The Corporation is an epic-length, award-winning, Canadian-made documentary about the history of incorporated companies.

The film chronicles their rise from benign associations to international conglomerates that act as world powers, sometimes with fascistic and even pyschopathic tendencies.

Imbued with a sense of wry humour that makes it as devastatingly funny as Bowling For Columbine, The Corporation is left-wing agit-prop, like the workers' theatre that emerged during the Great Depression in the United States.

That makes it easy to dismiss by anyone unwilling to delve into message movies that leave them unsettled or challenged. The film may end up preaching to the converted.

The trouble is, at least for the naysayers, The Corporation is as smart as it is clever. It presents such a reasoned, cogent, well-documented argument that it makes a mockery of anyone who dismisses it out of hand, without debate. This film, like the forthcoming companion book, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit Of Profit And Power, should be used as a learning tool in schools, including in economics courses.

The film was written by Joel Bakan, who also authored the book due to be published in March by Penguin Canada. The film was directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott.

Both co-directors have stormed the barricades before. With iconoclast Peter Wintonick, Achbar co-directed the brilliant doc Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky And The Media. Abbott made A Cow At My Table, a doc about animal rights, consumerism and agricultural corporations.

The Corporation is an excellent example of how a documentary can be as visually stimulating as a fiction film. Even though there are 42 talking heads -- including Chomsky, Michael Moore and a gaggle of social critics and corporate pitchmen and executives -- the film dances on screen with eccentric and playful images, as well as fun rants by Moore.

Because the filmmakers' intentions are serious, there are also vintage film sequences of human atrocities linked to corporate bad behaviour, including depictions of the Holocaust and the role IBM machines played in helping the Nazis manage their murders in a business-like fashion.

Ah, there's the rub, that's the key. The phrase "business-like" is fraught with peril in this film. Among many fascinating passages, The Corporation uses a psychiatrist's diagnostic checklist to show how the behaviour of corporations can be as morally bankrupt as the actions of a psychopath. Given that U.S. corporations fought to gain legal status as "a person" by abusively using an amendment meant to free the slaves in the 1860s, psychoanalysis of the corporation mentality seems legitimate. Many corporations fail the test.

As a film, The Corporation is a long sit. Some lesser arguments are bogus or at least repetitive. But, in toto, this well-organized and well-crafted film is a crucial social document. Every citizen of the "free world" should learn we are not really free in a world run by corporations.

(This film is rated PG)

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