Topic

Failure

The outcome most is learned from and least is written about honestly.

4: in film
13:00: average
52 min: in total
37: across the network

Failure across the network →

All briefs4

13:00

Fail-Safe

Sidney Lumet · 1964

A US bomber squadron, accidentally released from fail-safe protocols, heads toward Moscow. With no way to recall them, the President must order the destruction of New York City to prove to the Soviets that the attack was accidental — not the opening move of a first strike. Sidney Lumet’s 1964 thriller unfolds in real time across war rooms and airborne command posts, using austere visuals, procedural dialogue, and Henry Fonda’s restrained performance to dramatise how rational systems produce irrational ends.

13:00

Heaven's Gate

Michael Cimino · 1980

Michael Cimino’s 1980 Western Heaven’s Gate, starring Kris Kristofferson and Christopher Walken, is a visually sumptuous but narratively austere epic loosely based on the Johnson County War. Shot by Vilmos Zsigmond and scored by David Mansfield, it attempts to render class conflict as landscape and duration. Though reviled on release for its cost and length, later reappraisals treat it as a landmark of directorial conviction — flawed, forbidding, and formally uncompromising.

13:00

Night and the City

Jules Dassin · 1950

Jules Dassin’s 1950 London-set noir follows American tout Harry Fabian as he schemes to corner the city’s wrestling trade, only to be undone by his own miscalculations, betrayals, and the implacable logic of the underworld he misunderstands. Shot on location and at Shepperton Studios, it features Richard Widmark in a tightly coiled performance, Mutz Greenbaum’s precise cinematography, and Franz Waxman’s urgent score. Unsentimental and structurally rigorous, it ends not with reflection but with finality.

13:00

Inside Llewyn Davis

Ethan Coen, Joel Coen · 2013

A 2013 Coen brothers film set in early-1961 New York, following folk singer Llewyn Davis over one wintry week. Oscar Isaac stars in a performance defined by vocal authenticity and physical weariness. Bruno Delbonnel’s muted cinematography and T Bone Burnett’s live-recorded folk soundtrack anchor a story that loops rather than progresses — rejecting biopic convention in favour of a precise, unsentimental study of artistic persistence without reward.