Top 8 Movies Accountants Must Watch in 2024

There are many different categories of people who love movies. Some like to go in for entertainment, others go in for a deeper meaning, and some just like escaping their usual monotonous life. Movies have a variety of genres that attract different tastes and reasons why someone likes them. Regardless of your reason, they can vary from heartfelt to quirky oddities.

There are a lot of people around us who like a particular movie just because their favorite actor or actress was playing a role in it. Not only this, you will meet people who love watching a movie just because it was directed by a renowned director. Then there are people who will praise a movie because the movie is made on the subject they like. Now you get the sense of it; people have multiple reasons for liking something that they do.

Since there are multiple reasons, there are numerous movies that are directed on the subject that revolves around finance and accounts which attract many accounting professionals and students that are making their career in finance and accounts. Accounting professionals and students might like these sorts of movies because they might find them relatable or can find some sort of inspiration.

List of Movies Accounting Professionals and Students Must Watch

Here are 8 movies accounting professionals and students would surely like:

1. The Shawshank Redemption

This movie is a gem. You can find this movie on many ‘Greatest Movies Of All Time‘ lists by various renowned magazines and services. Without even the slightest of doubt, this movie is a classic and one of the best feel-good movies of all time. It is somewhere in the interest of accountants since the main character i.e. Andy Dufresne is a master in bookkeeping who subsequently guides the prison warden with his taxes and helps out multiple people in the prison with his astounding skills. As per this movie, the main character was unjustly sentenced to life in prison for murdering his wife and her lover. Andy gets extra protection from the prison warden since he helps them in preparing their tax returns. Once he gets escaped from the Shawshank prison, he exposes the corrupt warden for years of illegal bookkeeping. This movie should surely be on your list because whatever genre you are into, this movie will definitely secure a little place in your heart.

2. Inside Job

Inside Job is an oscar-winning documentary directed by Charles Ferguson. It basically is a documentary that presents the story of the economic meltdown that happened in 2008, which could have been kept at bay but it seemed like there was just one act of corruption after another that permitted numerous people to make billions while others lost all that they had. There were a lot of interviews with journalists, financial researchers, and some of the people involved and it’s pretty evident that this meltdown could have been avoided decades earlier but it seemed like every person who could have stopped it had their hands out and were just finding the other way while millions of people were destroyed from what was happening around.

Even if you don’t know much about Wall Street, investment trading, or understand how loans perform, INSIDE JOB actually does a very excellent job of not only describing it but presenting every bit of it with such great detail while never keeping you confused. The documentary does an amazing job at presenting the growth of these companies, how they carried on to make money by creating bad loans, and then of course there’s the meltdown, which slapped the poorest people the most while those to be blamed walked away with bonuses and another hefty amount.

The documentary presents such a clear picture of so many filthy things that it really is astonishing that it took so long for this collapse to occur. This documentary eclipses not only the financial situation of the US but multiple other countries such as China and Iceland that were suffered from this global recession. Every accountant should be cognizant of this historic crisis, and hence, this movie is definitely a must-watch for accounting professionals or students.

3. In Debt We Trust: America before the Bubble Bursts

In Debt We Trust is a documentary directed by a famous filmmaker Danny Schechter. This movie is about the causes and outcomes of consumer debt in the United States. Schechter brings his character ‘everyman’ to the movie to help viewers understand the crisis and its implications. Each clip in the movie provides a fairly intuitive description of what the movie is about. The movie talks about a consumer debt crisis where businesses, government, and creditors have colluded together to allow companies to continue extending credit debt that has been used to enrich them.

The movie presents a frightening picture of debt as uncontrollable, with excellent filmmaking quality and well-timed humor provided by Schechter and the use of the educational film from 1960, The Wise Use of Credit. Experts are interviewed that give explicit opinions on the danger of our current economy and different segments of the movie report on activists like Mildred Brown who work to reform legislation that impacts low- and moderate-income families. The movie is essentially eerily prescient when addressing the potential devastating failure if consumers are unable to maintain their mortgage payments which have since burst into a high-risk loan bubble.

4. The Big Short

The Big Short is a true crime story, a bank heist movie, and a polemic against Wall Street made by Hollywood. It’s all these things at once. Adam McKay (“Anchorman,” “Anchorman 2”) and Charles Randolph have written this movie and it is directed by Mr. McKay and released in the middle of Star Wars advent season, the film sets itself a very tall order. It wants not only to explain the financial crisis of 2008 — following the outline of Michael Lewis’s best-selling nonfiction book — but also to make them dry, complex abstractions of high finance exciting and fun.

