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Los Angeles Times
5 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Why a boutique video label is taking over L.A.'s theaters, plus the week's best movies
Hello! I'm Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies. Among this week's new releases is '28 Years Later,' the third film in the series that dates back to 2002's '28 Days Later.' The new project reunites the core creative team from the first movie: director Danny Boyle, screenwriter Alex Garland, cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle and producer Andrew Macdonald. This time out the 'rage' virus that turns people into crazed cannibal monsters has been isolated to the U.K., which has been quarantined from the rest of the world. A small community of uninfected survivors live on a coastal island and make their way to the mainland to hunt and for supplies. A teenage boy (Alfie Williams), having made one expedition with his father (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), goes back with his ailing mother (Jodie Comer) in search of a doctor (Ralph Fiennes) rumored to be able to help them. In her review of the film, Amy Nicholson wrote that it 'has a dull central plot beefed up by unusual ambition, quirky side characters and maniacal editing. It's a kooky spectacle, a movie that aggressively cuts from moments of philosophy to violence, from pathos to comedy. Tonally, it's an ungainly creature. From scene to scene, it lurches like the brain doesn't know what the body is doing. Garland and Boyle don't want the audience to know either, at least not yet.' '28 Years Later' is the first film in a planned trilogy, with the second film, directed by Nia DaCosta, having already been shot. I spoke with Boyle, Garland, Mantle and Macdonald for a feature story that will be in print on Sunday. Whereas the original '28 Days Later' was notable for its use of consumer-grade digital video cameras, this time the production used modified iPhones to capture most of its imagery. The result is a fresh and distinctive look with both a sense of immediacy and an unexpected beauty. 'What was great about the script is that although you were inheriting some DNA from the original film, it was a completely original story,' said Boyle. 'And deserved to be treated like that.' This week the boutique home video label Cinématographe is participating in screenings all over town, further cementing the evolving relationship between physical media and the local revival scene. Curated and produced by Justin LaLiberty as an offshoot of the Vinegar Syndrome label, Cinématographe is among a handful of companies that create releases meant to look as nice on your shelf as they do onscreen. With beautiful restorations presenting the titles as optimally as possible, the releases come with many extras highlighting their production and what makes them special, alongside new critical essays on the films. Among the titles released by the company so far are John Dahl's 'Red Rock West,' Paul Schrader's 'Touch,' Robert Altman's 'Thieves Like Us' and Martha Coolidge's 'Joy of Sex.' 'Cinématographe has a very specific kind of curatorial approach,' said LaLiberty in a Zoom call this week from his home in Connecticut. 'And it also has a mission in that it's trying to shine a light on these movies that have fallen into obscurity for one reason or another.' Working in conjunction with the local screening collective Hollywood Entertainment in pulling together some of the local events, LaLiberty got a sense of the current repertory scene in L.A. and hopes that putting on Cinématographe screenings here is something that can become a regular occurrence. 'What I like about L.A.'s cinema scene, without being there, is seeing how the spaces cater to different audiences,' said LaLiberty. 'It happens in New York to an extent too, but I've noticed it a lot more with L.A. where I think just by virtue of geography, those theaters have to build a community that's a lot more specific to whatever their mission may be or whatever audience they're trying to cultivate is. So that's what I tried to do with these screenings is kind of hone in on what demographic those spaces are going to reach and what film made the most sense for each one.' On Sunday at Brain Dead Studios there will be a restored 4K screening of the exuberant 1983 remake of 'Breathless' with director Jim McBride in person. That will be followed by the Los Angeles premiere of the 4K restoration of Bob Saget's 1998 comedy 'Dirty Work,' starring Norm MacDonald, in its newly created 'Dirtier Cut,' which restores the film to a version screened for test audiences before it was chopped down to earn a PG-13 rating. Co-writer Frank Sebastiano will be in attendance. On Monday, LaLiberty will be at a pop-up at the Highland Park video store Vidéotheque, selling discs from Cinématographe, Vinegar