Maxed Out Critic Reviews

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 the full review

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

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 the full review

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.Read the full review

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 the full review

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 the full review

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 the full review

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 the full review