Movie mini-review: "The White Planet" (2006)

The title refers to the Arctic, captured over one seasonal cycle. "T/W/P" has everything you could want from a doco – spectacle (the annual mass migration of the caribou), humbling grandeur (skyscraper-tall blue-white 'bergs calving), cute furry animals (a mamma polar bear tending and teaching her cubs), nature being "red in tooth and claw" (burrow-busting wolf, ravenous octopus, egg-snatching fox), colour (from the aurora borealis to miniscule jellyfish lit up like a Vegas street), mating rituals (musk oxen jousting for alpha-male status) and an environmental moral (when the ice disappears, so does all this). Unless you happen to have stumbled across a crowded pool of narwhals or witnessed thick-billed murres "flying" underwater, there are sights here that will amaze.

Final word: Tour another planet.

[Australian cinema release date: September 6]