Syndrome and affiliated titles from OCN Distribution — including some that are out of print. (Discs will be on sale at all the events too.) On Tuesday at Whammy Analog Media, 1994's essential lesbian rom-com 'Go Fish' will show in a 4K restoration with director and co-writer Rose Troche in person. On Wednesday, there will be a 45th anniversary screening at Vidiots of the 4K restoration of Ronald F. Maxwell's 1980 'Little Darlings,' starring Tatum O'Neal and Kristy McNichol as two teenage girls having a private competition at summer camp to lose their virginity. On Thursday, in conjunction with Cinematic Void, the Los Feliz 3 will host a showing of John Badham's 1994 action-thriller 'Drop Zone' starring Wesley Snipes, with the director in person. And while it may seem counterintuitive for a home video label to be encouraging people to go see movies in theaters, for LaLiberty the two go hand in hand. 'My ultimate mission is for these films to find an audience,' LaLiberty said. ''Little Darlings' is one of those movies that was out of circulation for so long that now that it's back and people can find it — to me that's the work. The end goal is that these films are brought back and that they're available for people to see and talk about and share. Theaters can play them and have them look great. I don't see it as cannibalizing. I see it as just being a part of the job.' The American Cinematheque is launching a series looking at films from Southeast Asia made around the turn of the 21st century and shot through with the energy of specific Y2K anxieties. These were films that felt cutting-edge and of the moment when they were released, but now perhaps function at least in part as memory pieces of their time and place. This is a sharp, smartly put-together series that contextualizes a group of films and filmmakers. Kicking off with Wong Kar-wai's 1995 'Fallen Angels,' the series also includes Hou Hsiao-hsien's 2001 'Millennium Mambo,' Tsai Ming-liang's 1992 'Rebels of the Neon God,' Fruit Chan's 1997 'Made in Hong Kong,' Shunji Iwai's 2001 'All About Lily Chou-Chou' Jia Zhangke's 2002 'Unknown Pleasures' and Lou Ye's 2000 'Suzhou River.' Writing about 'Fallen Angels' in 1998, Kevin Thomas called it 'an exhilarating rush of a movie, with all manner of go-for-broke visual bravura that expresses perfectly the free spirits of his bold young people. … Indeed, 'Fallen Angels' celebrates youth, individuality and daring in a ruthless environment that is wholly man-made, a literal underworld similar to the workers' realm of 'Metropolis' — only considerably less spacious. Life proceeds at a corrosive rock music beat.' 'Dogtooth' in 4K Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos' second feature, 'Dogtooth,' was his international breakthrough, winner of the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes and nominated for an Oscar. Yet even its most ardent admirers at the time would likely never have imagined Lanthimos would become the maker of commercially successful, Oscar-winning (and still weird) films such as 'The Favourite' and 'Poor Things.' A new 4K restoration of 'Dogtooth' will screen at the American Cinematheque at the Los Feliz 3 on Saturday, Tuesday and Sunday the 29th. The story feels abstracted and fractured, as a family lives in comfortable isolation, creating their own rules and language as the parents attempt to keep their children, now young adults, in a state of arrested development. When it was first being released, 'Dogtooth' struggled to find screens in Los Angeles. In my January 2011 review, I referred to it as 'part enigma, part allegory and even part sci-fi in its creation of a completely alternate reality.' When the film had its local premiere as part of the Los Angeles Greek Film Festival some seven months earlier, I spoke to Lanthimos, who perhaps pointed the way to some of his future work when he said, 'It's much more important to me for the audience to be engaged and to think about things themselves. If they miss any information, I'm OK with that instead of explaining every little detail and telling everyone what they should be thinking and how exactly things are.' Lanthimos added, 'People ask me if the film is about home-schooling or if it's political, about totalitarian states or the information we get from the media. And of course all those things were not in our minds as we were making the film, but it was intentional to make the film so people can come in and have their own thoughts about it.' 