Five business films better than 'Wall Street'

Let's get something straight right off the bat, Oliver Stone's Wall Street (1987) is an iconic film. God knows the cult of Gordon Gekko alone has inspired an untold number of young traders to set off on a career path that might one day find them making billion-dollar phone calls from a deluxe office suite while taking their own blood pressure and smoking a cigarette – never mind that this was never Stone's intention. It is a unique snapshot of a unique set of individuals playing out a morality tale in a unique setting during a truly unique decade. But is it an important business film?

Watching it in 2010, the cringe-factor extends way beyond the big hair, gratuitous sushi-eating and rampant consumerism that appears to have characterised New York in the 80s. It feels long, but the plot lines seem underdeveloped. The characters appear like caricatures – like Hal Holbrook's Lou Mannheim, the resident sage at Fox's broking firm, who materialises at various points to deliver such pearls of wisdom as "The main thing about money, Bud, is that it makes you do things you don't want to do" – and the relationships are by-and-large unbelievable (except, perhaps, for that between real-life father and son Charlie and Martin Sheen, who play Bud and Carl Fox).

Apart from a couple of truly great scenes between Michael Douglas' brilliantly portrayed Gekko and Sheen's Fox – in particular Gekko's final monologue about capitalism and, of course, his famous "greed is good” speech – it leaves you wanting. And more than 20 years later, with the return of an unrepentant Gekko in Wall Street II: Money Never Sleeps, there is less cringing, but the feeling is much the same: too much going on, not enough depth, not enough insight into the motivations of our main protagonists or the mysterious beast to which they are slaves.

So without further ado, here is a list of five films about business – in various shapes and forms – that we think are better than the Wall Street movies.

1. The Godfather trilogy – Really, you could count any good gangster film in a list of top business flicks, but Francis Ford Coppola's sweeping epic, starting with The Godfather in 1972, sets the benchmark. From the opening scene, where we find Don Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) and his consiglieri Tom Hagan (Robert Duval) listening to the plight of a disillusioned guest on the day of Connie Corleone's wedding – as Hagan tells us, "no Sicilian can ever refuse a request on his daughter's wedding day” – the intricacies of the running of the Corleone family business have you hooked. And the dual roles of Vito Corleone as the old-fashioned Italian patriarch and empire-builder, and Al Pacino's Michael Corleone, as the prodigal son who reluctantly succeeds his father and is quickly all-consumed by his role, are brilliantly portrayed – while every single other character (and there are many) is an important piece in the puzzle.

"(The Godfather) is about an empire run from a dark, suburban Tudor palace where people, in siege, eat out of cardboard containers while babies cry and get underfoot,” wrote New York Times critic Vincent Canby back in 1972. "It was (author of the novel The Godfather Mario) Puzo's point, which has been made somehow more ambiguous and more interesting in the film, that the experience of the Corleone Family... may be the mid-twentieth-century equivalent of the oil and lumber and railroad barons of nineteenth-century America.”

(A close second in this category would be the Coen brothers' brilliant 1990 gangster film Miller's Crossing, not least for mob boss Johnny Caspar's fabulous speech on ethics: "It's the grease makes us get along, what separates us from the animals, beasts a burden, beasts a prey. Ethics.”)

2. There Will Be Blood – The first 14-odd, dialogue-free minutes of Paul Thomas Anderson's 2006 cinematic masterpiece tell you everything that Wall Street didn't about the sort of man who is ruled by a singular, unfathomable drive to build an empire, no matter the cost. Daniel Day Lewis, as budding, turn-of-the century Californian oil man Daniel Plainview, is mesmerising. As Michael Phillips from the Chicago Tribune puts it, his "eyes glow, however deceptively, with paternal concern one second and turn as cold as a snake's the next.”

The film is loosely based on Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel Oil!, says Phillips, although PT Anderson trades the book's original socialism-vs-capitalism allegory "for an equally simple square-off between two men and their false (but profitable) idols” – capitalism and religion. And "Day-Lewis doesn't moralise about his character,” he adds, because "he's too busy making him unforgettable in his obsession.”

3. Glengarry Glen Ross – Who hasn't found themselves caught up in a comedy moment and shouting "ABC: Always Be Closing” – the quote made famous by Alec Baldwin's testosterone-addled business consultant Blake (or should we call him Mr f*ck you?) in this 1992 film about the real estate game. And "Baldwin's ferocious speech ...about the sanctity of the bottom line is scary and stands as a caustic indictment of the 1980s business mentality,” says Variety magazine's Todd McCarthy. The film's hugely talented line-up of battling realtors – Al Pacino, Jack Lemon, Ed Harris, Alan Arkin, Kevin Spacey – was directed by James Foley, but the true star of the show is screen writer (and author of the original stage play) David Mamet who, as McCarthy puts it, "reveals his exceptional talent for writing almost poetic working-class vernacular (and) scores his major implicit thematic thrusts against the nature of the way business-at-large is conducted.”

4. Office space – This 1999 classic, directed by Mike Judge, is aptly described by Chicago Sun-Times' Roger Ebert as "a comic cry of rage against the nightmare of modern office life.” It revolves around the character of Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston), an IT drone who, as he puts it, sits in a cubicle and updates bank software for the 2000 switch. Needless to say, he is dissatisfied, as are his best friends and co-workers, Michael Bolton (yes, like the singer) and Samir Nagheenanajar. So watching these characters deal with their lot of office protocols, corporate speak, middle-management consultants and the constant threat of lay-offs – including one unforgettable scene where they remove a much-despised photocopier from the office, take it to a deserted field and smash it to pieces – is like so much therapy for anyone who has worked in any sort of office. "Office Space is like the evil twin of Clockwatchers,” says Ebert. "Both movies are about the ways corporations standardise office routines, so that workers are interchangeable and can be paid as little as possible.”

5. Boiler Room – In its close attention to the ethos of buying and selling, lying and cheating, this 2000 film about the journey of a young trader is "both an homage to Oliver Stone's 1987 fable of innocence corrupted by avarice and a critique of it,” says AO Scott from The New York Times. Like Wall Street, it is no cinematic masterpiece – it, too, got a lot of bad reviews upon release. But in the same way that There Will Be Blood truly captures the essence of capitalist obsession, Boiler Room captures the heady mix of desperation, testosterone, insecurity and greed that might drive a young male trader to become the next Fabrice Tourre. As young, upcoming trader Seth Davis, Giavanni Ribisi is "an intense, brooding presence,” says Eric Harrison in the LA Times. And while he's "playing a man who sucks others dry," Ribisi "makes us care about Seth's struggles with his conscience.” The scenes – written and directed by Ben Younger – in which various young traders push stock to unsuspecting investors over the phone are riveting. "The baby sharks of JT Marlin like to play Gordon Gekko karaoke, bloviating along with Michael Douglas's mephistophelean arbitrageur and mocking his windy grandiosity,” says Scott. But compared to them, "Gekko is a great intellectual and a devoted humanitarian. His mantra, 'greed is good', strikes a sententious, faintly absurd note in the amoral world of Boiler Room, in which greed is simply axiomatic.”