Metacritic-Rezensionen

Eventually, it’s Wealth‘s inherent too-muchness that undoes its own best intentions.

The result is both a compelling, damning cultural observation and testament to Greenfield’s own visual artistry.

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.

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.

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.

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.

By turns, Greenfield’s survey is alarming, hilarious, and indulgent, sometimes strained and a little dull, prone to overstatement and an abuse of synecdoche.

Greenfield’s earlier documentaries, such as Thin and The Queen of Versailles, serve as better explorations of the topics this somewhat shapeless movie presents.

The most curious passages of Generation Wealth are those in which the director questions her own parents and kids.

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.