Groundswell Productions (USA): 4

The American sports comedy-drama film Win Win (2011) was written and directed by Tom McCarthy. Mike Flaherty, a small-town attorney in New Providence, New Jersey, struggles to maintain his law practice while also coaching wrestling. He faces the challenge of keeping his financial problems hidden from his wife Jackie and their two young daughters, Abby and Stella. Mike sees an opportunity when he is assigned to represent Leo Poplar, a client with early dementia who has no known family. He convinces a judge to make him Leo’s guardian, resulting in a monthly stipend of $1,508. However, instead of taking care of Leo ...

The Informant! (2009) is an American biographical-crime comedy film directed by Steven Soderbergh and written by Scott Z. Burns. It follows the story of Mark Whitacre, a rising star at Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) in Decatur, Illinois during the early 1990s. Whitacre’s wife Ginger urges him to blow the whistle on the company’s illegal price-fixing practices. In November 1992, he confesses to FBI agent Brian Shepard that ADM executives (including himself) had been colluding with competitors to manipulate lysine prices. To gather evidence, Whitacre secretly ...

Smart People (2008), a American comedy-drama film, tells the story of Lawrence Wetherhold, an English professor at Carnegie Mellon University. As a single parent to his college-aged son James and high school daughter Vanessa, as well as the sibling of his adopted brother Chuck, Lawrence’s life is complicated. He often clashes with Chuck, who he sees as a ne’er-do-well, and is generally bitter, arrogant, and self-absorbed. These traits also affect his relationship with his students; he has little interest in teaching them and even parks illegally on campus. However, when his car gets impounded and he can’t retrieve it due to a former student working ...

The American drama film, The Visitor (2007), was written and directed by Tom McCarthy and produced by Michael London and Mary Jane Skalski. Walter Vale, a widowed economics professor from Connecticut College, leads a mostly solitary life. He occupies his time by occasionally taking piano lessons in honor of his late wife, a renowned concert pianist, and rarely works on his latest book. Despite not being entirely enthusiastic about it, he is asked to present a paper at an academic conference at New York University as the ...