Leo starts out a naive stockbroker under the wing of weirdo drunk Matthew McConaughey (having a big year), eventually starts his own business (with a terrific Jonah Hill) using hard-sell techniques to trade junk stocks to rich people, until finally his nonstop cheating, drug-taking, money-laundering (Jean Dujardin is wonderful as a Swiss banker) and FBI agent Kyle Chandler (of Zero Dark and Super 8) take him down. Internet says Leo, Jonah and Matthew spent a few years in prison each (The movie sadly doesn’t portray Leo’s prison friendship with Tommy Chong), but Leo’s out selling his sales techniques at seminars, still a controversial mofo.

Written by Terence Winter, creator of Boardwalk Empire, who says: “You are being sold the Jordan Belfort story by Jordan Belfort, and he is a very unreliable narrator.”

G. Kenny: “There is a certain irony that Scorsese’s particular critique of capital is such an expensive one, and don’t believe for a minute that he is not unaware of it. We all, or most of us, do what we can with the resources made available to us. ”

MZ Seitz:

“Wolf” starts with a Fellini-like party on the floor of Belfort’s firm, then freeze-frames on Belfort tossing a dwarf at a huge velcro target, literally and figuratively abusing the Little Guy. The traders get away with their abuse because most people don’t see themselves as little guys, but as little guys who might some day become the big guy doing the tossing. “Socialism never took root in America,” John Steinbeck wrote, “because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

R. Brody on the final shot:

Scorsese’s camera rises over their heads to scan the yearning, vacant faces of the aspirants in the rows behind them. It’s a moment with a terrifying, Olympian blend of compassion, disdain, and anguish; it shows a fatal lack of imagination combined with a desperate range of unfulfilled desires. The shot shows not just an audience, but the audience: Scorsese puts the film’s viewers face to face with themselves, charges us with compensating for our lack of imagination and fatal ambition through contact with the wiles of a master manipulator. Just as the fictionalized Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) is presented at the seminar by a host (who, in a diabolical cameo, is played by the real-life Belfort), so we, the movie audience, have been introduced to Belfort by another enthusiastic impresario, namely Martin Scorsese, who knows perfectly well that he is giving us something that we want, something that we need, and something that taps into dreams and ambitions that are both central to life and completely suspect.

I wasn’t completely crazy about it, but gotta agree with Ben Wheatley, who says:

I saw Wolf Of Wall Street, and that was a fantastic experience, just going, “God, this is a proper film.”