At a time when environmental documentaries often overwhelm us with stark statistics and dire warnings, “Autumn and the Black Jaguar” chooses a different path. It speaks to our hearts through the universal language of friendship, reminding us that our connection to nature is not just about preservation, but about love. French filmmaker Gilles de Maistre, who already gave us “Mia and the White Lion” and “The Wolf and the Lion,” returns to familiar territory with this story of a girl and her unlikely bond with a jaguar in the Amazon rainforest. Yet despite its well-worn premise, this film manages to find fresh ground in the increasingly urgent conversation about wildlife conservation. Director: Gilles de Maistre Writer: Prune de Maistre Stars: Emily Bett Rickards, Lumi Pollack, Paul Greene The story follows Autumn (played with remarkable naturalism by Lumi Pollack), whose childhood in the Amazon gives her an extraordinary friendship with an orphaned jaguar cub she names Hope. When circums...
However, movies that take place inside a video game while being played by real players is a genre that, right now, consists mostly of Knit’s Island and 2024’s The Remarkable Life of Ibelin. To that short list we can add co-directors Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane’s documentary Grand Theft Hamlet, a hilarious and even moving chronicle of the COVID era that follows two out-of-work British actors dealing with the loneliness and creative boredom of lockdown by putting on a production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet inside the world of Grand Theft Auto Online. The film boils down 300 hours of GTA Online gameplay to a tight 91 minutes in which Crane and fellow out-of-work actor Mark Oosterveen walk, run, drive, fly, punch, and shoot their way through the game’s crime-infested version of Los Angeles while recruiting a troupe of willing GTA Online players to take part in this unusual staging of the Bard’s most famous play. Grylls and Crane laugh heartily at the disconnect between Shakespeare’s immortal wo...