(Now streaming on Netflix) Director Steven Soderbergh — with the help of some big-name actors including Meryl Streep, Antonio Banderas, and Gary Oldman — tries to entertain and educate us about how the very wealthy employ tax havens and opaque legal structures to hide much of their wealth. The real- life basis for the story was the publication of confidential papers from a law firm in Panama — the so-called “Panama Papers” — which clearly laid out who was hiding money, and how. The story is complicated, as such financial stories often are, and characters sometimes talk to the audience to make it clearer. But movies such as The Big Short were much more effective in clarifying events by breaking the so-called Fourth Wall. That the story is worth telling makes you regret even more the way it’s told here : the movie is too sprawling and disjointed to form a cohesive narrative. An A for effort, but a much lower mark for the result.
