Film Review – BlackBerry

Last month, there was “Tetris,” which took a serious look at the creation of a beloved video game, transforming business dealings into a spy film of sorts, with the production trying to wring some suspense out of contract negotiations and corporate villainy. And now there’s “BlackBerry,” which offers the same idea, only here the subject is the once popular smartphone that revolutionized the mobile device industry, inspiring insane popularity in the early 2000s. There’s more corporate villainy and contract negotiations, but co-writer/director Matt Johnson (taking inspiration from the book “Losing the Signal,” by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff) creates a more involving arena of egos and business dealings with the feature, keeping the picture moving along as the story grows meaner and stranger, also examining a wealth of idiosyncratic personalities. “BlackBerry” is listed as a “fictionalization” of the company’s rise and fall, but there are universal truths about human behavior to savor in this engrossing endeavor. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com