Bald white Emma Stone leashed around the neck and wrists

Telluride ’25: Bugonia

Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Crime, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Ireland, Sci-Fi, South Korea, Telluride, UK

**½/****
starring Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis, Alicia Silverstone
screenplay by Will Tracy, based on the screenplay by Jang Joon-hwan
directed by Yorgos Lanthimos

by Walter Chaw I don’t know what it’s like to come to Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia fresh, given that it’s a remake of Jang Joon-hwan’s gonzo, lacerating Save the Green Planet!, a film about wild conspiracy theories and the people who drink deep from them that seemed considerably more novel in 2003 than it does in 2025. Now, some pathetic incel white supremacist dufus doing a terrorism is a weekly–soon to be daily–occurrence, making Bugonia a lot like Ari Aster’s Eddington: too late to be a warning and too directionless to offer solutions. What is it, then? Well, it’s sort of like Idiocracy, if Idiocracy came out today instead of 20 years ago, when it was a terrifying prophecy of unusual prescience. I guess the proper term for this exercise would be “past its sell-by date,” but what I think it is, mostly, is a very fine vehicle for Jessie Plemons and possibly a test of how close we are to Lanthimos and Emma Stone finally pushing their luck a little too far and launching themselves into the land of the terminally overexposed. I love that they continue to inspire each other and stuff, though their collaboration is starting to feel like a party where everyone else has left and I have to work in the morning, you guys, please.

Christoph Waltz in a top hat in Frankenstein

Telluride ’25: Frankenstein

Posted in****/****, 2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Mexico, Telluride

****/****
starring Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Mia Goth, Christoph Waltz
screenplay by Guillermo del Toro, based on the book Frankenstein; or: The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley
directed by Guillermo del Toro

by Walter Chaw The poetry lives in the father. Do I mean the poetry? I’m not sure. No, I mean the place where this piece breathes and has always breathed is the father. The fathers. I say “poetry” because it’s a term that covers a lot of ground for me. Poetry is something that is ineffable, ephemeral, inexplicably alive. It is ageless and immortal. Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is about his father and Our Father. Fathers is where the poetry of it lives. It is, itself, poetry. My God, it’s beautiful. Let me explain.

David Jonsson and Cooper Hoffman, fg, in The Long Walk

The Long Walk (2025)

Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Stephen King, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Cooper Hoffman, David Jonsson, Charlie Plummer, Mark Hamill
screenplay by JT Mollner, based on the book by Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman
directed by Francis Lawrence

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. My least favourite thing is to go after something I mostly agree with, made by people who seem well-intentioned despite failing to recognize their dangerous biases. Francis Lawrence’s The Long Walk nails who we are right now: a nation that leads the world in pride and trails the field in things to be proud of. A nation crowdfunding life-saving healthcare while bankrolling genocide. A nation where dozens of billionaires control the same amount of wealth as the millions of everyone else. Last I checked, the thing America laps every other industrialized country at is the percentage of our adult population that believes in angels. Throughout The Long Walk, the cartoonish Major (Mark Hamill), channelling the spirit of Sgt. Rock, lets loose with jingoistic statements about the greatness of these United States and how it will one day, through a baptism of blood and the violent suppression of generations of hope and self-worth, be great again. It’s “IRONIC” spelled out in blazing letters across a dystopian sky, like the fireworks that greet our heroes after their long walk–but what is irony when it’s just the facts? What is satire when we are beyond satire?

Adult sisters lying on bed in an emotional embrace

Telluride ’25: Sentimental Value

Posted in****/****, 2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Denmark, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Telluride, Turkey, UK

