Life After Deaths: 28 YEARS LATER and28 YEARS LATER: THE BONE TEMPLE

Director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland wisely understood that the most interesting part of returning to the world of their 2003 zombie picture 28 Days Later for 28 Years Later is to see how a society has reshaped itself in the wake of a devastating, isolating event. In the world of this series, a zombie apocalypse has left the island of Great Britain cut off from the rest of the globe to prevent the spread of the “rage virus.” Talk about Brexit. Picking up the story so many years after the original’s inciting incident gives Boyle and Garland a chance to show a people re-forming, finding a deeper need to cling to family and to ritual, new and old. The older folks can remember the world before zombies roamed the countryside and the uninfected live in small fortified villages or lonely domiciles in the wilderness. But 28 years is a long time, and for the younger folks this is all they’ve known. They were born into this world. What reads to us as post-apocalyptic is, for them, merely the world. It’s humbling to be reminded that, throughout history, generations have lived through what might’ve felt like an end, not surviving to see descendants emerge into a different world not knowing any different. 

It’s grief that animates 28 Years Later. It’s a small troubled family story seen through the eyes of a tween boy in the British isle’s tradition of naturalistic films about just such a subject, like Kes and Ratcatcher. But it’s one turbocharged by its genre premise promising violence and gore. It finds young Spike (Alfie Williams), a sensitive boy who lives in a small community sealed off by fort walls and even further isolated by a land bridge that disappears at high tide. He has a sick mother (Jodie Comer) and a rough father (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). His dad thinks it’s time he takes the boy zombie hunting on the mainland. His mom disagrees, but is feverish and bed-ridden and confused, and so father and son head out, armed with bow and arrow, into a survivalist horror movie. Its moves might not be all that surprising—jump scares and splattering fluids—but the characters encountered are vivid, striking, memorable. We see new iterations of zombies—most ominously, an imposing Alpha (Chi Lewis-Parrry) and his pregnant mate (Celi Crossland). We meet a stranded Swedish soldier (Edvin Ryding), proof that the world beyond the country is very much ours, and a doctor (Ralph Fiennes) who has made a towering memorial to the dead out of their bones, proof life in this country is very much not like ours. And yet both are reflections of mankind’s reaction to mass death, those who would make austere peace with its heavy import, and those who’d turn a blind eye until it’s very much in their face. Between them is the boy, lead into this world by a father and a mother whose interactions with danger will inaugurate him into the heavy decisions of life in these times. 

Boyle delivers it all in elegiac tones that bolster the intensity of its life-or-death stakes. It’s grief for things that aren’t any more, and never will be again. It’s grief for the mournful facts of life that never change. And yet it’s just as muscular and jumpy as any of his hard-charging films. He shot the original on chunky pixelated consumer-grade digital video, and here trades it for an iPhone. Its images are both prosaic and painterly in the hands of cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle. He gets a eye-bogglingly intense green and blue in the landscapes, and an eerie blackish red in the blood. It’s always both hyper-real and intensely stylized, never more so than a swirling star field over a body of water like a mirror. These images are then cut together with Boyle’s usual frenetic montage and stutter-step editing, tableaux of gorgeous pixelated saturation and ugly spectacle occasionally layered with stock footage and references to Kipling and Shakespeare. It’s an extension of the script’s interest in sci-fi devastation exposing what’s essentially human at root, a stripping away that reveals continuity with British pastorals and Romantic ideations of national identity. And because Garland is interested in societal procedures and human frailty (Ex Machina, Civil War), and because Boyle is interested in social dynamics and the ways in which our surroundings and our relationships shape us (Slumdog Millionaire, Trainspotting), this new picture is a triumphant apotheosis of their intermingled thematic concerns. It’s prickly, propulsive, unexpected, and, amazingly for a movie about the undead and dying, viscerally alive.

What’s just as amazing is that they can hand the director’s chair over to Nia DaCosta for a sequel a mere six months later and get a new movie that continues those ideas while finding ways to jolt and surprise that are all its own. The action moves to Ralph Fiennes’ neck of the woods for 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. There he’s working through some experiments to see if he can calm the zombie beasts. He doesn’t have a cure, but he’s got some theories. In a quiet moment, he admits to another that the world used to feel certain. We have a sense that he’s a compassionate man of science who misses the certainty, and in fact clings to a kind of dignity and respect for all life that allows him to maintain a steady center. And yet, coated in disinfecting iodine, living in an ossuary, and stalking the fields with a tranquilizing blowdart mumbling Duran Duran lyrics to himself, he cuts a figure that, from a distance, approaches madness. He scares people, but he’s the most sensitive to their pain. It’s that tension of a sensible man in insensible times that gives the character such a beautiful charge, a patient bedside manner with a dash of danger. 

