Michael Moore

Michael Moore studied to be a journalist, but following the decision by General Motors to close the plant in his home town of Flint, Michigan with the loss of 30,000 jobs, he raised the money to make a documentary film about his attempts to confront the company's CEO Roger Smith about the devastating effects of the decision on the local populace and economy. The result was the 1989 Roger & Me, a multi-award-winning example of documentary agit-prop that firmly established the Moore style for films and TV series to come.

His TV series TV Nation was humorous critique of the wrongdoings of big business and the wealthy elite and won Moore two primetime Emmys and introduced a young English correspondent named Louis Theroux, who went on to make his own award-winning documentaries in which he, like Moore, was a key player.

His attacks on misdeeds of the rich and powerful continued in the 1997 film The Big One and the TV series The Awful Truth (1999-2000), but it was his Oscar-winning attack on US gun culture Bowling for Columbine (2002) that made Moore both an internationally celebrated documentarian and a key figure of hate for the American right. he cemented both positions witj the 2004 Fahrenheit 9/11, in which he launched an all-out assault on the Bush administration and its handling of the attacks on the Twin Towers. The film controversially won the Palme D'Or at Cannes, selected by a jury headed by Quentin Tarantino.

He followed this with Sicko (2007), an investigation of America's private health care system, and the somewhat self-indulgent Slacker Uprising/Captain Mike Across America (2007), which followed his own tour of US campuses in search of the new political generation. Moore has also directed a number of music videos, including testity and Sleep Now in the Fire for rage Against the Machine and All the Way to Reno (You're Gonna Be a Star) for R.E.M. His books Downsize This!, Stupid White Men and Dude, Where's My Country? have all been best-sellers.

Both Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11 were screened by us in previous seasons.

Capitalism: A Love Story trailer

DVD Outsider review of Slacker Uprising.