
Before the Flood
Leonardo DiCaprio uses his role as United Nations Messenger of Peace as the frame for this film, traveling to Greenland to watch meltwater pour off the ice sheet, to Sumatra to film rainforest cleared for palm oil, and to Miami where seawater already floods streets at high tide. Director Fisher Stevens follows him into meetings most environmental films skip: DiCaprio presses scientist Michael Mann on how fast the changes are compounding, sits down with Barack Obama in the Oval Office, and gets an audience with Pope Francis to discuss the moral case for action. Elon Musk turns up to argue for electric transport and renewable energy at scale. The film keeps returning to a basic tension: DiCaprio flying around the world by private jet to report on a problem partly caused by exactly that kind of consumption, and he lets the contradiction stand rather than resolve it. Solar farms in China and a carbon-tax push get screen time as evidence that alternatives already work, not just proposals. It closes on a straightforward question about political will rather than technology.