New review

As a work of filmmaking, it?s an immediate classic, fit to stand beside the best of Werner Herzog and Stanley Kubrick ? though it?s also entirely its own thing, classical to its bones yet not quite like anything that?s come before it.

This is not Apocalypse Now or Aguirre, The Wrath of God. The tone is more like Robert Bolt, who followed men in compelling natural settings with the screenplays for Lawrence of Arabia, The Mission and The Bounty.

Gray, as always, works with an elegantly muted visual palette (his favorite color: brown), and one can appreciate that his rhythm and style are a throwback to something you might call analog, or ?70s, or maybe just slow and deliberate.

The history of cinema is full of directors who bled tireless with the sole purpose of lifting essential projects with passion. And precisely those features, dedication and obsession, take part in the genetic code of 'The Lost City Of Z'

While Gray does a lovely, low-key job of sliding the viewer, along with the explorers, from the edges of the known into the absolute wild, readers of Grann's book may miss the extraordinary inventory of excruciating jungle predators just waiting to torture tender-skinned humans, from invisible microbes and strength-sapping parasites to enormous insects, toothsome flesh-ripping fish, jungle cougars and Jurassic era-sized eels and snakes.

In casting the role, Gray has taken something of a gamble. Charlie Hunnam?s broad-shouldered, laddish swagger seems an odd fit for the rake-thin, ramrod-straight gentleman explorer, who we follow through two decades of life.

Think in 'Aguirre, The Wrath Of God', or in 'Apocalypse Now', or even Conrad's 'Heart Of Darnkess' itself that strongly obsessed Welles and Coppola. Well, think of the opposite. Or, at least, something less disturbing, less dirty.

In other hands, this true story would have turned into a revival of the exotic adventures cinema, but the director of 'Two Lovers' doesn't want to make a 'Gunga Din'