It’s appropriate that Hiroshi Sakurazaka‘s light novel All You Need Is Kill, a story about trying something again and changing just a little bit each time, is getting a repeat adaptation. But it would be a disservice to the new film by Kenichiro Akimoto to call it the inverse of the Tom Cruise-starring Edge of Tomorrow (or is it Live. Die. Repeat?). This take, from a screenplay by Yuichiro Kido, is from the perspective of Rita instead of Keiji (or Cage, in the other film) – but they’re very different characters here.

Though there is overlap with the live-action adaptation (understandable, given the shared source material)—Rita’s perspective here is the difference-maker, as her story becomes more about her self-imposed isolation and inability to connect with people, a lingering symptom of an undisclosed childhood trauma. “I’ve been submerged ever since then,” Rita reflects at the film’s opening as she drives out into the desert, fleeing from something we can’t see. Red roots suddenly sprout from a portal and encircle the earth—Rita only smiles in response.

We learn the reasons behind this response as the film goes on, but the short of it is that she’s trapped even before the time loop begins; if anything that cycle gives her the opportunity to change herself—she has to change in order to survive, and fight til the next day. The writing is heavy handed in the delivery of this messaging, as is some of the imagery—showing her literally submerged in water in representation of the weight of her isolation. Her emotional journey
throughout the film is the anchor for All You Need Is Kill, even as it makes some head-scratching choices in the last moments.

For now, though, she’s a worker charged with disassembling the massive alien plant creature Darol branch by branch (not entirely far off the premises of Pacific Rim or Kaiju No. 8). Despite the funky mech suit, it’s not a military operation however, and so she goes through the same arc of floundering panic to assured combat prowess as Tom Cruise‘s character.

That training through repetition earned comparisons with video game structure for Edge of Tomorrow, but All You Need Is Kill doubles down—going as far as having a secondary character looking at a “Continue?” screen upon each death, or saying “it’s like a video game!” Such didacticism is something that happens frequently across anime, but it feels especially insulting here, when it’s so easy to infer: the characters have continual power-ups to their suit and weapons, for one.

Still, like it’s live action sibling, All You Need Is Kill is at its most pleasurable when it uses this checkpoint conceit as a prompt to play with editing, like cutting between Rita’s steps occurring in different resets, speeding up with each cut as she becomes more confident. Another distinction from the live-action film is that it adds another rule regarding the deaths and resets, which won’t be detailed here.

The little things add up to a film which feels worth seeing in spite of the similarities which are there. It’s also set apart by a hallucinatory style—not just in the different ways in which Akimoto presents the interaction between the alien threat and Rita’s mind, but also how the earth has mutated in response to their arrival. The colors are like looking at oil in water, while the 3D animation is dressed up with cel-shading and flattened, shadowless textures as well as scratchy linework, not
far off the art style embraced by the other Studio 4*C film shown at Annecy Festival the same week, ChaO, or perhaps Taiyo Matsumoto and Shinji Kimura‘s design work on Tekkonkinkreet and its film adaptation (another Studio 4*C film – a pattern emerges).

But even as its playfulness with editing and 3D camerawork and scene-blocking persists, Akimoto’s film keeps drifting back into less interesting choices as the film goes on, both in the story choices and even in the music. The soundtrack gradually abandons the eerie and sparse electronic notes of its early acts to more anonymous orchestral compositions.

As for the story itself, the film’s point isn’t entirely lost, but it undermines itself with the execution of some of its ideas. While this film’s take on character of Keiji is a fun subversion of his image both on page and on screen, the character gets put into a position which ultimately becomes a hijacking of Rita’s arc at the last possible moment, taking a vital choice to out of her hands. In addition, a decision made by one of the characters is undone simply because it requires too many steps, the
impact of the moment is diffused because of how much it takes to get to this point, and by the time it does, there’s no feeling left in it. It’s a shame that a film making such idiosyncratic choices in its merging of 3D and 2D visual languages in animation keeps falling into rather predictable patterns, because for the most part, it’s exciting to watch. Maybe someone will nail it on the next go-around.

Most movies are lucky to predict one thing. Danny Boyle’s 2002 dystopian thriller “28 Days Later” managed to be on the cutting edge of two trends, albeit rather disparate ones: global pandemic and fleet-footed zombies.

Add in Cillian Murphy, who had his breakout role in that film, and “28 Days Later” was unusually prognostic. While many of us were following the beginnings of the Afghanistan War and “American Idol,” Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland were probing the the fragile fabric of society, and the potentially very quick way, indeed, horror might come our way.

Boyle always maintained that his undead — a far speedier variety of the slow-stepping monsters of George A. Romero’s “The Night of Living Dad” — weren’t zombies, at all, but were simply the infected. In that film, and its 2007 sequel “28 Weeks Later” (which Juan Carlos Fresnadillo helmed), the filmmakers have followed the fallout of the so-called rage virus, which emptied London in the first film and brought soon-dashed hopes of the virus’ eradication in the second movie.

Like the virus, the “28 Days Later” franchise has proven tough to beat back. In the new “28 Years Later,” Boyle and Garland return to their apocalyptic pandemic with the benefit of now having lived through one. But recent history plays a surprisingly minor role in this far-from-typical, willfully shambolic, intensely scattershot part three.

