an angry film for an angry country
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09/02/09
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American Casino (2009)
70
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Reviews Counted:30
Fresh:21
Rotten:9
Average Rating:6.5/10
Consensus: American Casino presents the causes and effects of the American banking crisis with just enough clarity and rage to overcome its flaws.
Rated: Not Rated
Genre: Education/General Interest
Theatrical Release:Sep 4, 2009 Limited
Synopsis: “I don’t think most people really understood that they were in a casino” says award-winning financial reporter Mark Pittman. “When you’re in the Street’s casino, you’ve got to play by their... [More]
Director: Leslie Cockburn, Andrew Cockburn
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Reviews for American Casino
Thanks for not talking to us like idiots, but the lack of accessibility ends up turning this into a collegiate lecture.
09/02/09
The movie's lack of Michael Moore-style dynamism has a dulling effect.
09/04/09
A lopsided, visually uninspired film that works best when it eschews the complex numbers-crunching of its financial industry pundits and whistle-blowers to profile the everyday victims of the crisis.
09/18/09
This authoritative, far-reaching documentary by veteran investigative journalists Leslie and Andrew Cockburn comes off as curiously bloodless.
09/01/09
Top CriticMuch of the final two-thirds of the documentary can have a TV newsmagazine feel: solidly presented, but not shaped to a larger end. As self-righteousness sets in, however justified, so does a certain artistic slackness.
11/05/09
The film is designed for the public, but because it's made up of interviews with financial insiders -- and financial insiders talk like experts, not like high school economics teachers -- some of this information may be difficult for lay people to follow.
08/21/09
Top CriticThe pic never completely escapes a smallscreen feel, however cogent the material.
05/01/09
The film doesn’t come to life until too late in the game, when it takes the original tack of exploring the housing crisis through abandoned backyard swimming pools...
09/03/09
This film stands as an intimate, terrifying document that renders an incomprehensible slice of recent history in human terms.
09/18/09
Top CriticA revelatory howl against the still-gestating, $8 trillion-and-counting financial-services industry bailout, American Casino follows the money that changed hands, or account columns, at every step of the subprime home-loan scam.
05/03/09
Essential viewing for understanding how banks systematically targeted low income groups in over-leveraged mortgage lending practices that led to a catastrophic economic collapse, "American Casino" is still a far from perfect documentary.
09/05/09
As Leslie Cockburn's camera roams the foreclosed rowhouses of Baltimore, their planked-up doors reminiscent of shots from The Wire, I thought: Baltimore needs some good PR.
11/05/09
As the Cockburns interview exterminators and local police about the rats' nests and meth labs that tend to proliferate in foreclosed homes, the corruption metaphor is like something out of a Nathanael West novel.
09/10/09
The Cockburns have finally made a movie about a nuclear disaster that actually happened -- their subject is the social ecology of financial meltdown.
08/31/09
Top CriticYou'll never hear an economist explain derivatives again without thinking of the woman who walks away from the camera, weeping, as her mortgage broker refuses her check, or children's dolls splayed out on the floors of empty homes.
09/07/09
Top CriticA riveting and multidimensional examination of the subprime mortgage meltdown and its devastating impact on homeowners from poor African-Americans to wealthy Californians with swimming pools.
09/03/09
It may be a little too Jack Webb for the masses, but there is value to its sober, just-the-facts approach.
10/02/09
Has the feel of a quickie made-for-TV doc. It's bare bones ... but timely.
09/03/09
The Cockburns paint a picture of a financial world devoid of morality and scruples, a culture in which reckless disregard of reason and caution led to a towering house of cards that could only come crashing down.
11/22/09
Latest News for American Casino
October 25, 2009:
Trailer & Poster review 
More...
September 03, 2009:
Expose' asks what happend with economic crisis.
More...
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