Best Movies and TV About Climate Change and Natural Disasters

Throughout his career, filmmaker Rob Reiner was known for being ahead of cultural trends, and perhaps no movie from his oeuvre makes this clearer than his 1995 romantic comedy The American President. After all, this is a crowd-pleasing popcorn film centering on Annette Bening as an environmental lobbyist who meets President Andrew Shepherd — a widower played by Michael Douglas — when she chastises him for failing to support a bill that would significantly reduce emissions in combating climate change. As the unlikely couple pursue a romance, the commander-in-chief comes around on the legislation and, by the end of the Aaron Sorkin-penned feature, delivers an impassioned speech denouncing his rival for smearing Bening amid her fight for “the safety of our natural resources.” Shortly after Reiner’s death late last year, Yale Climate Connections wrote about the movie, “Thirty years later, it can be watched as a Rob Reiner what-if film: What if successive presidents and Congresses had worked across the aisle to reduce emissions?”

Nobody has ever accused James Cameron of subtlety, and Avatar is his most Cameron film — a $237 million freight train of environmental messaging dressed up as a sci-fi spectacular. A militarized corporation strip-mines the alien-moon home of an indigenous species for a mineral called, with zero irony, Unobtanium. The Na’vi resist. Destruction follows.

Cameron is a true believer, which is the film’s greatest asset (and its biggest problem). When he took the script to Fox, the studio tried to cut the environmental content. His response was essentially: That’s why I’m making it. Fair enough. The results are stunning, but with the film telling you exactly what to think at every turn, it can be exhausting to argue with.

Offscreen, Cameron founded the Avatar Alliance Foundation, powered the sequels’ production with a one-megawatt solar array, went fully vegan and has spent years publicly challenging other environmentalists to do the same. The man is not coasting on his convictions — nor on his ability to deliver unrivaled cinematic pageantry.

Who knew Bambi, Walt Disney’s 1942 cute animated movie about a big-eyed deer, could be a subtle treatise on saving an otherwise idyllic natural world from hunters and environmental destruction? The little fawn Bambi and his woodland friends — energetic rabbit Thumper and bashful skunk Flower — first encounter threats in the form of poachers who kill Bambi’s mother. The message, underneath a charming coming-of-age story, is clear: The joy and beauty of the sun-filled forest is gravely endangered by humans and their actions, as symbolized by the death of Bambi’s mother, and later, a potentially annihilating forest fire, leading Bambi to take on his father’s protector role as the Great Prince of the Forest. The crowd-pleasing family movie paved the way for later such enviro-toons as The Jungle Book, The Lion King and Finding Nemo.

Denis Villeneuve’s brilliant and underrated sequel to Ridley Scott’s sci-fi masterpiece so effectively builds upon the original’s atmosphere of environmental degradation that it becomes a visceral and unforgettable vision of climate change. The exposition stays focused on replicants, memory and the ghost of the first film, but the coming climate apocalypse is the world in which it all happens. Set 30 years after the original, 2049 opens on a protein farm under bleached gray skies, then follows Ryan Gosling’s Officer K through the corners of a ruined California that Roger Deakins — who finally won his first Oscar here, on his 14th nomination — photographs with visionary authority. A seawall holds back the Pacific from Los Angeles. San Diego is a shipyard graveyard. The ruins of Las Vegas glow in an orange haze, inspired by Australia’s real-life 2009 red dust storm. The film’s internal timeline — ecosystems collapsing in the 2020s — lands harder in 2026 than it did in 2017. Especially since we haven’t exactly established any off-world colonies on the shoulder of Orion just yet.

Made 20 years ago, Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men is set in 2027 — and if its viscerally realized dystopia ever felt at some kind of narrow remove, it’s now far too close for comfort. The film examines a ravaged global landscape, fueled by an infertility crisis and environmental decay, and centers on a bureaucrat (Clive Owen) roped into an underground refugee organization run by his estranged wife (Julianne Moore). Their journey is bloody, harrowing and eerily keyed into the impacts of a sustainability crisis, but Cuarón never loses sight of themes of hope or love — beams of warmth that cut through this blisteringly dark tale.

Roman Polanski’s noir masterpiece uses a murder mystery as a vehicle for something darker: a portrait of power and corruption in 1930s Los Angeles. The film is rooted in the real history of how the city’s water supply was manipulated by a wealthy elite to drive land grabs in the San Fernando Valley. Water scarcity, in Chinatown, is a manufactured crisis — not unlike climate change, it’s one engineered by men who understood that controlling a city’s most valuable resource meant controlling the city itself. As relevant now as ever.

