margin call movie reviews

Long night’s journey into collapse

Kevin Spacey in "Margin Call."

It may have happened something like this. “Margin Call” depicts the last night of good times on Wall Street, as a deadly certainty travels up the executive ladder at an investment firm: Disastrous speculation in the mortgage markets is leading to the firm’s collapse. We can still recall those days in the summer of 2008, during the Obama-McCain campaign, when America seemed awash in prosperity, and the stock market was setting records. Then one firm after another was forced to declare bankruptcy, the nation’s economic structure was threatened, and Congress ponied up its huge bailout.

“Margin Call” begins on a day at an unnamed investment firm that must certainly have an inkling of what’s coming, since 80 percent of the work force is laid off. One of the victims is Eric ( Stanley Tucci ), a senior risks analyst who like many of his colleagues was incapable of seeing that the real estate market was built as a house of cards. Although writer-director J.C. Chandor’s film has sympathy for most of its characters, it is important to remember that they all felt they had to play along with the deals that were bringing their firms such huge profits and bonuses.

On his way out the door, Eric slips a USB drive to Peter ( Zachary Quinto ), a younger analyst who wasn’t fired. There’s information on it that disturbs him. So it should. While the office is empty, and the survivors are out partying to celebrate not being fired, Peter realizes the firm and the market are clearly trembling on the brink. He contacts his supervisor, Will ( Paul Bettany ), who takes one look and calls his boss, Sam ( Kevin Spacey ). Others are called in for an all-night emergency meeting until at dawn as a helicopter brings in CEO John Tuld ( Jeremy Irons ).

You don’t need to understand a lot about the markets to follow the film. John is a cool, polished Brit who likes to say things like, “Speak to me in plain terms,” because his job requires him to manage the corporation but not necessarily understand its business. Indeed, as we now know, a fresh young college graduate could have looked at the balance sheets and clearly seen Wall Street was doomed.

It is up to John to make the margin call. In other words, to order his company to start dumping worthless holdings before the word spread that they are worthless — essentially, betraying their customers. It has now been established that some firms created hedge funds intended to fail, so they could make money betting against them. These they sold to their customers knowing they were worthless.

I think the movie is about how its characters are concerned only by the welfare of their corporations. There is no larger sense of the public good. Corporations are amoral, and exist to survive and succeed, at whatever human cost. This is what the Occupy Wall Street protesters are angry about: They are not against capitalism, but about Wall Street dishonesty and greed.

“Margin Call” employs an excellent cast who can make financial talk into compelling dialogue. They also can reflect the enormity of what is happening: Their company and their lives are being rendered meaningless. This scenario was enacted at many Wall Street institutions on the autumn of 2008, and fundamental financial reform is still being opposed. No particular firm is named, but doesn’t it seem to you that the name of the Jeremy Irons character, “John Tuld,” has an echo of Richard Fuld, CEO of Lehman Brothers, who collected enormous bonuses for leading his company into bankruptcy?

Irons is sly in the role, a man who knows his own financial stability is unassailable, who considers his job as an amoral exercise, who has made it to the top by not particularly caring about people. A great corporate executive must have a strain of ruthlessness. I also admired Kevin Spacey, who projects incisive intelligence in his very manner, and Demi Moore , as a senior executive who has risen to just below the glass ceiling and knows she will stay there.

The physical world of the film itself is effective. It’s all glass, steel and protocol, long black cars and executive perks, luxurious lifestyles paid for with what was inescapably fraud. One of the characters has a sick dog. The dog is the only creature in the entire film that anyone likes.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

Demi Moore as Sarah Robertson
Stanley Tucci as Eric Dale
Paul Bettany as Will Emerson
Jeremy Irons as John Tuld
Mary McDonnell as Mary Rogers
Simon Baker as Jared Cohen
Kevin Spacey as Sam Rogers
Penn Badgley as Seth Bregman
Zachary Quinto as Peter Sullivan

Written and directed by

J.C. Chandor

Now playing.

We Live in Time

Look Into My Eyes

The Front Room

Matt and Mara

The Thicket

The Mother of All Lies

The Paragon

My First Film

Don’t Turn Out the Lights

I’ll Be Right There

The Greatest of All Time

TIFF 2024: Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Sharp Corner, The Quiet Ones

TIFF 2024: Dahomey, Bird, Oh Canada

TIFF 2024: The Cut, The Luckiest Man in America, Nutcrackers

The Telluride Tea: My Diary of the 2024 Telluride Film Festival

The best movie reviews, in your inbox.

Supported by

Movie Review | 'Margin Call'

Number Crunching at the Apocalypse

Share full article

By A.O. Scott

Oct. 20, 2011

There have been reports of hurt feelings among the bankers and brokers who have been the focus of public ire and Occupy Wall Street protests. And it is true that those poor, hard-working souls have been demonized and caricatured. Surely the much-reviled 1 percent does not consist of plutocrats in top hats or predators in blue suits, but of human beings just like the other 99 percent of us, albeit with more money and perhaps more to answer for.

That, in a way, is the message of J. C. Chandor’s “Margin Call,” which does a great deal to humanize the authors — and beneficiaries — of the 2008 financial crisis. But the film, relentless in its honesty and shrewd in its insights and techniques, is unlikely to soothe the wounded pride of the actual or aspiring ruling class. It is a tale of greed, vanity, myopia and expediency that is all the more damning for its refusal to moralize.

There are no hissable villains here, no operatic speeches condemning or celebrating greed. Just a bunch of guys (and one woman, Demi Moore) in well-tailored clothes and a state of quiet panic trying to save themselves from a global catastrophe of their own making. Watching them going about their business, you don’t feel the kind of fury inspired by “Inside Job,” Charles Ferguson’s great muckraking documentary on the origins of the financial crisis, but rather a mix of dread, disgust, pity and confusion.

And also, above all, admiration for an extraordinary feat of filmmaking. It is hard to believe that “Margin Call” is Mr. Chandor’s first feature. His formal command — his ability to imply far more than he shows or says and to orchestrate a large, complex drama out of whispers, glances and snippets of jargon — is downright awe inspiring. The movie rarely leaves the Manhattan offices of the fictional investment bank ( loosely modeled on Lehman Brothers ) in which it takes place and limits its action, which consists mainly of phone calls and hurried meetings, to a frenzied 24-hour period. Within that narrow frame the gears of a complex narrative mesh with ravishing clockwork precision.

“Margin Call” is a thriller, moving through ambient shadows to the anxious tempo of Nathan Larson’s hushed, anxious score. It is also a horror movie, with disaster lurking like an unseen demon outside the skyscraper windows and behind the computer screens. It is also a workplace comedy of sorts. The crackling, syncopated dialogue and the plot, full of reversals and double crosses, owe an obvious debt to David Mamet’s profane fables of deal-making machismo. Hovering over all of it is the dark romance of capital: the elegance of numbers; the kinkiness of money; the deep, rotten, erotic allure of power.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber? Log in .

Want all of The Times? Subscribe .

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Trouble logging in?

By continuing, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes.

Email not verified

Let's keep in touch.

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

Upcoming Movies and TV shows
Rotten Tomatoes Podcast
Media News + More

By clicking "Sign Me Up," you are agreeing to receive occasional emails and communications from Fandango Media (Fandango, Vudu, and Rotten Tomatoes) and consenting to Fandango's Privacy Policy and Terms and Policies . Please allow 10 business days for your account to reflect your preferences.

OK, got it!

About Rotten Tomatoes®
Login/signup

Movies in theaters

Opening This Week
Top Box Office
Coming Soon to Theaters
Certified Fresh Movies

Movies at Home

Fandango at Home
Prime Video
Most Popular Streaming Movies
What to Watch New

Certified fresh picks

77% Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Link to Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
95% Rebel Ridge Link to Rebel Ridge
100% His Three Daughters Link to His Three Daughters

New TV Tonight

100% Slow Horses: Season 4
97% English Teacher: Season 1
93% Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist: Season 1
100% Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos: Season 1
54% The Perfect Couple: Season 1
-- Tell Me Lies: Season 2
-- Outlast: Season 2
-- The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives: Season 1
-- Selling Sunset: Season 8
-- Whose Line Is It Anyway?: Season 14

Margin Call Reviews

Afterward, we have a better understanding of the apathy that permeated our economy’s ongoing crisis, which, depending on your outlook, either focuses or alleviates your anger over the situation.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 6, 2023

Even though Chandor isn't trying to turn his characters into something abominable, the truth is that each of them is, on a bigger or lesser scale, an evil to society. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 21, 2022

Everyone thinks this movie is a fairly routine, not particularly notable drama...my love for Margin Call boils down to it being the one film that, more than any other, seems to understand the modern workplace.

Full Review | Jun 3, 2022

Margin Call opts to show us that there are no heroes and villains, only villains and victims and poor souls weighing the merits of a Faustian bargain.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 1, 2021

The film is practically hijacked by Kevin Spacey, though, as a far more complex corporate dirtbag than he usually plays.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4.0 | Sep 15, 2020

Though an excessively talky affair, the screenplay's abundance of great dialogue and powerful storytelling smarts casts a dazzling spell.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 20, 2020

You can tell a story out of anything, and you can tell a story about anybody, but the more technical the story gets and the more unsympathetic the characters become make telling that story harder. Margin Call is very well told.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Jul 17, 2020

Chandor has a real knack for capturing the airless, cutthroat dimension to the modern workplace.

Full Review | Jan 17, 2020

Though perhaps trying a little too hard at times to project a macro-profundity on its banks imploding thesis, Margin Call gets most of its tactics just right.

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

Margin Call is like a submarine movie: a chamber piece that sends us on a claustrophobic descent into the depths of the financial crisis.

Full Review | Aug 7, 2019

Even with its mostly even handed approach it remains mostly dry and clinical, lacking in fire and directorial spark.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 6, 2019

Chandor manages to induce a certain amount of unease and dread in the initial proceedings. But what begins like a prophetic Wall Street set John Grisham novel quickly becomes a stalemate of soliloquies.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jun 27, 2019

Margin Call is worth seeing for its cast and for its intentions, but it's easy to imagine how the whole thing could have been done better.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Feb 8, 2019

Not only does it offer no new insights into an issue everyone needs to understand; it's also about as enthralling as watching an investment banker pace his office all day while alternately talking and yelling into the telephone glued onto his ear.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jan 5, 2019

Vague on details regarding the company or the reasons for its impending demise, the film is far more meticulous in painting the possible final hours for this company that unfolds almost like a reverse werewolf tale.

Full Review | Dec 21, 2018

Positively devastating.

Full Review | Sep 14, 2018

Chandor is at times fortunate to have such a talented cast, all of whom provide strong performances.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 29, 2018

Margin Call ranks among the top dramas ever made about Wall Street.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 14, 2018

Margin Call effectively portrays these masters of the universe as flawed folk who were just as ill-informed, unaware and ultimately scared of losing it all as the general public.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 21, 2017

The movie is about gamesmanship and ruthlessness and what it takes to find room at the top. And stay there.

Full Review | Aug 30, 2017

'Margin Call': A Financial-Crisis Film That's on the Money

The sharp, star-studded chronicle of the crash is among the best movies of the year

"There's a difference between an old-fashioned financial panic and what happened on Wall Street in 2008," wrote Michael Lewis in his excellent chronicle of the crash, The Big Short . "In an old-fashioned panic, perception creates its own reality: Someone shouts 'Fire!' in a crowded theater and the audience crushes each other to death in its race for the exits. On Wall Street in 2008 the reality finally overwhelmed perceptions: A crowded theater burned down with a lot of people still in their seats…. The problem wasn't that Lehman Brothers had been allowed to fail. The problem was that Lehman Brothers had been allowed to succeed."

Though the 2008 financial crisis engendered quite a few good books and documentaries, it hasn't inspired much in the way of narrative film. This is no great surprise: The cinematic opportunities inherent in credit default swaps rather pale in comparison to those of predator drones, let alone extraterrestrial cops or robots . With his Wall Street sequel last year, Oliver Stone tried to again seize the economic zeitgeist, but it eluded his grasp. The film was at once hoary and contrived, an inflated melodrama of schemes and betrayals and motorcycle races that never conveyed the impersonal urgency of its subtitle: Money Never Sleeps .

