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What a strange bird this movie is. The title “The Hummingbird Project” refers to the millisecond it takes for a hummingbird’s wing to beat one time, I think. Or maybe it hints at the future home that coder Anton Zaleski ( Alexander Skarsgård ) dreams about, a domicile where the little birdies flit outside with impunity. If I waxed less poetically, I’d venture that it’s the name of the fiber optic cable-building job Anton’s cousin Vincent ( Jesse Eisenberg ) is hell bent on completing. This would give his trading company an infinitesimal yet crucial timing edge over other traders.

Whatever it is, I’m pretty sure you won’t care as much as the characters in writer/director Kim Nguyen ’s tonally confused feature do. This one works overtime, shifting gears repeatedly without once providing enough substance for the viewer to engage. It keeps trying on new genre outfits like an undecided shopper—here’s a comedic element, now here’s some thriller crumbs, and oh yes, a tragic illness for good measure! Far more gonzo movies have worked just fine in this manner, but ask yourself if you’d inherently give one iota of a damn about two guys who want to run one thousand miles of fiber optic cable so they can upstage the impossible-to-upstage Salma Hayek . Unless you have a Verizon Fios fetish, this might be rough going.

“The Hummingbird Project” never lets us know how we’re supposed to feel about these characters and their quest. Eisenberg is in “ The Social Network ” mode: obnoxious and completely devoid of any audience sympathy. Thankfully, he’s very good at that, but to what end? He's often mean to Anton, who’s possibly on the spectrum. He yells at Amish people and forsakes his own health for his obsession. Now, many a great piece of art has been made about doomed men enmeshed in their fixations—Ahab had his whale and Fitzcarraldo had his steamship. Vincent has his millisecond, and not a bunch of them, either. Just one millisecond . Granted, there’s a lot of money to be obtained with that millisecond, but from a dramatic standpoint, it’s a very dry concept. And this is a computer guy talking here.

The year is 2011 and Eva Torres (Salma Hayek) is a tough-as-nails power broker whose High Frequency Trading desk hires only the best traders and programmers. Anton and Vincent represent the crème-de-la-crème, so Torres is far from pleased when they decide to abruptly quit. Unbeknownst to Torres, the duo, along with drilling expert Mark ( Michael Mando ), have obtained seemingly bottomless financing to lay cable from Kansas to New Jersey in an attempt to get data quicker than Torres can. This project appears to be doomed from the start: even if they manage to drill from Dorothy Gale’s pre-Oz location through the Appalachians and into my beloved home state, the data won’t go through any faster unless Anton can make his code run one millisecond faster.

We’ve arrived at the part of the film that plays a bit like farce. Outside of those aforementioned zealous Amish guys, people are more than willing to allow a strange, snooty nerd to drill on their property. He does pay well, so there’s that. But some of the other ways Vincent gets around topographical and geographical issues come off way too easily. There’s no suspense, and since nobody’s willing to do a deep dive into process (and risk making this even more dull for the regular viewer), we don’t feel what’s at stake.

Meanwhile, in the thriller aisle of this supermarket of a movie, mean ol’ Ms. Hayek shows up every so often to threaten Anton about using his lines of code to do Vincent’s bidding. Since he wrote the algorithm for her, it’s now her intellectual property. She has a case for sure, but it’ll be pretty damn hard for her to prove without a printout or one hell of a detailed MRI of Anton’s brain.

But I digress. Torres keeps showing up like a smokin’ hot Freddy Krueger, christening Anton with droplets of water while he’s in his hot tub and mocking her rivals with graffiti about milliseconds written on rocks deep in the woods. As convincing as Hayek is, she’s completely wasted with her minimal screen time.

Though Nguyen is the only credited writer here, “The Hummingbird Project” feels like one of those movies where nine different people contributed to the proceedings without reading what anybody else wrote. I was ready to check out once we got to the major grab for sympathy (complete with hospital visit) that closes out the film. It’s a shame because the acting is quite good here, especially an against-type Skarsgård. His Anton is rather complex and he gets one hell of a celebratory dance sequence. I identified with his little boogie-woogie; finally someone put onscreen what it feels like when your code does what it’s supposed to do.

Odie Henderson

Odie "Odienator" Henderson has spent over 33 years working in Information Technology. He runs the blogs Big Media Vandalism and Tales of Odienary Madness. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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The Hummingbird Project (2019)

111 minutes

Jesse Eisenberg as Vincent Zaleski

Alexander Skarsgård as Anton Zaleski

Salma Hayek as Eva Torres

Michael Mando as Mark Vega

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Michael Mando, left, and Jesse Eisenberg in The Hummingbird Project.

The Hummingbird Project review – deeply odd tunnel-digging drama

Jesse Eisenberg plays a stock trader hoping to make millions by linking Kansas and New York underground

P art of me wants to cut this enigmatic drama about fibre optic cable-laying some slack for trying to disprove the notion there are no longer any truly original concepts in North American cinema. Yet Canadian writer-director Kim Nguyen’s sketchy question mark of a film proves so left-field it risks seeming esoteric or – with its technical dialogue on the matter of “neutrino messaging” – openly baffling. It’s the kind of verbose corporate parable David Mamet would sit down to write after a heavy night on the sauce.

Jesse Eisenberg plays Vincent, an ambitious day trader pumping his resources into digging a tunnel between Kansas and New York, a scheme designed to tap stock market data a millisecond faster, and thus turn him a sizeable profit. To this end, he has recruited his nervy coder cousin Anton, played – in the first of many bizarre choices here – by Alexander Skarsgård beneath a bald pate. Skarsgård wasn’t alone in spending long hours in hair and makeup puzzling over this script. Salma Hayek , as the ruthless CEO the pair aim to undercut, has her lustrous locks dipped in grey paint and offset with NHS specs. Eisenberg, meanwhile, contends with tummy trouble, for Vincent’s burrowing sets off rounds of doubtless symbolic intestinal distress.

What can it all mean? The business of rewiring America for personal gain feels secondary to Nguyen’s vision of characters who, for all their efforts to connect, appear deeply alienated. Around the neutrinos, there is some conventional messaging about faster communication not necessarily equalling better communication. Yet it’s so erratically delivered you suspect scenes have gone missing.

We get intriguing ideas, images and locations, and enough closeups of excavation equipment to enrapture plant-hire enthusiasts. With few narrative or thematic hook-ups, though, I guarantee plenty of head scratching in front of this curio.

Jesse Eisenberg
Drama films
Salma Hayek

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‘The Hummingbird Project’ Review: They’re Running Cable and Chasing Money

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By Ben Kenigsberg

March 14, 2019

For “The Hummingbird Project,” a sturdy, involving thriller set in the financial realm, the writer-director Kim Nguyen has cited heady inspirations like Michael Lewis’s book “Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt” (2014) and a Wired magazine article from 2012 on high-speed trading. But strip away the topical trappings and what is left is another variation on the obstacle course tension and male bonding of “The Wages of Fear” — or a dark variation on marathon road-trip goofs such as “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” and “Death Race 2000.”

Vincent (Jesse Eisenberg) and his cousin Anton (Alexander Skarsgard) want to run a fiber-optic cable from Kansas to stock exchange servers in New Jersey, securing a millisecond advantage over other algorithmic traders. To maximize the gain, the cable must run absolutely straight, through property, mountains and water, a colossal engineering job for which they have hired Marc (Michael Mando, from “Better Call Saul”). But their boss (Salma Hayek), soon to be former, spends heavily to stall the private-works effort.

“The Hummingbird Project” may be too committed to its popcorn mechanics to double as a truly brainy exposé, but it pays other dividends. Eisenberg adds unexpected shades of humanity to his lizard persona from “The Social Network,” while a bald, unrecognizable Skarsgard pulls off the difficult feat of being sympathetically antisocial as a coder driven batty by his work. As the geological, financial and personal barriers the cousins face grow increasingly absurd, the movie works up a satisfying sweat.

Rated R. Rigging of the system. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes.

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‘The Hummingbird Project’: A Very Strange Financial Thriller No One Needs

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

Whatever it takes to keep a techno hellraiser on its feet, The Hummingbird Project doesn’t have it. Just don’t blame the film’s two lead actors. Jesse Eisenberg surges with all the manic energy he showed in The Social Network, playing Vincent Zaleski, the hustler behind an idea to run fiber-optic cable from Kansas to a Wall Street databank in New Jersey to gain a millisecond of info advantage — the speed of a hummingbird’s wing beat — that could bring in billions.

