work
17 films tagged with “work”
Sorry to Bother You
The film opens every transaction with an apology, and the apology is the business model. Sorry to bother you is what Cassius says because bothering people is precisely what he has been hired to do: to interrupt strangers…
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…
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…
WALL-E
The first thirty minutes of WALL-E contain almost no dialogue and constitute one of the most precise depictions of work ever put on film. A small robot wakes up, charges his solar panels, puts on his treads, and goes to…
Office Space
The TPS report entered the language because it names something with no other name: work whose only consumer is the process that requested it. Peter's error is not omitting the report but omitting the cover sheet for the…
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…
9 to 5
The plot of 9 to 5 requires a kidnapping, three elaborate fantasy sequences, a near-poisoning, and a stolen corpse, but the management insight at its centre requires none of these. It is simply this: the three women who…
Norma Rae
The mill is the first thing you hear. Ritt opens the film inside the noise — the looms running, the shuttles hammering, the sound that fills the building for every shift and has already taken Norma Rae's mother's hearing…
Dark Star
The crew of the Dark Star has been in space for twenty years, and it is important to understand what that means in organisational terms. Nobody has been fired, nobody has been promoted, nobody has received new instructio…
Playtime
To film a city that does not work for the people inside it, Tati built one. Tativille rose on waste ground outside Paris: glass office blocks on rails so they could be repositioned between shots, streets, traffic lights,…
High and Low
The film's Japanese title — Tengoku to Jigoku, Heaven and Hell — announces its architecture before a single frame. Kingo Gondo's apartment sits literally above the city of Yokohama, a glass-and-steel tower from which the…
Judgment at Nuremberg
The central argument of Judgment at Nuremberg is not about the Nazi defendants in the dock — it is about the judges who put them there, and what that judgment costs. Chief Justice Haywood arrives in 1947 as an outsider,…
Mon Oncle
The Villa Arpel is a machine for demonstrating status. Every element of it — the fish-shaped fountain activated only when guests arrive, the garage door that opens before the car has stopped, the kitchen that runs itself…
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…
Stray Dog
Kurosawa made Stray Dog in 1949, four years into the American occupation, and the film is saturated with the specific texture of that moment: a city still half-rubble, a generation of young men who came back from the war…
Modern Times
The opening title of Modern Times announces a story of industry, of individual enterprise, humanity crusading in the pursuit of happiness, and then cuts to sheep being herded through a gate and workers emerging from a su…
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…