The Larsen Ice Shelf has split due to global-warming melt and Tokyo is struck by a giant hail storm — and that’s just the beginning of Earth’s problems. You all should have listened to Dennis Quaid (and never mind his brother Randy Quaid, though that has nothing to do with this movie). In Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow, climate change results in consequences so rapid, Jake Gyllenhaal can’t even finish his academic decathlon. To save the day, what’s left of it at least, paleoclimatologist Jack (Dennis Quaid) must walk across Pennsylvania to his son Sam (Gyllenhaal), who shelters in the New York Public Library, which I am literally staring at as I write this. It’s cool, it’s fine — for now.

This thriller from Mike Nichols — perhaps best remembered for George C. Scott teaching dolphins to talk — doubles as an early meditation on animal intelligence and human exploitation. Scott’s marine researcher forms a genuine emotional bond with his cetacean subjects, only to watch that relationship become weaponized (literally) by forces outside his control. The film arrives at the quietly radical conclusion that dolphins may in fact be more humane than the humans who study them, and that science without ethics as well as progress without checks (looking at you, carbon emissions) is just another form of predation.

Nobody is claiming Demolition Man is a great film. It’s a Sylvester Stallone vehicle from 1993, which tells you most of what you need to know — big muscles, bigger explosions, Wesley Snipes in a bleached Caesar cut and Sandra Bullock doing her best with dialogue that wasn’t written for anyone to be proud of. And yet, buried inside this thoroughly silly, and at times fun, action movie is one of Hollywood’s sharper accidental arguments about sustainability — and who it’s actually for.

Marco Brambilla’s film envisions San Angeles as a gleaming post-earthquake utopia: meat-free, tobacco-banned, gasoline-abolished, and governed by the paternalistic Dr. Raymond Cocteau, a man who outlawed everything deemed “bad for you” in the name of sustainable, collective wellness. What the film stumbles onto is the idea that control, whether for good or evil, is bad in the wrong hands. Cocteau’s eco-regulated paradise wasn’t built for its citizens — it was built to keep them compliant.

Brambilla himself abandoned Hollywood for fine art and eventually created a 2013 installation titled “Anthropocene,” named for the geological epoch defined by human environmental destruction. One man made a blow-em-up action movie. Then spent 30 years reckoning with what it unwittingly said.

The four-season run of the prehistoric ABC family comedy Dinosaurs from Jim Henson Productions ended in July 1994 with the final episode, “Changing Nature,” centering on the dawn of an Ice Age (everyone’s a dinosaur, after all). Bugs that eat vines don’t show up because their breeding ground has been paved over, and the vines damage the factories of the greedy WESAYSO Corp. A defoliant goes too far and kills all plant life, and bombs put into volcanoes to create rain for the plants to recover instead set off a snowfall that will render the entire population extinct. “I’m sure it’ll all work out OK,” patriarch Earl Sinclair says. “After all, dinosaurs have been on this Earth for 150 million years. It’s not like we’re going to just … disappear!” Series co-creator Marc Jacobs told Vulture: “We felt that the metaphor in the episode had to be that we, as humans, may be utterly unaware of what will come to get us if we are not vigilant.”

The first fiction feature from Swiss doc maker Jacqueline Zünd, which premiered at Locarno Film Festival last year, explores how external factors like climate change can affect our inner worlds. It focuses on a young man who provides rent-a-friend-type services to people who need specific social roles filled (son, father, friend, etc.), as humans grow increasingly distant amid curfews enforced due to the dangerous climate change-induced heat at certain times of the day. This cinematic, near-silent exploration of alienation is also a precursor to Heat, the climate-change documentary Zünd just released at Switzerland’s Visions du Reel.

Adam McKay’s less-then-subtle satire uses an extinction-level comet as a stand-in for climate change. Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence play scientists who discover the comet, then watch in horror as politicians, the media and tech billionaires treat planetary annihilation as a marketing opportunity. The film’s central joke — that the comet won’t be a problem as long as everyone simply refuses to “look up” — underscored the absurdity of our current climate crisis all too well. 

