Capitalism: A Love Story is what you’d expect from a Michael Moore documentary. There are montages of terrible things happening with ironically upbeat backing soundtracks. There are lots and lots of shots of ordinary, hard working Americans crying. There are slow motion sequences of politicians doing quite innocuous things like walking down a corridor, or talking, but in the context their very walking is made to seem fricking evil. But on the check-list of Moore standards there is also the clear explanation of pretty loathsome facts, like the huge number of American corporations who take out life insurance policies on their employees, making them more profitable dead than alive. There is moving coverage of a workers sit-in which eventually succeeds in winning its demands of a redundancy pay-out from Bank of America.

Finally and most importantly there is a sequence of Michael Moore making an absolute fool of himself for giggles. For many critics this is the most divisive part of Moore documentaries – why is it necessary for the director of a documentary on the recession to stand outside the New York stock exchange with a megaphone demanding the money back "for the American people"? But I think it’s bloody brilliant to see an irate fat man running around the Goldman Sachs building with yellow crime scene tape, pursued by amused security staff. Of course, it could be said that Moore is self-righteous, teenage and propagandist in his execution. He doesn’t need to use heart-tugging string music every time a Sad Thing is on screen. But he doesn’t make the vaguest pretence at being balanced and unbiased. He is the left wing equivalent of hysterical fear-mongerers like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.

This film is worth a look for its amusing account of what caused the economic crisis, and its broad-brush treatment of capitalist greed. Criticisms aplenty can be made of the Moore technique, but it’s pretty difficult to make a film about economics which holds attention. That he can make it into a blockbuster is testament to Moore’s agitprop genius.