Inside Job is the story of a crime without punishment, an outrage that has mostly escaped legal sanction and social stigma.

While  Inside Job can feel at times like the best sort of university lecture, it finds filmmaker Charles Ferguson summoning the moral force necessary for an irrefutable condemnation of the villains, crooks and unethical scoundrels of Wall Street with heart-throbbing determination.

We see how deregulation of the financial services industry in the 1980s and ’90s, the growing popularity of derivatives, the real estate bubble, and the explosion of subprime lending were celebrated in a delusional euphoria and ascribed to the brilliance, power and wisdom of free market forces.

Narrated by Matt Damon with music by Peter Gabriel, the film lets us step inside the rarefied, privileged worlds in which Wall Street titans and their political enablers flourished. Our outrage is built step-by-step on compelling research that builds a carefully articulated argument. Never before has so much information been so well assembled into such a gripping narrative.

The film recently won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Film in 2011. In his acceptance speech, Ferguson said: “Forgive me, I must start by pointing out that three years after our horrific financial crisis caused by massive fraud, not a single financial executive has gone to jail, and that’s wrong.”

Inside Job is being released on DVD in early March. Make sure you see it.