Curator Watchlist
A sharp, accessible corporate-crime documentary that turns a sprawling accounting scandal into a clear, infuriating cautionary tale about greed, deregulation, and institutional rot. It can be a little heavy-handed in its visual signposting, but the story is outrageous enough that the film still lands hard.
Where to watch: Buy
Fri · 1h 50m
Director: Alex Gibney
Starring: Peter Coyote, John Beard, Jim Chanos
A documentary about the Enron corporation, its faulty and corrupt business practices, and how they led to its fall.
Alex Gibney
Peter Coyote, John Beard, Jim Chanos
A sharp, accessible corporate-crime documentary that turns a sprawling accounting scandal into a clear, infuriating cautionary tale about greed, deregulation, and institutional rot. It can be a little heavy-handed in its visual signposting, but the story is outrageous enough that the film still lands hard.
This is one of the defining corporate-crime documentaries of the 2000s: brisk, angry, and built to make a complex scandal legible to a broad audience. It traces how Enron sold fantasy as finance, and how that fantasy was enabled by culture, media, and a system eager to believe in its own myths.
The film’s biggest strength is clarity. It keeps the moving parts understandable without pretending the fraud was simple, and it benefits from the sheer absurdity of the real events. At the same time, the filmmaking can be a little blunt, with obvious visual metaphors and a TV-news polish that some viewers will find over-explanatory.
Even so, the documentary remains highly watchable because the underlying story is so damning and so contemporary. It plays less like a dry business case study than a moral thriller about power, arrogance, and the cost of letting institutions police themselves.
David Weigel (3★) · 314 likes
Gibney shoots for "adequate" and never misses. If you can get past his annoying tics, like the on-the-nose music cues and the even on-the-nose-er stock images, it's a very good rundown of a bullshit scam that conquered the world for a few years. But man, those stock images. There's a point where Bethany McLean talks about "pulling a rabbit out of a hat" and Gibney spends like 20 seconds on a clip of a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Thanks! I enjoy getting a dementia test along with my documentary.
Andy Summers 🤠 (4★) · 89 likes
The amount of bad press that investment bankers, huge corporations, and what most people would call "unscrupulous greedy bastards" have had in recent years following the global financial crash of 2007-2008 has filled headlines time and time again. Gordon Gekko famously said in Stone's Wall Street, that greed was good, but that's hard to tell someone who's just saw their 401 and their pension pot frittered away in the largest corporate fraud in history. This documentary will make you scratch
Patrick Lohmeier (3★) · 74 likes
Capitalism is hell.
Rose Rowson (2.5★) · 60 likes
RIP Kenneth Lay you would have loved dying on the Titan submersible
Ed Glendenning (4★) · 59 likes
'The film has all the elements of Greek tragedy; arrogance, pride, power, the abuse of power - they're all here.'
A sharper, more playful companion piece about financial engineering and systemic collapse, with similar outrage but a more inventive style.
A clear-eyed, anger-driven examination of the 2008 financial crisis that pairs well with this film’s critique of elite impunity.
A tense fictional counterpart that captures the moral panic and executive self-preservation of a collapsing financial system.
The essential corporate-greed drama, still the most iconic fictional portrait of ambition, excess, and moral compromise in finance.
A broader, more theoretical critique of corporate power that shares the same anti-corporate energy.
More polemical and personal, but it overlaps in its anger at the way money and power shape public life.
A corporate whistleblower story with the same sense of institutions closing ranks to protect profit and reputation.
For viewers who enjoy investigative journalism as a suspense structure, this is the classic template.
A methodical newsroom investigation that rewards viewers who like process, evidence, and institutional exposure.
A modern fraud documentary with a similar focus on market deception and investor vulnerability.
A slick, cynical look at predatory sales culture and the seduction of easy money.
Not about accounting fraud, but it nails the desperation, manipulation, and toxic masculinity of sales-driven capitalism.
corporate fraud, capitalism, greed, deregulation, financial corruption, media manipulation, institutional failure, economic inequality
corporate scandal, financial fraud, investigative documentary, capitalism, greed, deregulation, economic collapse, 2000s, true crime
Open Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (Fri ) on Curator TV