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Times
21-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
28 Years Later — it's like a zombie movie made by Ken Loach
It can't be — can it — after all this time? Nostalgic pop-culture references to the old Tango adverts and the Teletubbies. Fancy freeze-frames and lickety-split editing. A banging mixtape of ambient house on the soundtrack so that even when the characters are battling for their life against zombies the audience feel like they are tying one on at the Haçienda on a Saturday night with their mates. It has to be … yes, it's a Danny Boyle film. Last seen directing Yesterday in 2019, Boyle returns to screens this week with 28 Years Later, an unusually thoughtful sequel to his 2002 classic 28 Days Later, which shows much has changed since the zombie apocalypse — sorry, Rage Virus — was first loosed on the world. England is now cut off from the rest of Europe and a small group of the uninfected are holed up on an island. It's a community that defends itself with homemade bows and arrows and has returned to the values of the 1950s including waving St George's flags. Boyle splices their defence of the fortified causeway that leads to the mainland with snatches of footage from the Battle of Agincourt in Laurence Olivier's 1944 film Henry V. We seem to be in one of those remote Hebridean communities beloved of old folk-horror films where villagers worship pagan gods, copulate in the fields and cure sore throats with toads. If George A Romero's zombie movies in the Seventies set themselves up as allegories of mass-market consumerism, Boyle's seem to be about the Little Englander belligerence that fuelled Brexit. These zombies don't want to eat our brains, just our unbendy cucumbers. • Danny Boyle: Road rage, Brexit — and why I'm returning to 28 Days Later Tutoring his son, Spike (Alfie Williams), in the ways of the postapocalyptic patriarchy is Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), whose sick wife, Isla (Jodie Comer), languishes in the bedroom upstairs. He takes his son on his first trip to the mainland to hunt for zombies, a blood sport-cum-rite of passage for the island's young men. 'The more you kill the easier it gets,' Jamie tells him, but there's a new breed of 'alpha zombie': big, naked brutes who run like the clappers, willies bouncing, who seem to represent all the coarse male energies at large in this postapocalyptic world. The screenwriter Alex Garland has bigger issues in his sights than just zombies. After Spike cottons on to his father's lies and escapes to the mainland with his mother in the hope of finding a cure for what ails her, the film downshifts into an odyssey that owes as much to Garland's Civil War last year as to the original 2002 Boyle film. The mother and son's journey is punctuated by images of societal breakdown — an abandoned Happy Eater roadside café, a rusting train carriage, a compound of human bones ruled by a bald, blood-and-mud-encrusted doctor (Ralph Fiennes) who raves about the 'magic of the placenta' in the crackpot fashion of Colonel Kurtz. • The best films of 2025 so far Garland's copy of Heart of Darkness must be well thumbed. Joseph Conrad's novella provided much of the thematic superstructure of The Beach as well. Do the slim fillets of action justify the weightier themes that are hung on them? He and Boyle are trying to make a wider statement about societal collapse — it's like a zombie movie made by Ken Loach. But what will gamers make of the gentle, ruminative climax? My guess is a slight but unshakeable feeling of bamboozlement. Boyle adds a bloody coda of zombie slaughter, freeze-framing on every arterial spray and brain splatter, just to be on the safe side. ★★★☆☆15, 115min Disney Pixar hits most of its marks, but not all. Elio is about an orphaned 11-year-old, Elio Solis (Yonas Kibreab), now in the care of his aunt (Zoe Saldaña), who channels his loneliness and longing into the sky. Sending messages using a ham radio and a colander for aliens to come and beam him up, he is one day granted that wish by a benevolent collective of alien races known as the Communiverse, who are facing down a threat from a warlord called Lord Grigon (Brad Garrett), who looks like a crab crossed with a Swiss army knife with plasma cannon for limbs. Anyone recalling the showdowns between Donald Trump and the United Nations would not be far off. • Read more film reviews, guides about what to watch and interviews The film gives kids a framework to understand the world's strong men — beneath his military-grade exoskeleton, Lord Grigon turns out to be a soft, caterpillar-like sweetheart — but suffers from the Pixar blight of too many bright ideas, an excess of benevolence and a story that doesn't know which lane to pick. We're almost 50 minutes into the film before we meet Grigon's pudgy, pacifist son, Glordon, whose friendship with Elio should have been the emotional core of the film. But they have to wait their turn in a plot set on heartwarming reconciliations for everyone — Elio and his aunt, Glordon and his dad, Grigon and the Communiverse. These things were so much simpler in ET's day. In this film, everyone has a heart light. ★★★☆☆PG, 99min Times+ members can enjoy two-for-one cinema tickets at Everyman each Wednesday. Visit to find out moreWhich films have you enjoyed at the cinema recently? Let us know in the comments below and follow @timesculture to read the latest reviews
The Guardian
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Look north: composer Gavin Higgins on his new song cycle celebrating northerness
