Metrograph

Chandor (All Is Lost, A Most Violent Year) made his auspicious feature debut with this Sundance standout, a story of slow-spreading panic in the workplace set almost entirely over a fraught 24-hour period at a Wall Street investment bank during the 2007-08 financial crisis. Demi Moore, playing the head of the bank’s risk management division and the lone female exec in an ensemble cast that boasts Jeremy Irons, Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany, Zachary Quinto, Stanley Tucci, and other notables slipping into day trader suits and suspenders, gives a beautifully restrained performance as a woman forced to hold her own amidst a scrum of macho know-it-all colleagues. “One of the strongest American films of the year and easily the best Wall Street movie ever made. It’s about corporate manners—the protocols of hierarchy, the rituals of power, and, most of all, the difficulty of confronting flagrant habits of speculation with truth.” —The New Yorker