| 100 |
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Absorbing, scary documentary.
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| 88 |
TV Guide
At times funny, but mostly tragic, Scurlock's film is important viewing for any who owns a credit card without realizing that it's a wallet time bomb.
|
| 80 |
Salon.com
Another strong journalistic-style film, this one exposes how unbelievably rapacious the financial industries have become in extending credit to unlikely prospects -- among them college students, nursing-home residents, small children, dogs and dead people.
|
| 80 |
Variety
Intelligent, informative and unusually entertaining documentary errs only when it yanks too insistently on heartstrings while focusing on worst-case scenarios involving desperate debtors driven to suicide.
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| 80 |
New York Magazine
James Scurlock's documentary Maxed Out, tells the bone-chilling, bloodcurdling, hair-raising story of a country (guess which one?) that's up to its eyeballs in credit-card debt.
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| 80 |
Washington Post
A riveting, amusing, enlightening and emotionally affecting movie by a guy you've never heard of, about -- wait for it -- the consumer debt crisis.
|
| 80 |
Los Angeles Times
Scurlock does well to counter the more dire aspects of the film with a razor-sharp sense of humor.
|
| 75 |
Christian Science Monitor
Scurlock's filmmaking style leans more heavily on woebegone personal testimony than facts and figures, but politicians willing to go up against the credit industry's lobbyists would be well advised to take a look.
|
| 75 |
The Onion (A.V. Club)
Maxed Out sacrifices depth for breadth and like a lot of low-budget documentaries, it's done no favors by its grimy, no-fi aesthetic. But the film's scattered ruminations on credit card mania add up to a powerful indictment of a culture of mindless consumption spinning out of control.
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| 75 |
Entertainment Weekly
Maxed Out, while occasionally muddled in its financial details, presents a more-accurate-than-not vision of a nation that is starting to look like a candidate for rehab, on both an individual and a national level, for its addiction to debt.
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| 70 |
Film Threat
Sally Foster
At a time when our debt as individuals and as a nation is at an all-time high, Maxed Out offers a much needed look at this escalating dilemma.
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| 70 |
Chicago Reader
Tends to let his consumers off the hook--you'd hardly guess that any of these people are responsible for their own financial woes.
|
| 67 |
Austin Chronicle
Josh Rosenblatt
Like Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me) before him, Scurlock sets his sights on vast money-motivated conspiracies and doesn't rest until he finds them.
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| 63 |
New York Daily News
Scurlock barely acknowledges the logical reality of any credit card transaction: If you choose to buy something, you will have to pay for it eventually.
|
| 63 |
Boston Globe
James Scurlock's documentary horror show has a critical message to impart -- your credit cards are out to kill you -- and a naive, ham - handed way of imparting it.
|
| 50 |
The New York Times
Although Maxed Out would like to be this year’s "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," it doesn’t measure up. "Enron" was a stronger film because its focus was specific, the personalities under its microscope were outsize, and its story had a beginning, middle and end. Maxed Out, which has no narrator, gathers facts, opinions and impressions and tosses them into a blender. And its story is still unfinished.
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| 50 |
Wall Street Journal
Scurlock's documentary serves up cautionary tales of epic abuse, though the overall tone is faux cheerful and sometimes genuinely entertaining.
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| 50 |
San Francisco Chronicle
While the documentary does a credible job of pointing out the magnitude of the problem, it skirts the issue of what can be done about it and by whom.
|
| 30 |
Village Voice
Nathan Lee
A slapdash piece of work totally indebted to second-hand rhetorical strategies.
|
| 25 |
New York Post
All the film provides is this bulletin: Lefties are angry about the things Lefties are angry about, chiefly corporate profits.
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