Laura Israel's social-issues doc opens with eye-poppingly bright images of flowers and farms, shots of unspoiled nature about to be desecrated by...wind turbines? The people of bucolic small town Meredith, New York, aren't against green energy; they just don't want it in their own backyard. Sympathetically chronicling the efforts of these upstate residents to combat a plan to build 400-foot-tall windmills in their hamlet, Windfall strikes a faux-populist tone, pitting the plucky people against a faceless corporation. But given the film's inability to posit any significant objections---or, for that matter, alternatives---to the turbines, it all feels like so much petty sniping against progress.
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Watch the trailer