Affeksjonsverdi
****/****
starring Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Elle Fanning
written by Eskil Vogt
directed by Joachim Trier

by Walter Chaw Joachim Trier is my favourite living director. Through his work, I’m seen, and in being seen, I am less lonesome, less self-loathing. For a while, anyway. When he finds value in the melancholy heroes of his films, riddled though they may be with depression, prone to stupid mistakes and debilitating anxiety though they are, he finds value, somehow, in me. The first movie of his I saw was Oslo, August 31st, which opens with druggie-in-recovery Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie) filling his pockets with rocks like a Danish Virginia Woolf and, on the first night of a day trip away from rehab, walking into a lake. He fails to kill himself, however, as he’s failed at everything else. I’ve failed in the same way. It’s hard to explain what that feels like if you haven’t experienced it. He’s 34. An old friend tells him he’s got a fresh start and should make the most of it, but he tells her it’s too late. All of his friends have transitioned into the next part of their lives while he’s been stuck in place with his addiction, anchored down by the dead, flat weight of his unmet potential. What kind of life is left for someone who was only ever really good at self-sabotage? What kind of next step is there for someone afraid to take the first one? Oslo, August 31st is one of the very few movies ever to nail what depression feels like. Sadness? Sadness is easy. Despair is easy. Hard is feeling like you’ve disappointed everyone who ever believed in you. Or they will be disappointed, given enough time. Hard is knowing you’re the problem. It’s the last day of summer. I’ve never felt so old.

Devilishly handsome George Clooney standing a few feet away from a giant George Clooney poster

Telluride ’25: Jay Kelly

Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Italy, Telluride, UK

*/****
starring George Clooney, Adam Sandler, Riley Keough, Laura Dern
written by Noah Baumbach & Emily Mortimer
directed by Noah Baumbach

by Walter Chaw Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly wants to be two things. It wants to be Cinema Paradiso, and it wants to be George Clooney’s All That Jazz–a hagiography for the temple of film on the one hand, a self-lacerating reflection on the cost of stardom on the other. A tightrope, in other words, requiring an abiding, all-consuming, some might even say sloppy love of movies paired with a genius-level creator. You see the problem. I have admired many of Baumbach’s works, both individually and in collaboration with Wes Anderson, but I’ve never found any of them to be particularly in rapture over the transformative potential of film as a medium. I have admired much of George Clooney’s work, but have never found him to be a once-in-a-lifetime talent with a deeply troubled backstory like, say, Bob Fosse. The closest analogue to Jay Kelly is actually Mr. Holland’s Opus.

Telluride ’25: Hamnet

Telluride ’25: Hamnet

Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, Shakespeare, Spielberg, Telluride, UK, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Emily Watson, Joe Alwyn
screenplay by Chloé Zhao and Maggie O’Farrell, based on O’Farrell’s novel
directed by Chloé Zhao

by Walter Chaw There is so much acting in Hamnet. So much. The most acting. A host, a bounty, a feast. Remember Denzel Washington’s Fences? It makes Fences seem subtle and reserved–even dignified, if you can imagine, which I could not. Hamnet is heavy with acting in the sense that brood cows are heavy with young in late July, teats pendulous and bellies stretched like unrefrigerated yogurt capsules whose live colonies have boomed under torpid, incubated petri-dish conditions. Miserable. Suffering. Ridden with monologue and gesticulation. The term “to the rafters” doesn’t begin to cover it, given how the great abundance (embarrassment, superfluity, profusion, glut) of acting in Hamnet is directed at the very heavens themselves, forsooth, screeched in the key of rent flesh and ripped bodice to the bowed ears of weary Danish gods. What is a stage that is only proscenium? Hamnet is the answer now and going forward.

Telluride ’25: Ballad of a Small Player

Telluride ’25: Ballad of a Small Player

Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Germany, Mystery, Telluride, Thriller

½*/****
starring Colin Farrell, Fala Chen, Deanie Ip, Tilda Swinton
screenplay by Rowan Joffe, based on The Ballad of a Small Player by Lawrence Osborne
directed by Edward Berger

by Walter Chaw Edward Berger follows up Conclave, his empty, showy relevance-grab of an Executive Suite remake, with Ballad of a Small Player, a similarly grandiose gambling flick that aims to reboot Peter Bogdanovich’s masterpiece Saint Jack but succeeds mainly in resurrecting the Ghosts of Orientalism Past. Gambler, conman, and small player of the title Lord Doyle (Colin Farrell) staggers through the slick gunmetal and neon streets of Macau looking for games of Baccarat like James Bond Man with a Golden Gun-ning for trouble. He meets his Waterloo in a supernaturally lucky old crone who never loses a hand because she’s riding shotgun to a hustler from the spirit world. It’s not as interesting as it sounds. After hitting a gambler’s rock-bottom, Doyle falls in with conscience-burdened casino manager Dao Ming (Fala Chen), who, in true Celestial lotus-blossom fashion, offers herself as a sacrificial moral lamb for a wayward gwielo trying to walk the straight and narrow.

