The Bear

The Bear (L'Ours, 1988) is Jean-Jacques Annaud's adventure drama you can watch online on iFILM. High in the mountains of British Columbia, a cub loses his mother to a rockslide and is left to face the wilderness alone.

The orphan latches onto a massive wounded male Kodiak who wants no company at all. Slowly, wariness turns into something close to kinship — just as two hunters with rifles and dogs close in on them both. Annaud tells nearly the whole thing without dialogue, leaning on trained bears Bart and Youk, real mountain terrain, and the animal's own point of view. There is a dream sequence of frogs and mushrooms that is as strange as it is tender.

Adapted from James Oliver Curwood's novel, the film keeps the camera low so you watch the humans as the cub does — as predators. It became a worldwide hit and remains a rare piece of big-screen filmmaking with no human leads at its heart. Stream The Bear (1988) online on iFILM.