Inside Job

Filmmaker Charles Ferguson’s documentary is indeed another dense indignant summary of the 2008 financial crisis, and not especially revelatory for anyone who’s seen or read the previous dense indignant summaries. At least its dense indignant press kit contains a legend of the movie’s dozens of talking heads, a lengthy glossary of its jargon, and a timeline, with the thesis-clarifying title of “How Deregulation and the Evolution of Wall Street Culture Led to the Financial Crisis.” You know you’ve tackled a tough subject when your film seems incomplete without its own study guide. Ferguson, who’s also an acclaimed scholar and the maker of the acclaimed and scholarly Iraq war documentary No End in Sight, can’t quite handle wedging an academic treatise into a popular mass-media format. Through the calmly narrating mouthpiece of Matt Damon, he’s an eloquent lecturer, but also self-contradicting and still, inevitably, insufficient. J.K.