Among the many virtues of Margin Call , the engrossing debut feature by writer-director J.C. Chandor, is its appreciation of this economic implacability. Unlike the second Wall Street (or, for that matter, the first), the movie understands that financial markets aren't merely tools to be wielded for purposes nefarious or benign, but vast and evolving entities in their own right, often inscrutable even to their purported custodians. Chandor's film is not a tale of the plots and counterplots of conniving bankers. It is a disaster movie, in which even the Masters of the Universe are running for their lives.

The movie depicts two days—and the long, intervening night—at a large investment firm loosely based on Lehman Brothers. The financial bubble is already popping, but no one has yet heard the sound it makes, with the exception of veteran risk analyst Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci). Before he can warn his colleagues, however, Dale is offhandedly cashiered, in what is clearly not the firm's first round of layoffs. (As he tells the duo of Ryan-Bingham-like downsizers assigned to "ease his transition": "Look, I run risk management. I don't see how that's a natural place to start cutting jobs.") On his way out of the building, Dale tosses a USB drive containing his unfinished research to a young protégé, Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto), who has escaped the corporate axe.

That night, as his fellow survivors head out to toast their good fortune, Sullivan stays behind to complete the analysis Dale had begun. It is, as he soon recognizes, a harbinger of financial apocalypse. Sullivan summons his boss (Paul Bettany), who summons his boss (Kevin Spacey), who summons his boss (Simon Baker), each fish bigger than the last, all the way up to the biggest fish in the pond: a primeval creature named Tuld, who arrives by helicopter and is played by Jeremy Irons.

As we work our way up this food chain, one character after another seems set up as narrative foil or villain-in-waiting: Bettany's tough, crew-cutted Brit, grinding Nicorette lozenges between his teeth as if they were competitors; Spacey's mid-level exec, pining for a sick dog while inured to the human toll around him; Irons's sardonic, sepulchral CEO. Yet with a minor exception or two, there are no white hats or black hats to be found here, merely modern-day shades of gray flannel . Chandor's film is less a portrait of individual malfeasance than of systemic, cultural failure. His characters have made their moral compromises gradually, selling off bits of themselves at a loss, piece by piece, until they find that their debts outweigh their assets and the only evident way out is to keep going.

The movie unfolds as a series of confrontations and collaborations between these characters, and though their outcomes are never much in doubt they are charged with urgency and intelligence. There are discussions of blame (which runs, as ever, downhill); bouts of lofty rationalization; and weighings of self-preservation against the public interest. (One need not be a student of the crisis to know how these turn out.) When Spacey warns of creating a panic in the markets, Irons responds drily, "If you're the first one out the door, that's not called panicking."

Margin Call is perforated with sharp insights. Each ascending echelon of the bank's hierarchy has a weaker understanding of the complex financial instruments they are trading than the one beneath it. ("Just speak to me in English," Spacey tells his analysts at one point; "Speak as you might to a young child, or a golden retriever," requests Irons at another.) And though this is a story of people wedded to their jobs, the lone female executive (Demi Moore) is the only one for whom that marriage appears to be exclusive, and the consolations of family an unaffordable luxury.

The cast is uniformly and uncommonly good, even by their generally lofty standards. Spacey in particular offers his best performance in years, emerging bit by bit as the closest thing the movie has to a conscience, however muddied. And Moore has a brittle, sexless authenticity as the Only Woman in the Room. This may be her first film set in an office in which no one throws anyone else lustfully across a desk.

Chandor's direction is understated but self-assured, and his script—which has more than a hint of Mamet to it—superb. Indeed, this is the all-too-rare film that began with a screenplay and then filled in the "talent," rather than the other way around. (It is also the fledgling venture of Quinto's production company, Before the Door.)

With luck, the Occupy Wall Street movement will offer Margin Call newfound salience, and a broader audience than it might otherwise have reached. But whether or not this is the case, Chandor's film is among the best of the year to date, a fable of global financial calamity distilled down to an intimate microcosm of human greed and frailty.

About the Author

Margin Call Review

13 Jan 2012

107 minutes

Margin Call

At one point during the long night of the soul that makes up Margin Call, Jeremy Irons’ Tuld, the vampiric head of a tottering investment bank, observes, “There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first, be smarter or cheat.” A prescient mantra for the current business age, the purity of the sentiment encapsulates the scalpel-like precision that J. C. Chador’s debut picks over the carcass of modern greed. Part thriller, part horror, part workplace tragi-comedy, all cautionary tale, this is a sharp film about sharp men (and Demi Moore) in sharp suits that makes Wall Street: 2 look like amped-up panto.

With its study of bruising machismo in tight spaces revealed through vital verbiage, Margin Call owes more than a debt to David Mamet in general and Glengarry Glen Ross in particular. But Chandor’s dialogue has none of Mamet’s grandstanding. Instead, the talk is terse, but the coolness with which they discuss nuclear options — dump all their mortgage bundles before the market realises they’re worthless but risk ruining their credibility forever — rings frighteningly true.

Chandor’s screenplay charts Sullivan’s seismic findings up the company ladder, each embodied by a terrific performance; from cynical foot soldier (Paul Bettany) to head trader (Kevin Spacey) to potential fall gal (Demi Moore) to Irons’ CEO. This superb ensemble only get quietly fractious meetings and harried phone calls to establish character, but everyone registers. It is Zachary Quinto (adding another great logician to his CV) and Stanley Tucci who propel the first half, and Spacey and the charming-but-scary Irons who dominate the second. Spacey, in particular, is great, adding a gentility to his normal acid-smart persona — his grieving for his dying dog may be an obvious metaphor, but Spacey makes it affecting.

There is a nice running gag that the higher up the chain of command we go, the weaker their command of financial mumbo-jumbo is. As much as it is about finance, it is also great on office politicking, from the agonies of mass redundancies to the etiquette of corporate hierarchies. It doesn’t shy from exposing avarice and moral myopia but this neither condemns nor glorifies the barbarians. Instead it humanises them, to such an extent it might turn your hatred of the one per cent into pity.

Movies | 21 01 2016

Movies | 09 06 2015

Movies | 21 12 2011

MARGIN CALL Review

Your changes have been saved

Email is sent

Email has already been sent

Please verify your email address.

You’ve reached your account maximum for followed topics.

'Sharp Corner' Review: Ben Foster Gives One of 2024's Most Memorable Performances | TIFF 2024

The 10 best psychological thrillers with great acting, ranked, only one actor has been nominated for an oscar twice after their death.

The 2008 economic collapse is one of the major events of our lifetimes and some filmmakers have rushed to turn the events into A Very Serious and Important Movie. J.C. Chandor's Margin Call would like to be that movie. It dresses up its respected cast in fine suits, puts them in the financial world, and then has them look at computer monitors and say "Fuck me..." in astonishment about 80-90 times throughout the course of the film. Chandor wants to bury the audience in the world of financial intrigue and corruption without doing the hard work of explaining the machinations of that world in any kind of detail. He gets away with it for the first half-hour as the audience becomes wrapped in a propulsive, plot-driven drama, but by the end the only saving grace is Kevin Spacey playing against type.

Margin Call takes place over a 24-hour time period in a major financial firm. The day begins with an executive in risk management ( Stanley Tucci ) getting fired, but before he leaves the building he gives a thumb-drive to his employee ( Zachary Quinto ) with the warning, "Be careful." The employee, a former rocket scientist, cracks the data on the thumb-drive and calls his superior ( Paul Bettany ) who looks at the data and says, "Fuck me..." He then calls his superior (Spacey) who looks at the data and says, "Fuck me..." He then calls his superiors ( Simon Baker and Demi Moore ), "Fuck me...", up the chain, and so forth until it reaches the big boss ( Jeremy Irons ).

Despite the repetition, Chandor is able to keep the momentum and drive of his script going throughout the first act, but then the story and momentum collapse as the particulars of this financial firm become less and less believable. Movies like this are usually filled with technical jargon and require an audience surrogate so another character can explain the complexities in layman's terms. That audience surrogate should not be a higher-up. Quinto has to explain to Spacey that the data means the company has loads of crap on its books based on shoddy projections and that the firm will be dead in a few weeks if they can't get rid of it. Later, Quinto has to explain to Irons that how the crap came from the mortgage market. Both Spacey and Irons have lines like "You know I don't understand this stuff," and "Explain it to me like you would a child."

Chandor may be trying to imply that the fault of the financial meltdown was from sheer recklessness and stupidity, but that's a simplistic and inaccurate understanding of the crisis. Spacey's character may be a salesman whose best trait is his ability to inspire his employees, but we have to believe he doesn't understand financial figures and the value of his product. We also have to believe that Irons' character stumbled out of the ether, and idiotically took over a financial institution. If Chandor truly believes this, then he has essentially removed any blatant greed or criminality from financial firms. Even if this fictional company isn't meant to stand in for a dead firm like Lehman Brothers or Bear Sterns, we still have to believe that nobody knew anything and that simply isn't true.

When you remove that responsibility, then Margin Call could not come at a worst time. There's no tragedy at play since these character have no one else to blame and the movie only plays to an audience that thinks, "Boy, I hope these rich Wall Street executives make it out okay." The story lacks drama and insight because most of the characters wander around dumbstruck by the impending calamity and only Bettany hits upon the salient point that the American people will be furious at the Street for the collapse, but no one asked where the money was coming from as long as it kept rolling in. It's an idea that would work far better if Chandor ever took a step outside the firm and introduced an everyman who could not only serve as an audience surrogate, but also as a representative of how the collapse will affect the average person. But there is barely any world beyond the firm and we have to spend time with empty suits worrying about their jobs.

The only character we only get to know is Spacey's (although Tucci gets a meaningless speech about a bridge he built), and the respected actor does a great job playing against type. We all know he can do a heartless executive in his sleep and he's also played the high-profile fraud with his portrayal of Jack Abramoff in Casino Jack . But in Margin Call , his character is faced with a moral choice, which makes him one of the story's few sympathetic characters. The film lets him off the hook with his ignorance of how the meltdown happened, but it puts him in the driver's seat for how he's going to react. There's no smarm to Spacey's performance and it's a nice change of pace for the actor.

Unfortunately Margin Call wastes the rest of its talented cast by making them nothing more than plastic figures moving around a poorly constructed play set (Note to toy manufacturers: do not make the Financial Firm Play Set). The devil is in the details and Chandor wants to make a movie without devils or even people. We need a good film about the financial collapse, but if Margin Call is the best we can get, then fuck me...

Entertainment

Common Sense Media

Movie & TV reviews for parents

For Parents
For Educators
Our Work and Impact

Or browse by category:

Movie Reviews
Best Movie Lists
Best Movies on Netflix, Disney+, and More

Common Sense Selections for Movies

50 Modern Movies All Kids Should Watch Before They're 12

Best TV Lists
Best TV Shows on Netflix, Disney+, and More
Common Sense Selections for TV
Video Reviews of TV Shows

Best Kids' Shows on Disney+

Best Kids' TV Shows on Netflix

Book Reviews
Best Book Lists
Common Sense Selections for Books

8 Tips for Getting Kids Hooked on Books

50 Books All Kids Should Read Before They're 12

Game Reviews
Best Game Lists

Common Sense Selections for Games

Video Reviews of Games

Nintendo Switch Games for Family Fun

Podcast Reviews
Best Podcast Lists

Common Sense Selections for Podcasts

Parents' Guide to Podcasts

App Reviews
Best App Lists

Social Networking for Teens

Gun-Free Action Game Apps

Reviews for AI Apps and Tools

YouTube Channel Reviews
YouTube Kids Channels by Topic

Parents' Ultimate Guide to YouTube Kids

How to Help Kids Build Character Strengths with Quality Media

Family Tech Planners
Digital Skills
All Articles
Latino Culture
Black Voices
Asian Stories
Native Narratives
LGBTQ+ Pride
Best of Diverse Representation List

Multicultural Books

YouTube Channels with Diverse Representations

Podcasts with Diverse Characters and Stories

Margin call.

