Eating Animals is not exactly breaking new ground: numerous films, from Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s violently lyrical Our Daily Bread, to Robert Kenner’s Food, Inc, to the Leonardo DiCaprio-produced Cowspiracy, have previously addressed the impact of industrial agriculture. But the combination of the critical timeliness of the subject – the cumulative environmental impact of factory farming is potentially devastating – and some grimly unpalatable home truths about the practices that the food corporations would prefer to conceal, make this unflinching documentary a difficult watch, but an essential one. Adapted from the book of the same name by Jonathan Safran Foer, the film persuasively explains why the ultimate cost of cheap meat is impossibly high.