Tom McCarthy's 'A Statement' Revisits a 1980 Climate Conference

Tom McCarthy's new film, A Statement, centers on a 1980 Florida conference dealing with the effects of carbon dioxide emissions on the environment. The gathering brings together politicians, academics, scientists and environmentalists from around the U.S. to talk about the subject. Deadline's critic notes that on paper this sounds like a dense polemic, hardly the stuff of exciting moviemaking — and a room full of experts and officials debating emissions is a genuinely hard thing to set in motion on screen. That tension is the interesting part of the premise: the film is built on the conference, not on the catastrophe.