Egos: Tribeca Film Festival 2026
Documentaries about AI are their own Portents Industrial Complex by now and Tribeca's AI: Probably Nothing To Worry About is another one. Frankenstein is invoked, ED-209 blows its top again, War Games are played. The history lesson is useful; the thoughts of Geoffrey Hinton who won a Nobel Prize for machine learning before learning not to spend any more of his life dealing with Elon Musk are illuminating; the poetry churned out by large language models is cardboard. The testimony from broken and bereaved families is horrible. The first person plural pronouns pile up. "We don't know how to make AI safe...we must decide...we must understand..." Well don't let me stop you. The enthusiasm and egos of the ultra-rich in charge papers over their hesitation to decide or understand anything that might disrupt profits. Papers over it poorly.
A review of AI: Probably Nothing To Worry About for Critics Notebook.
Also seen:
Film director Tony Kaye has an ego too, as the Hollywood executives making American History X in 1998 and handling its director like an unexploded bomb discovered. Having filmed every conversation and kept the tapes for three decades, Kaye has spliced some of them into an explanation of his doomed attempt to take his name off the film and replace it with Humpty Dumpty. The ever popular tortured artist effect.
Stealing Magic has a British stage magician on the trail of a website selling his secrets on the cheap. The fact that his target is basically a reseller who bought the materials from our protagonist in the first place, rather than some acolyte receiving the hidden secrets of the Temple directly from Hermes Trismegistus, dilutes the drama into something closer to an Amazon purchase dispute.
Never Change! joins the list of films addressing the tense and potentially lethal nature of US high schools through what you might politely call an approach suited to film festivals. Millennials: screwed again. See also Run Amok at Sundance.