“28 Years Later: The Bone Temple”
Danny Boyle’s “28 Years Later” was a film that practically spat in the face of legacy sequel cynicism. If “28 Days Later,” the foundational text in this series, dared to ask what our world would look like bereft of a human pulse, the more jagged and tender “28 Years” saw its characters venturing outward in search of connection, into a world whose thirst for death was boundless. “28 Years” introduced two fascinating peripheral characters who get more of an in-depth treatment in director Nia DaCosta’s shattering follow-up, “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple”: that would be the resourceful Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) and Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’ Connell), a viper who heads up a gang of murderous psychopaths all styled to look like notorious sex criminal Jimmy Saville. These characters emerge as unlikely mentors to Alfie Williams’ Spike, the sweet, resilient boy who, in “28 Years Later,” journeys into this infernal hellscape in hopes of saving his mother. “The Bone Temple” isn’t as stylistically out-there as Boyle’s films, and that’s by design: DaCosta brings an old-school muscularity to the proceedings, as well as an admirable unwillingness to look away when things get ugly. In keeping with the Boyle films, “The Bone Temple” is both a rousing popcorn movie and a lament for a broken world, and the fact that DaCosta manages to hold these two tones in tandem without the surrounding narrative ever rupturing is a kind of miracle. Really, any movie where Fiennes covers himself in corpse paint and performs a ritualistic fire dance to the sounds of Iron Maiden’s “Number of the Beast” is operating on a level that most of us mere mortals could only hope to comprehend. – NL
“Magellan”
“Magellan,” a towering colossus courtesy of Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz, came and went theatrically in the first week of January without much fanfare. With such an unusual release strategy in place, Diaz’s film was destined to be overlooked in favor of the still-raging debates surrounding the 2025 crop of Oscar favorites (“Sinners” vs. “One Battle After Another,” Timothée Chalamet potentially winning big for “Marty Supreme,” etc.). It’s a shame, as the sheer craft of “Magellan” is worth sitting with its weighty, at times demanding 164 minutes (for context, Diaz’s 2013 drama “Norte, the End of History” clocked in at 250 minutes; “Magellan” is modest only by comparison). The great Gael Garcia Bernal gives one of the more purely haunted performances of his legendary career as Ferdinand Magellan, the Portuguese explorer whose voyage here is evoked with the monolithic widescreen immensity that cinephiles tend to associate with Terrence Malick’s “The New World,” as well as Lucrecia Martel’s slow-drip modern masterwork “Zama” (the latter being another exquisite, austere rumination on the rotten aftertaste of plundering and conquest, and the festering wounds of colonial cruelty). The images, courtesy of Diaz and cinematographer Artur Tort (who regularly works with Albert Serra, director of “Pacifiction” and last year’s devastating “Afternoons of Solitude”), are living paintings rendered in sepulchral slow-motion: rhapsodic tableaux of endless, cyclical suffering. It’s by no means an easy sit, but “Magellan” is, instead, a rich and uncommonly rewarding milestone in contemporary slow cinema. – NL
“Project Hail Mary”
The easiest thing to praise about Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s “Project Hail Mary” is also the thing that could be easiest to take for granted: Ryan Gosling is simply sensational in it. Playing Ryland Grace, a one-time science teacher turned reluctant astronaut dispatched on a near-suicidal mission to save Earth from ecological catastrophe, Gosling spends much of the movie alone in the outer reaches of space, tasked with carrying massive stretches of exposition, wonder, panic, comedy, and existential dread with little more than his face, his timing, and his ability to make decency feel dramatically compelling. Lord and Miller, adapting Andy Weir’s novel from a script by Drew Goddard, bring their usual wiseacre bounce to the material, but “Project Hail Mary” is more openly sincere than much of their work. The film is a survival thriller, a buddy comedy, a science lesson, and an IMAX-ready cosmic adventure, sometimes all in the same breath. It can be ungainly, especially when its earthbound flashbacks have to muscle through scientific explanation and narrative setup, though Sandra Hüller’s dry comic timing helps those passages along. But once the movie is in the cosmos, where Grace begins to solve the impossible with unexpected help from beyond his species, “Project Hail Mary” becomes something genuinely winning: a big, earnest studio crowd-pleaser about intelligence, cooperation, sacrifice, and the stubborn belief that optimism is not the same thing as naivete. Any movie that can make audiences invest deeply in the emotional stakes between Gosling and an alien lifeform while still delivering large-scale sci-fi spectacle is doing something very right. – RP
“Hokum”
With only three features under his belt, Irish writer/director Damian McCarthy has carved out a totally unique niche in the contemporary horror space. Resisting the played-out tropes of trauma and grief as shortcuts to shock, McCarthy’s preferred brand of horror feels, by comparison, folksy, handcrafted, film-literate, and legitimately idiosyncratic. That said, when terror does arrive in a McCarthy picture, it’s enough to get your blood racing (seriously, if you haven’t seen his stellar 2024 wooden-man curio, “Oddity,” check it out on Shudder immediately). “Hokum,” McCarthy’s third and most assured feature, begins with a grim, otherworldly, desert-set prologue that feels ripped out of one of those Clive Barker books about an ageless, evil curse. We eventually learn that this gripping and grotesque introduction is, in fact, a snippet from the writer’s imagination of Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott, putting his gift for playing miserable pricks to fine use). Ohm is a misanthropic, albeit successful novelist whom we follow to the Irish countryside as he plans to scatter his mother’s ashes at an ominous old inn, The Bilberry Woods Hotel, where the woman once stayed. Oh, and that bit of gossip about a witch haunting the honeymoon suite? That’s just a local rumor. Right? While “Hokum” hardly skimps on jump scares, it’s genuinely creepy enough that it feels unlikely that the powers that be will be drafting McCarthy to direct a “Paranormal Activity” sequel anytime soon (this, to be clear, is a compliment). McCarthy’s is a vision of dread that’s both steeped in the arcane and folkloric while simultaneously remaining uncanny, deeply personal, and unlike anything else in the current horror market. – NL
“I Love Boosters”
Boots Riley’s “I Love Boosters” is a riot of color, vulgarity, and righteously brilliant anti-capitalist agitprop: a dizzying ride that blends the plot mechanics of the female-led heist classic “Set It Off” with the unmistakable cartoon-absurdist tone of Riley’s other output (2018’s “Sorry To Bother You,” a surreal gig economy fable that encompassed socialist rhetoric, mutant horse-people, and star Lakeith Stanfield speaking with the voice of David Cross, as well as “I’m A Virgo,” the story of a 13-foot-tall man living in a dystopian Oakland). The result will almost surely be remembered as one of the most brazen satirical attacks of 2026 in film. The boosters of the title, led by Keke Palmer’s fearless Corvette and filled out by Naomi Ackie and Taylour Paige, are a trio of Bay Area gal pals, cruelly dubbed the Velvet Gang by their local news media. Their M.O.: stealing (“boosting”) from high-end retail stores and distributing the costly wares to working-class citizens for a fraction of the price. The enemy in their sights: an affluent sociopath of a designer, Christy Smith (Demi Moore, really going for it), whose every word drips with solipsistic self-regard. Riley throws a lot at the wall to see what sticks in “I Love Boosters” – Stanfield returns as a honey-voiced demon lothario with unholy cunnilingus powers, Don Cheadle shows up in hideous prosthetics, playing a con man preying on his own community – but when a movie feels this vital, this alive, the messiness feels less like a bug and more like an inevitable byproduct of its creator’s one-of-a-kind imagination, which can barely be contained into one medium. – NL
