Tag Archives: Ralph Fiennes

Jan 14 2026
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Movie Reviews

Movie Review: “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple”

Ralph Fiennes rocks out in fourth installment of post-apocalyptic survivalist fear-fest freakshow

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
Starring Ralph Fiennes, Jack O’Connell, Alfie Williams, Erin Kellyman & Chi Lewis-Parry
Directed bt Nia DaCosta
Rated R

In theaters Friday, Jan. 16

Oh, how the days become weeks, and the weeks become years. As in life, that’s what happened with director Danny Boyle’s high-octane 2002 post-apocalyptic horror thriller 28 Days Later, about a rage-inducing virus that brings about complete societal collapse and turns the infected into ghoulish mobs of flesh gobblers.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is the fourth in the franchise, and new director Nia DaCosta certainly picks up the bloody baton and runs with it. Lauded British actor Ralph Fiennes reprises his role as Dr. Ian Kelson, a former physician now memorizing victims of the epidemic with a “temple” made from their bones. Things are complicated by the Jimmys, a Teletubbies-loving cult-like crew of survivors known for their gleeful brutality, and wearing ratty blonde wigs to honor their namesake, the late British comedian Jimmy Saville. Led by the satanically sadistic psychopath Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell), they reminded me of the Droogs in another British film, Stanley Kubrick’s brilliantly unsettling A Clockwork Orange (1971), only a whole lot nastier.

Alfie Williams returns as a young boy, Spike, also connected to the previous storyline. Chi Lewis-Parry, a former MMA fighter, plays Samson, the—ahem—well-endowed infected pack leader who long ago lost the need for clothes. Can the good Dr. K soothe this savage beast with the calming balm of morphine? Erin Kellyman, so delightful as a college coed alongside June Squibb in Eleanor the Great, and Emma Laird from TV’s Mayor of Kingstown, both play members of the Jimmys. Cillian Murphy, who starred in the original movie, makes a late appearance that helps tie the whole four-film franchise together.

If you’re not already aboard the 28 Days train, you may feel a bit lost jumping on now—and unpleasantly jolted by the spurting blood, the spilling guts and an early scene in which a head gets yanked off, spinal cord and all. It’s all a stylishly bleak horror-show survivalist parable with spasms of explosive violence, a veneer of religious allegory and nods to the fragility of civilization and the human proclivity for self-destructive delusion—and how ‘80s music can survive any apocalypse. Come for the blood and guts, stay for the upside-down crucifixion and Ralph Fiennes rocking out to vintage Iron Maiden, pretending to be Satan and singing along to “The Number of the Beast.”

It won’t be everyone’s cup of mild-mannered movie tea for polite sipping, but if you’re looking to scratch a head-banging zombie itch with a big-screen toast from a goblet of plague-fest freakshow grog, get ready to rock with yet another tale of unhinged terror set in a gritty Brit-centric future that’s a million miles away from Downton Abbey.

—Neil Pond

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Feb 16 2016
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Humor, Movie Reviews

Hooray for Hollywood

Coen Brothers deliver a splendid spoof of movies’ golden era

Hail, Caesar!

Starring Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Scarlett Johansson & Alden Ehrenreich

Directed by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen

PG-13

“People don’t want facts—they want to believe!” says Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), a 1950s Hollywood studio “fixer” in the new Coen Brothers comedy Hail Caesar!, a sprawling, star-studded spoof of the golden age of moviemaking.

Josh Brolin

Josh Brolin

What people believe, and what they make-believe, are the building blocks of Hollywood itself. And they’re certainly the cornerstones of the Coens’ lavish, multi-tiered parody that takes satirical shape around the production of a fictional studio’s major new movie, Hail, Caesar!, A Tale of the Christ, a Bible-based saga a la Ben-Hur, Spartacus and The Robe.

When the film’s lunkheaded leading man, Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), is kidnapped, Mannix has to find him and get the money-train movie back on track.

But in the meantime, he’s also got his hands full with other problems, and other films. His job is keeping the machinery of Capitol Pictures Studios whirling, keeping its numerous stars in line and out of trouble, and keeping the whiff of scandal away from prying gossip columnists, particularly twin sisters Thora and Thessily Thacker (Tilda Swinton).

Scarlett Johansson

The studio’s twice-divorced “innocent” aqua-starlet (Scarlett Johansson) is pregnant with an out-of-wedlock child. Capitol’s prissy British prestige-picture director (Ralph Fiennes) is at wit’s end trying to wrangle the company’s riding, roping singing cowboy (Alden Ehrenreich) into more refined roles. And a tap-dancing song-and-dance hotshot (Channing Tatum) glides across the set of a new musical, but his light-on-his-feet moves may be hiding heavier secrets.

Look: There’s Jonah Hill, Frances McDormand and the guy (Wayne Knight) who played Newman in Seinfeld! Even if you don’t know anything about Hollywood’s “Red Scare,” you’ll still get a chuckle out of a boatload of Commies bobbing off the California coastline. And Alden Ehrenreich’s young sodbuster charming his studio-arranged dinner date (Veronica Osorio) by twirling a strand of spaghetti like a lariat will rope your heart, too.

