Latest news with #Alphas
Straits Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Straits Times
At The Movies: Food for thought in 28 Years Later, My Sunshine a heartfelt coming-of-age drama
At The Movies: Food for thought in 28 Years Later, My Sunshine a heartfelt coming-of-age drama 28 Years Later (M18) 115 minutes, showing in cinemas ★★★★☆ The story: British director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland revisit the Rage Virus of 28 Days Later (2002) they created more than two decades earlier. Great Britain is now quarantined from the continent: who needs Brexit? A community, which survived the cannibalistic undead, has settled on a feudal fortress island connected to the mainland by a tidal causeway. Spike (Alfie Williams) is the boy hero of 28 Years Later, the third entry following 28 Weeks Later (2007) in the auteur zombie series. On his 12th birthday, his dad Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) takes him on a manly rite-of-passage hunt on the mainland. It is his introduction to the ghastly Infected roving the wilderness. The blubbery belly-crawling humanoids are easy targets for his arrows. Not the Alphas: they have evolved to be faster, smarter, feral and near-unkillable. Spike, however, has heard rumours of a physician, and he is soon sneaking back outside the safe zone, determined to save his long-ailing mother (Jodie Comer). That the mythical doctor is a kook played by Ralph Fiennes would be an encounter worth any danger, even, possibly, the Alphas chasing him down to rip his head off with spinal column attached. The movie in all its punk-rock helter-skelter viscera was filmed using iPhones and amplified by military footage. What is the Rage Virus if not Boyle's parable of humanity eating itself alive with its anger? And violence here becomes an entryway into a moving rumination on mortality for Spike, an innocent who has never known disease or death. Wherever Hollywood director Nia DaCosta (The Marvels, 2023) leads him next in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, the second in a new trilogy due in 2026, Boyle has reaffirmed himself as a vital innovator of a seminal horror lore. Hot take: There is food for thought, not just flesh-chomping frights. My Sunshine (M18) 90 minutes, opens exclusively at The Projector on June 26 ★★★☆☆ (From left) Kiara Nakanishi and Keitatsu Koshiyama in My Sunshine. PHOTO: THE PROJECTOR The story: During one winter in a Japanese island town, two adolescents pair up for an upcoming skating competition. Taipei Film Festival's 2024 Special Jury Prize winner will not be the usual underdog sports drama. My Sunshine is an understated movie constructed of glances. Takuya (Keitatsu Koshiyama), a shy schoolboy with a stutter, is with his ice hockey team at the local recreation centre when he sights figure skater Sakura (Kiara Nakanishi) elegantly gliding on the rink. He is spellbound. The older girl has eyes only for her coach Arakawa (Sosuke Ikematsu), who later sees Takuya clumsily attempting Sakura's manoeuvres and is moved to mentor him. A former skating champion, he also sees something of himself in Takuya's passion. The lad is so endearing that haughty Sakura, a rising star from big-city Tokyo, needs little persuasion from Arakawa to begin training with him for a mixed duo contest. They become a family. An excursion to a frozen lake is a joyous high as the threesome cavort madly and embrace tightly against the magic hour light. But then comes another, unhappier glance: Sakura espies Arakawa with his male partner. The idyll is over even before the season's snow has melted. Japanese writer-director Hiroshi Okuyama's sophomore feature had seemed just a sweet, nostalgic coming-of-age confection, one that is suddenly very grown-up and deeply sad in confronting Japanese society's conservative gender norms and homophobia. The sensitive performances play the emotions for real because they are: Okuyama based the screenplay on his experiences as a junior skater. Hot take: This youthful romance, slender though it is, holds heartfelt feelings, tender and sorrowful. Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'28 Years Later' star Chi Lewis-Parry spills the deets on his massive zombie pole
