#LastFourWatched (when I started): Malice '25, Jurassic World Rebirth, 40 Acres, and 28 Years Later

A thing that amused me, earlier this year, was AMC sending me a message about how the price for A-List would go on my next billing cycle but I'd get four movies a week, and then seeing them change the pre-screen ads to emphasize the laser projection. Were they going to have to change them again in a few weeks? So far, no, even though I've been able to do four a week for a month or so. I'm guessing they'll roll the upgrade out to current members first and then launch it later in the year or in 2026.

Obviously, they should do some sort of cross-promotions with Letterboxd's "#LastFourWatched" hashtag when they do. It just occurs to me that it should probably be "#LastFourWatchd", but maybe that's taking things too far.

Anyway, for various reasons, I wound up using them one-a-day for four days in a row this weekend/early week, and while there's almost a pattern - parents having kind of alarming attitudes toward their kids being in danger - Malice doesn't quite fit it. Also, surprisingly, the father in Jurassic World Rebirth comes across looking like a pretty good parent, all things considered, which is usually not the case when your decisions lead to your kids almost being eaten by dinosaurs!


E yi (Malice '25)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 5 July 2025 in AMC Causeway Street #5 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available), or pre-order the disc at Amazon

Malice (or E yi, to use its Mandarin name and avoid confusion with the Nicole Kidman/Alec Baldwin/Bill Pullman movie from 30-odd years ago) is a pretty good thriller with some interesting things to say until it becomes even more heavy-handed in its last act, and while this is the part where you might expect to ascribe that to Chinese censorship, I'd kind of expect something similar no matter what its origins were. Filmmakers everywhere are vulnerable to twist overload and scolding what media has evolved into since they got their start, after all.

It opens with a heck of a hook, though, as pediatric cancer patient Yu Jingjao (Yang Enyou) races through an eerily empty hospital at night, chased by nurse Li Yue (Chen Yusi), with Jingjing's foster mother Wu Yusie (Ting Mei) following them to the roof when she finds her daughter's room empty, arriving just in time to see them go over the wall. The official investigation of the incident will be led by Captain Liang Guan (Huang Xuan), but it's the work of his soon-to-be-ex-wife, journalist Ye Pan (Zhang Xiaofei) that will have the greatest impact on the case, as she and her team, notably intern Chen (Li Gengxi) post their own findings on Li Yue's lurid history in real time, feeding their website's colorful commentators who shape public opinion.

That opening is the most overtly stylish section of the movie, making it briefly look like a supernatural horror story or the climax of something with a serial killer, but it's soon revealed as something of an anomaly as the film cuts to Ye Pan delivering a lecture about journalistic ethics. That's more the filmmakers' speed for the rest of the movie, and that's not exactly a bad thing; with one of the folks who went off the roof dead and the other in a coma, more action would eliminate more possibilities than it would open, and for most of the movie, the big twists tend to do double duty: When a source caling himself "Lord Dao" (one of a number of cameos and special guest stars I'm not quite familiar enough with the recognize by name) appears on Ye Pan's live stream, it both upends what the audience knows and further highlights the recklessness of real-time journalism and "self-media", which is in many ways the real thing that the film's three credited writers and two credited directors want the audience to ponder as opposed to a murder mystery.

Unfortunately, the film is in some ways too efficient in its tight 100 minutes: Two prior related stories reported by Ye Pan are mentioned just enough to be tied together near the end, along with her crumbling marriage to Liang, and there's a sort of forced parallelism to it, where you can see how this reflecting that and that reflecting this is meant to tie the whole thing together, but so much of it being revealed in the homestretch means the writers' hands are too visible. It's only underlined by how, suddenly, characters are talking about who the "malicious woman" is, especially to non-Chinese ears; it's a phrase that sounds like a trope/attitude that the audience supposed to be familiar with but is so carefully underlined that I suspect it sounds heavy-handed even to the film's local audience.

It's frustrating, because one can see where the mystery story is clearly playing into the idea of the public's willingness to buy into the trope of the malicious woman and the media criticism looks like it fits the idea but maybe doesn't quite. Plus, both the mystery threads and the media criticism are pretty good until the filmmakers decide to stop the film dead with extra twists and lectures that make sure that both the audience and characters get what they're saying, and it's not even crashing in a way that implies censorship or regulation is necessary. Things are going well until the filmmakers suddenly seem to become confident in their bad instincts and timid about their good ones.


