The 2008 financial crisis gets a five-act autopsy from director Charles Ferguson, who opens not on Wall Street but in Iceland, tracing how a small country's banks deregulated themselves into total collapse as a preview of what was coming everywhere else. Matt Damon narrates as the film moves through the mechanics: subprime mortgages bundled into securities, credit default swaps used as side bets, and the ratings agencies that stamped AAA on all of it. Ferguson interviews economists, hedge fund managers, and former regulators, and gets some of his sharpest moments from the people who refuse to answer or grow visibly defensive on camera, including academics who wrote paid research for the industries they were supposedly studying. Lehman Brothers and AIG collapse in the film's middle section like dominoes the system had no plan for. The last stretch turns to Washington, showing how many of the same officials and advisers who built the deregulated system stayed in power to manage its aftermath. It won the Academy Award for Best Documentary.