The Bone Temple slowly draws him toward climactic confrontation with a dangerous, feral gang we met briefly in its predecessor. They’re a roving band of Satanist Teletubbies fans. (That phrase alone signals what mad imagination is on display here.)  They all call themselves Jimmy in tribute to their leader, the self-proclaimed Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell), and wear shaggy white wigs in honor of a British TV personality of the same name (who, in our timeline, was revealed to be a sex criminal). They represent death and easy destruction; the doctor represents life and stubborn hope. Of course they’ll collide. The movie takes its time rooting itself in characters (including some carry-overs from the last one), drawing out their perspectives and tensions, and then winds up the plotting with tension until it snaps. It’s just as nasty a violent picture as the others, but this one ends ecstatically with fire, and religious imagery, and a last-minute dash toward a better world. These movies are incredible feel-bad horror efforts about holding on to the faintest glimmer of light in the darkness, even as you—and society—bleed out in the mud. 

Truth and Consequences: IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT

A trouble with living in a society that allows for unaccountable government violence against those it deems a threat to the authoritarian government is the instability it breeds in the minds of men. When victims have no recourse for justice, of course they’ll be casting about for ways to giving their suffering meaning. How does one resist such wide-ranging wrongs without becoming one just as wrong? The great Iranian writer-director Jafar Panahi’s new film, It Was Just an Accident, follows a man named Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), a man who had been tortured by the Iranian government. Now free, he randomly encounters a man he thinks he recognizes as his torturer. He plots his revenge, proceeding as far as getting the man tied up in a hole in the dessert. As he pauses before burying the man alive, Vahid is struck by a glimmer of doubt. He needs to know he’s about to punish the right man. The film follows him as he drives the unconscious man around town, trying to get corroboration from others who were in the same cohort of the tortured. Panahi himself ran afoul of the Iranian government, receiving a 20-year ban on filmmaking in 2010 on charges of “propaganda” for such works as his 2006 movie Offside, a terrifically clever and moving picture of women soccer fans trying to sneak their way into the men-only crowd of a big match. He has continued to make films since that ban, and has just this year received a prison sentence in absentia while touring around the world with this one. It’d be a potent film even if you didn’t know his backstory. 

Here’s a dark, almost funny, setup with a ticking thriller spine to an ambling, attentive road movie. It finds two men bound by deadly force, either a cycle of retribution or one bad mistake. It has clear ethical force, and smartly complicated tensions and confusions. We want justice as much as Vahid, and strain to see if it’s about to be done, or if we’re about to witness yet another cruelty. Or maybe both. It’s clearly a work of moral interrogation, about wrongs and rights and the visceral mess in between. But it’s also a work of genuine humanity with characters who are real people, not points in a debate. As Vahid gathers his fellow witness, catching them in all states of life—from a cozy bookshop to a wedding photoshoot—and interrupting their quotidian with reminders of and threats for further violence. It’s a body-in-the-trunk movie, and that’s both the engine of its thematic interrogation and the cause for intensely intimate disclosures and disagreements. The situation is picking at scabs, and loosing deep wells of painful memory barely hidden just beneath the surface. Because Panahi’s cast of characters is so fully inhabited, breathing and pulsing, we can become so wrapped up in the complexities of their lives and this moment. We see something real and true, piercing and lingering, about the tensions and quandaries, the fears and failings of life in these trying times. 

Hide and Seek: THE SECRET AGENT

There’s something fitting about the cheeky yet deadly serious title of The Secret Agent, a loose-limbed and steel-spined character study of a Brazilian epic about life under authoritarianism. The movie takes place in the 1970s, when the country was under a military dictatorship, and, as the opening text states with a straight-faced understatement that’s somehow also clarifying, a time of mischief. It stars Wagner Moura in a natural and comfortable performance as an academic who has crossed a government official and thus has violent men looking to off him. He’s not a secret agent. He’s just a guy. Maybe times like these turn everyone into a secret agent of some kind. The movie ambles along after him trying to live his life, talking to friends, family, reconnecting with his son, driving around, going to the movies. Oh, and he’s looking for a way to survive, connecting with fellow dissidents and slipping around with an alias. That’s just a part of the background drumbeat of life’s routine given the circumstances. The threat of state-sanctioned violence registers as a distant, looming possibility, both real and unreal, predictable and theoretical. As we learn more about his backstory—the movie unspools gently out of order, a fact that registers only eventually as he admits it while narrating a flashback—we see that he’s already been deeply wounded by the regime’s actions in his life. The idea he’ll need to escape forms the backbone of the film’s plotting while it dissipates into generous lingering in scenes, and atmosphere, rich with detail of period and place. 

