Film
The China Hustle
A brisk, furious documentary about how Wall Street quietly funneled billions of dollars into fraudulent Chinese companies through reverse mergers, and the small band of short-sellers who caught it. It moves like a thriller built out of spreadsheets and confessions, plain-spoken and occasionally darkly funny about its own outrage. Good for anyone who loved The Big Short's anger but wants the real, ongoing, unresolved version.
If you liked this
Betting on Zero2016
Bill Ackman wages a very public war against Herbalife, convinced it's a pyramid scheme dressed as wellness — the same forensic thrill of watching one obsessive investor follow the money until the whole thing looks rotten.
But It's essentially a one-man crusade, and Ackman's ego is as much the story as the fraud — some viewers find him harder to root for than the villains.

Inside Job2010
Charles Ferguson's Oscar-winning breakdown of the 2008 crash names names and doesn't blink, tracing how deregulation, greed, and academic complicity built a bomb that everybody helped light.
But It's dense with acronyms and policy detail — thrilling if you like structure, exhausting if you want faces and stakes over systems.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room2005
The original template for the financial-fraud documentary — swaggering executives, invented profits, a company that collapsed in weeks after years of Wall Street applause. Still the gold standard.
But The scandal is old news now, and some of the archival footage and reenactments feel dated next to slicker modern docs.

The wildcard
Something you would not have found on your own.
Chinatown1974
Both are structured as investigations into how power protects fraud through paperwork and respectability; Chinatown just does it as noir instead of documentary, and concludes there's no fixing it.
A private detective chasing a simple infidelity case stumbles into a conspiracy about water rights and civic corruption — the same pleasure of pulling one thread until an entire system unravels, just wearing a trench coat.
But It's fiction, decades old, and paced like classic '70s noir — no forensic accountants, just moral rot dressed as mystery.

More like this (8)
The Big Short2015
A starry, jokey, formally inventive retelling of the 2008 crash that breaks the fourth wall to explain synthetic CDOs — proof financial fraud can be entertaining without softening the outrage.
But The gimmicks — celebrity cameos explaining jargon, direct address — either delight you or feel like a film slightly embarrassed by its own subject.

Dirty Money2018
A Netflix anthology series that spends a full hour per scam, letting each story — payday loans, emissions cheating, shady real estate — breathe in a way an 84-minute film can't.
But Quality varies episode to episode, and you're committing to a series rather than one clean sitting.

The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley2019
Swap Wall Street for Silicon Valley and stocks for blood-testing machines that didn't work — Elizabeth Holmes built Theranos on the same confident nothing that powered the shell companies here.
But It's a slower character study of one charismatic liar rather than a systemic exposé, so the scale feels smaller.

Icarus2017
Starts as a personal doping experiment and stumbles into a Russian state conspiracy — a documentary that keeps escalating past what its own director expected to find.
But The sports-doping angle is a big pivot from finance, so it won't scratch quite the same specific itch.

Margin Call2011
A tense, talky drama set over one overnight shift at a bank realizing it's holding worthless assets — all boardrooms and moral erosion, no chase scenes, just people deciding how much they can live with.
But Almost nothing happens physically — it's dialogue and dread, which some will find gripping and others merely slow.

American Greed2007
A long-running, unglamorous true-crime series dramatizing one financial swindle per episode — Ponzi schemes, embezzlers, fake charities — with a reliable, procedural comfort-food quality.
But The reenactments are cheesy and the narration is pure basic-cable, a big step down in polish from a theatrical documentary.

F for Fake1973
Both interrogate how confidence and paperwork substitute for real value, and both use the documentary form itself as part of the con — Welles just admits it outright.
Orson Welles' late-career essay film about a notorious art forger spirals into a meditation on whether any documentary — including this one — can be trusted, told with the same magician's-patter glee Welles brought to everything.
But It's self-consciously experimental and slippery on purpose — if you want a clear villain and a clean case, this will frustrate you.

L'Argent1983no page yet
Where The China Hustle tracks fraud through institutions and investors, L'Argent tracks the same dishonesty down to one human casualty, asking what all that abstracted money finally costs someone real.
Robert Bresson's final film follows a single counterfeit banknote as it passes from hand to hand, destroying an ordinary man's life step by step — fraud shown not as spreadsheets but as a slow, quiet moral catastrophe.
But It's austere, French, subtitled, and almost wordless in places — a world away from talking-head experts and stock tickers, deliberately so.
People
Cast
- Dan DavidHimself
- Matthew WiechertHimself
- Carson BlockHimself
- Jim ChanosHimself
- Soren AandahlHimself
- Maj SoueidnnHimself
- Alexandra StevensonHerself
- Crocker CoulsonHimself
- Dune LawrenceHerself
- Drew BernsteinHimself
- Gregory ColemanHimself
- Herb GreenbergHimself
Directing
- Jed RothsteinDirector
Writing
- Jed RothsteinWriter
Production
- Richard PerelloCo-Executive Producer
- Erin EdeikenCo-Producer
- Alex GibneyExecutive Producer
- Ben CosgroveExecutive Producer
- Frank MarshallExecutive Producer
- Jeff CubanExecutive Producer
- Mark CubanExecutive Producer
- Stacey OffmanExecutive Producer
- Todd WagnerExecutive Producer
- Devorah DeVriesLine Producer
- Ryan SuffernProducer
- Sarah GibsonProducer
- Sarit G. WorkSupervising Producer
Recommended by
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Betting on Zero, Inside Job