Streaming: the best films about artificial intelligence and robots

"Old-fashioned" is generally not a term you want to hear applied to science fiction, a genre from which one tends to expect the futuristic and unfamiliar. But old-fashioned is very much how Finch (Apple TV) feels, and not just because of the reassuring elder-statesman presence of Tom Hanks in the title role: a post-apocalyptic drama built from the scraps of a thousand others before it, it's about as nostalgically cuddly as a vision of a barren, desolate future can be. Hanks is seemingly the last surviving human on the planet; an inventor, he assembles an AI robot (voiced by Caleb Landry Jones) to mind his adorable dog when he's gone. The narrative direction of the film, previously a more downbeat enterprise, was altered to be more optimistic when the global pandemic struck. Perhaps Finch's creation, a throwback to the rickety robot aesthetics of 1980s kids' favourite Short Circuit, was always intended to be a hi-tech pet-sitter: either way, in the long history of cinema's fascination with artificial intelligence (AI), rarely has the technology been used to such wholesome ends.