It’s a movie about the moral and psychological complications of living in an oppressive society that makes planning difficult and interpersonal connection both fragile and essential. But it's also a warmly observant movie about a specific guy, one man's particular life against world historical backdrops. Writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho consistently makes films rooted in location and style from intimate dramas like the sensitive Aquarius to splashy pulp blends like the violent satire of Bacurau. This new picture is his masterwork, a sprawling widescreen picture of classical craft and vivid memory. Slick with homage and earnest in intention, it is at once a film of the 70s and of our moment. The playful structure luxuriates in its telling, an episodic variety of incidents and interactions (some deadly serious, others sweetly observed, and still others whimsical) arriving with a mix of tones and moods in one coherent blend, each vivid and memorable with the precision of research and feeling of reminiscence. The central performance is so well-drawn, supported by a great ensemble of specific faces and voices, and the world around them so evocatively portrayed, that it’s the sort of all-enveloping film that swells with rich implications and lingers with a spell that’s hard to shake. The film accumulates considerable power as a political thriller imposing upon an intimate, attentive character piece. 

Scenes from a Marriage: IS THIS THING ON?

Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On? is his third directorial effort, and the one that really clarifies his interests as a filmmaker. It also confirms he’s turning into quite a reliably good one. It’s another midlife crisis relationship movie, after his debut A Star is Born remake found an alcoholic country singer on a downward trajectory paused by a whirlwind romance, and his sophomore effort Maestro took composer Leonard Bernstein through biopic struggles with a long-suffering wife. This new one finds Will Arnett as a New Yorker with a finance job who, while stumbling towards divorce, discovers a new hobby: doing stand up comedy at open mics. Meanwhile, his soon-to-be-ex wife (Laura Dern) considers returning to her passion: coaching volleyball. This makes them a fit for Cooper’s other recurring interest: the ways in which the pursuit of performing something cultural and larger than one’s self can make, shape, break, and maybe, just maybe, heal a person. Cooper sees the tension between private lives and public personas; naturally, as one of our last great Movie Stars, he knows a thing or two about that. But in these movies he traces characters’ big emotions and big ideas with a fluid style that matches their moods, and a subtle sense of life. There’s none of the muscular musicality of A Star is Born or theatrical flourishes of Maestro here, and naturally so. 

As a smaller movie about intimate moments, Is This Thing On? Is a movie so low-key and unassuming in its scenes and shape, and yet so beautifully big screen in its bright, supple, unobtrusively professional cinematography, that it serves as a reminder that Hollywood craft put toward broad, but appealing, human stories are an abidingly pleasant pastime. Here’s a generous movie about people living lives, shot through with some gentle satire and loving specificity. It cares about them, and wants to see how they navigate life changes, bouncing off supporting characters—well-cast character actors forming a jostling friend group (including a very funny small role for Cooper himself as an endearing dope) and a warmly prickly family—with some crackle and sweetness. Arnett and Dern are two fine actors doing good work in observant and attentive dramatic scenes. Cooper’s feeling for performance, letting actors inhabit a scene and breathe life into fleeting moments, lets the movie lift above its looming sense of the familiar. How often have we been asked to think about the inner lives of comedians in our culture the last couple decades? He finds an interesting angle by simply inhabiting the experience here, watching how it’s therapy both as a compliment and insult, and willing to drift away from that, giving us a picture of a couple with a marriage falling apart as they each activate something deeper and more satisfying in their sense of professional possibilities. The movie’s warm and prickly and funny and ultimately a comfortable slice of uncomfortable life. 

