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Freakonomics

Freakonomics

2010
Documentary
1h 25m
Your probable score
Avg Percentile 39.63% from 240 total ratings

Ratings & Reviews

(240)
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Rated 29 Oct 2010
25
20th
What's worse? Spurlock's exasperating need to narrate everything and highlight everything with cutesy animation? Gibney's predictably somber look at an issue through the veil of humanity's innate corruption? Ewing and Grady's glance at an Important Issue through the vantage point of two arbitrarily chosen subjects? Unsurprisingly, it's tonally all over the place. Why is this a movie?
Rated 15 Jan 2011
70
46th
A schizophrenic documentary that has a lot of great information, but isn't packaged particularly well.
Rated 20 Jan 2011
71
61st
Individually, the segments are mediocre and incomplete, but I don't think the purpose of the movie is to convince you of any of those arguments. The purpose of the book and the movie is to make you question conventional logic. They present enough evidence to make you start asking questions, and I think that's all they were trying to do.
Rated 17 Oct 2010
20
41st
"Blame produced Chad Troutwine for bringing together an array of talented documentary filmmakers to try to coax life into material certainly not suited to the medium of film." - Lauren Wissot
Rated 27 Jan 2011
2
23rd
The film feels disjointed and the book was certainly more compelling.
Rated 12 Mar 2011
66
51st
Interesting but I can only assume this works better in book format with more room to flesh out.
Rated 25 Mar 2011
68
56th
Feels less like a documentary with a singular vision and more so like a series of interesting doc vignettes. Which makes sense considering how many directors are on board. I haven't read the book, so am not sure the differences between content, but I thought that each chapter provided something worthwhile. I really enjoyed the segment that sought to find the correlation between legalized abortion and lowered crime (though I'm sure that portion angered plenty of people).
Rated 27 Mar 2011
66
22nd
Bits of it stand out, but it's very unbalanced. The crime wave segment kind of blew my mind.
Rated 30 Mar 2011
75
23rd
Perhaps exploring the hidden side of everything is creating a high expectation, so do not wait to givew shocking cries on every scene. But as a documentary, the way it is told and presented was very good and impressive, after Spurlock effect the rest felt a little slow. Still, informative, sometimes exciting, but most certainly entertaining to watch.
Rated 24 Apr 2011
55
18th
An interesting distraction. The "bribes for grades" segment was funny.
Rated 23 Sep 2011
45
7th
Terribly disappointed in this. The smug economists at the center of the film treat themselves like modern day wizards, for what? For bold conclusions like: kids respond to bribery (Maybe!) Baby names don't matter (or do they?) Something absolutely nonsensical about abortion and crime. Maybe there's interesting data in their book, but holy crap this collection of vignettes was uniformly awful.
Rated 18 Apr 2012
42
8th
Interesting, but so poorly done. Just read the book.
Rated 13 Jul 2012
60
22nd
Documentary about (1) the possible role a person's name has for their success in life, (2) why there is so much cheating in an honor bound sport like sumo wrestling, (3) what helped reduce crime in the USA in the 1990s onward and (4) a school experiment to see if cash prizes can encourage struggling students to improve academically.
Rated 15 Aug 2012
60
29th
It had my attention, but where I think this failed was not really in the elaborate stagings, but perhaps in the fact that the final segment - "and now what" is skimmed over almost entirely. If this research cannot leads to plans of action, then tackling these big issues seem to be all for naught.
Rated 20 Aug 2012
55
31st
The book was interesting and thought provoking, this was not so much that. It wasn't bad, but it failed to capture the spark that the book had.
Rated 17 Dec 2012
73
37th
This is a good documentary but it feels like several small documentaries blended into one. Some of the subjects are more interesting than others but overall this is an enjoyable movie.
Rated 28 Sep 2013
68
43rd
A painfully average documentary in presentation, but the information still manages to be quite interesting.
Rated 04 Oct 2013
80
90th
I love these smart-bar-conversation movies and books with actual research. Not the knowledge would I need, but definitely want.
Rated 14 May 2016
67
38th
Boring overall, a creative mess. The Sumo piece was good and Ceaușescu was quite a surprise since I forgot about this from the time I read the book. Economy is simply not flashy enough to be in the movies.
Rated 28 Aug 2017
70
17th
Not what i expected. could have been better considering the source but still, I can't help but love freakonomics
Rated 18 Jun 2019
53
39th
I found this to be entertaining, but it doesn't seem to make any profound points besides correlation being inherently different than causation and there being a hidden truth behind just about everything...but even in those it isn't internally consistent between segments when trying to make them. If the convoluted nature of that sentence turns you off, then you probably won't care for this too much unless you already like the filmmakers involved in the project.

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