A certain candidate for the year’s best documentary, Joe Berlinger’s (Paradise Lost, Brother’s Keeper) environmental nightmare Crude expertly combines human catastrophe and corporate wrongdoing, exposing the devastation suffered by 30,000 Ecuadorians in a waste poisoned Amazon. In Ecuador—a country equal in size to Rhode Island—Texaco (now Chevron) spent decades drilling for oil, allegedly depositing deadly toxicity into the soil and water, causing permanent contamination and skyrocketing cancer rates in indigenous residents, in some cases beginning at infancy. Berlinger focuses on the longstanding lawsuit Ecuadorians brought against Texaco, at the center of which is heroic, novice Ecuadorian attorney Pablo Fajardo, a symbolic David taking on a most powerful Goliath, enlisting Amazon advocates Sting and Trudie Styler on his quest. Victims’ testimonials stir both the heart and outrage.

Employing a cinéma vérité approach, Berlinger avoids agitprop indulgences, letting the facts speak for themselves, resisting on-camera provocations by allowing the Chevron villains to tow party-line rhetoric in the face of unmitigated horrors. A moving experience, Crude ultimately questions whether winning a lawsuit—even for billions—can begin to address the human spoils of corporate irresponsibility.