Telluride ’25: The Theatre That Only Exists for Four Days

Telluride ’25: The Theatre That Only Exists for Four Days

Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Film Festivals, Telluride

by Walter Chaw Even though it’s painted a bright, canary yellow, there’s a hole-in-the-wall Mexican joint in Gunnison called Anejo Bistro & Bar that you would miss unless you were right on top of it. I stopped there with my friend this year on our way to the Telluride Film Festival–a seven-hour trip I’ve traditionally made on my own but maybe wouldn’t have made at all this year if not for her. The drive has become harder. The build-up to it, the anticipation-into-fear. I carry trauma from a bad accident years ago while driving over Vail Pass in the dead of winter, exacerbated by a horror film of a ride back from Telluride in the first throes of a second, maybe third round of Covid in 2022. Both experiences have made extended drives over curved passes spanning stories-deep drops triggers for my anxious equivocation. Add how, as I age, I become less and less desirous of breaking routine, even if counting the days until my death has lately become a perverse fascination for me. I am trapped in this prison of my quotidian days. I know this is a first-world problem.

Honey Don’t! (2025)

Honey Don’t! (2025)

Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coen Brothers, Comedy, Crime, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Margaret Qualley, Aubrey Plaza, Charlie Day, Chris Evans
written by Ethan Coen & Tricia Cooke
directed by Ethan Coen

by Walter Chaw Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke have a mission, and that mission is apparently to make affected, arch neo-noir “comedies” showcasing angry cunnilingus and the sense of humour that, in tiny doses, gave Ethan’s collaborations with his brother Joel a soupçon of bitterness. Without what seems to be Joel’s humanism to leaven what appears to be Ethan’s misanthropy, the residue left at the bottom of this cup is bitter to the point of repugnant. Flying solo, Ethan comes across as the kind of kid who inflates a toad to pop it with a slingshot for yuks. In some ways, Honey Don’t! is a definitive film for our era of nihilism, this generation of people becoming dead inside. It’s an endurance challenge, our Freddy Got Fingered, a sociopath by any other name. Remember that scene in Fargo where the wife tries to run away from her captors with her hands tied behind her back and her head covered by a hood? How she stumbles around in a confused circle before tripping and falling, causing kidnapper Steve Buscemi to laugh uproariously? Imagine an entire movie that is just that. Cruel. Mean. Tying-tin-cans-to-a-dog’s-tail mean. It’s aggressively nasty in a way I find punishing, and it’s scary because I suspect Coen and Cooke have enrichment on their minds. I think they’re doing this to force the “normies” to put some respect on alternative lifestyles. I think they’re doing it because they think the way to do that is to push our noses into our own sick.

Little boy in clown makeup at the back of an underlit classroom: "There's always a class clown."

Weapons (2025)

Posted in****/****, 2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical

****/****
starring Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, Alden Ehrenreich, Amy Madigan
written and directed by Zach Cregger

by Walter Chaw Zach Cregger’s Weapons is joy. It’s nostalgia without an obvious antecedent, capturing the phenomena of “hiraeth” for a sensibility raised on weird pulp and Halloween. If nostalgia is the last deposit with cultural veins still rich enough to mine, this is the way to do it. Weapons is the best Ray Bradbury adaptation there has ever been; while it’s not actually based on any of his stuff, one could argue it shares roots with 1962’s “Boys! Raise Giant Mushrooms in Your Cellar!”, 1948’s “The October Game”, and 1952’s “April Witch”. There are infernal images here snatched from modern sources as well. In its general (sub)urban chaos scene, it rivals the incomparable opening 10 minutes of Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead reboot. In its after-hours-in-familiar-places dread, it mirrors Tobe Hooper’s Salem’s Lot and the indelible midnight classroom set-piece from Demián Rugna’s When Evil Lurks. But the engine driving it, that coalesces these tantalizingly familiar bits and pieces into a toothsome meal, is the same thing that animates Stephen King’s work: a clever and nimble manipulation of the uncanny. Comedians (Cregger co-founded the comedy troupe “The Whitest Kids U’Know”), the good ones, boast that same gift for inserting the absurd into the mundane. The line between horror and laughter is so slight, there almost isn’t one. In Weapons, it’s the clown where your wife should be, dinner guests who don’t ever speak and refuse to leave, the obvious witch showing up for a parent/teacher conference. Terrifying in the moment, but funny…should you survive. Weapons made me feel like I was a seventh grader ripping through It over a long weekend in the fall of 1986 again. As with most things made only for me, I suspect it has delights for everybody.

