Capitalism: A Love Story: Critic Reviews

At its best, Capitalism: A Love Story is a searing outcry against the excesses of a cutthroat time. At its worst, it's dorm-room Marxism.

Like most of his movies, Capitalism is a tragedy disguised as a comedy; it's also an entertainment.

Michael Moore has succeeded in getting a film on this subject actually released in cinemas: a very sharp and entertaining one at that.

Capitalism is as entertaining as Roger & Me, and its critique skewers both major political parties, calling into question the economic policies of Bill Clinton as well as Ronald Reagan.

Isn't every Michael Moore film ultimately about capitalism? This one just has a more facetious title.

[A] scattershot, lazy slice of agitprop, which recycles Moore's usual slice-and-dice job on corporations, while bobbing a curtsey to the current crisis.

The film works best when Moore sits with representatives of the 99 percent of Americans vulnerable to financial freefall.

Mr. Moore aims to proselytize his friends and demonize his enemies. His movie hits both marks.

Smart-alecky and simplistic? Yeah. And primo Moore.

In a movie long on symbols, dead peasants are the most egregious, but a close second would be the rah-rah "confidential" Citibank memo about the United States having become a "plutonomy."

Moore relates a half-century of fraud in singsong narration that makes him seem like Mister Rogers with 200 extra pounds and a Che Guevara T-shirt instead of a cardigan. But what a figure he cuts.

Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story is something else -- not a good movie or a coherent exposition of the meltdown but an emotional attack on capitalism as a system, an attempt, literally, to de-moralize capitalism.

The film's title is never explained. What does Moore mean? Maybe it's that capitalism means never having to say you're sorry.

While it's amusing to watch Moore on camera plaster the entrance to the New York Stock Exchange with crime-scene tape, when Moore goes through his customary security-guard harassment in another segment, it's hard not to think: Here we go again.

Like most of his movies, this will probably make your blood boil, but it functions at a level of such blubbering emotionality that it might as well be a Glenn Beck rant.

In passages, the movie is eloquent. In sum, it is scattershot. Organization is not Moore's strongest suit; indignation is.

With Capitalism: A Love Story, Michael Moore delivers his liveliest, most radical film to date.

Michael Moore is up to his old tricks in Capitalism: A Love Story, and that's sure to both infuriate, and entertain and inform, depending which side of the Michael Moore fence you stand on.

Capitalism may be flawed, but it is nevertheless entertaining. Which counts for a lot.

By returning to his roots, professional gadfly Michael Moore turns in one of his best films.

Isn't it Washington that took money from the taxpayers to bail out the banks? Shouldn't Moore run his yellow crime-scene tape around the White House?

Capitalism is alternately moving and disheartening, energizing and enervating.

The result is a film that stands as one of Moore's finest arguments. It's also one of his funniest, if you accept that the jokes are all of the gritted-teeth variety.

Has only a few traces of Moore's wit and humor, and they're nearly lost in the fog of his indignation.

As a filmmaker creating a product for a marketplace, supported by profit-seeking investors, he obviously has some comfort level with capitalism in the sense of doing business.