Blackfish

Blackfish is a documentary for viewers who want a hard, plainly argued piece about captive orcas and the public world built around them. By our assessment, its strength is the way it turns archival material and witness testimony into a clear, forceful case instead of a loose essay. The trade-off is that it is openly one-sided in feeling, so it is less interested in balance than in persuasion. In practice it is disciplined and hard to shake off, the kind of nonfiction film that leaves you sitting with the image and the argument together. Compared with neutral natural-history programming, it is much more openly accusatory, and that is exactly why it has stayed so widely discussed.