Michael Moore's 'Capitalism, A Love Story'

Although the latest Michael Moore documentary, "Capitalism: A Love Story" has been screening in Los Angeles in a few theaters for a week, the controversial film debuted nationwide on Friday.

The consensus of film reviewers sampled by RottenTomatoes.com gives the controversial (and funny) doc a respectable 72% "fresh" (meaning more favorable reviews than unfavorable ones). L.A. Times film critic Kenneth Turan's review is equally lukewarm to the movie that uses AIG, Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger and even Jesus Christ to help prove Moore's theory that capitalism is hurting America. An excerpt:

Clearly, Moore has not lost his provocateur's gift for stirring the pot, and it is heartening to have a filmmaker take on a subject this all-encompassing and almost taboo. But not even Moore's skill can quell the suspicion that "Capitalism" misses the narrower focus that gave his earlier films some of their punch.
In a sense, "Capitalism" comes by its wide-ranging, scattershot approach naturally. After all, this is a heck of a big subject: Just ask Karl Marx, who spent 18 years researching and writing his multi-volume "Das Kapital." So it's perhaps inevitable because of the ton of territory "Capitalism" covers that this film ends up as the sum of its parts, nothing more.

That said, Moore's scattershot is a lot more interesting than some filmmakers' focus, and many of those individual parts are classic. For one thing, Moore retains the instincts of a shrewd stand-up comedian -- the astonished, baffled looks he often wears are a case in point, as is his decision to include under the rubric of "When did Jesus become a capitalist?" the dubbing of a section of a biblical epic with free-market platitudes.