Common Sense Says
Parents Say 3 Reviews
Kids Say 2 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

Thoughtful Wall Street drama has drinking, language.

Parents Need to Know

Why Age 16+?

Very strong, fairly frequent language includes multiple uses of "f--k," as well

Characters smoke and drink constantly. One character frantically chews Nicorette

A McDonald's "M" (golden arches) is visible twice during an aerial view of the c

A brief scene takes place in a fancy bar, where waitresses are seen wearing sexy

Occasional arguing.

Any Positive Content?

In a time of financial crisis, these characters generally disagree on the right

Sam Rogers is arguably the most responsible character; he argues against the sel

Very strong, fairly frequent language includes multiple uses of "f--k," as well as "Jesus Christ," "s--t," "ass," and single uses of "p---y," "c--t," and "t-ts."

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

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Characters smoke and drink constantly. One character frantically chews Nicorette gum but succumbs to having a real cigarette from time to time. Other characters smoke the occasional cigarette as well. One character drinks heavily throughout the night, swigging from a bottle in a paper bag. Main characters are seen drinking in a bar.

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

Products & Purchases

A McDonald's "M" (golden arches) is visible twice during an aerial view of the city. A bottle of Snapple brand water is visible on a desk. Nicorette gum is mentioned by name.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

A brief scene takes place in a fancy bar, where waitresses are seen wearing sexy outfits while serving. One character mentions the amount of money he's spent on hookers.

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

Violence & Scariness

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

Positive Messages

In a time of financial crisis, these characters generally disagree on the right thing to do. Some of the characters appear to lean toward self-preservation at others' expense. But many of the main characters doubt this path, even though it's not clear exactly what they should do.

Positive Role Models

Sam Rogers is arguably the most responsible character; he argues against the self-preservation action that the firm's leaders want to take. But in the end, he loses the argument and ends up going with the company.

Parents need to know that the biggest issue of concern in this dramatic thriller set on the eve of a huge Wall Street market crash is language. Characters liberally use "f--k," "s--t," and other strong words throughout the drama. They also drink and smoke frequently, seemingly as a response to stress. There's a brief scene in a fancy bar with sexy waitresses in skimpy clothes, and some brand names are visible from time to time. Despite all this, the movie is thoughtful and patient -- though teens may not be interested in the subject matter. But those who are could learn a bit about the ins and outs of recent Wall Street history. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Parent and Kid Reviews

Parents say (3)
Kids say (2)

Based on 3 parent reviews

Compelling drama about inside of Wall St firms

Gripping corporate thriller for adults and older/mature teens, what's the story.

In 2008, a Wall Street firm carries out a round of layoffs. One of the men to lose his job is Eric Dale ( Stanley Tucci ); he has discovered that the risky portfolios the company has been dealing with have stretched things too thin and that a huge crash is imminent. He leaves his findings with a young broker, Peter Sullivan ( Zachary Quinto ); by the middle of the night, all of the company's head honchos are sitting in tense meetings, trying to figure out what to do: protect the public interest or save their own jobs.

Is It Any Good?

J.C. Chandor makes his feature writing and directing debut here, and it's a very strong effort, suggesting a huge talent on the rise. MARGIN CALL is sometimes like a theatrical play, taking place on limited sets over a limited timeframe, with plenty of well-written, well-delivered monologues and dialogue. The plus side of this is that the movie gets some amazingly good performances from a wide range of actors, including Demi Moore , Simon Baker , Paul Bettany , and especially Jeremy Irons and Kevin Spacey (the latter has by far the richest role).

Chandor also throws in some remarkable little touches here and there that no stage play could get at, such as a young broker ditching his bottle of alcohol just before entering a conference room, or a cleaning lady overhearing some vague but tense details of the night's drama. This is a quiet, thoughtful little movie that teens with an interest in national affairs will find highly impressive and hauntingly memorable.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the way in which many of the characters drink alcohol and smoke , as if out of necessity. Are the characters enjoying their drinks and cigarettes? What are the other reasons they could be smoking and drinking so much? What are some healthier ways to respond to stress?

Does the movie have a clear message? Does it have a clear hero? What would have been the right thing to do in this situation?

What do stock brokers actually do, according to the movie? Why do they bring in such big paychecks?

Movie Details

In theaters : October 21, 2011
On DVD or streaming : December 20, 2011
Cast : Kevin Spacey , Paul Bettany , Zachary Quinto
Director : J.C. Chandor
Inclusion Information : Gay actors
Studio : Roadside Attractions
Genre : Drama
Run time : 105 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : language
Last updated : April 22, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Suggest an Update

What to watch next.

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

Want personalized picks for your kids' age and interests?

Thank You for Smoking

Fast Food Nation

Courtroom dramas, drama tv for teens.

Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.

an image, when javascript is unavailable

Margin Call

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

Want to be a fly on the wall when a gaggle of investment bankers precipitate the 2008 financial crisis? Step up for Margin Call , a thrillingly intense look at what went down through the prism of one unnamed Wall Street investment firm trying to save its ass before Armageddon. Writer-director J.C. Chandor, whose father toiled for Merrill Lynch, makes an impressive debut by focusing the action on a 24-hour period that starts with staff layoffs. One of the shitcanned is Eric Dale (a reliably superb Stanley Tucci), a manager who shares the smell of disaster with his protégé Peter Sullivan (a very fine Zachary Quinto, one of the film’s producers). It looks like the future losses will exceed the firm’s total market capitalization. Peter and his colleague, Seth Bregman (Penn Badgley), call in their boss, Will Emerson (Paul Bettany), who brings in his chief, Sam Rogers (Kevin Spacey).

Cedric Bixler-Zavala Slams Linkin Park's Emily Armstrong Over Alleged Danny Masterson Support

The growing list of republicans who have endorsed kamala harris, dr disrespect knowingly sent explicit messages to a minor, former twitch employee says, spotify wins copyright infringement lawsuit over eminem royalties due to legal loophole.

Before total panic, Sam consults with even bigger guns – Jared Cohen (Simon Baker, wily perfection) and Sarah Robertson (Demi Moore, silkily effective) – and then the firm’s CEO John Tuld (Jeremy Irons) descends from the sky in a chopper and all hell breaks loose. Chandor doesn’t take the documentary approach of Inside Job or amp things up like Oliver Stone in his Wall Street films. He’s measuring the human cost at stake. Every actor is first-rate. Spacey is at the top of his game. And Irons is stingingly funny as he addresses Quinto’s character, a former rocket scientist at M.I.T.. Like all of us, Tuld wants a simple explanation. “Speak to me like a small child or a golden retriever,” he implores. Margin Call is an explosive drama that speaks lucidly and scarily to the times we live in. As Tuld says, “There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first, be smarter, or cheat.”

Related • Peter Travers’ Fall Movie Preview

'Tonight Show' Scales Back to Four Episodes a Week, Repeats on Friday

three day weekends
By Daniel Kreps

Jimi Hendrix Documentary Film Coming From 'Greatest Night in Pop' Director

Life on Screen
By Tomás Mier

‘His Three Daughters’ Turns a Familiar Family Drama Into the Best Movie of the Year

MOVIE REVIEW
By David Fear

'Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos' Looks Back at the Iconic Mob Series — and the Man Who Made It

don't stop believin'
By Alan Sepinwall

Doug Emhoff Addresses Donald Trump's Attacks on Kamala Harris: 'It’s a Distraction'

Late-Night TV
By Emily Zemler

Most Popular

Brad pitt and george clooney dance to 4-minute standing ovation for ‘wolfs’ during chaotic venice premiere, richard gere jokes he had "no chemistry" with julia roberts in 'pretty woman', demi moore fuels speculation that she doesn't approve of channing tatum's plans to remake ghost, navarro, pegula highlight billionaire parents at u.s. open, you might also like, jacob elordi, daisy edgar-jones heat up toronto film festival with ‘on swift horses,’ queer drama filled with steamy sex, cyndi lauper, tiffany haddish, lil’ kim, selma blair and darren criss in christian siriano’s front row, the best yoga mats for any practice, according to instructors, 2024 creative arts emmy awards winners (updating live), pegula’s run ends as sabalenka wins first u.s. open.

How ‘Margin Call’ Gets It Right About the Financial Crisis

Margin Call is the smartest movie you will ever see about the Financial Crisis. Debuting at a time when the Occupy Wall Street movement seeks to make caricatured villains of bankers and much of the public puts the blame for a lagging economy squarely on their shoulders, this movie offers an extremely thoughtful, fair and—for that very reason—ultimately much more powerful critique of how our financial system really works.

It tells the story of a roughly 24-hour period at a fictional investment bank on the eve of the 2008 financial collapse. In a sequence of events that mirrors what really must have happened at several real-world banks, a lowly junior analyst discovers that his firm’s dangerously high risk exposure to mortgage-backed securities could bankrupt the entire company and alarm bells ring right up the chain of command in an effort to avert disaster before it’s too late. By the movie’s finale, that effort has set in motion the inevitable system-wide collapse that we are all still dealing with today. Together with the film’s cast, the writer and director J.C. Chandor masterfully shows how each and every person up the chain of banking seniority would have to weigh difficult decisions and wrestle with the moral and financial consequences of their actions.

And herein lies the key to Margin Call ’s truth: It examines the thoughts and motivations of individuals, resisting the easy narrative shortcut of lumping everyone responsible for the disaster into some monolithic, single-minded group. By doing so, Margin Call manages to do what almost no book, blog, newscast or Senate hearing has adequately done for the American people: to explain not just how the financial crisis happened (which financial giants failed in what order, which government entities bailed them out, etc.), but rather, to explain why it happened.

The standard trope about the crisis until now has generally been to point the finger at greedy banks and corrupt corporations. This isn’t an unreasonable reaction; when something as disastrous as the Great Recession happens, it is natural to want a bad guy to blame and punish. Hollywood , for its part, has always been inclined to this kind of Manichaeism—after all, every good story needs a hero and a villain. And the nefarious banker makes for a pretty perfect villain. Michael Douglas’s iconic portrayal of Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street set the mold for this character, and a batch of post-financial crisis films have followed suit: from narratives like Wall Street 2 and Company Men , to documentaries like Inside Job and Capitalism: A Love Story .

The problem with this portrayal is that it simply does not reflect reality. There were no capitalist masterminds who were able to maliciously game the entire financial system, no conspiratorial “fat cats” who single-handedly brought about the crisis. That’s why there have been no major prosecutions of any of the leading figures of American finance: because they didn’t actually break any laws. (Investigations across Wall Street since 2008 have turned up a few cases of isolated fraud and some infractions of SEC regulations, but nothing that could possibly be seen as a major cause of the crisis). And this is the core dilemma that is so vexing to the American people. How can something so bad, that hurt so many people and caused so much damage, have come about without any overt wrongdoing?

Margin Call attempts to give an honest answer to that question. There is no character in the film who breaks the law, engages in conspiracy, or does anything a reasonable person would label as unquestionably immoral. Even when the CEO of the film’s fictional bank makes the decision to sell all the company’s toxic assets—the act that literally sets in motion the complete collapse of the entire American financial system—it is an understandable, if difficult, choice. What else can he do? If he doesn’t sell first and start the catastrophe, someone else will. The outcome is inevitable, so what good could it possibly do for him to sacrifice himself and his firm and all his employees’ jobs if it makes no difference to the outcome?

That is the core conundrum of what economists call a collective action problem. If no individual person or firm’s actions can make a difference, the only reasonable thing to do is assume everyone else will follow their most selfish (and possibly destructive) instincts. Everyone has an incentive to follow the worst path they suspect others of following, and so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. This explains not only why bubbles burst, but also why they build up in the first place. After all, why did the big investment banks start packaging and selling huge amounts of the mortgage-backed securities that eventually triggered the crisis? Because all the other banks were doing it. They were seeking higher profits, of course, but profits are the raison d’être of any company and the basis of its survival. Each bank’s employees knew that if they didn’t get in on this extremely lucrative new branch of the business, they’d fall behind their competitors, their share price would go down, they’d get fired.

