Inside Job

Directed by Charles Ferguson

(Not Rated)

****

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In probing the causes of 2008’s financial crisis, this powerful documentary exposes a level of corruption in America’s halls of power “that would make even Gordon Gekko cringe,” said Duane Byrge in The Hollywood Reporter. Charles Ferguson’s “lively, droll, and acidic shakedown” of the insiders who triggered the collapse focuses on the rampant conflicts of interest that caused Wall Street regulators to look the other way as bankers and other highly compensated gamblers risked the nation’s future. Ferguson digs into this story like “Michael Moore without shtick,” said Joe Neumaier in the New York Daily News. He doesn’t try to entertain; he wants answers. To find them, he interviews observers and participants ranging from former Federal Reserve members to Charles Morris, prescient author of The Trillion Dollar Meltdown. Ferguson’s indictment of the “warped values” of Wall Street “rests its outrage on reason, research, and careful judgment,” said A.O. Scott in The New York Times. The film’s only real flaw is that it is “likely to be shrugged off by those who need its message most.”