He’s a sensualist, and in “The Lost City of Z” he turns the Amazon into a ravishment for the senses. As a director, he has an old-fashioned belief in cinematic beauty, in the charm and necessity of the perfectly lighted and framed face, the hauntingly darkened room, the grittily coarsened street. The romance of adventure has largely shifted from history to fantasy fiction, an easier, less contested playground for conquering white heroes. Hollywood used to churn these out regularly, but they’ve faded, casualties of shifting industry logic, audience taste, cultural norms and other pressures. For us, the Age of Discovery is long gone and, for the most part, so are old-fashioned historical epics, other than the occasional Chinese extravaganza or one of those international waxworks with clashing accents.

That dream isn’t only about the Amazon in “The Lost City of Z” but also about the movies and their ability to transport us to astonishing new worlds. It’s 1906, and while wonders like moving pictures are rapidly shrinking the world, the dream of unknown lands endures. Undaunted, he perseveres, venturing more deeply into a world that first becomes a passion and then something of a private hallucination. Enveloped by the forest, the explorer and his crew face snakes, piranhas, insects and that most terrifying of threats: other people, who at times bombard the strangers with arrows.

In “The Lost City of Z,” a lush, melancholic story of discovery and mystery, a mesmerizing Charlie Hunnam plays a British adventurer in the Amazon who is consumed by “all the glories of exploration,” as Joseph Conrad once wrote of a different journey.

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