Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2017 i Empire

THE SHOOT FOR Netflix’s new wrestling comedy-drama GLOW didn’t have the most auspicious of beginnings. “We literally broke the ring on day three,” laughs co-creator Liz Flahive of an early snafu during filming. “We had a male wrestler running the ropes and on the third hit off the rope, the ring collapsed. There were screams and gasps.” A steel beam spanning the ring, shorn in half, was identified as the culprit. But with the show’s base, a converted Los Angeles gym, cleared and the ring rebuilt, the cast of the ’80s-set ten-parter was swiftly back in action. The GLOW — as the saying almost goes — must go on. Standing for ‘Gorgeous Ladies Of Wrestling’ and toplined by Mad Men’s Alison Brie as Ruth, a struggling actress pushed to audition…

“I THINK ENGLISH people think Swedish people are much more comfortable with death than we are!” laughs Hannes Holm. The Swedish director is discussing his latest film, mordant but oddly life-affirming black comedy A Man Called Ove. It came out in Sweden on Christmas Day 2015 — in most countries, a time for chirpy family releases — where its popularity was instant. It became the country’s biggest hit in three decades. It is about a man repeatedly trying to kill himself. But A Man Called Ove is also about much more than that. And it’s very funny. Based Fredrik Backman’s bestseller, it’s the story of Ove (Rolf Lassgård), an elderly widower who loses his job and, with nothing left to live for, decides to hang himself. His attempts are repeatedly…

NICOLE RIVELLI/SARAH SHATZ THE TALE OF how Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon got together is highly dramatic and, in their new film The Big Sick, very, very funny. There was, however, a significant difficulty in telling it: for much of the story, one of them was unconscious. When Nanjiani, a stand-up comic and Silicon Valley regular, and Gordon, a writer and producer, had been dating for just a few months, she came down with a mystery illness. She was put into a coma while doctors frantically worked out what was wrong. Nanjiani remained by Emily’s side with her parents, his emotions deepening while hers stayed frozen in pre-coma casualness. To add to a strained situation, Nanjiani’s parents did not even know he had a girlfriend — much less a…

AN ADAPTATION OF a 1971 Don Siegel/ Clint Eastwood Southern Gothic genre movie that’s been labelled misogynistic (and, conversely, feminist) in the intervening years, The Beguiled doesn’t seem like an obvious Sofia Coppola pick. She confirms the point with a smile in her New York edit suite. “I would never [normally] consider remaking a movie,” she concedes, “but it took such a turn that I didn’t expect. I kept thinking about it. It was just so weird.” Based on Thomas Cullinan’s 1966 novel A Painted Devil and set during the American Civil War, it’s the story of wounded Union soldier John McBurney (Colin Farrell) who’s taken to an all-girl boarding school to convalesce. There, he develops complex relationships with the pupils and the head of the school, played by Nicole…

★★★★ OUT 19 MAY CERT 15 / 109 MINS DIRECTOR Nacho Vigalondo CAST Anne Hathaway, Jason Sudeikis, Dan Stevens, Tim Blake Nelson PLOT In Seoul, an enormous kaiju keeps appearing out of thin air to wreak havoc on the city. Meanwhile, in America, a thirtysomething fuck-up (Hathaway) is hitting rock bottom. It seems unlikely, but could the two somehow be connected? MONSTER MOVIES ARE all about chaos, confusion and disorder — sirens blaring as beasties with calves the size of skyscrapers kick in city blocks. But very rarely do they feel truly dangerous. Enter Spanish maverick Nacho Vigalondo. His work to date has taken the form of a bunch of spiky, low-budget genre pieces that defy categorisation. His cracking debut, 2007’s Timecrimes, was a mind-twisting time-travel thriller shot for the…

