The Sam Altman Movie Amazon Wouldn't Release Just Premiered to Raves

Nine of 11 first reactions to Luca Guadagnino's 'Artificial,' starring Andrew Garfield, were raves after its New York Film Festival premiere.

"Artificial," the Sam Altman movie Amazon wouldn't release, finally met an audience Monday night, and the first critics out of the theater posted raves. Luca Guadagnino's drama, with Andrew Garfield as the OpenAI chief executive, premiered at the New York Film Festival on October 5. By the end of the night, Variety's Clayton Davis was calling it the director's best work in ten years.

It got there the hard way. Amazon MGM Studios developed the $40 million film and had it aimed at an early 2027 release, then said in June it would let another studio have it, TheWrap reported. That came months after Amazon put $50 billion into OpenAI, the company the movie is about, though the studio denied the subject had anything to do with the call.

Netflix and Focus Features passed. Neon picked it up roughly two weeks later and is opening it in theaters on Christmas Day. Monday was the first public verdict on whether anyone should have wanted it.

The answer from the room was mostly yes. Between them, Variety and TheWrap collected 11 different first reactions from critics and festgoers on X, and nine were straight raves. Gregory Ellwood of The Playlist put the Garfield half of it bluntly: "Andrew Garfield gives Sam Altman the most epic character assassination ever," he wrote.

The comparison two of them reached for was "The Social Network." Joshua Rothkopf called "Artificial" that film's spiritual sequel and wrote on X that "Luca Guadagnino just ate Sorkin's lunch." Another viewer, posting as @eventualforever, described it as an angrier rewrite of that film for a world already past saving.

The other word that kept coming back was scary. Matt Neglia, editor of Next Best Picture, said it might be Guadagnino's funniest and scariest film to date, and Eric Kohn read it as a dark comedy with Garfield playing Altman somewhere between movie monster and clownish mogul. Rothkopf singled out Damon Albarn's score, which he likened to Bowie.

The two holdouts weren't pans. Joey Magidson wrote that the film "runs out of steam before the end," though he gave Ike Barinholtz, who plays Elon Musk, credit for stealing his scenes. A second festgoer found the script's swings in tone uneven but said Yura Borisov, the "Anora" actor cast as OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, keeps it human as it slides toward hell.

Neon is betting on that performance. The distributor will run Borisov for best actor while pushing Garfield for supporting actor, alongside Mark Rylance as Nobel winner Geoffrey Hinton, Variety reported; Monica Barbaro, who plays former OpenAI technology chief Mira Murati, goes for supporting actress. That hands the lead-actor push to Sutskever, not to the Altman everyone's posting about, which fits TheWrap's earlier description of a story told through Sutskever's eyes.

Guadagnino isn't worried about how the real people take it. He told Vulture he wasn't afraid of Altman's reaction or anyone else's, arguing that people with that much power owe something to the community around them.

Altman has never met Garfield, but he has seen him. He told Vanity Fair he was heading out for coffee one morning near his house and walked into the shoot: cameras everywhere, and a man in his clothes, with his backpack, walking his walk. "I felt I was in some weird glitch of the simulation or something," Altman told the magazine. "It was very strange."

Source: Variety, retrieved October 6, 2026. Other sources: TheWrap, TheWrap (2).