No one can accuse Stephen Gaghan of blowing off his homework: as a screenwriter (Traffic) and writer-director (Syriana), he’s shown an eagerness to explore complex social or political situations even as he lays out a weave of individual stories. This elephantine drama fictionalizes the mid-90s meltdown of the Canadian mining company Bre-X Minerals Limited, whose stock skyrocketed in 1995 after it reported the discovery of a major gold deposit in Indonesia, then plummeted in 1997 when the company’s assays were exposed as fraudulent. Matthew McConaughey, modeling the most detailed and least convincing bald wig ever, stars as the businessman chasing the gold deposit, though his scenes in the jungle with dashing geologist Edgar Ramírez are much duller than those in the movie’s latter half, which transpire in glassy office spaces but crackle with corporate and geopolitical skullduggery following the big score. With Bryce Dallas Howard, Bruce Greenwood, Bill Camp, and Stacy Keach.