Critic Reviews

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.

This stark account of a family's downfall has the wrenching power of an Arthur Miller Classic. [15-28 May 2017, p.17]

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.

All these characters, including Bernie, come into focus only after The Wizard of Lies sets up the Madoff case, giving us an obligatory survey on the crime and how it played out. That material, which fills the first third of the film, is unnecessary. Once we turn to the psychological fallout, and Levinson gives us a more intimate point of view, The Wizard of Lies is captivating.

You don’t have to be rich to feel the agony of Madoff’s victims, and Wizard shrewdly transcends the the-rich-are-people-too genre by making Madoff’s family drama seem universal.

What “Wizard of Lies” lacks in terms of a broader historical span is compensated for by telling Madoff’s tale as a classical tragedy about hubris and human cost--only in this case we watch as the villain’s wife and children take the brunt of the toll. DeNiro and Pfeiffer are as formidable in their roles as one would expect them to be, and the easy conversational flair with which Henriques squares off with DeNiro is incredible.

It's a mess. Michelle Pfeiffer, howeever, is stunning, and has a Queens accent so thick it's funny. [19 May 2017, p.55] The Wizard of Lies is less convincingly about Bernie Madoff than it is about the struggle to understand Bernie Madoff: The search for why and how, by his family and his victims and the system, maybe even the man himself.

Almost everything in The Wizard of Lies succeeds. The acting is impeccable, the script taut and Levinson’s direction scalpel-sharp. ... But what’s missing in Wizard is the why.

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.

Barry Levinson's The Wizard of Lies is a fascinating, and in many ways horrifying glimpse into one of the most notorious thieves in American history.