From Bone Temple to Oscar hopefuls, here are January's best movies

Welcome to the ABC Arts January film wrap.

As awards season heats up multiple Oscar hopefuls, such as Jafar Panahi's incendiary It Was Just an Accident and Richard Linklater's love letter to French film, are finally hitting Australian cinemas.

January also sees the return of the 28 Days Later franchise, with Danny Boyle handing the reins to a new director for the first time in the zombie series' history.

Happy watching!

• 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
• Addition
• Blue Moon
• It Was Just an Accident
• No Other Choice
• Nouvelle Vague
• The Secret Agent

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

Rarely does a sequel rise above its predecessors. Especially when it's actually the second film in a planned trilogy, which itself is a reboot of 20-year-old original movies. But Nia DaCosta (Hedda, Candyman) has defied the odds with 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. 

The Bone Temple picks up straight after 28 Years Later's shocking kicker, which saw sheltered teen Spike (Alfie Williams) run into the devious Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O'Connell) and his band of violent "fingers", who all dress as disgraced paedophile Jimmy Savile. 

Spike is bloodily initiated into the gang, which traverses the countryside looking for souls to send to St Nick, a version of Satan whom Sir Jimmy is delusionally convinced is his vicar father who perished in front of him when he was eight, at the inception of the Rage Virus.

This aspect of writer Alex Garland's story is what we've come to expect from the 28 Days franchise: gory, violent and explicit in its point that humans are the most cruel and dangerous part of a zombie outbreak. 

O'Connell, so perfect as vampire Remmick in Sinners, delivers another horror villain for the ages as the commanding Sir Jimmy, whose cruel, childlike interpretation of religion is as terrifying as it is compelling.

DaCosta saves her most delicate and profound visuals for Sir Jimmy's antithesis: the surprisingly tender relationship between Dr Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), the keeper of the chillingly beautiful ossuary central to the film, and Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry), a bullish infected "alpha" we met last edition. 

The pair share a love for morphine and dancing to Duran Duran, with Kelson becoming comfortable enough to attempt to medically coax out the human he suspects is lurking below Samson's murderous rage.

Capped off with the most explosive, audacious climaxes seen in recent memory (just give Fiennes the 2027 Oscar now), The Bone Temple delivers something seldom seen in continuing franchises: a feeling of satisfaction.

• Velvet Winter

Addition

"Life without obsession is no life at all", asserts Grace (Teresa Palmer), the protagonist of Australian director Marcelle Lunam's Addition — based on the novel of the same name by Toni Jordan — as she flits in between counting every piece of cutlery in the kitchen and having pillow talk with an imaginary Nikola Tesla. 

Grace's obsession is numbers, and the fascination has carried her far; her life's work is in pure mathematics, and she teaches it to eager kids every day.

But it's also hindered her. Fresh out of an inpatient clinic, she's eager to make sparks fly with "sexy Brit" Seamus (Joe Dempsie), but only if she can "hide the crazy". Despite Grace showing obvious signs of OCD, the film tiptoes around her actual diagnosis.

As far as rom-com leads go, Grace is refreshingly unique. But the romance with Seamus just doesn't add up. 

The meet-cute dialogue clunks and grinds — partly due to the questionable sound mix — and the chemistry between Grace and Seamus completely fizzles out by the second act.

There's a missed opportunity to focus on her mathematical mentorship of her niece Larry (Lois Baxter), which is a constant sore spot for Grace's neurotypical sister, Jill (Adrienne Pickering). 

The tension present in the idea of Grace passing down her gift for numbers, knowing that it also comes with a debilitating mental illness, is fascinating. But alas, this meaty idea is often shafted for more sex scenes with Seamus.

• Silvi Vann-Wall

Blue Moon

Alongside the Gershwin brothers, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein are etched into Broadway (and cinematic) history as the duo behind The Sound of Music, South Pacific and Oklahoma! But before Hammerstein, Rodgers was paired with Lorenz Hart.

Blue Moon director Richard Linklater casts regular collaborator Ethan Hawke as the down-on-his-luck lyricist, who co-wrote, with Rodgers, the ballad that lends its name to the film. A mix of older-age makeup and cunning camera angles shrinks him into Hart's dishevelled state.

It's March 31, 1943 – opening night of Oklahoma! — and Hart is smarting at being supplanted in his creative partnership with Rodgers (Andrew Scott) by Hammerstein (Simon Delaney), largely due to his alcohol-fuelled unreliability. 

Escaping from St James Theatre, Hart arrives early at the post-show party, wheedling for whisky from Bobby Cannavale's cautious bartender, Eddie.

Embracing its staginess, Blue Moon plays out almost entirely within this confined space, as a throng fills the room, including a teenage Stephen Sondheim (Cillian Sullivan). Determined to be somebody again, Hart re-woos Rodgers, but the impossibility hangs between them like a bruised heart, with Hawke and Scott conveying so much in their anguished looks.

The Substance star Margaret Qualley is also excellent as college student Elizabeth, to whom the closeted Hart, in a time of criminalised queerness, regularly wrote letters. 

Inspired by their correspondence, screenwriter Robert Kaplow depicts a desperate marriage proposal as Hart spirals ever downward.

Melodiously scored by Graham Reynolds, Blue Moon is achingly beautiful, in thrall with the artistic dream in all its complicated glory.

• Stephen A Russell

It Was Just an Accident

Nothing is coincidence, as the introductory frame of Iranian filmmaking giant Jafar Panahi's Palme d'Or winner reveals. Shrouded in darkness, Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi) is driving his family home when he accidentally hits a dog. His car falters shortly after, a fateful incident that brings him to a nearby garage, helmed by Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri).

