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Ghosts is a film that offers the hope of attracting those who care and those who don't, a documentary that will embolden the converted while likely influencing more to join the choir (or at least check out the song book). It is a documentary that refuses to preach, instead opting for a beautifully constructed homage to the rest of our kingdom, spilling over with a unique and thoughtful cordiality that is born out of unmitigable love, respect and understanding.

The documentary is a refreshing departure from its more rational-minded predecessors that throw facts and data at us while barraging audiences with violent sounds and images of slaughter and torture. Ghosts instead confronts with the unforgettable grace of animals many of us so easily shut out from our daily thoughts, as industrial capitalism distantly spins its cogs of exploitation on farms, in labs and factories and abattoirs.

These are the ghosts – the winged, the four-legged and the otherwise objectified and disgraced cousins gasping for life below us on the commodity/food chain.

Marshall doesn't throw the sixties wrench into the cogs of the machine, screaming from a mantle of righteousness that what we are doing is morally, ethically, ecologically wrong. Instead, she introduces proximal empathy into the abysmal space between consumers and capital with a powerful effect that hits both the mind and heart with an enduring resonance.

Through the various actions and efforts of the very talented and committed photographer Jo-Anne McArthur the film quietly sneaks into the obscured and horrific spaces of mink farms and other places where animals have had their essence as sentient beings barbarically debased into commodity form, lingering just long enough to occlude forgetting.

Both the photographs and cinematography in the film are stunning, and viewing on a small screen should be avoided – Ghosts is a visual delight, despite the sometimes difficult scenes that unfold. A confident direction shines through in this skilfully shot and tightly edited doc that is also audibly adorned with an awesome score and soundscape. The beauty of the film's artifice somehow does not aestheticize suffering, nor create Hallmark images of the animals documented – instead the richness of sound and images helps us through tough spaces, punctuating moments we might otherwise wish to shut out or alternately, not have registered as worthy of contemplation.

Yet we do not spend too much time in the most violent of animal oppression spaces, and by focusing on the beauty and individuality of the many animals (who have names and personalities) that McArthur documents, including and crucially the relationships between committed humans and the broken and discarded, Ghosts brings us in close and personal and squeezes tight.

It's a warm and inviting embrace that the film offers, one that builds empathy for these creatures over its 90 minutes, and it doesn't relinquish after the closing credits.

I didn't feel yelled at or schooled, but I do feel implicated and educated. To the benefit of Marshall and others who worked on this film (and by extension, to McArthur) those feelings of implication and elucidation are wrapped in beauty, love and understanding.

If I sound warm and fuzzy it's because this film's compassion and sensitivity are comforting sensations that just might be the right mixture needed to deliver a documentary on animal rights that transcends the earlier discussed divide and invites everyone in without compromising its politics, while not shutting out others, in spite of its politics.

At the 2011 Hot Docs opening and Canadian premiere screening of Morgan Spurlock's POM Wonderful Presents the Greatest Movie Ever Sold the peppy logo-clad filmmaker told the audience his film will have the effect of changing the way we look at advertising, TV, and films. Maybe Spurlock has been hanging out with a different crowd recently, because his grasp of audience intelligence—especially a doc audience—is certainly off the mark in terms of advertising savvy. While his film, as hilarious and entertaining as it is, won't be affecting the way I look at advertising, it definitely changes the way I now look at Morgan Spurlock.

Spurlock is a master story-teller to be sure, and this was readily apparent in one of the funniest, rollicking Q&As I've had the pleasure to sit through. Story after story rolled off his lips in all manner of imitation and animation – and had pretty much all in attendance slapping knees and grabbing sides in fits of laughter. His 2004 doc-buster hit Super Size Me told the story of one man's experiment to eat only McDonald's food while suffering the consequences. His 30 Days television series was a masterpiece jewel in the cheap tin crown of reality television fare. With all these storytelling accomplishments and talent under his belt his most recent work, a 90 minute celebration of advertising, marketing and commercialization bereft of any engaging narrative, comes as a whopping disappointment.

