A throwback to when major studios made family pictures with agreeably more heft than sap, this rugged survival story unfolds in southwestern Europe during the waning of the Ice Age 20,000 years ago. A Cro-Magnon chieftain (Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson of Game of Thrones) leads his men on a bison hunt, the first for his teenage son (Kodi Smit-McPhee, Let Me In). The nervous boy soon gets separated from the tribe, his only companion an injured wolf that he nurses back to health. Director Albert Hughes (The Book of Eli) has created a work of great imagination but devoid of wasteful excess, grounding his straightforward tale in recognizable human—and animal—behaviors.