Headlined by a star-studded cast, this legitimate must-see film tip-toes audaciously between biting satire and topical cautionary tale. You won't know whether to be pissed or be entertained and that's a powerful quality to pull off.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 16, 2024

'The Big Short' is the film that we needed at this time.

| Aug 27, 2023

Trying to keep up with all of the fast market talk and financial blather wore me down. And there’s so much emphasis on it that the movie comes off as overstuffed and missing the human element which would have given it a more powerful punch.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 19, 2022

McKay's defiant treatment just barely avoids becoming so irreverent that its sense of humor overshadows its significance.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 25, 2022

Both annoying and effective as McKay manages to simultaneously inform and talk down to his audience.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 15, 2021

The filmmakers do their best to bring this crisis and its human dimensions to life.

| Feb 26, 2021

Though presented as a jet black, indeed a cold-hearted, satire, it's concerned with reminding American audiences in particular just how close they came to economic Armageddon.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 14, 2021

Subtle it's not, but the director's use of pop culture images and music to set the scene goes a long way to establish a time, place and tone.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Feb 3, 2021

It manages to illuminate how the economic failure occurred with scathing wit and highly-stylized editing that keeps you on your toes.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Jan 30, 2021

The Big Short is both the defining film about the most recent financial crisis and the defining film of its director's young career so far.

| Jan 7, 2021

The Big Short is a remarkable piece of cinema and nothing seems to change.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Dec 23, 2020

Even a talented cast cannot make this labyrinthine topic fully understandable unless the viewer is already modestly familiar with the subject matter.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 16, 2020

There isn't a sense of winning or losing - merely weathering the periods of time when the villainy of banks and the government are at their most extreme.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Dec 4, 2020

The Big Short is as informative, insightful and innovative as it is drop dead entertaining.

| Oct 27, 2020

The Big Short keeps the narrative popping for a wealth of the run time.

| Apr 7, 2020

The standout, however, is Steve Carell's righteously angry Baum. Carell was primarily known as a comic actor, but he's been moving towards drama for a while now...

| Feb 13, 2020

McKay's masterful sendup of late-stage capitalism will leave you saying, "Never again!"

| Jan 13, 2020

Smart, funny, scary, ingeniously populated and a rollicking good time, The Big Short was such a left-field bolt from the blue and an enormously entertaining few hours in the cinema.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Sep 5, 2019

Steve Carell, Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt lead an ensemble cast firing on all cylinders.

| Aug 8, 2019

Teems with self-awareness about the complexity of Wall Street while using that opportunity to inject dark humor into what's otherwise a frighteningly bleak reality.

| Original Score: 3.75/5 | Jul 20, 2019