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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?