Capitalism: A Love Story

Michael Moore made this a year after the 2008 financial crisis. It screened at Venice to loud applause. Its strongest passages are not statistics but individual people. Families are followed inside as they are evicted. A widow and a widower describe discovering that their late partners' employers had taken out large life-insurance policies on them and collected. Airline pilots explain that their pay requires them to hold second and third jobs. Moore also cites an internal corporate memo to the effect that one per cent of the population holds ninety-five per cent of the country's wealth. The second hour is given to the backroom dealing between Wall Street and the White House and to financial deregulation. Who it is for: viewers who know Moore's method and want the crisis through stories rather than numbers. Who it is not for: anyone expecting balance. Moore is a participant in his own film, gives the other side no hearing, and the result is closer to a closing argument than a documentary.