28 Weeks Later (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, 2007)

Horror franchises where the first part had something new to offer are more unkillable than zombies, so more zombies is what we get. The US military has taken over Britain, presuming that the rage virus has finally been eradicated, except of course there'd be no film without it. Cue large chunks of London being laid to waste and mass slaughter of innocents, so the real enemy is actually 'shoot first' American foreign policy, which funnily enough makes more sense now than it did when the film was released in 2007. The gruesome action is, of course, relentless, so chaotically shot that anything could be happening for all you know, and there's virtually no attention paid to the geography of the city, location scouting apparently having been done by a particularly clueless American tourist with a checklist of landmarks. It is still a riveting ride, but that's the basic minimum you could expect, and it depressingly closes on a final shot promising a worldwide continuation of the menace, and therefore a sequel.

4/10

The Old Guard 2 (Victoria Mahoney, 2025)

How prescient Lulu's 1969 Eurovision winner, Boom-Bang-a-Bang was, when it comes to dealing with action film sequels. Because that's what so many of them do, just add more booms and bangs to their predecessors. The Old Guard was a product that really didn't deserve a continuation, being a pot of ripped-off ideas, mainly from Highlander, but apparently that wasn't enough to stand in the way of milking a cash cow for more. So, Charlize Theron and her crew of immortals must foil the plot of the first ever immortal to kill them all, and this naturally means lots and lots of gunplay and the standard unfeasible martial arts. Sure, the action sequences are competently constructed, but take them away and there's really nothing left.

4/10

Altered Hours (Bruce Wemple, 2018)

An insomniac on a regular cocktail of drugs takes a new one as a cure. Instead, it sends his consciousness into an even more fragmented state, eventually resulting in him time-travelling involuntarily across the course of recent past and future days. His attempts to fix a catastrophic outcome that has already happened and will happen are hampered by his lack of control over the jumps in time.

There's the seed of an idea here, but the genre of time travel has to be treated with scrupulous attention to detail and internal logic, and Altered Hours fails badly on this count. There's drama, including some vague ambitions to draw parallels between the protagonist's situation and class A drug addiction, but scarcely any cohesion, and so the end result is a rather hopeless mess.

4/10

Anti Matter (Keir Burrows, 2016)

A PhD student at Oxford stumbles across a technology to transport matter across space, utilising a wormhole. As these things so often go, of course soon it isn't enough to experiment only with marbles and mice, so she sends herself through, and the consequences prove to be dire. She finds herself unable to form new memories and suffers from constant hallucinatory flashes of people and events, leading to a state of paranoia as she tries to make sense of what's happening.

It would not be giving too much away to say that the director has obviously swallowed Timecrimes and The Prestige whole. Still, the twists he introduces to these forebears are interesting enough.

5/10

The Menu (Mark Mylod, 2022)

It would be somewhat simplistic to label this a comedy horror film, being rather an extremely dark satire, its target the ridiculous superficiality of nouvelle cuisine and its moneyed consumers. A soft target, of course, but it's attacked with some panache, through the assault of the sociopathically obsessive chef Julian Slowik, played chillingly by Ralph Fiennes, on the palates, and eventually the bodies, of the guests at his island restaurant.

The likes of Heston Blumenthal might choose to take umbrage, or alternatively feel some sympathy with the character, who sees himself as an artist forced to serve an unappreciative audience. In any case, the script is à point, and even though you can see that the situation will only deteriorate, it contains enough sharp turns and twists to satisfy.

7/10

Captain America: Brave New World (Julius Onah, 2025)

By now, it would be safe to say that the only things to survive an apocalypse would be cockroaches and the MCU film series, except I'm not sure about the former. Production #35 is a largely pointless affair, even in dramatic terms, never mind blowing at least $300 million on tedious, unimaginative FX sequences.

The meagre plot to hang all of that on involves Harrison Ford's U.S. President trying to broker some sort of crudely conceptualised world peace deal and a man, who he kept locked up for years to do his dirty work, now out to bring him down through mind-controlled agents. Amongst all of that, Anthony Mackie's new Cap flies around a lot and throws his MacGuffin shield though impossible trajectories at hordes of goons, only pausing briefly to deliver a few homilies.

It's unlikely the makers ever grasped the irony of the title, in that it serves as an ironic warning of a terrible future to come.

4/10

The Salt Path (Marianne Elliott, 2024)

Based on Raynor Winn's autobiographical book, The Salt Path sees the estimable Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs take on the roles of Winn and her husband, who has been diagnosed with a rare and fatal cerebral disorder. Just to compound their troubles, he has just lost a legal battle and through that, they've been evicted from their house. No room for self-pity for the couple, though, so they set out on an unfeasibly long 630-mile walk along the topographically rather challenging coastline of South West England, eating little but packet noodles and sleeping in a tent. Somehow, after a very shaky start, her husband grows stronger and naturally the change of environment and encounters with other people on the way, ranging from the unwelcoming to the very hospitable or just plain odd, are attributed with the improvement.

This might otherwise be taken as just the usual cinematic licence, but while there are, of course, some obvious interludes, emphases and lines added for dramatic or comic effect, it's clear that the bare bones of the story are fundamentally things as they happened. So neither does it wander far into melodrama or sickly sweetness, as too many films dealing with terminal illness do, and the empathic performances of Anderson and Isaacs play a large part in ensuring this.

7/10