Don't get me wrong – if you want funny, entertaining, inquisitive Spurlock you'll get your dose in this documentary about sponsorship in film. But if you're looking for critical analysis or an investigative lens you'll be very disappointed. Spurlock's film is the ultimate postmodern documentary – a film paid for by corporate sponsors about the business of financing films through corporate sponsorship. On the surface it's a great idea, but Spurlock doesn't scratch that surface to reveal the real "inner workings" of the business or the consequences of a social reality dominated by advertising and marketing. As one audience member said to him, the film is all joy – where are the questions? Spurlock, predictably upbeat responded that if the audience is uneasy about these things after watching The Greatest Movie Ever Sold than the film has done its job. Right.

As a postmodern self-reflexive work there is surprisingly little self-reflection in PWPTGMES. Spurlock is in almost every frame of the film – flogging his film idea to ad execs, flogging products, and making light of critical voices like Ralph Nader. Between getting free stuff, zipping around the country meeting rich people (why Donald Trump's opinion was sought in this film remains a mystery), and drinking litres and litres of POM juice, Spurlock apparently has little time to really critically explore the nature of what he's doing and what the whole thing is about. Sure he has his moments of wondering aloud if he's going too far down the rabbit hole, but they feel as forced and staged as his meetings with CEOs and marketing gurus (all shot with atrocious camera work it has to be said). One senses that he went into this much like he went into Super Size Me: as a personal challenge and experiment, just to see if he could do it. And, lo and behold, of course he can – he's Morgan Spurlock after all.

The first half of the film had me in stitches as he set up the gag. But by mid-way I was bored of watching Spurlock in predictable scenarios flogging everything from shoes to under-arm deodorant to airlines. I kept waiting for him to go deeper, to really provoke some critical thought on the issue of advertising and marketing. By the end of the film, this craving went unabated, much like my new craving to drink POM juice – thanks to what has to be the best marketing coup for a juice company since Dole colonized Carmen Miranda.

So if you're looking for a funny, intelligent, provocative and critical documentary on advertising and marketing I highly recommend seeking out the wonderful 2004 Czech film Czech Dream. If you want to laugh with and at Morgan Spurlock as he makes a mint from celebrating crass commercialism, check out POM Wonderful Presents The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, that is, if you have the stomach for it.

Water on the Table (WOTT) is impeccably photographed by Steve Cosens and Marshall with stunning images of water in its various awe-inspiring forms, movements and moments. There is also plenty of footage of people talking about the issues and doing good things, but the motif of the sanctity of water runs throughout (no pun intended) and connects the whole film as an homage to this life element that most in the minority world take for granted most of the time.

At least one reviewer has completely missed this point and has brashly harangued the filmmaker for including so many shots of water in a film, um, about water. It is precisely this aspect of WOTT that make it exemplary from other films on the topic: Marshall's treatment of the private-versus-public debate around water is far from doc pablum. Her film, like McMahon's Waterlife, is a thoughtful and aesthetically robust approach to an issue that has been picked apart with impersonal (but important) data in so many other "water docs." So if you're looking for a number-crunching, experts-overload talking-heads documentary you've come to the wrong water film. If you're looking for a film that cuts to the core issues of values, beliefs, ethics, responsibility and drive around the issue of water as a right and not a commodity you have indeed found the right film. Not that facts and figures aren't in Marshall's documentary – they just, thankfully, do not take a lead role.

Instead, much of the film (between the gorgeous and meditative water sequences) is devoted to the people whose lives are touched by the fight over water, especially "water warrior" and Council of Canadians president Maude Barlow. The film follows Barlow from UN sessions to rallies near the tar sands in Alberta and other sites along the conflict-ridden path to freeing water from the hungry maws of corporations and complicit governments. WOTT also smartly introduces audiences to others touched along this route, including and not insignificantly, First Nations communities in Canada. Providing some space for the "bad guys" the film also gives voice to those who oppose Barlow and the drive to make water a universal right for all. An especially telling moment comes when one such corporate player complains that there is no reason Canadians should sit on all that water and say, "You can't have it." It's a Sell! Sell! Sell! moment indeed.

Water on the Table is an essential component of the larger project of not only understanding the commodity-human right dichotomy around water, but of the ongoing campaign to wrest this life force from wanton and reckless profit-seeking entities. With top-shelf celebrities like Aniston flogging tap water in bottles, giant companies like Nestle and Coca-Cola practically commodifying waterfalls and projects like the Alberta Tar Sands polluting and ruining vast quantities of drinkable, fresh, clean water the water-as-a-right campaign needs all the help it can get. WOTT doesn't disappoint as a tool for this educational, political, ethical and economic battle.