“I had not intended to cry, but I couldn’t think about all those faces without crying,” Howard Lutnick recalls. “It wasn’t up to me. I wasn’t in control.” Lutnick, the chairman and chief executive of the Wall Street trading firm Cantor Fitzgerald, is filmed sobbing a great deal in Out of the Clear Blue Sky, and not only is it impossible to blame him, it’s hard to resist the impulse to join him…
The film is an emotionally draining and yet ultimately heartening documentary that follows Lutnick, a sort of weeping prophet in the spirit of Jeremiah, as he and his surviving co-workers cope with their sorrow, try to save their decimated company, and console the families of the dead…
Among other things, the movie is an object lesson in the human capacity for grace under pressure… but also a lesson in the apparently equal capacity for savagery and idiocy…
Director Gardner does an admirable job of getting Lutnick and other witnesses, including wives, husbands, siblings, and parents of the victims, to bare their souls; they are eloquent and affecting. She also synthesizes their recollections into an epic narrative worthy of her epic subject…
The Daily Beast