Just about every year, brilliant movies are utterly ignored by the Oscars. The Searchers, Groundhog Day, Breathless, King Kong, Casino Royale, Touch of Evil, Caddyshack, Mean Streets, The Big Lebowski, Shame — the Academy has a long history of overlooking comedies, action movies, horror flicks, hard-boiled genre pics, artsy foreign films, and documentaries that aren’t about World War II.

Blackfish Awards

SeaWorld's killer whale Tilikum broke its trainer's jaw, fractured part of her vertebra and dislocated one of her elbows and a knee while thrashing her around its pool, according to an autopsy released today.

A judge has temporarily ruled that video footage and photographs of the violent killing of SeaWorld trainer Dawn Brancheau by Tilly the killer whale will not be made public.

Through The Dawn Brancheau Foundation, we continue Dawn’s legacy of helping others, animals, and the environment.

Relatives of Chicago-area native and former SeaWorld trainer Dawn Brancheau have weighed in on "Blackfish," issuing a statement that distances the family from the controversial documentary about the treatment of killer whales in captivity.

Musical acts are canceling SeaWorld shows, citing the unsettling documentary's influence
The rock band Heart joins a expanding group of musical artists who've cancelled scheduled performances at SeaWorld -- they've all cited by the documentary Blackfish, which depicts the dark side of orcas living in captivity at the marine park, for leading them to this decision.

When director Gabriela Cowperthwaite (with my help, as an associate producer and co-writer) set out to make the documentary Blackfish, neither she (nor I) were setting out to change SeaWorld.

The film Blackfish probes the case of an orca that killed its trainer. Blame is assigned to SeaWorld—rightly so, in my view.

Parents need to know that Blackfish is a documentary about captive whales that perform at theme parks and sometimes attack and kill humans.

If Blackfish were an Inside Edition episode, the promo copy might read something like this: Twenty years after Keltie Byrne was brutally killed in 1991, Dawn Brancheau, a marine-mammal trainer like Byrne, became a victim of the same killer — who to this day goes unpunished.

It’s a rare and precious thing when a documentary changes some small part of the world for the better. And such rarity tells us a great deal about how heavily are the odds usually stacked against documentary – not just as a campaigning tool for change but as a purveyor of disruptive and inconvenient stories.

Documentary is one of cinema’s most useful tools when it comes to uncovering injustice and fighting for what is right.

A startling documentary about a trainer's death at SeaWorld shows the fatal consequences of keeping killer whales in captivity

The moral behind Blackfish is spelt out on its poster: ''Never capture what you can't control''.

The clue is in the name: not cuddler whale, not hugger whale – but killer whale. Yet the irony is that these predators don't want to kill humans in the wild. This documentary by Gabriela Cowperthwaite is as horribly gripping as a serial-killer thriller, though the real villain is not the ostensible culprit, but its human captors

For animal lovers with fond recollections of visiting SeaWorld as a child, director Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s Blackfish arrives to gatecrash your memories. Good documentaries can be merciless killjoys, destroying long-held assumptions with lashings of truth. Here the idea of SeaWorld as a place of innocence is turned to fish food.

abriela Cowperthwaite's documentary BLACKFISH investigates the fate not only of killer whales in captivity but the fates of some of their trainers. It begins with the death in 2010 of a highly respected trainer Dawn Brancheau by Tilikum, a male killer whale with a history of violence

It’s upsetting and scary to watch the footage of orca attacks collected in “Blackfish,” a damning documentary about the treatment of the animals by marine parks, where they have long performed water tricks in front of paying customers.