The Voracious Filmgoer

Wednesday, January 28, 2026

Job Insecurity: SEND HELP

If the only thing exciting in Send Help is the filmmaking and the lead performance, well, oh boy, that’s enough. It’s an unsurprising bit of genre fluff—a little Lord of the Flies here, a little Triangle of Sadness there, a splash of Misery elsewhere—in which a plane crash leaves a frumpy office worker (Rachel McAdams) on a deserted island with her callow young boss (Dylan O’Brien). The situation leads to an expected role reversal as the boss is laid up with a sprained ankle and a total lack of survival skills. Meanwhile his employee is a survivalist with a vindictive streak. It’s all good, nasty fun as orchestrated by director Sam Raimi, who at long last gets to stretch his horror-comic talents again for a sustained exercise in tension. His glee for near-cartoonish reaction shots, swirling establishing shots, and punchy pushes and pans are a fine match for a movie which needs that kind of egging on. The performers are game, with McAdams a fine, slippery protagonist made astonishingly unglamorous at first, and steelier as the show goes on. O’Brien, for his part, transforms into a perfect weasel, weaponizing his good looks until he’s untrustworthy even when he’s playing at earnestness. The cat and mouse game is made up of traditional jungle beats, the kinds any boomer filmmaker would’ve imbibed with every local late show or weekend matinee: spears, rafts, vines, coconut cups, wild boar, cliffs off which to dangle. It has everything but the quicksand. And to each twist of the script’s knife, Raimi is willing to add gallons of fluids from arterial spray and vomit and snot. Even early office-set scenes have a zippy, mean-spirited satiric edge, and the later mind games and inevitable violence—from an off-screen slice leading to an eruption of bloody gobs, to a literally eye-gouging thumb under an eyelid—are jumps and jolts with a sick glee. It may not have the novelty of his Evil Dead or heft of Drag Me to Hell, two far superior comic horror efforts rocking and rolling with laughs and screams. But this new picture has a similar vivid, cynical spirit of a karmic comic book. Raimi knows how to pace horror and violence so satisfyingly like a comedy, literal sight gags and punch lines. It’s why his Spider-Man trilogy remains some of the only superhero movies to do justice to every bit of the phrase comic book movie. And it’s why even as slight a screenplay as Send Help comes jumping to life with invigorating style.

Monday, January 19, 2026

Life After Deaths: 28 YEARS LATER and
28 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.

Sunday, January 18, 2026

There and Back Again: PEOPLE WE MEET ON VACATION

It’s about time we had a new Brett Haley movie. He makes warm, gentle, and observant little dramas that are broadly appealing and specifically drawn, small in scope and big in heart. They’re directed with a light touch and earnest feeling, and about ordinary people. Of course that means what used to be modest theatrical releases (like Sam Elliot in an aging actor story The Hero or Nick Offerman as a dad bonding with a daughter through music in Hearts Beat Loud) are now no longer in theaters first. His last couple, which might've gotten a little lost in the early days of the pandemic, went straight to Netflix. This one’s People We Meet on Vacation, a Sony release that nonetheless has debuted there, too. (Did they learn nothing from KPop Demon Hunters?) It’s based on a bestselling novel from Emily Henry, and as far as modern popular novelists getting adapted to the screen go, I’ll take more of these over Colleen Hoover’s any day. This particular story is cribbed a little from Devil Wears Prada and a lot from When Harry Met Sally. It stars Emily Bader as a cute writer for a travel magazine. Ah, it’s almost romantic enough to remember when that was reliable job. To please her boss, she agrees to turn a trip to a friend’s destination wedding in Barcelona into an article. Her only concern is that she’ll meet a longtime friend from college there. And she’s totally not into him. Except she is.

He (Tom Blyth) met her when they were matched by happenstance to carpool from campus to their shared hometown, and ever since they have been will-they-won’t-they best friends. (Harry, meet Sally.) The movie proceeds through her present day flutters about meeting back up with this obvious romantic interest while flashing back to a variety of vacations they took together as pals. Haley’s usual light touch is well-suited to these glossy throwback moves, from flirty banter in gorgeous locations to gentle wackiness about miscommunications or misplaced outfits. He lets the actors’ chemistry simmer at a low boil, surrounds them with a few ace comic ringers (like Molly Shannon and Alan Ruck), and gets his usual collaborators—from the glossy cinematography from Rob C. Givens to the low-key score from Keegan Dewitt—keeping the events low-key pleasant and lively. We know where this is going. Anyone who’s seen a romantic comedy can. But the charm with these sort of things is not always in the novelty, but in seeing the old tropes dressed up with new attractive packaging. This isn’t great, offering more smiles than investment, let alone laughter, but it’s a crowd-pleaser of a sort. And it’s good to see Haley back. There’s an easy, relaxed tone (even when drama gets heavy) and honest open-heartedness (even in the more predictable turns) that make his movies feel so comforting to experience. Perhaps it’ll inspire people to visit, or revisit, his earlier, better movies, too.

Friday, January 16, 2026

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.

Tuesday, January 13, 2026

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.

Saturday, January 10, 2026

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.