The Hummingbird Project

While the technology here may be cutting edge, the tone of writer/director Kim Nguyen's tense drama invokes the post-Watergate paranoia that fed into New Hollywood nightmares like Sydney Pollack's Three Days of the Condor (1975). The story begins with Wall Street drone Vincent Zaleski (Jesse Eisenberg) concocting a pioneering fibre-optic cable that can gazump the competition by sending messages about market fluctuations a millisecond faster than existing connections. Fortunately, his cousin Anton (Alexander Skarsgård) is a computer geek who can write the code to make them millions. But their former boss (Salma Hayek) cottons on to their scheme and does her level best to sabotage the network running from Kansas to New Jersey. Much depends on the viewer buying into the techie milieu and being able to excuse the caricature-like nature of Skarsgård and Hayek's performances. But, while it falls some way below the standards set by Nguyen's Oscar-nominated child-soldier saga, War Witch (2012), this has a cockeyed conviction that keeps you watching.