Rory Sutherland’s rolling list of movies and films

It’s genuinely strange to picture Rory Sutherland on his sofa watching telly. The man seems like he should be permanently at a lectern or holding court in a pub. But here we are → 32 films he’s referenced across his talks, each one pulled apart for insights about psychology and irrational behaviour.

I don’t always agree with his takes, but I always find them interesting. Which is the point, really. Next time you’re bored at home, mix work and pleasure together on the sofa. Pick one you’ve never seen, watch it through Rory’s lens, and see what you notice. At the very least, you’ll have a more interesting answer when someone asks what you watched last weekend.

Rory Sutherland frequently draws on film to illustrate ideas about context, irrationality, and human perception. This page lists every film he has referenced across 200 YouTube videos → 32 titles in total → each with an explanation of the specific insight he draws from it and a direct link to the relevant moment in his talks.

32 entries, sorted by citation frequency

The Usual Suspects

The Usual Suspects is Bryan Singer’s 1995 neo-noir thriller, famous for its climactic reveal that the unremarkable Verbal Kint is the mythical criminal mastermind Kaiser Soze. Rory uses the film’s ending → the euphoric rush of suddenly understanding everything at once → as an analogy for the disproportionate satisfaction of stepping off the kerb just as your Uber arrives, illustrating how timing and framing generate pleasure far exceeding their objective cause.

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Airplane!

Airplane! is the 1980 comedy film directed by Jim Abrahams and the Zucker brothers, a spoof of disaster movies built on rapid-fire absurdist gags. Rory quotes a joke in which an air traffic controller refuses to give the obvious instruction because “that’s just what they’d expect us to do” → using it to illustrate how rationality is always context-dependent, and how a framework that works brilliantly in one domain becomes pure nonsense in another.

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Goldfinger

Goldfinger (1964) is the third James Bond film, directed by Guy Hamilton, featuring the villain’s notorious card-cheating scheme using a woman with binoculars as a remote spotter. Rory uses the scene as an analogy for lateral problem-solving → winning not by competing on conventional terms but by reframing the game entirely. He also credits the film as a direct inspiration for Travis Kalanick’s Uber concept.

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The Big Short

The Big Short is a 2015 film (and Michael Lewis book) dramatising the handful of traders who bet against the US subprime mortgage market before the 2008 collapse. Rory cites it as one of his favourite films of the past two decades because it demonstrates how collective institutional insanity and misaligned incentives can persist in plain sight. He draws a parallel between Lou Ranieri, inventor of mortgage-backed securities, and J. Robert Oppenheimer → brilliant creators whose innovations produced catastrophic consequences.

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Inglourious Basterds

Inglourious Basterds (2009) is Quentin Tarantino’s revisionist World War II film, built around extended scenes of tension, misdirection, and subverted genre conventions. Rory references Tarantino’s approach as a model for counterintuitive thinking, citing the film’s capacity to upend expectations as creatively instructive. He also notes Tarantino’s reported shift after this production toward shorter, more constrained writing, using it to illustrate that imposed limits can sharpen rather than diminish creative output.

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Betty Blue

Betty Blue (37°2 le matin, 1986) is a French film directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix, following a volatile romantic obsession with minimal plot logic but overwhelming emotional force. Rory cites it as an example of cinema that succeeds entirely through psychological intensity rather than narrative coherence, bypassing rational evaluation to produce a powerful effect. It supports his broader argument that persuasion and impact often operate below the level of explicit information.

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Mad Men

Mad Men is an American television drama (2007–2015) set in a 1960s New York advertising agency, centred on the enigmatic creative director Don Draper. Rory returns to it repeatedly as a cultural touchstone for the tension between instinctive creative judgment and the demand for rational justification in advertising. Draper functions as shorthand for the insight that the most powerful persuasion operates through psychology and atmosphere rather than explicit argument.

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North by Northwest

North by Northwest (1959) is Alfred Hitchcock’s espionage thriller starring Cary Grant, featuring iconic sequences on cross-country trains and at iconic American landmarks. Rory notes that the film’s depiction of American infrastructure and material abundance would have seemed genuinely astonishing to British viewers of the era, using it as evidence that prosperity can function as a form of soft propaganda. He also references Hitchcock’s mastery of suspense as a model for managing expectations rather than delivering explicit information.

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Psycho

Psycho (1960) is Alfred Hitchcock’s horror film, notorious for killing its apparent protagonist early and for its innovative marketing campaign. Rory highlights that British audiences of the time were astonished by the sight of an en-suite shower in a basic roadside motel → a detail illustrating that perceived luxury is entirely relative to context and prior expectation. He also cites Hitchcock’s decision to withhold Janet Leigh’s top billing as an early, deliberate example of using scarcity of information to drive demand.

