The Night of the Hunter (1955)

I don't think this is as good a movie as it is now often made out to be and tend to agree with 1955 appraisals when it failed at the box office: a clearly ambitious but patchy first (and last) attempt at directing by Charles Laughton, full of shots at theatrical profundity - biblical stories, playbox sets, so many long quiet animal shots, pantomime, and nursery rhyme/fairy tale flourishes - awkwardly thrown in with a chilling serial killer story, an icy cold Robert Mitchum as the charlatan pastor, and a sense once it's over that it was all an elaborate but odd little affair.

★★★☆☆

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The Haunting (1963)

I count Shirley Jackson's book as the most anxiety-inducing one I've ever read, and this adaptation does a pretty good job recreating that uneasy world, but Eleanor's dreamy, internal monologue drove the book and revealed her often magical thinking about the paranormal investigation she finds herself a part of at the living, breathing, evil Hill House, and of course this movie truncates all that into something more prosaic and manageable, and strongly suggests a love triangle that certainly wasn't in the arguably lesbian-leaning book, in order, I suppose, to be less psychological, more tangible. 

★★★★☆

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28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026)

I started to wonder why I was being asked to watch the gruesome Manson Family/Funny Games goings-on of a faction of blond-wig weirdos, a cult that has formed and evolved some time during the twenty-eight years since the outbreak of the Rage virus - the cult we glimpsed at the end of 28 Years Later (2025) - and thought perhaps my interest in this dystopia was finally, completely depleted, but then, with an outrageous thrash metal film clip and a hark back to earlier forgotten scenes, the core thesis of this fourth movie in Danny Boyle's always unexpected series brings everything together, and when the film ends with even more loose threads from three previous films being reintroduced, I found I'd signed back on, ready for number five.

★★★★☆

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Project Hail Mary (2025)

There aren't many comedians in the world today who are funny without being equally annoying, but somehow Ryan Gosling - strictly speaking, not a comedian at all - manages to be hilarious and likeable and not even slightly annoying, and having watched him here playing a science teacher tasked with saving the world in this scifi adventure based on a book by Andy Weir (who also wrote the thematically similar but more earnest The Martian), I was compelled afterwards to google a list of Gosling movies to see if the actor has ever put a foot wrong.

★★★★★

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28 Years Later (2025)

It stands to reason that 28 years after the outbreak of the Rage virus, knowledge of the virus has advanced and survivors can now differentiate between the slow, the fast, and the alphas among the virus-affected, and we are suddenly confronted with the idea, too, that these creatures procreate, and on the human side, rituals have evolved and taken root - in young Spike's island safe haven, for example (his brutal rite of passage makes up the bulk of this episode) - and Ralph Fiennes' newly introduced, possibly mad doctor has obviously been working hard on an astonishing, inexplicable "bone temple", but some of this 28-year-old world into which we are suddenly thrust - remember, we were just "twenty-eight weeks later" the last time we checked -  starts to strain credulity, even under the direction of returning Danny Boyle - and starts to strain the actors' ability to deadpan their lines, too.

★★★★☆

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