It’s vital to acknowledge right away that Hollywood hasn’t ever done a good job at presenting programming movies. There are many things that the film industry might learn from genuine programmers, from implausible hack sequences to the absurd portrayal of the typical coder.

That doesn’t, however, imply that every Hollywood film presents programming and programmers inaccurately. Programmers may almost immediately relate to some of them since they are so unsettlingly realistic.

If you’re a programmer seeking to catch a Hollywood film, you’d prefer to see something relevant to your line of work. Here are some of the top programming movies you need to see which we reveal to you because… well, we’re also programmers and movie aficionados.

The Imitation Game

You should be familiar with Alan Turing if you have even the slightest interest in the development of computers. The Turing test, formerly known as the imitation game, took Alan Turing’s name as its inspiration. The title of the film refers to a test to see whether or not a machine is just as intelligent as a human.

The Imitation Game is a biographical account of Alan Turing that’s made interesting by a strong narrative. It chronicles the cryptanalyst’s and his team’s efforts to decrypt German communications during World War II. The Imitation Game is undoubtedly among the most enjoyable historical suspense films to watch for programming ideas, making it one of the top programming movies.

The Social Network

A movie called The Social Network was created to show how Facebook dealt with lawsuits in its early years as a social media platform. It’s difficult to critique the movie’s coding scenes, despite the fact that there has been a lot of criticism and skepticism regarding the truth of the film’s contents.

Don’t get us wrong, there are moments when programmers act really absurdly, but you don't anticipate seeing it very frequently. You can see why it’s a realistic movie by contrasting it to your typical Hollywood hacking film, where the IT nerd quickly breaks a bank’s security measures.

2010 saw the release of The Social Network, to middling reactions from the critics. The fact that Mark Zuckerberg didn’t particularly enjoy the film doesn’t diminish its attractiveness, though. The Social Network is a convincing choice if you’re a software engineer planning to launch a firm and are looking for the greatest programming movies to watch.

WarGames

In the 1982 technology thriller WarGames, a teenage hacker nonchalantly gains access to a US military computer intended to carry out nuclear assaults against the Soviet Union. This isn’t your normal programming movie. The main plot, however, doesn’t have as much in common with programming as David Lightman’s everyday life does.

What could be cooler than accessing and altering your grades and your friend’s grades using your home computer? Even more astounding is the fact that this film was aired in 1982, a time when almost no American school used computers to compile and store grades.

To go back to the movie’s primary plot, David runs the Global Thermonuclear War game as the Soviet Union and launches nuclear attacks on American cities. As a result of this development, David was detained and questioned by McKittrick, who assumed he was affiliated with the Soviet Union.

Finally, Falken, the original developer of the W.O.P.R program, was located by David Lightman when he managed to escape from custody. David eventually persuaded Falken to assist in preventing the nuclear apocalypse by repeatedly making the computer play tic tac toe against itself. It’s among the best programming movies available thanks to the technical aspects, and every programmer should watch it.

The Matrix

The Matrix is still deserving of being listed among the top programming films to catch in 2023, despite the fact that we doubt there’s a programmer alive who hasn’t seen it. The matrix’s premise seemed insanely plausible to many people when it was first published in 1999, to the extent that many of them speculated that the world could be the product of simulation.

The Matrix has encouraged many people to think about pursuing programming as a profession because of how it depicts cyber-anonymity and sophisticated hacking. What better way to get ideas for a tech product than to see a movie that shows you’re just living in a simulation if you’re hunting for inspiration to make one?

Takedown

It’s difficult for followers of the cybersecurity sector of the industry to not be familiar with Kevin Mitnick. American hacker Kevin was found guilty and sentenced to 50 years in jail following his high-profile capture in 1995 for a number of computer-related offenses.

Takedown, which was published in Finland in 2000, only concentrates on the hunt for and final capture of the cybersecurity specialist. Due to numerous disputes regarding the film's status, it took until 2004 for this movie to be released in US theaters. Considering that the movie actually is one of Kevin Mitnick’s least contentious endeavors, this isn’t even unexpected.

Today, Kevin Mitnick is the CEO of the Mitnick Security Consulting company. He’s 58 years old and focuses mostly on creating intrusion prevention systems while raising awareness of the value of cybersecurity and ways that people and businesses may protect themselves.

All of those are admirable things to accomplish, but it’s unlikely that anyone will pay them much attention. His most notable legacy will likely be as the unfavorable inspiration source for one of the greatest programming films ever made.

We Are Legion

You might think about watching this documentary movie if you’re interested in learning more about how the online hacktivist collective Anonymous operates. An hour and a half long, it is a staged story by Anonymous that was directed and written by Brian Knappenberger.

The movie explains some of the group’s motivations, which include copyright violations, online censorship, and police violence. That comes after a few hacktivism demonstrations in which the organization has taken part, both locally and online.

The movie’s reception wasn’t particularly positive, but it also wasn’t extremely groundbreaking. It’s a documentary that’s worth your time, according to Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes, where it has a 66% rating and a 73% approval rating.

Code Rush

Code Rush, which serves as more of a documentary than a movie and follows the lives of Netscape developers as they race to prepare the source code of Mozilla for publication, is similar to We Are Legion in that it follows their daily lives. Many Netscape staffers, including 16-year-old volunteer Stuart Parmenter, were shown in the documentary.

The documentary, which is just under an hour in length and is freely accessible on YouTube, is available. Many insightful quotations are included for programmers, some of which will subsequently influence how you view programming and development.

You’ll also be able to appreciate the lengths some people will go to in order to achieve their objectives. As you watch others give up valuable family time for a project, Project Code Rush not only motivates you to build things with your programming skills but also makes you realize that you might not be as committed as you should be.

Conclusion

Even while watching too many movies is perhaps a reasonable way for programmers to pass the time, it’s additionally one of the nicest pastime activities apart from taking a shot on WMS online casinos. Movies need to be about your love, in this case, computer science and programming, to be even vaguely intriguing.

This article examines a few of the top programming movies to see in 2023 and the reasons for their inclusion on the list. This list is absolutely comprehensive and includes anything from movies that track a real-life hacker to ones that tell the inside story of how Facebook was created.