Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
A young and impatient stockbroker is willing to do anything to get to the top, including trading on illegal inside information taken through a ruthless and greedy corporate raider, whom takes the youth under his wing.
Wall Street is elevated primarily by its performances — Michael Douglas's Gordon Gekko is one of cinema's great villains, earning him an Oscar and anchoring the film's cultural legacy. The 'Greed is good' ideology gave the film a distinctive voice and made it a defining document of 1980s capitalism, earning high Novelty as a singular portrayal of that era's financial culture. The plot is a fairly conventional morality tale of rise and fall, competent but not surprising. Oliver Stone's direction is energetic but the cinematography, while slick, doesn't rise to exceptional. The ending resolves satisfyingly but somewhat predictably in its moral accounting.