Antonia Bird‘s film Ravenous is a number of things. It’s a horror, and a comedy, and an odd collision of vampire and cannibal tropes, and a frontier narrative. It’s also a vegan, feminist, and anti-colonial attack on mythologies of masculinist virility.
The tradition of updating Rudyard Kipling’s classic The Jungle Book every 25 years or so continued in 2016, with Jon Favreau’s very beautiful, decidedly dark and tense take on the story, new to Netflix this week. Although Bill Murray gets some laughs as Baloo and belts out “Bare Necessities”, this Jungle Book mostly finds the young Mowgli in crouched peril or running for his life, which allows for lots of impressive set-pieces but also begs the question who this thing is supposed to be for.