Film review: Margin Call

This is JC Chandor’s debut feature, and its Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay is unquestionably deserved, says Helene Wong.

By Helene Wong In Film

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12th May, 2012

Film review

Towards the end of Inside Job, the revelatory documentary about the 2008 economic meltdown, a comment is made that “a real engineer builds bridges; a financial engineer builds dreams”. So when the sub-prime dream turned to nightmare, what did the engineers do? Or, as economist Joseph Stiglitz puts it in Four Horsemen – another useful analysis of the global crisis, now playing in the Documentary Edge Festival – “at what point does morality enter into the economic calculus?” Margin Call does a damn good job of not answering that question. It’s deliberate, ...

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