Capitalism: A Love Story (2009)

Michael Moore returns to the subject that has sustained him across a career, and he does so with the zeal of a man who has found the last unexamined sin. The film's indictment is total: Wall Street's casino mentality, for-profit prisons, corporate-owned life insurance taken out on dead employees, the leaked Citigroup memo declaring democracy a formality. Moore does not stop at reform. He calls for capitalism to be eliminated and replaced with democracy, a closing appeal delivered straight into the camera with an invitation for the audience to finish the job. The interview roster includes Elijah Cummings, Marcy Kaptur, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, presented as economic authorities. That is casting by expertise, not by demographic checklist, and the film treats them accordingly.

Where the picture earns its keep is in its historical counternarrative. Moore resurrects the 90 percent top marginal rate of the 1950s, recasts Reagan as a spokesmodel for banks, and unearths long-lost newsreel of Roosevelt's Second Bill of Rights. The prosperity mythology of the postwar decades gets a corrective reading, and the recovered footage does the arguing. He then hands the pulpit to Catholic priests who pronounce capitalism a sin, framing the whole affair as a matter of conscience. The direct address, the moral framing, the bullhorn stunts outside bank headquarters: this is the sermon form in its purest expression, and Moore preaches it without apology.

Elsewhere the film is pointedly narrow. Gender is not a lens it picks up. Climate does not enter the frame. Race surfaces only incidentally, through foreclosure stories and shuttered factories, never as an analytical instrument. There is no engagement with body politics or neurodivergence, and no LGBTQ content whatsoever. What remains is a class argument, delivered at volume, and a critic can only admire the single-mindedness while noting the silence everywhere else.