As Jordan Belfort, a real-life stockbroker who built an empire on fraud and excess, DiCaprio delivered a performance of terrifying comic energy.
Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) follows Belfort from modest beginnings to a life of yachts, drugs and criminal schemes, and DiCaprio never lets the audience look away. He is funny, charming and appalling in the same breath, and the film’s satire depends on that uncomfortable appeal.
It earned DiCaprio an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, and it remains a defining late-career role: a study of greed performed at full throttle.
Image credit: Georges Biard, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.