communication
22 films tagged with “communication”
Tenet
Most espionage films ask their protagonist to acquire information. Tenet asks its protagonist to operate without it. The Protagonist — unnamed, because naming would imply a stable identity that the film's structure works…
Arrival
Denis Villeneuve's Arrival places language — not weapons, not technology — at the centre of first contact. Louise Banks is recruited not to fight but to understand, and the film's premise is that the way we communicate s…
Interstellar
Professor Brand's lie is the centre of the film, and it is worth taking apart because it is not a simple deception. Brand has spent decades working on an equation that would allow humanity to manipulate gravity well enou…
Her
Her is the most accurate film about consumer artificial intelligence ever made, and it achieves this without a single scene about capability. Nobody in it asks whether Samantha is conscious, tests her, or worries about a…
Contagion
Contagion is not a disaster film about a virus. It is a procedural about the infrastructure that exists to manage catastrophic uncertainty, and about what happens when that infrastructure encounters a situation that outp…
In the Loop
In the Loop begins with a Cabinet minister saying, on a radio programme, that war is 'unforeseeable' — a word chosen for its deliberate vagueness — and then watches as that single adjective triggers a cascade of institut…
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…
Conspiracy
Conspiracy reconstructs the Wannsee Conference almost entirely through meeting mechanics — who sits where, who speaks when, who is permitted to object and under what conditions. Frank Pierson's film, working from Loring…
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…
Contact
The signal from Vega arrives as prime numbers, and the film is precise about why this matters. Primes are the one pattern that natural processes do not produce — no star, no pulsar, no geological formation generates a se…
Ghost in the Shell
The question the film poses is not whether an artificial mind can be conscious. It is whether a human mind, having replaced enough of itself, still is. Major Kusanagi's body is entirely prosthetic — manufactured, maintai…
Wings of Desire
Damiel and Cassiel drift through Berlin in 1987. The Wall is still standing. The city is full of people thinking — not talking, thinking — and the two angels can hear every one of them. They sit in the Staatsbibliothek a…
Kin-dza-dza!
The civilisation of Plyuk speaks two words. Ku means everything; kyu is the single obscenity. Everything else — commerce, courtship, law, threat, apology — is carried by those two syllables plus tone, gesture and the col…
Nineteen Eighty-Four
The Ministry of Truth is not a propaganda bureau. That framing would be too simple, and Orwell knew it. What Winston Smith does for a living is something more vertiginous: he rewrites the historical record so that whatev…
Being There
The first thing to understand about Being There is that Chance the Gardener does not deceive anyone. He never claims expertise. He never adjusts his language to his audience. He says what he knows — that gardens have sea…
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Roy Neary is driving a power company truck down an Indiana road when something comes over the hill and lights him up. He does not know what it is. What he knows, afterwards, is that he has received a signal, and the sign…
The Front
The mechanism the blacklist constructed is worth examining precisely because it was not a conspiracy in the conventional sense. Nobody in The Front is issuing direct orders to destroy careers. What Walter Bernstein's scr…
Solaris
The ocean on Solaris responds. That is the established scientific fact at the beginning of the film, and it is also the end of what anyone can say with confidence. An entire discipline, Solaristics, has been built around…
Fahrenheit 451
The firemen in Truffaut's film are not thugs, and that is the point that makes the whole thing land. Captain Beatty speaks clearly, reasons well, and explains his work with the patient authority of a man who has thought…
Alphaville
The most unsettling science fiction film ever made about a computer contains no special effects, no futuristic sets, no technology that did not already exist when the camera rolled. Godard shot Alphaville in 1965 Paris —…
Advise & Consent
Advise & Consent is a film about a process, not a verdict. The confirmation hearing for Robert Leffingwell as Secretary of State functions less as a courtroom drama than as an extended study in how institutions produce d…
The Great Dictator
The resemblance that makes the film possible was not invented by Chaplin. Hitler was born four days after him, in the same spring of 1889, and by the early thirties had adopted a toothbrush moustache that the most recogn…