★★★★ OUT 9 JUNE CERT 15 / 116 MINS DIRECTOR Cate Shortland CAST Teresa Palmer, Max Riemelt, Matthias Habich, Emma Bading PLOT Aussie traveller Clare (Palmer) meets German teacher Andi (Riemelt) in Berlin. After a one-night stand, Clare find she’s locked in his apartment. The next day, when Clare is once again trapped in there, it dawns on her she is being held hostage. AUSTRALIAN DIRECTOR CATE Shortland’s third feature is a corker. After 2004’s Somersault (a teenage girl expresses her burgeoning sexuality) and 2012’s Lore (a teenage girl gets to grips with her parents’ Nazi past), Berlin Syndrome is another lyrical, compelling exploration of fluid, dark compulsions, this time centred on the power play between hostage and kidnapper in an escape-proofed apartment. In some hands, this could be a…

★★★ OUT 26 MAY CERT 15 / 95 MINS DIRECTOR Christopher Smith CAST Tye Sheridan, Bel Powley, Emory Cohen PLOT Law student Harper (Sheridan) recruits a criminal, Johnny (Cohen), to kill his step-father Vincent (Stephen Moyer) in Vegas, convinced Vincent put Harper’s mother in a coma. Harper, Johnny and Johnny’s girlfriend Cherry (Powley) go on the road to Vegas, but it’s not a smooth trip. WITH BLACK DEATH, Creep and Severance under his belt, British writer-director Christopher Smith has a reputation for disturbing horror, but this American-set film has a little more in common with his time-bending thriller Triangle. Smith has assembled a fashionable cast of charismatic young talents: Tye Sheridan (Mud, X-Men: Apocalypse) as the troubled young law student Harper, Emory Cohen (Brooklyn) as his shady new cohort Johnny…

★★★★ OUT NOW CERT 12A / 136 MINS DIRECTOR James Gunn CAST Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Michael Rooker, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel PLOT The Guardians — Peter Quill/Star-Lord (Pratt), Gamora (Saldana), Drax (Bautista), Rocket (Cooper) and Baby Groot (Diesel) — are running from an alien race, when they receive unexpected help: from Ego, The Living Planet (Kurt Russell), an ancient being claiming to be Peter’s long-lost father. THE FIRST GUARDIANS Of The Galaxy’s chief weapon was surprise. When the quirky quintet made their debut back in 2014, they represented Marvel Studios’ biggest gamble to date. Sure, it was the company that had taken an Aussie surfer, given him a magic hammer and still created another hit to add to its roster of box office behemoths, but the received…

★★★ NETFLIX OUT NOW EPISODES VIEWED ALL SHOWRUNNERS J. Michael Straczynski, Lana Wachowski, Lilly Wachowski CAST Toby Onwumere, Doona Bae, Jamie Clayton, Tina Desai, Tuppence Middleton, Max Riemelt, Miguel Ángel Silvestre, Brian J. Smith PLOT The extrasensory octet take time out from their individual dramas to peel back the layers of conspiracy and discover more about what they are. WHILE THE BULK of it comes a full two years after the first, the second season of Sense8 actually began last December. Netflix’s telepathic drama might not have been the most obvious choice for a Christmas special but it draped itself in tinsel nonetheless, radiating familial warmth for some (largely trivial) festive fun. Capheus (Toby Onwumere) got a new van, pictures of Lito’s (Silvestre) naked arse turned up on the internet…

★★★★★ AMAZON VIDEO STARTS OUT NOW EPISODES VIEWED 1-2 CREATORS Bryan Fuller, Michael Green CAST Ricky Whittle, Ian McShane, Emily Browning, Yetide Badaki, Pablo Schreiber, Peter Stormare, Gillian Anderson PLOT Shadow Moon (Whittle) is serving time for assault when he’s granted early release, after his wife Laura (Browning) dies in a car accident. During his journey home, he meets con artist Mr Wednesday (Ian McShane), who employs him and draws him into a secret, supernatural conflict. IN HANNIBAL, SHOWRUNNER Bryan Fuller was all about the devil in the detail. That detail most often involving gorgeously photographed gourmet dinners and artfully eviscerated corpses. And that devil, of course, being Dr Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen), a sophisticated charmer and an arch-manipulator so consistently a step ahead of everyone else you suspected he…

