Food, Inc.
Magnolia Pictures | Release Date: June 12, 2009 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
80
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 28 Critic Reviews
Positive:
27
Mixed:
0
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
Entertainment WeeklyOwen Gleiberman
Food, Inc. is hard to shake, because days after you've seen it, you may find yourself eating something -- a cookie, a piece of poultry, cereal out of the box, a perfectly round waxen tomato -- and you'll realize that you have virtually no idea what it actually is. Read full review
100
Los Angeles TimesGary Goldstein
Essential viewing. Read full review
100
San Francisco ChronicleAmy Binacolli
A mind-boggling, heart-rending, stomach-churning expose on the food industry. Read full review
100
Philadelphia InquirerSteven Rea
It's not a pretty picture. But Food, Inc. is an essential one. Read full review
100
Baltimore SunMichael Sragow
A scary movie that's also funny, touching and good for you. Read full review
90
Village VoiceRobert Sietsema
Expertly crafted documentary. Read full review
90
SalonAndrew O'Hehir
An engaging and often wrenching film, Food, Inc. covers a wide range of material, including the horrific, the humorous and the exemplary. Read full review
90
Chicago ReaderCliff Doerksen
Smart, gripping, and untainted by the influence of Michael Moore, this muckraking 2008 documentary transcends anticorporate demonology to build a visceral but reasoned case against modern agribusiness. Read full review
88
Rolling StonePeter Travers
Eating can be one dangerous business. Don't take another bite till you see Robert Kenner's Food, Inc., an essential, indelible documentary that is scarier than anything in the last five Saw horror shows. Read full review
88
Chicago Sun-TimesRoger Ebert
I figured it wasn't important for me to go into detail about the photography and the editing. I just wanted to scare the bejesus out of you, which is what Food, Inc. did to me. Read full review
83
The A.V. ClubNathan Rabin
Like many social issue documentaries, Food, Inc. is better at addressing problems than offering solutions: its endorsement of organic food in particular feels a little flimsy. Nevertheless, it’s entertaining and fast-moving enough to make audiences intermittently forget they’re consuming cinematic health food. Read full review
80
New York Daily NewsElizabeth Weitzman
Though slickly packaged, Robert Kenner's unsparing exposé is harder to watch than any horror film. Read full review
80
Washington PostAnn Hornaday
See Food, Inc. after dinner, but see it. Read full review
80
The New YorkerDavid Denby
For many of this movie's likely viewers, the sting built into Food, Inc. is the realization that, without unending effort, they are not all that much freer in their choices than that hard-pressed family. Read full review
80
EmpirePhil Wilding
Compelling, entertaining and illuminating documentary which makes you think twice, and then a few more times, about eating anything at all in U.S. Read full review
78
Austin ChronicleKimberley Jones
Why wait for 2012? If you're hankering for a taste of the apocalypse, the opening sequence of this eye-opening, stomach-queasing doc has plenty to go on – witness menacing superimpositions on a bleak, blighted landscape – and the hits just keep on coming. Read full review
75
Miami HeraldRene Rodriguez
Food, Inc. argues that part of the reason why the food industry is so difficult to regulate is that many of the government officials currently assigned to watchdog roles were once employed by the companies they now keep tabs on. Read full review
75
Boston GlobeWesley Morris
The whole thing is as subtle as a watermelon in a bowl of Cheerios but necessary, nonetheless. Read full review
75
Chicago TribuneMichael Phillips
If Wal-Mart, the Lucifer of multinational corporations in many liberal eyes, sees the fiscal sense in stocking an increasingly wide array of organic foodstuffs, consumer habits truly are changing. Not fast enough, though, for documentary filmmaker Robert Kenner. Read full review
75
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Liam Lacey
In many areas, Food Inc. could be accused of being a fast-food version of a documentary – it's everywhere at once, skipping across the surface of a vast subject, and adding nuggets of sweetness to the scary filler. Read full review
75
Portland OregonianShawn Levy
Kenner mounts it all with a pleasingly fluent and varied style, which makes it more or less easy to absorb his arguments, even if they're familiar from other books and movies and are presented with unopposed certainty. Read full review
75
New Orleans Times-PicayuneMike Scott
As a result, the slickly produced Food, Inc. is more deeply unsettling than it is out-and-out stomach-turning. Read full review
70
New York Magazine (Vulture)David Edelstein
The sheer scale of the movie is mind-blowing--it touches on every aspect of modern life. It's the documentary equivalent of "The Matrix": It shows us how we're living in a simulacrum, fed by machines run by larger machines with names like Monsanto, Perdue, Tyson, and the handful of other corporations that make everything. Read full review
70
VarietyJohn Anderson
A civilized horror movie for the socially conscious, the nutritionally curious and the hungry. Read full review
70
The New York TimesManohla Dargis
Time and again the movie stops short before it really gets started, as with the debates over the big business of organic food. Read full review
70
The Hollywood ReporterKirk Honeycutt
No question, watching this film is a tough go. Horror films cause less seat-squirming. Read full review
70
Film ThreatMatthew Sorrento
And to all you sane folk out there, be prepared when seeing this film: you'll ponder the old adage about being what you eat. For those new to the truth about food, this is a great starting point. Read full review
38
New York PostKyle Smith
The movie offers very little that food radicals don't already know. Read full review
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