Critics reviews

Brand wants to serve a purpose similar to the various cameos in The Big Short: The concepts are technical and complicated, so here's a famous face with some pop culture cachet to keep our attention. And as in The Big Short, the effect isn't consistent. Sometimes the celebrity factor engages us, sometimes it's just a distraction. But at least it's better than the empty platitudes from politicians that the film regularly cuts away to (and has marvelous fun with during the end credits).

Winterbottom films the encounters from multiple angles, ensuring audiences have access to Brand's purported defiance, but really the bloke is just parading around, using his celebrity to partially ingratiate himself with the staff, and confirming the worst stereotypes about wealthy activists who, at all times, make certain they're the center of attention.

There's a staleness to these staged and slightly pointless confrontations, which have already been done, and done better, by the likes of Nick Broomfield and Michael Moore. Brand is on much more convincing form when mingling with the victims of corporate greed – the exhausted, minimum wage, zero-hours cleaners and shift workers who despair of ever scrabbling their way out of the poverty trap.

[The Emperor's New Clothes] is hosted by British actor/activist Russell Brand, who most would agree is not one of the most important intellectuals alive. Yet this sweetly annoying character of post-bohemian style has cut his own path for a few years now as someone unafraid to cut through the crap around issues of economic inequality and the prevarications of the financial markets and those who run them.

When Brand pulls a stunt in [the film], driving around in a van with "Shop A Banker" printed on it, and trying to burst into the offices of major banks like HSBC and RBS in order to speak to the CEOs who run them, he gives no indication that he's interested in open discourse. Instead of any sense of curiosity to add depth to his impassioned anger, there's only a preaching-to-the-choir sense of foregone conclusions. Why bother asking questions when you already think you know the answers?

The Emperor's New Clothes is a case study in the pitfalls of personality-led documentary.

The Emperor's New Clothes is the freshest and most urgent documentary yet to challenge the widening chasm between the 1% and the rest of us... The Emperor's New Clothes comes as a breath of fresh air and a wake up call to activist filmmakers who too often fail to transcend their natural audience and end up merely preaching to the choir.