With a blitz of talking heads and graphs and technical jargon, Money For Nothing can be exhausting viewing at times, and it's certainly not the most cinematic experience... But it's never unclear.
Actor Liev Schreiber’s voice-over narration is filled with sonorous urgency, but as the film’s commentators acknowledge, some ideas are a hard sell: How do politicians and regulators convince the public on the benefits of a financial diet when a spending spree sounds much more fun?
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Village Voice
Village Voice
Bruce may succeed in making you wary of the Fed, but, unfortunately, he's also likely to make you wary of his film.
Money for Nothing feels less prophetic than generally handwringing -- it's just enough to produce vague worry in the unschooled without moving policymakers to do anything they're not already doing.
The film doesn’t really live up to its subtitle. There is little sense of what kinds of debates take place at board meetings or how pressure is applied behind closed doors.
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Washington PostMichael O'Sullivan
Washington PostMichael O'Sullivan
The film is less a look into the Fed’s head than a presentation of its history, going back even farther than its creation in 1913, in response to a series of early 20th-century banking panics.
The best thing about Money for Nothing is the many talking heads trying to explain what monetary policy is and what the Fed does: controlling the supply of money and, with any luck, guiding the economy.