28 Years Later sequel keeps you on edge, Springsteen biopic tells intimate album origin story

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (R21)

109 minutes, opens on Jan 15
★★★★☆

The story: The genre-defining post-apocalyptic film series continues thrillingly. Ralph Fiennes returns as Dr Kelson to seek a cure for the Rage Virus that has devastated Great Britain, while boy hero Spike (Alfie Williams) falls in with some very bad company.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is the second film in a planned trilogy sequel to 28 Days Later (2003) and 28 Weeks Later (2007) by British director-screenwriter duo Danny Boyle and Alex Garland.

Hollywood’s Nia DaCosta (The Marvels, 2023) has stepped in for Boyle for this instalment and turned the ever-expanding dystopian world into Spike’s intimate, and terrifying, loss-of-innocence passage.

The 12-year-old, since leaving home in the earlier 28 Years Later (2025), has been forcibly inducted into the psychotic cult of Sir Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell). The self-styled Son of Satan leads his seven acolytes – all named Jimmy – on a campaign of sadism across the mainland.

Death by flaying is their favoured sport.

They have become humans’ greatest fear, more so than the infected, of whom there is mainly the solitary alpha Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry).

Even then, Samson is beginning a stunning reversal as this zombie horror franchise again reinvents conventions until it is no longer about zombies but a search for community and communion amid society’s desolation. The Jimmys have their twisted tribalism, which Spike is desperate to escape, and Samson has fostered a relationship with the good doctor Kelson that is reawakening his intelligence. How will their twin narratives of savagery and compassion converge?

The movie keeps viewers on edge through its every – occasionally, improbably humorous – minute. It climaxes with Kelson blasting an Iron Maiden heavy metal banger in a dance of poetry and madness, and Fiennes is literally on fire.

Hot take: One eagerly anticipates the concluding chapter, to be directed by Boyle.

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere (NC16)

119 minutes, available on Disney+ from Jan 23
★★★☆☆

The story: From The Bear (2022 to present) to The Boss, Jeremy Allen White plays American rock legend Bruce Springsteen over two life-altering years, conceptualising his radical 1982 album Nebraska amid an intensifying depression.

Anyone coming to this biopic for a head-bopping jukebox musical will be as disappointed as the Columbia Records executives, back in 1981.

Springsteen was 31, a burgeoning superstar high off the triumph of The River Tour. The moneymen wanted more hits.

Haunted by black-and-white childhood flashbacks of his abusive father (Stephen Graham), the ambivalent celebrity instead retreats to a rented house near his old New Jersey neighbourhood. There, he produces on a four-track home recorder a stark acoustic demo cassette of songs about outlaws and vagrants.

The decidedly uncommercial Nebraska has come to be regarded as a defining artistic statement.

“It’s like he’s channelling something deeply personal and dark,” his manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong) very helpfully says.

Writer-director Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart, 2009; Black Mass, 2015), in adapting Warren Zanes’ 2023 same-titled non-fiction book, has set himself the challenge of filming an artiste’s interiorised, unfilmable creative crises and inner demons.

Landau must therefore annotate the obvious, while White broods in Springsteen’s plaid flannel shirts.

White is fortunately capable of more than even doing all of his own singing. He conveys his character’s crushing melancholy, fleeing a relationship with a local waitress (Odessa Young) and just barely rescued from self-destruction by a loyal Landau.

The actor plays Springsteen, the myth, as a mood in an album origin story. The outcome, whatever its limitations, is affecting and admirable for resisting the rise-and-fall template of a show-business biopic.

Hot take: Spare and intimate, this is the B-side to the voluminous biographies already available on the musician.