Costa-Gavras has spent his career making movies about political issues: Z (about the assassination of a Greek political activist),The Confession (a show-trial in Czechoslovakia),Missing (the coup in Chile),Music Box (a Nazi fugitive) and now Capital (the whole business world). This one focuses on a young executive's appointment as CEO of a bank and the questionable deals that he starts making. The economic meltdown of 2007-2008 was still fresh in everyone's minds when the movie got released, and we see here the type of world that created it. This collection of cold, amoral - one might say evil - people who put on a facade of carrying out important work are the masters of the world. Much like in "Syriana", the characters are all ruthless individuals; pretty much everyone's a bad guy.

I wouldn't call it Gavras's best movie, but it's an undeniably chilling movie just in seeing the machiavellian goings-on in the business world. Definitely see it.

Marc Tourneuil (Gad Elmaleh) is an ambitious executive of the French Phenix Bank. When the CEO becomes incapacitated with cancer, he handpicks Tourneuil as the replacement CEO. He's surrounded by enemies. When he starts pushing to be more than a figurehead for the old CEO, he even loses that support. The only support comes from an American hedge fund minority shareholder Dittmar Rigule (Gabriel Byrne). The problem is that his support comes with strings attached. There is also underwear supermodel Nassim that has caught the eye of the married Tourneuil.

This starts off well. I like the corporate intrigue and the paranoid backstabbing. Some of the arguing from the wife and their family does border on naivety. I like the morally dubious protagonist better. However the movie slips as it tries to shoehorn a Hollywood happy ending. It would be better to keep a noir edge to the end. The last half has too many simplistic turns. I would be much happier with a murkier darker progression.

When the CEO of France's Phenix Bank collapses on the golf course, a young bank executive, (Gad Elmaleh) becomes a temporary CEO. He'd like to be permanent, but he realizes right away that there is a very different agenda in play.

An American hedge fund leader, Dittmar Rigule (Gabriel Byrne) is calling the shots and wants Phenix to purchase a worthless Japanese company, for one thing. If he does this, Phenix becomes worthless and the Americans can buy it for next to nothing.

That's just one of his problems. His enemies attempt to distract him using a gorgeous model (Liya Kebede),whom he chases around the world.

Elmaleh plays an antihero who is just as bad as everyone else with his wheeling and dealing, ambition, and disregard for the lives of others. He tells the stockholders that he is like Robin Hood, robbing from the poor to make the rich richer. It's what they all do. It's all a game, he tells someone at the end, and they're all children. They'll have fun until it all goes wrong. Meanwhile he travels, stays in the best places, and cheats on his wife.

I read a few critiques of this, that it's too light and should have been darker. But it's based on "Das Kapital" by Karl Marx and works in Marx's ideas. Some of it seems caricatured and clichéd, but it's really just drawing on an ideology put forth by Marx and Mao Tse Tung.

Like all of these corporation/banking films and documentaries, it's depressing. Last night I saw a film called "Common" where a woman's son is killed. She is getting money, but not in time to bury him, so she tries to borrow it from a bank. She can't. No, she can't, but everyone just piled money on Enron when they had nothing but dummy corporations and no product. Just threw money at them.

I have to think, as Costa-Gravas seems to, that someday this will all go amuck, though in some situations, it already has -- the housing industry, Enron, Bernie Maddock, reported to the SEC countless times, but no one could be bothered to do anything about it -- and on and on. I don't have any answers. Well, I do, actually. The answer is Greed.