As a child, the idea of 'the north' captured my imagination. Images of lonely moors, mist-drenched mountains and driving rain provided backdrops for some of my favourite books, poems and films. But for me, the raucous energy of Manchester had an almost religious pull. It was the birthplace of bands I loved – Oasis, Happy Mondays, Joy Division, A Guy Called Gerald – and home to that palace of techno and acid house music, the Haçienda, which I dreamed of visiting. I grew up at the rural borderland between England and Wales, but moved to Manchester when I was 16. It was my first time experiencing a real city with its cacophony of police sirens, shop alarms and drunken revelry, a far cry from the woodlands I'd grown up with. It was also the first time I realised I spoke with an accent. Against nasal Mancunian colloquialisms, my broad west country twang made me feel that I was from a different planet. But one of Manchester's great charms is how its people throw their arms open to strangers. The city quickly became my home and I became a proud northerner. Every city, town and village in the north of England has its own unique cultural identity, while the surrounding wild places – the moors, mountains, and coalfields – have an almost mythical allure for poets, painters and hikers alike. Walking the Lakes and Peak District – the beauty and melancholy of those landscapes permanently etched in my mind – changed the way I think about nature and our place within it. Experiencing community spirit at the annual Whit Friday marches in Saddleworth shaped my feelings towards the importance of community and ritual. The vibrancy of Manchester turned me from a provincial country boy to a card-carrying, coffee-drinking urbanite. Even my west country accent, an integral part of my identity, was changed for good, the singsong 'hello there' replaced by a succinct 'y'aright?'. I began to question the nature of my sense of Englishness, of my British identity. How do you even define such a thing? As a composer, the north remains a place of keen inspiration for me and one I was eager to revisit. So when soprano Claire Booth approached me to write a song cycle about 'the idea of the north', I was intrigued to explore more. The very idea of northernness felt so clear in my mind. But as I dug deeper, it proved more elusive and hard to pin down. My new song cycle, Speak of the North, is a vast and sprawling journey across the moors, mountains, cities and coasts of the north of England. Set to words from a host of northern poets such as Katrina Porteous, Tony Williams and all three Brontë sisters, the 11 songs explore ideas around regional and national identity, our place within the wild places of the north, and navigating life and hardship at the very edges and borderlands of England. In Great Northern Diver by Michael Symmons Roberts, Manchester is slowly revealed from above, from districts to stadiums to factories to pubs until we are on the very pavement itself, the earth rushing up to meet us as the rhythms of acid house music pound in the background. Here we learn the spirit of Manchester is not in its buildings or roads, but in the people who live there: 'so what keeps this city alive is you'. Zoe Mitchell's Sycamore Gap – written before the tree was felled – places us in border land, looking north to Scotland and south to England, not knowing which side is home. These liminal places fascinate me, challenging our absolutisms around identity. Where does Englishness stop and Scottishness start? Where does the north begin and where does it end? In Offcomer by Katie Hale, the very idea of northern identity is questioned. Through a series of visionary statements, she confronts her roots, her heritage and the way landscape has shaped her. 'My skin is a prairie, / my hair and eyes an Irish peat and sky, / my bones a Midlands town,' we are told. 'But put your ear to my chest […] you will hear / water, the raucous gathering of clouds.' This dichotomy is at the heart of this song cycle. Are we defined solely by our place of birth? Or by the movement of our ancestors, wars, stories, language, the weather? These are timely questions. Over the past decade, there has been a concerted effort from the right to push their definition of Englishness into public discourse, a definition that feels completely at odds with my own. Though these songs ask questions about northern identity specifically, they also invite a broader discourse about what it is to be English and to live in these isles. The simplicity and directness of folk music stands as a testament to the tenacity of ordinary people, holding a mirror to our deepest passions and concerns. The 'folk' is never far away in my composition. Whether through the inclusion of a folk-like violin part, or the leaping fifths and ninths in the vocal writing, mimicking the open strings of the violin, the use of folk ideas to explore class struggle resonate throughout the song cycle. The final song is a setting of the Northumbrian folk song Here's the Tender Coming, and leaves us on a sombre note. Here, a mother whose husband has been press-ganged faces the reality of her child being brought up in a broken home. This could equally be the story of a struggling single mother, or a wife mourning the loss of her husband in an industrial accident, and we are reminded that political choices made far away, by privileged people in fancy houses, can have a devastating impact on the lives of ordinary people. Though the cycle is made up of 11 clearly defined movements, melodic and harmonic motifs are heard throughout in different guises. The invigorating fanfares that open the piece return at a later point softer and muted, the dream of the north slipping through our fingers. The vocal leaps are littered throughout the cycle: at times jubilant and invigorating, at others stark, cold, relentless. In other moments, entirely different sound worlds are explored. In Sedimentary, the music is low and resonant, the pianist asked to play 'like a brass band' – a nod to the musical tradition that grew in the coalfields of the north. In Here's the Tender Coming, the piano part is prepared with Blu-Tack so that the strings resonate out of tune, tolling like a distant ship's bell. Techno piano rhythms feature throughout Great Northern Diver, beginning quietly as if from afar, later pounding as though we are on the dancefloor itself. The idea of the north is complex. It is a place of industry, of rolling moors and mountains. Of brass bands and acid house. It's a place of rain and proud, weather-worn people, of struggle and of survival. And it is also place of deep friendship and core memories: my friend and I deciding to climb Helvellyn but our plans being thwarted when she turned up in high heels; my first time in Manchester's gay village, the bar lady with a knowing wink giving me more money back in change than I'd handed her to pay for my drink; night swimming in the Lake District and then watching the sun rise over the mountains. Thinking of the north gives me a feeling of rootedness. It grounds me and reminds me of who I am and, in returning to the north for this song cycle, I feel like I've come home. The world premiere of Gavin Higgins' Speak of the North is at the Aldeburgh festival on 17 June. It is also at the Ryedale festival on 12 July.
