28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026)

Score: 4 / 5

The unpleasantness of Danny Boyle's usual style is mitigated here by a daringly beautiful attempt by Mia DaCosta to inject artistry and -- dare I say -- beauty into a world overrun by zombies. There was no way the titular set would have been built for Boyle's 2025 return to the franchise if more wasn't to come. The bone temple, a glorious and instantly iconic memento mori for the characters of 28 Years Later, deserved a film of its own, rife with arcane rituals, demonic drag, and deeper thematic merit than this franchise has ever had. And, thankfully, DaCosta was exactly the right person for the job.

Pitfalls and all, this material has never been my favorite, even within the fairly specific genre of post-apocalyptic zombie horror. The Rage virus, groundbreaking in its 2002 debut, is now so familiar in conceit that writer Alex Garland and the creators have needed to add new kinds of zombies and start categorizing them by mutation, yet another typical problem in this subgenre. With its attempt at edgy immediacy through shaky camerawork and more or less natural lighting, the series has never quite managed to achieve visual artistry on par with its occasionally sophisticated themes. DaCosta, approaching the whole affair almost as a dark fantasy, helps us view the world with more awe. Which is unexpected and a bit jarring, as this is the first entry to be temporally connected to the setting of its predecessor. How many franchises do you know of in which the third entry is, itself, a planned trilogy?

That's not to say this film isn't as gratuitously, viscerally cruel as the others. The story concerns young Spike (Alfie Williams), who starts in a bad place immediately following the events of the previous film. If you recall, a grotesque group of parkour thugs under command of "Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal," a seemingly sociopathic cult leader (Jack O'Connell), saved Spike from a group of the infected, inviting the wee lad to join them. It does not bode well, and the opening of The Bone Temple solidifies our fears as Jimmy orders Spike to fight to the death against his Fingers (the name he gives his tracksuit-wearing followers, who individually have variations of the same name like "Jimmima" and "Jimmy Shite"). It is revealed to us that they believe Jimmy's father is "Old Nick," the Devil, and this blood sacrifice merely a regular occurrence in their lives together. Spike survives and is inducted into their order as a new Jimmy, but his life gets more violent and less safe by the day. Even when he cautiously befriends Jimmy Ink (Erin Kellyman), who tries to help shield Spike from their most barbaric acts and from Jimmy Crystal's wrath, it's a far cry from safety.

Thankfully, the film crosscuts Spike's journey with that of Dr. Ian Kelson, played again by Ralph Fiennes in full command of his considerable craft. His introductory scene is a montage of him collecting rotten corpses in what appears to be an eccentric routine to continually improve the bone temple he's constructed; he goes about the macabre affair while absentmindedly singing hits from Duran Duran (the opening is "Girls on Film," which when I finally recognized nearly slayed me dead). Kelson lives in a bunker beneath his temple and spends the remainder of his time studying Samson, a giant of a zombie who apparently craves the sedation from Rage provided by drug darts Kelson uses. While under the influence, Samson is placid and Kelson develops what amounts to a friendship with him. Whether through teaching Samson language or dancing to the music, Kelson will make the connection.

Fiennes is magnetic in this role: a crazed humanist, a generous and hospitable mad scientist, an artist in every way yet alone and humble, the character he has constructed is impossible to nail down, and he constantly surprises us in his demeanor. He's also the saving grace of the film, which spends far too long tormenting young Spike (and us, by extension). When one of the Fingers spot Kelson and Samson chumming it up one day, he's sure he's seen Old Nick and demands an audience from Jimmy Crystal, who suddenly knows he's made quite a pickle for himself. Thus intersect the two plotlines of the film just in time for its magnificent climax.

