Instinct

For all its violence, outbursts on the nuances of freedom and illusion, and talk of mankind’s rape and final destruction of Mother Earth, this film has a very low level of emotional impact. An anthropologist (Anthony Hopkins) living with gorillas in Africa is imprisoned for murdering two park rangers and interviewed by an ambitious psychologist intern (Cuba Gooding Jr.). The drama here has a dark thriller arc but key scenes feel clumsily cloned from The Shawshank Redemption, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Gorillas in the Mist and Silence of the Lambs. Directed by John Turteltaub and “suggested” by Daniel Quinn’s novel Ishmael.