Equity (2016)

Former friends Naomi Bishop (Anna Gunn) and Samantha Ryan (Alysia Reiner) reunite for a power women panel. Naomi is a top investment banker with a hot IPO of internet privacy firm Cachet. She faces a glass ceiling especially after a problematic previous client. She's sleeping with corrupt trader Michael Connor (James Purefoy) who is desperate for inside information and is being investigated by US prosecutor Ryan. A programmer reveals a hack vulnerability to Naomi which Cachet CEO Ed vehemently denies. Naomi gets ambitious underling Erin Manning (Sarah Megan Thomas) for Ed to sign an indemnity clause.There are moments of greatness especially with Anna Gunn holding the center of the stage. This is almost good except little false notes keep popping up. I'm guessing Blackberry paid for the mention but it's shockingly unreal how every character is playing up their Blackberry phones. I'm fine with people going darker in the end but Naomi needs to be fired as a scapegoat. The movie fails to increase the intensity in many scenes with the exception of the climatic trading day. I love that Erin is secretly pregnant but Ed's pass at her needs to be bigger and more dangerously private. One of the reason I love Naomi being chewed out by her boss is that there is no buildup. He just barges in and starts barking at her. It's very effective. The connection between Naomi and Samantha needs to be tighter so that Samantha's part doesn't drift off so easily. It's obvious when Naomi gets the info that even a rumor could sink the IPO. The way to heighten the drama is for Naomi to lay out the ending of the movie directly to Ed and for the ending to happen nevertheless. She should tell Ed not to fire Marin and he fires her anyways. It's already bad that she's sleeping with Michael and gets blindsided by him. She can come off as a bit naive despite her brilliant smarts. While I get the female position in the professional sphere, the movie is not pushing the drama hard enough.

I cannot understand how a movie like this gets a 81% score on Rotten Tomatoes. The characters are under-developed, the movie is slow paced even though it's meant to be a thriller. To top all of this the director while trying to create strong female characters has included all the society stereotypes women face (just for the sake of it) ex.The lesbian relationship between the two characters. This movie is feminist to the core. If the director really wanted to show strong female leads then she should've learned it from Katherine Bigelow. The only good things about this movie is a powerful performance by Anna Gunn and an above average performance by Alysia Reiner. A star for this. 2nd star for the story (not the execution) And 3rd for the effort it took to make this movie.

If this movie was a stock about to get its debut, it would flop worse than the mock company that appears in it.With 1,5 "good, correct" male characters (the VP's husband disapproved of her dedication to work, so he gets only half...), we have women in all the lead roles.The hero is a white lesbian, in a relationship with a black, very supportive woman and having to small kids, all perfectly adjusted.All the women are presented as being inherently good - even if some, driven by the machinations of the evil men above and around them, do bad things to advance their careers....All the men (except the aforementioned 1,5) are manipulative or outright bad, with all the stereotypes related to Wall Street.An uni-dimensional movie with a poor, underdeveloped story. A thorough waste of time.

Strong, realistic portraits of women working in finance. Both savvy, attractive and fragile at the same time. The story and the inner workings of finance are close to reality. I think the writers have first hand experience from this world. Naomi (Gunn) delivered an authentic performance as did the rest of the cast. Recommended if you like seeing intelligent women and enjoy finance as a setting. The movie revolves around an Initial Public Offering for a new tech company and the work done immediately before and after. It shows in detail how difficult privacy and secrecy rules are to obey when everyone has their own agenda and also how difficult it is to catch white collar criminals.