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Another week, another set of recommendations. This time around, we have a really gnarly movie about child death, a slightly less gnarly movie about child death, and a TV series about a child who comes close to death. Sorry! I don’t make the movies and shows, I just watch ’em. And, uh, I guess tell you to do the same. 

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (January 16)

This followup to Danny Boyle’s frightening, strange, melancholic meditation on a Britain lost to history, does, in some ways, take a more straightforward route than its 2025 predecessor. Director Nia DaCosta doesn’t intersperse her film with footage of old movies, nor does she ever conjure up an abstractly star-lit night sky that looks as if the heavens are opening up to swallow the world. But this is still a weird creation, and an incredibly violent one. Maybe the weirdest thing about The Bone Temple is that it’s not exactly a horror movie? Horrific things certainly happen in it, but it’s more of a cramped, brutal thriller of faith than a jump-scare riot of dread. 

The film picks up pretty much immediately where last year’s movie ended, with young Spike (Alfie Williams) now in the hands of a nefarious band of bewigged, Jimmy Saville-styled urchins led by Jack O’Connell’s Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal, a lo-fi British cousin of a Mad Max villain. O’Connell is on a real bad-guy hot streak right now, and while Sir Lord’s mythology may strain credibility, he nonetheless looms over the film with effectively grimy menace. 

If he’s the devil, then maybe Ralph Fiennes’s Dr. Ian is something like God. Or, at least, he’s a kind of savior, spending much of Bone Temple trying to tease the humanity back out of one of the infected, a hulking brute named Samson—whom we met, quite nudely, in the last film. These two plot lines are kept separate for much of the film, and one craves a bit more momentum as the stories gradually converge. But screenwriter Alex Garland maybe figured that we’ve had plenty of relentless 28 movies and wanted this one to instead be a gruesome, just-shy-of-nihilistic slow burn. It works, despite its excesses. Or because of them? 

Bone Temple is so far afield of the original 28 Days Later that it’s almost a stretch to call the two films part of the same franchise—or, at least, of the same narrative. But DaCosta’s baroquely grotesque and disarmingly funny film is plenty alluring on its own idiosyncratic terms. It left me both energized and deeply bummed out, a curious mix of emotions that feels somewhat appropriate to our times. 

Hamnet (expanding January 16)

I recently saw this movie for a second time, because we’re talking about it on the Critical Darlings podcast this week (listen!!!). And because I wanted to see if my reaction to the movie would be different outside the bubble of a festival (where I first saw it) and in light of all the recent backlash against it, chiefly the accusations that Jessie Buckley and Chloé Zhao singlehandedly did 9/11 in order to win Oscars. 

And I mostly… feel the same as I did the first time? Sorry to be boring, but I still think it’s a nicely shot if overwrought and occasionally twee period drama until its last few minutes, which are exquisite. Not really for what they say about Aggie and Bill Shakespeare, but how they depict the spark of art, the flashpoint at which a deeply personal thing is suddenly made universal. That’s the real wallop of the movie’s ending, the way it illustrates that transference in real time. Much as I do care about that nice little kid and his parents, I am far more moved by the idea that we are witnessing one possible way that Hamlet, or any enduring art, might have played at its birth. 

So, yes, if you finally have the opportunity to see this movie in a theater, now that its release has expanded, do that and then assess for yourself whether or not Paul Mescal and Maggie O’Farrell did, in fact, invade Venezuela in order to secure the Golden Globe for best drama or whatever people are mad at this movie for doing. 

A Private Life (limited theaters)

Jodie Foster speaks French for almost the entirety of this Cannes curio from director Rebecca Zlotowski. That, I think, is reason enough to go see the movie if it’s playing near you and you have the disposable income. Foster’s recent career reemergence has been fascinating and fitfully fruitful. This is perhaps the most fascinating and most fitfully fruitful part of that project to date. A sort of murder mystery about a psychoanalyst trying to figure out what happened to a patient, A Private Life is mostly a bizarre Woody Allen pastiche that might play like crazy if you’re fluent in French, but the comedy does not translate to what I saw in the English subtitles. But, again, Jodie Foster is in a French murder mystery and that’s not nothing. 

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (HBO, January 18)

I realize it’s annoying to suggest that you, discerning readers, should watch a second spin-off of Game of Thrones. Because you are too sophisticated for such franchisery, and because the first GoT spin-off, House of the Dragon, is such an erratic, fan-service mess. But hear me out!

This GoT offshoot is actually really good? It’s small (half-hour episodes! And only six of them!) and thoughtful, and textured, and refreshingly humane. It’s a testament to the wisdom of taking a big thing like the world of GoT and exploring only a specific, meaningful corner of it, rather than trying to go for maximum sprawl. Credit, of course, goes to the forever delinquent George R.R. Martin for his novella, from which this show is adapted. But perhaps more credit to creator Ira Parker, who fills his series with individual life and detail and never tries to make his humble project anything more sweeping than it ought to be. 

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms stars a winning Peter Claffley as Dunk, the big, dumb (but not actually that dumb) squire for a lowly hedge knight who, upon his master’s death, pretends he’s been made a knight himself. He teams up with a frail and mysterious little boy, Egg (the eerily poised Dexter Sol Ansell), and the two head off to a jousting tourney. That is essentially the whole plot of the season, misfits trying to show the doubters and snobs in their pseudo-medieval ecosystem that they count for something. 

It’s rather poignant, and when it is all tethered to the broader mythology of Westeros, that’s done so with a whispery delicacy. A Knight of the Seven Kingdom evokes the ambient hum of history, of era tumbling into era—which is the most captivating element of Martin’s books—perhaps better than anything else in the GoT television universe. Give it a shot! I think it might even play well for those of you who’ve never seen a second of anything Game of Thrones related.  

Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials (Netflix, January 15) 

I went into this wanting something very sophisticated, and this three-part miniseries starts as such. It’s the 1920s and there’s an English estate and tart banter and Helena Bonham Carter being droll and sardonic. The mystery, a murder most foul disrupting a happy occasion, initially seems like a pleasingly knotty, head-scratchy affair, tied to some sort of global espionage. 

And, well, it is that. But it’s also pretty easy to solve, save for one lugubrious twist. And the wit of the series dulls some as things turn silly and antic. But the series looks nice throughout, and lead Mia McKenna-Bruce is a spritely heroine befitting of the Christie mantle. It’s a three-hour lark, this series, which showcases some lovely countryside and crisp fashions and not too terrible CGI renderings of Roaring London. I had a nice afternoon with it, and didn’t even mind when it so egregiously sets itself up to become an ongoing anthology. I’d turn the dial to it again.