28 Anos Depois

Classy, arty, horror. Good enough for genre fans. Mature enough for grownups. More than enough.

If you feared Boyle and Garland might play it safe with their now-seemingly-precious IP, 28 Years Later sufficiently proves otherwise. There's enough creative gristle to chew on and more than enough to stoke curiosity for what's next.

I don't know that I was ever scared... but I was never bored. Danny Boyle knows how to do this stuff.

Even near the end, dwarfed by a tower of skulls, it is Comer whose wrenching performance gestures toward the monumental.

Young Fathers' score for 28 Years Later...is phenomenal...Sadly, nothing else is quite up to [its] level.

Before the movie began, I worried whether Boyle and Garland would be able to top themselves more than two decades after 28 Days Later; by the time it ended, I was laughing at just how fantastical and wild their efforts were.

Boyle and Garland refuse to play it safe and, by doing so, make 28 Years Later an essential piece of horror social commentary.

Acting opposite such powerhouses as Fiennes and the ever-excellent Comer, Williams delivers a vivid performance.

The tension between the film's outsized presentation and its intimate dramaturgy is real and bracing; it's an epic that grows increasingly overwhelming as it shrinks its field of view.

There's still enough flesh-rending and severed body parts to sate the average horror fan. More crucially, "28 Years Later" has enough meat on its bones to serve as more than just a warmup for the next installment.

Mr. Boyle has made more than his share of memorable films, but he has also delivered some stinkers and unfortunately his new one carries the fragrance of a zombie underarm.

Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland are back to make sure this third episode of their auteur-horror franchise provides scares and scenery in the right proportions to whet appetites for the rest of an already-planned trilogy. Consider mine whetted.

While Boyle's unmissable visual style is reason enough to catch "28 Years Later" in a theater, it's far from an earth-shattering experience.

It's an uneven mix of horror movie gnarliness and human melancholia that never finds even ground or a consistent tone, and may make viewers reel from genre whiplash.

Pitched between sputtering hope and despairing resignation, the movie is a classic boys-into-men coming-of-age story updated for the postapocalypse.

Just when we thought the life had gone out of the zombie movie, Boyle and Garland remind us that the genre is flexible enough to evolve alongside our own reality, and remains one of our most powerful cultural metaphors.

An arresting, sneakily emotional and wildly weird third installment in the franchise. Never has the near-annihilation of mankind felt so good.

Boyle and Garland are superb at building and releasing tension: just when you think you can't bear any more bloody entrails or sinewy detached spinal cords, they lighten the mood.

"Years" takes the plot down to the studs, returning it to its British roots and taking a stripped-down, almost punk-rock approach to the whole enterprise. This simply doesn't feel like a big-budget Hollywood movie.

It's a kooky spectacle, a movie that aggressively cuts from moments of philosophy to violence, from pathos to comedy. Tonally, it's an ungainly creature. From scene to scene, it lurches like the brain doesn't know what the body is doing.