Tuesday new releases: 20 January 2026
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, Hamnet and Anchor Me: The Don McGlashan Story are in cinemas, The Mastermind is a rental at AroVision (and others) and The Rip is streaming on Netflix.
Last year’s restart of the 28 Days Later story, 28 Years Later could be read from some angles as an allegory for Brexit — a lonely Britain, forcibly isolated from the rest of the world because of its poor choices. If the moral of 28 Days Later was “Be careful what you wish for” then the new instalment, The Bone Temple, could be saying, “Be careful what you pray for.”
Nia DaCosta (The Marvels, Hedda) takes over the director’s chair from Danny Boyle for this episode but Alex Garland (Civil War, Warfare, The Beach) remains firmly in control of the screenplay.
The film starts immediately after the conclusion of the previous one — and like Avatar: Fire and Ash it offers zero concessions to audience members who didn’t see its predecessor1 — as brave young Spike (Alfie Williams) has been captured by the Jimmies gang and is undergoing an initiation of sorts. Led by Sir Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell), the Jimmies are uninfected by the virus but totally infected by the trauma, modelling themselves on the most evil Englishman of the 20th century, (Sir) Jimmy Savile. There can be only seven Jimmies so Spike can only survive this encounter by ending one of the others, something that as an 11-year-old he is ill-equipped to do.
A stroke of luck intervenes and Spike unwillingly joins the Jimmies on their rampage across Northumberland, eventually coming across the kind and decent Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes, who we met in the previous film) and his remarkable ossuary. With the help of prodigious amounts of opiates, Kelson has managed to befriend one of the infected — a giant ‘alpha’ who he names Samson — and is learning something about the virus that was previously undiscovered2.
To save himself — and his research — from Crystal, Kelson must take on a kind of role play to hoodwink the rest of the Jimmies but Crystal’s position is also at risk without this pact with “the Devil”.
There are sequences in The Bone Temple that are so gruesome that even hardened genre fans have reportedly had to leave the auditorium but I managed to shield my eyes from the worst of it. (I don’t want to speculate on what goes on in Garland’s head but I can say that the most disturbing film I’ve seen in the last ten years is his Men3.)
But The Bone Temple has green shoots of optimism about it, suggesting that while supposedly healthy humans can be capable of as much destruction as the infected, there might be enough of the good ones still left to see us through.
Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie Farrell’s bestselling novel Hamnet has divided critics and audiences. There’s a ‘love it’ or ‘hate it’ scenario out there so I I’m a bit out of step when I confess to not feeling very much at all.
My biggest problem isn’t with the heavy emotional pull of the grief inflicted on its characters — thanks to leads Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, I found those depths to be honest and believable. My problems are more to do with not being in much agreement with the intellectual thesis of the film — that the death of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway’s son, Hamnet at a young age prompted the playwright to produce the greatest play in the English language (if not the whole world).
And it’s not even that I don’t agree with the thesis necessarily, it's that the film fails to make an adequate case for it, requiring a wilful misreading of Hamlet the play in order to make it a treatise on a specific loss while the play ends with a stage strewn with unmourned corpses4.
There’s something moving about using fiction as a tool to help a loved one move through the bardo to the next place, and to give comfort to those left behind but this is not the play that does that.
Younger readers might know Don McGlashan only as the hero who told Chris Bishop to “Shut up, you dickhead!” at the recent Aotearoa Music Awards, so they might be surprised to know that he’s been an influential music artist in New Zealand for nearly 50 years. His story is told — in pretty straightforward linear fashion — in Shirley Horrocks’ documentary, Anchor Me: The Don McGlashan Story.
