BlackBerry

It’s a culture clash business comic-drama where the geeks and the suits go on a rollercoaster ride, a story stripped of outside life but rife with telling touches.

Investing heartily in its story's personalities, and eschewing myth-making reverence or preciousness, BlackBerry's makers entertainingly frame their film as a workplace dramedy about industry gate-crashers rudely ejected from a party of their own staging.

Rise-and-fall stories so often gloat after the bursting of the bubble, but this one is all condolences.

Johnson is also ruthless in his depiction of the business reality behind the glossy surface waffle of the tech dream.

Yet despite the guffaws, the film (directed by Matt Johnson) is deeper than a mere morality play about villainous money men.

It’s a film, ultimately, about failure. And immediately that makes it a far more intriguing proposition than all the boardroom backslapping of a movie such as Air.

One of 2023's 20 best films.

As the film progresses, the humor becomes more ironic, but it never loses its ability to make us reflect and laugh at the same time. [Full review in Spanish]

The comedy comes instead from Johnson’s deliberate direction. It’s found in an ironic zoom here, a hilarious cut there. This alchemy finds the most magic in how it supports Glenn Howerton’s towering performance.

It is in Glenn Howerton’s over-the-top portrayal of Jim that BlackBerry soars above everything else you’ve seen in this genre, and catapults BlackBerry into the satirical stratosphere.