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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.
Genre: Education/General Interest
US Box Office: $0
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
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.
It's a nightmare that starts like a normal daytime drive and ends in a vortex-like sinkhole.
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.
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.
Putting a face on the incomprehensible figures, the film takes a look at some of the victims, middle-class professionals who bought into the dream of home ownership and lost everything.
If there's an overarching theme it's that people respond to incentives and so regulation of the financial market is necessary to see that the incentives offered are not perverse.
It may be a little too Jack Webb for the masses, but there is value to its sober, just-the-facts approach.
The documentary details in no-nonsense, talking-head style how commercial and investment banks moved high-risk mortgages out into the economy, dumping debt and reaping profits in the process.
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.
Top CriticThis film stands as an intimate, terrifying document that renders an incomprehensible slice of recent history in human terms.
The best look to date at the rotten US housing mortgage system that developed over the last ten years. Clear enough to make you cry.
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.
You'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.
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.
The piece finds a balance between the tearjerkers caught in the crossfire and the reckless bidders who don't seem to feel troubled for the life of excess at the expense of others.
The movie's lack of Michael Moore-style dynamism has a dulling effect.
Has the feel of a quickie made-for-TV doc. It's bare bones ... but timely.
The lesson of this story: if enough money is involved, greed trumps morality.
Top CriticThe 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...
A 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.
October 25, 2009:
Trailer & Poster review 
More...
September 03, 2009:
Expose' asks what happend with economic crisis.
More...
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