution (P&A), estimated at around $20 million. The bigger question is whether the film was worth all the endless ink spilled over it — is Guadagnino’s film actually any good?

“Artificial” will mark the fifth time Guadagnino has screened one of his films at NYFF, following “Call Me by Your Name,” “Bones and All,” “Queer,” and “After the Hunt,” which opened last year’s festival.

The 64th edition of the New York Film Festival takes place from September 25 through October 12. The other major world premieres will be Tony Gilroy’s “Behemoth!,” Takashi Yamazaki’s “Godzilla Minus Zero,” Ava DuVernay’s “14th,” Tom McCarthy’s “A Statement,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Cameron Winter at Carnegie Hall,” and Carlos Reygadas’ “Jupiter!”