Wafting in a stupor between Hulk s and Matrix es and Terminator 3 's, movie critics in the summer of 2003 are living in a state of suspended animation.

A zombie picture, with lots of topical updating.

Investigative reporting about corporate malfeasance and government wrongdoing, analysis of national and world affairs, and cultural criticism that matters.

Read the Empire Movie review of 28 Days Later. The best purely British horror/science-fiction film in decades. And the first great apocalypse...

Stripped of pretention, Danny Boyle gets his mojo back in the zombie flick 28 Days Later

Viral apocalypse, zombies, and terror. For adults. Read Common Sense Media's 28 Days Later review, age rating, and parents guide.

(Danny Boyle, U.K., 2003)

Blood spurts, gushes, drips, sprays and otherwise runs thick in "28 Days Later," a 21st-century version of the zombie movies of the 1960s. Viewers who idolize directors such as George Romero and the lesser-known Dario Argento may find merit in Danny Boyle's contemporized take on those directors' films. Here, Boyle exploits the salient late-20th-century theme of contagion to reimagine modern England as a post-apocalyptic necropolis. It's "The Last Man on Earth" meets Romero's "Night of the Living Dead," with the shaky video-cam of "The Blair Witch Project" thrown in for heightened -- and particularly ugly -- realism.