'11TH HOUR' IS GOOD-FOR-YOU CINEMA ABOUT ENVIRONMENT.

Byline: BOB STRAUSS

>FILM CRITIC

Why Al Gore is a great movie star, Exhibit A: "The 11th Hour."

Even with no less celestial a presence than Leonardo DiCaprio producing and occasionally manifesting on screen, this compendium of talking heads and (mostly) stock footage, sometimes oddly juxtaposed, feels like a lecture compared to "An Inconvenient Truth." And that movie actually was a filmed lecture.

Gore, of course, had been polishing his presentation for years before recording it for posterity. And to its credit, "11th Hour" casts a much wider net among issues relating to environmental degradation, rather than just zeroing in on one aspect such as global warming.

There is an abundance of information here, and a good case is made for a holistic approach (economic, political, personal, methodological) to saving the planet -- or, at least, humankind's ability to live on it.

But informative is about the best that this movie gets. The constant barrage of experts -- even if what they have to say about the sea dying or mushrooms' ability to cleanse polluted soil -- can be dramatically depressing or encouragingly eye-opening. But these are not, in general, the most scintillating public speakers. Even dropping the occasional "superstar" like Stephen Hawking or Mikhail Gorbachev into the mix does little to relieve the droning pitch that takes hold of the whole project.

Directors Leila Conners Petersen and Nadia Conners (yes, they're sisters) obviously strive to be thorough while keeping an eye on the big, overall picture. And while they're certainly going for an urgent, emotional call to action, they try very hard to build it by accumulating facts and examining solutions that, outre as some of them may seem right now, could prove practical. This film may be a little wide-eyed in its ecologically correct assurance, but it could have been much more manipulative and hectoring.

So, "The 11th Hour" is good-for-you cinema in content, shape and form. There are far badder things.

Bob Strauss [phone]

[e-mail]

THE 11TH HOUR - Two and one half stars

>PG: some violent footage

>Director: Leila Conners Petersen and Nadia Conners.

>Running time: 1 hr. 31 min.

>Playing: ArcLight, Hollywood; Landmark, West L.A.

>In a nutshell: Wide-ranging documentary about all sorts of environmental issues bogs down in an overabundance of talking heads. Co-producer Leonardo DiCaprio provides some summing-up narration.

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Leonardo DiCaprio produces and occasionally appears in the environmentally conscious documentary "The 11th Hour."