This must be documentary week. After “The Lie Detector” on American Experience, I binge-watched the four-part Netflix series, MADOFF: The Monster of Wall Street.
The substance is excellent, but the style is annoying. I agree with everything in this review from The Daily Beast.
Berlinger… falls back on his worst habit: staging dramatic recreations that unnecessarily tip the action toward melodrama.
The narrative provided by Diana Henriques in the series has great clarity. So it’s no surprise that her book, The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death of Trust, was adapted into a movie.
This pre-existing dramatization of the Madoff story further proves the point made in The Daily Beast review of the Netflix series.
There’s little reason to have actors playing Madoff and his associates in dialogue-free sequences designed to accompany interview snippets.
The DeNiro movie is on HBO Max. I’ll get to it after watching the first part of another new documentary, Frontline’s “Global Spyware Scandal: Exposing Pegasus.”
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/global-spyware-scandal-exposing-pegasus/