The Big Short

The Big Short (2015) is Adam McKay's sharp-edged comedy-drama you can watch online on iFILM. A handful of misfits saw that the U.S. housing market was rotten years before Wall Street admitted it, then bet against the whole thing.

The film braids together four loosely connected stories. Hedge-fund oddball Michael Burry (Christian Bale) crunches mortgage data barefoot in his office and decides the bonds will collapse by 2007. Slick trader Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling) sniffs out a way to profit and narrates straight to camera. Twitchy Mark Baum (Steve Carell) drives through abandoned Florida subdivisions and grows sick at what he finds. Two young upstarts drag a burnt-out ex-banker, played by Brad Pitt, back into the game. Every few minutes the movie stops cold so a celebrity can explain credit default swaps and CDOs in plain English.

Adapted from Michael Lewis's nonfiction book, the picture won McKay and Charles Randolph the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. Its jittery editing, fourth-wall breaks and cold humor turn dry financial plumbing into a story about being right and finding no joy in it. Stream The Big Short (2015) online on iFILM.