Rudyard Kipling himself couldn't have imagined scenes more stunning than the ones captured by the creators of The Second Jungle Book: Mowgli and Baloo. The film, a live-action follow-up to Disney's 1994 Jungle Book feature, attaches itself to the loincloth of young wolf-raised Mowgli as he leads a gang of greedy grown-ups on a wild goose chase through the jungles of India, circa 1890. In the course of this breathless caper, a visual delicacy is cooked up. Eyes of all ages will be loath to wander from the screen as it shifts from one color-drenched, wildlife-rife scene to the next. The animals, more than the wilderness, are what give this film its Eden-like quality-Mowgli protectors Bagheera the panther and Baloo the bear, as well as wolves, tigers, a pack of prowling monkeys, and even exotic snakes of the deadly variety all mix and mingle to gorgeous effect. And that's not to give the tale unraveling all the while short shrift. Kipling, of course, never once spun a second-rate story, and this adaptation doesn't tinker with way-off ideas of its own. Bill Campbell is fully believable as an Indiana Jones-like circus scout, and Roddy McDowall is at his eccentric best as a cave-dwelling monkey commander. -Tammy La Gorce.

John Boorman's 1985 South American epic never quite gets all of its gears working simultaneously, but it remains an often startling work with an extraordinary performance by the director's own son, Charley Boorman. Powers Boothe plays an American engineer working on a dam project in Brazil. When his young son is seemingly absorbed one day into the dense perils and beauty of the Amazon rain forest, Boothe's character goes on a protracted, 10-year search for him. In the interim, Boorman puts his full storytelling powers to work by characteristically exploring the arcane rhythms and dangers of an indigenous world hidden from ordinary view. Specifically, Boorman leads us into the life of a forest tribe who have assimilated the missing child and who will ultimately send him back with the opposite of his father's pro-development sensibility. The movie is gorgeous to behold, and it's great fun watching Boorman find ever-novel ways of making the same film again and again. But the environmental message and the emotion of the core relationship get in each other's way a bit, preventing the film from uniting on every front. Still, this is a must for Boorman fans. -Tom Keogh.