Critics reviews

It may not be the fanciest or flashiest of financial thrillers—more like off-brand David Fincher or Steven Soderbergh—but it gets the job done... It skips past the usual handwringing over the temptations of capitalist wealth and just gets right to the risk-taking and double-crossing, assuming (rightly) that viewers don't need a character to have a backstory, a tragic secret, and a dead spouse, best friend, or parent to understand why they'd do anything to hold on to a career.

The picture works only passably as a story about corporate intrigue and backstabbing—some of it scenarios feel a little stagey—but it's fascinating as one view of what it's like to be a woman working in what is still, in so many ways, a man's world.

Weaving in and out of the multiple storylines of Amy Fox's intricate screenplay, director Meera Menon paces Equity with a sure hand, juggling the different threads efficiently and confidently. It's all so involving in the moment that only afterward do some of the screenplay's faults begin to register.

Menon's direction is merely efficient, but the script, by Amy Fox (who co-wrote the story with Thomas and Reiner), gives the women's personal lives equal weight, as they struggle to balance family and work and face male clients whose interests aren't all business. The story fits together too neatly and the characters remain ciphers, but scenes of news reports of the high-profile deals—in which the protagonists see themselves—evoke an eerie air of plausibility and alienation.

While the severity of the film's environment convinces, the specifics of Amy Fox's screenplay — tangled up in tech IPOs, post-Snowden security paranoia and venal investment banking practice — are less consistently persuasive.