Greed Is Now Being Compared To Cancer.

No fewer than three of the season's new films are focused on Wall Street and its players, each with its own moral message about the way markets are run and who's pulling the strings.

Here,the much awaited Wall Street sequel - Money Never Sleeps looks at the lessons about Wall Street, from the classics of years past to this year's latest offerings.

The Lesson: Beware of bubbles, figurative and literal.

At President Obama's recent town hall meeting a broker asked: Isn't it time to stop treating Wall Street like a piñata? Oliver Stone's answer: Not yet, punk. And now the controversial director has a brand new stick. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is the 23-years-in-the-making sequel to Wall Street, the movie that introduced us to trader Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) and his catchy slogan, “Greed is good.” Hollywood has always agreed with Wall Street on that point -- that's why they make sequels.

While Douglas returns as Gekko, this year's Charlie Sheen is Shia LaBeouf (the hot Transformer kid), playing a young hotshot with designs on the big score, and also on Gekko's daughter Winnie (Carey Mulligan).

Stone is the kind of director who makes Michael Moore look subtle and here he's at his bludgeoning best, aka worst. More than once he includes shots of actual soap bubbles. For those who have come straight from a screening of Resident Evil: Afterlife, that's known as a visual metaphor. It's what some movies have instead of zombies. As befits the sequel to a 1987 movie, there's a retro feel to the whole thing -- a little bit of '80s flash, but now with derivatives.

My favorite part of the film is the lesson that in the darkest days of any financial tragedy what matters most are love and family. Life goes on," says Lawrence McDonald, author of A Colossal Failure of Common Sense -- The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers, former Lehman Brothers VP of Distressed Debt. " My second favorite part was Michael Douglas' vintage speech on his fictional book lecture tour. He emerges from prison, after collecting his brick-size Motorola cell from the warden, writes a best-selling book and is on stage at a university in New York. In about two minutes and 25 seconds he (and Oliver Stone) do a masterful job describing and explaining the financial crisis."

Despite being flattered by how many lines from his book are used in the movie, McDonald ultimately gives it a mixed review. "I noticed early on there was lots of excitement, applause, and laughter dancing around the theater, but at the end of the film everyone got up and left a little confused, with zero emotion," he says.

The movie, which opens last week, also compares greed to a cancer. Stone can't be blamed for the wincing that will accompany that speech in light of Douglas' recent diagnosis. But at least the actor's feisty performance will remind us why we need to pray for his speedy recovery.