Film

An Inconvenient Truth

Name: An Inconvenient Truth
Genre: Documentary
Released: 2006
Cast: Al Gore, Billy West, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, George H. W. Bush

Al Gore's slideshow-turned-movie, and yes, that's really the format: a lecture hall, a laptop, a decade of glacier photographs and rising graphs. It's blunt, occasionally corny, sometimes surprisingly personal, and it's the film that dragged climate change into mainstream conversation. Not cinema in any conventional sense — more a devastatingly persuasive TED talk with a Nobel Prize behind it.

TMDb rating

3.5

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you like watching a single presenter build a case slide by slide, with graphs and hard numbers doing most of the persuading, and you enjoy a lecture that feels like a personal confession.

Skip it if you want cinematic spectacle or a story with many characters, since it is mostly one man at a podium with charts and slides.

What it asks of you: It runs about an hour and forty minutes and asks for steady attention to data, with pauses of reflection rather than rapid cuts, and it is more earnest than playful.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

Chasing Ice2012

James Balog's time-lapse photography turns melting glaciers into something you watch happen in real time — the visual argument Gore's slides gestured at, made devastatingly literal.

But It's one visual argument stretched across ninety minutes; if you want policy and context alongside it, this isn't that film.

Before the Flood2016

Leonardo DiCaprio globe-trots as a UN Messenger of Peace, talking to scientists and heads of state a decade after Gore's slideshow — same urgency, bigger budget, wider lens.

But The celebrity framing can feel like it's more about DiCaprio's concern than the science underneath it.

An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power2017

The actual follow-up: Gore a decade older, the data worse, the fights now happening inside the Paris Agreement rather than a lecture hall.

But Less a standalone experience than a check-in with a returning character — diminishing returns if the first one didn't grab you.

An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power poster

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from An Inconvenient Truth

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

The Unchained Goddess1958

This is Gore's exact warning, delivered almost fifty years earlier by American educational television — proof both the science and the neglect go back much further than most people assume.

A Frank Capra-produced science special that warned, on American network television in 1958, about carbon dioxide trapping heat and melting the ice caps — bow-tied, lab-coated, decades ahead of the slideshow.

But It's a creaky mid-century educational short with dated production values, not a polished documentary — charming rather than gripping.

The 11th Hour2007

Made almost as a companion piece the year after Gore's film, swapping one man and a laptop for a wall of scientists, thinkers and architects.

But Talking-head-heavy and a little dated now; it hasn't aged as memorably as the film it followed.

Years of Living Dangerously2014

Celebrity correspondents, Harrison Ford and Jessica Alba among them, chase climate stories around the globe in a big-budget series that treats warming as breaking news, not slideshow.

But Uneven episode to episode depending on which correspondent you get; some segments land far harder than others.

Merchants of Doubt2014

Turns from the science to the machine built to muddy it — the same PR playbook used for tobacco, recycled for climate, told with real bite and dark humour.

But More about spin doctors than glaciers; if you wanted more science and less media critique, look elsewhere.

Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret2014

A scrappier, angrier documentary that goes after animal agriculture as the environmental elephant nobody wants to discuss — a single-issue gut-punch.

But Its statistics have been widely disputed and its tone sits closer to activist pamphlet than balanced inquiry.

Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret poster

Racing Extinction2015

Shifts the lens from atmosphere to biodiversity, following undercover crews documenting the illegal wildlife trade and the mass extinction already underway.

But Jumps between several different crises without fully landing any one of them.

Kiss the Ground2020

Ends on the rare hopeful note — regenerative farming and soil health as an actual lever we could pull, narrated with Woody Harrelson's easy warmth.

But Its optimism sometimes outruns the science, and critics have called several of its claims overstated.

Don't Look Up2021

It's Gore's argument turned inside out: the same frustration with public indifference, delivered as farce instead of PowerPoint.

A starry satire that takes the same premise — scientists screaming about catastrophe while the world scrolls past — and cranks it into absurdist comedy with a killer cast.

But The jokes land more like sledgehammers than scalpels, and the satire is broad enough to feel exhausting by the end.

First Reformed2018

Where Gore stays procedural and hopeful, this imagines the psychological wreckage of someone who takes his exact warning completely, catastrophically seriously.

Ethan Hawke plays a small-town pastor whose crisis of faith curdles into climate dread and radicalisation — a slow, serious drama about what happens when the facts actually sink in.

But It's bleak, deliberately paced, and offers no reassurance — the opposite of a hopeful call to action.