99m; Denmark
Director: Lars von Trier
Cast: Jens Albinus, Peter Gantzler, Friðrik Þór Friðriksson
Synopsis: An IT company hires an actor to serve as the company’s president in order to help the business get sold to a cranky Icelander.
Category Archives: White Collar
Bureaucracy (2009)
87m; U.S.
Director: Mark Perreault
Synopsis: A loyal employee overburdened by a corrupt boss carefully plots a murder to save himself and his blind sister from economic hardship. DCLFF NOTE: “The Office”-inspired but without any wit whatsoever; amateurish acting, pedestrian direction and a plodding script that goes nowhere slowly. AVOID! (Garlock)
A Kind of Loving (1962)
112m; U.K.
Director: John Schlesinger
A young man (Alan Bates), inching his way up from working-class traditions via a white-collar job, finds himself trapped by the frightening reality of his girlfriend’s (June Richie) pregnancy and is forced into marrying her and moving in with his mother-in-law due to a housing shortage in their Northern England town.
A Shock to the System (1990)
91m; U.S.
Director: Jan Egleson
Cast: Michael Caine, Elizabeth McGovern
Synopsis: Focuses on office politics, featuring sneaky personalities and office traitors. It is dark and brooding.
The Apartment (1960)
120m; U.S.
Director: Billy Wilder
Cast: Jack Lemmon, Shirley Maclaine, Fred MacMurray
Synopsis: A man tries to rise in his company by letting its executives use his apartment for trysts, but complications and a romance of his own ensue.
Barbarians at the Gate (1993)
107m
Director: Glenn Jordan
Broadcast Date: March 23, 1993
Network: HBO
Cast: James Garner, Jonathan Pryce
Synopsis (New York Times): Based on the exhaustive, and sometimes exhausting, best seller by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, “Barbarians at the Gate” chronicles the multi-billion-dollar battle in 1988 for RJR Nabisco, which at the time was working feverishly on developing a “smokeless cigarette.” The machinations were incredibly complex, requiring bankers galore and backfield lawyers for the lawyers on the front lines. Condensing the story into a movie running less than two hours, Larry Gelbart, the creator of television’s “M*A*S*H,” has eliminated the players in the middle layers to focus almost entirely on the top-level principals, most notably F. Ross Johnson, chairman of RJR Nabisco, and Henry Kravis, the master of leveraged buyouts at the Wall Street concern Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company.
Conviction (2009)
107m; U.S.
Diector: Tony Goldwyn
Cast: Hilary Swank, Sam Rockwell and Melissa Leo
Synopsis: A working mother puts herself through law school in an effort to represent her brother, who has been wrongfully convicted of murder and has exhausted his chances to appeal his conviction through public defenders. Movie alternatively titled “Betty Anne Waters.”
The Company Men (2010)
104m; U.S.
Director: John Wells
Cast: Ben Affleck, Chris Cooper, Tommy Lee Jones, Maria Bello, Kevin Costner
Synopsis: A year in the life of three men trying to survive a round of corporate downsizing at a major company – and how that affects them, their families, and their communities.
Trailer
The Great Pretenders (2007)
30m; U.S.
Director: Jeremy Cohen
Cast: Raniah Al-Sayed, Keith Brown and Al Bundonis
Synopsis (IMDB): A biting satire from the front lines of the American workplace, where layoffs are so routine they’ve created their own industry – outplacement. Elite Transition Services promises laid-off worker Scott Matter help finding a job and getting back on his feet. But as the job search grows increasingly desperate, Scott finds himself caught in a corporate purgatory where the absurdities of office life are brought into vivid relief.
Trailer
The Gronholm Method (El Método) [2005]
115m; Spain, Argentina, Italy
Director: Marcelo Piñeyro
Cast: Eduardo Noriega, Najwa Nimri and Eduard Fernández
Synopsis: Brilliant. A modern version of Rod Serling’s classic TV morality play “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” crossed with “Survivor,” white collar job applicants are put in a room and choose up sides and press their individual advantages.
Trailer
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