28 Years Later star Chi Lewis-Parry is talking about the one big thing that's been on everyone's mind since the film premiered last Friday. The long-awaited follow-up to Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later explores how the zombies have evolved after 28 years wreaking havoc on what's left of Great Britain. This includes a variant known as the Alphas, who have grown into massive, hulking, violent creatures beyond even the original terrifying rage virus infectees. Lewis-Parry plays what he calls the "King of the Infected," an Alpha called Samson. Like the other Alphas, Samson lost any use for clothes years ago and spends the film in the buff. And the film does not shy away from unleashing that full-frontal nudity on screen. — (@) During a recent conversation with Variety, Lewis-Parry dug into some of the specifics of those sequences. Namely, the conversation acknowledged the necessity for prosthetics to be used for the benefit of one of 28 Years Later's young stars, Alfie Williams. "There's a law that states, I think, because he's a child, you're allowed to have nudity but it has to be fake nudity," the actor said. "It was to protect him. And, as well, I'm really friendly and am always hugging people. I wouldn't have been doing that if I was fully in the nip!" Of course, even if prosthetics are in play, anytime there's full-frontal male nudity in movies or TV, people still end up curious and clamoring for details of a more personal nature. So when the interviewer asked how Lewis-Parry's prosthetic measures up to the real thing, the former MMA fighter had a cheeky answer ready to go. "Well, I'm 6′ 8″," he replied. "I'll say no more!" This article originally appeared on Pride: '28 Years Later' star Chi Lewis-Parry spills the deets on his massive zombie pole 28 Years Later - Wikipedia Oh my! Cooper Koch used his real trouser monster in 'Monsters' nude scene Luca Guadagnino's 'Queer' delivered on the full frontals, but did the actors use prosthetics? 11 actors who wore a prosthetic pole in their sexiest scenes
Metro
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Metro
'I'm the 6ft 8in Alpha in 28 Years Later that's haunting your dreams'
'Terrify me.' That was the instruction given to Chi Lewis-Parry by director Danny Boyle in his 28 Years Later audition. 'I didn't really understand what that meant. Like, how do you want me to go about this?' Lewis-Parry laughs. 'But I'm guessing I terrified him good enough!' The actor and MMA fighter didn't know the movie he was reading for initially, it was just 'Untitled Danny Boyle project'. But as he says of the name attached: 'It didn't matter what it was. I could have played a bin bag, and I'd have been happy.' * Spoilers ahead for 28 Years Later!* Lewis-Parry gets rather more than that as he portrays the 'king of the Alphas', Samson, in 28 Years Later – the most feared, and genuinely nightmare-inducing, of the newly evolved strain of the Infected. Over 20 years since Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland introduced their take on the zombie horror flick to the world with 28 Days Later in 2002, they're back with their hotly anticipated follow up, which was released in cinemas on Thursday. It's not a sequel, but – like the less well-received 28 Weeks Later in 2007, which Boyle and Garland only executive-produced – it's set in the same post-apocalyptic world, ravaged by the blood-born Rage Virus that turned humans into the flesh-eating Infected. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video But, after 28 years and with mainland Britain now under quarantine, new variants have emerged, and the most fearsome of all is the massive Beserker or Alpha. Not only are they bigger, stronger and meaner, but they display intelligence – and also the truly hideous habit of 'despining' their victims. Another variant is the Slow Low, a blubbery and bald creature that crawls on the ground slurping up worms. 'I saw it as you became what you are in your society,' Lewis-Parry tells Metro of the Infected's evolution. 'So if you are an alpha in your everyday life, then you are an Alpha as the infected. The traits and characteristics of the Infected didn't necessarily change from when they were human, but they are fuelled by rage, so control is lost.' We see one Alpha chase father and son Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Spike (Alfie Williams) down the causeway to their human haven on Holy Island after an educational hunting trip. But Samson, who is so named by the iodine-stained and eccentric Dr Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), gets a little more character development. After we see him take out a patrol of NATO soldiers – ripping one man's skull and spine out and then using it to beat another to death – he announces his arrival in an abandoned train carriage in similar fashion after Isla (Jodie Comer) helps a pregnant Infected give birth. Samson is shown to be more in control of his Rage than normal, aware of his surroundings and clocking the Infected after seeing her feet, leading to an interaction that informed the rest of that claustrophobic encounter between him, Spike and Isla. 