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“The Jungle Book” Reviews: Critics take on the remake

Posted in: Must-Read Reviews  |  By: John Hanlon  |  April 17th, 2016
The Jungle Book Reviews

This weekend, viagra order director Jon Favreau’s remake of The Jungle Book hit theaters nationwide. Adapted from the Rudyard Kipling book, more about the film features Neel Sethi  as the young Mowgli but all of the animals who surround him are computer-generated creations voiced by some of the best actors in Hollywood (including Ben Kingsley, prescription Christopher Walken and Bill Murray). The film may have been a tricky proposition to pull off but The Jungle Book reviews have been extremely positive.

At this writing, the feature has a 95% fresh rating on RottenTomatoes.com but that rating could change slightly with more reviews coming in this weekend.

In the meantime though, check out a few of the must-read The Jungle Book reviews below (and make sure you check out our own review here).

Matt Zoller Seitz, RogerEbert.com: “Combining spectacular widescreen images of rain forests, watering holes and crumbling temples, a couple of human actors, and realistic mammals, birds and reptiles that nevertheless talk, joke and even sing in celebrity voices, the movie creates its own dream-space that seems at once illustrated and tactile.” Check out the full review here.

Chris Nashawaty, EW.com: “ It’s the first talking-animal movie I’ve seen where CGI seamlessly bridges the uncanny gap between fantasy and reality. It’s also one of the few 3-D movies that actually benefits from being in 3-D.” Check out the full review here.

Joe Morgenstern, The Wall Street Journal: “This time, though, it’s a coming-of-age story in a medium that has come of age. Mowgli has found himself, and his beloved surroundings, as never before.” Check out the full review here.

Manohla Dargis NYTimes.com: “Disney’s new take on ‘The Jungle Book’ is being touted as a live-action movie, though there’s scarcely anything alive in it.” Check out the full review here.

Todd McCarthy, The Hollywood Reporter: “Favreau and cinematographer Bill Pope vigorously keep the camera moving at all but the quietest moments, and the visual effects team led by Robert Legato and Adam Valdez has both created sumptuous settings that look as lifelike as any CGI ever presented in a studio feature and integrated both humans and animal characters into them in seamless ways.” Check out the full review here.

Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune: “[Favreau] has a knack for straight-ahead pacing and for tightening the screws (the movie is 81 percent life-and-death peril and 19 percent comic relief) without being maniacal about it.” Check out the full review here.

Alonso Duralde, TheWrap.com: “If there’s one element of ‘The Jungle Book’ that doesn’t quite play, it’s Favreau’s apparent reticence over the beloved songs from the 1967 version.” Check out the full review here.

Christopher Orr, TheAtlantic.com: “The Jungle Book may or may not be a nostalgia-plying cash grab. But regardless it is a genuinely wonderful film, an almost overwhelming onrush of thrills, wit, and tenderness.” Check out the full review here.

Bob Mondello, NPR.com: “Though he was mostly acting in a blue-screen environment, it’s a world that Iron Man director Jon Favreau had me so fully accepting as real, that about an hour in, when Baloo started singing, I confess it bugged me.”  Check out the full review here.

Nell Minow, Beliefnet.com: “The world of the jungle is enchanting and vital, a Rousseauian dream of an Edenic natural world (in this PG film, while there is peril and some characters are injured and killed, any carnivore behavior happens off-screen).” Check out the full review here.

If you want to read our perspective on the film, click here for our review.

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