Carroll Ballard does not go back on the promise of The Black Stallion. He goes forward on it, if anywhere. The photography here may be less glossily gorgeous, or anyway the terrain is certainly less touristically enticing. But whatever is lost in that area is no loss. It is rather a measure of the obvious rigors of the shoot. And it throws attention onto an area from which too much of the attention in The Black Stallion was taken away: namely, Ballard's ability to tell a story and to tell it, despite the supplemental dependence here on voice-over narration, in screen terms. The story itself -- a factual account of a lone and inexperienced biologist sent on The Lupine Project to gather evidence in support of what turns out to be the dead-wrong hypothesis that Canis lupis is to blame for the depletion of the caribou herds in the Arctic -- is, as is acknowledged openly at the resolution, short of heroes and villains. It is short, for that matter, of even a resolution, and the unsettling ambiguity in its stead is not quite what one has learned to expect under the Disney insignia. Nonetheless, the steady procession of problems encountered, discoveries made, people met, gives Ballard plenty to work with. There is rarely a dull moment, and never a lax one. With Charles Martin Smith and Brian Dennehy; based on the book by Farley Mowat. (1983) — Duncan Shepherd