Films that think about what we build
A curated selection of films, documentaries and series connected to the themes of this site — technology, organisations, language, complexity.
Mon Oncle
The Villa Arpel is a machine for demonstrating status. Every element of it — the fish-shaped fountain activated only when guests arrive, the garage door that opens before the car has stopped, the kitchen that runs itself…
Moneyball
Moneyball begins with a constraint rather than an insight, and that ordering is the whole reason the film is useful. Beane's description of his position — rich teams, poor teams, fifty feet of crap, and then Oakland — is…
Primer
Two engineers build something in a garage and then lose track of what it does. That is the whole of Primer, and it is also the reason the film has a reputation for being impossible to follow. The unintelligibility is not…
Memories of Murder
The central drama of Memories of Murder is not the murderer. It is the epistemology of the detectives. Detective Park Doo-man, the local investigator, works by intuition and coercion: he reads faces, trusts gut feeling,…
Chinatown
The mystery in Chinatown is solved completely, and the solving changes nothing. Jake Gittes identifies the crime — the diversion of public water to destroy the agricultural value of the San Fernando Valley so that land c…
9 to 5
The plot of 9 to 5 requires a kidnapping, three elaborate fantasy sequences, a near-poisoning, and a stolen corpse, but the management insight at its centre requires none of these. It is simply this: the three women who…