Alexander Skarsgård excels as Vincent’s cousin Anton, the genius coder behind the idea. The cousins are Russian Jews, raised in New York and looking for a big idea to run with. Playing geek with a vengeance, Skarsgård shaves his head, walks stooped and does everything possible to dim his hottie starshine. Even that can’t distract from the fact that the convoluted script, written by Quebecois director Kim Nguyen ( War Witch ), keeps tripping over itself in a strenuous effort to drum up interest into a premise that is decidedly uncinematic. Take Eva Torres, the hedge-fund manager played to the hilt and beyond by Salma Hayek, who’s eager to steal the tunnel concept from the Zaleskis, who used to work for her. She’s the she-wolf always nipping at their heels and working overtime to trump their plan with her own.

Wait, I’m making the movie sound like way more fun than it is. Nguyen is frequently sidetracked with laying out the logistics of the project as the cousins hire drilling expert Mark Vega (a stellar Michael Mando) and rope in a principal financier in Bryan Taylor (Frank Schorpion). Then there’s the matter of getting rights to dig tunnels under everything from national parks to the homes of private citizens (a no-go for the Amish). The minutia weighs a ton and there’s lots and lots of drilling.

The film’s documentary-like attention to detail may lead you to think that The Hummingbird Project is based on a true story. Not a bit, it’s all a Nguyen flight of fancy. To add a sense of emotional intimacy to the dusty details of high-frequency trading, the filmmaker invents a stomach-cancer crisis for Vincent that he ignores to keep the project on track. And, of course, at the last effing minute, something goes wrong with Anton’s code. Nguyen can stir up all the sturm and drang he wants, but Hummingbird feels as humdrum and impersonal as a blueprint.

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The Hummingbird Project Reviews

Eternally relevant and immediately obsolete.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 15, 2021

Sets its sights beyond the story of Wall Street intrigue to focus on something much bigger, the effects of global capitalism.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Mar 4, 2021

The Hummingbird Project asks the question but never gives a satisfying answer.

Full Review | Jan 7, 2021

The film's great dramatic question, as to whether Vincent and Anton will achieve their aim, simply does not arouse compelling interest.

Full Review | Dec 4, 2020

However, it's Alexander Skarsgard that shows a range we haven't seem from him before as Anton, a troubled genius whose intellectual gifts end up being more of a curse than a blessing.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.0/4.0 | Nov 14, 2020

The Hummingbird Project is a good film, but it's never as meaningful or as successful as it wants to be.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.0/4.0 | Sep 11, 2020

I'm not really sure what the moral of this story is, but I did enjoy the chance to watch these incredible performers really inhabit these roles.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jul 21, 2020

What might have made for either a thrilling, high-stakes drama or, at the very least, an intelligent comedy, ends up wildly uneven.

Full Review | Mar 13, 2020

In a film so dull it would make the flap of a hummingbird's wing feel liked it lasted for eternity, a stellar cast is squandered on shallow characters and a what-were-they-thinking script.

Full Review | Oct 2, 2019

It is [Jesse] Eisenberg's best work in years.

Full Review | Jul 10, 2019

Although sometimes it gets bogged down in the details of drilling, The Hummingbird Project extracts enough entertainment value from an unpromising premise, greatly helped by Jesse Eisenberg finding the humanity in his hustler.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 17, 2019

This has to go down as one of the nicest surprises of early summer - clever, ambitious and beautifully acted by Jesse Eisenberg and Alexander Skarsgård, who surely gives one of the best performances of his career.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 17, 2019

But, while it falls some way below the standards set by Nguyen's Oscar-nominated child-soldier saga, War Witch (2012), this has a cockeyed conviction that keeps you watching.

Part thriller, part family drama, part satirical commentary on the way that the pursuit of wealth is a cultural cancer that taints everything it touches, The Hummingbird Project is no less compelling for its odd mishmash of components.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 16, 2019

It sounds deeply unappetizing, but in fact, it's really enjoyable to watch. It's about obsession in a way I really like...

Full Review | Jun 14, 2019

It's typical of a movie, written and directed by the Canadian film-maker Kim Nguyen, that hits all the right genre beats while consistently reaching for something more.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 14, 2019

An unusual film, brought arrestingly to life...

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 14, 2019

I found the film funny, twisty and exciting enough to keep me watching, eager to find out of their mad caper would work in time.

It's the kind of verbose corporate parable David Mamet would sit down to write after a heavy night on the sauce.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 13, 2019

It may be a modest indie film, but it deserves a broad audience. Highly recommended.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 13, 2019

Film Review: ‘The Hummingbird Project’

Jesse Eisenberg and Alexander Skarsgård are entrepreneurial cousins attempting a technological breakthrough in this entertaining digital-age drama.

By Dennis Harvey

Dennis Harvey

Film Critic

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“ The Hummingbird Project ” feels so much like it’s “inspired by true events” — a claim that tends to get hung on even the most outlandish genre exercise these days — viewers may have to keep reminding themselves that Kim Nguyen ’s latest feature is in fact entirely fictive.

Recalling “Social Network” in that it once again casts Jesse Eisenberg as the engine behind a high-stakes, e-commerce-driven project — with a dweebified Alexander Skarsgård as his code-writing cousin — this is an entertaining vehicle for vivid performances by both actors. Yet, though the film shows signs of wanting to demonstrate the folly of an ever-faster-paced world in which people lose sight of life’s truer values, the message is a tad submerged in a familiar tale of entrepreneurial striving against impossible odds.

With a narrative of this nature, the lack of a true-story hook could hobble promotional efforts and awards favor, though reviews should be strong enough to help boost a picture whose central quest — efforts to build a fiber-optic tunnel — doesn’t comprise the sexiest movie pitch.

The tunnel is the brainchild of Vincent (Eisenberg) and Anton (Skarsgård), cousins of Russian-Jewish heritage who live in New York City and otherwise work for the ruthlessly demanding Eva Torres (Salma Hayek), a Wall Street CEO. Technology has reached a point where billions of dollars can ride on getting information just a tiny bit ahead of a competitor: If fiber-optic cable were laid from a core electronic exchange in Kansas to the Street’s New Jersey data bank, and if brilliant coder Anton could reduce communication time by a millisecond or so — the speed of a hummingbird’s single wing-beat — the cousins would be (at least temporary) kings of the financial sector, and set for life.

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They’re not about to share their idea with the all-controlling Eva, so once they’ve secured a chief engineer (played by Michael Mando) and principal financier (Frank Schorpion) for the massive project, they submit their resignations. Infuriated by the defection, she dogs them with spies and legal threats. But equally daunting are the practical obstacles that beset the absurdly ambitious and risky undertaking — from gaining permission to dig narrow tunnels under national parks, private homes, swamps, mountains and the fields of resistant Amish farmers to Anton’s code stalling out at reducing the last crucial fraction of a second.

Skarsgard, almost unrecognizable as the stooped, balding Anton, goes to the brink of caricature with his amusingly stereotypical brainiac turn; the character is such a socially inept geek it’s a wonder he has an attractive wife (Sarah Goldberg) and kids. Pushing past the point of caricature is Hayek, who doesn’t shrink from putting a touch of glam camp on her villainess. Supporting turns are more realistically grounded, notably Mando’s rock-steady engineer.

But it’s Eisenberg who lends the film its most human notes. What starts out as another motormouthed hustler act — a less sociopathic spin on his “Social Network” interpretation — hits a major speed bump as Vincent gets some very serious health news midway through the proceedings. Choosing to keep things to himself, since the project will likely flounder without him, he suffers in a pained silence that provides the movie’s only real poignancy.

Though shot in Canada, “The Hummingbird Project” does a convincing enough job of evoking a sprawl of American locales, with much of the action taking place on tunnel dig sites that lend a welcome emphasis on diverse, often spectacular landscapes. This very different story for globetrotting Quebecois Nguyen feels more impersonal in some ways than such prior features as the Oscar-nominated “Rebelle” or last year’s “Eye on Juliet,” but it retains his sharp sense of empathy — and grasp of pacing and character — within the potentially too-wonky thematic framework. Tech and design contributions are straightforward and first-rate. Occasional flights of slo-mo visual poetry underline why it might be foolish for humanity to speed up life too much.

Reviewed at Toronto Film Festival (Special Presentation), Sept. 9, 2018. Running time: 111 MIN

Production: (Canada-Belgium) An Elevation Pictures presentation of an Item 7, Belga Prods. production in association with HanWay Films, Automatic Entertainment. (International sales: HanWay Films, London.) Producer: Pierre Even. Executive producers: Brian Kavanaugh-Jones, Fred Berger, Marie-Gabrielle Stewart, Heidi Levitt, Kim Nguyen. Co-producer: Alain-Gilles Viellevoye.
Crew: Director, writer: Kim Nguyen. Camera (color, widescreen, HD): Nicolas Bolduc. Editors: Arthur Tarnowski, Nicolas Chaudeurge. Music: Yves Gourmeur.
With: Jesse Eisenberg, Alexander Skarsgård, Michael Mando, Salma Hayek, Sarah Goldberg, Anna Maguire, Frank Schorpion, Johan Heldenbergh, Kwasi Songui, Ayisha Issa. (English dialogue)

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‘The Hummingbird Project’ review: Solid acting helps complicated high-finance tale take wing

Movie review.

