In the Village Voice, Stephanie Zacharek writes, “One hour of that boorishness would be more than enough by the end of the second, you might be wondering if anyone, including Scorsese, is ever going to call these guys on their self-absorbed idiocy.” But as Criticwire’s Sam Adams points out in the headline to his piece, “Real life hasn’t punished Jordan Belfort. There’s a belief by some critics (and presumably some audience members) that the film glorifies Belfort’s actions and doesn’t provide anything even close to a comeuppance. At film’s end, Belfort briefly attends white collar prison and is ejected back into the world as a motivational speaker, ready to sucker a new group of schmoes. They are id incarnate, seemingly incapable of saying no to any drug or car or boat or helicopter or piece of tail that crosses their paths. Let us know what you thought.ĭoes The Wolf of Wall Street exalt Jordan Belfort’s excesses?īelfort and friends do many, many terrible things over the course of the movie. But what happens in a movie when that energy is willfully indiscriminate - shapeless, conscienceless, mindless?” Did the bacchanal leave you feeling coked up? Or did you walk out as woozy and numb as if you had just popped half a bottle of expired quaaludes? The Monday Movie Club is now in session.

Some critics have balked at Wolf ’s excesses in his review, Vulture’s David Edelstein called it an “endurance test,” writing “Martin Scorsese continues his worship of masculine energy: energy for its own sake, energy as a means of actualizing the self, energy because there’s nothing worse in Scorsese’s cosmos than passivity, which inevitably translates as impotence. But The Wolf of Wall Street, his fifth collaboration with Leonard DiCaprio, is a muscular and aggressive story that feels as if it were made by a much younger director. It’s hard to say no to a Martin Scorsese movie, especially because at 71 years old, the master American filmmaker probably doesn’t have that many more films left in him.

Wolf of wall street movie length