Jim Balsillie

While obviously an enormous hit and critical and commercial success, one of the most viscerally uncomfortable things about David Fincher’s The Social Network is how even before the film begins we know that the bad guys win: Facebook will become an enormous, zeitgeist-defining phenomena, and the patently unlikable Zuckerberg (played to perfection by Jesse Eisenberg) will become one of the richest men in the world. Less The Social Network’s rise-and-rise story, BlackBerry is a more classic rise-and-fall tale, and with that comes a degree of empathy that renders us perhaps more susceptible to the charms and quirks of the film’s central cast.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the story of the sensational rise and fall of the first smartphone would make a better doc than drama, but director and co-writer Matt Johnson turns that theory on its head with the fabulous bio-comedy, and faux-documentary, BlackBerry. The proudly Canadian feature tells the home-grown story of Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton), the two men behind the spectacularly popular line of thumb-numbing mobile devices. It traces its beginnings at the Waterloo, Ontario-based tech company Research in Motion (RiM) to its impressive and catastrophic downfall, largely due to cocky business decisions and a failure to keep up in an ever-changing, fast-moving market.