This was never meant to be a character study, so the snippets of flashbacks to the "before times" of Kelson and Samson didn't really work for me, though we definitely needed more ways to connect with them. But even with these, none of the characters really feel fleshed-out by the screenplay or in performance. Other than Kelson. Fiennes takes a mostly nonverbal character and turns him into a fountain of stimulation. When, in the climax, Kelson performs as Old Nick in order to satisfy his unwelcome, threatening audience of Fingers, Fiennes is dressed in some kind of demonic drag (a cross between War Boys in Mad Max and the Cenobites from Hellraiser) performing Iron Maiden's "The Number of the Beast" in a drug-induced rave replete with mosh pit and pyrotechnics. It's electrifying to behold. It also introduces a wholly unexpected theme of religious theatrics into consideration, one that deconstructs the artifice even as it elicited audible laughs from me, mostly due to Fiennes's otherwise deadpan, quietly monotonous delivery of his lines out of character. Though he so often plays the villain, we must never forsake his profound gift for comedy.

By film's end, DaCosta has done something rare in film. She crafts a visual and aural experience meant to push us along to the point of questioning, earnestly, how and why God would allow such horrors on earth. That's a dark place to go, even with fun and scares along the way. But the sensation I had, upon a recent rewatch, was not that of nihilism or despair. And, no, I'm not talking about the ending, which offers yet another obnoxiously optimistic little cliffhanger ending reminding us that there's another installment yet to come; that just pissed me off, yet again. No, the hope I felt was far more spiritual and human. In a cast of characters basically rendered dead inside from their hopeless, interminable existence, we're made to feel that Kelson actually made a difference. No spoilers here, but the film's proper finale (before that inexcusable stinger) validates and valorizes his life as an ethical doctor in this hellscape and offers encouragement to viewers feeling a similarly bleak outlook on a world gone mad.

The Invite (2026)

Score: 4.5 / 5

The surprise of the summer! 

An unhappy married couple host their upstairs neighbors for a dinner party that devolves into a nightmarish spiral of social and sexual anxieties. This is exactly my kind of story, its roots deep in theatrical chamber pieces like God of Carnage and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in a certain absurdist lambasting of bourgeois niceties. 

Olivia Wilde and Seth Rogen play the primary couple, and their winsomeness is carefully calculated to fracture and tear at key early moments. Each plays their part with energetic conviction, adding rich layers to characters that could be played quite straight. Trapped at home for years in a life that clearly doesn't satisfy, she's been buying expensive (and, frankly, a bit gaudy) materials to spruce up their large and expensive apartment while walking naked by her single-pane window on her community courtyard to catch the eye of a neighbor. He's a miserable band teacher who has lost touch with any inspiration (he was once a promising musician) and hides from the world at home while complaining about a bad back and doing nothing to help himself. They live in wholly separate worlds, and have clearly each attempted therapy without following through; within moments of him returning home on this day, they're hurling passive-aggressive jabs while deflecting with half-baked psychobabble. As they scream at each other in the kitchen, one wonders if their upstairs neighbors who are expected momentarily can hear them.

Which is funny, because half of the fight is about them. Edward Norton and Penelope Cruz, a sexy, worldly couple who have caught the eyes of both Wilde and Rogen separately, are apparently not quiet about their sex life. As the main couple fester in a sexless, loveless hell of their own making, Norton and Cruz have vivacious and very loud sex regularly in the dead of night. Rogen wants to confront them about the noise and establish some sort of dominance; Wilde seems eager to know more about what's happening up there and maybe compete or join. Once the dinner party commences -- which is an unmitigated disaster, for several increasingly hilarious reasons including dietary restrictions, a lack of wine, and the ultimate carnal purpose for the entire evening -- it's clear that the bohemians upstairs are in fact a little too perfect an opportunity for their repressed downstairs neighbors. Not all is well in their world of seemingly unbridled pleasure. 

