KCUR Arts Reporter Steve Walker shares his top movie pick of the weekThe Last Lions: From National Geographic's film division comes a nature documentary that is at once gorgeously filmed and brutally frank. Directors Dereck and Beverly Joubert followed the day-by-day struggles of a lioness and her cubs after they lose the cubs' father in a vicious fight with a territorial pack of big cats. Food is scarce at the new location but hopes grow as a pack of water buffaloes come ashore. Yet that, too, leads to further battles across a parcel of land with diminishing resources. Parents should know that this is no Disney nature film; it's quite violent (I'd never witnessed how fighting lions go for each others' eyes) and there are a couple troubling incidents involving the cubs that might make rough going for kids. The photography is extraordinarily intimate, though, and in an ironic twist, it is narrated (with a bit too much grandiosity) by Jeremy Irons, who voiced the ill-tempered Scar in "The Lion King." - (Glenwood) - Steve Walker
Walker's Three To See: The Last Lions
