American Casino

This splendid example of muckraking journalism puts a human face on a national scandal.

American Casino reveals the appalling truth about the subprime mortgage scandal and the financial industry’s rapacious embrace of the $12 trillion taxpayer bailout. Through interviews with the money guys freely conceding their own big winnings and residents of Baltimore’s devastated minority communities targeted by the mortgage industry and sucked in by predatory lending practices, the film lucidly gets to the heart of what ought to be understood as one of the defining moral disasters in U.S. history. With Ben Bernanke, Henry Paulson, and others. (90 mins., video)