1989–present: Directing, producing and screenwriting
The 1989 film Roger & Me was Moore's first documentary about what happened to Flint, Michigan, after General Motors closed its factories and opened new ones in Mexico where the workers were paid lower wages than their American counterparts. The "Roger" referred to in the title is Roger B. Smith, then CEO and President of General Motors.
Harlan Jacobson, editor of Film Comment magazine, said that Moore muddled the chronology in Roger & Me to make it seem that events that took place before G.M.'s layoffs were a consequence of them. Critic Roger Ebert defended Moore's handling of the timeline as an artistic and stylistic choice that had less to do with his credibility as a filmmaker and more to do with the flexibility of film as a medium to express a satiric viewpoint.
Moore made a follow-up 23-minute documentary film, Pets or Meat: The Return to Flint, that aired on PBS in 1992. It is based on Roger & Me. The film's title refers to Rhonda Britton, a Flint, Michigan resident featured in both the 1989 and 1992 films, who sells rabbits as either pets or meat.
Moore's 1995 satirical film Canadian Bacon features a fictional U.S. president (played by Alan Alda) engineering a fake war with Canada to boost his popularity. The film is also one of the last featuring Canadian actor John Candy. Some commentators in the media felt the film was influenced by the Stanley Kubrick film Dr. Strangelove.
Moore's 1997 film The Big One documents the tour publicizing Moore's book Downsize This! Random Threats from an Unarmed American, in which he criticizes mass layoffs despite record corporate profits. Among others, he targets Nike for outsourcing shoe production to Indonesia.
His documentary Bowling for Columbine, released in 2002, probes the culture of guns and violence in the United States, taking, as a starting point, the Columbine High School massacre of 1999. Bowling for Columbine won the Anniversary Prize at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival and France's César Award as the Best Foreign Film. In the United States, it won the 2002 Academy Award for Documentary Feature. It also enjoyed great commercial and critical success for a film of its type, and has since gone on to be considered one of the greatest documentary films of all-time. At the time of Columbine's release, it was the highest-grossing mainstream-released documentary (a record now held by Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11).
Shortly after winning the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for Bowling for Columbine, Moore spoke out against U.S. President George W. Bush and the Iraq War, which had just started three days prior. He further criticized the president by stating, "We live in a time where we have fictitious election results that elects a fictitious president. We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons." The speech was received with a cacophony of boos, applause, and standing ovations from the audience at the theater. Moments after the speech concluded, to lighten the mood, host Steve Martin joked, "The Teamsters are helping Michael Moore into the trunk of his limo." Moore later said a stagehand "screamed 'asshole' right in my eardrum." After his return flight, he opened his bag to find his Oscar had been keyed, with a TSA notice.
Moore's film Fahrenheit 9/11, released in 2004, examines America in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, particularly the record of the George W. Bush Administration and alleged links between the families of George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden. Fahrenheit was awarded the Palme d'Or, the top honor at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival. It was the first documentary film to win the prize since 1956's The Silent World.
Moore later announced that Fahrenheit 9/11 would not be in consideration for the 2005 Academy Award for Documentary Feature, but instead for the Academy Award for Best Picture. He stated he wanted the movie to be seen by a few million more people via television broadcasting prior to Election Day. According to Moore, "Academy rules forbid the airing of a documentary on television within nine months of its theatrical release", and since the November 2 election was fewer than nine months after the film's release, Fahrenheit 9/11 would have been disqualified for the Documentary Oscar. Regardless, it did not receive an Oscar nomination for Best Picture.
The title of the film alludes to the classic book Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, about a future totalitarian state in which books are banned, and any books found are burned by firemen. According to the novel, paper begins to burn at 451 °F (233 °C). The pre-release subtitle of Moore's film continues the allusion: "The temperature at which freedom burns."
As of August 2012, Fahrenheit 9/11 is the highest-grossing documentary of all time, taking in over US$200 million worldwide, including United States box office revenue of almost US$120 million. In February 2011, Moore sued producers Bob and Harvey Weinstein for US$2.7 million in unpaid profits from the film, claiming they used "Hollywood accounting tricks" to avoid paying him the money. In February 2012, Moore and the Weinsteins informed the court that they had settled their dispute.