Even if they thought the securities might crash at some unknowable point in the future, it would happen regardless of their own decision whether or not to get involved, and in the meantime it was their job to get the timing right for their shareholders and lock in profits before that bubble bursts. It was by this exact same thinking that so many millions of ordinary Americans bought or refinanced homes they couldn’t really afford in the expectation of making an outsized return on their investment. Virtue this was not. But in a capitalist economy, decisions aren’t made on virtue, they’re made on self-interest. These courses of action were logical on the individual level. The problem was that collectively they made everyone worse off.

The difficult truth is that with systemic failures like the one that caused our current economic crisis there is no one to blame because everyone is to blame. The only enemy in Margin Call is the system itself. And not just the banking system, for the “real economy” or “ Main Street ,” as politicians like to call it, is just as dependent on Wall Street as Wall Street is on them. Wall Street exists, as one of the movie’s characters poignantly puts it, because the rest of society demands that it exist; they demand all the aspects of a modern, affluent civilization that an advanced financial system makes possible. Through our government and through our own actions in the marketplace, we all set the rules, we all took advantage of the massive expansion of cheap credit and affordable housing and ballooning asset prices, we all benefitted from the upside of the bubble, just as we are all suffering from its aftermath today.

In the end, however, this sympathetic portrayal of the bankers’ dilemma offers perhaps the most damning indictment one can make of the modern capitalist financial system. After all, if such disaster can come about even when decent people are more or less trying to do their best, then the flaws of the system must run very deep indeed. It means that the problem can’t be fixed by just rounding up a few bad apples and throwing them in jail. The kind of collective action problem that brought about the financial crisis is exactly the kind of market failure where some kind of outside intervention is most appropriate and necessary—where it should be in the interest not only of the general public, but also of the banks themselves, for the government to step in and establish rules to prevent anyone from starting off a competitive cycle of ever-riskier behavior. And indeed, the bankers seemed to agree on this: After the crisis, all the major investment banks issued multiple statements supporting a move by the federal government to impose regulatory reform.

The problem arises, of course, when theory gets translated to practice. The Dodd-Frank financial reform law was passed only over the objections of major banks, who are now advocating that large parts of it be repealed. Perhaps the banks’ statements in support of reform were just a cynical ploy to begin with, but that wouldn’t explain why essentially all major American banks complied with new international capitalization standards outlined by the Basel III accords (and actually met their requirements years ahead of the deadline) even though they reduced profit margins. The fact is bankers are astute to the flaws of Dodd-Frank. Many economists question whether some of its more controversial regulations will actually reduce systemic risk, or rather just create needless red tape and encourage risk to shift to other even more dangerously unregulated sectors of finance like hedge funds. Also, its stringent measures will not apply to foreign banks, thus putting U.S. firms at a disadvantage without removing the risk of a global meltdown. By contrast, economists were in near unanimous agreement that Basel III would reduce international systemic risk.

Generally speaking, the best kind of reforms are those that avoid trying to predetermine exactly what kinds of financial transactions or activities should or should not be allowed, but instead seek to better align individual incentives with the collective interest—essentially to reward bankers for regulating themselves. Requiring individual pay to be more strongly linked to long-term investment returns and firm performance would be one step in the right direction, but even that strategy poses problems. Every new set of rules has limits and creates an incentive to skirt them or offload risk to overlooked areas.

And this is the ultimate—and ultimately unsatisfying—conclusion of Margin Call : that there may be no true and final fix for the problem; that, to a large extent, it may be simply unavoidable that bubbles will build and burst, and that financial crises will continue to happen in any economy that resembles free market capitalism, for the instincts and behaviors that cause them are so basic to human nature. In the film’s ending scene, the bank’s CEO stares out over the Manhattan skyline and recounts for his junior analyst a near-epic list of the world’s financial booms and busts—dating back some 400 years. The message is clear: This has happened before, it will happen again. Human nature does not change. The real question to take away from the movie is not whether we should reform our financial and economic system to prevent another crisis. The question is whether we can at all.

Daniel Krauthammer is a writer in Los Angeles .

Margin Call (United States, 2011)

Long ago, the concept of "money" was devised as a means by which commerce could be simplified - after all, it's easier to carry around some kind of marker than cows or cattle or bags of grain. As society has evolved, however, so has the way in which people view money. Today, it's just numbers in a computer, ways of keeping score. "Wealthy" is no longer a synonym for someone who has enough money to live comfortably (or in luxury) - it's an indication of a winner. Playing the stock market is a game and those who are good at it can tally their winnings in computer dollars (or euros or yen or whatever). Margin Call emphasizes this aspect of the financial sector, where brokers play fast and loose with other people's money in order to be able to claim victory at the end of the day.

It's 2008 and the economy is on a precipice. The financial sector is about to collapse. Margin Call is not a documentary; it does not claim to be factual. Instead, it is a fictionalization that incorporates some of the triggers that led to the real-life crisis. The movie names no names - the brokerage company where the action takes place is referred to merely as "The Firm." However, there's a sense of verisimilitude about the way in which events transpire. We can taste the panic as the snowball begins its inexorable roll downhill. Margin Call may not be telling things exactly as they were, but it's close enough to provide an uncomfortable glimpse behind the curtain. And it's an engrossing "thinking" thriller as well. It's amazing that so much tension can be generated without a shoot-out, a fight, a car chase, or even a death.

Margin Call spans a critical 24 hours in the life of The Firm. As the movie begins, it's layoff day for a significant percentage of the brokers. The ones who are let go are "good," but the survivors are "better." This is a regular cost-cutting measure. The market is sputtering, profits are down, so headcount needs to be reduced. One of the managers being force reduced is Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci), who turns over a pet project to his protégé, Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto), as he's being shown to the door. Peter stays behind after work to flesh out Eric's models, and the results horrify him. He's looking at projections that indicate the near-future losses will exceed The Firm's total market capitalization. He makes a call to his best buddy, Seth (Penn Badgley), and his boss, Will Emerson (Paul Bettany). As the clock ticks toward midnight, they return to the office and realize the enormity of Peter's findings. Calls go out to Will's boss, Sam Rogers (Kevin Spacey); Sam's boss, Jared Cohen (Simon Baker); and, finally, the CEO, John Tuld (Jeremy Irons), who arrives by helicopter at 4 o'clock in the morning. They have two hours to determine how to unload billions of toxic sub-prime mortgage securities before they destroy a company that is "too big to fail."

Margin Call is not political. It is also surprisingly non-judgmental. It's a procedural that begins by examining how the problem is discovered then proceeds to detail how a solution is decided upon and implemented. In a strange way, it's a little like Contagion except, in this case, the characters have heft. Writer/director J.C. Chandor, making his feature debut, has avoided the easy route of demonizing the brokers. They come across as exceedingly human, with all the positive and negative attributes inherent in the species. Some are more greedy than others. Some show more compassion. Others are scared. And nearly everyone has entered "cover your ass" mode.

For an independent movie with no studio backing, the filmmakers were able to assemble an astonishing cast (Tim Robbins, Ben Kingsley, and Carla Gugino were also interested but unable to participate due to schedule conflicts). This speaks volumes about the importance and intensity of the project, which takes the viewer on a wild ride into a world where money has lost the meaning it retains for the average person. We're not in Kansas anymore.

Margin Call is a little talky, and there are times when the exposition slows things down, but Chandor attempts to provide us with the necessary background in easily digestible bites. When Tuld asks Peter to explain things to him as if he was a child, he is speaking for all of us. As if to compensate for the occasionally wordy dialogue, Chandor provides two great monologues. One is delivered by Paul Bettany and the other belongs to Jeremy Irons, who gives what is arguably his best performance in two decades. Other standouts include Kevin Spacey, whose work here is subtle and moving (he's the most sympathetic character and a scene with him comforting his terminally ill dog tweaks the heart strings); Bettany, who displays the perfect mix of alarm and cynicsm; and the always-reliable Stanley Tucci.

Margin Call contains sporadic echoes of Wall Street and The Boiler Room . Considering the culture in which it is immersed, how could it not? However, the movie with which it has the closest relationship may be Glengarry Glen Ross . The same sense of desperation, the same need to make the sale, permeates Margin Call . Both films are to some degree about the dehumanizing impact of money and both are driven more by characters than plot points.

At some point in the future, there will probably be a definitive documentary about the causes and effects of the economic seizure that lies at Ground Zero of Margin Call . That film will undoubtedly be equally fascinating and troubling. But it's doubtful it will provide the mixture of drama and suspense to be found in J.C. Chandor's assured directorial debut.

Comments Add Comment

Fight Club (1999)
In the Company of Men (1997)
Apollo 13 (1995)
Cosmopolis (2012)
Cruel Intentions (1999)
Bad Lieutenant (1993)
Glengarry Glen Ross (1992)
Bug's Life, A (1998)
American Beauty (1999)
Fred Claus (2007)
Ref, The (1993)
Beautiful Mind, A (2001)
Secret Life of Bees, The (2008)
Avengers: Infinity War (2018)
Transcendence (2014)
Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018)
Da Vinci Code, The (2006)
Kingdom of Heaven (Director's Cut) (1969)
Kingdom of Heaven (2005)
Appaloosa (2008)
Eragon (2006)
Pink Panther 2, The (2009)
Beekeeper, The (2024)

Become a Critical Movie Critic
Movie Review Archives

Movie Review: Margin Call (2011)

Charlie Juhl
Movie Reviews
One response
--> October 24, 2011

Set in a fictional brokerage firm in 2008 just before the housing bust, Margin Call appears to be very loosely based on Lehman Brothers (hence the boldly printed words “Inspired by a True Story” on its poster). Opening strongly, Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci) is ushered into a conference room to meet with people he has never met before who thank him for his 19 years of service to the company but he is being let go and will now be escorted to the front door by security, but really, thank you for your service. In a slight nod to the territory covered by Up in the Air , the film follows neither the nameless administrators who just did the firing or the shocked new unemployed banker. On his way out the door, Eric tosses a data stick to his young protégé Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto) and tells him to take a look at it and to “be careful.”

Peter is a young guy who doesn’t mind burning the midnight oil to get ahead in the firm but also has mixed feelings about the way his boss was just unceremoniously ushered out of the building. Taking a look at the date file, Peter discovers Eric was onto something big. Apparently, his firm — and all of Wall Street — is about to fall off a cliff and go bankrupt because of some newly discovered toxic assets. From following the news the last few years, the audience is well aware Peter just figured out the securities which the banking industry has been trading based on lousy home mortgages is about to send everyone to the poor house.

Peter calls his new boss Will (Paul Bettany) who call his boss Sam (Kevin Spacey) who calls his boss Jared (Simon Baker) who calls his boss John (Jeremy Irons). These higher up bosses are names Peter has only distantly heard of, the kind of bosses who do not routinely come into the office and only show up in the columns of the Wall Street Journal. Explaining over and over again what he has stumbled across is not easy for the audience to follow. The script deliberately sticks with convoluted business speak which only a skilled MBA holder would be able to follow. Even when the big boss John asks Peter to explain it to him like he is talking to a golden retriever, the explanations is still muddled and it is only because we are in 2011 instead of 2008 that we are able to kind of figure out what is going on.

Now that everyone realizes what the problem is, what will they do about it? They are the first firm on Wall Street to figure it out, but probably not for long. Enter the ethics debate and the prisoner’s dilemma. If the firm goes to the press or to the other banking firms, they will take an enormous loss along with the rest of them, maybe even going bust. If they sell all of these toxic assets the next day, they will spark a panic, an SEC investigation, and severely cripple their reputation, but they won’t go broke. However, in shoveling their junk investments to other firms, they will set their brethren up for failure.

The vast majority of all of these conversations and worried looks take place in one building from secret basement rooms to the roof. Most of the action also takes place in one night as the bosses try to balance ethics, secrets, and most of all, profits before the opening trading bell strikes. The script is sharp, but the relentless banking jargon tries one’s patience. Also, the claim that Margin Call was inspired by a true story is a pretty far reach — there was no magic moment on Wall Street when one young guy sat down and figured out the recession was going to start the next day. No firm pulled an all-nighter and sparked the crisis. Lehman Brothers had a gigantic meltdown, but it wasn’t because they stumbled onto the truth and decided to lead-turn the panic.