Jurassic World: Rebirth

* * * (out of four)
Seen 6 July 2025 in AMC Causeway Street #2 (first-run, RealD 3D laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available), or pre-order the disc at Amazon

When Jurassic World came out, there was an interview with director Colin Treverrow about how the idea behind it was "what if people got bored with dinosaurs?", and while it's not a bad idea, it's potentially poisonous if the filmmaker can't make a film that says this stuff is cool and exciting anyway. Treverrow, it turned out, wasn't the guy to do that; his two movies played out the premise but never gave the sense that he had an antidote for it. Gareth Edwards, working from a screenplay by returning writer David Koepp, seems to have a better handle on the whole thing, as well as a much better handle on what makes for a good adventure movie.

There are different sorts of tragedy in how this attitude manifests as the film opens: A flashback to how the need to engineer bigger and badder dinos has fatal results, a scene where a confused bronto that escaped from a New York City zoo is confused and dying in a modern world the climate and ecosystem are hostile (which also rolls back some of the prior film's unwieldy status quo), and the introduction of Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), who studied under Alan Grant and is kind of heartbroken to see how these creatures he loves no longer seem to inspire wonder. This could all be just world-building, necessary extrapolation to get from the previous six movies to a story about an expedition to another island where genetically-engineered dinosaurs have escaped containment, this time to recover DNA that may be crucial in creating human heart medication, but there's sadness here.

And that's a good thing; it's got the audience in the right mood as they're introduced to Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali as mercenaries who are too professional to wear their feelings about recently lost comrades on their sleeves, and kind of ready when Koepp and Edwards decide they are going to fight against it. The trailer may have featured a version of John Williams's music that was as slowed-down and lower-keyed as you'd expect by the time a series reaches a seventh film and is playing to people who take The Lore seriously, but it shows up in its full, bombastic glory surprisingly often when we arrive on the island, and there's a spot where one may be expecting an action scene but instead gets an earnest and mostly-successful attempt to recreate the awe provoked by the first movie, or a trip to a natural history museum with a dino skeleton.

And around that, Rebirth is a thoroughly capable adventure movie, occasionally catching one aback with how often other blockbusters often seem to strain for its basic competence. Edwards stages a couple of action sequences on boats really well, taking into account how they move and make everything a little harder without ever letting the audience get lost, for instance. Scarlett Johansson reminds the audience that she's a movie star who can create the right sort of chemistry with everyone else in the cast to make things feel fleshed-out even if they're not actually complicated. The side plot about a family that winds up on the island as well actually works when it would usually be pandering idiocy; Manuel Garcia-Rulfo in particular makes the father feel like he knows his kids and is looking out for them rather than like someone annoyed by their presence.

The film stretches on a bit, and the finale doesn't entirely come together as it sinks in that Koepp & Edwards don't have anything new left up their sleeves that six other movies about folks running from corporate hubris in the form of resurrected life forms (with it raining at night to cover any shortcomings in the VFX) haven't covered, with a chase through dark tunnels not the best way to show off the misshapen, almost tragic "D-Rex". It's nevertheless a darn satisfying movie whose makers would rather make it fun than mean and seldom misstep even if they also seldom innovate.


40 Acres

* * * (out of four)
Seen 7 July 2025 in AMC Boston Common #4 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available), or pre-order the disc at Amazon

40 Acres is not the first film in the post-apocalyptic survival genre to have Black creators and a majority-Black (and Native American) cast - heck, Breathe just came out last year, so not even the first in a while - but it's got a chip on its shoulder that other films of its ilk don't necessarily carry. Its family does not feel that they have not carved a safe space out of the chaos around them, specifically because of their backgrounds, and the tension of it is a vise that feels specific even as the themes and actions are familiar.

The matriarch of that family is Hailey Freeman (Danielle Deadwyler), an army veteran who returned to her family's Canadian homestead - which they arrived at as escaped slaves around the time of the American Civil War - just as ecological and societal collapse began. She has an 18-year-old son, Emanuel (Kataem O'Connor), In the decade or so since, she has married Galen (Michael Greyeyes) who has a teenage daughter Raine (Leenah Robinson) of his own; they now have two daughters, Danis (Jaeda LeBlanc) and Cookie (Haile Amare). The family are strong farmers and even better at defending their territory, as seen when a group of marauders get too close in the opening. Hailey won't give her location away to anyone, even the people she communicates via CB that she considers friends, which might protect them from a rumored band of cannibal marauders. But Manny is starting to buckle under this pressure, and he's just caught sight of a beautiful woman (Milcania Diaz-Rojas) who is about his age and not his stepsister in a nearby swimming hole.

