The Venice Film Festival has kicked off its 83rd edition with a calculated combination of glamour, authorship, entertainment, and critical spirit. The elegance and media appeal were provided by George Clooney, who received an honorary Golden Lion this Wednesday. Curiously, last year Clooney was already seen receiving an award for his career in Venice, but it was on the festival's screens, in the fiction of Jay Kelly, Noah Baumbach's film. In reality, the link between the Hollywood star and the Festival dates back a long way, since 1998, when Clooney was still part of the cast of Emergencies, the actor stepped onto the festival's red carpet to present A very dangerous mess next to Jennifer Lopez. “My love story with Venice is almost thirty years old, and my most precious memory was my wedding – in 2014, with Amal Alamuddin, at the luxurious Aman Grand Canal Hotel. If I don't say this, I could get in trouble at home,” Clooney commented to the accredited press, showing off a charming and mischievous smile.

You wouldn't believe it. And this is good, very good, considering we're talking about a late sequel to 28 days later from 2002, which already had a second part in 2007 and which, since then, we have seen millions of films and series and played hundreds of video games about infected zombies (yes, we have even lived through a pandemic, what the heck!). That is to say, as addicted spectators, our capacity for astonishment may be completely anesthetized. But then Danny Boyle comes along and, patapam, he invents, 28 years later, a film about ultra-violent cannibalistic infected people that seems, at times, new. First of all, because it's largely a story... of children's adventures! It's a rite of passage for a 12-year-old boy who lives overprotected and literally isolated in a self-sufficient reserve of quarantine survivors. gore and one day his father takes him out into the open so he can learn how to kill savages. From there, the film evolves with unexpected plot twists and tones. They don't always work, of course! Sometimes, Danny Boyle steps right into the ditch with some truly disconcerting sentimental sections of the story. But other times, he pushes himself, along with Alex Garland on the script (there are fragments that remind us of Civil War, in fact), some proposals within this subgenre that are quite unusual and gratifying: the character of Ralph Fiennes (a humanist Colonel Kurtz?) or the film's capicuous prologue and epilogue would be good examples.

The film director's signature Boyle Damage (Trainspotting) and that of the screenwriter Alex Garland (Civil War) arrive in theaters hand in hand with a genre that, in Boyle's own words, "continues to work and has its audience": horror. Starting this Friday, viewers will be able to transport themselves once again to an inhospitable England ravaged by a virus that has infected the citizens and transformed them into zombies,