The greatest asset to Margin Call is its cast. It is an independent film, but you would not know that by looking at the billing. Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany, Jeremy Irons, Zachary Quinto, and Stanley Tucci all knock it out of the park and lend a huge dramatic weight to what could have been a very dry and eye-gouging script. Demi Moore, Simon Baker, and Penn Badgley are also along for the ride but noticeably do not measure up to their peers listed above. I am not saying they deliver poor performances, but someone is going to come in second fiddle to Jeremy Irons.

I do not, however, actually recommend this film even though the cast will most likely be strong nominees for any ensemble cast award this season. The script is too cumbersome and the idea that first time film writer and director J.C. Chandor tries to play this story off as true is too unbelievable by far. When it comes to films about the downfall of the banking industry, it is best to stick with the superior documentaries such as Inside Job and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room .

I like movies and they like me right back. You can find out how much by visiting my personal site Citizen Charlie .

Movie Review: The Gatekeepers (2012) Movie Review: Beautiful Creatures (2013) Movie Review: Warm Bodies (2013) Movie Review: Parker (2013) Movie Review: Mama (2013) Movie Review: 5 Broken Cameras (2011) Movie Review: Gangster Squad (2013)

'Movie Review: Margin Call (2011)' has 1 comment

October 25, 2011 @ 9:15 am Hector

Hasn’t this topic been beaten to death yet?

| Log in

Get the Reddit app

The goal of /r/Movies is to provide an inclusive place for discussions and news about films with major releases. Submissions should be for the purpose of informing or initiating a discussion, not just to entertain readers. Read our extensive list of rules for more information on other types of posts like fan-art and self-promotion, or message the moderators if you have any questions.

Margin Call is brilliant.

Finance movies rule. But this isn’t a finance movie. It’s really a movie about humans working within a massive system that makes some rich, many poor, and cannot be stopped. You could take all financial jargon out, and the bones of the movie are how people and personalities clash, work together, make decisions, grieve, resent, and ultimately begrudgingly accept circumstances.

It’s amazing that this script didn’t get overcooked into just another “Us vs. Them” story, and instead turned into a nuanced movie with a heap of reality.

By continuing, you agree to our User Agreement and acknowledge that you understand the Privacy Policy .

Enter the 6-digit code from your authenticator app

You’ve set up two-factor authentication for this account.

Enter a 6-digit backup code

Create your username and password.

Reddit is anonymous, so your username is what you’ll go by here. Choose wisely—because once you get a name, you can’t change it.

Reset your password

Enter your email address or username and we’ll send you a link to reset your password

Check your inbox

An email with a link to reset your password was sent to the email address associated with your account

Choose a Reddit account to continue

We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.

'Margin Call' - A Movie About The Financial Disaster That's A Cinematic Disaster [Sundance Review]

It is safe to say that Margin Call was my most anticipated film of this year's Sundance Film Festival. Having scored a spot on the buzzed-about 2010 Black List , Margin Call has an all-star cast featuring Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons , Stanley Tucci , and Zachary Quinto . It is also topical, purporting to be based on true events and chronicling the actions of an investment banking firm at the epicenter of the 2008 financial disaster.

Sadly, Margin Call is an unfortunate lesson in what happens when you make a movie that, like The Social Network , features dozens of characters talking intensely at each other for 2 hours, only with none of the skill that Sorkin or Fincher brought to their particular film. Hit the jump for some further thoughts, plus an audio blog I recorded with Laremy discussing the film. (He loved it. I hated it.)

Margin Call begins with a scene that's so good, it makes the punishingly mediocre material that follows all the more disappointing. There's a round of layoffs happening at an investment banking firm and risk management specialist Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci) is among them. The scene in which Tucci is fired masterfully captures all the nuance of such an uncomfortable situation: the robotic nature of the woman's voice as she delivers the news, the subtle, almost imperceptible way she checks his dossier when reciting how many years he's worked at the firm, the awkwardness experienced by Dale right afterwards. (Picture the opening scene of Up in the Air , where Clooney fires a hapless worker, only more raw and brutal).

Dale goes to pack up his office, but in a case of bad timing, it turns out he was right in the middle of putting together a report that portended the entire firm's downfall. Before he leaves, he hands his work off to Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto), a lower-level analyst who happens to be brilliant with numbers. Sullivan finishes what Dale started and realizes that, not only is the entire economy is headed down the toilet, but their century-old firm may not survive.

What follows over the course of the next hour that comprises the second act of the film is the information in my paragraph above being reiterated over and over again. No joke: that exact same information (including how Sullivan got his hands on the numbers) is passed up the chain of command in explicit detail several times, making this nearly-2-hour long film feel frustratingly padded. But don't worry, each time the film makes sure to spell it out for the laypeople in the audience by having a character state something along the lines of "Tell me this like I don't know anything about finance or accounting!" Thanks, Margin Call ! Seriously though, we get that it's a bad situation. Tell us something new or move it along, please.

[In the film, there is a dialogue exchange where one character says that the situation will get ugly, and the other responds "How ugly?" His rejoinder: "Really, really, really fucking ugly." Picture this scene repeated 5-8x and you will start to get an idea of what it was like to watch this film]

When you create a film that deals with a hopelessly complex issue such as the housing crash, you can choose to either capture the complexity of the issue using a strong sense of verisimilitude and/or focus on the human drama behind the scenes. (We've seen films that have done both. Hell, we've seen films starring Kevin Spacey that have done both. Recount , anyone?) The very cursory financial information provided in Margin Call hardly qualifies it for the former. I have literally heard finance-centered episodes of NPR's Fresh Air that were more informative, more exciting, and more emotionally loaded than the entirety of Margin Call .

More unforgivably, all the characters in this film are complete ciphers. Several of them are given subplots that go nowhere, but with only paper-thin details about each one, we have no reason to care about whether X's dog survives, or whether Y gets blamed for this whole mess, or whether Z gets fired. As both a dramatized document of one of the worst crashes in our history AND as a riveting drama, Margin Call fails completely.

There are moments when Margin Call springs to life and demonstrates exactly why it was a candidate for the vaunted Black List. Every now and then, a character delivers an interesting monologue with a clever turn of phrase or an eternal truth wrapped inside it, and we wonder what might have been if the film had maintained this level of consistency throughout. Instead, most of the film features pointless, clunky dialogue about how much money the characters make, with a large dose of heavy-handed expounding on "What It All Means, This Whole Investment Banking Thing."

This is writer/director J. C. Chandor's first feature-length film and it shows. The performances are excellent throughout (Spacey and Irons are great, and Quinto continues to impress as a dramatic big-screen actor) and the film looks great, but almost all the other choices are nearly disastrous. Scenes that could be easily edited to be more tight instead chug along sluggishly. Entire characters that contribute nothing to the plot could have been combined with others or excised entirely. There is nothing in Margin Call that is not illustrated far better by other observers and artists, even those using other forms of media. For example, John Wells The Company Men and Jason Reitman's Up in the Air provide more intimate portraits on the agony of job loss. And those looking for something more exciting and/or profound on this subject would also be better served reading the works of Michael Lewis.

I can't imagine anyone I know who would want to watch this film. I can't imagine any studio that would want to buy or distribute this film, seeing as how there is no scenario I could envision in which it would perform well at the box office. Sure, it centers on a hot button issue, but the level of filmmaking skill on display in Margin Call unintentionally reveals the unfortunate truth that in movies, topicality isn't everything.

Here's my discussion about this film with Laremy from film.com .

Margin Call (2011)

User Reviews

Awards | FAQ | User Ratings | External Reviews | Metacritic Reviews

User Ratings
External Reviews
Metacritic Reviews
Full Cast and Crew
Release Dates
Official Sites
Company Credits
Filming & Production
Technical Specs
Plot Summary
Plot Keywords
Parents Guide

Did You Know?

Crazy Credits
Alternate Versions
Connections
Soundtracks

Photo & Video

Photo Gallery
Trailers and Videos

The Ending Of Margin Call Explained

Sam Rogers looking concerned in board room

The 2011 financial thriller "Margin Call” explores the origins of the 2007 to 2009 financial crisis. Caused in large part by the boom-and-bust of the U.S. housing market in the early-to-mid 2000s, as well as investment banks selling mortgage-backed securities, the "Great Recession" sank the world into the deepest economic catastrophe since the Great Depression from the 1920s to the 1940s. While Wall Street tumbled, Main Street reeled, with trillions of dollars in economic growth lost and millions losing not only their homes, but their jobs. The echoes of the crisis reverberated through people's lives for years; some never recovered.

"Margin Call" unfolds at an unnamed investment bank where, during a round of layoffs, a young analyst (Zachary Quinto) discovers the firm's risky trading has potentially led not only to the organization's demise, but to a potential market collapse. Over the course of 24 hours, the firm must decide how to proceed knowing there is no going back. "Margin Call" is a taut Wall Street drama that's not just about the numbers — it's also a story of the very human choices and circumstances that led to this economic and societal catastrophe. The conclusion of the film can't be understood by mere spreadsheets, and its characters' moral ambiguities live outside a financial algorithm. So let's explain the ending of "Margin Call" and explore how small choices can lead to big trouble.

What you need to remember about the plot of Margin Call

In "Margin Call," it's 2008 and a heavy round of layoffs is taking place at an unnamed investment bank. Head of risk management Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci) is fired, and as he's escorted from the building, Dale passes a flash drive of his work to young associate, Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto). He asks Sullivan to finish the work located on the drive, but Dale warns Sullivan to "be careful." Completing Dale's work that night, Sullivan discovers the bank is on an inevitable path to failure due to the firm's over-leveraged assets.

Sullivan, along with analyst Seth Bregman ( Penn Badgley ), trader Will Emerson (Paul Bettany), and Emerson's boss, Sam Rogers (Kevin Spacey), attend an emergency meeting with an executive team that includes Jeremy Cohen (Simon Baker) and Chief Risk Management Officer Sarah Robertson (Demi Moore). Cohen and Robertson conclude Sullivan's report checks out, but it's not a startling revelation to the higher-ups. Rather, it serves as a receipt for their knowingly risky behavior.

With the bank on the brink of ruin, CEO John Tuld (Jeremy Irons) is summoned to the office, and it's determined that a fire sale of the toxic assets will save the company. The liquidation sale risks the bank's industry reputation, the careers of its employees, and broader market stability. Tuld ultimately decides it's better for the firm to be the first to sell in order to survive a seemingly inevitable collapse of the financial market.

What happens at the end of Margin Call

At the end of the film, the firm moves forward with the fire sale. Despite his trepidations and knowing that it will destroy the careers of many of his employees, Rogers rallies his traders, and the firm successfully liquidates many of its assets. Many traders lose their jobs, including Bregman. Emerson, whose trading prowess we follow as the fire sale unfolds, makes the cut. Sullivan, a Ph.D.-level rocket scientist who is ambivalent about working at the firm, is promoted for his efforts and is now seen as a valuable asset to the firm's recovery.

The firm's management team doesn't fare much better. Dale, who was unceremoniously fired the day before, is all but forced back to work, his severance and benefits held hostage unless he comes back. His work uncovered the crisis, and the firm wants to keep him close. Robertson is pushed out by Tuld, made to publicly take responsibility for the firm's failure, but Cohen stays. While Rogers successfully commandeers the fire sale, he wants out of his job. He confronts Tuld, asking him how they messed up so badly. Tuld sees the day's events as just another moment in historic market volatility. For Tuld, money is merely an imaginary concept that keeps civilization in order. His firm survives the day, and Tuld is already focused on future potential profits from the downturn. Tuld wants Rogers to stay. Disillusioned but in need of the money, Rogers continues working at the firm.

Greed and success go hand in hand

At the firm, success depends on employees' ability to embrace their own greed and selfishness. Some, like Tuld and Emerson, rationalize their greed as a reaction to outside systems. Tuld believes that the markets can't be controlled, one simply reacts to them. Through this twisted logic, he is able to absolve himself of personal responsibility for the societal misery brought on by his choices. Tuld believes there are always winners and losers.

