What has always fascinated me most about the zombie saga shepherded by director-producer Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland isn’t narrative cohesion so much as texture. 28 Days Later (2002), shot largely on DV, felt like a nightmare ripped straight from the subconscious—raw, abrasive, and invasive. 28 Years Later (2025) escalated that sensation into something formally audacious, blending multiple iPhones with an aggressively stretched 2.76:1 aspect ratio. Both films share the unmistakable visual stamp of cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, whose imagery carries a marrow-deep anxiety you don’t merely watch—you physically feel.

That’s why I tend to disengage when these films drift toward conventional storytelling. The more visually ordinary entries—28 Weeks Later (2007) and now 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple—test my patience precisely because they lack Mantle and Boyle’s feral immediacy. Compounding matters is my exhaustion with the current cinematic trend, inaugurated by the wildly overpraised Sinners, of Jack O’Connell playing flamboyant, cackling psychopaths. Here, he leads a Jimmy Savile-styled cult with anti-charisma to spare. I’ve praised O’Connell before—his work in Andrew Haigh’s criminally overlooked The North Water (2021) proves his depth—but The Bone Temple reduces him to repetitive, cartoonish menace.

Director Nia DaCosta, who already struggled to find footing with last year’s Hedda, seems similarly mismatched to the sadistic terrain of The Bone Temple. A centerpiece skin-flaying sequence lands with a thud, provoking equal parts revulsion and apathy. And yet, much like Hedda was redeemed by Nina Hoss, The Bone Temple is rescued by Ralph Fiennes. Reprising his role as the iodine-soaked, cheerfully deranged Dr. Kelson, Fiennes brings wit, menace, and a welcome unpredictability. His scenes taming the towering Alpha infected Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry) are the film’s most engaging stretches, culminating in a climactic Iron Maiden needle-drop that’s poorly staged but oddly exhilarating thanks to Fiennes’ total commitment to the bit. It’s the sort of moment that will linger with viewers long after they stumble upon the film again through Flixtor movies online.

A recent revisit to Cover-Up, Laura Poitras’s documentary tribute to journalist Seymour Hersh, only reinforced my mixed feelings about her work. Poitras often lets moral certainty calcify into self-congratulation, dulling the very fury that initially animates her films. Ethical complexity tends to be smoothed over, with the heavy lifting deferred to ominous ambient scores that sound like unused tracks from Nine Inch Nails’ Ghosts era.

That tendency feels especially glaring now when reconsidering Citizenfour (2014), given the ideological detours later taken by collaborator Glenn Greenwald. Ironically, it lends unintended depth to Risk (2016), where Julian Assange’s volatility—and Poitras’s own personal entanglements—become unavoidable elements of an already knotted text.

By contrast, Cover-Up is comparatively straightforward. Hersh, a longtime confidant of Poitras and co-director Mark Obenhaus, is treated less as a subject than as a respected colleague. His journalistic achievements—exposing My Lai and Abu Ghraib—are undeniably monumental. Yet when the film brushes against the messier corners of his life, from flawed research to self-destructive tendencies, the directors retreat rather than interrogate. The result is a respectful but overly cautious portrait that avoids the psychological and ethical thickets where the most interesting truths often reside.

Together, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple and Cover-Up exemplify a similar tension: both flirt with complexity, only to pull back when things get truly uncomfortable. One leans on a singular performance to elevate familiar apocalypse tropes; the other soft-pedals its subject’s contradictions in favor of admiration. Both are watchable, even compelling in flashes—but neither quite embraces the danger that once made their respective creators feel essential, whether encountered in a theater or rediscovered later via Flixtor movies online.