They’re a study in contrasts. Vincent Zaleski (Jesse Eisenberg) is an ultrahyper, motormouthed Wall Street stock trader whose self-confidence knows no bounds. His cousin, Anton Zaleski (Alexander Skarsgård), is an uber-nerd with few social skills, a programmer who loves to lose himself in the intricacies of solving arcane coding problems. He’s prone to noisy panic attacks (airborne turbulence triggers major freak-outs on cross-country flights).

Best buddies, they’re men with a plan in “The Hummingbird Project.” That plan is to use Anton’s programming prowess to devise an algorithm that will shave milliseconds off the speed of stock trades — and, in so doing, earn themselves millions in the megacompetitive field of high-frequency trading where a mere millisecond advantage can mean huge profits to the trader with the right mojo. We’re informed that the grail getting the trade speed down to 16 milliseconds is the time it takes for a hummingbird to flap its wings once.

Sounds complicated.

You don’t know the half of it.

Allow writer-director Kim Nguyen to take the audience by the hand and give it a crash course in Wall Street esoterica that will leave heads spinning.

The difficulty of developing the algorithm is only a part of the plot’s complexity. To make the plan work, the cousins have to construct a straight-line fiber-optic tunnel (a tube actually) from Kansas to New Jersey to carry the high-speed signal. To do so, they have to run it under swamps and farm fields and forests and residential neighborhoods, and oh, under the Appalachian Mountains. The cost will be in the millions. Specialized drilling machines and helicopters are involved. Property easements must be purchased. Government permits must be negotiated (or secured with bribes). Raising the cash for all of that is where fast-talking, super-salesman Vincent comes in.

Complexity piles on complexity.

A further complication: The cousins’ former employer, a woman with the personality of a barracuda (played by Salma Hayek with white-frosted hair and a ruthlessly abrasive disposition), is developing her own rival high-speed network, this one involving cellphone towers. Sabotage is her specialty, and the roadblocks she throws up, legal and otherwise, to thwart the cousins are formidable.

Also, a serious illness is a part of the plot.

It’s a lot to pack into a movie of less than two hours of running time. To Nguyen’s credit, he balances the elements of his screenplay with such skill that the audience doesn’t get too lost in the weeds. Well, the explanations of how the algorithm works do cause the eyes to glaze. But the strength of the performances, especially on the part of Eisenberg and Hayek, is such that they help the picture power through the confusion.

Along the way, “Hummingbird” offers cogent commentary on the way unbridled avarice drives the search for even the smallest advantage in the cutthroat world of high finance. The cousins are motivated by it, and later learn the consequences of their race for riches. What we have here is a cautionary tale.

★★★ “The Hummingbird Project,” with Jesse Eisenberg, Alexander Skarsgård, Salma Hayek. Written and directed by Kim Nguyen. 111 minutes. Rated R for language throughout. Opens March 22 at multiple theaters.

The Hummingbird Project Is Just Passable, But See It for Alexander Skarsgård

There are two great things about Kim Nguyen’s otherwise passable The Hummingbird Project , the first being the title, which is a simile. That is, it likens amazing wing speed to the potential flow of data from somewhere in Kansas to a brokerage house in New York. Apparently, fortunes can be made by getting info one millisecond ahead of the competition, which is good to know if you want to understand why so many people become multimillionaires for doing nothing except siphoning money from “the system” (define the system how you will). The second thing is Alexander Skarsgård. He’s often the best part of anything he’s in, but here he’s uncanny. He’s Anton Zaleski, the wonky (perhaps on the spectrum) techie and cousin of the film’s protagonist, Vincent Zaleski (Jesse Eisenberg), who has hatched a plan to lay a high-speed cable under the Appalachians and other hard-to-get-to spots between the Midwest and East Coast. Skarsgård plays the part as if his considerable height were an impediment; he’s always bent over, leaning forward with his bald brainpan. Anton is happiest when he’s alone in a room with his specs and equations, although “happy” is a relative term given his thick layer of gloom.

The movie is tense and absorbing, though it goes too far in the opposite direction of something like The Wolf of Wall Street . I disliked Martin Scorsese’s drama principally for its repetitions (the same scene over and over, garishly accelerating instead of going deeper), but also because the director seemed indifferent to real-world consequences of his antihero’s perfidy. The Hummingbird Project , on the other hand, is weighed down by its moralism. The film’s other operative simile is that corrosive capitalism is like stomach cancer — Vincent’s diagnosis when what seems like an ulcer borne of high pressure turns out to be something graver. Against the doctor’s advice, Vincent doesn’t submit to surgery and chemo. For him, the cable represents the fulfillment of his (and his ambitious father’s) dreams and is therefore more important than his physical existence. While he drives forward, Anton pores over data in a Kansas hotel and confides what he’s doing to a waitress — the movie’s conscience. She asks what the people (in this case farmers) whose products are being sold get out of the new technology, and Anton replies, blankly, that they’re irrelevant. But he does concede that she’s raising “a lot of epistemological questions” — a chink in his armor. Thereafter he cites those poor farmers a lot. The epistemology hangs him up.

Most of The Hummingbird Project is Eisenberg grimacing over his stomach and talking very fast — he’s a verbal hummingbird, a high-speed blurter. He’s good, though for most of the movie one-note, like his character. We’re meant to register the fundamental absurdity of what he’s doing while on the brink of death: raising outrageous amounts of money, rounding up contractors, bargaining with homeowners for rights to their subterranean space — among them an Amish farmer who sternly editorializes against Vincent’s materialism and passes on a 300-thousand-plus-dollar fee. Vincent is not just up against the clock but his former employer, played by a scenery-chewing Salma Hayek under a white lioness mane. She talks just as fast (though not as deftly), grilling her techie subordinates on other ways of streaming data and occasionally popping over to Kansas to sneer at the Zaleskis. There’s some but not a lot of suspense. Game of High-Speed Cables just doesn’t have much oomph.

Some of the supporting actors register, especially Michael Mando as the unpretentious but quick-witted chief engineer. But the only surprise is Skarsgård. He has played wife-beaters, vampires, rapists, and mute would-be detectives, but who’d have thought he’d make a credible nerd? It’s exciting to watch him moan and talk to himself and pace back and forth in a motel room before a bank of computer screens. He puts the hum in The Hummingbird Project .

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DVD & Streaming

The Hummingbird Project

Drama , Mystery/Suspense

Content Caution

In Theaters

March 22, 2019
Jesse Eisenberg as Vincent Zaleski; Alexander Skarsgård as Anton Zaleski; Salma Hayek as Eva Torres; Michael Mando as Mark Vega; Johan Heldenbergh as Amish Elder; Sarah Goldberg as Mascha; Frank Schorpion as Bryan Taylor; Kwasi Songui as Ray Engineer; Ayisha Issa as Ophelia Troller; Anna Maguire as Quant Jenny; Ryan Ali as Quant Elias

Home Release Date

June 25, 2019

Distributor

The Orchard

Movie Review

There will always be someone who is smarter than you. And that’s bad for business.

That’s why Eva Torres recruits the brightest minds for her fast-paced, high-frequency trading deals. Time is money. Down to the millisecond. And right now, Eva’s formulas are the quickest in the world—grabbing information in a scant 16 milliseconds and garnering the big bucks for her company.

Vincent Zaleski believes that he and his cousin, Anton, can beat that number. By one millisecond. All they’ll need to do is build a thousand-mile fiber-optic tunnel from the Kansas Electronic Exchange to Wall Street.

Easy. Well, theoretically.

First, he and Anton must leave Eva’s cult-like business (an affront she doesn’t take lightly) and forge their own path. Second, the duo will need multiple construction teams as they attempt the impossible. Third, they will need complete secrecy on all sides.

But nothing is sacred, or secret, in the world of money. Soon, Vincent and Anton find themselves racing against their own clock to finish before Eva finds out and decimates their lives—right down to the last penny.

Positive Elements

Anton is a loving father who wants to protect and help his family (even though some of his choices could also put his wife and daughter in danger). Similarly, Vincent initially has a good heart (though his motives gradually become distorted and corroded by greed and bitterness).

After a man is diagnosed with cancer, he realizes that the most important things in life are not material. He begins to focus more on his family, repaying debts and living life at a slower pace.

Members of an Amish community speak about the importance of human connection in a fast-paced, technological world. Vincent and Anton begin to see this truth as the film progresses. The two men also learn that life is about our important relationships and what we do with our time.

