Even though Ray Kroc referred to himself as the founder of McDonald’s, he didn’t exactly invent the idea. That would be the McDonald brothers, who ran a popular burger stand in Southern California in the 1950s, when Kroc came across it. What happened next is described in The Founder, featuring Michael Keaton in a showy turn as Kroc.

The Founder played briefly last year and is opening wider this week. My review is at PopMatters:

Sometimes a hamburger isn’t just a hamburger. Consider how many Americans still hold primal memories of wolfing down a Big Mac with fries as a child, or the fact that the Soviet Union only seemed truly dead and gone after a McDonald’s opened in Moscow in 1990. A phenomenon in many ways, McDonald’s has inspired backlashes against its cookie-cutter business model. It has also served “billions”. As the visionary Ray Kroc (Michael Keaton) puts it in The Founder, “McDonald’s can be the new American church”…

You can see the trailer here.