Food, Inc. 2008

Ben Mankiewicz, At the Movies: A powerful, muckraking documentary on the big business of what we eat. Read more

Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune: 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. Read more

Christy Lemire, Associated Press: Kenner presents an even-tempered but nonetheless horrifying dissection of the U.S. food industry. Read more

David Edelstein, New York Magazine/Vulture: 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 more

Michael Upchurch, Seattle Times: The result is an alarming film that tackles food and freedom-of-speech issues on many fronts. Read more

Nathan Rabin, AV Club: It's entertaining and fast-moving enough to make audiences intermittently forget they're consuming cinematic health food. Read more

Wesley Morris, Boston Globe: The whole thing is as subtle as a watermelon in a bowl of Cheerios but necessary, nonetheless. Read more

Gary Goldstein, Los Angeles Times: Suffice it to say, after the film's disturbing glimpses inside the meat industry, along with its blunt indictment of fast food giants, you'll think twice before eating just about anything nonorganic. Read more

Cliff Doerksen, Chicago Reader: Smart, gripping, and untainted by the influence of Michael Moore. Read more

Tom Long, Detroit News: If you are what you eat, we are mostly genetically modified, poorly regulated, unhealthy meat byproducts generating profits for a few gargantuan corporations. Read more

Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly: An essential, disturbing portrait of how the food we eat in America has become a deceptively prefab, even hazardous industrial product. Read more

Amy Nicholson, I.E. Weekly: An engaging and enraging primer of corporate caloric misdeeds that skips around from chickens to pigs to spinach to potatoes. Read more

Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald: Illuminating and occasionally revolting. Read more

David Denby, New Yorker: An angry blast of disgust aimed at the American food industry. Read more

Elizabeth Weitzman, New York Daily News: Though slickly packaged, Robert Kenner's unsparing expose is harder to watch than any horror film. Read more

Kyle Smith, New York Post: Trading on now-familiar gross-out tactics (images of corporate slaughterhouses and chicken sheds), the movie offers very little that food radicals don't already know. Read more

Roger Moore, Orlando Sentinel: After you see what IBP is doing to cattle, what Tyson is doing to chickens, what farmers are doing to us and what Monsanto is doing to farmers in the new documentary Food, Inc., you may never eat again. Read more

Steven Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer: It's not a pretty picture. But Food, Inc. is an essential one. Read more

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times: This review doesn't read one thing like a movie review. I just wanted to scare the bejesus out of you, which is what Food, Inc. did to me. Read more

Peter Travers, Rolling Stone: 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 more

Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com: An engaging and often wrenching film, Food, Inc. covers a wide range of material, including the horrific, the humorous and the exemplary. Read more

Amy Biancolli, San Francisco Chronicle: A mind-boggling, heart-rending, stomach-churning expose on the food industry. Read more

Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune: Food, Inc. tackles a vast problem, but sends us home with glimmers of hope. Read more

Joe Williams, St. Louis Post-Dispatch: In exposing the unsavory practices of agribusiness, the muckraking documentary Food, Inc. cuts to the bone. Read more

Liam Lacey, Globe and Mail: If you're planning on seeing Food, Inc. as a date movie, make sure you have dinner beforehand. Read more

Jason Anderson, Toronto Star: An invaluable primer, Food, Inc. covers a wide array of factors and concerns without becoming excessively polemical or deadeningly earnest. Read more

Ben Kenigsberg, Time Out: This is the kind of muckraking we should see more often. Read more

Gabriella Gershenson, Time Out: For informed locavores, director Robert Kenner's documentary on America's troubled food system covers little new territory. But the facts are still compelling enough to influence the way viewers eat, which is the film's ultimate mission. Read more

Tom Huddleston, Time Out: This solidly constructed documentary aims to do for food production what An Inconvenient Truth did for global warming. Read more

John Anderson, Variety: Does for the supermarket what "Jaws" did for the beach -- marches straight into the dark side of cutthroat agri-business, corporatized meat and the greedy manipulation of both genetics and the law. Read more

Robert Sietsema, Village Voice: Some of the film's scariest moments fall in X-Files territory. Read more

Ann Hornaday, Washington Post: This absorbing film looks terrific and does a superb job of making its case that our current food ways are drastically out of whack. Read more