The usual trend of franchises is to progressively add gloss and scale. But where other franchises might have gone global, “28 Years Later” has remained in the U.K., now a quarantine region where the infected roam free and survivors — or at least the ones we follow — cluster on an island off the northeast of Britain, connected to mainland by only a stone causeway that dips below the water at high tide.

Boyle and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, who innovatively employed digital video in “28 Days Later,” have also turned to iPhones to shoot the majority of the film. Boyle, the “Slumdog Millionaire,” “Trainspotting” filmmaker, is an especially frenetic director to begin with, but “28 Years Later” is frequently gratingly disjointed.

It’s a visual approach that, taken with the story’s tonal extremes, makes “28 Years Later” an often bumpy ride. But even when Boyle’s film struggles to put the pieces together, there’s an admirable resistance to being anything like a cardboard cutout summer movie.

The recent event that hovers over “28 Years Later” is less the COVID-19 pandemic than Brexit. With the virus quarantined on Britain, the country has been severed from the European continent. On the secluded Holy Island, 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams, a newcomer with some sweetness and pluck) lives with his hunter father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), and bedridden mother, Isla (Jodie Comer).

The scene, with makeshift watchtowers and bows and arrows for weapons, is almost medieval. Jamie, too, feels almost like a knight eager to induct his son into the village’s ways of survival. On Spike’s first trip out off the island, his father — nauseatingly jocular — helps him kill his first infected. Back inside the village walls, Jamie celebrates their near scrapes and exaggerates his son’s coolness under pressure. Other developments cause Spike to question the macho world he’s being raised in.

“They’re all lyin’, mum,” he says to his mother.

After hearing of a far-off, supposedly deranged doctor whose constant fires mystify the townspeople, Spike resolves to take his mother to him in hopes of healing her unknown illness. Their encounters along the way are colorful. Ralph Fiennes plays the doctor, orange-colored when they encounter him; Edvin Ryding plays a Swedish NATO soldier whose patrol boat crashed offshore. Meanwhile, Comer is almost comically delusional, frequently calling her son “Daddy.”

And the infected? One development here is that, while some remain Olympic-worthy sprinters, other slothful ones nicknamed “Slow-Lows” crawl around on the ground, rummaging for worms.

Buried in here are some tender reflections on mortality and misguided exceptionalism, and even the hint of those ideas make “28 Years Later” a more thoughtful movie than you’re likely to find at the multiplex this time of year. This is an unusually soulful coming-of-age movie considering the number of spinal cords that get ripped right of bodies.

It’s enough to make you admire the stubborn persistence of Boyle in these films, which he’s already extending. The already-shot “28 Days Later: The Bone Temple” is coming next near, from director Nia DaCosta, while Boyle hopes “28 Years Later” is the start of trilogy. Infection and rage, it turns out, are just too well suited to our times to stop now.

“28 Years Later,” a Sony Pictures release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for strong bloody violence, grisly images, graphic nudity, language and brief sexuality. Running time: 115 minutes. Two stars out of four.

It’s always risky to mix genres, but some movies pull off the trick with more skill than others. Dragonfly, which had its world premiere this week in Tribeca, starts as an intimate character drama, with two Oscar-nominated British actresses — Brenda Blethyn and Andrea Riseborough — at the top of their game. (They were given a joint acting award by one of the juries at the festival.) Paul Andrew Williams’ movie unfolds at a fairly leisurely but rewarding pace until an event occurs that unhinges one of the characters and turns the movie closer to the horror genre, with a blood-splattered finale. Reactions will surely be mixed about this surprise tonal shift, but there is no doubt that the film sticks in the memory.

Blethyn plays Elsie, an elderly woman living in a drab housing complex and tended to by caregivers who do the bare minimum to meet her needs. Her next door neighbor Colleen (Riseborough) senses that Elsie may require extra help and tries to intercede, offering to do shopping and cleaning. Elsie’s son John (Jason Watkins) makes occasional appearances and seems suspicious of Colleen, but he clearly does not want to take on much of a caretaking role himself.

The friendship between the two neighbors makes us uncomfortable from the start, and the presence of Colleen’s large, menacing dog does not calm our fears. When Elsie gives Colleen money to do some extra shopping for her, we can sense that Colleen may have motives beyond pure altruism in looking after her neighbor.

The first part of the movie, sketching in the friendship, is paced a tad too slowly, but we are aware that the situation is unstable and the two actresses help to keep us riveted. Blethyn earns our sympathy without begging for it, and Riseborough is always commanding. Her surprise Oscar nomination for To Leslie a couple of years ago, aside from being the result of savvy campaigning, was confirmation of the skill that she has demonstrated over the last decade. (Her outstanding performance in a recent Masterpiece Theatre production, Alice & Jack, in which she costarred with Domhnall Gleeson, also was evidence of her vigor and versatility.)

The script for Dragonfly could have provided a bit more background for Colleen. We can understand that Williams didn’t want to construct a labored psychiatric case study, but he might have sketched in more of her history to prepare us for the shift that takes place in the final third of the movie. That includes a couple of gotcha shock moments that had the Tribeca audience literally gasping and screaming.

Is this tonal swerve a little gimmicky? Probably, and the film will not be to everyone’s taste. But it is a skillfully rendered exercise in terror. Williams has studied a couple of Hitchcock movies, and he has absorbed sly lessons from the master.

This is a slight film, but the jolts do stay with you, and the two stars offer a humanity that many horror movies lack. Some smart distributor should snap it up.