By Jason A. Hill

Inside Job, USA, 2010

Directed by Charles Ferguson

The financial crisis has had broad coverage in the media over the past two years, but in contrast to its impact there have been fewer documentaries covering its aftermath compared to the political and war documentaries during the George W. Bush era. The lack of more prominent financial crisis documentaries is probably due to the subject being such an un-sexy and difficult topic to dramatize. Michael Moore, king of drama in docs, gave the economy a whack with his Capitalism: A Love Story (2009), a punchless and overreaching attack on capitalism that turned out to be pretty nominal on drama.

It proved that this story is just that difficult to make appealing to a broad American public, but too important to ignore. The story of the financial meltdown is as broad – involving the entire world’s economy – and as complicated – dealing with complex banking and trading laws – as ever there was for a documentary, but director Charles Ferguson handles the topic without losing focus and consistently stays on message. The film achieves something very difficult in most narrative films, let alone documentaries, which is boiling the underlying problem down to one simple idea: greed is not good. (Sorry, Gordon Gekko). Read More