Neill Blomkamp’s follow-up to District 9 is often discussed as a parable about health care or immigration, but the film gets there by setting its story inside an environmental catastrophe it barely bothers to explain. The year is 2154. Earth is depleted, overheated, poisoned and left to the poor. The mega-wealthy, naturally, have retreated to Elysium, a luxury resort-like space station orbiting the planet, where they indulge in technological marvels like a bed-shaped medical device that can cure any ailment (eat your heart out, Elon). Matt Damon plays a factory worker on Earth who is accidentally exposed to a lethal dose of radiation and promptly discarded by his corporate overlords — inspiring a quest to claim Elysium’s healing technology for the masses. The catastrophe could be climate change, pandemic or simple environmental despoliation — but Blomkamp was certainly on to something. In the 13 years since Elysium‘s release, news items about billionaires building bunkers and devising schemes to ensure their survival in the event of global disaster have become actually commonplace. 

Separating this film from almost all other climate-disaster blockbusters is a real-life story: Pacific Gas & Electric pumped hexavalent chromium into the groundwater of Hinkley, California. People got sick, and the company’s paperwork stayed spotless. Steven Soderbergh’s film — driven by Julia Roberts doing the best work of her career — is essentially a procedural about what happens when a corporation decides that a community’s health is a line-item problem.

Roberts plays Brockovich, an unemployed single mother who talks her way into a paralegal job and then more or less single-handedly builds the case that results in a $333 million settlement — the largest of its kind at the time. What’s remarkable is how unglamorous Soderbergh keeps it. This is a film about documents, phone calls and sick people in a desert town who can’t get a straight answer from anyone. The facts are ugly enough. The film gets out of the way.

What makes it stick 25 years later is that Brockovich never treated it as a capstone. She’s still at it — running Brockovich Research & Consulting, fielding groundwater contamination complaints across the country and internationally, and in 2024, writing in The New York Times that weakened EPA regulatory authority would leave Americans exposed to exactly the kind of corporate behavior the Hinkley case exposed. Anyone watching the benzene levels being tested in Altadena’s water supply after the Eaton Fire — another community hit by disaster and another round of questions that somebody’s legal department is in no hurry to answer — knows she has a point.

The first thing you see in episode one of Fallout is a child’s thumb. It’s giving the classic Vault Boy thumbs-up — that eternal, cheerful gesture from the game franchise’s mascot, the cartoonish figure grinning through nuclear annihilation. Then the camera pulls back and you understand what you’re looking at, and the joke curdles into something genuinely disturbing. That’s the show’s whole argument in one image: 20th century American optimism about technology, energy and progress, held up against what it actually produced. The thumb stays up. The world does not.

Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s bright Amazon Prime adaptation of Bethesda’s legendary game franchise is, at its core, a story about nuclear energy’s broken promise — the utopian dream of clean, limitless power that in this world ended instead in a 2077 war that turned the planet into a wasteland. Two centuries later, survivors emerge from corporate-built underground vaults into a world that looks exactly like what it is: the long-term consequence of short-term thinking. The show never lectures. It doesn’t need to. The landscape does the work. Every irradiated skyline, every mutated creature, every cheerful piece of Vault-Tec propaganda plastered across a collapsed civilization makes the same point with savage efficiency.

Nuclear power is back in serious policy conversation right now, pitched again as the clean solution. Fallout has thoughts on that.

Kids of the 90s don’t realize how good we had it. For starters, comic geniuses like Robin Williams and Tim Curry were willing to voice secondary characters in an animated musical about protecting the environment. And though back then, social media wasn’t even a glimmer in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye, technology is intricately linked with the villain in FernGully. The 20th Century Fox’s movie’s protagonists are a fairy named Crysta and a human teenager named Zak, who’s working on a logging crew in the rainforest. When he’s almost crushed by a falling tree, Crysta tries to save him, shrinking him down to her size in the process. They then team up (along with the nutty bat Batty, voiced by Williams) to find Crysta’s magical teacher and restore Zak to normal. However, they soon realize they have bigger problems when the evil spirit Hexxus (Curry) is unleashed and starts feeding off the pollution from the logging machinery. It’s a fun story with the bonus of raising kid-friendly conservation questions about rainforests, which as massive carbon-dioxide absorbers, help reduce one of the foremost drivers of climate change.  

