10. The Bay (2012)
The Bay starts with a great hook: All the footage in this film was confiscated by the U.S. government until it was leaked by an anonymous source. What they didn’t want you to see was an entire Maryland town on the eastern shore die from the contaminated water supply of Chesapeake Bay, tainted by chicken excrement from steroid-fed chickens. Director Barry Levinson creates a collage of chaos through the use of various media formats, including news reports, FaceTime videos, surveillance cameras, and dashcam footage. These camera techniques give us a front-row seat to the catastrophe. We feel just as desperate and frightened as the small-town residents who are trapped with no help or warning from the CDC or Department of Homeland Security. The issues of environmentalism and government conspiracy add some depth to what is usually a very formulaic genre.
