Movie Review: ‘Gaslit’ And Interview With Director Katie Camosy

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By James Lindorf

Jane Fonda has spent decades using her fame for causes, and in “Gaslit” she points it at the oil and gas boom. Director Katie Camosy has worked with Greenpeace for years, making her the perfect choice to helm the organization’s first feature length project. After winning Best Documentary at both the Santa Barbara International Film Festival and Raindance, it is now available to rent or own on Prime. “Gaslit” also launched on Documentary+ on October 28th through Suncatcher Productions. More platforms are rolling out this month, and you can find the full list at gaslitdoc.com/watch.

“Gaslit” sends Fonda on a road trip through the oil fields of West Texas’ Permian Basin and the Gulf Coast communities of Texas and Louisiana, meeting the shrimpers, ranchers, former oil workers, and self-described reluctant activists fighting the extraction boom. The boom has made the United States the world’s biggest exporter of liquefied natural gas, fueling a massive expansion of plastics production along the way.

It is the Jane Fonda show, and I mean that as an observation more than a complaint. Most documentaries keep their guide off-screen, asking questions or speaking as a voice-over. Here, she is in nearly every frame, working with people and sharing their frustrations and grief. She is clearly passionate and willing to spend her fame on bringing attention to the cause. You also get the sense she went off script a time or two, name-dropping and ad-libbing, which fits the loose feel of a road trip. A couple of famous friends, Connie Britton and Maggie Rogers, are featured guests who join her briefly for meetings and tours. Britton gets deep into the activism side, and watching her use specialized cameras and thermal imaging to capture invisible methane leaking from factories and pipelines is one of the film’s best visuals. Rogers has slightly less to do on camera but lends her voice as one of her songs plays over the closing credits.

The moment that sticks with me is in Corpus Christi, where Fonda visits a once-thriving Black neighborhood. The residents are suffering from lower life expectancy, higher cancer rates, and more congenital disabilities than the rest of the city because of its proximity to the refineries. It puts the film’s argument next to real people, and it makes its strongest case by showing the breadth of its impact across all ages.

The film is largely one-sided, but it is hard to fault it. Siding with oil and gas here would be like rooting for Goliath in his fight with David. They have the money and the lobbyists to do their talking for them. The people who get to talk in this film are the ones suffering medically and financially from the industry. Camosy is smart about scope. Fossil fuels touch our lives in so many ways that no single film can capture it all, so the film briefly touches on the big picture before narrowing its focus to LNG. She also contrasts great aerial shots of the landscape, setting the natural beauty against the massive plants, trucks, and ships that produce and transport natural gas.

“An Inconvenient Truth” is still the gold standard for this kind of film, in the attention it raised, the critical response, and the awards it won. “Gaslit” is very much in that vein emotionally. The argument is that difficult changes could save the lives of people we will never know, and the problem is getting the overwhelming majority, or the important few, to be willing to make them. If the world isn’t on their side, these people may as well be on their own, and films like this from Greenpeace help them rally others to the cause.

Oil and plastics capture most of the headlines. “Gaslit” expands the knowledge base for viewers who follow those stories or care about the environment and want to learn about a piece of it they may not know much about. It is a passionate, well-shot and well-paced film that puts people and places in front of its argument. What held it back for me were small structural decisions. I could have used more of the traditional documentary framework, and the road trip meandered a bit for my taste. It is a good way to meet people, but it is a less reliable way to build a case. Overall, “Gaslit” earns a 4 out of 5.

Genre: Documentary
Original Language: English
Release Date (Theaters): June 12th, 2026, Limited
Release Date (Digital): October 28th, 2026
Runtime: 1h 55m
Director: Katie Camosy
Distributor: Suncatcher Productions
Production Co: Greenpeace