Life may be too short for long-term grudges, as the quote goes, but it’s still lengthy enough to dole out some justice.
This weekend, A24 brings out Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s You Can See Everything, the Elizabeth Holmes doc that is already creating a major stir with filmgoers after previously dazzling critics. The opening follows the releases last weekend of Musk, The Social Reckoning and the New York Film Festival premiere of Artificial. All four films contend with the tech alphas trying to remake our lives in their image. And they exact a kind of revenge at once inevitable and improbable.
You know the alpha types — those talkers on CNBC or in your college WhatsApp group saying there’s a solution for everything, even to things you didn’t know were problems. Actually, they don’t say there’s a solution — they say there’s a solve, which should tip you off right there. Never get involved in a land war in Asia, and never trust anyone who seamlessly turns a verb into a noun. He’s probably trying to sell you something from behind his puffer jacket.
Far from the usual stake-less Hollywood gaze, these docs and fact-based dramas center three figures deeply relevant to our current landscape: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman. (Add any more of them and we might think it’s a Donald Trump state dinner.) The fourth figure, You Can See Everything’s Holmes along with her husband Billy Evans, is less relevant, but the pair embody a Silicon Valley attitude that survives and dominates even as one half of it sits in a Texas prison: that with a little pluck and a lot of smooth talk anything can be achieved, reality be damned.
But it’s not just filmmakers’ decision to center these figures that matters: it’s how they take them on. Musk spends four hours meticulously deconstructing the ways its subject got his power and the surveillance and even alleged potential-election rigging he is using it for. Reckoning shows a Meta intent on stoking our rage and divisions for its own profiteering.
Artificial, which arrives in theaters on Christmas, may be the most searing of the lot. Ostensibly a procedural account of Sam Altman’s rise to power at OpenAI, Luca Guadagnino’s drama (complete with an Oscar-level performance from Andrew Garfield) brutally takes apart how Altman hustled investors and even his own staff — including the engineering prodigy Ilya Sutskever. Sutskever joined and made possible OpenAI’s breakthrough science after Altman reassured him everything would be done all human-centric and responsible. Whoops.
Audiences may justifiably seethe at how Sutskever’s safety-first mindset gets steamrolled by Altman’s slick accelerationism (as happened in real life). But we also might want to take heart in how the very fact that we’re watching this account represents its own kind of triumph, as the safety concerns Sutskever worried would be silenced are being megaphoned into the very theater in which our rage curdles. Winning the P.R. war isn’t the same as winning the Wall Street one, of course. But it doesn’t stand apart from it either — not least because companies need some pretty heavy consumer adoption to pull off their financial coup.
Even as Musk rolled out to theaters nationwide, homepages told of how Musk’s SpaceX appeared to manipulate Starshield such that it limited Ukraine’s ability to ward off Russian attacks, the man becoming in real-time the policy oligarch Gibney’s film intimates.
In all these movies you can’t help sensing a kind of authorial revenge. Aaron Sorkin, sitting down to tell us how mad he is at what Zuckerberg has done in the 15 years since he last visited with him, with not much Zuckerberg can do to respond. Or Gibney, by his own telling, shines a light on the power Musk is gaining over all our lives, with little recourse but to lash out scatologically on the social platform he owns. (X, TikTok, Meta and YouTube all at first denied ads for the film; the latter two, at least, came to their senses.) Altman, meanwhile, was left to simper that “I don’t think they’re going for accuracy,” which he did to Vanity Fair on the day of the Artificial premiere, clearly worried that accurate is exactly how we’ll perceive it.
In all of this we have a collection of great dramas — if you haven’t booked your ticket to hoot and gasp at YCSE, go out and do so now — but also the latest turn in a greater meta-drama, lowercase m, between artists and Silicon Valley, a bow-shot from human storytellers to the masters and sellers of computer code. Tech leaders thought that the magic of LLMs had rid us of all that professional wordsmithing for good. These writers and creators come to say not so fast. After all these years of hearing about (and sometimes already living the idea of) AI coming for Hollywood jobs, some of the people who work at them finally get to say their piece, with everyone listening.
This sudden storyteller leverage is literalized by, well, Fielder’s face, which, to every Holmes or Evans desperate fib, subtly contorts into skepticism or disbelief, giving that not only does he know he is being fed con-ish hooey, but also that he and co-director Lance Oppenheim have the power to cast it as such the minute they enter the edit room. What’s more, Holmes and Evans seem to know it too. At one point Evans stomps in to a Fielder secondary interview to try to stop it. You could almost smell the algorithmic impotency in the face of human vitality.
In that moment vibrates the larger, call it…trans-cinematic message of the four films — “Engineers may live in our screens and even addict our brains, but the storytellers have something even more powerful: they can make us feel.” The people shaping these four narratives are all singing the same chorus — that much of what they do (and human thought generally) can’t be outsourced to a machine. “I’m not particularly charismatic or good-looking,” Artificial screenwriter Simon Rich told the NYFF audience, “but as a last-ditch effort to warn mankind I wrote this movie.” (Lisa Kudrow and Michael Patrick King’s latest season of The Comeback also boldly trafficked in this Hollywood vs the Machines theme.)
Perhaps the most surprising part of this filmmaker uprising is that it’s also turned Hollywood studios into something they haven’t been in a long time, possibly since the 70’s and all those Vietnam protest movies: the good guys. Amazon thought it could silence the protest voices by dropping Artificial. Instead it just sidelined itself. And now Neon (which picked up Artificial), Sony (The Social Reckoning), HBO (Musk) and A24 (You Can See Everything) are all out there proudly putting the tech industry in check. Not for nothing do these four studios also have some of the smallest Silicon Valley involvement. (Though an A24 making deals with Google DeepMind, a Sony that produces hardware and an HBO now bankrolled by Larry Ellison shows how such entanglements also aren’t easily escapable in 2026.)
AI will generate plenty of memeslop and cost-cutting; anyone who comes out of these movies thinking the great automation battle has been won in Hollywood, let alone the world, is either naive or self-deceiving. But it would be equally misguided to emerge into the daylight and think the films won’t matter at all, that a strong injection of anti-oligarchal humanity won’t course through the collective blood or change social views — that a long-term grudge, really, won’t be settled in some very productive ways.
That grudge quote, by the way, comes from Elon Musk, who (ironic contrasts with his own lawsuit-happy pedigree aside) now has been grudgily victimized himself — and by the very truth-seekers and storytellers he thought he’d dispatched when he bought Twitter. Talk about a good solve.