The Bastard King – 8.5

This is sort of a Don’t Look Up for lions: why are we fighting over something trivial like different eye color when our entire species faces extinction? The story could not have been told more intimately if the director had used animation. Extraordinary documentary footage of two lion prides in southern Tanzania shows the lions making love, raising cubs, hunting giraffes and zebras, squaring off, killing each other and suffering the effects of climate change and habitat destruction. A sepia-tinted palette and percussive music raised the art quotient above a simple documentary. The anthropomorphism was a bit heavy, but not if you see the blue- and yellow-eyed lions as stand-ins for the humans in the audience.