A documentary about the Enron corporation, its faulty and corrupt business practices, and how they led to its fall.
Ratings
Curator score: 6.7/10
IMDb: 7.5/10
Letterboxd: 3.66/5
Rotten Tomatoes: 97%
TMDB: 7.2/10
Director
Alex Gibney
Production
2929 Productions, HDNet Films, Jigsaw Productions
Cast
Peter Coyote, John Beard, Jim Chanos, Dick Cheney, Carol Coale, Gray Davis, Reggie Dees II, Joseph Dunn, Max Eberts, Peter Elkind, David Freeman, Philip Hilder, Al Kaseweter, Bill Lerach, Loretta Lynch, Amanda Martin-Brock, Bethany McLean, Mike Muckleroy, James Nutter, John Olson
Where to watch
Amazon Prime Video, Amazon Prime Video with Ads
Curator Review
Verdict
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.
Best for
Viewers interested in business scandals and financial fraud
People who like investigative documentaries with a strong point of view
Audiences drawn to cautionary tales about corporate power
Fans of post-2000s nonfiction filmmaking about systemic corruption
Skip if
You want a subtle or stylistically restrained documentary
You already know the Enron story in detail and want new revelations
You dislike documentaries that use obvious narration and illustrative stock footage
You prefer character-driven films over explanatory, journalism-style nonfiction
Overview
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.
Worth noting
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.
Bottom line
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.
Top Letterboxd reviews
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… more 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… more
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.'
2013 · Crime, Drama, Comedy · 3h · R · Curator 7.9/10 (5.7M ratings) · Where to watch: Amazon Prime Video, Paramount Plus Premium, Paramount Plus Essential, AMC+, Philo, Amazon Prime Video with Ads
A louder, more decadent cousin in the story of financial excess, fraud, and self-mythologizing.