Who’s afraid of the ‘Wolf of Wall Street?’

"The Wolf of Wall Street," Martin Scorsese's depiction of corruption and greed on the trading floors of the 1990s, has certainly divided critics.

TIME magazine's Richard Corliss said the movie covering the highs and lows of Wall Street stockbroker Jordan Belfort is "bathing in amorality until it drowns." The Wall Street Journal's Joe Morgenstern, meanwhile, said he couldn't wait for the "hollow spectacle" to end.

But many others were bowled over, with the Los Angeles Times' Betsy Sharkey arguing that the movie will have you hating the "Wall Street high rollers" even more than you do already.

(Read more: Strippers, dwarfs & coke: The real Wall Street)

Jonah Hill, one of the stars of the film, told CNBC about the Wall Street portrayed in the movie, saying: "I've never seen anything close to the excess of what we did in this film in Hollywood."

He defended director Scorsese, saying he doesn't think the movie glorifies crime, but rather lets the audience judge what was right and what was wrong, and displays "the pitfalls of excessive behavior."