the cost of ambition

Daniel Plainview drinks everyone's milkshake and dies alone in a bowling alley. Mark Zuckerberg builds a network of two billion people and refreshes a friend request that will never be accepted. Lou Bloom climbs the ladder by filming other people falling off it.

The field changes — oil, music, crime, tech, boxing, ballet — but the shape stays the same. Someone wants something badly enough to let everything else burn, and the film watches the burning. The ambition isn't always punished; sometimes the cost is simply what was traded away, noticed only after it's gone.

Films here also carry Moral Ambiguity, Artistic Obsession, Organized Crime, Psychological Horror, Identity Crisis · Most represented: Martin Scorsese, Paul Thomas Anderson.