'The Seven Year Itch' 70th anniversary On Wednesday the Laemmle Royal will present a 70th anniversary screening of Billy Wilder's 'The Seven Year Itch' introduced by film writers Stephen Farber and Michael McClellan. Starring Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell, 'Itch' was written by Wilder and George Axelrod, an adaptation of the hit Broadway play that also starred Ewell. Though the movie does include the iconic scene of Monroe standing over a subway grate, it deserves to be remembered for much more than that. It's a bracing satire of midcentury masculinity, with Ewell playing a mild-mannered family man who lets himself be taken away by fantasies of what may happen while he is on his own for a summer with a young single woman living upstairs from his New York apartment. Writing about the movie in June 1955, Edwin Schallert said, 'This picture is nothing for the moralists, though it may not quite satisfy the immoralists either, whoever they are.' Tom Cruise, Dolly Parton among honorary Oscar recipients This week the motion picture academy announced four honorees for the Governors Awards in November. Dolly Parton will receive the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, while honorary Oscars will go to actor, dancer, choreographer and director Debbie Allen, production designer Wynn Thomas and actor and producer Tom Cruise. As always, it must be noted how disappointing it is that these awards will be bestowed at an untelevised ceremony and not as part of the Academy Awards telecast itself. The idea of giving an award to Tom Cruise, who has recently refashioned himself as nothing less than an international ambassador for movies and Hollywood in general, and not putting it on TV is just beyond reason. Here is hoping that Cruise will perhaps be able to do what his co-star in 'The Color of Money' Paul Newman once did, which is win a competitive Oscar after already being given an honorary one.
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Scotsman
8 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
28 Years Later review: 'wild and radical'
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... 28 Years Later (15) ★★★★ First released in 2002, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland's 28 Weeks Later helped reinvigorate the zombie film with its super-fast 'infected', its pioneering use of digital video and its none-too-subtle warning about the hell-zone Britain might become if it didn't keep its isolationist proclivities in check. Post-Brexit, post-Covid, and with the political landscape increasingly hostile, it's hardly surprising Boyle, Garland and producer Andrew Macdonald have chosen to revisit the franchise with 28 Years Later, an almost real-time sequel that follows on from the first film and its 2007 follow-up 28 Weeks Later. 28 Years Later | Sony Pictures Though neither Boyle nor Garland were much involved with that last film, it kept its Brit-centric focus right up until the final minute, when the infected made it to Paris. With the new film, however, Boyle and co have smartly opted to make the infected a uniquely British problem once again: after a Highlands-set prologue foregrounds the hallucinatory tone the film will take in its later stages (it involves a zombie attack against the backdrop of the Teletubbies — a very Boyle move), a short bit of expository text informs us that Europe was successful in pushing the Rage-infected zombie hoards back all those years ago. Britain has been quarantined ever since, its coastlines patrolled by the navies of Europe, its surviving population left to fend for themselves. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad It's a neat way to contain the plot as we pick-up the titular story in the Northeast of England with a group of survivors living in a fortress on Holy Island. Connected to the mainland via a causeway that's only walkable twice a day, their own isolation has further warped their perception of the world, making them prone to xenophobic cracks about the French and overly invested in promulgating their own myths and lies about what's really going on. 28 Years Later | Sony Pictures We see all this through the eyes of the film's 12-year-old protagonist Spike (Alfie Williams - excellent), who starts to see through his dad's hunter-gatherer bravado (his dad is played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson) while on a rites-of-passage excursion to the mainland to get his first zombie kill. Here, Boyle re-acquaints us with the series' sense of dread with a couple of gnarly set-pieces that subvert the usual dank, grimy tropes of apocalyptic cinema by intercutting scenes of bucolic wonder with both archival footage of classic British films and blood-red night-vision shots that show the evolution of the infected. It's pretty wild and radical stuff, like a well-financed B-movie infected with the spirit of one of Powell and Pressburger's myth-interrogating flights of fancy. And that sense of strangeness continues as the focus of the story shifts from a father-son tale to a mother-son tale, with Jodie Comer brilliant as Spike's ailing, confused mum whose undiagnosed illness motivates Spike to sneak her onto the mainland in search of a Kurtz-like doctor (Ralph Fiennes) rumoured to have lost his mind.
