Curious how it compares to Too Big to Fail and the Big Short?
First of all, both those movies are excellent and true stories, and should be required watching in every high school U.S. history class. Too Big to Fail deals with what happened after the banks were already screwed. The Big Short, while a great movie and very accurate in its analysis of why the crash happened, it is from an outsiders' perspective. You don't get much more outsider on Wall Street than Mark Baum and Michael Burry.
Margin Call is fiction. That said, it accurately illustrates how a bank thinks and operates when faced with a crisis. There are some things that are completely unrealistic, such as the events in the movie occur over 24 hours where it should have been weeks if not months. But the bank's decision-making is very accurately portrayed, and interesting to watch.
Wall Street is obviously the gold standard for movies about the financial industry, and it was a fairly accurate portrayal of corporate raiders in the 80's. The Gekko character was a cross between Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken. Boesky was a garden variety scumbag, but Milken is a much more interesting person. I recommend that if you ever meet someone that worked at Drexel Burnham, you offer to buy them a drink and talk about the 80's at that place. I had the privilege of having lunch with former Drexel CEO Fred Joseph about 20 years ago. I learned more in an hour with that guy than I had learned in about half my classes at business school. If I could have worked for any company in the world at any time in history, it would have been for Drexel Burnham in the 1980's.
The trading scene in 25th Hour where you meet Barry Pepper is dead on for what a bank trading floor was like in the early 2000's.
Boiler Room is also a great movie about a different era. Wolf of Wall Street is about the same firm, only slightly less fictionalized.
Rogue Trader is really good, and very accurate.
Arbitrage and Wall Street 2 don't suck, but are nothing special.
