It’s West Virginia’s biggest private employer and a proven consumer-price chopper. But it’s been fined for polluting, accused in lawsuits of forcing employees to work overtime — and even settled lawsuits alleging child-labor law violations. It’s crowded at midnight but unwanted in Kanawha City.

The impact of Wal-Mart on the economy, environment and state of neighborhoods is as immense as it is controversial, and there’s been no shortage of ink spilled over it.

Now the debate is playing out in a new format: film, with two newly released documentaries tackling the pros and cons of the way the world’s No. 1 retailer does business.

On the con side is “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices,” which began airing across West Virginia and the rest of the country this week in 7,000 churches, nightclubs, college halls and private residences.

It’s the latest release from Los Angeles director Robert Greenwald, who has taken on the Fox television network, Donald Trump and the Iraq war in previous documentaries.

In dozens of interviews with Wal-Mart workers and small-business owners squeezed by the retailer, the movie portrays its subject as a sinister, cash-crazy corporation — content to let the government fund its workers’ benefits while it pockets ever-bigger profits. Wal-Mart can set prices so low, Greenwald contends, only by mistreating workers, skirting environmental laws and contracting with Asian sweatshops.

The movie’s production company, Brave New Films, opted against a nationwide theater release in part because it expected Wal-Mart would use its influence as a top DVD seller to bully distributors, said Kristy Tully, the movie’s director of photography.

But locally organized screenings — which the movie’s producers are calling “the largest grassroots mobilization in the history of film” — also make for a bigger impact on the audience, Tully says. “It’s much more powerful and effective if you’re told about the movie by your neighbor or brother.”

The producers located screeners by appeals on left-leaning Web sites like Moveon.org, which in turn drew people to the movie’s Web site, Tully said. The first screenings in West Virginia took place in Charleston on Monday and continue throughout this week, in Beckley, Berkeley Springs, Bluefield, Green Bank, Huntington, Morgantown and Shepherdstown.

Covenant House in Charleston airs the movie today at noon. Co-director Barbara Ferraro says she wanted to hold a screening because Wal-Mart workers are among the struggling people who draw on the shelter’s services.

“They’re the working poor, and this is an issue for the people we serve,” she said. “Wal-Mart is basically putting to death all the small businesses and mom-and-pops that have existed, and it’s not putting back into the community what these businesses put back.”

Concerns about Wal-Mart’s impact on independent businesses was one of the things that mobilized opposition to a planned Supercenter in Kanawha City in 1997. Traffic was another issue, and eventually City Council refused to rezone the targeted property, scuttling the plan.

Wal-Mart gets a more sympathetic hearing in the documentary “Why Wal-Mart Works & Why That Makes Some People Crazy,” which is out today on DVD.

Director Ron Galloway, of Augusta, Ga., says in a news release that he began the movie, which is partly funded by Wal-Mart, as a book exploring the elaborate logistics of Wal-Mart’s distribution operations. But the personal stories of the company’s supporters persuaded him to switch to a more personal medium, the release says.

Galloway has produced one other movie, a World War II documentary called “Oflag 64: A POW Odyssey.” He could not be reached for an interview.

“I believe that a family’s money can be considered ‘freedom chips,’” Galloway writes in media materials for the movie. “By saving money by shopping at Wal-Mart, a family keeps more of their ‘freedom chips’ and is therefore enabled to spend that extra money in ways that enrich their lives.”

The central argument of Greenwald’s movie is that Wal-Mart’s low prices come at a cost.

“What people don’t realize is that Wal-Mart has lower prices because taxpayers are subsidizing it” through the health benefits that Wal-Mart refuses to fund, Tully said. “They have no idea that they’re the ones funding this corporate greed.”

A Wal-Mart spokesman wouldn’t return calls for comment. But the company has issued statements blasting the movie as “a propaganda video — pure and simple” and describing Greenwald as having “a careless disregard for the facts.”

Last month Galloway challenged Greenwald to have “Why Wal-Mart Works” screened at the screenings of Greenwald’s movie. But Greenwald isn’t biting. Tully said it was hard enough to arrange the screenings for one movie.

“Wal-Mart spends billions a year to get their message out,” she said. “We thought we would spend our measly amount of money on the other side.”