Generation Wealth
Evergreen Pictures | Release Date: July 20, 2018 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
53
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 23 Critic Reviews
Positive:
7
Mixed:
14
Negative:
2
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
83
UproxxVince ManciniAug 2, 2018
Generation Wealth is, as Greenfield surely intended, a valuable and necessary work of cultural anthropology, that entertains even as it horrifies. It’s an important watch that never feels like homework. Read full review
83
Entertainment WeeklyLeah GreenblattJul 12, 2018
Eventually, it’s Wealth‘s inherent too-muchness that undoes its own best intentions. Read full review
80
Screen DailyNikki BaughanFeb 21, 2018
The result is both a compelling, damning cultural observation and testament to Greenfield’s own visual artistry. Read full review
75
Washington PostMichael O'SullivanJul 25, 2018
Meaty interviews with journalist Chris Hedges, for instance, lend the film needed context and a sense of intellectual detachment. Read full review
75
RogerEbert.comGlenn KennyJul 20, 2018
Greenfield wraps up this compulsively watchable movie with observations of family love and some of its characters striving for redemption and/or an honest living. But she doesn’t quite dissolve the bitterness of the pill. Because it really can’t be. Read full review
67
ConsequenceClint WorthingtonAug 1, 2018
While the focus occasionally gets lost in the filmmaker’s personal inquisition, it remains a thought-provoking, challenging cap to Greenfield’s life-long body of work. Read full review
63
Slant MagazinePaul O'CallaghanJul 18, 2018
Into a broad-strokes picture of a culture in crisis, Lauren Greenfield attempts to incorporate autobiographical elements, which results in some awkward narrative pivots and jarringly clunky voiceover. Read full review
60
CineVueAdam LowesAug 2, 2018
At times the whole film threatens to turn into a visual stream of consciousness exercise which is a real shame, as Greenfield’s aims are entirely admirable and with merit. Read full review
60
Los Angeles TimesRobert AbeleJul 19, 2018
The mix of essay, history, critique, laughable spectacle, and reflection starts to feel unwieldy and steered toward easy assessments about the perils of loving money and worshiping appearance over substance. Read full review
60
TheWrapTricia OlszewskiJul 19, 2018
Generation Wealth is ultimately a string of subjects in search of a binder. And the director’s interests don’t count. Read full review
60
The New York TimesJeannette CatsoulisJul 19, 2018
Darting from micro to macro and back again, squashing obscene consumption against child beauty pageants and ruinous debt, its structure makes for an unfocused thesis. The through line, though, works, as Ms. Greenfield repeatedly turns her camera on her own family and career choices. Read full review
60
Village VoiceAlan ScherstuhlJul 18, 2018
By turns, Greenfield’s survey is alarming, hilarious, and indulgent, sometimes strained and a little dull, prone to overstatement and an abuse of synecdoche. Read full review
60
The Hollywood ReporterDaniel FienbergJan 27, 2018
Easily the most ambitious film of the director's career, but also the most infuriating for all of the sociological and psychological points that it tries to make in ways that are too often unearned or poorly defended. Read full review
60
VarietyPeter DebrugeJan 27, 2018
Though it can sometimes feel invasive when a documentarian includes his or her own voice in the finished cut, Greenfield’s presence is essential here as we observe the rapport she’s established with people whom it’s difficult for us not to judge, and whom she views with all the complexity her portraits suggest. Read full review
60
The GuardianCharlie PhillipsJan 27, 2018
An ambitious essay documentary that is often brilliant but is let down by a parallel focus on Greenfield’s own family and career which becomes too sentimental and stretches the film out beyond its natural length. Read full review
50
Philadelphia Daily NewsGary ThompsonAug 2, 2018
Greenfield makes an ambitious attempt to tie all of these things together as symptoms of capitalism gone wrong in Generation Wealth, although her thesis is weakly argued, and thinly sourced – the movie often turns out to be a curiously insular polling of family, friends, and high school and college classmates. Read full review
50
San Francisco ChronicleWalter AddiegoJul 27, 2018
The film has its flaws, but after watching its catalog of shifty hedge fund types, Kardashians, plastic surgery addicts, bling-laden rappers and children of Hollywood royalty, you can’t help but agree. Read full review
50
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Kate TaylorJul 26, 2018
Greenfield tells us she charts the extremes to understand the mainstream, but glimpses of an explanation for the insanities and obscenities depicted in Generation Wealth are frustratingly few. Read full review
50
The New YorkerAnthony LaneJul 16, 2018
The most curious passages of Generation Wealth are those in which the director questions her own parents and kids. Read full review
50
The Film StageDaniel SchindelJan 27, 2018
Greenfield’s earlier documentaries, such as Thin and The Queen of Versailles, serve as better explorations of the topics this somewhat shapeless movie presents. Read full review
42
IndieWireDavid EhrlichJul 18, 2018
It’s hard to understand how anyone so capable of diagnosing this problem can also believe themselves capable of solving it — so hard, in fact, that the last 20 minutes of Generation Wealth might compel you to reconsider the value of the 80 minutes before them. Read full review
30
Austin ChronicleDanielle WhiteAug 1, 2018
It’s not entirely clear what “generation” is the guilty one being examined in filmmaker Lauren Greenfield’s third full-length documentary, but it’s safe to say that we are now several decades into the decline of Western civilization (that Creem critic was right, you guys). Read full review
20
Wall Street JournalJoe MorgensternJul 19, 2018
This new film, though, is mainly appalling, and not instructively so. It’s all over the place, to the point of inducing numbness or suffocation. In the end it comes out in favor of love, which is good, but getting there may leave you glassy-eyed, unless you’re deeply into bling porn. Read full review
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