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100It's slick, melodramatic, even inherently trashy - but a blue-chip moviegoer investment. [11 Dec 1987, p.1D]
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88Stone's most impressive achievement in this film is to allow all the financial wheeling and dealing to seem complicated and convincing, and yet always have it make sense.
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80As with Platoon, Stone captures the horrific essence of an environment and transfers it to us without the need for prior knowledge. Dazzling filmmaking.
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75The world of Wall Street is that of a lush soap opera-"Dynasty" with a moral. It gets the barn burning, all right, but it has no impact. [11 Dec 1987, p.A]
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75Stone intentionally set out to make a good old-fashioned liberal drama about the evils of unchecked capitalism. This approach results in a film with few shades of gray and lots of moralizing speeches, but Stone nearly pulls it off through his usual visual verve and keen casting instincts.
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70Wall Street isn't a movie to make one think. It simply confirms what we all know we should think, while giving us a tantalizing, Sidney Sheldon-like peek into the boardrooms and bedrooms of the rich and powerful.
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63Oliver Stone's Wall Street plays like "Platoon" in civvies. It's a good bad movie, unable to muster the moral firepower of the earlier film, but entertaining on the level of a big, bold, biff-bam-pow comic strip that likes high-profile high-rolling more than it perhaps realizes. [11 Dec 1987, p.45]
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63Despite some casting problems, director paints a convincing portrait of a frenzied world. [11 Dec 1987, p.D1]
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The film is best when Gekko and Fox power it up, but Wall Street falls into the red when Stone's heavy-handed moralizing takes over.
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60Douglas plays Gekko with a terrible intensity. He raves and rants, but he has a rascal's humor.
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50Wall Street is a silly, pretentious melodrama that panders to the current fascination with insider trading. [10 Dec 1987, p.1]
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40Wall Street wants to be a shrewd piece of movie making, our own insider's tip, but it's tinny and thin and close to moral bankruptcy. As for its veracity, it's probably no closer to Wall Street than "The Bad and the Beautiful" was to the skills of movie making. And it's a lot less fun. [11 Dec 1987, p.1]
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40The entire film is in fact a ferocious meditation on the dilemma of a son choosing his father. Which one will Bud emulate: the noble failure or the triumphant sleaze? The outcome is never really in doubt, so streamlined and predictable are the characters. [14 Dec 1987, p.82]
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40The sensibility of this movie is so adolescent that it's hard to take it as seriously as the filmmakers intend us to.
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20Watching Oliver Stone's Wall Street is about as wordy and dreary as reading the financial papers accounts of the rise and fall of an Ivan Boesky-type arbitrageur.
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12For all its hip, rat-a-tat dialogue and a sharp photographic look that give Wall Street a feeling that something exciting is happening, the movie's a bankrupt deal. [11 Dec 1987, p.E1]