Movies inspire you to be a smarter and a better person, or in our case a better programmer. Today, when the world is hyper-connected, movies are the best way to see through it.
How many of you have watched these best movies?
1. The Social Network
The whole movie is about how Facebook grew as a business and the various ups and downs it had to face.
2. The imitation Game
As a programmer, You will find this movie extremely engaging.
Alan Turing, a British mathematician, joins the cryptography team to decipher the German enigma code. With the help of his fellow mathematicians, he builds a machine to crack the codes
3. Pirates of Silicon Valley
This is one of the top notch movie among these programming movies lists.
It basically tells the story of how the personal computer was designed by today's giants like Microsoft and Apple.
4. Jobs
The movie sheds light on Stev Job's personal and college life.
The movie revolves around how Apple became the business enterprise that it is today.
5. Mr. Robot
The show follows the footsteps of Elliot Alderson, a cybersecurity engineer in a cybersecurity firm ‘Allsafe’ by day and vigilante hacker operating from his computer, apprehending no-gooders by night.
This movie is fun, rebellious, got stunning soundtrack and even includes realistic aspects of programming.
(Note: It's a TV Series, not a movie but every episode is worth watching.)
6. Source Code
As the name suggests, there is some code involved :P
The hero in the movie enters the body of another person using his programming skills.
7. The Founder
This movie doesn't involve a programmer but is highly recommended if you want to start you first startup.
The movie shows how persistence, determination and hardwork pays off. It's by far the best movie I have seen when it comes to building a business. Besides that it also shows how to scale a business.
8. The Social Dilemma
"Only two organization call their customers users - illegal drugs & software". This statement is quite a relative explanation about this brilliant perfect eye opener documentary , undoubtedly it's Oscar deserving stuff.
A must watch movie for everyone. Every person living in present world is aware about how he or she is addicted to drug called social media in other words we are being used as lab rats not to discover something new but selling to customers, here advertisers are customers we are just products.
9. The Great Hack
In this eye-opening, well-executed documentary, the filmmakers meet the challenge of blending complex tech information with heightening drama. Plus, there's plenty of "rooting interest."
The thing is, in The Great Hack we end up rooting for ourselves, and the long odds of not being one of the fooled, the foiled, and the exploited, unmindful victims of "psy-ops" warfare.
Bonus - Silicon Valley
It is not a movie but TV Series and a must watch if you're a programmer.
This is about Richard, a programmer who creates an app called the Pied Piper and tries to get investors for it. Meanwhile, five other programmers struggle to make their mark in Silicon Valley.
Hope you enjoyed the list. Add a ❤ if you liked it.
Please suggest your other favorite movies in comments 👇👇
About me here: Om Bharatiya
Also read these interesting blogs by me:
React Native vs Flutter - What to Choose in 2021?
When to choose NoSQL over SQL?
Happy Coding <3
Discussion (113)
I would like to recommend also:
Sneakers- from Robert RedfordHalt and Catch firePirates of Silicon Valleywhere they do not idolize Jobs and the restWargames(a hidden gem I believe)Halt and Catch Fire x 100000000. The most underrated tv show about retro tech age of the 1980s going forward. Lee Pace and Mackenzie Davis, both amazing and also so very underrated in Hollywood.
Excellent series
This was an incredible series.
I absolutely love Sneakers, but its treatment of crypto drives me crazy.
Sneakersis a favorite from when I was younger. (My mom had a crush on Robert Redford but the whole cast is incredible.)Was just going to say Sneakers as well. Classic movie, super entertaining and was so ahead of it's time (all the discussion about whomever controls the flow of information controls society, etc).
Halt and Catch fire is awesome!
I also recommend one here is the name : Hacker
I'd say the best movies (in order of importance) are:
General Magic (2018)
Triumph of the Nerds (1996)
High Score (2020)
Sillicon Valley (2014)
Hidden Figures (2016)
Tron (1982)
The first two are really eye opening in terms of what happened and how startup succeed/fail.
And they aren't so fictionalized like "Pirates of Sillicon Valley" and others that took a lot of liberties with reality.
