Maxed OutMovie Reviews

Poster art for "Maxed Out."

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Critic scores range from 0 to 100, with higher scores indicating more favorable reviews.

  • 80
    Washington Post | Ann Hornaday

    A riveting, amusing, enlightening and emotionally affecting movie by a guy you've never heard of, about -- wait for it -- the consumer debt crisis. Read full review

  • 80
    Salon.com | Andrew O'Hehir

    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. Read full review

  • 80
    Variety | Joe Leydon

    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. Read full review

  • 80
    Los Angeles Times | Kevin Crust

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

  • 75
    Entertainment Weekly | Owen Gleiberman

    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. Read full review

  • 63
    Boston Globe | Ty Burr

    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. Read full review

  • 63
    New York Daily News | Elizabeth Weitzman

    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. Read full review

  • 50
    San Francisco Chronicle | Ruthe Stein

    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. Read full review

  • 50
    Wall Street Journal | Joe Morgenstern

    Scurlock's documentary serves up cautionary tales of epic abuse, though the overall tone is faux cheerful and sometimes genuinely entertaining. Read full review

  • 50
    The New York Times | Stephen Holden

    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. Read full review

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