The Wizard of Lies

It’s hard to hold a bit of bluntness against a film with such patience. By the time The Wizard of Lies exposes its wizard as a fearsome man projecting a kind aura, the impact is as powerful as De Niro’s performance is restrained.

The Wizard of Lies doesn’t try to either understand or humanize Madoff, but all the same it manages to be an intimate, unsettling portrait of a borderline sociopath.

Mostly, The Wizard of Lies is a film of fantastic acting beats--the way Pfeiffer captures a mother choosing husband over sons; the way Nivola’s paranoia builds as he realizes the public hates him too; the matter-of-fact decisions of a suicide attempt by the Madoffs when they saw no other way out.

The Wizard of Lies doesn’t have the pop of “The Wolf of Wall Street” or “The Big Short” but it does its best to give viewers a look at a man who still seems like an enigma. Complexity aside, it gives De Niro one more notch on his belt of highly detailed, award-winning characters.

Featuring an enigmatic lead performance by Robert De Niro. ... Wizard of Lies is a much odder thing, a character study without a conclusive answer to be revealed on its subject.

The film is a bit too long. Wizard of Lies has some worthwhile moments, but it never seems sure at what it’s trying to be.

The Wizard of Lies doesn't refute that armchair outrage, which probably isn't possible or desirable anyway, but it's so pointedly lacking in empathetic imagination that one wonders why Levinson made the film, which bears less of a resemblance to art than a book report.