A.I. Artificial Intelligence

Director: Steven Spielberg, Steven Spielberg, Steven Spielberg, Steven Spielberg, Steven Spielberg

2001 / 146min / 35mm

The seemingly disparate sensibilities of sentimentalist Steven Spielberg and chilly ironist Stanley Kubrick, who left this science fiction Pinocchio story unrealized at the time of his death, here achieve an unexpected harmony. Haley Joel Osment plays a robot child abandoned by his adopted parents to the cruel (if astonishingly realized) outside world, in a film that finds Spielberg at his most challenging and most poignant. “One of the most poetic and haunting allegories about the cinema that I can think of... It’s also the most philosophical film in Kubrick’s canon, the most intelligent in Spielberg’s.”—Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Chicago Reader

“The first time I saw this movie, I was so angry at what it made me feel, what it plucked in my psyche, but the question that it poses—is your love less real because of what or who you are, and how you happened to come across it?—is such a good one, and I could never forget these intense, unexpected feelings. I also felt so manipulated by Spielberg, but I realize now that that is the point, and that he was the perfect person to finish directing the film after Kubrick died.

“I find there is a pulpiness, almost a visual ugliness, that helps, in my case, make more ‘believable’ what is really an epic, looping back around on itself at the end. Now, it is one of my favorite movies.”— Louise Bonnet