Emerson, meanwhile, justifies his work as merely giving people what they want. If they want to afford big houses and fancy cars, Emerson thinks, he's the one who moves the money to make it happen. Both men understand how their choices affect society but show little concern for any negative outcomes. Because in their minds, if they're not holding power or making money, then someone else will.

For other characters, their greed manifests in acts of quiet self-interest. When Rogers leaves the room when Cohen and Robertson discuss Sullivan's findings, he's asked to stay and possibly help in their predicament. Instead, he leaves, telling them that willful ignorance about the hard data and problems facing the company is how he's been at the firm so long. For Rogers, ignorance is not only bliss — it's a survival tactic. To Sullivan, his work at the firm is just numbers, and he's only there because of the good pay. Ironically, it's the openly money-obsessed Bregman, who, only when faced with his inevitable firing, thinks outside of himself and contemplates how the firm's actions will hurt regular people.

Why build bridges when investment banking pays so much better?

Many of the firm's employees didn't start their careers in finance, but enticed by the enormous payouts of investment banking, they ditched their more humble and noble work for Wall Street. Before joining the firm, Dale worked as an engineer. He tells Emerson about how he designed a bridge that saved drivers hours of their life commuting, thus improving their quality of life. Sullivan, a literal rocket scientist, works at the firm because, he says, it pays better than science.

Both Dale and Sullivan traded in their altruistic careers for well-paying positions at the firm but — at least for Dale — it has come at a high price. When Emerson tries to get Dale to return to the firm with promises of a big payday, Dale responds, "I've been paid enough already." He's been there, done that, and was fired unceremoniously after nearly 20 years on the job. He knows what his work has revealed about the firm and doesn't like it, and he laments the intangibility and uselessness of his work with the firm compared to his more civic-minded past career in engineering. Meanwhile, newbie Sullivan is rewarded with a promotion for completing Dale's work. While we understand possibilities that Dale has seemingly squandered for investment banking, Sullivan bolted for Wall Street early in his scientific career, so we don't know the scientific potential Sullivan abandoned by joining the firm. However, at the end of the movie when he is seated in the executive dining room, Sullivan's trepidatious glance at Rogers implies it's a lot.

What did senior leadership know before the meeting?

Cohen and Robertson standing beside cleaning lady

When an emergency meeting is called to pore over Dale's now-completed report, we assume it's to alert the executive team about potentially new, perilous information. Sullivan, Bregman, and Emerson are shocked by their findings and jump to warn senior leadership. Turns out, the senior leadership was already aware of the firm's troubles. During the meeting, Rogers whispers to Robertson that he warned her about potential trouble last year and that if she had listened to him, they wouldn't be in this position now. So not only did Dale know, but Rogers and Robertson did, too.

Later, when Cohen and Robertson speak alone, we learn that Cohen was also in on the information. They know consequences are in order and attempt to formulate a strategy as to how they will handle their boss, Tuld. It's not that they want to reveal insights to Tuld, but they want to manage him now that the report's findings are known. They're keeping no secrets from the CEO because Tuld knew about the toxic assets as well. Rogers acknowledges that Tuld is working with more information than he has, and when Tuld fires Robertson, she makes it clear that she, Cohen, and Tuld had some sort of pact around what they were doing. While the exact extent of their knowledge is never revealed, it's safe to say firm leadership had lots of information about their toxic position well before the movie takes place.

Dale and Robertson know the firm has the power

Robertson standing anxiously near window

Eric Dale was merely doing his job by digging into the precarious trading practices of the firm, and for his efforts, he was laid off. Emerson implies his firing was at the hands of Sarah Robertson, and Dale clearly regrets that he went to her last year — but what for is not revealed. As he walks out of the building, Dale spots Robertson and confronts her. She doesn't deny his accusations that she had anything to do with his firing, and she walks into the building flustered. There's unspoken tension between Dale and Robinson, and soon we learn why.

With the emergency meeting well underway, it's revealed that Robertson and Cohen knew about the firm's risky trading practices, and now Dale's work (completed by Sullivan) has exposed them. Robertson wants assurance from Cohen that they will go down together, but he doesn't give it to her. When Tuld fires Robertson and asks her to take a public fall for the firm instead of Cohen, she reminds him that she warned both him and Cohen about the impending catastrophe. Tuld urges her not to protest the decision, and she reluctantly obeys. She eventually finds herself sequestered in the same room as Dale, who is now back with the firm after they threatened to mess with his severance package. Dale and Robertson are trapped by the firm, both literally and figuratively. The firm has the power, and feeling there's little they can do to fight back, Dale and Robertson accept their fates.

Rogers' dog days on Wall Street

Rogers in office chair looking concerned

Sam Rogers is a decades-long veteran of the firm, but the brutal inhumanity of his work is finally catching up with him. We meet Rogers as the firm conducts a massive layoff. Distraught, Rogers wipes away tears — not for the newly unemployed, but for his dying dog. Rogers has been through job loss cycles before, and he rallies those left with jobs with a polished, well-honed speech. It's rote work for Rogers. Later, as Sullivan works into the night completing Dale's work, Rogers is at the vet, consoling his sick chocolate lab. Others are hard at work in the office, but Rogers is the only character seen actively tending to his personal life.

At the end of the film, understanding the human toll of the fire sale he just facilitated, Rogers storms the executive dining room to tell Tuld he wants out of the firm. Tuld diffuses Rogers' rage by telling him how lucky he is to be working at the firm and that it's better than digging ditches. Rogers retorts, "And if I had, at least there'd be some holes in the ground to show for it." Ironically, the final scene of "Margin Call" takes place during the night in the front yard of Rogers' ex-wife, Mary (Mary McDonnell). Rogers, in his rolled-up dress shirt, digs a grave for his dog, Ella. Rogers indeed digs his ditch, but all he has to show for it is grief, loss, and suffering.

The real-life inspirations behind Margin Call's fictional bank

"Margin Call" takes place at a fictional, unnamed investment bank, but it's definitely inspired by true events. The subprime mortgage crisis crescendoed in September 2008, when Lehman Brothers filed for the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history, the same year the movie takes place. Writer and director J.C. Chandor, whose father worked on Wall Street, penned the script soon after Lehman Brothers' collapse. His story wasn't a specific indictment of one bank; rather, as he told The New York Times , the movie was meant to figure out "the decision-making process that got us into this mess."

The movie not only takes inspiration from Lehman Brothers but from some of its power players. There are parallels between former Lehman Brothers chief risk officer Madelyn Antoncic and "Margin Call's" Sarah Robertson. In an op-ed published by The New York Times , Antoncic wrote that she alerted leadership about their risk missteps but was dismissed. While Robertson says in the film that her warnings were expressed with "insufficient urgency," she acted in a manner similar to her real-life counterpart. But Robertson isn't the only character inspired by real people. John Tuld is a combination of former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain and Lehman Brothers head Dick Fuld. Fuld was pinpointed as a main instigator of the financial crisis, and it's safe to say that if the story of "Margin Call" had time to unfold, Tuld would have been considered in the same light.

What has the cast and crew of Margin Call said about the ending?

"Margin Call" boasts an all-star cast that was attracted to the film because it brought a human element to a very technical, and at times, hard-to-understand societal issue. Jeremy Irons said the film "clarifies what a lot of us sort of thought might have been happening, but didn't quite understand how it was happening and why it happened." He also said that when people finish "Margin Call," "They will understand how normal, pretty honest individuals got into this situation. How unregulated financial behavior [is something] we can't really have in society these days."

Other cast members have spoken about the film's ability to make complex financial issues simple for audiences to understand. Simon Baker said in an interview that the film "in essence explained those things, but more in layman's terms and put it on a more human, hierarchical system so I can look at is as a layman." He said, "The script doesn't delve too much into the vernacular of that world." Paul Bettany has commented on the moral ambiguity of "Margin Call," noting that the characters are not villains, rather they are merely acting on their capitalistic instincts that are aligned with the economic system in which they find themselves.

Margin Call's alternate ending

In an interview with ProPublica , writer and director J.C. Chandor shared that "Margin Call" could have had a very different ending from the final version. In 2009, financing the movie proved difficult, perhaps given its proximity to the crash itself. Chandor said money was available to produce the film but at a price: Chandor said he felt he could get financiers on board, but only if he provided them a Hollywood ending. Chandor said, "If Zachary Quinto's character had stood up and called in the SEC, and [Kevin] Spacey's character had been perp-walked out of the building à la [Oliver Stone's film "Wall Street"], I had a check to go make the movie. It was a very simple change at the end of the movie. It's often what happens with financiers that come on."

Chandor never said that he wrote this "alternate ending," nor did he suggest that such an ending was ever filmed. But it's clear that "Margin Call" could have been another typical Hollywood finance movie like "Wall Street" or "The Wolf of Wall Street" with an audience-pleasing ending, except Chandor stuck to his story. He shared, "I strongly, strongly felt that you did not get a systemic collapse where the tip of the sword of capitalism had to be socialized — which was of course what had just happened, where the government basically had to come in and take over the banking sector — you don't get that happening just on individual failure." Instead, the movie deliberately denies any one character hero status, choosing to examine the moral, ethical, and emotional dubiousness they face by working at the firm. Other films, like "The Big Short," have told stories about the financial crisis, but none have the unnerving ambiguity of "Margin Call."

Margin Call is a claustrophobic finance drama that rivals The Big Short – here's where and why you should stream it

J. C. Chandor's debut feature is a masterclass in dialogue

Kevin Costner stands up at a table with other men in suits around him

“There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first, be smarter, or cheat.” The most quotable line from J. C. Chandor's under-appreciated finance drama Margin Call might read like a winning Monopoly strategy, but when spoken by a sharp-suited Jeremy Irons during the film’s most important boardroom scene, it plays like a revelatory blueprint for beating capitalism.

Adam McKay’s excellent tragicomedy The Big Short is rightly regarded as this generation’s go-to financial crisis biopic, but Margin Call – which you can stream via Tubi , The Roku Channel and Amazon ’s Freevee service for free in the US, or on Prime Video in the UK or on Netflix in Australia – deserves its flowers for being an equally damning look at where it all went wrong for the world in 2008.

What is Margin Call about?

Margin Call (2011) Official HD Trailer Debut - YouTube

Set almost exclusively within the glass confines of a fictional Wall Street investment bank, Margin Call opens with the dismissal of risk management chief Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci), a long-serving member of the firm whose final words to his wonder boy associate, Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto), are "be careful". Talk about ominous.

Determined to finish his boss’s work, Peter discovers, in the small hours of the same shift, a multi-billion dollar, potentially cataclysmic hole in the firm’s finances (or more specifically, the “biggest bag of odorous excrement ever assembled in the history of capitalism”), which naturally sends its top brass – played by Jeremy Irons, Demi Moore, Simon Baker, Kevin Spacey and Paul Bettany – into panic mode.

I won’t reveal more than that basic premise, but rest assured that the firm’s extremely well-heeled executives (for context: Jeremy Irons’ character pulls up to the crisis meeting in a helicopter) are more concerned with preserving the profitability of their corporation than they are with the stability of… the entire US housing market?

A pop culture force

Paul Bettany sits in a chair wearing a suit

In fairness, it’s easy to point fingers at the financiers whose unchecked greed blew up the economy and doomed an entire generation of people for a decade, but Chandor's exceptional script does well to pose uncomfortable questions about what others would do if faced with the same dilemma: would you put yourself out of business to save a hundred others? I’m sure we’d all like to think we selflessly would, but the reality is less than black and white.

Margin Call , then, is a star-studded exercise in humanizing the people we love to hate, and a damning indictment of a system that continues to make the world go round. Sure, it’s not the most hidden of hidden gems on the best streaming services – Chandor’s writing was nominated for an Oscar, for goodness sake! – but it’s certainly a movie that deserves more attention (and potentially a spot on our lists of the best Prime Video movies and best Netflix movies ), especially considering the pop culture force that The Big Short has become.

