As the greed from Wall Street once again rears its ugly head this past week, filmmaker Oliver Stone's timing couldn't be better as he works on the highly anticipated and even more highly secretive sequel to his brilliant tome of morality versus greed, 1987's Wall Street.
Beginning with the complex thriller Following, produced on a shoestring in London, he's made a succession of masterly movies - Memento, Insomnia, Batman Begins and The Prestige - each a piece of sophisticated storytelling pursuing recurrent themes, among them questions of identity and complementarity and of deadly games played between brilliant men where issues of morality become blurred.
Their entwined lives lie at the heart of this brilliant inquiry into art, family and morality at the turn of the century.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid mocked conventional morality, and Arthur Penn's brilliant, picaresque Little Big Man poured comic scorn on manifest destiny and dared using the word "genocide" to describe the treatment of Native Americans.
George Price produced the most general algebra of this genetic morality with his eponymous equation, but this brilliant flash of insight opened the door to the mechanical dissection of altruism which drove him to madness.
Polanski's removed morality is exactly why he is often brilliant: He is so empathetic to his characters that, like a trauma victim floating above the pain, he is personally impersonal.
Never afraid of big ideas, morality or politics, Smith's retelling is bold and brilliant - containing the best sex I've read in years.
Her 1997 book, "Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture, and Philosophy," was hailed as a "major contribution to moral philosophy" and a "brilliant examination of relativism" by Hilary Putnam, an emeritus professor of philosophy at Harvard.
You likely already know about FX's "The Americans," a brilliant espionage thriller that's really a dark poem about marriage and morality, which has won many deserved raves.
Today we would dismiss all of these brilliant, narcissistic artists and writers as alcoholics, the word itself carrying its own antiseptic morality, its own irrefutable argument for balance and sobriety, but back then they were simply charismatic.