Fahrenheit 9/11 drew criticism and controversy following its release just prior to the 2004 United States presidential election. Journalist and literary critic Christopher Hitchens alleged that the film contained distortions and untruths. This contention drew multiple rebuttals, including an eFilmCritic article and an editorial in the Columbus Free Press.
Moore directed the 2007 film Sicko, about the American health care system, focusing particularly on the managed-care and pharmaceutical industries. At least four major pharmaceutical companies—Pfizer, Eli Lilly, AstraZeneca, and GlaxoSmithKline—ordered their employees not to grant any interviews or assist Moore. According to Moore in a letter on his website, "roads that often surprise us and lead us to new ideas—and challenge us to reconsider the ones we began with have caused some minor delays." The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 19, 2007, receiving a lengthy standing ovation, and was released in the U.S. and Canada on June 29, 2007. The film is currently ranked the twelfth highest grossing documentary of all time and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature.
Moore takes a look at the politics of college students in what he calls "Bush Administration America" with Captain Mike Across America, which was shot during Moore's 62-city college campus tour in the months leading up to the 2004 presidential election. The film debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 7, 2007. It was later re-edited by Moore into Slacker Uprising and released for free on the internet on September 23, 2008.
Released on September 23, 2009, Capitalism: A Love Story analyzes the 2008 financial crisis and the U.S. economy during the transition between the Presidency of George W. Bush and the Presidency of Barack Obama. Addressing a press conference at its release, Moore said, "Democracy is not a spectator sport, it's a participatory event. If we don't participate in it, it ceases to be a democracy. So Obama will rise or fall based not so much on what he does but on what we do to support him."
Where to Invade Next examines the benefits of progressive social policies in various countries. The film had its premiere at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival. Godfrey Cheshire, writing for Roger Ebert.com, wrote that "Moore's surprising and extraordinarily winning Where to Invade Next will almost surely cast his detractors at Fox News and similar sinkholes into consternation".
In Michael Moore in TrumpLand, Moore talks about the 2016 Presidential Election Campaigns. It is a solo performance showing Moore on stage speaking to a seated audience. The film consists of Moore's opinions of the candidates and highlights the Democratic National Candidate Hillary Clinton's strengths and also features a lengthy section on how the Republican National Candidate Donald Trump could win. It was filmed in Wilmington, Ohio, at the Murphy Theatre over the course of two nights in October 2016. The film premiered just eleven days after it was shot at the IFC Center in New York City.
In May 2017, it was announced that Moore had reunited with Harvey Weinstein to direct his new film about Donald Trump, titled Fahrenheit 11/9, which was released in approximately 1,500 theaters in the United States and Canada on September 21, 2018. Sexual assault allegations against Weinstein prompted Moore to revoke the plan to work with The Weinstein Company, which stalled production.
The title refers to the day when Donald Trump officially became President-elect of the United States. In a column for Variety responding to the film's low opening weekend, "How Michael Moore Lost His Audience," sympathetic film critic Owen Gleiberman wrote "He's like an aging rock star putting out albums that simply don't mean as much to those who were, and are, his core fans". According to Glenn Greenwald, "what he's trying is of unparalleled importance, not to take the cheap route of exclusively denouncing Trump, but to take the more complicated, challenging, and productive route of understanding who and what created the climate in which Trump could thrive."
Michael Moore was executive producer of the documentary Planet of the Humans, which was directed by Jeff Gibbs and released on July 31, 2019. The film makes the argument that, since the first Earth Day, the condition of the planet has worsened, and questions whether mainstream approaches adopted by industry to mitigate climate change, entail environmental impacts whose costs are comparable to or even possibly outweigh the benefits. The film received criticism from a number of climate change experts and activists who disputed its claims, and the accuracy of figures cited in the film, and suggested that the film could play into the hands of the fossil fuel industry.
Michael Moore, Jeff Gibbs, and co-producer Ozzie Zehner responded to the critics on an episode of Rising.