Time of India
10 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Time of India
When Danny Boyle and Alex Garland redefined Zombies with Cillian Murphy in 28 Days Later
'28 Days Later' brought a horrific genre back: the zombies. The movie was two decades ago and starred Cillian Murphy as Jim, who was a bicycle courier guy. He discovers that he is among the survivors of an incurable virus that has wiped out the U.K. after he wakes up from a coma. How did the idea come to reinvent the genre? Garland was a fan of George Romero's 1968 'Night of the Living Dead' when he was young. The idea was pitched when he was getting pizza with Andrew Macdonald about the running zombies in London. Garland tells 'THR' that 'There were five drafts where it was just me working with Andrew, and then eventually Andrew said, 'OK, now I'm going to show this to Danny.'' The writer has said that fast-moving zombie dogs in the 1996 video game 'Resident Evil' were a disclosure: 'That's the thing that gave the idea of a zombie movie, but where the zombies move quickly.' Naomie Harris, Brendan Gleeson, and Christopher Eccleston rounded out the cast for the film that got released theatrically on June 27, 2003. It collected 74 million dollars globally at that time, and a 'THR' story about its legacy noted that the project 'uses the idea of these living dead to explore the collapse of society.' Producer credits Danny Boyle , the director, and Alex Garland , the screenwriter, only had producer credits on the 2007 sequel of '28 Weeks Later,' but the June 20 follow-up of '28 Years Later' sees the return of Boyle as director and Garland as writer. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Buy Brass Idols - Handmade Brass Statues for Home & Gifting Luxeartisanship Buy Now Undo Over the years, Boyle has attended anniversary screenings for '28 Days Later' and informed Garland when they're packed with fans. 'I think it's the idea and the manner with which we did it,' Boyle has said about the first movie's appeal. 'That led us to think, 'Could we actually investigate this further?'' The OG cast The sci-fi thriller had Cillian Murphy as Jim, Naomie Harris as Selena, Brendan Gleeson as Frank, Megan Burns as Hannah, Christopher Eccleston as Major Henry West, Noah Huntley as Mark, Stuart McQuarrie as Sergeant Farrell, Ricci Harnett as Corporal Mitchell, Leo Bill as Private Jones, Luke Mably as Private Clifton, Junior Laniyan as Private Bell, Ray Panthaki as Private Bedford, Sanjay Rambaruth as Private Davis and Marvin Campbell as Private Mailer. Additionally, Alex Palmer, Bindu De Stoppani, and Jukka Hiltunen portray the animal liberation activists, while David Schneider portrays a scientist at the laboratory. Christopher Dunne and Emma Hitching appear as Jim's parents, and Toby Sedgwick plays an infected priest encountered by Jim.
Euronews
16 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Euronews
Film of the Week: '28 Years Later' - Bold, brilliant and Brexity
When we left the 28 (pick your time span) Later franchise in 2007, the protocol-breaching actions of two misguided siblings led to the carpetbombing of London's no-longer-safe zone. Kids... What can you do? 28 Weeks Later, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's surprisingly effective follow up to director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland's 2002 zombie genre revitalizing horror experience, ended with a devilish final stinger that had audiences saying 'Et, merde' at the sight of the Rage Virus-infected emerging from a Paris Métro. 18 years later (in the real world) and 28 years later (in the Rage-infested world), Boyle and Garland are back, and they're not keen to simply rest on their laurels. We quickly learn that the terrifying pandemic has been beaten back from mainland Europe (the French presumably shrugged off the infestation and dusted off the guillotines) and that Rage is contained to Blighty. They really can't catch a break... And in many ways, that's the point. While the infected are still out and about, there exists a safe space – an island within an island. Its name is Lindisfarne, aka: Holy Island, and it's in this isolationist community, only connected to the UK mainland via a causeway crossable at low tide, where we meet 12-year-old Spike (newcomer Alfie Williams). His scavenger father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is keen to make a man out of him and so decides to embark on a coming-of-age ritual of sorts: take him inland for the first time in search of his first kill. As Spike's bedbound and mysteriously sick mother Isla (Jodie Comer) foretells in a fit of expletives, it's a really dumb idea... 28 Years Later doesn't look or feel like 28 Days Later. Or 28 Weeks Later, for that matter. So those wanting more of the same may end up