craft
13 films tagged with “craft”
Hidden Figures
The title is doing structural work. The figures are mathematical — orbital trajectories, launch windows, re-entry angles — and they are hidden in the ordinary sense that the calculations these women performed were not at…
The Imitation Game
The machine works on a Tuesday, and by Wednesday the problem has changed completely. For months the Bletchley team has been consumed by a single question: can they build a device that tests Enigma configurations fast eno…
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…
Moon
Moon is an employment story. It is set on the far side of the Moon, it involves cloning and corporate conspiracy and a robot named GERTY who communicates partly through emoticons, but the structure underneath all of that…
Synecdoche, New York
Caden Cotard receives a MacArthur grant and uses it to build the most ambitious theatrical production anyone has ever attempted: a life-size reproduction of New York City inside a warehouse in Manhattan, populated by act…
The Lives of Others
Wiesler is the best at what he does, and the film establishes this before it establishes anything else. In a lecture hall at the Stasi academy he explains, with the unhurried patience of a man describing a craft he has f…
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…
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…
The Right Stuff
The first design decision an organisation makes is who it lets in. Everything else follows from that — the culture, the vocabulary, the fights, the things that never get built because nobody in the room knows to ask for…
The Conversation
Harry Caul is one of cinema's great craftsmen, and like most great craftsmen he has drawn a very precise line around what his craft includes. He builds his own equipment. He knows which microphone to point at a moving ta…
Andrei Rublev
The bell-casting sequence of Andrei Rublev runs nearly forty minutes, occupies the final episode of a three-hour film, and contains the most complete depiction of craft under radical uncertainty ever committed to any med…
Desk Set
In 1957, the year Sputnik went up, Hollywood released a romantic comedy about a reference librarian being replaced by a computer. Bunny Watson and her three colleagues sit in the research department of a television netwo…
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…