Some larger philosophical questions come into play as well, such as the meaning of life, the importance of community and the need to pursue justice (not just money).

Spiritual Elements

Vincent tells a two people that he’s suffered from nightmares for months in which a “shadow man” is standing over him. He says he doesn’t know whether the ominous presence is there to warn him or to kill him.

The Amish tell someonew who wants to purchase their property that they live their lives “in the service of God.” They’re not interested in money, but in preserving and caring for God’s land.

A man likens a physical location to Dante’s Inferno .

Sexual Content

Someone asks if a business is a “legitimate” establishment before receiving a massage (during which we see him shirtless). Another man is seen sans shirt in a hot tub and elsewhere. A woman wears cleavage-baring tops.

Violent Content

Eva Torres ensures that those who “betray” her will pay for their transgressions. She makes multiple threats against Vincent and Anton, telling Anton specifically that she will make his life “hell.” Vincent likewise threatens Eva.

Vincent attends his father’s funeral. Later, Vincent describes his father as a harsh man who used him as an outlet for his own anger.

A man dying of cancer collapses. We see his urine mixed with blood. He’s eventually rushed to the hospital. We hear that a man was slapped in the face after an argument. After a business program is hacked, employees smash their keyboards in furious anger. Someone says he wants to burn Wall Street “to the ground.” A man fleeing the FBI on foot gets tackled.

Crude or Profane Language

God’s name is misused once, and Jesus’ name is abused twice. The f-word is used more 50 times, and we hear about 20 s-words. Other profanities include multiple uses of “a–hole,” “a–,” “b–ching” and “h—.”

People are occasionally called “stupid” and “dumb.” A man refers to bodily waste as “p-ss” and “s—.” Someone repeatedly says “screw you” to a friend. We hear a few harsh Spanish profanities.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Men and women drink wine and liquor. Vincent smokes cigarettes.

Other Negative Elements

Due to high levels of stress, Vincent yells often at those who ruin his plans (and ocassionally threatens them as well). Similarly, Eva abusively degrades her workers who, in turn, do the same to one another.

Both Vincent and Eva are highly suspicious of anyone who could be a potential threat to their machinations. Eva sends men to spy on Vincent and his team. She eventually frames a man unjustly, resulting in his arrest for stock market fraud.

An elderly man makes a racist statement. A woman treats her employees as “disposable assets.” A pessimistic woman states her belief in Murphy’s Law.

The Hummingbird Project isn’t your typical thriller. In fact, it’s not really a thriller at all as much as an intense drama that interweaves multiple story lines about various characters’ choices and values—and the consequences some of them eventually face.

Set in the context of high-frequency stock trading, this story revolves around its characters’ brilliant minds and insatiable desire for more contrasted with their hollow souls and moral bankruptcy. Along the way, this coarse morality tale encourages viewers to recognize the futility of lives driven totally by materialism as they consider what is most important in the world.

As R-rated films go, this one is relatively tame. At least, visually speaking, that is. Unfortunately, a barrage of harsh profanity bombards our ears over and over again, making the moral about materialism at the heart of this story less accessible than it could have been.

Kristin Smith

Kristin Smith joined the Plugged In team in 2017. Formerly a Spanish and English teacher, Kristin loves reading literature and eating authentic Mexican tacos. She and her husband, Eddy, love raising their children Judah and Selah. Kristin also has a deep affection for coffee, music, her dog (Cali) and cat (Aslan).

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Movie Reviews

Fiber-optic farce 'the hummingbird project' clips its own wings.

Ella Taylor

Vincent (Jesse Eisenberg) and Anton (Alexander Skarsgård) are financial traders trying to strike it rich in The Hummingbird Project. The Orchard hide caption

Vincent (Jesse Eisenberg) and Anton (Alexander Skarsgård) are financial traders trying to strike it rich in The Hummingbird Project.

Remember Jesse Eisenberg in The Social Network as the callow Harvard undergrad who cooked up a little thingie called Facebook because his girlfriend dumped him? Please welcome back both actor and, more or less, character in The Hummingbird Project , a likably cheeky but rambling and overstuffed hedge-fund romp by Canadian writer-director Kim Nguyen.

Representing the legions of tech-billionaire wannabes who toil unsung below the radar, Eisenberg's Vincent Zaleski is a manically oversharing hustler who's peddling a big idea for streamlining the flow of market information while lining his own pockets. We meet Vinnie parked on a bench, chattering like an express train to a taciturn fellow sitting next to him. Pay attention: In an entertaining running visual joke, Vinnie's cousin Anton, a brooding hulk with stooped shoulders and a monk's tonsure, is played — wildly against type — by the incurably pretty Alexander Skarsgård.

Though not gifted at human contact, Anton is a math genius who reluctantly allows Vinnie to harness his wizardry with algorithms into a scheme to lay a straight line of fiber-optic cable from Kansas to New Jersey. This, Vinnie is certain, will speed up the already frantic pace of high-frequency trading by one millisecond, which is equal to a single flap of a hummingbird's wings. If you're thinking, welcome to our world, be advised that this is a period piece (meaning circa 2011, which is what passes for history these days) and the technology that drives the action is obsolete as we speak.

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What follows is a wackadoodle procedural, with Vinnie in the field stomping on the land rights of ordinary Joes who get in his cable's way, while Anton holes up in a hotel room in a ratty old bathrobe, working up algorithms for the theft of proprietary code. Among the frantically plotted obstacles the cousins face, in no particular order, are: nature and weather, Amish and Appalachians, and inevitably, the FBI. None of which comes close to the vengeful trickery of the Zaleskis' former boss Eva Torres — a gorgon in power shoulders and murderous stiletto heels played with relish by Salma Hayek — who throws up a trail of microwave towers to counter Vinnie's cable.

Nguyen is a skilled farceur, but he doesn't know when to stop. For a film about our obsession with speed, The Hummingbird Project soon bogs down in saggy repeat cycles involving flat tires, unhappy investors, and logistical snafus that even Vinnnie's stalwart engineer (Michael Mando) can't resolve. At which point the movie, already dampened by dingy visuals, veers off into a moral fable with a cancer diagnosis thrown in that makes an uncomfortable fit with the movie's overall jokey tone.

As I write, scandals are bubbling up about cheating one percenters in every public sphere from banking to college admissions, and for the sake of perspective it pays to remember that it was Vinnie and his ilk who crashed the economy in 2008. Much of what he does here is unspeakable and inflicts suffering on those around him. Yet Nguyen wants us to think of Vinnie as nothing worse than a socially unskilled scamp whose worst fault is that he thinks of himself as a plucky David among greedy Goliaths.

In fact Vinnie's just another of the Goliaths he's trying to outsmart, for whom winning is a prize even above profit. At its best The Hummingbird Project is a parable about failure, but one that ultimately undercuts itself with redeeming goo. What's at the end of the "line," and the line, for Vinnie and Anton? Enlightenment for sure, atonement of course, and an Amish-propelled chastening climax that involves grain sacks, sheds, and the dubious pleasures of simply country living. That makes for a sweet and funny — but implicitly cynical — ending that takes the edge off what might be a trenchant fable about the unrestrained venality at the heart of the gamed system we call American public life.

Flickering Myth

Geek Culture | Movies, TV, Comic Books & Video Games

Movie Review – The Hummingbird Project (2019)

April 1, 2019 by Robert Kojder

The Hummingbird Project , 2019.

Written and Directed by Kim Nguyen. Starring Jesse Eisenberg, Alexander Skarsgård, Salma Hayek, Michael Mando, Johan Heldenbergh, Ayisha Issa, Mark Slacke, Sarah Goldberg, and Frank Schorpion.

A pair of high-frequency traders go up against their old boss in an effort to make millions in a fiber-optic cable deal.

It would be stupid to write off The Hummingbird Project as uninteresting due to its subject matter, which is improving high-speed fiber-optic connections in a straight shot from Kansas City to New York. Part of the general moviegoing experience is finding empathy and relating to characters and stories of all different kinds, many of which are inherently about things we don’t necessarily care about. As a young adult obsessed with director Darren Aronofsky, Black Swan instantly became one of my favorite movies of all time despite me never once caring about ballet beforehand. On a grander scale, critics and audiences alike fell love with The Social Network (which coincidentally stars Jesse Eisenberg) while eating crow in the process for laughing at the very idea of a Facebook origin story functioning as a compelling narrative.

