Rogue Trader

You don’t give a hoot about The Phantom Menace, yet somewhere deep inside, you suspect it won’t be a fulfilling summer without a shot of Ewan McGregor. Witness here, then, the Scotsman’s fine turn as Nick Leeson, the British futures trader whose fast-and-loose market executions brought down his employer, Barings, the prominent English bank. The film takes a sympathetic view of Leeson, which is fine; the problem is, it never offers a sense of the man behind the mania. What does come through is that Leeson ate a lot of candy during crises. Cadbury wrappers shouldn’t be made signifiers of emotional distress.

–By Ginia Bellafante