In this late-era masterpiece, Paul Schrader frames the climate catastrophe as a spiritual crisis. Ethan Hawke plays Ernst Toller, a tormented pastor unable to find hope in the face of a real-world apocalypse. Toller is haunted by his inner demons, his past as a military chaplain and the death of his son in Iraq. He spends his days in penance, overseeing a beautiful but mostly empty Dutch Reformed church in a sleepy New England town that draws more tourists than believers. His nights are spent drinking and self-castigating, journaling his failings in an unsparing voiceover.

The world’s misery intrudes on Toller’s personal anguish when a pregnant young woman named Mary (Amanda Seyfried) comes to the church, asking if Toller can counsel her husband, Michael (Philip Ettinger). He is an environmental activist who despairs of humanity’s destruction of the Earth and appears unwilling to bring a child into a world with no future. Toller pleads with him to have faith, but this being a Paul Schrader film, Michael’s vision of the climate apocalypse feels more convincing. Toller’s torment echoes the spiritual anguish of the country priests in the films of Robert Bresson and Carl Dreyer, updated with the science that appears to be pointing to the end of days.

Global temperatures have spiked 10 degrees, and the world has become a desiccated wasteland in this postapocalyptic thriller, the debut feature from September 5 director Tim Fehlbaum. Exposure to the blazing sun — represented, in the movie’s best low-budget special effect, by a blinding white sky — means certain death. (The film’s title is a clever play on words: “Hell” translates as “bright” in German.) We follow a group of marauders, outfitted in a lightproof Volvo, as they struggle to find water and shelter and live to see another scorching day. The plot borrows heavily from Mad Max, with a sampling of horror tropes from The Hills Have Eyes and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But Fehlbaum, shooting in environmentally devastated regions, including a burned-out forest in Corsica, viscerally evokes a world on fire, doing for global warming what Roland Emmerich, an executive producer on Hell, did for global cooling in The Day After Tomorrow.

South Korean maestro Bong Joon Ho lifts inspiration from a real-life incident in which an American civilian under contract to the U.S. military in 2020 ordered the illegal dumping of toxic waste into the Han River near Seoul. The Oscar-winning Parasite director cooks up a delirious monster movie in the Godzilla tradition, about an amphibious mutant creature terrorizing the waterway banks, believed to be spreading an unknown deadly virus, and the fearless ragtag family of a young girl abducted by the monster and held captive in the city sewers. A wicked blend of environmental and political satire with gonzo comedy, the film has grown more relevant in the years since its release, due to disasters like the Flint, Michigan, water crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Daniel Goldhaber’s 2023 thriller has young eco-activists banding together to blow up a Texas oil pipeline because it “poisons the air, water.” A take on Andreas Malm’s nonfiction, anti-Big Oil manifesto of the same name, the movie features increasingly desperate characters deploying blatant property destruction as a valid tactic for ending toxic pollution, even as they ignore being branded terrorists. This ticking clock thriller has eight eco-warriors — played by Ariela Barer, Kristine Froseth, Lukas Gage, Forrest Goodluck, Sasha Lane, Jayme Lawson, Marcus Scribner and Jake Weary — skipping the ethics-of-violence debate and assembling explosives in the desert to battle what they judge as an immediate danger to the planet and humanity. Hence the “how to” in the immersive eco-heist movie’s title released by Neon.

If you want to make an animated comedy about climate change, gather Ray Romano, John Leguizamo and Denis Leary in a recording booth and let them improvise their dialogue. That’s what Blue Sky and 20th Century Fox did for Ice Age. Set during prehistoric times when animals and humans are migrating south toward warmth, the story follows woolly mammoth Manny (Romano), ground sloth Sid (Leguizamo) and sabre tooth tiger Diego (Leary), who team up to return a lost baby to its tribe of humans. The film was a critical and box office success, earning $383 million worldwide and spawning five sequels and a video game — in part thanks to Scrat, a fictional sabre tooth squirrel-rat who steals the show with his ongoing quest to harvest and bury acorns ahead of the coming freeze. 

