28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

I don't think I've seen Ralph Fiennes have this much fun since Harry Potter. Sitting on a throne of skulls, performing Satan himself to Iron Maiden's 'The Number of the Beast'—and somehow making you laugh and choke up simultaneously. He's so fragile, so unhinged, so profoundly human in that dance sequence that I found myself applauding in an empty room. Jack O'Connell's Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal is the most unsettling villain of the year. A twisted, apocalyptic refraction of a real-life child abuser. You feel both revulsion and pity—because he's also just a boy who lost his toys. But the performance that truly broke me was Chi Lewis-Parry's Samson. That hulking, barely-verbal creature, uttering the word 'moon'... No zombie film has ever taught me to grieve for a monster like this. Yes, the film is chaotic. Yes, its tone whiplashes from cartoonish to brutally grim. But maybe that's what the apocalypse actually feels like: never knowing when to laugh, when to weep.