Tuesday new releases: 20 January 2026

Last year’s restart of the 28 Days Later story, 28 Years Later could be read from some angles as an allegory for Brexit — a lonely Britain, for­cibly isol­ated from the rest of the world because of its poor choices. If the mor­al of 28 Days Later was “Be care­ful what you wish for” then the new instal­ment, The Bone Temple, could be say­ing, “Be care­ful what you pray for.”

Nia DaCosta (The Marvels, Hedda) takes over the director’s chair from Danny Boyle for this epis­ode but Alex Garland (Civil War, Warfare, The Beach) remains firmly in con­trol of the screenplay.

The film starts imme­di­ately after the con­clu­sion of the pre­vi­ous one — and like Avatar: Fire and Ash it offers zero con­ces­sions to audi­ence mem­bers who didn’t see its pre­de­cessor¹ — as brave young Spike (Alfie Williams) has been cap­tured by the Jimmies gang and is under­go­ing an ini­ti­ation of sorts. Led by Sir Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell), the Jimmies are unin­fec­ted by the vir­us but totally infec­ted by the trauma, mod­el­ling them­selves on the most evil Englishman of the 20^th cen­tury, (Sir) Jimmy Savile. There can be only sev­en Jimmies so Spike can only sur­vive this encounter by end­ing one of the oth­ers, some­thing that as an 11-year-old he is ill-equipped to do.

A stroke of luck inter­venes and Spike unwill­ingly joins the Jimmies on their ram­page across Northumberland, even­tu­ally com­ing across the kind and decent Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes, who we met in the pre­vi­ous film) and his remark­able ossuary. With the help of prodi­gious amounts of opi­ates, Kelson has man­aged to befriend one of the infec­ted — a giant ‘alpha’ who he names Samson — and is learn­ing some­thing about the vir­us that was pre­vi­ously undis­covered².

To save him­self — and his research — from Crystal, Kelson must take on a kind of role play to hood­wink the rest of the Jimmies but Crystal’s pos­i­tion is also at risk without this pact with “the Devil”.

There are sequences in The Bone Temple that are so grue­some that even hardened genre fans have reportedly had to leave the aud­it­or­i­um but I man­aged to shield my eyes from the worst of it. (I don’t want to spec­u­late on what goes on in Garland’s head but I can say that the most dis­turb­ing film I’ve seen in the last ten years is his Men³.)

But The Bone Temple has green shoots of optim­ism about it, sug­gest­ing that while sup­posedly healthy humans can be cap­able of as much destruc­tion as the infec­ted, there might be enough of the good ones still left to see us through.

Chloé Zhao’s adapt­a­tion of Maggie Farrell’s best­selling nov­el Hamnet has divided crit­ics and audi­ences. There’s a ‘love it’ or ‘hate it’ scen­ario out there so I I’m a bit out of step when I con­fess to not feel­ing very much at all.

My biggest prob­lem isn’t with the heavy emo­tion­al pull of the grief inflic­ted on its char­ac­ters — thanks to leads Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, I found those depths to be hon­est and believ­able. My prob­lems are more to do with not being in much agree­ment with the intel­lec­tu­al thes­is of the film — that the death of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway’s son, Hamnet at a young age promp­ted the play­wright to pro­duce the greatest play in the English lan­guage (if not the whole world).

And it’s not even that I don’t agree with the thes­is neces­sar­ily, it’s that the film fails to make an adequate case for it, requir­ing a wil­ful mis­read­ing of Hamlet the play in order to make it a treat­ise on a spe­cif­ic loss while the play ends with a stage strewn with unmourned corpses⁴.

There’s some­thing mov­ing about using fic­tion as a tool to help a loved one move through the bardo to the next place, and to give com­fort to those left behind but this is not the play that does that.

Younger read­ers might know Don McGlashan only as the hero who told Chris Bishop to “Shut up, you dick­head!” at the recent Aotearoa Music Awards, so they might be sur­prised to know that he’s been an influ­en­tial music artist in New Zealand for nearly 50 years. His story is told — in pretty straight­for­ward lin­ear fash­ion — in Shirley Horrocks’ doc­u­ment­ary, Anchor Me: The Don McGlashan Story.

