Amazeballs

The first shock of 28 Days Later, before you know a Rage virus from a droplet of Thames rain, is Cillian Murphy, shivering into sentience among the plastic flowers of a London hospital, naked as Adam and just as raw. It’s a beginning unclothed in every sense, stripping away the reassuring illusions of civilization as effectively as the virus that, we come to learn, has erased all the comforting bustle of the city. Danny Boyle has always been a kinetic filmmaker, one who moves with the pulse of the streets and the shuffle of fast-talking characters, but here, those streets are hauntingly, disturbingly empty. The effect is eerily transformative: in 2002, this was less an apocalypse than a waking dream.

There’s something bracingly cold in the Korean morning after, and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance unspools as if Park Chan-wook had gathered up every post-war trauma, every splintered family, and boiled them down to their reasonless elemental grudge. If the opening salvo to the so-called “Vengeance Trilogy” feels like an autopsy of the revenge thriller, it’s only because Park is dissecting not just genre, but the black, sodden heart of the human condition itself. How often do we watch films about vengeance and walk out, buoyed by the giddiness of catharsis? Not here. Here, you stagger out like you’ve come from a wake, the taste of rust clinging to your tongue.

There’s something almost indecent about the joy with which Kevin Reynolds’s 2002 The Count of Monte Cristo throws open the trapdoor on Dumas’s enduring chest of treasure. It’s not just an adaptation—it’s a swashbuckler, a cocktail of innocence and cold revenge shaken so hard that pearls of melodrama practically fly into the audience’s lap. Where so many literary adaptations settle for stagy reverence, Reynolds, with a wink and a hot air balloon, sweeps you into a storybook France that can’t quite remember if it’s in 1840 or a theme park in Orlando. And for two hours, you’re grateful for the confusion.