Telegraph
22-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The Manchester hotel that's full of Nineties nostalgia
On any stroll through Manchester's Gay Village, I try to piece together fractured, blurred bits of the Nineties. Like many Gen X bores, I gas on about the Haçienda, and how all the dives – as well as what, 30 years ago, felt like shockingly new and edgy bars around Canal Street – were starting points for misadventures that ended up in utter chaos at the now fabled nightclub (long since turned into luxury flats, of course). On a recent visit, I was wondering where, precisely, amid all the old redbrick waterside warehouses, a particularly memorable and magnificent multi-level restaurant and bar complex designed by Marc Newson, had been. While checking into Leven, the swish, oh-so 2020s aparthotel on the corner of Canal and Chorlton Streets, I clocked that defunct restaurant's name four down on the cocktail list (the bar doubles as Leven's reception): 'Mash & Air! Wow!' I announced with a camp flourish to the moustachioed mixologist. 'You'll be too young to know what that is!' He was the wrong generation to have been a patron, but he knew what it was: 'You're standing right where it used to be.' Mind blown. Hallowed ground. And even if this hadn't been where Mash & Air was, I'd still give Leven a solid 10/10 for location. Canal Street has changed massively over the decades, but it's still party central, super-queer (but welcoming to all who are respectful, with a lot of hen parties in the mix), and a five-minute walk from the main railway station. I'd give full marks to Leven for a lot of things, actually. The aesthetic is calm and clean, with a few Manchester-centric twists (industrial metalwork on the hallway ceilings, for example) and flattering lighting. It's chic throughout and the rooms would be perfect for longer stays as well as weekends. Kitchenettes and tables for two mix with original warehouse exposed-brick walls, wooden floors, and marble and ceramic shower rooms with Grown Alchemist body products from Melbourne (the current hot brand for those jaded by Aesop). The 'Life Size' entry-level rooms have a decent footprint, all with good views, too. The penthouses, on the more recently built top floor, have a duplex arrangement and are popular with TV luminaries in town for filming. Some have baths and balconies. All rooms also come with a gratis pair of white socks as an amenity – a great idea. I always feel like an ugly sister in Cinderella trying to fit my giant hoofs into tiny towelling slippers that barely last a single wear. The hotel is overtly aligned with the surrounding local nightlife (there are earplugs on the bedside tables, but I wasn't kept up at all) and its lobby bar – stocked with Leven-branded merch – is cute. As Google Maps said of pretty much everywhere for so long, it's 'cosy with good cocktails'. You're not coming here for an evening with friends, but it's a good starting point. I didn't have the Mash & Air cocktail (I don't do vodka-based drinks after breakfast), but the Bananas Fostered, a mix of spiced rum, banana liqueur, cinnamon and caramel, was a party in my mouth. A continental breakfast is served in a little library space at the end of a hallway off reception. It had been cleared away when I surfaced at 9:45am, but staff quickly got the toaster back out for me and rustled up a flat white. I lingered for an hour at the long communal table, working contentedly before my train back to London. There's no official Leven restaurant, but the hotel shares the building with Maya, which is spread over three floors and flashy, new-wave Manc glam in feel. Get a Yuzu Gimlet cocktail on the ground floor; head one floor down for grilled steaks and martinis; then hit the basement for the vaguely Prince-themed live music and club space that I could just about recognise as being the home of the old brewery in Mash & Air. I got talking to a couple at the bar on the ground floor of Maya, who were only too happy to hear me go on about the Nineties. 'Oh, it must have been so great,' one said. 'Yeah, it was,' I told her. 'But so is all this.' Doubles from £99; breakfast, £12. There are four fully accessible rooms. O'Flaherty travelled as a guest of Avanti West Coast, which offers returns from London and Manchester from £32 one way. Leven, 40 Chorlton Street, Manchester (0161 3597900)
