Like Rams before it, the ice-glazed hillsides and stark ochre grasslands of northern Iceland are the backdrop for Grímur Hákonarson’s third feature The County, a rural drama that explores the murkier side of local politics.

“Psychopathologies come and go but they always tell us about the historical time period in which they’re produced.” So says the journalist and academic Chris Hedges in Lauren Greenfield’s documentary Generation Wealth. The idea the film plays with is that a psychopathology which currently dominates to a morbid degree is our obsession with being rich and, as much, with the public signifiers of wealth.

When Kentish hardcore punk two-piece, Slaves emerged with their debut album, Are You Satisfied?, they caused quite a stir with lairy tunes of austerity Britain like “The Hunter”, “Sockets” and the magnificent “Hey”. Since the heady days of 2015, however, they seem to have been somewhat stuck in the musical doldrums, in need of something to reinvigorate their sound.

There's surprising and then there's The Lehman Trilogy, the National Theatre premiere in which a long-established director surprises his audience and, in the process, surpasses himself. The talent in question is Sam Mendes, who a quarter-century or more into his career has never delivered up the kind of sustained, smart, ceaselessly inventive minimalism on view here.

Having recently seen Chris Pine reprising his role as the headstrong but heroic Captain James T Kirk in the latest Star Trek, it's a revelation to find him in this gritty tale of crime, punishment, righted wrongs and moral ambiguity. To his credit, he doesn't wilt in the glare of his co-stars Jeff Bridges and Ben Foster, both of whom are giving it both barrels here.

This programme was not ironic, humorous or in any way lighthearted. I’m fairly sure of that, but worry that perhaps I’ve missed the joke.  A withering take-down or a meaty exposé of the corruption and excess of the extremely wealthy would have served a purpose, but this was neither. It pretended to offer a salacious glimpse behind closed doors but instead delivered a congratulatory slap on the back to the villains we love to hate – it seemed, in fact, to be a straightforward “Banker’s Guide to the Art Market”.

Arts festivals the size of the Venice Biennale are inevitably patchy. The appointed directors are hardly ever given enough time to curate and fill absolutely vast volumes of space. They can exhort the many national and individual participants to follow their lead, and yet they have no editorial control over them. And so for this year’s architecture biennale, with its theme of social responsibility – Reporting from the Front – set by director Alejandro Aravena, consider the newly-built Australian pavilion. This proudly features a swimming pool.

You are a massive cock. A gigantic tool. You are a monumental prick. Grayson Perry did not mince his message as he concluded his portrait of modern maleness with a tour of the City of London. At the end of each programme he has presented the subjects of his study with an artistic response to their world. The men working in so-called financial services inspired him to create a work called Object in Foreground (pictured below) in the shape of a giant penis.

Although terms like "collateralised debt obligations" and "credit default swaps" were much bandied-about after the banking crash of 2008, they still make sense to almost nobody except bond traders and arbitragers. However, director Adam McKay has come as close as is humanly possible to getting the baffled layman inside the belly of the financial beast in this complex but absorbing movie, and he's done it with wit and flair.

The Big Short is based on Michael Lewis's book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, a true story of how a handful of maverick investors discerned that the financial industry was perpetrating a fraud of historic proportions based on bullshit and sleight of hand. Some of the names have been changed, but one which hasn't is Dr Michael Burry (Christian Bale), a former neurologist with a glass eye, a passion for playing heavy metal drums, and Asperger's syndrome. Subsequently running his own Scion Capital hedge fund, Burry had the monomaniacal tenacity required to sit down and read through all the individual mortgage agreements which had been bundled together to create the "mortgage-backed securities" which became a critical component of the banking Armageddon. He discovered that many of them were worth much less than the paper they were printed on, and thus the financial instruments derived from them were doomed to crash.But that was only the start. In order to exploit his startling insight, Burry had to persuade the bankers to create the credit default swap, whereby he could bet large on the collapse of the US housing market. Since everybody had convinced themselves that the housing business, anchored on the personal investments of millions of honest Americans, could never go wrong, they were delighted to oblige.

The rest is history, but McKay has transformed it into a rollercoaster of big characters, moral hazard and blackly comic digressions. He's hugely assisted by a powerful cast. Bale, ever the method fanatic, was a shoo-in for the charm-free, obsessive Burry. Brad Pitt (also one of the producers, pictured above) does a senior statesman turn as veteran finance-Einstein Steve Rickert.

Steve Carell is superb as Mark Baum, a bull-headed, bad-tempered hedge fund manager who gets wind of Burrell's activities and leads his team of wisecracking whippersnappers (including a sparky Rafe Spall) through their own personal investigation into the looming financial tsunami. Down in Florida, they find insanely overstretched buyers being fed lavish mortgages by lenders who haven't a clue what they're selling. In a scarily comic climactic scene, Baum shares a debating platform with a senior banker who's blithely declaring his faith in his company's shares while assembled financial journalists are watching the price plummet to oblivion on their Blackberrys.

Rude and crude as he is, Baum does at least feel shock and remorse as the full extent of the crisis becomes clear, with its crushing impact on millions of fellow-citizens. McKay sprays moral outrage over the bankers, but his protagonists aren't much better as they rejoice in being clever enough to create a personal jackpot out of this collective purgatory. Particularly smarmy is Jared Vennett, played by Ryan Gosling like a weasel dipped in Brylcreem, and the most eminently punchable banker on Wall Street (Gosling and Carell pictured below). McKay also uses him as narrator, letting him break the fourth wall with asides to the audience ("yes, this meeting really did happen").That's just one of several devices the director shuffles to fend off glazed-eye syndrome. On-screen text might pop up helpfully, while spliced-in flashes of pop-culture imagery add a subliminal timeline. A deadpan sequence of how staid and boring banking used to be before the 1980s evokes a sleepy world of sludge-green and taupe, where bankers were mostly at lunch and two per cent was considered a handsome profit. The best trick is the unashamedly gratuitous introduction of celebrities to explain thorny plot points – "to tell you about subprime mortgages, here's Margot Robbie in a bubble-bath", or svelte popstrel Selena Gomez teaming up with economist Richard Thaler to give y'all the lowdown on "Synthetic CDOs".

Smart and sharp as the movie is, turning arcane financial activities into mass entertainment is like Splitting the Atom II, and on top of that there's no avoiding the fact that this is a movie all about men, most of them not very pleasant. Marisa Tomei gets a bit of room to shine as Baum's wife Cynthia, but Melissa Leo's Georgia Hale is little more than a stick with which to beat the corrupt ratings agencies which played a contemptible role in the crash. Nonetheless, as an investigation of a bout of collective insanity which almost destroyed the civilised world, this is a ride worth taking.

BRAD PITT’S BIG MOMENTS

Allied. Doomed but entertaining attempt to revive 1940s Hollywood

Fury. David Ayer and Brad Pitt take the war film by the scruff of the neck

Inglorious Basterds. Pitt is gloriously absurd in Tarantino WW2 alternative history

Killing Them Softly. Brad Pitt cleans up an almighty mess in Andrew Dominik’s high-calibre crime ensemble

Moneyball. How Billy Beane created a revolution in Major League baseball

The Counsellor. Ridley Scott ensemble thriller is nasty, brutish and short or mysterious, upsetting and alluring

The Tree of Life. Terrence Malick’s elliptical epic leads us through time, space and one family’s story

PLUS ONE TURKEY

World War Z. It's World War with a Zee as Brad Pitt battles the undead and a zombie script

OVERLEAF: RYAN GOSLING'S FILMOGRAPHY