Three very different documentaries centered around nature or animals and the last grouping of my “30 reviews in 30 minutes” (woo-hoo! My hands can rest!)…
Dark Horse…A working-class British lot go in together and buy a racing horse, cracking into the upper-crust world of competitive horse racing. A beautiful and stirring film that may be a little too quaint for its own good. You’ll have to be in the right mood to give this one its proper patience. Grade: B-
Into the Inferno…By now, you know that Werner Herzog documentaries are going to be less informative than transcendant. The beautiful footage of volcanos are what you’re really wanting to see here and this doc has plenty of them. Grade: B-
The Ivory Trade…A very worthy cause doc (much more so than the other two) that is about the poaching of elephants and the—you guessed it—illegal (or legal) trade around their ivory tusks. The film is at least 30 minutes too long (it clocks in at nearly two hours) but it does a good job of explaining the illicit global trade. Although I wish some parts had been left out—there’s a Chinese “activist” who seems more motivated by greenwashing China’s image than anything to do with elephants, and seems oblivious to the scale of the problem in China if nobody even thinks it’s possible he’s against killing elephants while he’s undercover—this is about as close to a Michael Mann film on poaching as we’re ever likely to see. Grade: B