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

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

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

An engrossing case for justice.

Full Review | Dec 3, 2009

A gripping, multifaceted thriller about media politics, global economics, and legal infighting. Wherever your sympathies fall, this may teach you a lot about the way the modern world works.

| Dec 3, 2009

One has to wonder if oil industry executives are concerned about the release of Joe Berlinger's damning documentary.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 3, 2009

What Crude does best is take us behind the scenes and show in often candid detail how campaigns are waged, tactics decided on and strategies prioritized.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Dec 3, 2009

As the film very eloquently implies, when the greater good is defined as profits, and a lack of culpability is proportionate to your number of shareholders, well . . . a lot of petroleum-soaked chickens will be coming home to roost.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 2, 2009

At first Crude looks like one more environmental agit-doc intended to outrage and inspire. Director Joe Berlinger is no doctrinaire hack, though.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 5, 2009

If you ever had doubts about the impact that celebrities can have on such a David-and-Goliath struggle, Berlinger methodically removes them.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 23, 2009

It's a David-and-Goliath tale, full of anger and disturbing accusation, but it's also inspiring.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Oct 14, 2009

A legal thriller, it's a three-year investigation into the disaster environmentalists call the "Amazonian Chernobyl" that offers both sides of the story and leaves the viewer in the position of jury.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 9, 2009

It will certainly remain in your mind the next time you stop for gas.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Oct 9, 2009

Berlinger provides a bracing and intelligent look at how such battles are (and perhaps must be) fought in a world that's hardly lacking when it comes to tales of injustice.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 9, 2009