The Bay

When you’re a veteran director who’s never made a fake documentary or a work of true science fiction or an ecological screed, I imagine there’s still a way to make a single movie of all three, a movie that scares, informs, and entertains, a movie that makes you bite your knuckles while robo-dialing your senator. That’s the movie “The Bay” would like to be: a righteous freak-out. The movie recalls incidents in which tons of fish have washed up dead on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay (in 1976 the death toll was about 15 million). The cause was severely cold water and algae bloom. Barry Levinson imagines the worst-case pollution scenario and coughs up a flesh-eating parasite in “The Bay.”