All Critics (68) | Top Critics (20) | Fresh (66) | Rotten (2)
It not only delivers astonishing, suspenseful footage that makes it a legitimate thriller, but also serves up thoughtful meditations about using wild animals for our own entertainment.
It's hard to imagine anyone coming out of this movie and not swearing off the next vacation trip to Orlando, San Antonio or San Diego.
Unfortunately, this feels like a ten-minute news segment blown up to theatrical proportions.
While Cowperthwaite's film opens with a simple question about the behavior of a single killer whale, it ends up mounting a persuasive ethical argument against keeping orcas in captivity.
"Blackfish" is no trumped up horror story fueled by Hollywood brand names and special effects. In this riveting documentary directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite, all of the creatures are real, and all seem entitled to the serious chip on their shoulders.
The film may be depressing. But even with a terrible, watery musical score, it's also good.
As enlightening and passionate as the picture is, Cowperthwaite fails to summon the type of comprehensive journalism this type of story deserves.
The one save-the-whales movie to see when you only have time for one.
There aren't too many animal-rights documentaries that could be described as "metal," but Blackfish, one part horror movie and one part nature film, fits the bill and then some.
Cowperthwaite juxtaposes to devastating effect official PR spin with news reports and eye-witness accounts of marine park tragedies.
[An] impressive, often gripping documentary ...
Engrossing when offers alarming CSI-type forensic analysis into the death of a whale trainer [but] the narrow focus on SeaWorld raises more questions that aren't considered.
Through interviews with whale scientists and several former Sea World trainers, [Cowperthwaite] paints a disturbing picture of the profit-minded climate of deceit that prevailed at the company.
Puts 'killer whales' into wildlife and humanitarian perspective while giving you all of the dangerous action sequences you could possible want. Free Willy, it ain't.
Blackfish marries biography, activism and psycho thriller into a pleasing cinematic shape, starting with a single whale and the trainers who worked with him.
Some of the archive footage is exceedingly harrowing, but the case against commercially condoned cruelty is made without sensationalism, and few will be able to watch this without a growing sense of outrage.
Cruelty begets cruelty and whales don't belong in the circus.
It is never less than gripping, and devastatingly undermines the notion of performing whales as wholesome family entertainment.
Damning and disturbing viewing.
It's a strong piece of video journalism in which images and the interviews deliver the information, and we reach our own conclusions.
A horrifying, heartbreaking eye-opener about human inhumanity to other intelligent and emotional beings who share our planet.
As horribly gripping as a serial-killer thriller, though the real villain is not the ostensible culprit, but its human captors.
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