As the Occupy Wall Street movement began to crest and millennials the world over started to realize they’d be the first generation since World War II to make less money than their parents, French economist Thomas Piketty had the good fortune to release a hyper-readable book that explained why (or at least offered a lucid argument for liberals to debate and conservatives to deny). “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” moved 1.5 million copies in its first two years of release, making it the highest-selling title that Harvard University Press has ever published, and turning its author into the closest thing his field has to a rock star.

Now, in the midst of an election year pandemic that is ruthlessly exposing…

This film is completely inadequate for our times: a broad survey of the history of our destructive economic system, in which technocrats gently suggest 'we need to fix capitalism'. It could be an Elizabeth Warren speech. If you're looking for anything resembling radical political or economic ideas, this is not the film for you.

It is unconscionable to me that a film titled 'Capital in the 21st Century' makes no mention of the climate crisis–the defining problem of our time. There has been a wealth of research over the past decade attributing the origins of global warming to the fossil-fueled dawn of capitalism–and the rampant acceleration of emissions in the past three decades to the deregulated capitalism unleashed by neoliberalism–and…

I mean as far as documentaries go this wasn't too bad. It was kind of like a less coherent Hypernormalization.

As far as the actual content goes though it was atrocious. "Yeah we're seeing massive wealth inequality globally and the solution to that is... progressive taxation!" It is impossible for me to see the history of capitalism and conclude that anything short of capitalism itself is the problem. But this movie wants to convince you that first world countries ought to return to a more equitable capitalism of the post-war era.

As with most things this would be better if it were Marxist. If you go through this thinking that the events and effects in here was just a random…

The trick behind “lecture documentaries” is not to make them feel like lecture documentaries, but director Justin Pemberton barely even tries. His film is literally a history of capital spanning the past three centuries—from the age of monarchy and colonialism through the World Wars and into the present—as a parade of economists, writers and academics talk about how wealth has been either consolidated or dispersed at various times, depending upon political and sociological factors. If that sounds like a snooze, that’s only because it generally is. Like a teacher trying to spice up a subject for bored students, Pemberton shows us an on-the-nose, topic-appropriate movie every now and then—The Grapes of Wrath to illustrate the Great Depression, Wall Street to…

It’s (real) Labor Day, so this felt fitting, though perhaps I’ll watch something a little more naked about the tensions between labor and the bourgeois later.

This is solid enough , though both late and perfect in its timing in the wake of Sanders and Corbyn’s limited ascendence in real power, and dramatic ascendence in the public eye.

It’s a little simplistic at times, especially given the length of its source material. This helps it, making it an extremely digestible film, but does leave you wondering more if you’re someone already keyed into these issues. The Eurocentrism is where this comes to mind the most, as well as it’s 50s optimism and idealization. 

The form of it as documentary is…

WARNING The title is misleading.
It is neither an adaptation of Piketty's book or discourse nor about the present and future. The intent here is probably to introduce people who had little knowledge about the system it alludes to to its workings and what led to the current situation. It is indeed little more than a brief history lesson.

That purpose is more or less fulfilled thanks to the rapid montage, use of alluring pop songs and snipets of Hollywood movies, leaving little room to the usual talking heads (including Piketty) we've come to expect from less formally ambitious documentaries, the lesser presence of graphs and the way it glances over many points (the more forgivable being the communism discarded…