Movies About Creative Thinking: Making it together

Part six of seven. About ideas that cannot be had alone, and about how a team is assembled around a problem.

The most talkative part of the selection: almost everything here is built on dialogue and on the pleasure of watching other people be competent.

The manager of a poor baseball club stops buying players by reputation and starts buying by a single undervalued metric.

Topics: changing the metric instead of raising the budget, data in conflict with the experience of scouts, an industry resisting a new approach, the price of betting on an unproven idea.

Aftertaste: calm, smart, quietly uplifting. A film with the feeling of a victory that happened somewhere other than where it was expected.

The investigative desk of a major newspaper tests for a pattern where everyone before them saw isolated cases.

Topics: an investigative method as a craft, working with documents and lists, the discipline of not publishing until the full picture is there, the responsibility of institutions.

Aftertaste: serious, restrained, leaving respect for the profession and a dull anger at the system. Deliberately shot without showy scenes, and you can feel it.

Several people, independently of one another, notice in the financial system what everyone else prefers not to notice.

Topics: checking primary data instead of ratings, the loneliness of a person with an unpopular conclusion, collective blindness, explaining the complicated in plain language.

Aftertaste: angry, ironic and energising. It plays like a comedy and ends like a verdict, and that combination is what sticks.

A village hires warriors for its defence, and half the film is devoted to picking the team and preparing.

Topics: selecting a roster by function, training the untrained, a defence plan as an engineering problem, the relationship between hired fighters and the people they protect.

Aftertaste: epic and sorrowful. Three and a half hours that leave you feeling you have lived that time alongside the characters.

A team is assembled for one specific job: each member covers a single stage of the plan.

Topics: distributing roles across stages, the pleasure of watching someone else's professionalism, style as part of the design, trust inside the group.

Aftertaste: light, stylish, impeccably entertaining. The perfect break between the heavier films in the selection.

Three product launches, three backstage conflicts, one man who knows how to demand and does not know how to stop.

Topics: the role of the client and the editor in a creative process, high demands and their cost to the people around you, acknowledging someone else's contribution, the public image against private life.

Aftertaste: wired and contentious. The dialogue moves at a rattle, viewers disagree about the man, and the film is more interesting to discuss than to watch.

Next part: documentaries.

The whole series:

1. Inventors and engineers
2. Limits that help
3. Obsessed with the craft
4. A change of viewpoint
5. When nothing comes
6. Making it together
7. Documentaries