The Wizard of Lies

The Wizard of Lies centers on Bernard Madoff, the respected Wall Street financier and former Nasdaq chairman whose investment fund was exposed in 2008 as the largest Ponzi scheme in American history. Rather than following the mechanics of the fraud alone, the film traces what the collapse meant for the people around him, including his wife Ruth and his sons Andrew and Mark, many of whom had been involved in the business. The story is drawn from Diana Henriques's book about the case.

Barry Levinson directed the film, the twenty-fifth of twenty-eight features in his career, arriving between Rock the Kasbah and Paterno. Robert De Niro plays Madoff and Michelle Pfeiffer plays Ruth, with Hank Azaria, Kristen Connolly, Lily Rabe and Alessandro Nivola among the main cast; ninety performers are credited in all. The screenplay was written by John Burnham Schwartz, Sam Levinson and Samuel Baum, and the film was produced by HBO Films and Tribeca Productions.

It runs 133 minutes and was made for television, released in May 2017. On IMDb it holds 6.8/10 from around 32,000 votes, while on TMDB it has 6.6/10 from a much smaller pool of users. A critics' rating of 6.5/10 from 51 reviews places professional assessment close to, and slightly below, the audience scores.