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2001: A Space Odyssey

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is Stanley Kubrick’s landmark science fiction film, featuring HAL 9000 → an artificial intelligence that communicates entirely through speech, with no graphical interface of any kind. Rory notes this reflects the era’s confident assumption that voice would be the natural endpoint for human-computer interaction, long before the technology existed to deliver it. He uses HAL as evidence that cultural imagination locks in technological defaults before they are technically determined.

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A James Bond film

A James Bond film → the specific title varies in Rory’s retellings → contains a scene depicting a real-time moving map that Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick credits as the original inspiration for the app’s live tracking interface. Rory uses this anecdote to illustrate how fictional portrayals of technology seed entrepreneurial imagination, and how the solution to a trust problem (strangers entering unknown cars) can emerge from an entirely unexpected cultural source.

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American Graffiti

American Graffiti (1973) is George Lucas’s coming-of-age film set in early 1960s California, built around teenage car culture and the rituals of cruising, drag racing, and drive-in diners. Rory references it in discussions of how the automobile displaced exotic travel as the primary aspirational status object for younger generations, with the car becoming the dominant vehicle → literally and figuratively → for freedom, identity, and social belonging.

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Ask a Mortician

Ask a Mortician is a YouTube channel hosted by mortician Caitlin Doughty, dedicated to frank, often humorous discussion of death, embalming, and the funeral industry. Rory recommends it enthusiastically, singling out the episode examining why JFK’s casket was kept closed as a strikingly fresh perspective on one of the most over-analysed events in modern history. He cites it as an example of how genuine domain expertise can unlock new angles on exhausted subjects.

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Citizen Kane

Citizen Kane (1941) is Orson Welles’s landmark film, loosely based on newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. Rory invokes the attributed Hearst dictum → ‘make the headline big enough and I’ll make the story big enough’ → to illustrate his argument that the Mona Lisa’s canonical status was largely manufactured by journalists rather than earned through intrinsic merit. The reference supports his broader point that perceived cultural value is often a product of media attention and narrative construction.

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Curb Your Enthusiasm

Curb Your Enthusiasm is Larry David’s long-running American comedy series (2000–present), structured around trivial early incidents that return with disproportionate consequences. Rory references its use of the Chekhovian gun → a planted detail that resurfaces to escalate conflict → particularly in scenes where an ambiguous signal like a car horn is misread and triggers an outsized response. The show becomes a model for how context and interpretation, not the act itself, determine social meaning.

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Deadpool 2

Deadpool 2 (2018) is a Marvel superhero comedy co-written by Rhett Reese. Rory notes that Reese inserted a scene of Matt Damon delivering a passionate monologue about moist toilet paper → apparently at Rory’s instigation or at least aligned with his arguments → to illustrate the point about willingness to pay. The detail supports Rory’s claim that consumers will pay a significant premium for products that address visceral, emotionally charged discomforts even when the rational case for the upgrade appears trivial.

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Eyes Wide Shut

Eyes Wide Shut (1999) is Stanley Kubrick’s final film, a psychological drama suffused with imagery of secret luxury, exclusive gatherings, and carefully managed access. Rory references it briefly as atmospheric shorthand when describing a concept for a high-end airport departure experience designed to feel less like a transport facility and more like entering a private, invitation-only world → using the film’s mood to capture the psychological register he is aiming for.

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Goodnight Mister Tom

Goodnight Mister Tom (1998) is a British television film based on Michelle Magorian’s novel, following a London evacuee who finds unexpected warmth and belonging in a small rural community during the Second World War. In conversation with Rory, Rob Henderson cites it as an analogy for the psychological benefits of moving to a smaller institution, where reduced scale increases visibility, belonging, and emotional safety in ways that larger, more prestigious environments often fail to provide.

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I Am Legend

I Am Legend (2007) is a science fiction film starring Will Smith as the last surviving human in a post-viral New York, whose only companion is his dog Sam. Rory references it briefly in discussions of the deep evolutionary interdependence between humans and dogs, using the film’s central relationship to illustrate that the human-canine bond is not merely sentimental but represents a genuine mutual dependency forged over tens of thousands of years.

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Magnum PI

Magnum P.I. is an American television detective series (1980–1988) starring Tom Selleck as a Hawaii-based private investigator. Rory references it, typically as an opening aside, to observe that Selleck’s particular physical presence was unusually well-matched to the role → an example of casting where the actor’s attributes communicate exactly what the character needs to project, effortlessly and without explanation. The joke typically serves as a set-up for a broader point about how appearance shapes perceived credibility.