Unfortunately, The Hummingbird Project is ultimately a misfire only rendered passable thanks to strong turns from the aforementioned Jesse Eisenberg (he once again channels commitment and dedication to changing the game with levels that go far beyond obsession) and Alexander Skarsgard as a balding tech guru. Together, the cousins from New York leave the fiberoptics business they work for (a corporation run by Salma Hayek in a rather thankless role that paints her as a one-dimensional villain more than a rival) to hatch out a deal with a high-frequency trading organization that is going to dump unlimited money into their bank accounts in order to see this ambitious geographical endeavor through. If they are successful and if they can reduce the speed by a millisecond (a hummingbird flap), they can take advantage of Wall Street and become filthy rich… or something. The movie doesn’t really explain much about anything, and watching resourceful but greedy people get wealthy is not exactly an exciting endgame.

Written and directed by Kim Nguyen (who I’m suspecting cares more about all of this than any of us, especially considering this is not even based on a true story), The Hummingbird Project is an acting showcase if anything. This is a role we know Jesse Eisenberg can pull off in his sleep, and he’s perfectly serviceable here, but it’s Alexander Skarsgard that is given the closest thing to a complex character as he looks down on the majority of society for their lack of intelligence while following his cousin around compulsively without much explanation. They both seem driven to prove a point, whether it be out of family legacy or personal fulfillment, with each cousin pursuing this goal with reckless abandon. Skarsgard begins to neglect his family while Eisenberg places success over his stomach cancer that will kill him if not treated immediately.

The problem is that the film prioritizes problem-solving over at each dig site rather than developing these characters. Most issues that pop up come and go, while Salma Hayek looms in the background ready to take serious legal measures stopping at nothing to referring the cousins from usurping her own speeds, with a run-in with a defensive community of Amish citizens unwilling to allow digging to commence on their property, which is a huge problem considering this thing needs to be a straight horizontal line. It’s also the closest The Hummingbird Project gets presenting intriguing moral juxtapositions, as mostly the movie is going through the motions. However, perhaps its greatest failing is that not even solid acting can fully overcome the alienating esoteric premise.

As previously mentioned, The Hummingbird Project introduces contrived plot points like stomach cancer that are blatantly obvious when they will return to take the protagonist down another notch. There is no cat and mouse chase between the FBI and the cousins, although Selma Hayek does have a counterplan to their idea, but it also is not very engaging. At the same time, it’s probably about as good as a movie about high-speed fiber optics is going to get. There are also some refreshing settings ranging from forests and farms, with decent cinematography that frequently gets low to the ground to put the image in our heads of digital networking heading into the soil. If there was more conflict similar to the drama with the Amish family, The Hummingbird Project would have worked better as a contrast between technological ambition and morality, but as it is the only real reason to come and slog through to the end are Jesse Eisenberg and Alexander Skarsgard. The Hummingbird Project needs to be more character driven, not a series of episodic digging achievements.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★

Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews, friend me on Facebook, follow my Twitter or Letterboxd , check out my personal non-Flickering Myth affiliated Patreon , or email me at [email protected]

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The hummingbird project, common sense media reviewers.

Tech-caper story has salty language but no real point.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

If anyone had learned any lessons in the movie, th

Characters set out to do something quasi-illegal a

Spoken story about being hit in face with pipe and

Character goes to a massage parlor and asks for a

Frequent, strong language, with many uses of "f--k

Cigarette smoking. Social drinking. Beers with lun

Positive Messages

If anyone had learned any lessons in the movie, there might have been some kind of message to take away, but it's really "just a bunch of stuff that happened." No one succeeds, no one fails. In final scene, there appears to be some remorse, but it's too little, too late.

Positive Role Models

Characters set out to do something quasi-illegal and don't really seem to benefit or learn from their actions. Aside from being smart and perhaps assertive, they aren't particularly admirable.

Violence & Scariness

Spoken story about being hit in face with pipe and knocked unconscious. A character is diagnosed with stomach cancer. Hospital scenes, etc. Urinating blood. Shouting and arguing. Characters arrested. Chainsaw wielded in semi-dangerous way.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Character goes to a massage parlor and asks for a legitimate massage (unspoken reference to an erotic massage).

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Frequent, strong language, with many uses of "f--k" and "s--t," plus "motherf----r," "bulls--t," "pendejo," "hell," and "stupid."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Cigarette smoking. Social drinking. Beers with lunch, drinks at dinner, etc.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that The Hummingbird Project is a (fictional) story about an attempt to beat the stock market by installing a faster, more than 1,000-mile-long fiber optic cable. Language is the biggest issue, with fairly frequent use of both "f--k" and "s--t." A character is diagnosed with stomach cancer; some scenes take place in a hospital, and one shows the character urinating blood. There's a spoken description of an injury, several scenes of shouting and arguing, a character getting arrested, and a character wielding a chainsaw. Someone goes to a massage parlor and asks for a "legitimate" massage, as opposed to an "erotic" one. Cigarette smoking is shown, as well as social drinking (beer at lunch, drinks at dinner, etc.). Unfortunately, the film feels like a letdown, but it's appropriate for mature teens and adults. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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What's the Story?

In THE HUMMINGBIRD PROJECT, fast-talking Vincent Zaleski ( Jesse Eisenberg ) has a million-dollar idea. He convinces his computer genius cousin, Anton ( Alexander Skarsgard ), that they should both quit their jobs at a powerful high-tech firm run by the formidable Eva Torres ( Salma Hayek ) to try to make the idea happen. And what is that idea? Nothing short of running a fiber optic cable underground, straight from Kansas to Wall Street, so that they can have stock market information a millisecond early and make a fortune. Obstacles quickly start popping up, including the challenges of drilling through a mountain and buying land from an Amish family. Meanwhile, Anton hasn't quite cracked the problem of subtracting the all-important millisecond from the code. Perhaps worse, Ms. Torres is not about to sit back and watch her former employees eat up her profits.

Is It Any Good?

Though it certainly looks and sounds like fun, this comedy goes through a great many plot mechanics while hardly scratching the surface of its characters -- and without ever coming to a point. Written and directed by Kim Nguyen (of the Best Foreign Language Oscar nominee War Witch ), The Hummingbird Project initially feels like it's going to have the energetic cleverness and complexity of something like The Social Network or The Big Short . It feels like it ought to be "based on a true story," but it's actually not.

Despite Vincent's obvious similarities to Eisenberg's superb portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg, The Hummingbird Project fails to discover what makes its main character tick, other than a brief story about his childhood. (A cancer-related subplot feels tacked-on.) Anton, meanwhile, is a broadly characterized "socially awkward genius" type, and Ms. Torres is just an angry, barking villainess. The strangest thing of all is that in the end, the characters neither win nor lose. This is a story with no real ending and no purpose; it doesn't leave viewers with much of an impression. The ending that Nguyen does choose, which involves an Amish farm, might have meant something if the movie had been pared down and zoomed in on that particular episode. But as it stands, it feels like a hollow gesture.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about The Hummingbird Project 's violence . How does the movie build tension mainly through the use of tense words, rather than actual violence? What's the impact of media violence on kids?

Are any of these characters role models ? What is there to admire about them? Can they be admired for their methods, even if their motives aren't noble?

Did the movie seem like a true story? Do you think it could have happened? How?

What did you learn about technology from the movie? What are positive uses of technology vs. more questionable ones?

Movie Details

In theaters : March 15, 2019
On DVD or streaming : June 25, 2019
Cast : Jesse Eisenberg , Alexander Skarsgard , Salma Hayek
Director : Kim Nguyen
Inclusion Information : Asian directors, Female actors, Latino actors, Middle Eastern/North African actors
Studio : The Orchard
Genre : Comedy
Run time : 111 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : language throughout
Last updated : December 4, 2022

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The Hummingbird Project Ending, Explained

‘The Hummingbird Project’ is a Canadian-Belgian drama thriller film that combines finance and tech for an extravagant undertaking. At its core, it is the story of exactly how far people are willing to go to achieve their dreams. However, the narrative itself is quite unique. Starring Jesse Eisenberg , Alexander Skarsgård, Salma Hayek , and Michael Mando in leading roles, the movie has been written and directed by Kim Nguyen. So, if you wish to understand the ending of the film, then you’re at the right place. SPOILERS AHEAD!

The Hummingbird Project Plot Synopsis

Vincent and Anton Zaleski are cousins who work under Eva Torres on Wall Street. But after Vincent is able to secure funding from Bryan Taylor for a project that facilitates quicker data transmission timings, he convinces Anton to leave the firm and join forces with him. After all, the plan is to construct a tunnel that consists of a 4-inch fiber optic cable from the Kansas Electronic Exchange to the servers of the New York Stock Exchange in New Jersey.

If they’re able to bring down the time by just one millisecond, they can beat the market and reap huge profits. While Vincent focuses on the business aspect, Anton is the coder responsible for bringing the time down to 16 milliseconds. Along with their contractor, Mark Vega, the cousins embark on this journey to make their dreams come true.

