Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

Surviving Progress

2011 · ★ 7.4

Humanity’s ascent is often measured by the speed of progress. But what if progress is actually spiraling us downwards, towards collapse? Ronald Wright, whose best-seller, “A Short History Of Progress” inspired “Surviving Progress”, shows how past civilizations were destroyed by “progress traps”—alluring technologies and belief systems that serve immediate needs, but ransom the future. As pressure on the world’s resources accelerates and financial elites bankrupt nations, can our globally-entwined civilization escape a final, catastrophic progress trap? With potent images and illuminating insights from thinkers who have probed our genes, our brains, and our social behaviour, this requiem to progress-as-usual also poses a challenge: to prove that making apes smarter isn’t an evolutionary dead-end.

Land of White Alice

1960

Film sponsored by Western Electric (AT&T's equipment manufacturing division), the builder of the United States Air Force's White Alice Communications System in Alaska. Introduces the people and geography of the new state as well as the Western Electric radio-relay system, which links far-flung military sites, alert stations, and missile-warning facilities. Ralph Caplan praised the film's "intrinsically dramatic and highly photogenic" portrayal of communications equipment.

Popular Science L-7-4

1948 · ★ 8

At Arcata, California, testing technology for landing planes in fog. Also: a high-tech barber shop in Westwood Village, California; manufacture of precision steel gauge blocks in Eskilstuna, Sweden.

Hands of Silver

2025

In a dystopian near-future, a young writer struggles to navigate his strained relationship with his ailing father, whose recovery through revolutionary technology comes at a great cost to his own well-being.

Glitch

2020

Nabil's life changes as an engineering company invades his house, claiming to build the house of the future as a solution to the pollution/trash crisis, infusing weird technology into his old traditional house.

Seedless

Seedless is a high-energy thriller-meets-dark-comedy that explores the quiet dissonance between how people present themselves and who they truly are.

Lyon-Turin : Le Dernier Tunnel XXL

2020 · ★ 8

No synopsis available.

My Ride with Uber and Lyft

2024

“My Ride with Uber and Lyft” follows taxi drivers in Boston from 2012, through the transition to Uber, and ends at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2022.

Microchip

2019

Imagine to be suddenly able to control your car, your bank account and all the electronics in your life just by thinking about it. What would you do with this power? What would you compromise for it?

The Lie Detector

2023 · ★ 8

In the first decades of the 20th century, when life was being transformed by scientific innovations, researchers made a thrilling new claim: they could tell whether someone was lying by using a machine. Popularly known as the “lie detector,” the device transformed police work, seized headlines and was extolled in movies, TV and comics as an infallible crime-fighting tool. Husbands and wives tested each other’s fidelity. Corporations routinely tested employees’ honesty and government workers were tested for loyalty and “morals.” But the promise of the polygraph turned dark, and the lie detector too often became an apparatus of fear and intimidation. Written and directed by Rob Rapley and executive produced by Cameo George, The Lie Detector is a tale of good intentions, twisted morals and unintended consequences.

Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer

1975 · ★ 7.2

Thom Andersen's hour-long documentary adroitly combines biography, history, film theory, and philosophical reflection. Muybridge's photographic studies of animal locomotion in the 1870s were a major forerunner of movies; even more interesting are his subsequent studies of diverse people, photographed against neutral backgrounds.

Do You Trust this Computer?

2018 · ★ 7.1

Science fiction has long anticipated the rise of machine intelligence, and today a new generation of self-learning computers has begun to reshape every aspect of our lives. Will A.I. usher in an age of unprecedented potential, or prove to be our final invention?