To say we are currently living in Idiocracy may be putting it mildly. At this point, amid a war with Iran, we’d probably be better off with President Camacho (Terry Crews) as commander-in-chief. Mike Judge’s cult comedy predicts an incredibly dumb future — imbued with the kind of anti-science, uninformed conspiracist thinking behind climate-change denial — based off a not-so-idiotic premise that, if our stupidest and most-unemployable citizens continue to reproduce at a rate that outpaces our best and brightest (and busiest), we could end up in a country where Luke Wilson looks like a genius. ::shudder::

“Mankind was born on Earth. It was never meant to die here,” says Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) in 2014’s Interstellar. While Christopher Nolan’s Oscar-winning epic is classified as science fiction, its core message explores how love transcends dimensions and what humans are willing to sacrifice to survive. Set in 2067, Earth is on the brink of ecological collapse, reduced to a dust bowl landscape with dwindling resources, pushing Cooper to make the ultimate sacrifice — leaving behind his two children, including a pre-superstardom Timothée Chalamet — to search for a new habitable world. Throughout the journey, McConaughey delivers a heartbreaking performance, quite literally watching his children grow old without him due to the effects of time dilation. The film taps into a haunting question: Could this one day be our reality, and how far would we go to stop it? Oh, and it features one of the greatest scores in cinema history — how did this film not win more Oscars?

A landmark of environmental cinema, Godfrey Reggio’s non-narrative tone poem pairs Ron Fricke’s stunning time-lapse and slow-motion photography with a hypnotic score from Philip Glass. The film moves from vast pristine landscapes to the churning machinery of modern urban life, drawing a stark and wordless contrast. The Hopi title translates roughly as “life out of balance,” and Reggio never lets you forget it. With no arguments made and no data presented, Reggio gives us images of astonishing beauty and creeping dread that accumulate into an indictment of modern life without a single word of testimony.

In the world of The Last of Us, a mutated strain of Cordyceps — a real parasitic fungus that hijacks the nervous systems of insects — makes the jump to humans, producing a civilization-ending pandemic that leaves the survivors scrambling through the wreckage of what America used to be. (In actuality, climate change scientists warn that a melting permafrost may release ancient viruses against which we won’t have any defenses. Fun times!) But the show isn’t really about a virus. It’s about what happens when the natural world, pushed past its limits, pushes back.

What Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann’s HBO adaptation understood — and what your nephew who has played the video game already knows — is that the emotional engine isn’t the fungus, it’s the people. Joel and Ellie navigating a dead world is a grief story first and an environmental parable second, which is probably why it landed so hard with audiences who’ve never touched a controller. Extra credit goes to star Bella Ramsey (THR’s Sustainability 2025 cover star), who brings her eco-conviction offscreen, negotiating a green rider into their season two contract, requiring electric vehicles and waste reduction across the entire production. The actor playing a girl surviving ecological collapse is, in real life, refusing to let the production contribute to one.

Like the two Mad Max films that came before it, George Miller’s third installment of the saga takes place in a postapocalyptic wasteland, the product of human destruction of the environment and nuclear war. But now, in addition to Tina Turner in unforgettable chain mail garb and spring-coil earrings, the story has gone green. Mel Gibson’s Max finds himself in Bartertown pursuing the thief who stole his camel-drawn carriage in the desert. Founded by Aunty Entity (Turner), Bartertown operates on biofuel: methane gas collected from pig feces in a below-ground refinery known as the Underworld, run by the duo Master Blaster (Master is the brains, Blaster the brawn). Aunty offers to give Max his ride back if he battles Blaster to the death, gladiator-style, in the Thunderdome — part of her plan to keep power-hungry Master in check. Max ends up double-crossing Aunty and is banished to the Wasteland. Pig poop doesn’t end up solving Max’s or the world’s problems, but the movie offers an action-packed cautionary tale about how our mishandling of resources could lead to environmental and societal collapse.

Melancholia doesn’t have much to say about the mechanics of the climate crisis or its impact on the world, but on a very intimate, metaphoric level, proves profoundly insightful into the experience of feeling like the world is about to end. In the Lars von Trier drama’s case, that feeling is literal: Bride-to-be Justine (Kirsten Dunst) is battling depression on her big day as a rogue planet is on the verge of colliding with Earth. It builds toward an agonizingly beautiful vision of the apocalypse, a visual tornado as chaotic and compelling as Justine’s inner life.

Released a year before Studio Ghibli was founded, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind established the strong environmentalist current that would run through so much of director Hayao Miyazaki’s oeuvre. Adapted from his own manga, the film is set 1,000 years after an apocalyptic industrial war called the Seven Days of Fire destroyed civilization and left the Earth covered in a toxic jungle patrolled by the Ohmu: massive, armored insects with glowing red eyes. The young princess of the title seeks to understand the jungle and find a way for humans and nature to coexist — but to do so, she must first broker peace between two warring kingdoms before they burn what’s left of the natural world.

