Before the Flood (2016)

Leonardo DiCaprio spends the bulk of Before the Flood walking through melting landscapes with the expression of a man who has been personally let down by the atmosphere. Fisher Stevens directs, National Geographic distributes, and the result is a feature-length sermon on climate urgency, delivered in 45 subtitled languages and handed out free in the week before the 2016 American election. The film is not subtle about its intentions. It opens with the Bosch triptych that hung above DiCaprio's crib and closes with an instruction to vote.

The economic argument is where the film sharpens. DiCaprio and his interviewees go after oil companies, lobbyists and fossil fuel subsidies, and they propose a carbon tax as a way of bending a capitalist economy toward renewables. That is a critique of a specific industry's incentives, not a rejection of the system that produced the private jet. The globe-trotting cast is genuinely international, from Anote Tong of Kiribati to Pope Francis to Elon Musk, though this reflects the subject matter more than any casting philosophy. Island nations and indigenous communities appear as victims of rising water, which gives the film an environmental justice thread it never pulls hard enough to become a racial argument.

The film's omissions are equally instructive. Women appear as scientists and ministers and are never asked to carry a gendered thesis. There is no discussion of bodies, of neurodivergence, of reinterpreting the past. Piers Sellers, dying of pancreatic cancer, talks about the short time he has left, and the film lets that sit without editorializing. Six years on, the urgency reads as period detail, a snapshot of a moment when the argument still seemed winnable. The lecture is well delivered. The congregation has heard it before.