If George Romero had the technical facilities and the budget available to studio-backed filmmakers these days, his Night of the Living Dead might have looked a lot like 28 Weeks Later. Of course, much of what makes his epochal 1968 film powerful in a way that still shocks audiences was a function of its low budget: More money might only have amplified all the wrong parts of the film. Like its predecessor 28 Days Later, this British production is minimally plotted. A lab-grown virus turns anyone it comes into contact with into a raging, murderous lunatic. Six months after the initial outbreak has killed all the populace of Great Britain who weren’t able to flee in time, the American military is beginning efforts to repopulate London. (Why they don’t start in a smaller, more easily maintained setting is one of many questions you have to overlook.) After an opening scene that confronts the question of at what point self-preservation takes precedence over love, the first half of the movie looks as if its going to concern similar questions of living after unbearable loss. (The fact that the leading characters in this small cast are an adolescent brother and sister lulled me into a false sense of security.) But I’m sure I’m giving away nothing to reveal that the pestilence returns to attack the returnees, with the second half of the film a battle for the main characters to escape an increasing horde of flesh-eating subhumans. Like the monsters that stalk its scenes, 28 Weeks Later is ferocious, relentless and pitiless, more so than you may consider acceptable in an evening’s entertainment. The pivotal scene in which the virus is reintroduced from an immune carrier was as unpleasantly nasty as anything I would ever hope to encounter. When Romero had parents be killed by the child they refused to abandon after she was attacked by zombies in Night, he knew the idea was disturbing enough without making it explicit. Director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (taking over from Danny Boyle) has no such compunction here, and audiences may leave the theater asking themselves just how cynical a movie really needs to be.

Here’s what I wrote about the first Shrek film, way back in 2001 : “…it features a lot of highly marketable characters that I’m sure presently have their own aisle at every national toy chain. But despite its carefully calculated appeal, it’s not that strong of a film: sure, kids will be dragging their parents off to see it opening weekend, but it’s hardly the kind of thing anyone will want to see over and over again. It’s nothing in the class of Toy Story or Chicken Run.”

The late Susan Sontag famously warned us against the use of illness as a metaphor. At some points, Sarah Polley’s debut directorial effort, Away From Her, seems to be edging toward a contemplation of Alzheimer’s as a symbolic phenomenon, but it never really abandons the common, difficult and often frightening human dimensions of this disease.