The 11th Hour: Critic Reviews

Alternately impassioned, despairing, edifying, and hectoring about all the ways humans are screwing up the earth in a death rattle of hubris.

An unnerving, surprisingly affecting documentary about our environmental calamity [that] is such essential viewing.

The picture almost beats its theme to death -- the first hour is enough -- but the imaginative designers dreaming up a cleaner future end this Cassandra cry on an upbeat note.

The movie says we have to get back to the garden before complacency and ignorance hasten our demise. This is a hard argument to make without sounding kooky, but the documentary is too dire to turn dippy, cheesy, or sentimental.

A cautionary eco-doc so earnest and moth-eaten it should properly be seen on filmstrip during fourth-period social studies.

If you get through the first hour without slitting your throat, the cautiously optimistic last third offers some intriguing options.

The movie needed to reflect its own lesson: Less would have been more.

The 11th Hour, directed and written by Leila Conners Petersen and Nadia Conners, mixes in enough hard science to make the Deepak Chopra New Age flummery less easy to snicker at.

This movie, for all its noble intentions, is a bore. Rent An Inconvenient Truth instead. Even if you've already seen it.

If it gets people thinking about which light bulbs they buy and their current gas mileage and such, then it's good to have it in the world. It is, however, a panicky blur as documentaries go.

The filmmakers take pains not to foster fatalistic gloom, concentrating on some of the progressive solutions still available to us.

As a call to action, it's sincere but flawed, and as an inquiry into humankind's bafflingly self-destructive tendencies, it scarcely scratches the surface.

The film lacks both the personality and central figure (as well as the all-important sense of humor) that made last year's similar An Inconvenient Truth so watchable.

11th Hour presents the viewer with reams of depressing data, loads of hand-wringing about the woeful state of humanity and, finally, some altogether fascinating ideas about how to go about solving the climate crisis.

Unusually undisguised leftism. The scare montages are--I'm not making this up--very similar to one shown in last year's remake of The Omen.

It's not a movie with a lot of answers, but The 11th Hour does push the debate further down the road.

If Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth was a warning, The 11th Hour is the red alert.

Consistent with the film's occasionally hippy-dippy tone, DiCaprio speaks about human beings engaging in a willed 'evolution in consciousness,' which sounds a little too desperate to be comforting.

A haunting, elegiac history of how human beings have brought the planet to the edge of a precipice, and call upon an impressive array of thinkers to discuss how, and whether, we can avoid the abyss that waits below.

It's like sitting through a college lecture and knowing with gripping dread that you're going to be quizzed on all of this afterward.

It is unabashedly a documentary of talking heads, but it works.

The montage rolls inexorably forward, pitched somewhere between Koyaanisqatsi and An Inconvenient Truth.