Miyazaki’s clever conceptual twist is the slow reveal that the poisonous jungle isn’t the enemy at all — it’s the planet’s immune response, with the plants silently filtering centuries of industrial pollution through petrified wood in the soil below. (The master animator drew inspiration from Japan’s notorious Minamata Bay mercury disaster, where a devastated ecosystem slowly recovered after decades of industrial poisoning.) From Castle in the Sky (1986) to Pom Poko (1994), Princess Mononoke (1997), Ponyo (2008) and beyond, Ghibli classics have routinely returned to this theme, in stories of brilliant imagination and aching poignancy — nature’s fundamental dignity in the face of humanity’s seemingly inescapable tendencies toward hubris, greed and destructive folly.

A rare but potent excursion into genre filmmaking for minimalist poet Kelly Reichardt, this eco-terrorism thriller stars Jesse Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning and Peter Sarsgaard as radicalized environmentalists plotting to blow up a hydroelectric dam in Oregon. (Though low carbon-emitting, the dam is endangering the local salmon population — you can’t win ’em all.) The nail-biting sequence in which they put their plan into action is a model of tense Hitchcockian suspense, made more unsettling by the decision to confirm the mission’s success only through the distant noise of the explosion. The director’s many films set in the Pacific Northwest show a deep connectedness with nature and its preservation. But it’s to Reichardt’s credit here that while sympathizing with the cause, she casts a sharp eye over the delusions of unfocused idealism, with its rippling after-effects and unforeseen consequences.

The Dan Fogelman-created postapocalyptic drama became a runaway hit (and picked up several Emmy nods) after it launched on Hulu in early 2025. Ever since its twisty premiere, Paradise viewers were nervously on the edge of their seats imagining how the show’s world ended — after being told that a catastrophic climate event nearly wiped out all of civilization, sending Sterling K. Brown and 25,000 survivors into the underground bunker that saved them, called Paradise. 

But nothing prepared viewers for how eerily close to home it would feel when it was revealed in the seventh episode of season one. The series showed how a super volcano erupted in the Arctic, shattered the ice shelf, melted trillions of gallons of water and triggered a tsunami traveling 600 miles per hour with a wave as high as 300 feet. The coastal cities were wiped out first and global devastation followed. The president, played by James Marsden, and his hand-picked survivors were the only ones who escaped, thanks to the creation of Paradise by an in-the-know tech billionaire named Sinatra (played by Julianne Nicholson).

Fogelman and his team relied on extensive research to create their climate crisis, including speaking to experts on nuclear fallout and environmental catastrophe, and even a city architect who wrote a 40-page dissertation for the writers room. That research was also funneled into season two, which released its finale March 30 and tackled the AI era alongside its climate story, and will be applied to the third and final third season. Whatever big ideas Fogelman is working through, the execution is sophisticated and nuanced, rendering a television series that remains riveting as both a spectacle and all-too-human drama.

This epic masterpiece from Hayao Miyazaki, set in feudal Japan, pits industrialization against the ancient gods of the forest in a battle where neither side is simply wrong. Lady Eboshi’s ironworks brings medicine and dignity to society’s outcasts, while forest spirits defend a world being steadily erased. Miyazaki eschews easy resolutions, arriving instead at the genuine tragedy of progress in which humanity’s drive to build and survive comes at a cost that cannot be fully calculated or undone.

For a movie about an atmospheric threat causing the sun to dim at an alarming rate that puts it on course to trigger an extinction-level global ice age, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s first feature in 12 years is disarmingly sweet, funny and graced by hope for humanity. That’s largely thanks to the sci-fi epic’s ability to spark soulful buddy chemistry between Ryan Gosling and a rock — or more precisely, a blocky little alien engineer from a different solar system, whose home planet faces the same metaphorically climate change-esque threat. The companionable interspecies cooperation of two sole survivors of their missions, alone in space, gives the film an awestruck innocence to offset its melancholy, a quality that harks back to vintage Spielberg.

Bruce Dern stars as an astro-botanist stationed on a giant glass-domed spaceship filled with the last remaining specimens of Earth’s plant-life — a Noah’s Ark for flora. But in this 1972 eco-thriller, it’s not exactly climate change that’s ruined the home planet but progress; the entire globe has been paved over and sanitized, turned into a bland, frictionless utopia with no poverty, no hunger and no disease — but also no wildlife. When the order comes from Earth to destroy the domes, Dern goes rogue, battling to save his beloved forests with the help of his three adorable robot pals, Huey, Dewey and Louie.

