Rumours, insider deals and rampant speculation drive markets down and companies to bankruptcy in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, which weaves fiction with the fact of the global financial crisis.
Oliver Stone returns to the scene of his 1987 hit Wall Street, and Michael Douglas is back as ruthless corporate raider Gordon Gekko in a film where big banks have replaced the greedy individual as the bad guys.
Part morality tale, part revenge thriller and part analysis of where the financial markets and regulatory authorities went wrong, the movie has its world premiere at the Cannes film festival on Friday.
Timely and topical as concerns over the strength of the economic recovery grow, Stone said he, like others, was confused about whether he thought capitalism was a good or a bad thing.
"It seems that it's excessive and unregulated and I would love to see serious reform," Stone told reporters after a press screening. "There are tremendous issues worldwide, I mean it goes to Greece and England and Spain and Portugal.
"In 1987 I thought it was going to correct itself. I thought the system will correct, but it didn't, it got worse."
MORAL ANCHOR
In the follow-up, Gekko's daughter Winnie, played by Carey Mulligan, is the movie's moral centre who is in a relationship with Jake Moore.
Shia LaBeouf takes on the role of the brash young trader who blends ambition and avarice with altruism through his commitment to investing in green energy projects.
Douglas said he and Stone had been "stunned" that the original Gekko was idolised by many Wall Street aspirants.
"We just never anticipated that all these... people in business school would just be ranting and raving that this was the person that they wanted to be," he told reporters.
Reflecting the passage of time in the latest film, Gekko is handed back a giant mobile phone when he leaves prison, and rather than repeating the mantra of the original movie that "greed is good", he now speaks about how "greed got greedier".
On a lecture tour to promote his new book Is Greed Good? he attacks complex derivatives that only a handful of people understand, calling them "weapons of mass destruction", and argues that speculation is "the mother of all evils".
Michael gives no support to Polanski
Michael Douglas says he will not sign a petition in support of director Roman Polanski, who is under house arrest in Switzerland in connection with a 33-year-old sex scandal.
Douglas told French radio it would be "unfair" for him to sign a petition for "somebody who did break the law."
Other filmmakers at the festival, including French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard and actor-director Mathieu Amalric, have signed the petition, which is posted on a website overseen by renowned French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy.
Polanski was taken into custody in September and is currently under house arrest in Geneva.
