In this month's picks, the latest in the "28 Days Later" franchise, an aerial phenomenon, and a samurai lost in time.
Spike (Alfie Williams) is 12 and growing up in a Britain that is overrun by hostile, zombie-like wretches, turned into monsters by a highly contagious virus. A rite of passage involves going out and killing one with a bow and arrow -- the country, which is sealed off from the rest of the world, has regressed to a preindustrial stage. We saw how it all started almost a quarter of a century ago in Danny Boyle's influential "28 Days Later" (which also just landed on Netflix), and this sequel, for which Boyle reunited with the screenwriter Alex Garland, is even better. In addition to being masterfully shot and edited, the new film has a bonkers vibe that stitches together new spins on zombie lore (they can mutate and have sex) and poetic riffs on pagan horror. Jodie Comer as Alfie's troubled mother and Ralph Fiennes as a mysterious survivor provide sterling support in roles that don't go where you would expect. The ending essentially sets up Nia DaCosta's "28 Years Later: The Bone Temple," a sequel due on Jan. 16. That movie cannot come soon enough.
'Star People'
On March 13, 1997, a good number of Arizonans were equally mesmerized and perplexed by strange lights moving in formation across the night sky. The phenomenon, which became known as the Phoenix Lights, was said to be caused by military training in the area, but many remain unconvinced. It's that incertitude that the director Adam Finberg, himself a Phoenix native, explores in his story of a young woman, Claire (Kat Cunning), who saw the lights as a child. She remains obsessed by them and spends nights in the desert, taking photos of the sky. One day she gets a tip that the lights may have been spotted again, and she goes to the desert to investigate, accompanied by her new influencer boyfriend (Connor Paolo) and her drug-addicted brother (McCabe Slye). While the question lingers of whether there is life in the great out-there, Finberg smartly sets up the sci-fi elements against our current reality: the multiplying intense-heat advisories; the desperate people entrusting their lives to smugglers to cross the border; the armed militia patrolling the desert. Whether the aliens come from outer space or across a border, "Star People" is about the stories we need to tell ourselves to survive in an unsettled world.
'Same Day With Someone'
Aug. 8 is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day for museum curator Mesa (Jarinporn Joonkiat). First, a catastrophic accident with potentially devastating diplomatic and financial repercussions unfurls at an exhibition she oversaw. Then her fiancé, the handsome airline pilot Tul (Man Trisanu Soranun), abruptly breaks up with her.
Worst of all is that she can't even move on: Mesa is trapped in a time loop and the day keeps resetting. Rangsima Aukkarawiwat and Yanyong Kuruangkura's comedy, from Thailand, starts off by the numbers as Mesa keeps trying to prevent what turns out to be inevitable: No matter what she does, a sculpture always crashes down and Tul always dumps her. But the movie eventually wanders off in a more interesting direction when Mesa's colleague Ben (Warintorn Panhakarn) gets stuck on repeat with her. As in "Palm Springs" (2020), in which Cristin Milioti and Andy Samberg were time-looping together, "Same Day With Someone" follows a budding couple getting to know each other better through their shared predicament. The movie finds another gear as Ben and Mesa live a life where there are no consequences. Of course she learns a life lesson, as is de rigueur in this cinematic subgenre, but yet another pivot, to a more somber perspective, successfully anchors the movie's conclusion.
'A Samurai in Time'
When Shinzaemon Kosaka (Makiya Yamaguchi) turns up on the set of a period action drama, he fits right in: dexterous with a sword and sporting the topknot and partly shaved hair of a samurai from the Edo period. Because that's what he is: After being struck by lightning, Shinzaemon comes to 140 years later and finds work as a stuntman specializing in sword fights in the jidaigeki genre -- a Japanese term for movies and TV shows often set in feudal times. Jun'ichi Yasuda's gentle time-travel comedy does not actually make all that much of the fish-out-of-water angle, though there is an amusing scene in which our warrior, enjoying a strawberry cake, asks his hosts "any ordinary person can eat this thing?," then cries at this abundance of riches (Shinzaemon is quick to tear up, which makes him even more lovable). As our displaced hero finds employment playing what he actually is, "A Samurai in Time" becomes a nostalgia-tinted ode to jidaigeki itself as a time when that genre's popularity is receding. The people who make these films and series are portrayed as artisans dedicated to their craft, which does not make them so different from Shinzaemon.
'Somnium'
Like many young strivers who move to Los Angeles with dreams of acting, Gemma (Chloë Levine) needs a day job to pay the rent. What she finds actually is a night job monitoring people snoozing away in plexiglass-topped pods at Somnium, a sleep clinic designed to "make dreams come true." Her supervisor, Noah (Will Peltz), explains that thoughts are imprinted in the clients' subconscious so they can better their lives -- it's basically a high-tech riff on Norman Vincent Peale's "The Power of Positive Thinking." Racheal Cain's film is less interested in exploring the shenanigans happening at Somnium (naturally, there are secret experiments) than in exploring Gemma's psyche as she navigates the line between dreams, reality and memories. The last of which are of her boyfriend from home in Georgia, Hunter (Peter Vack), who wants to be a musician but is resigned to working in his dad's garage. Achieving your goals, or not, is a big theme here; Gemma feels alone and alienated in L.A.--in a nice visual touch, she's always the lone brunette in a sea of blondes, whether they are office receptionists or rivals at auditions. Cain tries to evoke Gemma’s difficulty in holding on to her sense of self by overtly going for a David Lynch-esque mood (there’s even a band called Twin Peaks), when in a way that disappearance was there all along, in her professional ambitions: Hollywood has been nicknamed the Dream Factory, after all.