risk
9 films tagged with “risk”
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 w…
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…
WarGames
The break-in that starts the catastrophe is not a break-in. David is looking for an unreleased video game, finds an undocumented dial-up number, and is greeted by a prompt: shall we play a game? — followed by a menu that…
Fail Safe
Fail Safe arrived in 1964, the same year as Dr. Strangelove, treating the same source material — a mechanical error that sends nuclear bombers past the point of no return — and asking the same structural question: what h…
Safety Last!
The most famous image in silent cinema is a man hanging from a clock face twelve floors above Los Angeles, and it is usually remembered as a stunt. It is better understood as the last step in a chain of small, reasonable…