The Wolf of Wall Street Review

Scorsese makes the boldest possible choice here: he never once steps outside Jordan Belfort's high to tell you it is wrong, and the queasiness comes entirely from watching an audience laugh along. Leonardo DiCaprio gives his loosest performance, and the Quaalude sequence, the delayed dose and the country-club stairs taken on his stomach and the ham sandwich, is sustained physical comedy of a kind almost nobody attempts at this budget. Jonah Hill's Donnie is a grotesque with fluorescent teeth, and Matthew McConaughey's chest-thumping lunch cameo sets the film's rhythm in four minutes.

Terence Winter's dialogue runs on sales patter and direct address, and Thelma Schoonmaker cuts it at a pace that makes three hours feel like ninety minutes. The knock is structural: the film repeats its own escalation, party then deal then betrayal then party again, and the final act's federal reckoning is perfunctory next to what precedes it. It is a comedy about appetite that leaves you feeling complicit, which was always the point.