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One Billion Lives

One Billion Lives is a documentary film produced by vaping advocates, built around testimony from credentialled medical scientists who argue that mass adoption of vaping as a cigarette substitute could prevent a billion smoking-related deaths globally. Rory cites it to support his argument that regulatory risk-aversion → treating the visible harms of a new technology as more politically dangerous than the invisible but certain harms of inaction → constitutes a systematic and lethal bias in public health decision-making.

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Rain, Steam and Speed

Rain, Steam and Speed → The Great Western Railway (1844) is an oil painting by J.M.W. Turner depicting a locomotive crossing a bridge at speed, with a small hare visible in the foreground fleeing the oncoming train. Rory references it as the cover image chosen by sociologist Hartmut Rosa for his work on social acceleration, with the hare representing any organism overwhelmed by the pace of technological change. It serves as a vivid shorthand for the cost of optimising relentlessly for speed at the expense of everything else.

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Succession

Succession is an HBO prestige drama → though listed in this section, it is a television series → following the Roy family’s struggle for control of a global media empire. Rory cites it as a study in how the ultra-wealthy signal status through deliberate understatement: the characters dress in quiet, expensive basics like Max Mara rather than flashy brands, illustrating that high-status signalling at the top of the wealth hierarchy works by subtraction, not addition.

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The Big Lebowski

The Big Lebowski is the Coen Brothers’ 1998 comedy following Jeff Bridges as a laconic Los Angeles slacker caught up in a kidnapping scheme. Rory recounts staying at a former East German secret police station converted into a Berlin hotel where the film played on continuous loop → an absurdist juxtaposition he finds telling about how culture travels across ideological contexts.

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The Hitcher

The Hitcher is a 1986 thriller in which a young motorist picks up a hitchhiker, played by Rutger Hauer, who turns out to be a psychopathic killer. Rory uses it to explain the deep psychological resistance to car-sharing services like BlaBlaCar: even a vanishingly small probability of a catastrophic outcome dominates decision-making, illustrating his argument that reducing variance matters far more to human behaviour than improving the average outcome.

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The Imitation Game

The Imitation Game is a 2014 biographical film dramatising Alan Turing’s work cracking the German Enigma cipher at Bletchley Park during the Second World War. Rory draws on it to illustrate a key information asymmetry insight: the codebreakers succeeded partly because they already knew the shape of messages they were searching for, demonstrating that knowing what a solution looks like dramatically reduces the search space for finding it.

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The Lion King

The Lion King is Disney’s 1994 animated musical, loosely based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet and drawing also on Richard III, following a young lion prince who must reclaim his kingdom. Rory confesses to resisting it but finding it genuinely amazing → using it as a personal example of how aesthetic prejudice can prevent engagement with excellent work, and as evidence that enduring narratives are rooted in deep, universal archetypes.

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The Wolf of Wall Street

The Wolf of Wall Street is Martin Scorsese’s 2013 film depicting the excess and fraud of stockbroker Jordan Belfort, saturated with conspicuous displays of newly acquired wealth. Rory references it in passing in discussions of airport luxury retail and ostentatious consumption, using it as cultural shorthand for the kind of performative status-signalling that contrasts sharply with the deliberate understatement favoured by the genuinely wealthy.

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THX 1138

THX 1138 is George Lucas’s 1971 feature debut, a dystopian science-fiction film set in a dehumanised underground society, known for its stark, clinical visual aesthetic. Rory cites it as evidence that Lucas developed a distinctive creative sensibility and commercial identity very early, long before Star Wars made him famous → illustrating how a creator’s fundamental character is often visible from the very first work they produce.

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Trading Places

Trading Places is John Landis’s 1983 comedy in which two wealthy commodities traders bet on whether they can ruin a street hustler or transform a con man into a gentleman. Rory references it in discussions of identity and status signals, using the film as a vivid illustration of how rapidly context, clothing, and framing can transform perceived social standing → a live experiment in the constructed nature of class.

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Un Chien Andalou

Un Chien Andalou is the 1929 surrealist short film directed by Luis Buñuel and co-written with Salvador Dalí, famous for its shocking opening image of an eyeball being sliced with a razor. Rory cites it as a touchstone of avant-garde art → a work that abandoned narrative logic entirely yet became one of the most famous films ever made, raising questions about what audiences actually require from creative work.

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Virtual Railfan

Virtual Railfan is a YouTube channel broadcasting live webcam feeds from railway lines and stations across North America, attracting a devoted global audience of train enthusiasts. Rory mentions leaving it running in the background while working from home, using it as a personal example of the psychological comfort value of ambient, low-stakes content → and as evidence that deeply niche interests can find large and loyal audiences through digital platforms.

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