THE SET OF Wonder Woman is, at first glance, pretty far from wonderful. As Empire looks on, a weary column of World War I Allied troops trudge past, boots caked with filth, faces smudged with dirt. The mud — which just the day before, we’re told, was ankle-deep — is slowly drying under the February sun; it’s just about possible to pick your way across the crust without sinking in. In the trenches around us lie dead rats, a pungent stench suggesting that those tiny corpses represent an unhealthy commitment to realism. Everything and everyone is dirty and damp. Except, that is, for Gal Gadot, who strides past in her Wonder Woman gear looking like, well, a goddess. A gold eagle tops her red leather cuirass. A lasso is coiled…

“WOULD YOU EVER go back to Twin Peaks?” Empire asked David Lynch in 2001. “No,” he said. “Uh-uh. It’s as dead as a doornail.” And it was. Or so it seemed. But this is Twin Peaks, where there is more than one reality, if there was ever such a thing at all. Twin Peaks was a genuine televisual revolution — we had never before seen its kind, with its nightmarish noir, hallucinogenic bad guys, Red Room and backwards-walking/ talking dwarf. It made stars of its actors, pop-culture icons of its inhabitants, and got under our skin like a hidden clue beneath a fingernail. Fittingly, Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost, who met in 1986 to work on a film about Marilyn Monroe that never happened, dreamed it up in a diner.…

Edgar Wright’s got a full tank of gas. He’s got half a pack of trail mix. It’s dark out. And he’s wearing glasses. At 11pm on Day 38 of his latest production, everything — including the presence of an olive Cadillac packed with movie stars — suggests that the director is ready to make like Jake and Elwood Blues and hit it. But there’s a hold-up. Gripping a polystyrene cup of coffee, his fourth of the evening and God-knows-how-many-th of the day, Wright furrows his brow and... grunts. Don’t worry — the director of The World’s End is not at his wits’ end. He’s not had a caffeine overdose, or breathed in too many automobile fumes. Instead, he’s attempting to figure out his next shot. At first glance, it looks…

00.04.40 HERE COMES THE SUN __ The movie’s infectious opening number, Another Day Of Sun, in which a crowd of LA wannabes dance on the freeway, very nearly wasn’t. “You used to see Ryan [Gosling] and Emma [Stone] before it began, and there was a three-minute overture,” says writer-director Damien Chazelle. “It was making the whole sequence unwieldy.” He cut the song, but eventually dropped the overture instead. 0:10.58 EMERGING FROM THE CROWD __ The next number, Someone In The Crowd, an ensemble piece in which Emma Stone’s character Mia gradually takes centre stage from her roommates as they hit a Hollywood party, follows soon after. “The idea was to gradually allow the leads to take ownership,” says Chazelle. “From a musical numbers standpoint it becomes smaller and more intimate…

#12 MATT HAIG ON THE EXORCIST THE IDEA OF The First-Take Club is simple: we ask someone to choose a movie they haven’t seen from our 301 Greatest Movies Of All Time list (published in 2014). They then see that film and tell us what they thought. This month, acclaimed author Matt Haig, whose new novel How To Stop Time is being turned into a movie starring Benedict Cumberbatch, tackles a classic horror. The power of Christ compels him... The Exorcist had always been the most terrifying film I had never seen, which is precisely why I had never seen it. I can remember in the ’80s, at secondary school, over a decade since it had been at the cinema, it was still the film people…

