rationality
7 films tagged with “rationality”
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…
Zodiac
The film is structured as an investigation that refuses to converge, and the structure is the argument. Fincher begins with the murders — sudden, arbitrary, filmed with a flatness that drains them of the dramatic tension…
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…
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…
Pi
Max Cohen restates his assumptions at the beginning of the film: mathematics is the language of nature; everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers; if you graph the numbers of any system, patt…
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…
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…