The most honest conversations America has about climate change don’t happen in Washington. Sometimes they happen in the darkness of a movie theater or living room.
A year after An Inconvenient Truth hit theaters in 2006, a Gallup Poll recorded what up to that point was the highest recorded percentage of people to express concern about the climate.
Since its release six years later, Chasing Ice has screened in more than 172 countries, has reached 15 million broadcast viewers and has produced measurable shifts in their concern and attitudes, the film’s producers have said. And in 2016, Before the Flood became the most-watched National Geographic film ever. These documentaries did their job. Not only did they inform viewers, they also moved people.
But so too have feature films. The Day After Tomorrow — a movie openly ridiculed for its preposterous science — turns out to have been one of the most effective climate communication vehicles ever produced. A Yale University study found it had a significant effect on risk perceptions, behavioral intentions, policy priorities and even voting intentions of moviegoers. Of moviegoers surveyed, 83% said they were somewhat or very concerned about global warming, compared to 72% of nonwatchers. It wasn’t the science that viewers were responding to, but a tidal wave deluging Manhattan.
Decades earlier, conservative Republican and six-time Oscar-winning filmmaker Frank Capra, in his 1958 Bell System Science Series television special The Unchained Goddess, issued one of the earliest televised warnings about carbon dioxide, global warming and rising seas.
The message is as relevant as ever today as the administration of President Donald Trump works to weaken or erase rules aimed at reducing all manner of climate pollution through hundreds of deregulatory actions that are happening faster than in his first term, according to Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.
But filmmakers haven’t shied away from the climate crisis, with dozens of environmentally themed films set to be released by year’s end. Among the most noteworthy are Sara Dosa’s poetic Time and Water; Abby Ellis’ environmental political thriller The Lake, which tracks the toxic depletion of the Great Salt Lake; Yorgos Avgeropoulos’ devastating Arctic exposé Mankind’s Folly; and Thomas Vinterberg’s near-future climate refugee TV miniseries Families Like Ours.
Here are 14 of the most meaningful climate documentaries and feature films of the last three decades and where you can watch them.
DOCUMENTARIES
An Inconvenient Truth (2006) Davis Guggenheim and Al Gore’s documentary is the gold standard for measurable impact and the first mainstream climate documentary. A year after its release (and in the year it won an Oscar), a Gallup Poll found that 41% of Americans said they worried “a great deal” about climate change — a new record at the time. Research confirmed that it increased knowledge, concern and willingness to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Rent or buy on Prime Video, Apple TV, Fandango.
Before the Flood (2016) surpassed a billion minutes of viewing time, a record for a National Geographic documentary, according to the company. Watching it now though is a bit depressing because the climate change issues addressed in the film haven’t changed much. Reach over measurable behavior change. Disney+, Apple TV.
Chasing Ice (2012) It screened in 172 countries and reached 15 million broadcast viewers, post-screening surveys showed a significant shift in concern and desire to adjust personal behavior. Its impact campaign was honored with the Doc Impact Hi5 award for excellence in filmmaking and created significant effects — from inspiring politicians to pass relevant legislation to mobilizing voters and empowering youth activists. Rent or buy on Prime Video, Apple TV, YouTube.
Chasing Coral (2017) Also recognized with the Doc Impact Hi5 award for measurable social impact, the second Chasing documentary was used by communities worldwide to grow local solutions. Its greatest contribution may be making an invisible crisis visible — reef bleaching had no public imagery before this film gave it one. Netflix.
I Am Greta (2020) Once 15-year-old Greta Thunberg burst onto the scene in 2018 and inspired a youth-led global movement to fight climate change, powerful forces were quick to claim she was a puppet of adults. What they didn’t know was that filmmaker Nathan Grossman was following her the whole time, from filming her first protest sitting alone cross-legged outside the Swedish Parliament to writing her own speeches to pushing back against anyone who dared to challenge her. Thunberg’s journey from a Stockholm sidewalk to the United Nations stage is the kind of story that sounds invented. This film proves it wasn’t. Hulu.
The Territory (2022) This film was explicitly conceived as the beginning of an Indigenous-led campaign to fight Amazon deforestation, not the end of one. And by that measure, it delivered. After the film won an Emmy and amplified international pressure, there was a reduction in deforestation and occupation of the Uru-eu-wau-wau territory in the Amazon rainforest of Brazil, and both Indigenous leaders and government officials reported feeling safer on the ground. The land grabbers haven’t stopped. But neither has the resistance. Disney+.
Time and Water (2026) Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason turned to his family archives to chronicle what is being lost — not just the glaciers his grandparents honeymooned on, but the memories, the stories, the whole living archive of a people tied to ice for seven centuries. Director Sara Dosa, who gave us Fire of Love four years earlier, documents this moving act poetically and does what only the best climate films manage — she makes the ice personal. Coming to Disney+ and National Geographic later this year.
FEATURES
Princess Mononoke (1997) Hayao Miyazaki made his environmental argument in this animated masterpiece nearly 30 years ago, and it has never stopped being right. Set in feudal Japan, the film pits industrialization against the forest gods with enough moral complexity that neither side wins. No easy resolution. HBO Max.
WALL-E (2008) Nominated for six Academy Awards and winner of the Oscar for best animated feature, this Disney-Pixar film follows a solitary robot named WALL-E who scours an uninhabitable, deserted Earth in 2805 cleaning up garbage. The film grossed more than $520 million worldwide, and has helped children get an environmental lesson disguised as excellent entertainment. Disney+.
Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012) Benh Zeitlin’s evocative debut feature won the Grand Jury Prize, Dramatic, at the Sundance Film Festival and the Caméra d’Or at the Festival de Cannes and garnered four Oscar nominations. More importantly, it portrayed climate change through the face of a 6-year-old girl, and in Quvenzhané Wallis’ unforgettable performance, made rising waters personal. Scholars at Harvard University’s Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment have used it as a teaching tool specifically because it illustrates the interconnectedness of climate justice and racial justice in ways data cannot. Hulu and HBO Max.
Interstellar (2014) Christopher Nolan’s space epic earns its place solely for its opening act, which is as good as climate filmmaking gets: a dying Earth, dust storms swallowing farms, civilization accepting its own extinction. Nolan never calls it climate change. And he doesn’t have to. Paramount+.
Okja (2017) Bong Joon Ho’s moral fable about industrial meat production — corporate greed, slaughterhouse horror, the environmental cost of feeding the world’s appetite for meat — lands all of it through the eyes of a young girl and her genetically engineered super-pig. Google searches for “vegan” spiked 65% after its release, according to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Ho went vegan during filming, too, though it didn’t last — he’s now mostly pescatarian — which is either an apt metaphor for how hard real change is or proof that making the film is more radicalizing than watching it. Netflix.
First Reformed (2017) Paul Schrader’s searing portrait of a minister (played by Ethan Hawke at his best) whose faith collapses under the weight of ecological despair is one of the most psychologically precise films ever made about climate grief. No tidal waves. No melting glaciers. Just a man coming apart. Netflix.
Don’t Look Up (2021) Adam McKay’s dark comedy unfortunately left audiences more cynical about powerful forces blocking climate action than galvanized about enacting change. (Disclosure: McKay is a member of Capital & Main’s advisory board.) With splashy Netflix promotion, this generation’s Dr. Strangelove at least brought an issue that had started to fade back into the light. Netflix.