Based on a French graphic novel, Bong Joon Ho’s first English-language feature (starring Chris Evans, Jamie Bell, Tilda Swinton and Octavia Spencer) predates Parasite by five years, and while it goes much larger on genre action and spectacle, like his Oscar winner, it never lets up on the horrors of highly pressurized human dynamics. Following an attempt to combat global warming by injecting the sky with a compound that goes horribly wrong, civilization’s only survivors have been living for 17 years in a state of class war on a high-speed, perpetually moving train that encircles the planet, now encased in a new ice age. The poor subsist on protein-gel cakes (and much worse, in earlier, more desperate times), their children press-ganged into labor, while the more privileged wear furs and sit down for formal dinners. Naturally, revolt ensues, which exposes a series of revelations each more terrible than the last. Gripping and never stinting on exploring the extremes of what humans are capable of, from base self-preservation to species-saving bravery, the movie and its themes of wealth inequity writ large led to four seasons of a TNT-then-AMC series offshoot starring Jennifer Connelly and Daveed Diggs.

Here’s how Hollywood in 1973 imagined New York in 2022: overcrowded. Sweaty. The streets and stairwells packed with so many sleeping bodies that Charlton Heston literally has to climb over them when he leaves his apartment in the morning. In other words, nailed it!  Except in Soylent Green, the Big Apple, like everywhere else on Earth, is also undergoing a climate crisis, with greenhouse gases triggering runaway global warming and a collapsed food supply forcing all but the superrich to subsist on little green wafers that turn out to be made from … let’s just say they aren’t gluten-free. 

The electrical storms, dramatic cloud formations and glowering skies in Jeff Nichols’ domestic thriller of paranoia, unease and dread have nothing on the haunted intensity in the eyes of the director’s frequent collaborator, Michael Shannon. The film’s disquieting effectiveness lies in the fact that the menace bearing down on an ordinary man in rural America is never specified, and yet it taps into the pervasive anxieties of the 21st century — the danger of natural, industrial and economic cataclysms, for starters — more incisively than any film since Todd Haynes’ Safe. It’s about the endurance — or not — of family in the face of an unknowable impending doom, an allegory for apocalyptic climate crisis, along with countless less identifiable terrors that plague contemporary life.

There is a lot of time travel and a lot of dystopia and a lot of Bruce Willis paranoia and an uncomfortable amount of suspecting Brad Pitt as an unleasher of a terrible virus. But the sly secret at the heart of Terry Gilliam’s 1995 mind-bender is that the activist Pitt plays isn’t the bad guy (he’s just trying to help animals). The real bad guy is David Morse’s lab assistant Dr. Peters, who unleashes the virus because he doesn’t like how humans are eco-punishing the planet. By doing this, Gilliam has pulled a neat double trick — raising attention for the plight of the Earth while also satirizing those who react zealously to it.

This 1995 Kevin Coster thriller’s main message seems to be that, so long as you have a jet ski, life after the apocalypse won’t be all bad. OK, so maybe that’s not the single biggest takeaway (and sadly, not an excuse to get that water-polluting, marine life-disrupting PWC). In Waterworld, in the year 2500, the polar ice caps have melted and the sea level has risen 25,000 feet, covering basically all land. (It’s cute that writers Peter Rader and David Twohy thought it would take that long.) The result is a true disaster in every sense of the word, and by that I also mean the insane budget, complicated production and generally not-great acting, but the drinking-piss moment is worth the price of admission for this good-bad rewatch.

There’s nothing like a Pixar movie to deliver a profound message that resonates with both children and adults. WALL-E follows an adorable, self-named robot — Waste Allocation Load Lifter: Earth-Class — left behind to clean up a deserted, uninhabitable Earth. He becomes a quiet symbol of the planet’s environmental collapse, now buried in trash and consumed by dust storms. When WALL-E discovers a small living plant, it offers hope that life can still survive. He shows it to the advanced probe robot EVE and follows her to the Axiom spaceship, where the plant can prove humanity can return home. In the end, their mission succeeds, and humans begin restoring Earth — reinforcing the idea that it’s not too late to change course and protect the planet for future generations. The film won best animated feature at the 81st Academy Awards. Put it on Pixar’s Mount Rushmore.

This story appears in The Hollywood Reporter’s 2026 Sustainability Issue. Click here to read more.