This muckraking documentary on America's personal-debt crisis lays bare the predatory practices of credit card companies and the Bush administration's cozy relationship with the financial services industry.

| Dec 4, 2007

Do not see this film if you worry about money.

| Original Score: 4/6 | Oct 6, 2007

Maxed Out focuses on how much we're in hock without ever really wondering why we need to buy.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 6, 2007

This scattershot exposé of usurious banking practices examines why the most vulnerable segment of society is victimized by the lending industry and finds a simple answer: It's obscenely profitable.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 6, 2007

Maxed Out exposes the credit card sham for what it is, and fingers the hustlers who perpetuate it.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 20, 2007

To maximize your return on this useful report, sit through the end credits where Spurlock deposits some of his best material.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 23, 2007

Maxed Out doesn't really offer solutions, probably because there are none. But it does a great job of showing how the rich get richer and the poor foot the bill, plus interest.

Full Review | Mar 20, 2007

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.

| Original Score: B | Mar 14, 2007

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.

| Original Score: B | Mar 13, 2007

Though the movie sometimes feels a bit cursory in telling its many stories, many of its points resonate strongly, in that hey-how-come-I-didn't-know-that way that the best muckraking journalism can do.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 9, 2007

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.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Mar 9, 2007

All the film provides is this bulletin: Lefties are angry about the things Lefties are angry about, chiefly corporate profits.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/4 | Mar 9, 2007

James Scurlock's often riveting documentary is likely to leave you outraged over the manipulative greed of America's banks and credit card firms.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 9, 2007

James Scurlock's documentary serves up cautionary tales of epic abuse, though the overall tone is faux cheerful and sometimes genuinely entertaining, especially in the use of clips from an old educational film that looks too fatuous to be faux.

| Mar 8, 2007

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.

| Original Score: B | Mar 8, 2007

Scurlock does well to counter the more dire aspects of the film with a razor-sharp sense of humor.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 8, 2007

A film all high school seniors should see. And their parents. And their siblings, neighbors, best friends and acquaintances. You should see it, too.

| Mar 8, 2007

James Scurlock's Maxed Out takes a long-overdue swipe at the shamelessly predatory tactics of the credit-card and home-mortgage industries, which are feeding on the most economically vulnerable members of our society.

Full Review | Mar 7, 2007

A slapdash piece of work totally indebted to second-hand rhetorical strategies (the '50s educational film, glib Bush-bashing) and threadbare indignation.

| Mar 6, 2007

Given that James D. Scurlock's documentary Maxed Out is a resolutely uncinematic progression of talking heads -- and they're talking about a subject most of us would rather not even think about -- it's a remarkably entertaining film.

Full Review | Mar 6, 2007