The Hummingbird Project Ending

Just as things seem bleak, Anton is able to finally figure out how to decrease the time by 1 millisecond. But Eva won’t let them get ahead of the game so easily, and so she presses charges against Anton. The genius coder is arrested by the FBI for stock market fraud. He then calls Vincent from jail to inform him about what just happened. While working on the tough terrain, the construction team comes across a message pointing towards a tower.

This is Eva’s way of letting Vincent know that her team has managed to get the upper hand. After all, she has found a university student who helps the firm construct these microwave towers that work as fast as 11 milliseconds. Naturally, this agitates Vincent, who starts heading towards the tower with a chainsaw while repeatedly saying that he’s going to cut it down. A verbal altercation between Mark and Vincent takes place, following which, the latter passes out.

Vincent wakes up in the ambulance and asks for his phone. Before he is admitted to the hospital, he buys insurance for his project, knowing full well that he has failed. He also asks Mark to get Anton out of jail, but the other Zaleski cousin still has one last trick up his sleeve. He knows about the bug in Eva’s system and uses it to slow down her network to 20 milliseconds. She then visits Anton in jail, who is able to secure his freedom after she agrees to drop the charges in exchange for the solution.

Bryan visits Vincent in the hospital and says that he may just end up losing his company because he trusted the latter. Following this, the cancer patient is back at home. Mark has finally completed the project, and over a video call, he shows Vincent that they were actually able to do better than their original goal. The speed, now, is 15.73 milliseconds. But this holds significance mostly for Vincent. It has no real-life application anymore, as Eva has already cornered the market.

During a conversation with Anton, Vincent says that the insurance has refused to pay them. But the former has an idea that uses neutrino messaging to bring down the time to 9 milliseconds. It is a more sturdy technology as well since it can penetrate through various terrains and objects. They seemingly joke about being able to buy all of Wall Street and then burn it down.

In the end, they go to the Amish farm to apologize to the village leader. It starts raining, and Vincent helps the other people put the sacks into the barn. He tells the Amish leader that they have removed the pipe from under the community’s land. While waiting for the rain to subside, the cousins take shelter in the barn. Vincent ponders over how he would process the existence of 16 milliseconds, and Anton replies by saying that Vincent’s life would still feel as long as that of a man who has lived for 100 years.

How Feasible is The Neutrino Messaging Technology?

For a game where every millisecond counts, Anton definitely comes up with a great idea. If they use neutrino messaging for their purposes, the transmission speed becomes as fast as 9 milliseconds! On paper, it definitely sounds grand – these tiny particles can pierce through all sorts of landscapes and overcome most issues that traditional communication methods face. Given how competitive everyone in the financial industry (in the movie) is, how has someone else not implemented this idea already?

We think we can solve this mystery. Back in 2012, a group of researchers at the University of Rochester and North Carolina State University collaborated to transmit a message using neutrinos. In fact, the very information they sent was the word “neutrino.” This experiment holds some significance for us. Firstly, it proved that this technology could be viable in the future as and when scientific advancements happen. Moreover, it showed us that we still have a long way to go before we can impart huge amounts of data using this method.

Dan Stancil, the electrical engineer who also headed the study, opened up about the possibilities of the technology. He said, “In principle, you could have straight-line communication right through the center of the Earth, without satellites or cables. I can imagine there could be certain strategic situations where that could be very valuable.” Clearly, Anton’s idea is not viable presently. But we would still argue that he is a visionary in his field.

The Irony of The Title

‘The Hummingbird Project’ is an appropriate title for the movie when you consider the subtle yet decipherable statements it makes on human greed. We learn that it only takes 16 milliseconds for a Hummingbird to flap its wings once! Plus, it can also fly backward. This small fraction of time essentially does wonders for this particular species. Au contraire, 16 milliseconds is the speed that the Zaleski brothers need in order to make their venture successful.

To accomplish this goal, Vincent stops at nothing. He even finds a way to penetrate through the protected Appalachian trial just so that the tunnel can be built. If Vincent’s wings can “flap” as fast as the Hummingbird’s, he has the potential to earn millions of dollars. But as the movie progresses, we learn that he has lost his career, credibility, and health in pursuit of a dream motivated simply by dollar signs. Although he tries to be as maneuverable as the bird, this is clearly not his forte.

Read More: Is The Hummingbird Project a True Story?

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Film review: the hummingbird project.

This indie film deserves to be a hit

BY Linda Marric

In Canadian director Kim Nguyen’s new indie drama Jesse Eisenberg ( The Social Network, Zombieland, Night Moves ) stars as a high-frequency trader who decides to go head to head against his manipulative old boss (Salma Hayek) with the help of his brainiac cousin (Alexander Skarsgård). Exposing the ruthless dealings of an increasingly competitive digital world, the film offers a beautifully understated, if slightly flawed, semi-comedic narrative which once again manages to showcase Eisenberg’s unequalled flare for both drama and comedy.

Having worked for one of the most competitive companies dealing in the high-speed trading of stocks and commodities, Vincent Zaleski (Eisenberg) and his cousin Anton (Skarsgård) refuse to let their boss Eva Torres (Hayek) get her hands on Anton’s latest genius idea

. Instead, Vincent has hatched his own plan to run a fibre-optic cable from Kansas to a Wall Street databank in New Jersey to gain a millisecond of advantage on his competitors.

Armed with millions of dollars from a venture capitalist backer (Frank Schorpion) and with the help of amiable drilling expert Mark (an impressive Michael Mando), Vincent will have to sweet-talk hundreds of small landowners into letting him run the cable under their properties.

Disaster strikes when a series of setbacks and unforeseen personal circumstances force him to face the possibility of failure.

Nguyen ‘s film has ambitions beyond its humble indie credentials. Presenting a story which is first and foremost rooted in the desire to expose greed, the film offers an unabashedly moralising tale about the dangers of modern business and its unscrupulous players.

And while the intricacies of the technical jargon can sometimes feel a little overdone, there are still some moments of utter genius thanks to both Nguyen’s excellent writing and Eisenberg’s fantastic delivery.

Eisenberg is truly magnificent as a man who appears to be completely in control one minute and way-in-over-his-head the next.

Showing both huge conviction and irresistible vulnerability, the actor delivers each line as if his life depended on it.

Elsewhere, a bald-headed and barely recognisable Alexander Skarsgård ( True Blood, Melancholia, Big Little Lies ), puts in a solid performance as Anton, an obsessive and nervy savant who will do anything to keep his cousin happy.

Overall, The Hummingbird Project delivers on its promise of intrigue and pure unbridled enthusiasm for a subject many would have, understandably, shied away from broaching due its abstract nature.

It may be a modest indie film, but it deserves a broad audience. Highly recommended.

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Where Movies and Technology Meet

The hummingbird project review.

A Beautiful Bind

One can be forgiven for presuming that any new movie concerning technology and starring Jesse Eisenberg is going to play like an inevitable follow-up to - or worse, a carbon copy of - 2010's " The Social Network ." New tech drama " The Hummingbird Project " certainly shares some DNA with the unlikely Facebook-focused blockbuster, in that it concerns another technological arms race: here, the battle to best the financial markets with souped-up electronic trading systems.

Restless schemer Vincent (Jesse Eisenberg, "Now You See Me 2") has his sights set on a million-dollar idea that will take him out of the humdrum of his daily work behind the scenes at an investment firm and put him on the fast-track to riches: a completely straight, all-geographical-hurdles-be-damned data relay line that will speed up information exchange enough to enable lucky users to leapfrog over other stock traders and theoretically reap fabulous profits in the process. Vincent enlists his brainy and awkward cousin Anton (Alexander Skarsgard, True Blood ), who's a fitfully passionate savant when it comes to technology - in an early scene he shouts down a stubborn co-worker over the issue of neutrino messaging vs. microwave transmission - and together they walk out on their uber-ambitious boss Eva (Salma Hayek, " The Hitman's Bodyguard ") to pursue their against-the-odds venture. It turns out to be much, much more difficult than they could possibly imagine.

One failing of "The Hummingbird Project" is that it's dealing with a complicated topic, but it isn't until halfway through the film that we get a solid layman's explanation of the theory behind the scheme and can finally synthesize all of the efforts that we've been witness to in the first half of the story. Still, that lack of full immersion doesn't keep the story from being engaging. Watching Vincent hurl himself at every obstacle, first with smug confidence, then hucksterish persistence, and finally with the tumult of a man who's been pushed over the edge, makes for an absorbing character study. It's initially unclear if Mr. Eisenberg can convey the emotional arc - he seems more given to glassy, guarded performances than onscreen introspection - but as circumstances shift we see a more relatable character emerge, and by the end can grasp the universality of his story.