For fiction "Silicon Valley" is good because of all the jabs it takes at the expense of Silicon Valley culture.
Hidden Figures, while not directly related to modern CS, is pretty good too because of the illustration of the life of a "computer" back in the day when they were people!
The Imitation Game could have been good but it portrayed Turing as the ONLY genius and as an annoying person. I thought that was weak and unnecessary.
And Tron for it's profound innaccuracy... but high nostalgia factor for 1982. :)
Also include
Download: The true story of the interneten.wikipedia.org/wiki/Download_The...
I'm sure it's available somewhere on youtube.
Hmm.. saw the first episode of "Download" but so far I find it to be a bit too over dramatized. While not factually incorrect they paint a more negative picture than necessary at times.
For example, they paint Bill Gates as being hard on his employees. But most people know that he actually gave stock options much more freely than others of the time. And was far nicer than people like Steve Jobs. The problem with a lot of these movies is they always want a villian and a good guy.. when the reality is that there was a strong competition between companies and yes.. sometimes they did bad things.. but they weren't entirely bad people either.
This one is great! Pretty cool to see my own company on there (eBay, episode 3 "Bubble") even though all the footage is like 12yrs old now, hah.
I haven't seen that one. I'll check it out.
General Magic has been on my queue for a while.
Triumph of the Nerds was new to me; thanks for the recommendation!
General Magic is awesome, I have watched it. Also Silicon Valley.
I'll watch the rest, thanks for sharing this amazing list and your suggestions, mate! 🤗🤗
High score all the way 🙌🙌
Office Space - it teaches valuable lessons on decimal point precision and the importance of paperwork!
A classic. At my dot-com 1.0 job we always planned to have an Office Space watch party but, hey, it was dot-com 1.0 so the office didn't last that long.
All kidding aside, it's good to watch so you can spot when that stuff starts happening in your office. Some of it is harmless, but it's a good shared reference to point out silly things without having to come right out and call them silly.
See also:
I saw War Games when it came out. I know I shouldn't be bothered by lack of attention to detail in movies but, hey, attention to detail is how we types live.
My college roommate and I actually owned the Cermetek modem used in the film. Hey, 1200 bps was living in the fast lane when everyone else was stuck at 300 - and "only" $600 in mid-1980s dollars. Anyway, they had all the switches set wrong. I guess randomly flipping them up and down was more "cinematic".
And the scene where he hacks a payphone with a pull-tab he finds on the road?? Removable pull-tabs on cans had been replace a decade or so before movie came out because of litter issues and the fact that people kept dropping them in the can then accidentally swallowing them.
Unfortunately those and other sins dampened my enthusiasm for the movie.
Yes, that I missed to add. Amazing movies.
Must Watch
Thanks, mate for sharing! 🤘
Snowden
hackermovie.club/ ,
This is a site for this purpose , if you like to see and more.
Thank you a lot lol I have been looking up for a site like that but always finding myself to Reddit all the time
Oh, and I am surprised no one had mentioned the IT Crowd.
After 10 years ... I still come up with the line ... have you tried turning it off and on again...
IT Crowd is extremely funny.
Mr. Robot is a must watch, and not just for programmers (although programmers will find it most interesting)
Mr. Robot is a television show, not a movie, which you stated correctly at first.
The Hacktivists, The Internet’s Own Boy, Terms and Conditions May Apply, and Killswitch, are all documentaries about programming that I have repeatedly rewatched and I wholeheartedly hope others do, too.
Citizenfour is the only one I own that I haven’t watched yet.
citizenfour is really great - the film 'snowden' is an eerie movie to watch having seen it, because the making of citizenfour is one of the things that is dramatized in it
I don't think anyone mentioned
👌🎬
"Pirates of Silicon Valley" is so cool.
It was "only" TV movie, kind of crazy that they weren't any theater movies so far, which was able to catch the spirit as this one did.
The way the makers of the movie depicted the evolution of PC in shaping the history looks quite relevant and interesting throughout. Also, good to see our heros Jobs and Gates.
I liked their portrait, there weren't portrayed are perfect heroes as in typical Hollywood movies.