Get daily insight, inspiration and deals in your inbox

Margin Call is now streaming on Tubi, Amazon Freevee and The Roku Channel in the US, on Prime Video in the UK and on Netflix in Australia.

3 of my favorite thrillers of all time are free to watch on Tubi
Everything new on Prime Video in September 2024
5 new movies coming to Netflix in September

Axel is TechRadar's UK-based Phones Editor, reporting on everything from the latest Apple developments to newest AI breakthroughs as part of the site's Mobile Computing vertical. Having previously written for publications including Esquire and FourFourTwo, Axel is well-versed in the applications of technology beyond the desktop, and his coverage extends from general reporting and analysis to in-depth interviews and opinion. Axel studied for a degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick before joining TechRadar in 2020, where he then earned an NCTJ qualification as part of the company’s inaugural digital training scheme.

New Paramount Plus show Landman looks like another slick and thrilling drama from Yellowstone's co-creator, and it's releasing in November

How to watch Sinner vs Draper: US Open 2024 semi-final live streams

IFA: meet Beyerdynamic's seriously impressive earbuds and flagship headphones

We need your support today

Independent journalism is more important than ever. Vox is here to explain this unprecedented election cycle and help you understand the larger stakes. We will break down where the candidates stand on major issues, from economic policy to immigration, foreign policy, criminal justice, and abortion. We’ll answer your biggest questions, and we’ll explain what matters — and why. This timely and essential task, however, is expensive to produce.

We rely on readers like you to fund our journalism. Will you support our work and become a Vox Member today?

Recommendations /
One Good Thing

One Good Thing: 107 minutes of Wall Street traders behaving badly

Help, I can’t stop rewatching this 11-year-old corporate thriller nobody saw in theaters.

by Dylan Matthews

A still from the film Margin Call, featuring Demi Moore and Simon Baker.

I think it was on my third or fourth viewing of Margin Call , the 2011 corporate thriller starring Zachary Quinto and Jeremy Irons, that I realized I finally understood Grateful Dead fans.

I was of course familiar with the Dead; I grew up across the river from Vermont. I thought they were just … fine. “Friend of the Devil” was a fun song. Cherry Garcia is an okay ice cream flavor. But why did a band so average-seeming, so unexceptional to me, inspire such a dedicated fanbase? Why would people follow them around, spending thousands of dollars producing and trading bootlegs of their favorite live sets?

I feel about Margin Call the way Deadheads feel about the Dead. Everyone thinks this movie is a fairly routine, not particularly notable drama. Most people don’t get the obsessive, fanatical love I have for it. This must be the Deadheads’ struggle: confusion and frustration that the whole world hasn’t fallen as rapturously in love with the art they love so much. Around the moment that Quinto takes out his headphones and realizes the bank where he works is in desperate, desperate trouble, it clicked for me.

Deadheads sometimes talk about the “X factor” : the indescribable aspect of a performance that elevates it to a higher level. There are certainly aspects of my love for Margin Call that are similarly difficult to put into words. At some level, either you find Jeremy Irons telling Quinto to “speak as you might to a young child. Or a golden retriever. It wasn’t brains that brought me here,” to be funny, or you don’t.

But to a large degree, my love for Margin Call boils down to it being the one film that, more than any other, seems to understand the modern workplace (or at least the office workplace), and the moral compromises involved in living and thriving in that world.

Some introductory Margin notes

A still of Zachary Quinto and Seth Bregman wearing shirts and ties in Margin Call.

In case you aren’t already a diehard Marginalist: Margin Call chronicles a day in the life of an investment bank at the outset of the financial crisis of 2008. Conditions are rough from the start; the film begins with Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci), the head of risk management at the firm, getting booted in the latest round of layoffs. Before leaving the building, Dale tosses a flash drive to his protégé, the erstwhile rocket scientist Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto). His last words, as the elevator closes, are “be careful.” It doesn’t take long for Sullivan to dive into Dale’s spreadsheet and realize that if the firm’s mortgage-backed investments fall in value by even a modest amount, it could bankrupt the company.

Sullivan freaks out and tells his boss, Will Emerson (a wonderfully sardonic Paul Bettany), who freaks out and tells his boss, Sam Rogers (Kevin Spacey), who grudgingly tells his much-younger boss Jared Cohen (Simon Baker), who finally calls in the firm’s CEO John Tuld for a 4 am meeting. Portrayed with remarkable charisma and menace by Jeremy Irons, Tuld decides how to deal with the toxic assets, which he describes as “the biggest bag of odorous excrement ever assembled in the history of capitalism.” His decision is astonishing, and his colleagues immediately realize what it means. The rest of the film chronicles their attempt to come to terms with it all.

This does not sound like the most riveting of material. And as I have learned the hard way, after forcing various friends and loved ones to watch it with me, Margin Call is not for everyone. It belongs to the micro-genre that the writer Max Read memorably labeled “halogencore” : It and peers like Michael Clayton , The Assistant , Shattered Glass , and Moneyball are thrillers set in offices, where the drama is fueled by white-collar misconduct or incompetence, and where the characters grow by learning something new about the bureaucracy to which they’ve given a portion of their lives.

Movies like that, much like all mid-budget dramas meant for adults and not featuring superheroes , are hard to get made these days. But they scratch a very particular itch. They thrive on specificity, on the norms and jargon of a particular institution. Margin Call ’s dialogue (“the standard VAR model,” “go block by block,” “we’re fill or kill at 65”) approaches the spy cant of John Le Carré in its density. But writer-director J.C. Chandor assumes the viewer is smart and a quick learner, and can grasp what they need to grasp. Like the Grateful Dead, he’s here for the superfans first and foremost.

The banality of greed

Jeremy Irons in a still from Margin Call.

Chandor’s script is obsessed with the moral implications of white-collar work, and specifically how workers cope with and adapt to those implications. Some become self-loathing, even self-pitying, like the Spacey and Tucci characters; the latter waxes nostalgic about his prior career as a structural engineer, building bridges that helped actual people, rather than shuffling numbers around. Some come up with grandiose self-rationalizations for why what they’re doing either doesn’t matter (“It’s just money ,” Irons’s character says, “it’s made up ”) or is somehow helping the middle class (“If people want to live like this, in their cars and the big fucking houses they can’t even pay for, then you’re necessary,” Bettany admonishes a younger colleague).

This, to me, is the main attraction of Margin Call . It’s a movie that takes work — office work, people sitting at desks typing stuff into laptops — seriously, as an activity with moral significance. And what sets it apart from other films, even some other halogencore films, is that the moral questions it asks are about the work itself, not some extreme violation outside that work’s code of ethics. Shattered Glass is about a reporter making up stories out of whole cloth; Michael Clayton is about a corporation hiring hitmen to murder potential whistleblowers as part of a coverup.

The choice that CEO John Tuld (Irons) makes in the middle of Margin Call , by contrast, is not a crime. When someone raises the prospects of “the feds” stopping the move, executive Ramesh Shah (Aasif Mandvi), implied to be a lawyer, pushes back: “They can slow you down. They can’t stop you.” This is a choice they can make in the course of doing business. It’s just part of being a banker. And it will hurt many, many people.

Margin Call is suffused with small moments showing how this ethos corrupts the people who embrace it. At one point, Peter Sullivan (Quinto) and his younger colleague Seth Bregman (Penn Badgley) are at a strip club, looking for Eric Dale (Tucci). Bregman immediately starts speculating about how much the dancers make in a night. Will Emerson (Bettany) tells Sullivan and Bregman that he made $2.5 million in a year, but it wasn’t that great, because “you learn to spend what’s in your pocket.” Sam Rogers (Spacey) clearly thinks of himself as the man in the room with a real conscience, but it never occurs to him that the firm’s actions might destroy the career of his son at another bank. The firm comes before his own child.

These men (and apart from an underutilized Demi Moore, they’re all men) have seen themselves warped, in ways large and small, by their work, by work for which they are paid obscene amounts and which they have no intention of ever stopping.

Toward the end of the film, Rogers is giving a pep talk to a room of traders, “People are going to say some very nasty things about what we do here today, and about what you’ve dedicated a portion of your lives to,” he tells them. “But have faith that in the bigger picture, our skills have not been wasted. We have accomplished much, and our talents have been used for the greater good.” This is a man doing something he knows is wrong, and not just that but wielding his power to make dozens of other people do something he knows is wrong. The brilliance of the movie is its illustration of why he, and so many like him, make that choice, again and again and again.

Margin Call is available to stream on Netflix and Hulu . For more recommendations from the world of culture, check out the One Good Thing archives.

Recommendations

Today, Explained

Understand the world with a daily explainer plus the most compelling stories of the day.

This is the title for the native ad

More in One Good Thing

One Good Thing: A food memoir about love, grief, and lockdown

In The Year of Miracles, Ella Risbridger cooks through the end of the world.

One Good Thing: A new classic of country heartbreak

Carly Pearce’s 29: Written in Stone turns a tumultuous year of her life into a near-perfect divorce album.

One Good Thing: A Danish drama lets its girlbosses fail

The latest season of Borgen is a political thriller for the Great Resignation.

One Good Thing: Two ’90s Asian films that capture the loneliness of modern life

In Chungking Express and Rebels of the Neon God, the vibes are melancholy but incredibly aesthetic.

One Good Thing: Musician Ethel Cain nurses Gen-Z America’s broken heart

A gothic album, soaring with gorgeous darkness.

One Good Thing: A French reality show with high-end homes and low-stakes drama

Netflix’s The Parisian Agency is a luxury real estate show featuring a family that actually gets along.

Margin Call

Review by brian eggert november 8, 2011.

Margin Call takes place in 2008, as our economy dangles on the edge of a volcano. Written and directed by first-timer J.C. Chandor, the independently produced film does not tell a “true story” about what happened; rather, it fictionalizes a believable behind-the-scenes scenario without directly pointing fingers. The story concerns an analyst who discovers his brokerage firm’s upcoming losses go beyond their total market value. To save their butts, the company decides to unload their inventory of sub-prime mortgage holdings before their worthlessness becomes public knowledge, making a fortune as they betray their customers. Filled with convincing financial jargon delivered by the best ensemble cast you’re likely to see in 2011, the film belongs on a short list of good financial thrillers, including Oliver Stone’s Wall Street and James Foley’s film of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross .

Referenced only as “The Firm,” the corporation at the film’s center begins its day by dropping eighty percent of its brokers in a mass layoff. The day is a stressful one, at the end of which the “survivors” celebrate. Earlier, longtime risk manager Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci) is walked out the door and, on his way, tells young analyst Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto) to look over his current project, and to “be careful” with what he finds. Sullivan stays late to review the numbers. When he realizes what he’s found, he calls his colleague Seth (Penn Badgley) and their boss Emerson (Paul Bettany) to look at the calculations. Before long, it’s midnight and Emerson’s boss Sam Rogers (Kevin Spacey) has been called in. Another couple of hours and Sam’s bosses (Simon Baker and Demi Moore) arrive and concur the numbers are correct. By four in the morning, CEO John Tuld (Jeremy Irons) lands on the roof via helicopter and asks Sullivan to explain what’s going on. “Speak to me as you would a child,” Tuld says, reminding audiences that executives are rarely as smart as their title suggests. And thus, finally, the audience can understand what everyone’s been talking about until now.

At this point, you’ll feel the sudden desire to purchase a Guy Fawkes mask and join those Wall Street protesters. Some consider the protesters anti-American or at least anti-Capitalism, but these days the two seem inseparable. They’re not angry about The American Way; they’re enraged by the greed fueling Wall Street, the inhumanity. This is a place where corporations service themselves for a profit, regardless of how it affects the world at large. Even in the face of disaster, Tuld (no doubt inspired by Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld) thinks first about how to make as much money from what’s happening. Granted, it’s every business’ right to turn a profit, but there comes a point when your pursuit of revenue begins to destroy everything around you and, in the long term, means corporate (if not national) suicide. You’d think that with all the expensive education in attendance at these companies, someone would have been smart enough to grasp this. Alas, Gordon Gekko’s enduring motto, “Greed is good,” meant as an overstated but honest axiom in Wall Street , has been taken literally since its pronouncement, and Margin Call shows the result.

