A ferocious, funny, and deliberately repellent rise-and-fall saga that turns excess into spectacle. It’s long, loud, and morally corrosive, but the filmmaking is so energized that the movie stays compulsively watchable.
The Wolf of Wall Street
Where to watch: Buy
Movie · Crime · Drama
Wed · 3h 0m
Director: Martin Scorsese
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, Margot Robbie
Overview
A New York stockbroker refuses to cooperate in a large securities fraud case involving corruption on Wall Street, corporate banking world and mob infiltration. Based on Jordan Belfort's autobiography.
Director
Martin Scorsese
Cast
Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, Margot Robbie
Curator Review
Verdict
A ferocious, funny, and deliberately repellent rise-and-fall saga that turns excess into spectacle. It’s long, loud, and morally corrosive, but the filmmaking is so energized that the movie stays compulsively watchable.
Best for
Viewers who like big, maximalist crime comedies
Fans of antihero stories and financial scandal
People who enjoy fast dialogue, escalation, and dark satire
Anyone interested in Scorsese at his most outrageous
Skip if
You want a restrained or subtle drama
You’re sensitive to misogyny, drug abuse, or constant vulgarity
You dislike long runtimes and relentless chaos
You prefer films that clearly condemn their protagonists
Overview
The Wolf of Wall Street is a riot of greed, performance, and self-destruction, shot through with the kind of kinetic confidence that makes even the ugliest behavior hard to look away from. Scorsese treats Belfort’s world like a carnival of fraud: funny, disgusting, seductive, and eventually numbing in the exact way the lifestyle itself is numbing.
Worth noting
Leonardo DiCaprio gives one of his most unhinged, technically precise performances, and Jonah Hill is a perfect amplifier for the movie’s manic energy. The film’s humor is sharp enough to make the three-hour runtime feel like a binge, but the joke is always poisoned by what’s underneath it: exploitation, addiction, and total moral vacancy.
Bottom line
It’s not a movie for everyone, especially if you want clean lessons or a sympathetic center. But as a piece of filmmaking, it’s a blast of controlled excess, and one of the great modern depictions of how wealth and appetite can turn people into cartoons of themselves.
Top Letterboxd reviews
hunter strawberry (4★) · 23273 likes
the most realistic thing about this movie is that leo dates a 22 year old
Lucy (4.5★) · 13985 likes
can you believe that leo won his first oscar for grunting when THIS performance exists
BeefSquash (4.5★) · 10106 likes
Uhhh... I didn’t see any wolves.
oleff (4★) · 8306 likes
it was 3 hours but at least stuff was constantly happening
alor (4.5★) · 7228 likes
teenage boys when they buy 2 dollars worth of bitcoin: the movie
Themes
greed, financial fraud, antihero downfall, excess and addiction, toxic masculinity, satire, power and corruption, hedonism
Topics
crime drama, dark comedy, financial scandal, antihero, satire, cocaine-fueled chaos, Wall Street, excess, moral decline, 2010s cinema