'I remember when we shot that, it wasn't on the page. That was something we came up with. Danny just said, 'I want to include something here that shows he is conscious, what do you think?'' 'That's his creative genius is he lets you talk about things because we all inspire each other. There's no ego involved – and he literally just made it up on the day, based off our conversation.' Spike and Isla are then stunned to see Dr Kelson sedate Samson rather than kill him – something which would take as many as 12 precious arrows anyway in a society without guns. Suddenly, he's not just a scary killing machine – especially as Kelson reveals he has spent 13 years tending to the dead among both humans and the Infected alike, building his towering 'memento mori' of their skulls and bones. 'A lot of people would be put off by a person like Dr Kelson, and Jamie even says that he's gone mad, but he's a complicated man, in a very dire situation, and he's also very lonely,' suggests Lewis-Parry, who also played Phoebus in Gladiator II. And as to their characters' unexpected 'sweet relationship', he adds: 'I think in Samson he sees something that is probably more attractive than the humanity that's left, because this is something that's just operating off instincts, not hatred or a dislike for people, it is just existing. I think there's a nice sort of innocence to it.' That's one way of describing the huge naked zombie with wild hair and a long beard, red eyes and a thirst for blood – oh, and near-unstoppable strength. And yes, because everyone will be wondering – the Infected wear prosthetic genitals for both modesty and also legal reasons, due to working with the then 12-year-old Williams (or as Lewis-Parry confirms of the behind-the-scenes processes for the appearance of nudity: 'I never at any point thought I was going to be walking around in the nip'.) But it's not just how Lewis-Parry looks – being 6 ft 8in barefoot helps with the intimidation – but how he moves as an Alpha too that gives him such impact on screen. There's a very neat story behind the first person he explored Samson's physicality with, actor and the film's movement coach, Toby Sedgwick. Sedgwick actually played the Infected priest who Cillian Murphy's confused courier Jim interacts with in 2002's 28 Days Later, when he's trying to work out why he's woken up from a coma to find London abandoned. It was also him who invented the iconic stilted but petrifyingly fast run of the Infected. But Lewis-Parry knew he needed to do something different as he saw his Alpha having 'more control over the state that the infection puts him in, so that actually makes him more dangerous'. 'I felt like it looked like he was trying too hard, and I didn't want him to be trying anything – everything he did was just incidental. So I started to look at legendary movement, people like Andy Serkis, who is, in my opinion, the greatest all time. I looked at how he moved.' Although he couldn't directly copy Serkis due to – in his words – 'how vastly different our sizes are', he knew it was all about intention. 'What was his intention when he was moving, when he was crawling, when he was standing or when he was breathing?' shares Lewis-Parry, who was also inspired by creatures in 1980s and 90s horror movies like Predator and the Wolf Man. '[Samson's] very predatory, but he's not hiding the fact that he's coming after you. He's not trying to sneak up on you or conceal his presence. He's just like, I'm running through this wall, and if you're on the other side of it… The motive I gave him was that nothing will stop me.' And it appears that nothing has yet, as – although Lewis-Parry is very careful about giving anything away regarding next year's sequel, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple , which was shot back to back – Samson is still alive and kicking as a zombie can get at the end of this year's film. More Trending 'What can I tease? There's a part two,' he smiles before hesitating as he picks his next words carefully. 'It's different, it's amazing.' And that's all I'm getting. 28 Years Later is in cinemas now. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple will be released on January 16, 2026. Got a story? If you've got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@ calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we'd love to hear from you. MORE: Netflix fans devour 'unrelenting' horror movie as sequel hits cinemas MORE: The 'best horror film of 2025' has arrived on Amazon Prime's Shudder MORE: Jurassic World Rebirth embraces hardcore horror: 'I waited for the studio to say no'
Business Insider
