Windfall

Urgent, informative and artfully assembled documentary.

It's a tantalizing case study that suggests ordinary people still have the power to steer a course between faceless bureaucracies and greedy capitalists, but only just - and only if they can find a way to overcome their differences and work together.

Windfall left me disheartened. I thought wind energy was something I could believe in.

Whatever the legitimate arguments Windfall makes against the industry it targets, Meredith's feuding becomes just as inaccessible as the windmills that incite it.

Windfall is undeniably persuasive - and is likely advocating on the right side of the wind-farm issue - but the movie's case relies more on emotional appeals and frightening images of giant machines than on real, objective number-crunching.

The argument is so tilted against windmills (sorry) that this comes perilously close to an advocacy video. But Israel deserves credit for delivering the bad news that wind power, like natural gas and nuclear, comes with its own array of social and environmental headaches.

Given the film's inability to posit any significant objections - or, for that matter, alternatives - to the turbines, it all feels like so much petty sniping against progress.