J-Lo with an intact horse

The Cell (2000) [Limited Edition] – 4K Ultra HD

Posted in2000s, 2025, 4K Ultra HD, Arrow Video, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Esoterica, Germany, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A+*
starring Jennifer Lopez, Vince Vaughn, Vincent D’Onofrio, Marianne Jean-Baptiste
written by Mark Protosevich
directed by Tarsem Singh

by Walter Chaw It’s a collision of travel-worn ideas, this movie–a tired serial-killer thriller married to Dreamscape–and the wear shows whenever someone mouths their ration of exposition like a toothless shut-in gumming their daily soup-soaked toast. Yet Tarsem’s The Cell is also a collection of astonishments, visions so startling and sticky they linger like the midnight-carnival sequence in Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn: a hellish gallery adjacent to Clive Barker’s nightmare mosaics of violated flesh. Portions of it were inspired by the techniques perfected by the Catholics during the Spanish Inquisition, and no one knows invasions and perforations of the body like the Catholics. Now imagine Eiko Ishioka designing the costumes for this infernal Mass; Howard Shore composing the score; and Tarsem (a.k.a. Tarsem Singh), a Desi-American artist steeped in the eye-popping iconography of the Hindu pantheon, pulling the strings. Even the supporting cast (Jake Weber, Dylan Baker, James Gammon, Dean Norris, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, and so on) is a murderer’s row of total bangers, albeit tasked with the most serviceable roles. There’s too much talent here for the story at hand. It’s like inviting the 1927 Yankees to play in a beer-league softball tourney.

Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal arguing: "'Now, now, I think you'll find it tastes great.' 'No, it's less filling!'"

Eddington (2025)

Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Theatrical, Western

***/****
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Luke Grimes, Emma Stone
written and directed by Ari Aster

by Walter Chaw The problem I have with Ari Aster movies is that Ari Aster is contemptuous of his characters. He gives them anxieties he then maximalizes into catastrophes so extreme they’re funny. (How else does a cake allergy turn into a telephone-pole beheading?) And once he creates an unbearable situation, he scoffs. It’s tempting to draw a corollary between his work and that of post-Raising Arizona Coen Brothers, but however bleak the Coen Brothers can be, however barbed their humour gets, there is always a redemptive element. Not hope, exactly, but dignity, whereas Aster’s films feel like audience punishment and only that. He’s confirmed his desire to troll: In a 2018 interview with FILM COMMENT, Aster described Hereditary as a hybrid of Peter Greenaway, whom he sees as “maybe our most authentic misanthrope,” and Douglas Sirk, whose heightened emotions and forced artificiality Aster found horrifying. His 2011 short film The Strange Thing About the Johnsons was his answer to the question, “What is the worst”–as in most offensive–“thing I could make at AFI?” Aster fancies himself the great gadfly, the wizened stirrer of a pot left too long on the burner.