Looks like I gonna re-watch this movie pretty soon 😉
Thank you for your list / share!
I'd like to add
Hidden Figures!Oh and of course:
The MatrixYou forgot Snowden. Snowden is also one of the good movies.
Fail Safe, 1964. Besides being a great thriller, this 56 year old film touches on the problematic aspects of technology we worry about today, including privacy concerns, its ability to distance us from others, and our ceding control to processes which can be impossible to understand as a whole. Highly recommended.
Is my memory failing me or there wasn't any programming AT ALL in the movie Source Code? Both of Jake Gyllenhaal's character weren't remotely close to being programmers, aren't they? One is a solider and the other is a teacher.
I enjoyed Dennou Coil a lot. A somewhat slow anime sci-fi mystery series about augmented reality. Less programming, more psycology though. The hacking they do portray is quite "3D flashy effects" which would normally annoy me, but in that universe it's pretty justified.
(Note that it may not be for kids, despite looking so. We watched it all family but later discovered it made our 5yo afraid to sleep alone :)
List needs more Primer : imdb.com/title/tt0390384/
Since you included The Social Dilemma, it is only fitting that 'Zero Days' should be in the list. For ones who dont know what this is.. It is about how a computer virus designed by a entire country to destroy the nuclear program of iran, and its impacts.
Blackhat (2015) is outstanding. Directed by Michael Mann, who makes few movies but every one a classic. Known for being meticulous about to detail, the coding sequences do not disappoint. It's also a hell of a thriller.
Missed #1, Office Space. I subjectively don't think social network was anything great, and Jobs was garbage compared to Pirates of Silicon Valley.
@huncyrus nailed some good ones too: Sneakers, HCF, wargames
Halt and Catch Fire. If you grew up in the 80s it's fantastic. If you grew up in the 80s and paid 4 figures for a beige box that is now slower than the CPU in your watch ... it's still fantastic. :)
the serie : Halt & catch fire is a gem
also I would add Golden Eye since the Russian programmer is a fun bit to watch !
I almost forget to mention Jurassic Park, just for fun watching the teen girl managing a linux file system with a UI that exist no where (looks more like the Reboot, kid show)
Disclosure (1994) with Michael Douglas and Demi Moore. It's the first movie that got computer technology and technology company politics and issues right, and very few movies since then have done it as well.
Might I also suggest:
Real Genius
Prime Risk
Prime Risk was a direct to video movie about accessing ATMs, which leads to uncovering a plot to destroy the national economy.
And Real Genius is, well, a funny movie.
The only mention of Real Genius.
Superprogrammer! 👑
May I recommend Zero Days and Internet's own boy ?
Haven't watched Zero Days yet, how's it?
I think it's super interesting, almost like a secret spies movie in documentary form XD
Will watch it, waiting for the next weekend. Thank you..
whar aboout limitless?
The Founder is great, but I'd watch it as much as a cautionary tale. The main character was a predatory sociopath. Not exactly how I would want tech founders to build their businesses.
Furthermore the main character is not the founder. A sad story...
Ah man! Cloak and Dagger - I've completely forgotten about that one! It's the one with the "web page" with a "secret link" on the homepage, right?! Dang, i need to try and get that and rewatch :D
Suggested Series [How to Sell Medicines Online (Fast)]
A series about a young programmer who creates a website to sell drugs
Episode 2 they use Vue lol
The Travelling Salesman - youtube.com/watch?v=6ybd5rbQ5rU! Where else you can see people talking about P vs NP.
I loved how the first minutes — literally the introduction of the protagonist as someone who's "proved non-existence of one-way functions in 2012" — establishes the movie as alternate history.
[Reality: Most people assume they exist but we're nowhere near proving or disproving that. OWFs remain a popular plot device in the speculative genre called Complexity Theory / Cryptography :-) cstheory.stackexchange.com/questio...]
For a low-budget, men-in-a-room movie, it has surprisingly good discussions of CS theory and possible consequences. The plot is... well there is not much plot :-) I was actually disappointed with a few scenes that go outside the room into vague territory (delusional or real? I wasn't sure). But overall I'm happy I watched it.
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