Movie · 2001 · Drama, Science Fiction, Adventure · 2h 26m · PG-13 · English
Curator score: 5.5/10 (633.6K ratings)
David is 11 years old. He weighs 60 pounds. He is 4 feet, 6 inches tall. He has brown hair. His love is real. But he is not.
Overview
David, a robotic boy—the first of his kind programmed to love—is adopted as a test case by a Cybertronics employee and his wife. Though he gradually becomes their child, a series of unexpected circumstances make this life impossible for David.
Ratings
Curator score: 5.5/10
IMDb: 7.2/10
Letterboxd: 3.64/5
Rotten Tomatoes: 76%
Metacritic: 65
TMDB: 7.1/10
Director
Steven Spielberg, Stanley Kubrick
Production
Warner Bros. Pictures, DreamWorks Pictures, Amblin Entertainment, Stanley Kubrick Productions
Cast
Haley Joel Osment, Jude Law, Frances O'Connor, Sam Robards, Jake Thomas, William Hurt, Jack Angel, Robin Williams, Ben Kingsley, Meryl Streep, Chris Rock, Ken Leung, Clark Gregg, Kevin Sussman, Tom Gallop, Eugene Osment, April Grace, Matt Winston, Sabrina Grdevich, Theo Greenly
Where to watch
Hulu, TCM
Curator Review
Verdict
A.I. Artificial Intelligence is a haunting, ambitious sci-fi fable about love, abandonment, and the cost of wanting to be real. Its tonal shifts can be jarring, but the film’s emotional force, visual imagination, and eerie melancholy make it one of the most distinctive studio sci-fi dramas of its era.
Best for
viewers who like emotionally devastating science fiction
fans of philosophical, high-concept films with fairy-tale logic
people interested in artificial consciousness and identity
audiences who appreciate big, formal, visually expressive filmmaking
Skip if
you want a straightforward robot adventure
you dislike abrupt tonal changes
you prefer cool, detached sci-fi over sentimental tragedy
you are looking for a light or purely optimistic future story
Overview
A.I. Artificial Intelligence is a strange, sorrowful machine of a movie: part fairy tale, part science-fiction parable, part elegy for human need. It begins with a deceptively simple premise and keeps widening into something more unsettling, asking what love means when it is programmed, performed, or withheld.
Worth noting
What makes it linger is the collision of tenderness and dread. The film can feel overdetermined in places, but that excess is also part of its power: the glossy surfaces, the uncanny children, the ruined future, the impossible hope of being chosen. Haley Joel Osment gives the movie its aching center, and Jude Law adds a sly, bruised humanity that keeps the film from becoming purely abstract.
Bottom line
It is not an easy film to settle into, and that is exactly why it stays with people. The ending is divisive, but the emotional logic of the whole work is unusually bold: a story about artificial life that ends up feeling painfully, recognizably human.
Top Letterboxd reviews
mia lee vicino (3.5★) · 4907 likes
obsessed with the fact that kubrick primarily wrote the 1st & 3rd act’s sentimental parent/son relationship while spielberg added the 2nd act’s jude law sex robot storyline and not the other way around. just goes to show ya — don’t judge a director by their past filmography’s central themes!
James (Schaffrillas) (4.5★) · 4373 likes
I promise you will never in a million years guess where the plot of this movie goes
Jonathan Rosenbaum (5★) · 3241 likes
Only Kubrick and Spielberg, working together on different time planes, could create such a philosophical and intellectual heartbreaker.
demi adejuyigbe (5★) · 2514 likes
jesus fucking christ.
i had gone my entire life never having seen A.I. and only vaguely grasping what the movie even was, but i went into it functionally blind and… did not know what i was getting into. what a devastating fucking movie. a film that posits love as a life-giving and life-destroying force, the spark in an endless cycle of destructive, wholly-encompassing grief, and the finger that can eventually snuff it out. as soon as we meet David, there’s… more
davidehrlich (5★) · 2451 likes
I was already 16 years old when “A.I.” hit theaters on the last weekend of June 2001, but Steven Spielberg’s unnerving techno-fable has always felt like the last film that I ever saw as a child.
To a certain extent, of course, everything that happened before the end of that summer would soon be recast in a soft new light. Spielberg had imagined the World Trade Center would serve as a lasting memorial for our entire species more than 2,000… more
1995 · Action, Animation, Science Fiction · 1h 23m · NR · Curator 8.7/10 (568.8K ratings) · Where to watch: Amazon Prime Video, Amazon Prime Video with Ads
A major cybernetic identity film that asks what remains of the self when the body becomes replaceable.