Krypto the Dog: Oh no I'm a Krypto bro

Superman (2025)

Posted in****/****, 2025, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

****/****
starring David Corenswet, Rachel Brosnahan, Nicholas Hoult, Edi Gathegi
written and directed by James Gunn

by Walter Chaw I’m in the bag for Superman, I admit it. I grew up in a small town, Golden, CO, in an environment some would describe as Norman Rockwellian. Before the bullying started in earnest, before I spoke English, I would earn pennies at the corner barbershop and spend them at the 5 & 10 across the street on Silly Putty, gum, and comic books. Superman comic books, Wonder Woman, too. Superman, for me, is the superhero we should most want to be. I’m not talking about the superpowers, I’m talking about being a decent person who genuinely cares about others. He’s also the one I most wished were real–who, although he had unimaginable advantages, still cared about me. I no longer believe that anyone with more power than me is interested in whether I live or die if it serves them no profit. Do you? When did you stop? I realized somewhere along the way that Superman is my Jesus. When people talk about their Jesus, they use the same words: righteous, just, generous–the Sermon on the Mount, you know? I see a lot of fascist functionaries who want the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament God posted in schoolrooms in order to frighten children into obedience under an omniscient surveillance state. I see no Christians pushing to get their New Testament God’s Beatitudes posted in those same rooms; why? Oh, hey, did you ever notice how you’ve given Santa Claus the same power as your Christian God? What is your God, now, with the threat that bad behaviour will be punished with inferior Christmas gifts?

Jurassic World: Rebirth

Jurassic World: Rebirth

Posted in2025, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, India, Malta, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Taiwan, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

Jurassic World Rebirth
**½/****
starring Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, Jonathan Bailey, Rupert Friend
written by David Koepp
directed by Gareth Edwards

by Walter Chaw Our first film about hyper-normalization, Jurassic World Rebirth presents a world that has grown tired of dinosaurs, and it’s buoyed not only by that topicality but also by Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, and a steadfast refusal to give a good shit. About anything. Which is not to say the craft is poor (this was an expensive production, and looks it), but that the picture is more a collection of vignettes–vignettes that replicate how children play with dinosaur toys–than it is a legible narrative. It’s a rack of Scrabble tiles arranged at random, or a completely fucked-up Rubik’s Cube you’re on the verge of stripping of its stickers. That it’s not awful is a testament to stars who know the assignment, a new director who isn’t Colin Trevorrow, and a script, by professional populist screenwriter David Koepp (returning to the franchise for the first time since The Lost World), that takes it easy on the last film’s memorably ugly misogyny and autocritical metaphors for the bankrupt intentions driving franchise filmmaking. I’m not saying Jurassic World Dominion is wrong about the cynical commodification of everything, just that it made dinosaurs eating people not fun.

M3gan 2.0 looking apologetic: “'I’m sorry for MeToo-ing your Teddy Ruxpin but he had it coming.'”

M3GAN 2.0 (2025)

Posted in2025, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Horror, New Zealand, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Allison Williams, Violet McGraw, Jenna Davis, Jemaine Clement
written and directed by Gerald Johnstone

by Walter Chaw Gerald Johnstone’s M3GAN 2.0 feels like one of those 1980s teensploitation sci-fi adventure flicks. D.A.R.Y.L., for instance–D.A.R.Y.L. exactly, let’s face it. Given that D.A.R.Y.L. hardly set the world on fire, this does not bode well for M3GAN 2.0. To its credit, it takes a wild swing at relevance, M3GAN 2.0 does, in a way that’s at complete odds with what drove the first film’s safe swing at relevance, pushing this sequel into Spies Like Us/Volunteers territory. Or Best Defense, why not? All those musty Cold War artifacts of the Reagan era that looked for humor in entrenched doomsday scenarios; closed-system satires that don’t have much to say because there’s no way out–that don’t have much room to satirize anything because you can’t make the “stupid Apocalypse” any stupider than the idiots heralding it have already made it. M3GAN 2.0 plays a lot like a Naked Gun prologue, in fact, one that opens with a spybot assassinating a brown baddie in a ridiculous stalking and ends in a bump-off that’s just a little too violent to be horrible. It’s a joke everyone’s in on, told with an arched eyebrow and a whiff of “the call is coming from inside the house,” The Matrix Resurrections-style. This is payback for all the notes. This is payback for thinking this is a franchise.