Without having seen the 2020 Spanish film on which this is based, I admire writers Will McCormack and Rashida Jones for their incisive, kinetic screenplay that keenly and knowingly dives into the darker and more graphic subtext found in most sex-adjacent sitcoms. These jokes aren't salacious in nature or mean-spirited about who deserves pleasure and fulfillment in any kind of puritanical schema; rather, they take a frank look at people being genuinely curious while also being riddled with anxiety and demonstrate the inherent humor of being forced to reckon with oneself while trying something new in a nonjudgmental way. This refreshing approach is bolstered by four top-notch performances, each of which deserves an award.

Wilde herself directs this venture, which is saying a lot because her performance was the standout for me, with an aesthetic visually more in line with a thriller. Somewhat drab lighting in frames upon frames -- doorways and windows constantly restrict movement of these characters in their starkly artificial world -- makes the film appear a little jaundiced in its sickly amber pools of light. Her pacing is fast and I found myself cackling aloud in the cinema while sometimes chiding myself for laughing at certain moments of insults and cruelties. It's apparent that this is originally based on a play, and I'd love to see it live. Wilde succeeds, in making it a film, by deftly and artfully controlling the scope of our reactions to every beat -- awkward, horny, and hilarious -- as they come. The first act might throw some viewers off because of the forceful directorial approach (by which I mean the cinematography and editing, both firing on all cylinders from the first scene), but once you settle in to her style, you can start collecting boons. When the music starts interjecting slasher-movie stings in the middle of a particularly funny and tense scene, I found myself thinking that Wilde was parodying Hitchcock in a clever blend of Psycho and The Trouble with Harry. 

By the second half, things calm down a bit visually and aurally, and the actors rise to the occasion to carry us through the climax and denouement with some career-best work. Where she started the film encouraging us to judge the characters, she opens up in the final act with a more mature approach, allowing the film and actors to breathe, and us by extension. This is a slice of life; strange, funny, and earnest, meant to remind us that what connects us all isn't necessarily money or sex but something a bit more mysterious and satisfying. Purpose and communication, negotiation and patience, kindness and hospitality; these things should matter more than they do in 2026 America, and films like this help us cut through the confusion to find our profound shared humanity. The laughter and sex just help us swallow the pill.

Moana (2026)

Score: 3 / 5

I've long been an apologist for Disney's live action remakes, for reasons shared elsewhere on this blog. And despite not liking a handful of them, I find myself of a new opinion entirely when it comes to the new Moana: utter ambivalence.

While it's patently silly for Disney to remake something only a decade old, this is the kind of material they should be adapting. Human-centered narratives, in my apparently controversial opinion, should center the human element, so I tend to prefer such stories in live action. Why we haven't, then, gotten the likes of Hercules or The Hunchback of Notre Dame is beyond my comprehension, while Lady and the Tramp and its ilk fill up Disney+ with nightmare fuel. Animation is exactly for stories that cannot be told by real people in front of real cameras: stories like The Little Mermaid or Treasure Planet that would be almost entirely animated anyway. Yet in this expensive-looking production, I could not help but find myself annoyed that so much appeared to be CGI, and not much of it of more realistic quality than in the animated original.

Yet director Thomas Kail (mostly a theatre director, but whose Fosse/Verdon is still criminally underappreciated) and his extensive production team (including Lin-Manuel Miranda, Dwayne Johnson, returning to his role as Maui, and Auli'i Cravalho, who does not appear but who sings a new song during the credits) take great pains to make this film an almost shot-for-shot remake. One wonders why. The history of "The Long Pause" is intriguing, and surely within the past ten years there has been sufficient research into Polynesian history and interest in culture in general to have improved the storytelling of this otherwise simple plot and its straightforward themes. And in a year when The Odyssey will surely sweep the summer (and yearly) "best of" lists, it feels odd that Moana couldn't expand her horizons and seek out any new adventures.

The material literally sings for an inexplicable compulsion, a call from beyond the familiar to prove oneself and save one's home. Why, then, are we locked into the exact same screenplay with the exact same adventures? Only two years ago, Moana 2 gave us more options to play with -- though we can certainly debate the value of those options -- so this feels like a disappointing return to basics. Apart from a couple new guffaw-inducing jibes from Johnson's narcissist demigod, even the laughs are exactly the same, down to precisely timed beats involving the braindead google-eyed sidekick Heihei. 

