King Corn (2007)
Mosaic Films

Description

King Corn is a fun and crusading journey into the digestive tract of our fast food nation where one ultra-industrial, pesticide-laden, heavily-subsidized commodity dominates the food pyramid from top to bottom corn. Fueled by curiosity and a dash of naivete, college buddies Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis return to their ancestral home of Greene, Iowa to figure out how a modest kernel conquered America.

With the help of some real farmers, oodles of fertilizer and government aide, and some genetically modified seeds, the friends manage to grow one acre of corn. Along the way, they unlock the hilarious absurdities and scary but hidden truths about America's modern food system in this engrossing and eye-opening documentary.

Tags

Food

Collected reviews and ratings

9.2 Entertainment Weekly | Owen Gleiberman

Aaron Woolf's we-are-what-we-eat documentary King Corn is a lively introduction to the corn industrial complex.
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9.0 Amazon user reviews

Whether you are well versed in the ways of the industrial food chain or just beginning to learn about it, King Corn is an entertaining film that delivers a lot of information.
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8.8 TV Guide | Maitland McDonagh

Morbidly fascinating facts are interspersed with an excess of cutesy animation, folksy chitchat with the neighbors, and homey but not especially interesting trips down the Ellis and Cheney family lanes.
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8.0 documentaryfilms.net | Umut Newbury

King Corn doesn’t teach foodies and sustainable agriculture advocates anything they did not know before. However, it’s a gentle introduction for the average American consumer into the nightmare that food production has become in this country.
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8.0 DVD Talk | Brian Orndorf

It's a lot of science and perspective to cover, yet Woolf manages to keep "King Corn" focused and sedate.
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8.0 filmcritic.com | Christopher Null

As documentary stunts go, King Corn is an awfully good one.
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7.0 Washington Post | Ann Hornaday

It should be required viewing before going into a supermarket, McDonald's or your very own refrigerator.
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7.0 Salon.com | Andrew O'Hehir

Cheney and Ellis are a virtually indistinguishable pair of post-fraternity fellows in backward Red Sox caps, but the movie they made with director (and Ellis' cousin) Aaron Woolf is a chilling one.
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5.0 New York Times | Matt Zoller Seitz

all the time spent on autobiographical detail and personal banter hampers the film’s urgency, and plays like an awkward attempt to justify a format that the filmmakers are too self-effacing to exploit.
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