F1 (2025)

F1 (2025)

Posted in2025, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sports, Theatrical

F1: The Movie
***½/****
starring Brad Pitt, Damson Idris, Kerry Condon, Javier Bardem
screenplay by Ehren Kruger
directed by Joseph Kosinski

by Walter Chaw The first movie I saw in a theatre was Star Wars, in 1977. I had just turned four and didn’t speak a word of English. The 45rpm read-along storybook my parents subsequently bought for me helped me take my first steps towards learning the language. And the sense of exhilaration I felt watching Star Wars that first time? I’ve never equalled it, and never will. There are highs in life you experience once; though you may chase that feeling for the rest of your life, you chase it in vain. The problem with a film like Joseph Kosinski’s F1 is that it is very much like hundreds, if not thousands, of other films that have come before, in stark contrast to the average film, which only has, like, several dozen antecedents. F1 is a tried and true assemblage of complementary parts: an old warrior and a young warrior, gladiatorial contests, mentors, romance, the Big Game; think Bull Durham, for instance. It’s so familiar archetypally that it’s easy to identify as such (as opposed to other films that are equally derivative but draw from more obscure sources), and it’s such a notoriously lavish undertaking that it’s tempting to strike at it for its swaggering confidence and what some would call unearned arrogance. Greek Tragedies are about elevated personages because their fall is greater, you see: we love slaying giants, deservedly or not.

Elio lying on a beach with a colander for a hat: "I don't like sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere.”

Elio (2025)

Posted in2025, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Drama, Family, Pixar, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

*/****
screenplay by Julia Cho & Mark Hammer & Mike Jones
directed by Adrian Molina, Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi

by Walter Chaw Elio, from Coco co-director Adrian Molina, Madeline Sharafian (animator, Turning Red), and Domee Shi (director, Turning Red), is a derivative oddball-kid/buddy comedy space adventure of the middle-aspiring family-programmer variety Pixar now uses to pad its roster between increasingly flaccid and uninspired franchise tentpoles. How the mighty have fallen. Boasting three directors and three writers (Julia Cho (Turning Red), Mark Hammer (Shotgun Wedding), and Mike Jones (Soul and Luca)), it’s a mosaic of borrowed bits designed to geek chafed pleasure centres, thus ensuring the relative placidity of your children for a couple of hours. That is, if the shot-for-shot “live-action” remakes of Lilo & Stitch and How To Train Your Dragon have run their course…which they haven’t. Maybe the inevitably tepid word-of-mouth damning praise–the “you know, for kids!” and “the whole family will like it” kind, or even the classic “it’s not great, but I cried”–will help it reach whatever goals it’s meant to before assuming its proper place as anonymous streaming filler for a content-voracious delivery service. It’s the sort of movie Common Sense Media and other censorious sites for terrible parents adore, if that gives you an idea. It’s funny because it’s not like I even dislike Elio; it’s just that if you ask me to think about it, I start to realize how much of my life I’ve wasted.

Low angle of an emaciated zombie against a blue sky: "And now a word from Senator Rick Scott"

28 Years Later (2025)

Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, Zombie

*½/****
starring Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ralph Fiennes
written by Alex Garland
directed by Danny Boyle

by Walter Chaw At its best, Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later is alive with the speculative cultural anthropology of the due-for-revision Reign of Fire. At its worst, it’s Ren Faire: The Movie, a guided LARP through a fantastical post-apocalypse, replete with unnecessarily elaborate lore, feasting scenes, braids for miles, and paste-thick accents. It’s almost entirely humourless sociology drunk on its own gravid religiosity, ending at a neo Sedlec Ossuary complete with mad curator who explains very carefully what a “memento mori” is. If my inner 16-year-old’s hormones could operate a typewriter, they would produce exactly this script, written by the returning Alex Garland. I did appreciate a flash of wit in a “SHELL” station sign vandalized to say “HELL”–shades of the spray-painted “S” before “LAUGHTER” on the side of The Joker’s semi rig in The Dark Knight (and of course Catwoman’s “Hell Here” in Batman Returns)–but that kind of gallows humor, evident even in Boyle’s own 28 Days Later, is conspicuously absent in this intensely self-important/self-serious piece. I was tempted to look at it more favorably as an epitaph for the human race–a companion piece to the Philippou Brothers’ Bring Her Back that likewise boils down to rituals of grief and remembrance–but comparing things to Bring Her Back ultimately does those things no favours.