“This is a subtle, fascinating performance—a chronicle of a man who destroyed lives, including those of his family members, but never quite understood the depths of his own evil. ”
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Category Archives: The Wizard of Lies (HBO)
Telegraph: “De Niro’s Best Role in Years”
“For the first time in years, the inscrutable De Niro had a meaty role to sink his teeth into. He conveyed Madoff’s pangs of conscience and self-justifying monstrousness with subtle facial expressions…”
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Washington Post Review
“No one understands Madoff’s profile better than Diana B. Henriques, who filed dozens of stories on Madoff for the New York Times and wrote the book on which Levinson’s film is based. She also appears as herself in the jailhouse interview scenes that frame the story, making her acting debut across a thin metal table from Robert De Niro…”
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Salon Review
“Levinson trains the film’s focus on the intimacy of Madoff’s betrayal. Scene after scene bristles with close-ups of the people closest to Madoff as they struggle to respond truthfully to questions for which they have no solid answers…”
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The Atlantic Review
” … {the film] doesn’t try to either understand or humanize Madoff, but all the same it manages to be an intimate, unsettling portrait of a borderline sociopath.”
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New York Times Review, HBO‘s “Wizard of Lies”
“The film returns repeatedly to Ms. Henriques, calmly grilling her subject, pushing him not just to recount the facts of his crime — something he’s unusually willing to do — but also to accept that he hurt his clients and family.”
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Boston Globe Review
In those bleak scenes (in which Henriques plays herself), you sense that he has a phenomenal sense of denial
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