Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret (2014)

Cowspiracy arrives with the sweaty urgency of a man who has just found a leak in the basement and cannot locate anyone willing to care. Kip Andersen, our guide, ambles from one environmental organization to the next asking a simple question about animal agriculture, and receives a series of evasions that he treats as evidence of a cover-up. The film is at its most effective when it simply lists numbers: water consumption, land use, methane, ocean dead zones. It is at its least effective when it decides those numbers constitute a conspiracy.

The argument here is a lecture, and the film knows it. Andersen walks us through graphs and interviews with the patience of a substitute teacher who genuinely believes this time the class will listen. The interview roster is varied enough to avoid looking like a closed circle, though the film makes no argument of it. The targets are not merely individual consumers but the machinery of corporate environmentalism, Greenpeace and the Sierra Club included, accused of protecting donor relationships and revenue streams ahead of the planet. That indictment of institutional self-interest is the film's sharpest edge, and it lands harder than any statistic about feedlots.

Where the film stumbles is in its certainty. The 51 percent figure it leans on has been disputed by scientists who place livestock emissions far lower, and the documentary never seriously entertains that objection. This is advocacy wearing the lab coat of inquiry, and the seam shows. The result is a persuasive piece of sermonizing for the already converted, useful as a primer and unreliable as a verdict. It plays less like an investigation than a recruitment pitch, which is a shame, because the underlying question about what we eat deserves better than a crusade.