I was worried this was going to be a malls = evil 1970s kind of documentary, but it really brought something marvelous and unexpected and new to the subject. As you watch it, its scope broadens and broadens, like a complex film plot. At the end you feel as if you’ve seen something slightly holy. A wonderful doc.

Douglas Coupland, author, Generation X, J-Pod

Fascinating yet ultimately frightening, Malls R Us is an elegant, thoughtful documentary which exposes the mindset of mallpreneurs and mall designers from the time malls were first invented till the present, and the increasingly sophisticated, calculated effects of their manipulations. Consumers beware: shopping will never be the same.

Mark Achbar, filmmaker, The Corporation

A fascinating, sumptuously filmed investigation into the history, design, function and future of the shopping mall in modern life. With its global sweep, vintage footage, and searching assessment of the mixed blessings that malls are in our lives, Malls R Us is instant classic– the documentary you want to see on this subject.

Professor John Lyden, Chair, Religion, Film, and Visual Culture Group, American Academy of Religion

A monumental documentary on a global scale, Malls R Us shows shopping malls to have a tragic and apparently irreversible effect on every dimension of moral and material life.  Not only are malls the central symbol of modern auto-industrial society, they are the site of a titanic clash of civilizations and values.

Sharon Zukin, Author, Point of Purchase: How Shopping Changed American Culture

An exceptional kaleidoscope of views on the effect the mall has had on modernity and on the symbolic nature the mall has as a metaphor for the human experience.

Dwight DeWerth-Pallmeyer PhD, Director of Communication Studies, Widener University

“Malls R Us” is a powerful reminder as we slide into global economic crisis of how much mass consumption has shaped people’s lives and created the public spaces of modern societies, East and West, North and South. This film impresses upon us the folly of our ways, the alternatives we might entertain, but also the difficulties we will face extricating ourselves from a world overly dependent on retail for prosperity and community.

Lizabeth Cohen, Author of A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America