Review of Margin Call (2011) by Hbswan13 — 02 Apr 2019

"I think this is one of the best movies of the past several years—or at least the most thrilling, finely crafted, and piercingly insightful one yet made about the 2008 crisis and contemporary capitalism.

There is, admittedly, not a lot of competition there. Cynical though it may be, one can understand how profit-minded studio executives might be skeptical of drama manifested in numbers and balance sheets. Most other entries in the genre (let’s call it ‘financial thriller’) tend to be squarely polemical—either satirical depictions of greed like The Wolf of Wall Street or Oliver Stone’s 1987 Wall Street, or else advocacy documentaries like Capitalism: A Love Story or Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job. Margin Call strikes something of a balance between the two, giving us a sense of the numbing scale and complexity of the crisis as well as the way it affects—and is affected by—the human qualities of the people involved, and for this reason its portrayal of a Wall Street firm feels both more realistic and more insightful. It’s the rare fact-based story that finds drama not just in showing what happened, but in trying to understand why it happened.".

Read my full review and analysis at: https://rewatchlist.