Racing Extinction

Louie Psihoyos's documentary is about the sixth mass extinction now under way at human hands. The team works with hidden cameras, recording illegal seafood sold in restaurants, the shark fin trade and the hunting of manta rays. The second half turns to carbon emissions and tries to make the invisible visible. Its best find is filming emissions with infrared and specialised cameras. Gas from an exhaust pipe or a chimney appears on screen as a black cloud, which lifts the argument out of the abstract. At the close the team projects images of vanishing species onto the face of the Empire State Building in New York, and that display became the film's most discussed sequence. Psihoyos had already won an Oscar for The Cove, about dolphin hunting, and the method here is the same: covert filming, activism and spectacle together. Who it is for: viewers who like environmental documentary and activist cinema. Who it is not for: anyone wanting a balanced debate, since the film is openly constructed as a campaign.