5. Money Monster
Its Influence: High and Low (1963)
The clash between the rich and the poor is a conflict that predates most forms of storytelling and even today continues to define how modern society operates. No film better explored either world as viscerally or delicately as Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1968), a film whose very title marks a puerile distinction between the two social classes. High and Low (1963) and Money Monster (2016) exist on fundamentally different economic and social planes, but their stories are virtually the same: when faced with poverty, a frustrated young man resorts to kidnapping and ransoming money from an affluent man only to discover a deeply sinister, systemic motive behind his economic crisis. Money Monster, unfortunately, possesses only a tenth of High and Low‘s depth.
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