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Business Insider
The infected have evolved in '28 Years Later' — and they're scarier than ever
The "28 Days Later" franchise sees society collapsing after a virus escapes a lab and turns people into zombie-like killers. In "28 Years Later," while people have adapted to survive, the Rage Virus has evolved. Here's how the infected are different in the sequel. Warning: spoilers ahead for "28 Years Later." In " 28 Years Later," the Rage Virus that turned Britain post-apocalyptic in the original movie has evolved, meaning the survivors have new types of the infected to deal with. Spike (Alfie Williams), a 12-year-old boy, is the film's protagonist. He lives on the island of Lindisfarne, cut off from the mainland by the tide, which saves the community from the Rage Virus. His father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), takes him hunting on the mainland as a rite of passage, and Spike learns how dangerous the rest of the country has become after 28 years of the virus spreading. It isn't long before the young boy comes face-to-face with the infected. "There have been evolutions because we didn't want to just stand still with them," the film's director Danny Boyle told IGN in June, referring to the infected. "28 Years Later" introduces "Slow Lows" and "Alphas." On the mainland, Jamie constantly reminds Spike to be vigilant of the infected, and explains that there are "Slow Lows" who crawl on the ground eating bugs. Slow lows are more bloated than the original infected, and their skin is pale and mottled. While they're easier to kill from a distance, their loud screams draw attention. Interestingly, Jamie chooses not to kill one of the Slow Lows when he realizes she's a little girl, and she flees into the undergrowth when he lets her go. But the Slow Lows pale in comparison to the "Alphas," who are much bigger and stronger than the other infected. One Alpha, who is nicknamed Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry), shows off his brute strength by ripping a soldier's head off along with his spine with his bare hands. The Alphas can also withstand getting struck by several arrows without dying, although they can be killed by the large flaming javelins used by the guards on the Lindisfarne gate. Jamie tells Spike that in specific people, the Rage Virus acts like bodybuilding steroids, which appears to make them invulnerable to minor injuries. The Alphas make things difficult for Spike and his mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), when they go looking for a mysterious doctor on the mainland and come across one in the ruins of an old train. Knowing they can't kill an Alpha cranks up the terror in a nail-biting chase sequence.
India Today
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- India Today
Diana Penty on Cocktail's re-release: Curious to know what Gen-Z thinks
'Cocktail', the much-loved romantic drama from 2012, quietly made its way back to theatres on May 30 this year. Directed by Homi Adajania and starring Saif Ali Khan, Deepika Padukone, and Diana Penty, the film became a pop culture favourite when it was released over a decade ago, and its re-release has stirred a wave of nostalgia among a candid conversation, Diana Penty looked back at the film's journey and the love it continues to receive. Speaking exclusively to India Today, Diana said, 'It feels great to know that 'Cocktail' has been re-released. That film did really well back then and has always held a special place in my heart. I think what's exciting now is that there's a whole new generation that hasn't seen it - a younger audience that might experience it for the first time on the big screen.'advertisementDiana emphasised her curiosity over how modern audiences will receive the film: 'It'll be interesting to see how they receive it, especially since times have changed so much. Even up to five or six years ago, I remember people telling me how much they connected with it. So I'm curious - will Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha relate to it the same way? Maybe the Alphas are still a bit too young, but you never know!' She added, 'Either way, it's lovely that a film like 'Cocktail', which meant so much to so many, is getting a second life.' Originally released on July 13, 2012, 'Cocktail' became a box-office success thanks to its urban charm, vibrant soundtrack - including hit songs like 'Tumhi Ho Bandhu' and 'Daaru Desi' - and dynamic performances by its iconic Penty is currently gearing up for the release of her upcoming film 'Detective Sherdil', which is set to release on June 20. The film stars Diljit Dosanjh, Boman Irani, and others as part of the ensemble cast.
