28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (Nia Dacosta, 2026)

The numbing of the beast

Saw The Bone Temple and thought it far better than the first movie. No, I'll go further: in my book the best by far 28...Later movie to date. No, I'll go even further; best film of the entire franchise, and yes I haven't seen the as yet nonexistent third installment-- calling it here and now, a year or so early. 

No-- backtrack. I'll go even further than that: Bone Temple is the first movie in the entire franchise that I actually like. 

Civil War (Alex Garland, 2024)

This means war

Alex Garland's Civil War is set in the near future (from Max Headroom: "20 minutes into the future") but traces its roots to the recent past, particularly films on journalists or photojournalists wading into war zones trying to catch the story: Under Fire, The Year of Living Dangerously, The Killing Fields, Salvador.

Annihilation (Alex Garland)

Affliction

Meteor flashes across the sky strikes base of lighthouse; Special Forces husband presents himself to wife after an absence of two years; heavily armed scientific expedition walks into the light-and-time distorting perimeter of a jungle afflicted by a mysterious alien force, the twelfth such effort after the previous eleven (save for one notable survivor--the aforementioned Special Forces soldier) failed to return. 

Ladies and gentlemen welcome to Alex Garland's second feature--a loose adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer's novel that is if anything more bizarre and ruinously ambitious than his first (the wicked sexy Ex Machina).