Critics reviews

A deeply straightforward yet beautifully crafted documentary (it’s like a great Frontline episode with hipper music) that turns the vortex inside out, and does it with a thrilling moral clarity.

[A] cracking documentary... Gibney's movie shows how the top brass at Enron realised what was happening, but like a mad and dysfunctional cult, everyone carried on.

A case study in pride before a fall, the film's narrow focus allows it to expose the wider costs of corporate greed and the dark side of the American dream far more effectively than the wider-ranging likes of The Corporation or Fahrenheit 9/11.

“Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” is a horror film for adults. It’s a chilling, completely fascinating documentary that reveals the face of unregulated greed in a way that’s every bit as terrifying as Lon Chaney’s unmasking in “The Phantom of the Opera.” Maybe more so, because everything here is true.

"Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" documents the collapse in vivid detail and with cinematic flourish. Moreover, the film doesn’t require an economics degree to understand the factors that led to Enron’s demise, although laymen may occasionally wish for a pause button in the theatre in order to absorb the volumes of information in more manageable scoops.

Where "Enron" succeeds is not merely by making complicated financial transactions accessible to the layman. The story is, as the film points out, a human tragedy, after all, as much as it is a tale of monstrous business failure.

Americans were taken for a ride by Enron. This film lets us sit back and see how it all happened. There will be lots of seething at the sight of it all, but there are enough good laughs to make the experience more than worthwhile.

No matter what your politics, "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" will make you mad... It is best when it sticks to fact, shakier when it goes for visual effects and heavy irony.

The film is for the most part too journalistically scrupulous to indulge in anything that might smack of conspiracy theorizing. Which is not to say that its scope is narrow or the implications of its story confined to one reckless Texas company. While the audience's contempt for Mr. Lay and Mr. Skilling feels good and is duly earned, Mr. Gibney does not encourage undue smugness... "Enron" suggests a widespread moral deficit underlying Enron's eventual bankruptcy.

The documentary cannot be called muckraking, as the muck has already been well-raked, but Gibney’s recounting has a touch of playful sadism that I quite enjoyed.

It's scarier than The Amityville Horror, as scandalous as Fahrenheit 9/11 and loaded with more conspiracies than The Interpreter. Alex Gibney's riveting documentary is a rape story, with the public trust as the victim.

A blistering portrait of capitalism run amok... light on new evidence but impressively comprehensive in scope... Gibney’s accurate film is molded in the Errol Morris tradition of hard reporting embellished with subtle touches of symbolic imagery.