"No One Has Yet Found A Successful Idiom For Making Us Feel Anxious About The Environment"

'Green films' very rarely earn back their investments, and it is the rare one indeed that not only turns a profit, but goes on to become a cinematic hit. Why?

"dimwit voiceovers and preachy tutting"

That'll do it.

There are the ones about the end of the world. There are single-issue ones, about soil or oil or fish. There are gimmicky ones, in which a man spends a month scoffing Big Macs, or a year living carbon-neutral, or goes for swims in polluted rivers, or faces up to the fact that he's not going to be president. There are ones that make you swap lightbulbs, the ones that suggest you adopt a goat. There are ones in glossy 3D, featuring an A-list actor doing the voiceover and endangered beasties scuttling about under an ominous sky.

I've watched my fair share of eco-docos over the years, because I'm interested to see what have to say, and how they present their information and back up their claims.

But most of them have been terrible. A waste of time. Just fucking appalling cinema, or home viewing.

The Cove sounds like it might have cracked the secret of cinematic eco-doco alchemy : educate, but also entertain :

The Cove's subject is the slaughter of wild dolphins in one small cove in Japan – some 23,000 of them each year. This was brought to the attention of Psihoyos, previously a photographer for National Geographic, by one Ric O'Barry, a former trainer of Flipper who is now an animal activist. Many knew about the killing, but no one had ever witnessed it – apart from the hired harpooners who would trap the dolphins in the heavily guarded cove, then kill them. So Psihoyos assembled a crack team to help him get the footage, including Olympic divers, an air force engineer, a stuntman and a team of designers from Industrial Light & Magic, who hid cameras in fake rocks to be planted around the cove.

It doesn't nag or holler; it lets its audience join the dots. It's made by people with enough detachment to be sly, satiric, even aesthetic. It is the closest thing green cinema has got to its own Dr Strangelove.

The trailer :