82-year-old Claude Lorius was the first scientist to alert the world to the perils of global warming. His one regret in life is that history has proved him right. A biographical, cinematic corollary of Al Gore’s canned Learning Annex lecture, Luc Jacquet’s Antarctica condenses 22 polar missions — all told, they consumed ten years of Lorius’s life — into one visually breathtaking documentary. (It helps that Lorius and his crews were wise enough to pack a couple of 16mm cameras to record the various expeditions.) The narration — inspired selections from Lorius’s diary spoken by Michel Papineschi — complements the epical force of the images. For a time, it looked as if Jacquet (March of the Penguins) had every intention of letting the pictures do the talking. Sadly, the last ten minutes are squandered on spoon-feeding doom. And if ever a film cried out for a domed IMAX 3D presentation it’s this. (2015) — Scott Marks
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