Channing Tatum

Channing Tatum

For many viewers, the quirky movies of writer-director Joel and Ethan Coen have always been a bit of an acquired taste. Sure, most everybody now falls in line to applaud the genius of Fargo, No Country For Old Men, True Grit, The Big Lebowski and O Brother, Where Art Thou. But where was the box-office love for The Hudsucker Proxy, Barton Fink, The Man Who Wasn’t There and Inside Llewyn Davis?

There may be more commercially successful filmmakers, more mainstream filmmakers or filmmakers who win more awards. But you’d be hard-pressed to find many filmmakers who love movies, and making movies, more than the Coens. And that love is evident in every carefully crafted frame of this gloriously goofy homage to the glory days of big studios, big stars and the big wheels that churned out the spectacles of Hollywood’s dream factory from a bygone era.

While Hail, Caesar! is looking backward with such comedic affection, however, it’s also making a sly, playfully subversive statement about our “need” for entertainment, the importance of escapism and how movies have always been—and hopefully will always be—a “potion of balm for the ache of all mankind.”

“What a waste of talent,” a woman behind me groused as the credits rolled, somehow disappointed. Not me, and not a chance. Strike up another win for the Coens, I say. I’m a believer. Hooray for Hollywood, and “Hail, Caesar!”

—Neil Pond, Parade Magazine

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Nov 15 2015
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Movie Reviews, Movies

Bond is Back!

‘Spectre’ double-O dazzles with derring-do, action & emotional depth  

Spectre

Spectre

Starring Daniel Craig, Christoph Waltz and Lèa Seydoux

Directed by Sam Mendes

PG-13

 

James Bond, with his iconic “license to kill,” has never been a stranger to death. And in Spectre, the latest adventure of the world’s most famous secret agent, the prospect of mortality looms especially large. “The dead are alive,” a cryptic sentence, is the very first thing you see on the screen, just before the face of a gigantic skeleton in a Day of the Dead parade.

But as Bond (Daniel Craig) notes at one point, “Death and dying—it’s all a matter of perspective.” Spectre, the 24th movie since Dr. No began the Bond franchise in 1962, may reflect on the past and even gaze into the grave, but it’s vibrantly, expressively, emotionally alive and very much in step with today. Reuniting Craig with director Sam Mendes—his partner in the snap, crackle and pop of Skyfall in 2012—it begins with Bond going off the grid to wrap up some unfinished business just as the “double-O” espionage program headed by his boss, M (Ralph Fiennes), is in danger of being scrapped back in London.

Daniel CraigA crusading young British intelligence officer, C (Andrew Scott, Moriarty on TV’s Sherlock), wants to replace Bond and his “prehistoric” stalk-and-shoot derring-do with a new multi-national initiative, using global surveillance and drones to keep track of criminals—as well as everyone else.

“It’s the future,” C tells M. “And you’re not.”

M smells a big, worldwide rat, and so does Bond—and off he goes to track it down, to Mexico, Rome, Austria and the desert of North Africa, setting up some thrilling set pieces that up the ante on cinematic Bond moments. A dazzling 15-minute beaut of an opener begins as one ludicrously long, unbroken tracking shot (filmed by a drone!) down a street and into an alley, up and out of an elevator, into a hotel room, through a window and onto a rooftop—before climaxing in a building-toppling explosion, a frantic foot chase and a brutal hand-to-hand fight in an out-of-control helicopter dipping and diving over a crowded plaza filled with thousands of people.

Wow!

There’s a sleek nighttime car chase, an alpine pursuit with an airplane that becomes both a bobsled and a battering ram, and a brawl in a train so slam-bang intense you expect it to cause a derailment.

Christoph Waltz (left) and Leå Seydoux in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures/Columbia Pictures/EON Productions’ action adventure SPECTRE.

Christoph Waltz

Christoph Waltz plays a nefarious über-villain with a deep-rooted evil secret that haunts—and hurts—Bond in more ways that one. Former pro wrestler Dave Bautista (so memorable as the red-tattooed Drax in Guardians of the Galaxy) is a hulking wall of sneering, leering bad news—and only one teeny, tiny two-word line of dialogue.

Lea Seydoux

Lèa Seydoux

As the latest “Bond girl,” French actress Lèa Seydoux gives Bond pause for something “more important” than the sometime-vicious necessities of his job. Ben Whitslaw returns as nerdy gadget master Q, and Naomie Harris is back as Moneypenny, the office assistant who’s now become an invaluable assignment aide.

Will this, Craig’s fourth outing as James Bond, be his last, as rumored? Time will tell. Other spies come and go, but Bond—whoever portrays him—has been the standard for more than 50 years, and Spectre finds him in fine, full, clever, super-stylish, ultra-cool, death-dodging form, very much alive and well.

“It’s good to have you back, 007,” M tells him at one point, welcoming him home. Yes, it bloody well double-O is!

—Neil Pond, Parade Magazine

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