“Margin Call” – Risky business

Dir. J.C. Chandor
(2011, R, 107 min)

Margin Call is the movie Too Big to Fail should have been. The HBO telefilm, which tried to cover the 2008 financial crisis from the top down in just 100 minutes, had a plaster-dry instructive approach, reiterating what was already better explained in the documentary Inside Job and otherwise failing to provide much dramatic interest. In contrast, Margin Call is laser-focused. It takes place over one day at a fictional New York investment bank, where all of a sudden they realize their numbers don’t add up and they must negotiate the apocalypse.

“Horrible Bosses” – Hostile workplaces

Dir. Seth Gordon
(2011, R, 98 min)

When Horrible Bosses begins we’re immediately aware of the hoops the film must go through just to make its premise work. Hoping to elicit laughs from three men (Jason Bateman, Charlie Day, and Jason Sudeikis) plotting to murder their abusive employers, it must first address two inherent concerns: (1) The bosses must be so overwhelmingly awful that we would sympathize with their prospective killers, and (2) if the bosses are so overwhelmingly awful, why not just quit?

“Moon” – Alone, together

Dir. Duncan Jones
(2009, R, 97 min)
★ ★ ★ ½

When Moon starts, we know exactly what it’s going to be about. We’re happy to be wrong. Set in the near future, an energy company called Lunar Industries mines Helium-3 on the surface of the moon. The lunar installation is run by a single man, Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), with the help of GERTY, an artificial intelligence who seems a little too pacifying not to be evil. It’s voiced by Kevin Spacey, who sounds like Kevin Spacey doing an impression of HAL 9000. We spend the first third of the film waiting for him to say, “I’m sorry, Sam, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”