25 Favorite New-to-Me Movies of 2025

25. Jiang Ziya (2020, Cheng Teng/Wei Li)

24. 45365 (2010, Bill and Turner Ross)

 23. Downhill Racer (1969, Michael Ritchie)

22. Unfaithful (2002, Adrian Lyne) 

21. Conspiracy (2001, Frank Pierson) 

20. Blood and Black Lace (1964, Mario Bava) 

19. Resurrected (1989, Paul Greengrass) 

18. The Warriors (1979, Walter Hill) 

17. Glen or Glenda (1953, Ed Wood) 

 

16. So Far From India (1983, Mira Nair) 

15. House of Bamboo (1955, Sam Fuller) 

14. Shopworn (1932, Nick Grindé) 

13. Miami Blues (1990, George Armitage) 

12. Pumpkinhead (1988, Stan Winston) 

11. Frida (2002, Julie Taymor) 

10. The Sniper (1952, Edward Dmytryk) 

09. Executive Decision (1996, Stuart Baird) 

08. Tea and Sympathy (1956, Vincente Minnelli) 

 

07. 36 Fillette (1988, Catherine Breillat)  

 

06. A Few Good Men (1992, Rob Reiner)  

05. Brooklyn Bridge (1981, Ken Burns) 

04. Devil in a Blue Dress (1995, Carl Franklin) 

03. The Life and Death of 9413, a Hollywood Extra (1928, Slavko Vorkapich/Robert Florey) 

02. Household Saints (1993, Nancy Savoca) 

01. High and Low (1963, Akira Kurosawa) 

Crime and Punishment: THE PERFECT NEIGHBOR, PREDATORS and ZODIAC KILLER PROJECT

What’s the value of pointing a camera at the ugliness of life and calling it an important social service? Some of the year’s best documentaries have true crime on the brain, and are committed to exploring that very question. Even something seemingly more straightforward like Geeta Gandbhir’s The Perfect Neighbor, a powerfully heartrending, doom-laden doc about an older white woman who murders her black neighbor in front of her victim’s kids, is, through its near-exclusive use of police body cam footage to build dual portraits of both a vibrant neighborhood and what Jamelle Bouie astutely called the “psychosis” of racism, as much about its telling as its facts. But the prevailing true crime mode hasn’t been so reflective. Our culture has been addicted to a kind of flippant binge watch mentality about this genre that confuses watching true crime documentaries with activism, as if watching the lurid details of an investigation or the public shaming of an alleged perpetrator is the same thing as preventing or even understanding crime. (To be fair, conflating viewing habits with political effort has been a cross-party problem for the better part of two decades.) Worse still are the kinds of investigative vigilantism the true crime craze has inspired, from ad hoc social media detective networks to YouTube sting operations that get it wrong just as often as right. And the ways in which everything from network news exposés to amateur sleuthing can actually impede the course of justice — tampering with the chain of evidence or crossing into entrapment — is counterproductive to their ostensible aims. When law enforcement is subservient to the demands of entertainment, it’s no surprise which one triumphs at the expense of the other. 

Dissecting this very dilemma is part of the project of David Osit’s Predators. With a clinical, methodical, critical eye, he looks at the NBC series To Catch a Predator, which ran from 2004 and 2007 and made host Chris Hansen’s gotcha appearances a steady pop culture presence. Its episodes followed a rigorous formula, with a youthful-appearing decoy actor luring a man into a house to meet what he thinks is a minor, at which point Hansen and camera crew confront him. When the man leaves, police are typically waiting to arrest him. This new documentary problematizes the production through its own raw footage, turning what was punchy newsmagazine sensationalism and schadenfreude into something more complicated and troubling. No wonder it didn’t make final edit to watch people beg and plead for help with mental illness, or decoys reeling from their exposure to these events or growing uncertain in the moment, or, in one infamous case, the suicide of a suspect. Through interviews with sociological experts, law enforcement officials, people involved in the show, and people who copycat the structure for web series now, the movie makes a persuasive case that the cheap hits of indiscriminate exposure and catharsis has done absolutely nothing to prevent these crimes from happening. Couched in the language of raising awareness and catching criminals, the show has merely made a spectacle of it. (Hansen expresses wonder at how, late in the show's run, many perpetrators liked the show, too.) There’s something awful about the crimes, yes, but also something queasy about the sensationalism and futility in the show's interest. Is this really justice? What are we really learning by all this empty repetition of ugliness and depravity? For however well-intentioned and even informational the intent from which the idea sprang, Osit makes a persuasive case that its ends did not justify the means. 

