The Wolf of Wall Street

Martin Scorsese's fifth collaboration with Leonardo DiCaprio is the closest the director has come so far to duplicating the career-defining highs of the eight films he made with his former favourite collaborator, Robert De Niro. Charting the rise and fall of high-flying New York finance executive Jordan Belfort, who became a multimillionaire in the 1990s through fraudulent share trading and stock-price manipulation, this is an exhilarating story of decadence and debauchery, made all the more thrilling by DiCaprio's charismatic and physical lead performance. Around him, Scorsese has assembled a sterling cast that keeps the demented momentum hurtling forwards, notably Jonah Hill as Belfort's larger-than-life sidekick Donnie. Together, DiCaprio and Hill create a whirlwind of havoc that recalls the hectic, cocaine-fuelled energy of GoodFellas but without the brooding, omnipresent threat of violence. Instead - unusually for a Scorsese movie - the tone is flat-out black comedy, with farcical X-rated laughs, most of them coming from Belfort's various sex and substance addictions, which perfectly offset the savagely funny, Sopranos-style dialogue.