I never got into the corporate thrillers of the 1980s, ’90s, and aughts, the subject of a new retrospective at the Criterion Channel. These films tended to involve plots and characters that ostentatiously deplore that world of greed and wrongdoing, but that deploring generally requires a long, lingering, lascivious process of glamorizing evil excesses.

They’re rather like Cecil B. DeMille’s biblical epics that proved wildly popular for decades, such as The King of Kings (1927), The Sign of the Cross (1932), Samson and Delilah (1949), and The Ten Commandments (1923 and again in 1956). Their spurious piety in condemning sin provided a perfect excuse for depicting it on a tantalizingly vast scale. Sign of the Cross even features a sequence in which a nearly naked Christian woman is tied up and presented to a gorilla in the Roman colosseum. Just another pious biblical epic from Hollywood.

But I have to admit, my prejudice against the genre led me to miss some pretty good films. Now that Criterion Channel is running a ten-film Corporate Thrillers series, I’ve finally seen Primal Fear (1996) and Michael Clayton (2007), for example, both remarkably solid dramas that insist on the dark, serious malevolence of our capitalist world in a way that some of the goofier works do not — looking at you, The Devil’s Advocate (1997).