How New York Film Festival Landed Movies Like Controversial OpenAI Biopic ‘Artificial’ and Toho’s ‘Godzilla Minus Zero’ — SkimNews
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- New York Film Festival unveiled a 113-film slate running September 25 through October 12, with world premieres from Luca Guadagnino ("Artificial"), Tom McCarthy ("A Statement"), Ava DuVernay ("14th"), and Tony Gilroy ("Behemoth!").
- "Artificial" — Guadagnino's Sam Altman dramedy starring Andrew Garfield — moved from Amazon to Neon, with artistic director Dennis Lim noting the film 'has gotten even more scarily topical since I saw it in July' amid recent AI news.
- "Godzilla Minus Zero" by Takashi Yamazaki gets its world premiere at NYFF this weekend via GKIDS in the U.S., even before its hometown Tokyo Film Festival screening — a rare blockbuster bow for the festival.
- "NAZA", a Guardian Films-produced documentary from Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor of the Oscar-winning "No Other Land" collective featuring IDF interviews about the war on Gaza, will rush into self-release at IFC Center mere days after its sold-out September 26 NYFF premiere.
- Ira Sachs' "The Man I Love" — an AIDS-era love triangle starring Rami Malek and Tom Sturridge — still lacks domestic distribution despite playing Cannes, Karlovy Vary, and Telluride, with Lim citing the difficulty of selling gay narratives around AIDS.
Why it matters: NYFF's 113-film lineup functions as a buyer-finding venue for films without distribution, while the 'Artificial' studio shuffle — Amazon passing to Neon — suggests AI-themed content has become commercially radioactive even as its topicality intensifies, with the festival offering filmmakers a sophisticated, cine-literate platform that studios increasingly can't provide elsewhere.
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