Rudyard Kipling – Pain In The Bud

Keanu (2016): Jordan Peele stars as Rell, a man who is despondent after he’s dumped by his girlfriend. When a kitten shows up on his front step, Rell takes the little guy in and his life is suddenly transformed. He’s enamored with the kitten, whom he names Keanu, can’t stop talking about him, and even begins photographing him in dioramas based on famous films.

But tragedy strikes when drug dealers ransack Rell’s home, mistaking it for the small-time drug dealer’s home next door, and take Keanu. Rell and his cousin, Clarence (Keegan Michael-Key) embark on a quest to get Keanu back no matter what it takes, even if it means posing as a pair of contract killers to infiltrate the criminal world where Keanu’s been taken. It’s every bit as absurd as you’d imagine — but it’s also very, very funny. “Actually, we’re in the market right now for a gangsta pet,” is not a line I’d expect to hear in a movie, but in Keanu it works.

Flow is the surprise hit of the awards season.

Flow (2024): Even the hype of Golden Globe awards and Oscar nominations can’t take away from the powerful impression Flow makes. By now most of us are probably familiar with it through clips or trailers, but they don’t do justice to the beauty of director Gints Zilbalodis’ world, nor how naturally expressive his protagonist, Cat, is.

The animators put in an extraordinary amount of effort into understanding and perfectly replicating every feline behavioral quirk, every hackled coat and curiously bent tail. They accomplish the same with Cat’s companions, including a Labrador, a secretarybird, a lemur and a capybara. And while we’re dazzled by the visuals and energetic narrative, Zilbalodis poses a thematic question as the flood waters take the animals through the ruins of human civilization: without people, the world will go on. What would a world without humans look like? Cat and his companions tell us one story while the environment tells us another, and the result is greater than the sum of its parts.

Tiger: A Spy In The Jungle (2008): What makes this documentary so special is that it was filmed over three years in an Indian tiger preserve, and the filmmakers not only disguised cameras as rocks and tree stumps, they trained elephants how to carry “trunk cams,” achieving shots which no human cameraman could ever hope to get without spooking the subjects of the film.

Tigers don’t hunt elephants because they’re simply too big. Unlike lions, they’re not feeding a whole pride, and they don’t hunt cooperatively. It’s just not worth the effort required to take down the giant, majestic beasts. As a result, tigers and elephants not only tolerate each other, they mostly ignore each other’s presence.

One of the cubs stares curiously at a camera disguised as a rock in Tiger: Spy In The Jungle

That allowed the team to get unprecedented shots of an iron-willed tigress raising a litter of four cubs by herself. We see their dens, we watch the cubs play, and we witness the incredible prowess of the mother, who according to narrator David Attenborough has a remarkable 80 percent success rate while hunting. That’s pretty much unheard of.

With four young mouths to feed in addition to herself, the tigress is determined, and also supremely skilled. The whole jungle erupts in a cacophony of shrieks and alarm calls the instant a single animal gets a whiff of the tigress’ presence, but that still doesn’t stop her from achieving her goal.

Still, the odds are against all four cubs making it, with dangers like adult leopards, sickness and hunger. Through Spy In The Jungle, we get to see the entire journey, from the newborn cubs to the confident juveniles on the cusp of adulthood. There’s no better tiger documentary anywhere.

Shere Khan, right, makes an intimidating villain in The Jungle Book (2016)

The Jungle Book (2016): With so many Disney cash-grabs in the form of live-action remakes of classics that did not need to be remade, it’s easy to dismiss The Jungle Book. The thing is, this movie has heart. Neel Sethi is an earnest Mowgli, Idris Elba voices the infamous tiger Shere Khan, and to balance out the felid villainy with some heroism, Sir Ben Kingsley voices Bagheera, the noble leopard who discovers baby Mowgli in the jungle and protects him as his wolf friends raise the boy. Lupita Nyong’o as the wolf matriarch Raksha, Bill Murray as the honey-obsessed bear Baloo and Christopher Walken as orangutan King Louie round out a great cast.

One photo shows a melanistic leopard — better known as a black panther — cautiously but curiously poking its head out from behind a tree. Another shows the same cat, tail raised and ready to spring as it stalks prey in the jungle mists.

The photos went viral this week, accumulating millions of views as people hailed the leopard as the second coming of Rudyard Kipling’s Bagheera, the beloved leopard from The Jungle Book.

Both photos come from the lens of Shaaz Jung, known as the “Leopard Man of India” for his astonishing shots of the majestic cats taken deep in the country’s jungles and forests.

“When people see these pictures, they think there are several leopards, but actually there’s just one black panther where we are — one melanistic leopard in the dense forest of Nagerhole. So it was like finding a needle in a haystack,” Jung told BusinessInsider.

The leopard has been named Saya by local wildlife enthusiasts, and he’s a bit out of his element in the deciduous Kabini forest, which is also home to a tiger preserve. Normally, leopards like Saya live in dense jungle, where the thick canopy and lack of light play to their advantage.

Jung patiently followed Saya, snapping photos of the big cat hunting, fighting and courting potential mates.

“He’s not just surviving, he is thriving,” Jung said.

Jung is a wildlife photographer, NatGeo’s director of photography for films and a big cat specialist in his own right. He also photographs India’s tigers, and his shots reveal a connection to — and a deep appreciation of — these regal apex predators who have been pushed back by human development and the resulting habitat loss.