A film casting stones at excess, Greed is hardly without sin itself.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
Winterbottom delivers a heady cocktail of absurdity and profundity, laced with a generous measure of cutting one-liners in a film that builds into a scathing commentary on a world where the rich keep getting richer and the poor are merely collateral damage.
Slant Magazine by Chris Barsanti
The film takes occasional stabs at comic grotesquerie, but it’s brought back to earth by an insistent docudrama seriousness.
A serrated but superficial portrait of how capitalism distances the rich from its consequences, Michael Winterbottom’s damning sendup is often right on the money, but its broadside attacks on the ultra-rich are too obvious to draw any blood or raise our hackles.
You’re left to wonder whether you’ve watched a freshman college course with laughs, or a failed comedy with a lecture surgically grafted on to it.
The Hollywood Reporter by John DeFore
It's a wobbly but amusing pic that only really raises eyebrows at the end.
Like Maximus, the hero who inspires the theme of its pivotal party, Greed will keep you entertained. But patchiness and occasional preachiness mar a clearly heartfelt message movie.
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
Greed isn’t especially penetrating about money or power. ... Winterbottom chucks everything up to and including the kitchen sink into this movie: sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.
The emperor is naked, Greed wants us to realize, but unless we agree to radically rethink our own wardrobes, does it make any difference?
RogerEbert.com by Simon Abrams
Greed is never the sum of its best parts since other actors — especially Jamie Blackley, who, playing young McCreadie in a series of flashbacks, is fine but relatively disappointing — can’t pull off the movie’s delicate balance of broad humor and po-faced drama.