accountability
36 films tagged with “accountability”
The Big Short
The film's opening gambit is also its thesis. It puts a quotation on the screen — it ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble, it's what you know for sure that just ain't so — and then spends two hours demons…
Citizenfour
The film opens with text on a black screen and a voice reading it: instructions for staying alive. Assume that your adversary is capable of a trillion guesses per second. Use a machine that has never touched the network.…
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…
Margin Call
The model worked. That is the film's first and most unsettling point, and it is easy to miss because every popular account of 2008 wants the models to have been wrong. The risk models at the bank were not badly built. Th…
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
George Smiley does almost nothing in this film, and the almost-nothing is the method. He sits in chairs and listens. He reads files. He asks questions that are one sentence long and then waits, sometimes for a very long…
Inside Job
Ferguson trained as a mathematician and ran a software company before he made films, and Inside Job is built the way a systems engineer would build it: not as a story about greed but as a trace through a pipeline, follow…
Michael Clayton
Michael Clayton opens with a monologue spoken into darkness — Arthur Edens, the firm's lead litigator on a massive agrochemical class action, dictating an ecstatic, unravelling brief that sounds like a man simultaneously…
Good Night, and Good Luck
Clooney shoots the film in black and white and confines it almost entirely to the CBS newsroom, and both choices are structural. The black and white is not nostalgia; it allows the film to integrate actual footage of Sen…
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,…
Shattered Glass
Shattered Glass is not really about Stephen Glass. It is about the editorial system that made him possible. The New Republic in the mid-1990s had developed a culture in which the admiration of colleagues functioned as a…
The Fog of War
Robert McNamara was the first modern data-driven executive, and The Fog of War is the closest thing we have to a full accounting of what that identity costs. At Ford he was one of the whiz kids, the group of Air Force st…
Minority Report
The system works. This is established early, stated often, and never contradicted by the evidence within the film's own logic. The precogs see murders before they happen, and Pre-Crime intervenes, and for six years no on…
Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade
Jin-Roh is structured around a question that never gets asked aloud: who is using whom? Kazuki Fuse, the elite trooper at the film's centre, believes himself to be acting from feeling — guilt over a girl's death, attachm…
The Insider
The question at the centre of The Insider is not whether Jeffrey Wigand should speak. He has data showing that Brown & Williamson manipulated nicotine delivery while its executives testified to Congress, under oath, that…
The Iron Giant
The Iron Giant does not know what it is. This is the film's first and most important structural choice: the robot arrives damaged, its memory erased, its purpose unavailable to itself. It does not know where it came from…
Quiz Show
The quiz show scandal of 1958 is usually told as a story about fraud, and it was fraud, but Robert Redford's film is interested in a more structural question: how does an institution arrive at a lie that everyone inside…
The Shawshank Redemption
Andy Dufresne arrives at Shawshank with two life sentences and a skill set that is, from the institution's perspective, extraordinarily convenient. He is a banker. He understands taxes, investments, trusts, the internal…
RoboCop
The boardroom scene tells you everything the film is about, and it happens before the title character exists. Omni Consumer Products is demonstrating ED-209, a fully autonomous enforcement unit, to its senior leadership.…
Silkwood
Nichols and his screenwriters (Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen) make a choice in the first act that governs everything that follows: they show you the work. Not the scandal, not the conspiracy, not the investigation. The wor…
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…
Norma Rae
The mill is the first thing you hear. Ritt opens the film inside the noise — the looms running, the shuttles hammering, the sound that fills the building for every shift and has already taken Norma Rae's mother's hearing…
The China Syndrome
The China Syndrome is built around a single structural irony: the people best positioned to know whether a nuclear plant is safe are precisely the people with the most to lose from saying it is not. Jack Godell (Jack Lem…
All the President's Men
The film's real subject is a method, and the method is stated once, almost in passing. In a conspiracy like this, you build from the outer edges in. Nobody in the Washington Post newsroom has access to the centre, so the…
Three Days of the Condor
Joe Turner's job description is one of the most precise metaphors for knowledge work ever put on screen. He works for the CIA, but not in the way anyone imagines working for the CIA. His office is a brownstone in New Yor…
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…
The Parallax View
Pakula's conspiracy trilogy — Klute, The Parallax View, All the President's Men — moves from a crime with a single victim to a crime against the republic, and the middle film is the one that looks at the mechanism. Where…
Soylent Green
The film's most famous line is its least interesting element. Everyone knows the reveal — Soylent Green is made out of people — and the sentence has entered the language as shorthand for a terrible secret, but the secret…
The Candidate
The proposition is clean. Marvin Lucas, a campaign manager who has run enough races to know exactly what losing looks like, approaches Bill McKay with an offer that sounds like freedom: run for the Senate against an incu…
Z
The opening title card is the film's first structural claim, and it deserves to be read as one. Most films based on real events assure the audience that any resemblance to actual persons is coincidental. Z reverses the f…
Dr. Strangelove
The Doomsday Machine is the purest argument ever staged about automated systems, and it is worth being precise about what the argument actually is. The device works by removing human judgement from the decision to retali…
High and Low
The film's Japanese title — Tengoku to Jigoku, Heaven and Hell — announces its architecture before a single frame. Kingo Gondo's apartment sits literally above the city of Yokohama, a glass-and-steel tower from which the…
Judgment at Nuremberg
The central argument of Judgment at Nuremberg is not about the Nazi defendants in the dock — it is about the judges who put them there, and what that judgment costs. Chief Justice Haywood arrives in 1947 as an outsider,…
Paths of Glory
The attack on the Anthill is ordered by General Mireau, who initially refuses the mission as impossible and then accepts it within sixty seconds of learning that a promotion accompanies success. This is not a scene about…
Stray Dog
Kurosawa made Stray Dog in 1949, four years into the American occupation, and the film is saturated with the specific texture of that moment: a city still half-rubble, a generation of young men who came back from the war…
Rope
Brandon kills David Kentley not because he hates him or profits from his death but because he has a theory. The theory holds that certain superior individuals exist beyond conventional morality, and that the act of murde…
All Quiet on the Western Front
The schoolmaster Kantorek stands at the front of his classroom and delivers a speech about duty, honour, and the fatherland. His students — boys, essentially, seventeen and eighteen years old — are moved to volunteer for…