But I digress. Chandor’s onscreen assessment of these characters may feel more even-handed than one expects in troubled economic times. It’s quite realistic, thanks to the all-around strong performers who give human faces to businessmen who want nothing more than to make a buck (or a few million of them), fearing their superiors enough to suppress their reservations about company policy. Much like other financial thrillers of this sort, Chandor uses the illusory nature of money—that artificial thing that our society created to make our lives easier but instead dominates it—as an invisible device that drives all decisions. Quinto’s naïve young analyst questions whether or not his company has made the right choice, but it doesn’t matter, since the paychecks are good. Only Spacey’s 34-years-in character shows any true regret about the situation. Spacey’s character is further humanized by a subplot about his dying dog; we can’t help but feel sympathy for a man who cries at the idea of losing his best friend. Irons’ two or three scenes steal the film, however, as he’s so composed and cold; it’s his best performance in years. The cast overall is staggeringly good. Has a first-time director ever assembled such an impressive roster of talent?

Though fuelled by compelling dialogue—in particular two monologues, a cynical one from Bettany and a chilly one from Irons— Margin Call doesn’t have a style in the language itself. It’s not a film “about” dialogue, nor is it “about” the characters, strange as that sounds. Information is presented matter-of-factly, without involving backstories to artificially enhance what’s happening. This isn’t Money Never Sleeps , where the numbers are a device propelling a melodrama. Chandor instead lays out a potboiler where things look bad, get worse, and then boil over, giving way to a poignant and somber aftermath. It’s a wonderfully acted story that puts what happened in the fall of 2008 into perspective, taking us behind corporate walls where everything hums with computer monitors and the chatter of desperate brokers, and then into board rooms where suits find themselves speechless at their company’s forecast. And afterward, we have a better understanding of the apathy that permeated our economy’s ongoing crisis, which, depending on your outlook, either focuses or alleviates your anger over the situation.

Related Titles

In Theaters

Recent Reviews

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice 2 Stars ☆ ☆
Close Your Eyes 4 Stars ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
Look Into My Eyes 2.5 Stars ☆ ☆ ☆
AfrAId 1.5 Stars ☆ ☆
Patreon Exclusive: Rope 3 Stars ☆ ☆ ☆
Good One 4 Stars ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
Strange Darling 3 Stars ☆ ☆ ☆
Blink Twice 3 Stars ☆ ☆ ☆
Alien: Romulus 2.5 Stars ☆ ☆ ☆
Skincare 3 Stars ☆ ☆ ☆
Sing Sing 3.5 Stars ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
Borderlands 1.5 Stars ☆ ☆
Dìdi 3 Stars ☆ ☆ ☆
Cuckoo 3 Stars ☆ ☆ ☆
The Instigators 2 Stars ☆ ☆

Recent Articles

The Definitives: Goodfellas
The Definitives: The Spirit of the Beehive
Interview: Jeff Vande Zande, Author of The Dance of Rotten Sticks
Reader's Choice: Even Dwarfs Started Small
The Definitives: Nocturama
Guest Appearance: KARE 11 - Hidden Gems of Summer
The Labyrinth of Memory in Chris Marker’s La Jetée
Reader's Choice: Perfect Days
The Definitives: Kagemusha
The Scrappy Independents of Mumblegore

IMAGES

Margin Call (2011)
Margin Call movie review & film summary (2011)
Margin Call 2012, directed by JC Chandor
Margin Call
Margin Call (2011)
Margin Call

VIDEO

Margin Call AI Movie
MARGIN CALL Scene ROCKET Scientist #shorts
Movie Review 01 : THE CALL
Margin Call Calculation
Watches in MARGIN CALL
MARGIN Call Scene #shorts

COMMENTS

Margin Call
When an analyst uncovers information that could ruin them all, the key players (Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany) at an investment firm take extreme measures to control the damage. Director J.C. Chandor ...
Long night's journey into collapse movie review (2011)
Margin Call movie review & film summary (2011)
'Margin Call,' With Zachary Quinto
Directed by J.C. Chandor. Drama, Thriller. R. 1h 47m. By A.O. Scott. Oct. 20, 2011. There have been reports of hurt feelings among the bankers and brokers who have been the focus of public ire and ...
Margin Call (2011)
The movie "Margin Call" depicts the events that immediately preceded the Financial Crisis in 2008 within a nameless Investment Bank. What I like especially about the movie is the fact that it doesn't try to explain the technical causes of the Financial Crisis but the psychological causes - human failures, which are the real cause for the Crisis: greed, egotism, ignorance.
Margin Call
Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 20, 2020. You can tell a story out of anything, and you can tell a story about anybody, but the more technical the story gets and the more unsympathetic ...
Margin Call (2011)
Margin Call: Directed by J.C. Chandor. With Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany, Jeremy Irons, Zachary Quinto. Follows the key people at an investment bank over a 24-hour period during the early stages of the 2008 financial crisis.
'Margin Call': A Financial-Crisis Film That's on the Money
When Spacey warns of creating a panic in the markets, Irons responds drily, "If you're the first one out the door, that's not called panicking." Margin Call is perforated with sharp insights. Each ...
Margin Call
Featuring an all-star cast, Margin Call was one of the most talked about films of the Sundance Film Festival and was also the Opening Night selection of New Directors/New Films. ... Generally Favorable Based on 38 Critic Reviews. 76. 84% Positive 32 Reviews. 13% Mixed 5 Reviews. 3% Negative 1 Review. All Reviews; ... Margin Call is a movie that ...
Margin Call Review
Margin Call Review. 2008. Fired from his job, risk management executive Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci) hands a flash drive to up and coming analyst Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto). Staying late to ...
MARGIN CALL Review
MARGIN CALL Review. The 2008 economic collapse is one of the major events of our lifetimes and some filmmakers have rushed to turn the events into A Very Serious and Important Movie. J.C. Chandor ...
Margin Call Movie Review
Our review: Parents say (3 ): Kids say (2 ): J.C. Chandor makes his feature writing and directing debut here, and it's a very strong effort, suggesting a huge talent on the rise. MARGIN CALL is sometimes like a theatrical play, taking place on limited sets over a limited timeframe, with plenty of well-written, well-delivered monologues and ...
Margin Call
Margin Call is an explosive drama that speaks lucidly and scarily to the times we live in. As Tuld says, "There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first, be smarter, or cheat."
Margin Call
Margin Call - Wikipedia ... Margin Call
How 'Margin Call' Gets It Right About the Financial Crisis
Margin Call is the smartest movie you will ever see about the Financial Crisis. Debuting at a time when the Occupy Wall Street movement seeks to make caricatured villains of bankers and much of ...
Margin Call
Margin Call spans a critical 24 hours in the life of The Firm. As the movie begins, it's layoff day for a significant percentage of the brokers. The ones who are let go are "good," but the survivors are "better." This is a regular cost-cutting measure. The market is sputtering, profits are down, so headcount needs to be reduced.
Movie Review: Margin Call (2011)
Set in a fictional brokerage firm in 2008 just before the housing bust, Margin Call appears to be very loosely based on Lehman Brothers (hence the boldly printed words "Inspired by a True Story" on its poster). Opening strongly, Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci) is ushered into a conference room to meet with people he has never met before who thank him for his 19 years of service to the company ...
Margin Call is brilliant. : r/movies
Margin Call is brilliant. Recommendation. Finance movies rule. But this isn't a finance movie. It's really a movie about humans working within a massive system that makes some rich, many poor, and cannot be stopped. You could take all financial jargon out, and the bones of the movie are how people and personalities clash, work together ...
'Margin Call'
It is safe to say that Margin Call was my most anticipated film of this year's Sundance Film Festival. Having scored a spot on the buzzed-about 2010 Black List, Margin Call has an all-star cast ...
Margin Call
Margin Call is reviewed by Christy Lemire (AP critic and host of Ebert Priesents at the Movies, check your local PBS listings), Ben Mankiewicz (host of Turne...
Margin Call (2011)
The movie "Margin Call" depicts the events that immediately preceded the Financial Crisis in 2008 within a nameless Investment Bank. What I like especially about the movie is the fact that it doesn't try to explain the technical causes of the Financial Crisis but the psychological causes - human failures, which are the real cause for the Crisis: greed, egotism, ignorance.
The Ending Of Margin Call Explained
The 2011 financial thriller "Margin Call" explores the origins of the 2007 to 2009 financial crisis. Caused in large part by the boom-and-bust of the U.S. housing market in the early-to-mid ...
Margin Call is a claustrophobic finance drama that rivals The Big Short
The most quotable line from J. C. Chandor's under-appreciated finance drama Margin Call might read like a winning Monopoly strategy, but when spoken by a sharp-suited Jeremy Irons during the film ...
One Good Thing: Wall Street traders behaving badly in the movie Margin
One Good Thing: 107 minutes of Wall Street traders behaving badly. Help, I can't stop rewatching this 11-year-old corporate thriller nobody saw in theaters. by Dylan Matthews. Jun 3, 2022, 5:30 ...
Margin Call
Rated. R. Runtime. 107 min. Release Date. 10/21/2011. Margin Call takes place in 2008, as our economy dangles on the edge of a volcano. Written and directed by first-timer J.C. Chandor, the independently produced film does not tell a "true story" about what happened; rather, it fictionalizes a believable behind-the-scenes scenario without ...

Long night’s journey into collapse

Roger Ebert

Written and directed by

Leave a comment

We Live in Time

Look Into My Eyes

The Front Room

Matt and Mara

The Thicket

The Mother of All Lies

The Paragon

My First Film

Don’t Turn Out the Lights

I’ll Be Right There

The Greatest of All Time

TIFF 2024: Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Sharp Corner, The Quiet Ones

TIFF 2024: Dahomey, Bird, Oh Canada

TIFF 2024: The Cut, The Luckiest Man in America, Nutcrackers

The Telluride Tea: My Diary of the 2024 Telluride Film Festival

Number Crunching at the Apocalypse

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Email not verified

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

Margin Call Reviews

'Margin Call': A Financial-Crisis Film That's on the Money

About the Author

Margin Call Review

Related Articles

MARGIN CALL Review

'Sharp Corner' Review: Ben Foster Gives One of 2024's Most Memorable Performances | TIFF 2024

Or browse by category:

Common Sense Selections for Movies

50 Modern Movies All Kids Should Watch Before They're 12

Best Kids' Shows on Disney+

Best Kids' TV Shows on Netflix

8 Tips for Getting Kids Hooked on Books

50 Books All Kids Should Read Before They're 12

Common Sense Selections for Games

Nintendo Switch Games for Family Fun

Common Sense Selections for Podcasts

Parents' Guide to Podcasts

Social Networking for Teens

Gun-Free Action Game Apps

Reviews for AI Apps and Tools

Parents' Ultimate Guide to YouTube Kids

YouTube Kids Channels for Gamers

How to Help Kids Build Character Strengths with Quality Media

Multicultural Books

YouTube Channels with Diverse Representations

Podcasts with Diverse Characters and Stories

Common Sense Media Review

Parents Need to Know

Why Age 16+?

Any Positive Content?

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Products & Purchases

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Violence & Scariness

Positive Messages

Positive Role Models

Where to Watch

Parent and Kid Reviews

Compelling drama about inside of Wall St firms

Is It Any Good?

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Movie Details

Did we miss something on diversity?

Suggest an Update

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

Thank You for Smoking

Fast Food Nation

Margin Call

Peter Travers

Cedric Bixler-Zavala Slams Linkin Park's Emily Armstrong Over Alleged Danny Masterson Support

'Tonight Show' Scales Back to Four Episodes a Week, Repeats on Friday

Jimi Hendrix Documentary Film Coming From 'Greatest Night in Pop' Director

‘His Three Daughters’ Turns a Familiar Family Drama Into the Best Movie of the Year

'Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos' Looks Back at the Iconic Mob Series — and the Man Who Made It

Doug Emhoff Addresses Donald Trump's Attacks on Kamala Harris: 'It’s a Distraction'

Most Popular