Michael J. Kagan Movies

Twenty-seven years after turning one of Rudyard Kipling's best known works into a successful animated musical, Disney returned to the same source material for this live-action adventure, which hews slightly closer to the original source material. Mowgli (Sean Naeleli) is the five-year-old son of a wilderness guide who accompanies his father on a hunting expedition in the jungles of their native India. Mowgli becomes close friends with a British girl named Kitty (Joanna Wolff), whose parents commissioned the hunt, but when a tiger attacks their camp and kills Mowgli's father, the boy is lost in the confusion, and he's left to fend for himself. Mowgli is befriended by the animals of the jungle -- Baloo the bear, Bagheera the panther, and Grey Brother the wolf -- and they develop an unspoken sense of communication as the growing boy learns to live in the wilds. Years later, after growing to adulthood, Mowgli (now played by Jason Scott Lee) once again encounters Kitty (now played by Lena Headey), who is visiting India with her father, Col. Brydon (Sam Neill), a British officer stationed nearby, and her stuffy fiancée Capt. William Boone (Cary Elwes). Kitty and Mowgli recognize each other, and while his powers of speech are rusty, with the help of Dr. Plumford (John Cleese), Kitty and her father are able to return Mowgli to civilization. However, after spending most of his life in the jungle, Mowgli does not feel at home among other people, and while he deeply loves Kitty, he concedes to his rival for her affections. However, Boone and several of his men kidnap Mowgli when they learn that he has discovered a vast treasure in the jungle, and they try to force him to reveal its secrets while fending off the dangers of the jungle which Mowgli understands, but Boone and his men do not. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

Mel Gibson and Robert Downey Jr. play a couple of what-the-hell flyboys flying contraband to Laos during the Vietnam War. Gibson doesn't seem to care about anything but the "guts and glory" aspects of the job, but Downey has serious questions about the moral implications of their mission. When a Laotian general expresses more concern over the wellbeing of an opium shipment than the men who are risking life and limb to fly it in, Gibson comes around to Downey's way of thinking. By film's end, Gibson is stuck in one of those character-building dilemmas so common to films of this nature: should he deliver his cache of weaponry, or should he dump it all to rescue a bunch of refugees? ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

A trio of agents are summoned by Interpol to trail the villain Harry Pimm (Sylvester McCoy) in this low-budget spy feature. Elliot Cromwell (Robert Ginty), Sergeant Terry O'Shea (Victoria Barrett), and Major Shan (Shakti) combine forces to track down the international crime boss ~ Dan Pavlides, Rovi

Julie Andrews delivers a virtuoso dramatic performance in Duet for One. Based on a play by Tom Kempinski, the story concerns brilliant concert violinist Stephanie Anderson (Andrews) who is slowly succumbing to the ravages of multiple sclerosis. Stephanie's problems are compounded by her cheating husband David Cornwallis (Alan Bates), and her protégé Constantine Kassanis (Rupert Everett), who shows signs of "selling out" to popular entertainment. Max von Sydow, who previously co-starred with Andrews in Hawaii, plays psychiatrist Dr. Louis Feldman, who tries to help Stephanie cope with her debilitations, but who ends up as much an albatross around her neck as David and Constantine. Critics are still divided over whether or not the mystical sequences between Andrews and the ghost of her violin teacher (Sigfrit Steiner) truly work within the context of the plotline. Duet for One was the third English-language production for Russian filmmaker Andrei Konchalovsky. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Director Tobe Hooper adapts Colin Wilson's edgy novel The Space Vampires in this in this horror/sci-fi epic with a cult following. The story concerns a joint British-American space probe of Hailey's Comet. Inside the comet, the astronauts, headed by Carlsen (Steve Railsback), find a spaceship that contains the dead bodies of several aliens, along with the naked bodies of three human-like creatures in suspended animation. They bring the aliens aboard the ship for examination, but the specimens are sloppily guarded and soon the trio spread contagion among the population of the ship. Returning to earth, the beautiful space vampire (Mathilda May) escapes into London and begins to feed of the bodies of the unwary Britons, turning the city into a zombie-populated wasteland. It is now left for Carlsen to stop the vampire invaders. ~ Paul Brenner, Rovi

Similar to the 1991 Dead Again starring Kenneth Branagh, this story of reincarnation and murder also features two couples who meet again in a new lifetime. Brooke Ashley (Jaclyn Smith) is a ballerina and Michael Richardson (Nigel Terry) is her lover, and they both perish in a fire that destroys their home. Fifty years go by, and Gregory Thomas (Terry), a screenwriter, sees an old film clip of Ashley who could easily pass for his fiancee Maggie Rogers (Smith). Intrigued by this coincidence, he starts to research a screenplay on the ballerina's life, and to help get more material, he visits a medium (Shelley Winters) who used to know her. The medium reveals that Gregory is the reincarnation of the dead Richardson -- which means the former couple is back together again. Before any celebration is in order, some of the increasingly sinister mystery of how and why the couple died in the long-ago fire has to be cleared up. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi