ARCTIC TALE A smarmy score (“We Are Family” when it ought to be “Stayin’ Alive”), some orgiastic farting from a herd of walruses and a modicum of cutesy anthropomorphism from narrator Queen Latifah prove a small price to pay for this stunningly photographed documentary about a year in the endangered life of an Arctic ice floe. With 15 years of experience in the area, Adam Ravetch and Sarah Robertson shoot around, inside and underneath the compromised habitat of Nanu, a polar bear cub, and Seela, an enchanting jolie-laide walrus calf weighing several hundred pounds, as they and their mothers try to survive in hunting grounds that may lose all their ice by the year 2040 if we don’t mend our anti-green ways. G-rated or not, Arctic Tale is admirably hard-headed about the dog-eat-dog call of the wild. The movie’s bracing account of the blend of altruism and aggression that is animal domestic life, and the sheer diversity of family forms (bear cubs are raised by single mothers, walruses by mothers and self-sacrificing “aunts”), may be enough to place it on the shitlist of the evangelical right. Diminishing resources encourage civil war: The movie’s most heartbreaking moment comes when, two years ahead of developmental schedule, Nanu’s hitherto protective mother has to put a steely glint in her eyes and scare her underprepared daughter into self-sufficiency because she can’t feed them both. As agitprop alone, Arctic Tale must be doing something right: Coming out of the theater, my daughter’s pal grabbed my cell phone to call home and check that her family owned a hybrid, while my own child menaced me with “Shorter showers, Mom, okay?” (Selected... More >>>