American Casino

Directed by Leslie Cockburn

(Not Rated)

***

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A documentary traces the economic collapse of 2008.

American Casino is a “gamble that simply doesn’t pay off,” said David Fear in Time Out New York. In an attempt to help the American people understand the economic collapse of 2008, husband-and-wife team Andrew and Leslie Cockburn connect the dots leading up to it. The film begins on Wall Street, where an indecipherable “parade of talking heads, speaking advanced business-ese,” explains how deregulated markets led to unprecedented debts. American Casino paints a “damning portrait of the financial industry,” said Ronnie Scheib in Variety, even if the experts are “hardly geniuses” at explaining the crisis. When the Cockburns turn the camera on minority homeowners in Baltimore and on California officials left to deal with decaying foreclosed homes, they humanize the “destabilization and personal cost” of shortsighted policies. The film succeeds less at tracing the collapse’s causes than at capturing an important chapter in the American experience, said Andrew O’Hehir in Salon.com. It is an “intimate, terrifying document that renders an incomprehensible slice of recent history in human terms.”