An even further dissection of the form can be found in Charlie Shackleton’s Zodiac Killer Project. The conceit is that he’s failed to get the rights to a true crime book about the eponymous serial killer and so, instead, is going to take us through all the decisions with which he would’ve been confronted if he’d gotten to make it. He talks about the “gravitational pull” of the commercial incentive for relitigating old sensationalistic crimes that has taken hold of all modern documentarians. (The list of generational talents who’ve been slumming in the streaming true crime mines for a quick buck is truly astonishing.) And as such the comprehensiveness of Shackleton’s efforts to totally take apart the tropes and ruts they’ve fallen into in making these docs is satisfyingly wry and accumulatively devastating. His narration plays out over straight-faced parodies that are perfect recreations of the kind of drone establishing shots and eerie minimalist music and ominous insert close-ups of which these projects are always full. From opening credits to red herrings to dubious conclusions, he takes us through the whole arc. And then each step he’ll layer on real examples from real docs that perfectly match his. Over this he might say, “It doesn’t really tell you anything, but at the same time it gives you the general vibe. In case you have one eye on your phone.” It’s grimly funny to watch this laser-focused and comprehensively sharp skewering of these repetitive moves, as well as the tricks and manipulations of the true crime doc. It shows how reality is so fungible in the hands of a filmmaker that even genuine fact and authentic interviews can be bent toward the banal and the manipulated. What we take for documentary truth can be so mediated by the genre dictates and the fans’ expectations, that we end up with endless interactions of grizzled sheriffs stepping onto a gravel parking lot, and slow pans across dark windows, and the empty feeling of so much darkness drudged up to make us feel a little glimmer of vicarious sickness and the vague sense of having learned something from staring into mankind’s essential illness. And to click play on the next one.

Drawn In: ARCO and ZOOTOPIA 2

The new French animated film Arco is a time travel movie about a boy from the far future accidentally stranding himself in the slightly less far future. It’s done in a lovely hand-drawn style that’s clearly anime influenced, and with its slow pace, flying suits, kindly robots, bickering sorta-antagonists, and sweet child protagonists, it’s unmistakably a work of Studio Ghibli karaoke. I can’t blame director Ubo Bienvenu and his collaborators for copying from the best; who doesn’t love Ghibli? In practice, it means the characters have rounded expressions and subtle movements, we spend time watching water bubbling in a stream, wind in piles of leaves, attentive food prep and other subtleties quietly and matter-of-factly rendered in clean lines. The characters are adorable, and the main boy’s plight is rendered with some degree of both whimsy and emotion, sometimes blending the two. In the far future, people can time travel in multicolored flying suits, leaving rainbows behind them in the sky like Tron light cycles. One boy too young to explore like that sneaks out and ends up crashing with a girl centuries earlier. She has been left in the care of a nanny robot while her parents are away. She needs a friend, and the boy needs help finding the right materials to get back home. Together they form a fast bond that’s a sweet childlike tumble toward softly rendered suspense, building to a bittersweet ending that feels just right. Its simple, colorful images are finely layered and textured with colorful graphical style that carries along the low-key tone with some genuine feeling. However much a jumble of influences, it manages to hit the notes even if it’s borrowing the melodies. 

Speaking of familiar: Zootopia 2. If you, like me, had, in the aftermath of the disappointing Wish and Moana 2, started wondering if Disney Animation had lost its magic, here’s a temporary reprieve for those doubts. Like its predecessor, the sequel is a cleverly plotted mystery that plays like a hard-charging buddy-cop action-comedy. The cops just happen to be a bunny (Ginnifer Goodwin) and a fox (Jason Bateman) in a sprawling metropolis populated by anthropomorphized animals. The first was a broad allegory for racial profiling and unconscious bias as the mismatched heroes stumbled into the mayor’s plot to exploit prejudice to consolidate power. This one picks up with the duo thrust into another conspiracy that goes all the way to the top, this time with a crooked family of billionaires plotting to hide the true history of the city and their complicity with its past of pushing marginalized species out of their neighborhoods. They don’t want anything stopping their attempt to expand their real estate empire by doing it again. Sounds like it could be tough medicine or obvious messaging, but the screenplay wears that all pretty lightly, as grist for racing through different biomes and introducing new animal characters and revisiting some favorites from last time while uncovering the plot. The animation is bright and colorful and vivid, with the best in CG furs and water and scales, and broad cartoony expressions. There’s that weird charge of seeing, say, a bunny’s legs in yoga pants or a sloth driving a sports car (and how are its reflexes fast enough for that?), in a city that’s slightly more New York than Busytown in its construction. It’s a funhouse mirror version of our world, with abstracted political cartoon social commentary and pun-laden gags mixed in with the high-energy chases and danger just real enough for suspense and just slapstick enough to keep from scaring the kids too badly. But of course, none of it would work if it didn’t care so much for its characters, and want to see them succeed. Like the original, it balances it all and makes it easy, breezy entertainment.