Wall Street (1987) Critic Reviews

It's slick, melodramatic, even inherently trashy - but a blue-chip moviegoer investment. [11 Dec 1987, p.1D]Read the full review

Stone's most impressive achievement in this film is to allow all the financial wheeling and dealing to seem complicated and convincing, and yet always have it make sense.Read the full review

Wall Street isn't a movie to make one think. It simply confirms what we all know we should think, while giving us a tantalizing, Sidney Sheldon-like peek into the boardrooms and bedrooms of the rich and powerful.Read the full review

Oliver Stone's Wall Street plays like "Platoon" in civvies. It's a good bad movie, unable to muster the moral firepower of the earlier film, but entertaining on the level of a big, bold, biff-bam-pow comic strip that likes high-profile high-rolling more than it perhaps realizes. [11 Dec 1987, p.45]Read the full review

The film is best when Gekko and Fox power it up, but Wall Street falls into the red when Stone's heavy-handed moralizing takes over.Read the full review

Douglas plays Gekko with a terrible intensity. He raves and rants, but he has a rascal's humor.Read the full review

Wall Street is a silly, pretentious melodrama that panders to the current fascination with insider trading. [10 Dec 1987, p.1]Read the full review

Wall Street wants to be a shrewd piece of movie making, our own insider's tip, but it's tinny and thin and close to moral bankruptcy. As for its veracity, it's probably no closer to Wall Street than "The Bad and the Beautiful" was to the skills of movie making. And it's a lot less fun. [11 Dec 1987, p.1]Read the full review

Watching Oliver Stone's Wall Street is about as wordy and dreary as reading the financial papers accounts of the rise and fall of an Ivan Boesky-type arbitrageur.Read the full review