Though one-sided and all too happy to assail an easy target such as a monstrous oil company, Crude backs up its rhetoric by providing footage and images of the people and terrain affected...

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Oct 11, 2019

Yes, Crude talks about the environmental impact of oil exploitation, but it is not just another documentary about this subject... it is the human perspective that prevails, showing the human cost of each drop of oil we consume. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 16, 2018

Well shows how a canny public relations campaign is a key part of legal strategy to even up the odds in the court of world opinion. . .But does not get below the surface.

| Original Score: 6/10 | Jan 1, 2016

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 17, 2011

Another interesting film from Joe Berlinger

| Original Score: B | Aug 17, 2011

In a welcome change from many recent documentaries with an activist bent, the director is never seen on camera, never heard on the soundtrack, and does precious little overt editorializing.

| Original Score: 6.1/10 | Jul 4, 2010

This intense documentary tells a hugely important story that's packed with compelling characters and situations. Although a repetitive structure and a sense of agonising futility conspire to undermine the vital lessons it has to teach us.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jan 15, 2010

Not exactly genre-bending innovation or anything but a decent documentary about an important episode in history of oil company exploitation.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 15, 2010

Although the real-life outcome may be known to some, Crude still, at its best, unfolds like a courtroom thriller.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 15, 2010

The Ecuadorians' fight continues, and their courage isn't to be doubted. Even the much-mocked, much-maligned campaigner Trudie Styler emerges with credit for supporting them.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 15, 2010

Structurally a little jumbled, it's still a worthy addition to the angry eco-doc subgenre.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 15, 2010

Gripping and powerful, Crude is documentary journalism as it needs to be. Blissful ignorance stirred with bland apathy is no longer an option.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 15, 2010

There's much speechifying, with no high-octane finale - but that's near-unavoidable for a case still dragging on amid corrupt politicking.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 15, 2010

Berlinger's purpose is not to cheerlead or show Fajardo rubbing shoulders with celebrity activists like Trudie Styler and Sting, but to highlight how easily money can tilt the scales of justice.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 15, 2010

While the current trend in documentaries is to take stories and wrap them into neat little packages, Crude runs merrily against the grain.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 15, 2010

Few of these films ever take solid, substantive slices of truth or attestation from both sides. They are always partial, which vitiates the eagerness with which we would, if we could, espouse the cause of downtrodden.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 15, 2010

Joe Berlinger's film is a suitably forensic dissection of an ecological disaster and much less of a crusading piece of polemic than documentaries such as An Inconvenient Truth.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 15, 2010

The arguments are batted back and forth, and one's sympathy for the Ecuadorean side takes only a slight wobble when Trudi Styler gets behind the cause.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 15, 2010

A well-balanced documentary all the more incisive for its decision to eschew editorialising and let the evidence speak for itself.

| Jan 15, 2010

A sturdy, hard-hitting account.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 15, 2010