And that story contains some bewildering stumbling blocks. In trying to run a communication line straight - yes, literally straight - from an origin site in Kansas to the stock exchange in New York City, Vincent and his project manager Mark (Michael Mando, " Spider-Man: Homecoming ") find themselves contending with the foibles of human nature (suspicious landowners, and drilling crews that suddenly pull up stakes at the prospect of a bigger payday) and - well, nature-nature (how to run a line through mountains, across rivers, and into protected federal lands). "The Hummingbird Project" repeats the same pattern again and again of presenting an obstacle, explicating the utter impossibility of overcoming it, and then brainstorming a workable solution. Surprisingly, there's something strangely soothing about watching others pull themselves figuratively hand-over-hand up the sheer side of a massive, insurmountable problem set, regardless of the ultimate outcome.

"The Hummingbird Project" features some unexpectedly striking cinematography as Vincent treks into ever more remote locations to keep tabs on the crews who are hard at work conquering the wilderness at his behest. In contrast, cousin Anton is sequestered in a Midwestern hotel room, wrestling with the technological obstacles that threaten to upend their entire venture. As the intently focused Anton, Alexander Skarsgard ventures well outside his typical territory of handsome, brooding leading man, and "Hummingbird" lets him play it bald and bespectacled to boot. He presents a believable portrait of a frustrated creative thinker who just wants the world to leave him alone to laboriously untie his latest set of mental knots.

In the end, "The Hummingbird Project" isn't telling a world-changing story, but it's consistently engaging, occasionally challenging, and will leave you knowing more than you did when the opening credits rolled. It may also convince you that the shortest distance between two points isn't always a straight line.

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The Hummingbird Project Streaming: Watch & Stream Online via Hulu

By Monica Prabhakar

The Hummingbird Project is a 2019 Canadian thriller-drama film. The movie centers on the high-stakes world of high-frequency trading (HFT), where milliseconds can mean millions.

Here’s how you can watch and stream The Hummingbird Project via streaming services such as Hulu.

Is The Hummingbird Project available to watch via streaming?

Yes, The Hummingbird Project is available to watch via streaming on Hulu .

The film follows cousins Vincent and Anton Zaleski who dream of outpacing their competitors by constructing a fiber-optic cable from Kansas to New Jersey. This would slash data transmission times to just 16 milliseconds. So, Vincent pushes forward despite the huge financial and logistical hurdles. Meanwhile, Anton strives to perfect the necessary software. Their ambitious plan puts them in direct conflict with their former boss, Eva Torres who will stop at nothing to sabotage their efforts. As they battle legal issues, financial strain, and personal sacrifices, Vincent and Anton’s quest for success challenges their relationship and moral boundaries.

Directed by Kim Nguyen, the cast features Jesse Eisenberg and Alexander Skarsgård in the lead roles of Vincent and Anton Zaleski, respectively. Meanwhile, Salma Hayek essays Eva Torres.

Watch The Hummingbird Project streaming via Hulu

The Hummingbird Project is available to watch on Hulu.

Hulu offers a range of movies, shows, documentaries, anime, stand-up, and Hulu originals. If you’re in search of fresh new content to watch, stream, Anatomy of a Fall, Big, Rye Lane, Little Women, Modern Family, L.A. Confidential, 2 Days in New York, Sideways, and The Royal Tenenbaums on Hulu.

You can watch via Hulu by following these steps:

Go to Hulu.com/welcome
Select ‘Start Your Free Trial’
$7.99 per month or $79.99 per year (With Ads)
$17.99 per month (No Ads)

Hulu (With Ads) is the cheapest option, providing users access to Hulu’s streaming library with commercials. Hulu (No Ads) is the service’s premium option, providing access to its library without any advertisements. There are also several bundles available with Hulu that pair the service with Disney Plus and ESPN Plus, along with Live TV plans that also include many live TV channels.

The Hummingbird Project’s official synopsis is as follows:

“A pair of high-frequency traders go up against their old boss in an effort to make millions in a fiber-optic cable deal.”

NOTE: The streaming services listed above are subject to change. The information provided was correct at the time of writing.

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Kevin Costner ‘s new Western epic may have gotten a 10-minute standing ovation at Cannes, but once critics got back from festival screenings to their hotel rooms, they posted reviews for Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1 that were far less enthusiastic.

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After Garfield's unexpected reunion with his long-lost father, ragged alley cat Vic, he and his canine friend Odie are forced from their perfectly pampered lives to join Vic on a risky heist... Read all After Garfield's unexpected reunion with his long-lost father, ragged alley cat Vic, he and his canine friend Odie are forced from their perfectly pampered lives to join Vic on a risky heist. After Garfield's unexpected reunion with his long-lost father, ragged alley cat Vic, he and his canine friend Odie are forced from their perfectly pampered lives to join Vic on a risky heist.

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Anora Is a Raucous Good Time With a Gut-Punch of an Ending

By Richard Lawson

Image may contain Mikey Madison Urban Club Night Club Adult Person Face Head and Night Life

The director Sean Baker has, in recent years, been moving closer toward what one might call the mainstream. His films—which are not generally driven by big movie stars or hooky genre trappings—have maintained their idiosyncratic ramble, their interest in lives on the fringes of American society. But in 2021’s Red Rocket and in his new film Anora , Baker is working in a more broadly accessible comedic tone and tempo. It suits him, even if a little of his earlier scrappiness is missed.

What’s thankfully still in play is Baker’s sensitivity to the humanity behind the antics. Anora, which premiered here at the Cannes Film Festival on May 21, is in line with something like Uncut Gems , a kinetic race through a New York City rarely seen on film. It’s a wild, profane blast. But Baker is also zooming in, very slowly, so that in the movie’s startling, disarming final scene we are forced to reconsider what we’ve just watched. Was it a raucous chase movie or a quiet tragedy?

The title character, who prefers to be called Ani, is a sex worker (played by Mikey Madison ) who strips at a Manhattan club and does the occasional house call on the side. She’s a native of the Russian enclave that is Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach and can speak a little of the language. So when a Russian client is brought to the club, Ani is tasked with entertaining him. Rather than some menacing gangster or piggish old oligarch, the customer is a wiry kid, Ivan ( Mark Eydelshteyn ). He’s friendly and generous; Ani immediately takes a shine to him, and he to her. After a few paid-for hangs at Ivan’s waterfront mansion (well, it’s his family’s place), Ivan makes a decent proposal to this pretty woman. She will earn $15,000 to be his girlfriend for the week, an arrangement to which she happily agrees.

So begins a whirlwind of a love story, or something like it, as Ivan lavishes Ami with gifts, takes her out clubbing, and flies her and a gang of friends to Las Vegas on a private jet. It’s there that Ivan, horned up and smitten in that particularly adolescent way, proposes marriage. There’s a quickie chapel wedding, and Ani figures she’s hit the jackpot. But those rich parents back in Russia make us worry. When will the likely villains come to spoil the fairy tale?

Blessedly, Baker isn’t terribly interested in violence. When some of the body men in the family’s employ do come to intervene—their intention is to force an annulment—Ani is certainly manhandled, but it never seems that anyone’s well-being is in any serious danger. Instead, Baker sets this ragtag crew on a tear through Brighton Beach and Coney Island, another of Baker’s surveys of an interesting corner of the country. Ani is fuming, a taciturn goon named Igor ( Yura Borisov ) is making eyes at her, and Ivan is missing.

Throughout, Ani is repeatedly referred to, quite derisively, as “some hooker” or worse, epithets to which she takes righteous offense. Anora is largely about a woman in a marginalized profession constantly asserting her personhood among people who view her as little more than a concept, or a prop. Madison, sporting a mostly credible Brooklyn accent, does a lot to aid in that assertion. Her performance is big and vivid, brash but charming. Even when Baker’s storytelling and dialogue gets repetitive (this is a 139-minute movie that could certainly be trimmed), Madison keeps things lively.

In the courtship portion of the film, she and Eydelshteyn—who has an appealingly erratic beanpole energy—create a propulsive chemistry. Baker has once again given great, star-making roles to two worthy actors who’ve not had this kind of opportunity before. There is also a palpable charge passing between Ani and Igor, so winningly played by Borisov. Baker is careful to remind the audience that these two first met in a moment of aggression; Igor is not exactly gentle. But that doesn’t necessarily preclude later affection, just as it didn’t for Jack Foley and Karen Sisco in Out of Sight .

Still, a darkness thrums under the surface of all this flirting and bickering. Ani is forever yanked this way and that, degraded and disregarded. She is vocally indignant but otherwise rolls with it, baited with money and, no doubt, cowed by the tacit authority of those with it. There’s something political being said here, especially in the film’s final, disquieting scene. Immediately afterwards, I found myself torn between finding Baker’s conclusions compassionate and sensing a vague whiff of something patronizing. The film’s insistence that Ani, and maybe all sex workers, be given their autonomy and dignity is certainly a worthy mission. But is that assurance really this movie’s to give? And does the film’s use of sex in its final moments suggest a bit of armchair psychology about why sex workers do what they do? One could read Anora as a film that dares to think it can confer approval.

