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Drama 122 min R
Rotten Tomatoes90%Metacritic83IMDb
Television will never be the same.
When veteran anchorman Howard Beale is forced to retire his 25-year post because of his age, he announces to viewers that he will kill himself during his farewell broadcast. Network executives rethink their decision when his fanatical tirade results in a spike in ratings.
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Meticulous, prestige, bleak and overwhelming.
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Written by TMDB members; each links to the original. Not part of Taste Buds's numbers.
Few Hollywood productions have been as utterly prescient as director Sidney Lumet’s cinematic masterpiece “Network” (1976), a chillingly serious satire about the television business in the 1970s and where it was ultimately headed in years to come. Written by TV pioneer Paddy Chayefsky, this winner of four Oscars on 10 total nominations provides a comical but cynically disturbing look inside the workings of a fictitious American television network. In telling this story, the film eerily forecast the direction this medium would take in the decades that followed with remarkable accuracy, stunningly predicting such developments as the tabloidization of TV, the consolidation of media ownership, the impact of foreign influence and investment, and the dumbing down, sensationalism and line-blurring of its content in both its entertainment and journalistic programming. It also nailed developments outside the television business with great clarity by focusing on the pivotal role that TV played (and would come to play) in those occurrences. And, even though it’s something of a nostalgic time capsule of the period in which it was filmed, the picture has held up remarkably well (it gets better
Read the whole review on TMDBPeter Finch is superb here as the increasingly puritanical television news anchor ("Beale") who, having been told he was about to be fired decided on air to tell the audience he was going to shoot himself on live telly. Next night - yep, he was allowed back - he declared that it was time the viewing public got off their sofas and declared they had "had enough" with lazy government and corporate greed. His long suffering boss "Max" (William Holden) wants to have him looked after (medically) but the ambitious PR executive "Diana" (Faye Dunaway) sees an opportunity amidst all this evangelicalism and convinces the station's new boss "Hackett" (Robert Duvall) to remove "Max" and to reinstate "Beale" with his own hour long news hour programme complete with it's own soothsayer! Initially, this all sounds too barmy to be real, but in true television tradition - it catches on. The audiences soar, the advertisers and sponsors love it. For once, the news division isn't haemorrhaging cash! Can this be sustained though? "Beale" is entirely out of control and nobody - even his own network - is safe from his ranting and raving. Sooner or later he is bound to overstep the mark - and then the domin
Read the whole review on TMDBThe UPS network is a television network that suffers from a lack of viewership. This led to the layoff of a group of their employees, including the great media night news presenter, Howard Beale, and this led to the events of a psychological impact on Beale, so he promised that he would commit suicide in front of the camera the next day. The conditions and conditions of the network changed after Beale's decision to commit suicide in front of the camera the next day. The film takes us through the changes that occur to the network after this incident. How did Howard get the situation to the brink, how does the network deal with the crisis, and how do they benefit from the incident, or in a more correct, how do they exploit it to increase the number of views and return the network to the most powerful television network in America. The film focuses on 4 characters, the first character is Diana Christensen, a character who doesn't care about high principles in the media and tries in various ways to do anything, even if it is bad, in order to make the network gain more views, a character that surprises you a lot because of her orientations. The second character is Howard Beale and the i
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22 profiled raters. Loved most by The Provocateurs; disliked most by The Ironists.
If you loved this film, the television, the book, the music, the game.
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