Upon hearing the singular squeak of Eghbal's prosthetic leg dragging upon the floor, something in Vahid breaks and he sets out after him. Through a gradual accretion of detail, we learn what precipitated this impulse — Eghbal's distinctive gait resurfaced traumatic memories of abuse that Vahid endured at the hands of a brutal guard in prison. 

Vahid has a score to settle, but how can he be sure it's really his abuser?

Joining him in this unlikely odyssey of retribution are former political prisoners equally haunted by torture doled out by the very same guard — wedding photographer Shiva (Mariam Afshari), soon-to-be-bride Golrokh (Hadis Pakbaten) and her fiancé Ali (Majid Panahi), and unstable firebrand Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr).

Just as with recent Iranian films like The Seed of the Sacred Fig and countless before them, the precariousness of the filming conditions that Panahi — who has spent two prolonged stints in Tehran's Evin Prison — and his crew endured seeps into the undercurrent of the film. 

Humour and humanity underwrite even the direst of life's circumstances, and so too it does in It Was Just an Accident. 

Panahi simultaneously excoriates and lampoons the ridiculousness of state-sanctioned control, the inanity of corruption, the senseless bureaucracy of evil. 

Propulsive and nerve-wracking until its very final scene — a stunning feat in unknowing — It Was Just an Accident arrives at a critical juncture in Iranian public life. With between 3,000 and 5,000 anti-government protesters killed and 18,000 injured, Panahi's latest work of dissent posits the question: how long will this cycle of violence continue?

• Sonia Nair

No Other Choice

Korean auteur Park Chan-wook returns with yet another mammoth exercise in social commentary — this time centred on down-and-out paper factory worker Yoo Man-su (a masterful Lee Byung-hun), who struggles to find a job after being retrenched by the American overlords who have seized control of the pulp manufacturer to which he's dedicated his working life.

The family's descent from upper-middle-class to lower-middle-class is hardly the fodder for protracted misery, but Chan-wook laughably raises the stakes of their misfortune as he holds a mirror to a demographic that undoubtedly constitutes many of the film's viewers.

The family dogs are surrendered, furniture is sold, a Netflix subscription is cancelled, and when the future of Man-su's intergenerational family home hangs in the balance, he snaps and hatches a misguided plan to overthrow his competitors in the job market.

Delivered in Chan-wook's signature absurdist style, replete with dreamlike scene transitions and amusing specificity, No Other Choice is a psychological thriller, crime caper, black comedy and domestic drama all in one. 

Teetering between slapstick farce and the tragedy of moral rot, the film hurtles towards its fatal end as Man-su's hyper-fixation on eliminating his cadre finds its nexus in paper worker Choi Sun-chul (Park Hee-soon).

The second film adaptation of Donald E Westlake's 1997 crime novel The Ax, No Other Choice is both a riposte against the encroachment of AI in a capitalist system already designed to privilege a minute few at the expense of everyone else, as well as a study in toxic masculinity.

That Man-su is willing to do everything he does for a position in middle management is perhaps the film's most searing critique of modern life.

• Sonia Nair

Nouvelle Vague

French critic-turned-filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard was never modest. He once said, of his 1960 debut feature, Breathless (À Bout de Souffle), that it "took everything the cinema had done … exploded all this and put an end, once and for all, to the old style".

Big-noting, sure, but there's truth to it. At the vanguard of the French New Wave, Godard — alongside peers including Agnès Varda, Éric Rohmer, Alain Resnais and François Truffaut, the latter penning Breathless's outline — helped reshape the look, feel and sound of cinema far beyond Gallic borders.

American director Richard Linklater was hooked by Godard's penchant for naturalistic walk-and-talk scenes and bracing jump cuts. Sixty-five years later, Linklater pens his Palme d'Or-nominated lettre d'amour to Breathless's birth with the biopic Nouvelle Vague.

Just as Godard cast a then-unknown Jean-Paul Belmondo to play Bogart-loving, cop-killing crim, Michel, Linklater taps newcomers Guillaume Marbeck and Aubry Dullin to portray the Breathless director and his star. 

Marbeck uncannily adopts Godard's infuriatingly louche manner without resorting to mimicry. Dullin swaggers with the charm that made a broken-nosed Belmondo's performance pop.

But Zoey Deutch, as ill-fated American star Jean Seberg, is the revelation. Surpassing Kristen Stewart's also-great turn in Seberg (2019), her exasperated eye-rolling at Godard's inscrutability, wondering if she's cursed her career, is hilariously relatable.

Artfully shot in black and white in the Academy ratio by cinematographer David Chambille, Breathless looks lush, but Linklater wisely avoids aping Godard's tricks. Instead, c'est une vibe, one that film history lovers will inhale.

• Stephen A Russell

The Secret Agent

In this languorous noir thriller, director Kleber Mendonça Filho luxuriates in the torrid sensuality and brazen hues of 1977 Recife — described in the opening titles as a "time of great mischief".

Under the roar of the local Carnival celebrations, university researcher Armando (Wagner Moura, Civil War) intends to slip away from Brazil's military dictatorship with his son Fernando.

As he anxiously waits for an escape plan to hatch, he takes on work at an unassuming government job and lies low in an apartment complex teeming with other dissidents and political refugees, none of whom readily share their real names.

Filho pays moving tribute to both his hometown and the cinema-going culture of his childhood, the local theatre affectionately depicted as both temple and cruising spot.

Among the many dilemmas Armando faces — not least the matter of two brutish hit-men set on his trail by a corrupt former minister — our protagonist is confronted with the question of whether to take his son to watch Jaws.

The spectre of Spielberg's monster looms large; early on, a severed leg is recovered from the maw of a shark and sparks a nationwide obsession, spiralling into a giddy B-movie digression.

The Secret Agent gradually turns up the heat as real-world violence ruptures Filho's nostalgic idyll.

A perfect summer film.

• Jamie Tram