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| By buying the pitch that its central character’s escapades were the stuff of mesmerizing drama or comedy, Scorsese, Winter and DiCaprio reveal themselves as dupes — the latest in a long line of clever folks swindled by Jordan Belfort. |
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| (Richard Corliss, Time) |
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| Any meaningful perspective on the greedfest of the period is obscured by the gleefulness of the depiction. |
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| (Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal) |
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| The film is almost three hours long and precious little of it feels new – not from Scorsese or from anybody else. |
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| (Peter Rainer, Christian Science Monitor) |
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| The Wolf of Wall Street is a fake. It’s meant to be an expose of disgusting, immoral, corrupt, obscene behavior, but it’s made in such an exultant style that it becomes an example of disgusting, obscene filmmaking. It’s actually a little monotonous; spectacular, and energetic beyond belief, but monotonous in the way that all burlesques become monotonous after a while. |
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| (David Denby, New Yorker) |
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| Epic in size but claustrophobically narrow in scope, The Wolf of Wall Street maintains a near-exclusive focus on the greed and self-indulgence of its proudly rapacious hero. |
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| (Dana Stevens, Slate) |
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| Seemingly taking its cue from Belfort’s shenanigans, the film is completely without modulation. It starts with all the knobs cranked up to 11 and remains that way for the next three hours. While what’s onscreen is never uninteresting, its unrelentingness is exhausting. |
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| (Marjorie Baumgarten, Austin Chronicle) |
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| For all of its carnal frivolity, The Wolf of Wall Street lacks passion and purpose, qualities Scorsese at his best has in abundance. |
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| (Steve Persall, Tampa Bay Times) |
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| There's no question about the efficacy of Scorsese's filmmaking prowess, only that he never knows - or doesn't care - to slow down and deepen the material. |
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| (Eric Kohn, indieWIRE) |
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| Been there, done that. As thrilling a filmmaker as Martin Scorsese continues to be, and as wild a performance as Leonardo DiCaprio dishes up as its morally bankrupt master of the universe, The Wolf of Wall Street seems almost entirely unnecessary. |
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| (Steven Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer) |
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| If you’re going to invest three hours watching a movie about a convicted stock swindler, it needs to be a whole lot more compelling than Martin Scorsese’s handsome, sporadically amusing and admittedly never boring — but also bloated, redundant, vulgar, shapeless and pointless — Wolf of Wall Street. |
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| (Lou Lumenick, New York Post) |
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| Here’s something I never expected to say, something I doubt I’d have believed if someone else had said it to me: Martin Scorsese can make a three-hour movie without one fresh perspective or compelling character from end to end. The proof, for three agonizing hours, can be found in The Wolf of Wall Street. |
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| (Lawrence Toppman, Charlotte Observer) |
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| A string of memorable scenes does not necessarily add up to a satisfying whole. Sure, there’s a forceful satirical thrust at corporate America. It’s no accident that Scorsese has Belfort’s first wife opening a limo door on him, in drug-addled contortions with his mistress, on the golden doorstep of Trump Tower. But it’s dangerously easy to regard Belfort, irredeemably dissolute though he is, as the hero of the hour. Or three hours. Indeed, there was only once a collective gasp at the screening I attended — that was when Belfort, who by then had committed most imaginable and some unimaginable sins, struck his wife. It was as if the audience considered that to be the first real blotting of his copybook. So for me the film is somehow less than the sum of its parts, with no palpable sense that these men are doing anything more contemptible than living life to the full. |
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| (Brian Viner, Daily Mail) |
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, Matthew McConaughey 