disappointed. Ditching the lo-fi, punk rawness of the first brush with sprinting nightmare fuel and the equally lean-and-mean feel of the second, 28 Years Later is crisper and more expensive-looking. While that may frustrate some audiences, what's clear is that Boyle and Garland didn't come back to simply cash in and play it safe. It couldn't be any other way. 28 Days Later breathed new life into a horror mainstay by having the sprinting Rage-infected replacing traditional reanimated corpses. More than two decades later, zombies have invaded the screens and become ubiquitous – to the point of exhaustion. From the big screen offerings of the Rec franchise, Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland and Planet Terror (to mention only the high points) to the zeitgeist-capturing small screen hits The Walking Dead and The Last Of Us, civilisation-threatening outbreaks featuring ravenous walkers, crawlers and biters have become mainstream. The only way was forward. And a lot has happened since 2007's 28 Weeks Later – namely Brexit and a worldwide pandemic. Both of these resonate in 28 Years Later, especially the self-inflicted isolationist wound. The nationalist and seclusionist subtext becomes text: Saint George's Cross flying above the community; the banner reading 'Fail we may but go we must'; the sea patrol keeping the infection contained to the UK; the 'us' and 'them'-ness of looking backwards to a past of the England that once was... It all makes for a simple but effective Brexit analogy. It's not particularly subtle; but then again, no allegory-infused zombie movie ever was. And neither was Brexit. The obviousness of certain thematical strands is countered by some far more surprising choices, like the teasing-and-ditching of The Wicker Man motifs and the Summerisle setting in favour of exploring the evolution of the infected. Of course, the introduction of various kinds of berserkers ('slow-lows' or the terrifying 'Alphas' with Predator penchants for spine-yanking) will lead to inescapable comparisons with The Last Of Us. But the script does enough to explore the potential of its ideas without toppling into déjà vu – particularly when one initially grating yet radical element is introduced... Then there are unpredictably profound moments in the second half of the film, culminating in the Memento Mori / Memento Amori dichotomy, which is brilliantly delivered by the show's last act MVP Dr. Kelson, played to perfection by Ralph Fiennes. His scenes with Spike have an emotional resonance that elevates the material and make it hard to fathom how Alfie Williams is so accomplished for a first-time actor. We'll hopefully be seeing both Boy Meets World and the iodine-covered Colonel Kurtz again soon, as 28 Years Later was filmed back-to-back with the first sequel in a planned new trilogy, titled 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, which is slated to hit theaters in January 2026. Let's pray Young Fathers return too, as their terrific soundtrack is not worth ignoring. From the Teletubbies opening to a heroically bizarre finale which scoffers will likely liken to The Village, via a three-act structure that makes a young hero's odyssey evolve from a father-son adventure to a mother-son rescue mission to a young father figure spreading his wings, 28 Years Later's strange verve is exhilarating. While there are some pacing issues, as well as surplus to requirement CGI moments involving swarms of birds and deer, Boyle and Garland have truly outdone themselves. Without skimping on the edge-of-your-seat tension and gruesome viscera that made the first two instalments so pant-browningly effective, their belated sequel is a radical revival that eschews the obvious at every turn. It may not satisfy everyone, but give us daring over safe any day / week / year of the Rage pandemic. 28 Years Later is out in cinemas now. "Wake up, wake up" is the chorus of the Felix Flavour music that Jeny BSG choreographed for the Dance4Refugees campaign on Instagram and at the Bozar arts venue in Brussels. It's also the call to action for people everywhere to speak out and show their support for refugees. "Everyone needs to wake up. It's time to talk about it, it's time to help, it's time to react. We can't stay silent, we have to speak out for the oppressed and that's what I'm doing," she told Euronews. Jenybsg (@jenybsg)'in paylaştığı bir gönderi The social media campaign challenges people to post their versions of the choreography on Instagram and donate funds. It is aimed primarily at young people, who Jeny works with at her dance school and when she travels abroad. 