After losing his job as a stockbroker, Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) starts selling penny stocks in a Long Island brokerage room. His aggressive and boisterous sales style makes him rich. Based on a true story, The Wolf of Wall Street offers an engrossing, often entertaining look at greed and corruption in the world of finance. The movie also showcases chaotic comedy, especially from Jonah Hill in versatile post-Moneyball form as Belfort’s slimy sidekick Donnie Azoff.
Leonardo DiCaprio
Even Gordon Gekko looks like a pussycat next to Jordan Belfort, the proudly rapacious stockbroker at the center of Martin Scorsese’s robust, raunchy lowlifes-of-high-finance bacchanal. While The Wolf of Wall Street is not a great movie, it’s never boring thanks to a furious filmmaking style and an electric performance from Leonardo DiCaprio as the morally bankrupt wolf.
After losing his job in the stock market crash of 1987, Belfort turns to selling unregulated penny stocks out of a chop shop on Long Island. With help from his partner Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill), he creates a pump and dump scheme that makes him rich. But his wild lifestyle quickly spirals out of control.
Matthew McConaughey
Whether he’s cradling a baby in his arms or rallying his brokerage colleagues like an impassioned version of Gekko in the midst of their rampant greed, Matthew McConaughey is nothing short of brilliant in this flixtor app film. He and Jonah Hill give the movie a lot of chaotic comedy that keeps you from becoming completely desensitized to the film’s more questionable material — such as the infamous quaalude scene.
And he also leaves a lot of his impersonation behind, instead bringing out spontaneous bursts of energy to make Belfort truly come alive on the screen. This is a performance that should stand up to the test of time, unlike his previous roles in Scorsese movies. This is one of his finest performances to date. And he proves that he is more than just a good-looking boyish charmer.
Jean Dujardin
Martin Scorsese’s gleeful depiction of stock-market fraud and self-indulgence is so exuberant and high-spirited that susceptible viewers may experience a sort of high contact. It’s a movie about Jordan Belfort, a broker who made a fortune on shady penny stocks and spent his profits on drugs, sex, and other self-indulgences.
The cast, which includes a terrifying Jonah Hill as Belfort’s nebbishy lieutenant and a feisty Margot Robbie as his chest-thumping second wife, do splendid work in their roles. The screenplay by Terence Winter (Boardwalk Empire, The Sopranos) is carefully constructed to make sure that the characters never descend into caricature.
The Wolf of Wall Street is a veritable orgy of immorality, an outrageous scathing indictment of corrupted capitalism and a celebration of male savagery. Yet it’s also a relentless burlesque that can become monotonous in the way all of these things do.
Margot Robbie
More than a decade after it was released, The Wolf of Wall Street still has people going at each other. The film’s use of sex and alcohol makes for a great discussion about gender roles and the impact of these things on one’s life.
This is also a movie that shows off the comedic chops of everyone from Jonah Hill as Jordan Belfort’s clueless sidekick to the surprisingly good Matthew McConaughey (who will probably never get the leading role his talent deserves). But the star of the show is Margot Robbie as Naomi, Belfort’s second wife. Her beauty and Brooklyn accent make her a cutthroat femme fatale that is hard to look away from. She is a perfect match for DiCaprio’s Jordan. Their fight scenes are a joy to watch.
Martin Scorsese
The ensemble cast of Wolf of Wall Street is excellent (even Jonah Hill, whose Donnie Azoff comes close to grating; but Winter and Scorsese craft him so well that it never happens). And, though many critics have complained about the three-hour orgy of greed and hedonism in this real-life tale, the movie never becomes boring.
Based on the self-aggrandising memoirs of convicted stock market crook Jordan Belfort, it spools out over years in a sprawling true crime saga with chronic voice-over and fevered digressions (including an hilarious mind-reading showdown between Belfort and a sneaky Swiss banker, played by Jean Dujardin from The Artist). But what really holds things together is DiCaprio’s electrifying performance. He brings out all the sexy man child and devilish charm that makes him so inescapable on screen.
