28 Years Later: The Bone Temple review – Ralph Fiennes is phenomenal in best chapter yet of zombie horror

A murderous Clockwork-Orangey gang take on the zombies in this gruesome and energised fourquel. It’s the finest of the 28 franchise by a blood-curdling mile It’s very rare for a fourquel to be the best film in a franchise, but that’s how things stand with the chequered 28 Days Later series. In this one, which follows immediately on from the previous episode, 28 Years Later , Ralph Fiennes and Jack O’Connell bring pure death-metal craziness. There is real energy and drama in this latest iteration of the post-apocalyptic zombie horror-thriller saga, created by director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland back in 2003, with Nia DaCosta taking over directing duties for this film. Fiennes’s dance to Iron Maiden’s The Number of the Beast is basically one of the most extraordinary moments of his career. At the screening I attended, we were on our feet, looking for a speaker bin to headbang into. The band surely has to rerelease this track with Fiennes’s performance as a new official v...

Rojek review – unsettlingly intimate portraits of Islamic State militants

Documentary collects sequence of interviews with prisoners, not all repentant, alongside footage of war-blasted Syrian Kurdistan

Here is an astringent, devastating and truly extraordinary film that is hard work to watch, but entirely worth it. Rojek probes the roots and fallen leaves of the Syrian civil war, a conflict the western media has practically forgotten as news of Ukraine and Gaza-Israel-Yemen dominates international reporting. Director Zayne Akyol, heard off-camera throughout, interviews members of Islamic State, now being held in high security prisons by the Syrian Democratic Forces, about their lives, with some recalling more innocent days when they hunted goldfinches to sell in markets or liked Canadian pop music. Many recount how they were recruited into IS by cells in local mosques in assorted countries – Germany, say, or Saudi Arabia – and came to have positions both high-ranking and menial in the organisation in the part of Syria with a dense Kurdish population.

In the film’s present, some are still unrepentant, believers that they fought honourably in a holy war; others see things differently and are riven with regrets. Some are women who recall their time of service to IS as the happiest days of their lives. In stately procession, each person speaks straight to the camera in almost disconcerting closeup, and however repugnant some of the things they say might be, it’s impossible to not recognise and see most of them as broken human beings.

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