All the excitement in the movie world has been in Manhattan this week, where the New York Film Festival has brought splashy world premieres of Oscar contenders like Tony Gilroy’s Behemoth! and Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial.
On Monday, as the crowd filed into Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall for the world premiere of Artificial, I chatted with fellow Prestige Junkie Pundits Sophia Ciminello and Matt Neglia about Digger and whether it had the juice to make it through Oscar season despite calamitous reviews and worse box office. (My take: It does, but we can save that debate for another time.)
Artificial features the best Andrew Garfield performance in a movie since he should’ve won an Oscar for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s directorial debut, Tick, Tick… Boom. Playing Sam Altman in Guadagnino’s ripped-from-the-headlines look at OpenAI’s rise, and how it has set humanity on a collision course with its own ruin, Garfield lords over the movie like a millennial cringe Bond villain without the shark tank. (Sample line reading: “Sooo, that just happened.”)
I’ve already seen people compare Garfield’s performance in Artificial to Anthony Hopkins’ Oscar-winning work as Hannibal Lecter — and the fact that Guadagnino and his cinematographer, Malik Hassan Sayeed (He Got Game, After the Hunt), often replicate Jonathan Demme’s signature close-up shots, with Garfield and other actors looking directly into the camera lens, certainly lends credence to the juxtaposition.
→ Read more about how Artificial played at NYFF at TheAnkler.com