Celebrity cameos (from Margot Robbie, Anthony Bourdain, and Selena Gomez among others) are turned into mini-seminars on the finer points of credit-default swaps and collateralized debt obligations. The story revolves from executive suites and conference rooms to bustling Manhattan streets and desolate Florida subdivisions. The script, the performances, and the camera itself seems to be running on a cocktail of Red Bull, Adderall, and mescaline. This is a terrifically enjoyable movie that leaves you in a state of rage, nausea, and despair. Mr. McKay presents the audience with an important moral and political challenge as to how one should deal with such feelings.

5. Midnight Run

Midnight Run is directed by Martin Brest, is entertaining plus engaging – a total winner.

With a comedic spirit and strong characters, this movie transcends the road-movie genre by its offbeat humor. Mardukas is a mild-mannered Mafia accountant who stole $15 million from a Chicago kingpin. While under arrest for robbery, he jumps bail. Jack Walsh is an ex-cop who left the force when he refused to join his colleagues in criminal activities. Now he’s a bounty hunter who will get $100,000 if he returns Mardukas back. Walsh captures his criminal in New York and starts a cross-country trek. Everything goes against him: the FBI is on their tail, Mafia killers are after them, and Mardukas has been sent another bounty hunter to ensure that he shows up on the appointed day. Along the way, the white-collar criminal, who donated most of his money to charity, befriends the former detective whose conscience got him canned. The acting by Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin is top-notch. These two characters are worth caring about. Surrounded on all sides by ethical infants, they at least know the difference between virtue and vice.

6. The Insider

Michael Mann’s intelligent documentary + drama, The Insider, is a simmering brew of altered facts and dramatic license. In comparison to the wider film, however, the film (co-written with Forrest Gump Oscar winner Eric Roth) is effectively accurate due to its immersive study of ethics in the corruptible industries of tobacco and broadcast journalism. On one side there is Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe), the former cigarette scientist who violated contractual agreements to expose Brown & Williamson’s inclusion of addictive ingredients in cigarettes, casting himself into a vortex of moral dilemma. On the other side is 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino), who strives to report Wigand’s story putting him at odds with veteran correspondent Mike Wallace (Christopher Plummer) and senior executives at CBS News. As the film’s desperate urgency increases, so do the viewer’s anxious response.

Filmgoers will find themselves comparing the gripping drama to All the President’s Men. Even with some of Pacino’s personal cinematic excesses, he is in top form when portraying a tortured man who has retained his integrity at great personal cost. The Insider is about two different themes: it offers an intense thriller with interesting parts of social commentary as seen in Wigand and Bergman. Even if details aren’t always precise on-screen (as Mike Wallace and others protested before its release), the movie still offers an important truth- one that was so brazenly undermined by tobacco executives seen in a familiar clip, lying under oath to the detriment of their greed. The movie illustrates how accountants must sometimes make a tough decision, even if it means making one that’s not the best for them. This movie may serve as a reminder to decision-makers to always make the right decision.

7. The Accountant

Accountant” is a movie that revolves around the life of an accountant caught by the FBI, who later takes up other facets of work to outsmart the FBI. This is a fantasy for any accountant; watching Ben Affleck as he tackles taxes and takes care of accounting problems. Within the first few minutes, he meets his match and starts to practice his combat skills while giving us some homework help too! The movie continues with Ben taking on dangerous tasks that are not traditionally done by accountants; both legal and illegal. You will find that it makes logical sense, but the storyline is amazing in its own unique way where anything could happen.

Mark Affleck’s character in “The Accountant” makes the perfect accountant and is more good-looking, dangerous, and exciting than you might think. He helped guide a lot of people from all walks of life as well.

8. Unraveled

In the last few years, many documentaries have been released about the financial crisis including the Oscar-winning film “Inside Job”, “Casino Jack and the United States of Money” and many more. One documentarian is Marc Simon’s “Unraveled,” which has been showcased at the Los Angeles Film Festival. This is a less comprehensive work than even “Inside Job”, focusing specifically on one white-collar criminal – attorney Marc Dreier who embezzled more than $400 million from hedge funds and a few private individuals.

In their documentary, “Unraveled”, Simon, an attorney who once worked for Dreier – was granted unprecedented access to his former employer during Dreier’s 60 days of house arrest between his conviction and sentencing. What emerges is that fascinating human portrait that should enjoy limited audiences. A “purgatory” is set in the Upper East Side penthouse — where the Court has ordered Dreier confined until his sentencing day — “Unraveled” mixes first-person flashbacks with access to the mastermind’s thoughts after his arrest, exposing a criminal deception started by greed and hubris.

Accounting professionals can easily get overwhelmed from juggling so many different tasks and deadlines on a daily basis. Relaxing with some familiar movies can be as entertaining as it is encouraging.

A collection of movies to inspire accountants

Have fun watching them!