'I try to reach out to the younger generation because for me they are the change, they can make a difference in this world. Dance was, for me, a great way to bring attention and change the narrative, to celebrate the strength, potential and resilience of refugees,' Jeny said. The dancer and choreographer was born in Belgium, where her family sought refuge from the decades-long conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). A background that left its mark on the artist and led her to activism in collaboration with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). "My family fled violence in the 1990s. My elder brothers spent time in a refugee camp. My mother and my father have experienced displacement, violence, fear, struggle", she recalls. More than 6.9 million people are internally displaced across the DRC, with an additional one million refugees and asylum-seekers in neighbouring countries, according to the UNHCR. This 'legacy' brought additional self-imposed responsibilities for Jeny, who set herself the task of 'not failing' and being a voice for the Congolese diaspora: 'Today I am living proof that the origin of refugees does not define the limits of refugees, but rather their strengths.' Jeny uses her platform to promote marginalized voices, having founded the AfroHouseBelgium, a Brussels-based dance school. She's also been working with the UNHCR since last year to amplify the stories of those forced to flee. "Dance is universal and the refugee cause today is also universal. We know that refugees come from all around the world: Ukraine, Afghanistan, Syria, DRC and other countries. But they are not only statistics or numbers. Their lives matter, and they are like us", she says. The UN says there are currently 123 million forcibly displaced people worldwide, twice more than a decade ago. Almost 37 million of them are refugees. The organisation warns that recent drastic cuts in humanitarian aid funding are putting their lives at risk. Funding for the agency is now roughly at the same level as a decade ago, said Filippo Grandi, UN High Commissioner for Refugees, at the launch of the annual Global Trends Report on 12 June. 'We are living in a time of intense volatility in international relations, with modern warfare creating a fragile, harrowing landscape marked by acute human suffering", Grandi highlighted. The report found that, contrary to widespread perceptions in wealthier regions, 67 per cent of refugees stay in neighbouring countries, with low and middle-income countries hosting 73 per cent of the world's refugees.
Los Angeles Times
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Brainy and bizarre, ‘28 Years Later' shows a zombie series running into dark, strange territory
Zombies were dormant when screenwriter Alex Garland convinced director Danny Boyle to resurrect the undead — and make them run. The galloping ghouls in their low-budget 2002 thriller '28 Days Later' reinvigorated the genre. There's now been so many of them that they've come to feel moldy. So Garland and Boyle have teamed up again to see if there's life in these old bones. There is, albeit sporadically and spasmodically. '28 Years Later,' the first entry of a promised trilogy, has a dull central plot beefed up by unusual ambition, quirky side characters and maniacal editing. It's a kooky spectacle, a movie that aggressively cuts from moments of philosophy to violence, from pathos to comedy. Tonally, it's an ungainly creature. From scene to scene, it lurches like the brain doesn't know what the body is doing. Garland and Boyle don't want the audience to know either, at least not yet. The plot picks up nearly three decades into a viral 'rage' pandemic that's isolated the British Isles from the civilized world. A couple hundred people have settled into a safe-enough life on Lindisfarne, an island that's less than a mile from shore. The tide recedes every day for a few hours, long enough to walk across a narrow strip of causeway to the mainland. Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Isla (Jodie Comer) were young when normality collapsed, roughly the same age as the kids in the film's cheeky opening flashback who are watching a VHS tape of 'Teletubbies' while hearing the screams of their babysitters getting bitten. But these survivors have managed to grow up and become parents themselves. Given their harsh circumstances, Jamie and Isla have called their son Spike. Name notwithstanding, 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) is a sweet kid. When his father slips him a precious ration of bacon, he gives his share to his mother, who now lies weak and confused in an upstairs bedroom. The script pushes too hard to make Spike naive — blank and moldable — instead of what narrative logic tells us he is, the hardscrabble child of two stunted children. His career paths are hunter, forager or watchtower guard, but he seems more like the product of a progressive Montessori school, even with his dad urging him to