Carefully crafted performances and taut pacing carry the day. full review

Topical drama about the financial crisis lacks the visceral punch to grab an audience. full review

A methodical, coolly absorbing boardroom thriller. full review

Spacey is mesmerizing as Sam, a weary, aging lion losing his appetite for antelope. And Irons plays the villain with magisterial ease. full review

It's a realistic take on what happens when high-flying money speculators suddenly hit ground. It's also a great calling card for J.C. Chandor, the writer/director making his feature debut. full review

That Chandor manages to find the blood in each character is accomplishment enough; that he manages to make his drama both relevant and timeless portends a bright future indeed. full review

A terrific piece of entertainment. full review

Margin Call is one of the strongest American films of the year and easily the best Wall Street movie ever made. full review

Chandor's film is not a tale of the plots and counterplots of conniving bankers. It is a disaster movie, in which even the Masters of the Universe are running for their lives. full review

Writer-director J.C. Chandor then plunges us into a dark night of quietly nasty reckoning as it becomes clear to the firm's honchos that the calamitous risk assessments one of their own was working on might well be true. full review

This may be the first post-2008 feature film to dramatize the crisis itself, rather than using it as a backdrop for an outraged harangue against the banks. full review

The real strength of '[Chandor's] debut feature is how persuasively it depicts the fishbowl world of high finance, whose executives seem incapable of seeing past their towering salaries and privileged lives. full review

It's all fairly entertaining but also confusing for anybody who doesn't get the Wall Street lingo. full review

It sees its characters not as villains but, simply, as business people - with all that means. full review

A smart, harrowing and mordant drama set inside a fictional Wall Street firm at the trip-wire moment just before the 2008 financial collapse. full review

Though fictionalized and understated, "Margin Call'' effectively voices the same outrage that the Occupy Wall Street movement is so loudly proclaiming. full review

How good is J.C. Chandor's debut? So good I was ready to buy what he was selling even though I didn't entirely understand it. full review

It opens with a bloodbath, builds to an apocalypse and ends with a gravedigger doggedly excavating the earth. By the time the story is told, the blood -- sorry, red ink -- is surging down long corridors like a tidal wave. full review

Margin Call might have lost me completely if it weren't for Spacey, who delivers his meatiest, most nuanced work in years. full review

Chilling and enjoyable in unequal measure. Entertainment predominates, but entertainment with smarts, and a well-honed edge. full review