Dizzying, no-holds-barred study of corruption

NOTHING succeeds like excess, as they say, and The Wolf of Wall Street is about as excessive as it gets.

Director Martin Scorsese's paean to a time (the decade between the late-1980s and late-'90s) when greed was good and a job on Wall Street was the equivalent of handing ambitious 20-somethings the keys to an adult candy store is itself a bloated, over-indulgent exercise in excess - but boy, it sure looks like they had a lot of fun.

The "wolf" in the title refers to Jordan Belfort, a young man who discovered his calling in the art of selling less-than-kosher penny stocks to unsuspecting investors. When Belfort (played by Leonardo DiCaprio), a novice in the stockbroking industry, becomes another statistic in the 1987 financial crisis, he finds a lucrative way of - as he puts it - moving money from his clients' pockets into his own.