cackle at shredded deer intestines. When the boy's not looking, Johnson's shoulders sag as he trudges up the stairs to Comer's sickbed, showing us a hint of adult complexities he alone understands. Spike's storyline is a fairly simple coming-of-age journey. Once he's slayed his first infected ('The more you kill, the easier it gets,' his dad gloats), Spike decides to sneak his sick mother to the mainland in search of a mythological being: a general medical practitioner. But straightaway, the movie's editing (by Jon Harris) starts having a fit, seizing our attention as it splices in herky-jerky black-and-white archival footage of earlier generations of kids marching to protect their homes, both in newsreels and classical retellings including Laurence Olivier's 1944 film of 'Henry V.' The chilling electronic score by the Scottish group Young Fathers blurps and drones while an unseen voice recites Rudyard Kipling's 'Boots,' a poem about the grinding Boer War that was first published in 1903, but whose sense of slogging exhaustion sounds just as relevant to us as it would to Beowulf. These theatrics sound fancy, but they play deliberately abrasive and confounding. '28 Days Later' forced the audience to adapt to the ugliness of digital cameras, and despite the years and prestige that Garland and Boyle have accumulated since, they've still got a punk streak. The filmmakers seem to be making the point that our own kinder, gentler idealism is the outlier. Humankind's natural state is struggle and division. In this evocative setting, with its crumbling castle towers and tattered English flags, we're elbowed to think of battles, from Brexit to the Vikings, who first attacked the British on this very same island in 793. A 9th century account describes the Lindisfarne massacre as nightmarish scenes of blood and trampling and terror, of 'heathen men made lamentable havoc.' Those words could have been recycled into '28 Years Later's' pitch deck. As a side note, Lindisfarne remains so small and remote that it doesn't even have any doctors today. The one we meet, Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), doesn't show up until the last act. But he's worth the wait, as is the messianic Jimmy (Jack O'Connell), who appears three minutes before the end credits and successfully gets us excited for the sequel, which has already been shot. (Jimmy's tracksuits and bleached hair are evidence that his understanding of pop culture really did stop at Eminem.) Their characters inject so much energy into the movie that Boyle and Garland seem to be rationing their best material as strictly as Spike denies himself that slice of pork. This confounding and headstrong movie doesn't reveal everything it's after. But it's an intriguing comment on human progress. The uninfected Brits have had to rewind their society back a millennium. When a Swedish sailor named Erik (Edvin Ryding, marvelous) is forced ashore, he talks down to all the Brits like they're cavemen. They've never even seen an iPhone (although the movie was itself shot on them). Upon seeing a picture of a modern Instagram babe plumped to a Kardashian ripeness, Spike gasps, 'What's wrong with her face?' The infected ones have regressed further still and they've split into two sub-species: the grub-like 'slow-low' zombies, who suck up worms with a vile slurp, and the Neanderthalish sprinters who hunt in packs. The fast ones even have an alpha (Chi Lewis-Parry) who is hellbent on taking big strides forward. One funny way he shows it is he's made a hobby of ripping off his prey's heads to use their spines as tools, or maybe even as décor. Dr. Kelson, a shaman, sculptor and anthropologist, insists that even the infected still share a common humanity. 'Every skull has had a thought,' he says, stabbing a freshly decapitated one with his pitchfork. He's made an art of honoring death over these decades and his occasionally hallucinatory sequence is truly emotional, even if Fiennes, smeared with iodine and resembling a jaundiced Colonel Kurtz, made me burst out into giggles at the way he says 'placenta.' Yet, I think we're meant to laugh — he's the exact mix of smart and silly the film is chasing. So who, then, are the savages? The infected or us? The film shifts alliances without taking sides (yet). I'm unconvinced that sweetie pie Spike is the protagonist I want to follow for two more movies. But whatever happens, it's a given that humans will eventually, stubbornly, relentlessly find a way to tear other humans to pieces, as we do in every movie, and just as we've done since the first homo sapien went after his rival with a stick. That's the zombie genre's visceral power: It reveals that the things that make us feel safe — love, loyalty, civility — are also our weaknesses. '28 Years Later' dares us to devolve.
