Evolving over 36 hours in a troubled New York trading firm, J.C. Chandor's Margin Call--the true-ish story of the origins of the 2008 financial crisis--ranks alongside Wall Street, American Psycho and Glengarry Glen Ross in Hollywood’s long-standing fascination with the corrupting logic of late capitalism. The film’s opening round of lay-offs, one of several, includes that of a risk analyst (Stanley Tucci) who has secretly uncovered the runaway corrosive effects of the firm's big success story (and the bête noire of recent economic history): hyper-leveraged securities backed by sub-prime lending. Sensing meltdown, his protégé (Zachary Quinto) sends a warning signal up the corporate ladder--an overnight crisis meeting is convened; a drastic plan is forged--and the firm resolves to dump the bad schemes at the cost of projected global recession. The rest, we know, is history. Like Charles Ferguson's 2010 documentary Inside Job, Margin Call is tuned in to our suspicions of post-Keynesian economics, imagining high finance as an alchemy of unreal quantities from which huge profits can be netted. But if nobody, even academia, comes out of Inside Job intact, Margin Call presents a range of ethical positions: Kevin Spacey is a believably weary sales manager for whom Wall Street status is a gilded cage, while Simon Baker and Demi Moore are superb as unreflecting high-rollers, frosted over with greed and cynicism. Neither extremes are as interesting as Paul Bettany's pragmatic rank-and-file trader with a talent for corporate survival--and Jeremy Irons’ towering performance as CEO John Tuld (not to be confused with former CEO of Lehman Brothers Richard Fuld, obviously) is the most primal embodiment of capitalism since Daniel Day-Lewis prospected for oil in There Will Be Blood. His verdict sounds depressingly like authentic Wall Street cant: financial crises and the misery they inflict are a necessary part of the economic cycle. --Leo Batchelor