Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
A look behind the scenes at Bernie Madoff's massive Ponzi scheme, how it was perpetrated on the public and the trail of destruction it left in its wake, both for the victims and Madoff's family.
The Wizard of Lies is elevated almost entirely by Robert De Niro's commanding central performance as Bernie Madoff, with Michelle Pfeiffer also delivering strong work as Ruth Madoff. The film covers familiar Ponzi scheme territory and follows a fairly conventional biographical TV-drama structure, offering competent but unremarkable cinematography suited to its HBO origins. The narrative does a reasonable job weaving together the fraud's mechanics and the family fallout, though it never fully excavates the psychological depths it teases. The ending feels somewhat anticlimactic and abrupt, failing to deliver the emotional or thematic resolution the story demands. Novelty is modest — the subject matter was well-trodden by 2017 and the approach is straightforward prestige TV storytelling, though De Niro's performance lends it a distinctive charge.