Set almost entirely over one frantic 24-hour period at the dawn of the 2008 financial crisis, this ensemble drama follows the executives and traders at a fictional investment bank, played by Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Paul Bettany and Zachary Quinto among others, as a junior analyst's risk model reveals the firm is catastrophically overexposed and the leadership must decide, in the dead of night, whether to sell off toxic assets they know will devastate the market and their own reputations. Writer-director J.C. Chandor, in his debut feature, avoids simplistic villainy in favor of morally exhausted characters making rational, self-interested decisions within a broken system, giving the financial collapse a human, almost Shakespearean intimacy. The film earned Chandor an Oscar nomination for his screenplay and was widely praised as one of the sharpest, most clear-eyed dramatizations of the 2008 crisis. Its dialogue-driven, boardroom-bound tension has been compared favorably to classic ensemble dramas like '12 Angry Men'.