Margin Call is one of the better fictional films about the economic crisis. In fact, with the competition being so inept (see The Company Men for proof of this) it could well be the best. Rather than chronicling the collapse from the perspective of the average man on the street it takes the braver position of showing how it impacted on the investment bankers that were part of the problem. Considering most people want to lynch these irresponsible number pushers it is interesting to see writer-director, J.C. Chandor, wanting to humanise society’s new public enemy number one.

For the most part he does a good job showing how their lack of foresight brought down the entire house of cards. Over…

It takes a special talent to make a film about a subject and, for quite a lot of the running time, have much of your audience wonder what the hell anyone is talking about. It has to be a special talent because how else would a film like Margin Call end up being so utterly riveting?

The purported plot sees a troubled Wall Street investment bank wrestle with the decision to sell off all its assets, assets they know are very soon to be worthless, after discovering that the firm has reached the limits of its spending and risk plunging the stock market and banking sector into crisis as a result.

What I watched it as was, "Some bad stuff's…

When the shit hit the fan for the banking industry back in 2007 very few people outside the corridors of investment banking really gave a shit. That changed considerably when the fallout affected everyone from the man in the street to wealthy executives. The monumental fuck-ups of these overpaid, bonus obsessed scumbags changed the world...forever.

A fictitious Wall Street investment bank going through a tough time discovers that certain parameters that control the volatile trading limits have been breached and that a critical meltdown of their company is imminent. As complex models of the company's financial stability show serious problems, especially in their mortgage and risk departments, it appears their mountain of toxic debt is going to bury them. 2:00am…

An underrated movie about the 2007-08 financial crisis. The story takes place entirely over the course of one night and within the upper echelons of a very Lehman Brothers-esque but unnamed investment bank, as they make decisions that will inevitably trigger an economic meltdown. The movie falls somewhere between 2010's documentary "Inside Job,"possibly the best take on the crisis, and 2015's "The Big Short." While the former can feel didactic in its approach to explain and cover the economic collapse and the latter can get heavy handed doing the same thing, Margin Call doesn't really care to do either because it works off the fact that audience doesn't need to be lectured into the intricacies of financial markets. The movie…

Like The Big Short, it manages to present the complex issue that is the '08 financial crisis in an engaging way, though they take much different approaches. Here, we follow a bunch of people in suits in a skyscraper as panic sets in upon the realization that they are holding a bunch of toxic assets. There are a lot of meetings discussing whether and how they should get rid of those assets and what the fallout will be. By focusing on a single unnamed bank over just a day, I was able to have a general understanding of what the issue was and feel the pressure they felt, without fully understanding all of the details. The script manages to be…