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Critics Consensus: No consensus yet.
Critic Consensus: No consensus yet.
All Critics (22) | Top Critics (8) | Fresh (12) | Rotten (10) | DVD (1)
Even if you're convinced by the many well-spoken interviewees, the film's conclusion is almost as depressing as the historical indictment that precedes it.
Because Diaz constructs his movie like a classroom tutorial, we expect something more from him than an appeal to end privatization.
Powerful and upsetting.
Why Philippe Diaz has titled his new documentary The End of Poverty? is unclear, because this guilt trip/history lesson is really about the beginning of poverty.
The End Of Poverty? offers simplistic answers to many of the most pressing questions of our time.
It's heartbreaking, of course, but also crassly manipulative and blandly shot, too.
A confrontational documentary by neo-Marxist director Phillippe Diaz that explores the inconvenient truth that the gears of capitalism are greased by the exploitation of the weak.
so stuck in the self-importance of covering the economically disadvantaged that it thoroughly loses the ability to show how the circumstances evolved to such a state.
A didactic documentary that covers ground already trampled to death by countless other films, books, magazine articles, and grad-student theses.
The most articulate film to date describing the modern means and methods of the free market enslavement of undeveloped countries.
A hard-hitting documentary that presents the voices and concerns of the poor along with suggested ways out of the abyss between the rich and poor.
A timely and provocative documentary, but it's rather dull, poorly synthesized and fails to keep you engaged with an overload of information and a disorganized variety of interviews.
"The End of Poverty?" is a documentary that starts well enough in telling the history of colonial exploitation which began in 1492 and simply went downhill from there for the indigenous peoples in Africa, Asia and South America. Surprisingly, things did not get that much better with independence as an insidious form of imperialism took over, more economic than political. The IMF and World Bank(or legal loan sharks, if you will) gave out loans to developing countries while dictating the terms which usually meant the gutting of social programs and protections for their citizens, leaving the population without a safety net or jobs in many cases. Whereas the interviews with ordinary citizens are heartbreaking, they also tend to be repetitious, as the documentary should have spent more time with them and skipped the statistics. These vignettes also give the feeling that the suffering is passive with a few exceptions like the water protests in Bolivia. Not quite, as it turns out. In reality, a movement has been working on two fronts to challenge the IMF/World bank hegemony that Rebecca Solnit recapped in a recent article. Activists starting in Seattle in 1999 have been bringing huge protests to the bankers' front door, demanding debt forgiveness(Which is mentioned once in the film. It might have a chance if we slashed the military budget), while leaders are elected in South America that are responsive to their citizens' needs, especially in Venezuela and Bolivia.(The documentary talks to most of Evo Morales' government but does not mention his historic win.) And it would have been interesting to compare Cuba to the other countries mentioned in this film which I think has it sort of right. This is not an end, just a new beginning.
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