That is the risky line Baker’s explorations of outsiders—several of them, like Tangerine , concerning sex work—tend to tread, between graciousness and gawking, benevolent anthropology and the more malevolent, missionary kind. The more I think about Anora , the more I feel that it is operating from a good place, that its ultimate statement is one of complex empathy. That these faint alarm bells rang as I watched this vastly entertaining and finely acted film may simply be evidence of a contemporary kneejerk tendency to morally audit films, an impulse that Baker regularly, and perhaps admirably, challenges. Anora , like Ani, is maybe best understood on its own terms.

Richard Lawson

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COMMENTS

The Hummingbird Project movie review (2019)
What a strange bird this movie is. The title "The Hummingbird Project" refers to the millisecond it takes for a hummingbird's wing to beat one time, I think. Or maybe it hints at the future home that coder Anton Zaleski ( Alexander Skarsgård) dreams about, a domicile where the little birdies flit outside with impunity.
The Hummingbird Project
Rated: 3.5/5 Mar 4, 2021 Full Review Craig Schroeder Battleship Pretension The Hummingbird Project asks the question but never gives a satisfying answer. Jan 7, 2021 Full Review Read all reviews
The Hummingbird Project review
The Hummingbird Project review - deeply odd tunnel-digging drama. P art of me wants to cut this enigmatic drama about fibre optic cable-laying some slack for trying to disprove the notion there ...
'The Hummingbird Project' Review: They're Running Cable and Chasing
March 14, 2019. For "The Hummingbird Project," a sturdy, involving thriller set in the financial realm, the writer-director Kim Nguyen has cited heady inspirations like Michael Lewis's book ...
'The Hummingbird Project': Film Review
Jesse Eisenberg and Alexander Skarsgard star as New York cousins who go up against Salma Hayek's high-frequency trading tycoon in Kim Nguyen's latest movie, 'The Hummingbird Project.'
The Hummingbird Project (2018)
The Hummingbird Project: Directed by Kim Nguyen. With Jesse Eisenberg, Alexander Skarsgård, Salma Hayek, Michael Mando. A pair of high-frequency traders go up against their old boss in an effort to make millions in a fiber-optic cable deal.
The Hummingbird Project
The Hummingbird Project is a 2018 thriller drama film about high-frequency trading and ultra-low latency direct market access, ... On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 58%, based on 123 reviews, and an average rating of 6.1/10.
'The Hummingbird Project' Movie Review
The minutia weighs a ton and there's lots and lots of drilling. The film's documentary-like attention to detail may lead you to think that The Hummingbird Project is based on a true story. Not ...
The Hummingbird Project
The Hummingbird Project is a good film, but it's never as meaningful or as successful as it wants to be. Full Review | Original Score: 3.0/4.0 | Sep 11, 2020
'The Hummingbird Project' Review: Toronto Film Festival
Film Review: 'The Hummingbird Project'. Jesse Eisenberg and Alexander Skarsgård are entrepreneurial cousins attempting a technological breakthrough in this entertaining digital-age drama ...
'The Hummingbird Project' review: Solid acting helps complicated high
★★★ "The Hummingbird Project," with Jesse Eisenberg, Alexander Skarsgård, Salma Hayek. Written and directed by Kim Nguyen. 111 minutes. Written and directed by Kim Nguyen. 111 minutes ...
The Hummingbird Project
The Hummingbird Project. Metascore Mixed or Average Based on 26 Critic Reviews. 58. User Score Generally Favorable Based on 29 User Ratings. 6.1. My Score. Hover and click to give a rating. Add My Review.
Movie Review: 'The Hummingbird Project'
Most of The Hummingbird Project is Jesse Eisenberg grimacing over his stomach and talking very fast. ... movie review Mar. 15, 2019. The Hummingbird Project Is Just Passable, ...
The Hummingbird Project
Movie Review. There will always be someone who is smarter than you. And that's bad for business. That's why Eva Torres recruits the brightest minds for her fast-paced, high-frequency trading deals. Time is money. Down to the millisecond. ... The Hummingbird Project isn't your typical thriller. In fact, it's not really a thriller at all ...
Review: The Hummingbird Project
The Hummingbird Project is an alluring and smart film, especially for IT and financially savvy professionals. It's still an overly techy movie that isolates its audience with the subject matter. The Hummingbird Project is like a smaller scale version of The Social Network meets The Wolf On Wall Street. It's hard to recommend this film for ...
REVIEW: "The Hummingbird Project"
Ambitious and gripping, "The Hummingbird Project" is a surprisingly accessible film, considering its construction around intricacies of modern technology and electronic communication. Get past the technobabble, and it's a film about greed. It's about ambition, obsession, and competition.
Review: 'The Hummingbird Project': A Farce With Clipped Wings : NPR
Nguyen is a skilled farceur, but he doesn't know when to stop. For a film about our obsession with speed, The Hummingbird Project soon bogs down in saggy repeat cycles involving flat tires ...
Movie Review
The Hummingbird Project, 2019. Written and Directed by Kim Nguyen. Starring Jesse Eisenberg, Alexander Skarsgård, Salma Hayek, Michael Mando, Johan Heldenbergh, Ayisha Issa, Mark Slacke, Sarah ...
The Hummingbird Project Movie Review
Parents need to know that The Hummingbird Project is a (fictional) story about an attempt to beat the stock market by installing a faster, more than 1,000-mile-long fiber optic cable. Language is the biggest issue, with fairly frequent use of both "f--k" and "s--t." A character is diagnosed with stomach cancer; some scenes take place in a hospital, and one shows the character urinating blood.
The Hummingbird Project Ending, Explained
'The Hummingbird Project' is a Canadian-Belgian drama thriller film that combines finance and tech for an extravagant undertaking. At its core, it is the story of exactly how far people are willing to go to achieve their dreams. However, the narrative itself is quite unique. Starring Jesse Eisenberg, Alexander Skarsgård, Salma Hayek, and Michael Mando in […]
Film review: The Hummingbird Project
Film review: The Hummingbird Project. This indie film deserves to be a hit. BY Linda Marric. June 13, 2019 10:27. Share via. In Canadian director Kim Nguyen's new indie drama Jesse Eisenberg ...
The Hummingbird Project
2019, R, 111 min. Directed by Kim Nguyen. Starring Jesse Eisenberg, Alexander Skarsgård, Salma Hayek, Michael Mando, Johan Heldenbergh, Kaniehtiio Horn. REVIEWED By Richard Whittaker, Fri., March ...
The Hummingbird Project Movie Review
The Hummingbird Project Review. By Lora Grady. A Beautiful Bind. One can be forgiven for presuming that any new movie concerning technology and starring Jesse Eisenberg is going to play like an inevitable follow-up to - or worse, a carbon copy of - 2010's "The Social Network." New tech drama "The Hummingbird Project" certainly shares some DNA ...
The Hummingbird Project Streaming: Watch & Stream Online via Hulu
The Hummingbird Project is a 2019 Canadian thriller-drama film. The movie centers on the high-stakes world of high-frequency trading (HFT), where milliseconds can mean millions.
Horizon: An American Saga
Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1: Directed by Kevin Costner. With Kevin Costner, Abbey Lee, Sienna Miller, Jena Malone. Chronicles a multi-faceted, 15-year span of pre-and post-Civil War expansion and settlement of the American west.
"Unfiltered Hummingbird Podcast" Mental Health and Self-Worth ...
IMDb is the world's most popular and authoritative source for movie, TV and celebrity content. Find ratings and reviews for the newest movie and TV shows. Get personalized recommendations, and learn where to watch across hundreds of streaming providers.
Bad News And More Bad News About Kevin Costner's 'Horizon ...
Costner debuted the first part of his four-part movie anthology at the Cannes Film Festival in France and most critics panned the film. When I started reading reviews Monday morning, the movie sat ...
Kevin Costner's 'Horizon: An American Saga' Slammed in Critic Reviews
Cannes critics are piling on Costner's three-hour epic, with one dubbing it the "dullest cinematic vanity project of the century" and "more 'Waterworld' than 'Dances with Wolves.'"
The Garfield Movie (2024)
The Garfield Movie: Directed by Mark Dindal. With Chris Pratt, Samuel L. Jackson, Hannah Waddingham, Ving Rhames. After Garfield's unexpected reunion with his long-lost father, ragged alley cat Vic, he and his canine friend Odie are forced from their perfectly pampered lives to join Vic on a risky heist.
Anora Is a Raucous Good Time With a Gut-Punch of an Ending
Sean Baker, director of 'Tangerine' and 'The Florida Project,' investigates another under-examined corner of America.

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