risk
15 films tagged with “risk”
Pressure
The decision Eisenhower makes on the night of 4 June 1944 is not a military decision in any straightforward sense. It is an epistemological one. Captain James Stagg, the Scottish meteorologist who stands between the Supr…
Eye in the Sky
The operational premise of Eye in the Sky — a drone strike complicated by a child selling bread in the blast radius — is a trap the film sets for itself and then methodically refuses to spring. It does not resolve into a…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 wor…
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…
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…
The Andromeda Strain
The Andromeda Strain is not a monster film. There is no creature to outrun, no villain to defeat, no moment of human bravery that resolves the crisis. What Robert Wise and screenwriter Nelson Gidding preserved from Micha…
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…