It feels like an unne­ces­sary quibble to want a bit more drama out of a doc­u­ment­ary— Mr. McGlashan has led a mostly happy life, burn­ing few-to-no bridges in the pro­cess, but he’s no less entitled to hav­ing his achieve­ments recor­ded because of that. He’s been a keen observ­er of pāke­hā New Zealand life, telling com­pel­ling stor­ies in song, and at his peak his ear for a catchy melody was unparalleled.

Josh O’Connor appears to be hav­ing the kind of career that Adam Driver had before he made it to full-blown movie star status. He’s work­ing a lot, with inter­est­ing dir­ect­ors, and show­cas­ing a con­sid­er­able tal­ent. (He’s also not con­ven­tion­ally good look­ing but I’m sure that’s just coincidence.)

In Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind he plays an unem­ployed cab­in­et maker in a sleepy Massachusetts town in 1970. With a breezy over­con­fid­ence com­bined with a lack of actu­al crim­in­al aptitude, he decides to steal some paint­ings from the loc­al muni­cip­al museum. From the begin­ning, things start to go wrong. He didn’t know that it was teach­er only day at the school so he has to look after his two sons. His get­away driver bails at the last minute so he has to take on the job him­self. And one of his accom­plices decides to start wav­ing a gun around dur­ing the day­time heist.

With no appar­ent plan for what to do with the paint­ings once he’d stolen them and the heat bear­ing down, he ends up split­ting on his fam­ily and going on the run. As he gets fur­ther into the interi­or of America, real-life con­cerns, espe­cially the Vietnam War, start to make them­selves known.

Indeed, I think of The Mastermind as an allegory for America in that peri­od, get­ting involved in ille­git­im­ate adven­tures with no plan for the after­math — sev­er­al people to say to O’Connor’s char­ac­ter dur­ing the film, “You didn’t really think this through, did you?” — but his sense of enti­tle­ment and self-actuation trumps the pos­sib­il­ity of good decision mak­ing⁵.

The Rip is an enter­tain­ing cop drama from writer/director Joe Carnahan but its biggest impact should be as a state of the art demon­stra­tion of Netflix’s DolbyVision and Dolby Atmos tech­no­lo­gies. Shot mostly at night, I’ve seen people com­plain­ing about how dark it is, but if you have a DolbyVision-enabled screen you’ll catch everything in the shad­ows and the col­ours will pop superbly. And if you have enough speak­ers the first big shootout will have you duck­ing for cov­er as the bul­lets fly all around you. I’m a big pro­ponent of phys­ic­al media — as you know — but I can’t ima­gine a UHD disc look­ing and sound­ing any bet­ter than this.

Oh, the film? Matt Damon and Ben Affleck play cyn­ic­al Florida cops who are tipped off to a vast amount of money behind the dry­wall of a sub­urb­an house. The rules say they have to count it then and there and hand it over to their bosses. But what if, you know, you just didn’t? Somebody in their team is a snitch — and it could be either of those two — and they have to find the rat and decide what to do with the money before the Cartel comes look­ing for them.

Solid, but alto­geth­er too much swear­ing. Maybe you shouldn’t use it as a demo then …

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1. I’m not sure about the strategy here. If, say, 15% of the people who watched the last film didn’t enjoy it and you aren’t going to pick up anoth­er 15% of new audi­ence to replace them because you make no con­ces­sions for them, aren’t you guar­an­tee­ing a smal­ler box office than before? Or does word of mouth grow the whole fran­chise over the long haul? ↩︎
2. It won’t hap­pen because The Bone Temple is a genre movie and it’s being released too early in the year to be remembered in a years time, but Fiennes abso­lutely deserves some awards recog­ni­tion. ↩︎
3. Men wasn’t a film that I ever felt up to review­ing — des­pite its hold on my psyche — as I couldn’t ima­gine any of my read­ers, listen­ers, friends or rela­tions will­ingly put­ting them­selves through it. ↩︎
4. The pro­duc­tion of the play in the film — open­ing night of the première sea­son appar­ently — does what so many oth­er pro­duc­tions have done which is to treat Fortinbras as an incon­veni­ence and ignore him alto­geth­er. ↩︎
5. I liked the film a lot but the editor-in-chief has very low tol­er­ance for char­ac­ters who are unable to see or do what’s best for them­selves. ↩︎