Thankfully, it's all very fun and very pretty, much like the original. The ocean, delightfully animated in its fantasy, pseudo-anthropomorphized form, is wonderfully rendered, and I certainly don't tire of the tropical vistas of thickly jungled islands. Rena Owen is the pulsing heart of the film as Moana's grandmother who sets her on her quest and returns like a Force-ghost in Moana's climactic turn; her gravitas and whimsy combine in an effective characterization that wrung tears from my eyes more than once. Jemaine Clement returns, too, as Tamatoa, the monstrous crab who hoards shiny things, in a replicated scene of the original film's standout moment, but his voice does feel tired and uninspired this time around. Too bad he wasn't given some fresh material to crack open and masticate.

The strength of this movie lies almost solely in its human element. To that end, the film's first act is easily its strongest, as Moana is chosen by the ocean as a child and as she grows into her father's daughter, a chief-in-training to lead her island's people. The first big musical number is magnificent, and I found myself repeatedly wishing that Kail leaned even more into his theatre background and away from the original film. How much more satisfying it would be to have long takes of masses of Motunui islanders harvesting coconuts and fish while dancing and singing, instead of cartoon-esque choppy edits and eye-popping set pieces! Yet in seeing real people in gorgeous production design, we are nevertheless transported into an escapist fantasy as Disney does best. Alas, we must settle for what we've been given, and its mediocrity and redundancy won't work for everyone, though I had a lovely time singing along in my otherwise empty cinema.

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (2026)

Score: 4 / 5

Opening immediately after the end of the first film, the film centers on Grace as her horrors continue. In a nice long take focused on Samara Weaving's face as she collapses and is carried into an ambulance, Grace blacks out but is resuscitated, each jolt reminding us of key flashbacks to the traumatic night she's just endured. The Le Domas family is no more -- well, apart from her now bearing their surname, legally -- and in case you missed the first one and for some reason started with the sequel, we're given some nice exposition early on. Grace's estranged sister Faith (yes, there's a jab about Catholic names) is her emergency contact and arrives as Grace is handcuffed to her bed, under suspicion of unspeakable things to the Le Domas family and estate.

But, as they do in all things, directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett and writer Guy Busick handle the our return to this world with wit and style. Even exposition dumps are riddled with humor and nihilism, earned by what they know fans loved about the first film. Swiftly, a new plan is hatched as the young women are attacked in the hospital and spirited away. We're shown a new assemblage of wealthy assholes, representatives of various families associated with the diabolic Mr. Le Bail (apparently literally the Devil), gathering at a remote estate; these new characters have been summoned to partake in a new "game" of sorts: a battle to vie for the High Seat of "the Council," a group of elites who have made Faustian deals and who now secretly control the world. One (played by David Cronenberg himself) is introduced to us as watching news footage of a war and calling someone privately to have a ceasefire, which is immediately enacted on screen. 

Unfortunately, this means that it's double or nothing. The Council families will each send a representative at a time to kill the young women, and they'll be replaced by their own reserves. It's shockingly bleak for our heroines, one of whom is still quite injured from the previous day's exploits, the other of whom has to suddenly believe all this capitalistic, satanic insanity and simultaneously try to survive it. One imagines with agony the kind of physical stress these women underwent to make this film; they capably pull off what was surely a grueling shoot of goopy, sticky, slimy special effects and tons of fight choreography, to say nothing of all the running they do. 

Their deadly game board this time is a sizable, rural estate of many acres. What, in the first film, was a sort of flip on the Gothic whodunnit, is here a Grand Guignol vision of The Most Dangerous Game or The Hunt from a few years ago. Things seem even less fair this time around, even lorded over as they are by a delightfully perky Elijah Wood as a sort of cabal secretary or consigliere to these evil families. Their representatives are bizarre and hilarious as they arm themselves and prepare for the chase, especially Kevin Durand doing what he does and Nestor Carbonell with a caricatured Spanish accent through what seem to be exaggeratedly false teeth. 

