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If The Cove isn’t in the running for next year’s Best Doc Oscar, there’s something terribly wrong with this world. Gripping exposé, harrowing horror-thriller and devastating agitprop, it takes us to “a little town with a big secret”.

Every year in a pretty cove in the Japanese fishing settlement of Taiji, thousands of terrified dolphins are driven in from open water and savagely massacred.

We know this thanks to activist dolphin-whisperer Ric O’Barry, who trained these remarkable mammals for cult ’60s TV show Flipper – until one of them died in his arms after a tortured existence.

Having dedicated his life since to freeing captive dolphins everywhere, O’Barry leads a team of champion free-divers and ILM experts on an Ocean’s Eleven-style raid, taking on a murderous government cover-up and local fishermen to plant hidden cameras inside the cove.

What happens next will wrench and rouse you.