A still from A Statement. Photograph: Sabrina Lantos/Sony Picture Classics/Allstar View image in fullscreen A still from A Statement. Photograph: Sabrina Lantos/Sony Picture Classics/Allstar First look review New York film festival 2026 Review A Statement review – outstanding climate change dramedy about a 1980 meeting New York film festival: Paul Rudd, Paul Giamatti and Tatiana Maslany lead an excellent ensemble in this dramatization of a failed conference on climate change
Adrian Horton Sun 4 Oct 2026 02.15 CEST Last modified on Sun 4 Oct 2026 02.16 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google I n late October 1980, days before the election of Ronald Reagan , Congress summoned 20 experts in various fields to a beachfront hotel in Florida. Their mandate was simple: figure out how to address the dire threat posed to the climate by fossil fuel emissions, then deliver their recommendations to Congress in the form of a statement.
Every word said during four marathon sessions over the next 36 hours – every disagreement or digression, tirade or truce – was recorded by a stenographer for posterity into a single document, hundreds of pages long, that stands as an artifact from a time when expertise was trusted, before corporate greed and political expediency mired “debate” about rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere in a haze of misinformation and inaction. The fact that this meeting took place at all – that experts in climate, energy, law, philosophy, politics and more agreed on the fundamental facts, yet struggled to reach consensus on what to do about them – is fascinating, if perhaps not the most natural fit for a movie. This was, after all, a conference room of specialists sharing evidence via overhead projector.
Read more Nevertheless, A Statement, a new film from Spotlight director Tom McCarthy that dramatizes the landmark conference, bets on the inherent sparks of watching fractious personalities forced together, as outlined in a 10-page section within Nathaniel Rich’s 2019 book Losing Earth. McCarthy and fellow screenwriters Noé Debré and Thomas Bidegain have embarked on an admirable act of faith: every word said within the conference room walls – roughly half of the movie – is pulled verbatim from the stenographer’s document. That is no mere fun fact within the press notes; though occasional text overlays from the actual transcript suggest some level of verisimilitude, it is in fact helpful to one’s appreciation of the movie, which dives headlong into the weeds and spins out in circular debates, to know that every tedious discussion of semantics, every frustrating spiral of potentials, was not in fact a writerly decision, but a real event – the natural and instructive result of 20 individual humans, each with their own personal feelings and professional responsibilities, confronting an existential problem of global scale.
View image in fullscreen Paul Rudd and Amy Ryan at a press conference for A Statement at the New York film festival on 3 October. Photograph: Roy Rochlin/Getty Images for FLC McCarthy, of course, is the writer/director of one of the great so-called competency porn movies of our time; the thrill of Spotlight is in both the successful reveal of a corrupted institution, and the frisson of watching people be unflappably good at their jobs. A Statement puts a misty-eyed spin on that pleasure: its people may be failing their objective – it’s a 46-year-old spoiler to say that no consensus was ever reached, nor a statement…