While the filmmakers are never less than inventive, engrossing, and wildly entertaining, they do expand the scope of what's happening in a big way. That's normal for sequels, of course, and in a lot of ways this literally doubles the good stuff from before. But if you, like me, liked the restrictions in the first film with its limited cast and setting, you might find yourself both overwhelmed and numb to the much-expanded proceedings. There are too many characters for any to have much presence beyond an initial impression or superlative characteristic. Each has a spectacular death as well, which begin to feel camp as things get messy. Spontaneous bloody combustions happen fairly frequently this time around. The expanded mythology, too, is well-designed and sure to lead to yet more installments, but the lack of mystery does make things less intellectually stimulating. We already know Mr. Le Bail is not to be trifled with and that all the conspiracy is true, and so apparently does everyone else; whereas the Le Domases were torn on their belief, everyone in this film knows what's at stake.

Yet the film takes a few steps that are so intense and upsetting that I hesitate labeling it camp or even macabre satire. First, there's the rather shocking treatment of violence against women. Obviously that was a central theme in the first film -- the iconic bloody wedding dress is evidence enough -- but here, for the first time, I got uncomfortable to the point of squirming distraction as the two leading women were so viciously tortured on screen. There's one scene in particular when Faith (a wonderful Kathryn Newton, by the by) is beaten so brutally I had to avert my eyes, something I almost never do, because the camera and edit just lingers on it so long. The other is the wicked twin pair of Shawn Hatosy and Sarah Michelle Gellar, who are lovably nasty and almost sympathetic until a crucial climactic moment when Hatosy reveals that his evil is real. Without spoilers, suffice to say that his Patrick Bateman-like quirks are indeed fueled by hellish motivation, and when he shows his true face, he's quite scary.

While I'm still angry they haven't yet followed up with more Scream, I guess I can be happy that they chose to continue work on this material over something like Abigail. 

Scream 7 (2026)

Score: 3.5 / 5

"What's your favorite scary movie?" Kevin Williamson, the brilliant writer behind my favorite horror franchise, returns this time in double duty as both writer and director to a series foundering in the wake of some awful producing decisions. Without going into the muck of the business, suffice to say that the exciting plots and characters of Scream 5 and Scream 6 are on a bit of a hiatus (let us hope not abandoned permanently). Given his thankless job of taking the reins from what was clearly a planned trilogy and trying something different, independent, and ultimately safe, Williamson performs a Herculean task here to mostly successful results. While this will almost certainly rank lowly among fan favorites, I do think it's important to always take the art on its own terms; as such, we'll not be discussing the casting/directing/writing upsets that led us to this point, and rather focusing on the film itself and its place within its series.

Unlikely as it might seem after so very much crime there, the Macher house yet stands in Woodsboro, California. Drawn to the "true crime" setting of his own favorite serial killers -- and enthusiastically aware of the long-festering rumors of Stu's possible survival -- a young man and his girlfriend book the large estate as a sort of AirBnb for a spooky night. Given the material's tendency to blur the lines between history and reality, trauma and reckoning, heroism and cruelty, it's a bit surprising that we haven't really seen this yet; usually, it's Gale profiting off the fictionalized lives of others, yet here (and in our digital age) we see a potential nobody profiting off the tragedies that have occurred in this storied house. Who owns the Macher residence now? Who knows? Like the inevitable killer lurking in plain sight in the decked-out Halloween-esque attraction, it could be anyone.

