Oscar season is almost over! Soon, we will finally put the year to bed and get to work on the important things, like determining which films seem to be early contenders for Academy Award attention next year.
The other day, we provided some guidance to this year’s prestige awards, drawn from our viewing, reading, and arbitrary hunches.
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.