The Big Short

Yay, a 130-minute movie about subprime loans and collateralized debt obligations!—says no one, ever. But that’s the amazing thing about The Big Short (rated R for pervasive language and some sexuality/nudity), a Golden Globe–nominated drama about the U.S. housing market that collapsed into the Great Recession: For a film with little in the way of action, romance, or likable heroes, it’s pretty entertaining.

Adapted from Michael Lewis’ best-selling nonfiction book, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, the film is billed as a comedy, but it’s not very funny. The story’s actually quite terrifying in a surreal way: Several sharp-witted Wall Street insiders correctly predict that America is sitting inside a housing bubble that will burst at any moment. But everybody—bankers, rating agencies, economists—insists the housing market is secure. Apparently everybody is asleep, cheating, or simply doesn’t care.

Director Adam McKay lets the events play out through the eyes of those who forecast the financial disaster. Doctor-turned-hedge-fund-manager Michael Burry (Christian Bale) is the first, by doing what pretty much nobody else does: run through thousands of individual mortgages and realize that too many subprime home loans are dangerously unstable, despite the AAA ratings. So he visits a bunch of banks and pools about $1.3 billion of his clients’ money into credit default swaps, basically betting against the housing market.

Others catch wind of his seemingly suicidal gamble: Deutsche Bank trader Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling as the epitome of a capitalist pig); cantankerous trader Mark Baum (Steve Carell) and his business team; and small-league investors Charlie Geller (John Magaro) and Jamie Shipley (Finn Wittrock) and their crunchy-granola mentor Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt). They too decide to profit off the impending doom—never mind that people will lose homes, savings, and jobs.

You don’t have to know housing market jargon—cheeky, fourth-wall-smashing cameos by celebrities such as pop star Selena Gomez and bad-boy chef Anthony Bourdain break down acronyms into easy-to-grasp language and analogies. Better pay attention, because history tends to replay itself.