by SAM SCHECHNER

With last summer's "An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore managed to bump global warming to the top of the national consciousness -- and sell over $24 million of U.S. tickets. Now Leonardo DiCaprio is betting he can repeat the feat.

Mr. DiCaprio hosts, narrates and partly funded "The 11th Hour," a documentary out today that paints a bleak picture of humanity's prospects unless environmental policy is shifted almost immediately. It's just one of an unusual number of politically motivated documentaries slated to hit theaters in coming months, from a Darfur film featuring Don Cheadle to "Taxi to the Dark Side," which uses the death of an Afghan taxi driver to examine U.S. detention policies.

But America's stomach for such sobering fare may be starting to flag. Ticket sales this ...

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