Zombies and Americans
"28 Weeks Later"
At Quality 16 and Showcase
Fox Atomic

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

"28 Weeks Later" is the sequel to "28 Days Later" and is almost as good, but in a very different respect.

Months after the events of "28 Days," the "rage virus" has been almost completely eliminated. London is a quarantined community, offering great amenity and military protection for the few that choose to re-enter. Everything seems fine until some very unfortunate circumstances bring the virus back.

From there, everything and everyone goes bat shit, and it couldn't be a more harrowingly grandiose panic show. The military and infected ultimately spar in a way that begs the question of which side is worse? Ultimately, having one's eyes gouged out is just as bad as being sniped through the head.

Juan Carlos Fresnadillo ("Intacto") helms with polished scare tactics, building anticipation in almost masterful fashion. Low lighting, sporadic attacks and the great art of implication add to the film's scares.

BLAKE GOBLE

David Lynch: Here we go again
"Inland Empire"
At the Michigan Theater
Studio Canal

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

"Inland Empire" is the most intense narcotic currently on the market, and at its best, it's a pretty flooring high. Avant-garde maestro David Lynch's most experimental film in at least a decade is a dark tapestry jammed with savage images and adjacent plots, its implacable menace harnessed and redoubled by the exalted star turn by Laura Dern ("Happy Endings"). The actress, who appears in nearly every scene of this unwieldy 172-minute movie, is lost somewhere deep in Lynch's ecstatic, frightening vision, for the first time rendered on his newly beloved digital video.

The story concerns an actress (Dern) who lands a big part in a movie she soon learns is a remake of an unfinished film from Poland. This being a David Lynch movie, the early mention of a curse on the feature materializes in every aspect of the actors' lives, the line between the movie in production and real life becoming irrevocably blurred.

Is this a movie-within-the-movie, a hallucination, a dream? Who the hell knows? There are man-sized rabbits cut with ominous laugh tracks, ravenous husbands, a bug-eyed old hag and some impossibly claustrophobic framing. And that's just in the first half hour. Since the movie goes on for nearly six times that long, there are dry spells, long periods in which even the most bluntly provocative images can't distract from the frustration a film this oblique inspires.

It comes together in the end because there is a unity of narrative vision centered on Dern, whose wayward and somehow profound journey is the key to the film's mysteries. The movie is coarse and unrelenting, grotesque and fiendishly hilarious, but it's eventually the purveyor of an almost spiritual experience that hits the viewer as handily as it does the characters.

JEFFREY BLOOMER

Lohan, Huffman and Fonda don't 'Rule'
"Georgia Rule"
At Quality 16 and Showcase
Universal

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

There's little about "Georgia Rule" to either love or hate. That's quite the problem for this parable of family crises that plucks chords of every emotion imaginable and piles on the sap by the gross.

Lindsay Lohan ("Just My Luck") plays a troubled adolescent named Rachel, a character much like her real-life self. Bitter, destructive, rude and out of control, Rachel is sent away by her mother (Felicity Huffman, TV's "Desperate Housewives") to rural Idaho to suffer her stern grandmother (Jane Fonda, "Monster-in-Law") and maybe learn a thing or two about life.

Alarming, even heart-breaking secrets are revealed about the pasts of all three women, but the raw materials for a poignant drama are never hashed down with a coherent sense of purpose. The narrative swerves in various directions - characters weep, rage and break, but all the audience is able to feel is confusion.

Simply put, a film of the emotional devastation that "Georgia Rule" deals with cannot work with the usual modes of cinematic execution. The film's inability to go beyond the usual bits of sentimental dialogue and music to explore the full gravity of its weighty themes is the reason it fails to do much of anything.

That's a shame because Huffman, Lohan and Fonda all deliver spectacularly in roles that seem built for them. Given a stronger driving force behind the madness, this film could have been something special.

IMRAN SYED

It's not you, it's Zach Braff
"The Ex"
At Quality 16 and Showcase
Weinstein

Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

Even after the lengthy delay that "The Ex" took to make it to the big screen, something still doesn't taste right.