Warm Bodies

In a not-too-distant future, a zombie plague destroys civilization and divides humanity into the living and the undead. In this bleak world, zombie boy (Nicholas Hoult) meets human girl (Teresa Palmer). Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet gets reimagined by writer-director Jonathan Levine (adapting Isaac Marion's novel) in a landscape out of countless trashy movies, with generous dollops of Beauty and the Beast thrown in for good measure. Levine maintains the novel's delicate balance of horror, comedy and romance (with more comedy than Marion wrote), and he provides what could become breakout roles for Hoult and Palmer, after years of wallflower parts—good but unnoticed work in other people's pictures. The movie is ultimately a guilty pleasure, but enough of a pleasure that we needn't feel all that guilty.