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.
Perfect Blue
The mechanism that destroys Mima Kirigoe is not the stalker, and not the murders. It is the fan website. Early in the film, Mima discovers a site called 'Mima's Room' — a first-person diary written in her voice, by someo…
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
McMurphy arrives at the institution expecting a system he can game. He is a convict, not a patient — he got himself transferred from a prison farm on the theory that a mental hospital would be softer — and he reads the w…
The Hudsucker Proxy
The premise of The Hudsucker Proxy is a board of directors deliberately installing an incompetent man as CEO in order to crash the company's stock price, and the comedy depends on the viewer recognising that this is not…
Brazil
A fly falls into a teleprinter and a letter is struck wrong. Archibald Tuttle, heating engineer, becomes Archibald Buttle, cobbler. Armed men come through the ceiling of the Buttle flat at Christmas, bag the father in fr…
Snowpiercer
The train is a closed system, and Bong Joon-ho organises his film as a traversal of it. Curtis Everett starts in the tail section — dark, cramped, fed on gelatinous protein bars whose ingredients nobody asks about — and…
A Beautiful Mind
The Nash equilibrium describes a state in a game where no player can improve their outcome by changing strategy alone, given the strategies of all other players. It is one of the most important ideas in twentieth-century…