I suspect that one of the reasons director R.T. Thorne and his co-writers break the film into chapters that shift perspective and emphasis is to prevent Danielle Deadwyler from making it hard to see anybody else with her white-hot intensity. Hailey is the sort of tightly-wound martinet that these films usually reveal to be the real danger compared to the zombies and cannibals, and Deadwyler seldom seems to be holding anything back as she lashes out at the family who occasionally act like children or otherwise don't seem to be at 110% all the time. She's a force of nature and kind of terrifying, even with a load-bearing flashback where what she's seen before returning home seems to have staggered her and the occasional scene with Michael Greyeyes as someone she can't exactly let her guard down with but who can at least talk to her.

But because Deadwyler burns so bright, you've got to get Manny away from Hailey to see what being her son has made of him, and Kataem O'Connor is really great there, cowed but also rebellious as he can be even when he's got no-one to talk to about it. Manny is smart enough and self-aware enough to recognize that being isolated and on a constant combat footing has warped him, and he talks like a guy with holes in his experience who can't be the sort of person his mother wants him to be but can't quite figure out what else he can be. His scenes with Milcania Diaz-Rojas are fun because her Dawn is too worldly to immediately respond to his infatuation in kind and both she and the audience can recognize that his earnest good intentions can read as really dangerous.

Thorne and company keep the audience's eyes on the family dynamics enough that it's not exactly a surprise when he springs the trap doors that will put this blended family into a fight with outsiders - he never gets tunnel-visioned enough to treat what's going on outside the house as a distraction - but it's a flipped switch that leads to things getting slasher-movie bloody with a mean streak that one can't say the filmmakers haven't warned the audience about. It's impressively deployed violence - there's a shot Thorne holds for long enough for everything the film told the audience about mass extinction in passing to line up with everything we know about Galen before the film twists a knife, for example - and it goes to pulpy heights without ever feeling less than serious and potentially deadly. He shows the audience just enough of the marauders to make the audience see how their leaders could be charismatic enough to be followed without tempting the audience to think of them as more than monsters who need to die, even if it's Manny who has to kill them.

And that's the thing at the heart of the film that may be unresolvable: Hailey, Manny, and the rest live in a time where the need to be constantly vigilant and ready for action cannot be denied even if it can't be a healthy way to live, and the Black & Cree characters probably feel it in their bones in the way that Caucasian audiences like myself need to be shown. It doesn't have a single answer for how one stays alert and also stays sane, even as that's becoming the reality for more and more people.


28 Years Later

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 8 July 2025 in AMC Causeway Street #3 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available), or pre-order the disc at Amazon

It was interesting to rewatch 28 Days Later and 28 Months Later ahead of this long-awaited third film (which itself is the start of a trilogy), because it really highlighted how much the first clicked into place when the former started to have something to say about rage and how hollow the second felt for not doing much more than building zombie-apocalypse lore. 28 Years Later lands someplace in between - I am deeply uninterested in its new infected variants and how a village isolated by the plague goes about its business, but when the filmmakers focus on the need to create mythology in the face of tragedy so big in one way or another that it beggars comprehension, that kind of becomes fascinating.

(Which, come to think of it, was the theme of Sunshine, director Danny Boyle's last collaboration with writer Alex Garland, back in 2007, and I wonder if their perspectives are a bit more in line this time!)

That doesn't make the first half - and first trip to the mainland from an island that is only connected to the mainland by a causeway at low tide - bad; it opens with a nifty sequence that is clearly going to echo through the trilogy. But it mostly exists to give the audience the lay of the land for when 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) returns in the second half, and introduce new forms of infected - "alphas" and "slow lows" - that don't necessarily follow from the pure blind rage of the previous movies. There's some good zombie action and Boyle does some interesting things with fever-dream flashbacks, but even the things we haven't necessarily seen before feel more like talented filmmakers trying to make the most of a played-out genre rather than an exciting addition to it.

It's when Spike returns home and doesn't see the way father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) misrepresents the expedition as his story that things get interesting. What he's found important is very different from what Jamie intended to show him, and his return seeking a doctor for his ailing mother (Jodie Comer) eventually leads him to a Swedish soldier (Edvin Ryding) who represents a sort of traditional take on zombie stories and Ralph Fiennes's Dr. Kelson, who has gotten a bit peculiar over the last 28 years but represents a humanist point of view usually treated with mockery in these movies. The scenes between Fiennes, Comer, and Williams are odd but rich, a commentary on what we lose when we worry about security above all else and how truth hurts more than the well-intended lie but it creates a solid foundation. Spike matures, but not as this genre usually defines maturing - becoming hard and willing to sacrifice - but by starting to question his assumptions and choosing to learn more.

I'm not entirely sure I'm interested in where the last scene(s) indicate the series is going next year, but I can't say there's not potential.