Chandelier-related kill and all, the opening is effective and had me thrilled to be back in the world of Scream. We immediately shift to our protagonist: Neve Campbell back again in the spotlight as Sidney Prescott, of course. And while it makes sense -- indeed, easily could have been the character's development far sooner -- it's pretty damn cool to see her as a mother whose daughter is now being threatened by the horrors plaguing her life. Sid is a bit too strict and cold for my preference, but Campbell plays mama bear with a firm rigidity that hearkens to Jamie Lee Curtis's Laurie Strode in her final three Halloween titles. The difference is that Sid seems to not want to deal with Tatum as a burgeoning adult; she won't talk about sex with her daughter specifically, though she's aware of Tatum sneaking boys into her room. Even Tatum's name suggests a curious choice from her mother; similarly, Williams kept Mark as the name of Sid's husband (after being mentioned briefly before), but for some inexplicable and infuriating reason, it's not Mark Kincaid (Patrick Dempsey) but rather Mark Evans (Joel McHale), who is coincidentally the police chief. It's just an insulting switch for fans, not least because McHale plays Mark as kind of creepy.

Thankfully, Williams seems aware that, if we're not continuing the same story from Scream 6, we probably don't care about the plot. So he doesn't focus on character development for legacy folks. Instead, he launches into a series of solidly entertaining kills with enough intrigue around each to propel the whodunnit mystery forward. There's a stylish and memorable theatre kill, though one any theatre artist will decry as being outrageous; it's gotta be one of the most unsafe tech rehearsals ever, with a terrible teacher and stage manager. Soon after, there's a brutal, intense Ghostface attack in Sid's home. By this point, the film has revealed that it's playing things safe: this is a run-of-the-mill slasher whodunnit with characters we love. I don't hate that; frankly, if the worst this franchise can do is spin an entertaining variation on familiar ideas, I'll take it any day over more than half the shlock pumped direct to streaming. Yet, as a fan who knows what Williamson and this series is capable of, it's disappointing to see them not taking bigger risks. Even the cinematography feels more like something out of the classic Weinstein Company catalog than something from Dimension; bland, amber lighting and too much unnecessary editing sap what should be a dynamic vision of shadow and LED while forcing us to exist in real time and space with visceral kills.

Unfortunately, the cast of characters assembled here feel both rote and archetypal at this point, and none are given much opportunity to shine. Their collective energy simply doesn't electrify us, even as they discuss Important Themes like AI and societal collapse; unfortunately, it all feels a bit "too little, too late," not unlike listening to an old man complain about his 2020 election results six years after the fact. When Gale finally shows up -- looking fabulous, as usual -- she's joined by the two Meekses, Chad and Mindy, who are a breath of fresh air in this film. Weird as it is to see them without the other half of their "Core Four," Jasmin Savoy Brown and Mason Gooding are as likable and endearing as ever, even if their reasoning for working with Gale is murky at best. All together, the heroes set the metafictional stage for us: Trauma is their life. Actually, once the killers are revealed, one of them literally says that to Sid, in the film's most glaring move into metafiction. And what trauma! Much like in the previous two films, these kids are brutalized in this film; Mark, who I would have been fine to see go in favor of the real Mark coming back into Sid's life, inexplicably survives.

While I liked the killer's use of AI to literalize "ghost faces" of previous Ghostfaces, I wish Williamson had leaned into it more. These films work because they are timely and state-of-the-art, bound by the technology of their setting. But Williamson shies away from it, instead trying to make a connection between new tech and old memories; I don't think it works to have nostalgia be a driving force for a film in this franchise. Yet moments of nostalgia that could only speak to real fans do land well. I'm thinking of Sid finally allowing Gale to interview her, including Roman in the lineup of killers, and the legitimately terrifying slow-mo reveal of the second killer, all of which are not really meant to gain new fans but are very much geared to satisfy longtime fans.

Yet the idea of self-help being a gateway to insanity and murder is so tasty that I cannot deny loving this movie. I love the fun whodunnit, the occasional grisly spectacle, the genuinely scary knives-behind-every-door suspense. And I love that this franchise just keeps going.