ALAMY, REX FEATURES A MUMMY MOVIE can apparently be anything it wants to be. Universal’s 1932 original was essentially a dark romance; its sequels, strange crime noirs. The Hammer films were proto-slashers, and Stephen Sommers’ blockbusters Indiana Jones-style period capers. What, then, can we expect from director Alex Kurtzman and star Tom Cruise? “I’m not going to lie to you,” laughs Kurtzman. “It’s huge!” A globetrotting action-fantasy-horror with the budget you’d expect from a Cruise blockbuster, Kurtzman’s The Mummy is the first salvo in a new onslaught of Universal monster movies. If it connects with moviegoers it promises to reanimate one of cinema’s oldest shared universes, Universal first having set Frankenstein’s Monster against the Wolf Man back in 1943. “The genius of that was that audiences already had deep relationships…

“WHEN THEY OFFERED me the job, I was covered in shit,” recounts Joe Gilgun. “Like, actual poo on my face. I’d just cycled my mountain bike through a field full of cows. Then I got the phone call: ‘Do you want to be a vampire?’” It’s a scenario not a million miles from Preacher, the small-screen adaptation of Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s bonkers comic book about a clergyman accidentally imbued with the power of God. So far, it’s taken in chainsaw fights, exploding Scientologists, cockney angels and an unkillable demon cowboy — not to mention a character with an arse for a face. With Season 1 ending, quite literally, with a bang, Season 2 shifts gears, introducing new characters, a deeper backstory and more black comedy, as the key…

1 LEIA WON’T BE BACK FOR EPISODE IX Despite talk of a mix of CGI (shudder) and unused footage to recreate Leia, Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy confirmed that The Last Jedi will see the character’s final appearance. At the time of her death, Fisher had completed filming for VIII and Episode IX has subsequently been written without Leia’s inclusion. Does this mean everyone’s favourite princess will meet an untimely end? Or drive off into a twin sunset in the same manner as Paul Walker in Fast 7? Either way, Leia’s absence will be keenly felt. 2 THE NEW PLANET IS CALLED CRAIT One of the striking images in The Last Jedi’s first trailer is of land-skimmers hurtling across salt flats, their stabilising fins kicking up streams of crimson dust. That…

ALAMY IT WAS JONATHAN Demme’s own idea to release The Silence On The Lambs on Valentine’s Day. Instead of roses and romance, his landmark thriller offered unsuspecting moviegoers fava beans, Chianti and lurid splashes of violence to curdle the blood. It must have sent a shiver through a million dates. How strange that such a terrifying experience — an orchestration of suspense that outdoes even Hitchcock — should come from as compassionate an artist as Demme, who last month died from complications due to cancer. Then, that is entirely the point. For the New Yorker, the monsters were part of the dance of humanity. Naturally, he put the film’s success down to the brilliant performances. But you’ll search the ’90s in vain for a better-directed film. Demme’s warmth and generosity…

IF THERE’S ONE thing people love more than superheroes, it’s more superheroes. Superheroes all over the shop, teaming up, palling around, occasionally squabbling. Oh, and fighting evil. The Avengers did it, to great success of course, in 2012, which triggered a vast expansion of costumed crusaders. And now comes the latest big Marvel team, streaming straight to sofas everywhere: The Defenders. The latest bingeable Netflix series isn’t, as you might think, focused on a flat back four. Instead, it brings together, over a truncated eight episodes, the four heroes introduced over the last three years — Charlie Cox’s Matt Murdock/Daredevil, Krysten Ritter’s Jessica Jones, Mike Colter’s Luke Cage, and the most recent addition, the much-maligned Danny Rand/Iron Fist (Finn Jones) — to face down a threat so great, one hero…

★★ OUT 19 MAY CERT 12A / 108 MINS DIRECTOR Jim Sheridan CAST Rooney Mara, Vanessa Redgrave, Eric Bana, Theo James, Jack Reynor, Aidan Turner PLOT Rose (Redgrave) has been living in a mental institution for 50 years. She tells her story to a sympathetic doctor (Bana), recounting her past as a young woman (Mara) in wartime Ireland, and the circumstances which led to her committal. A FILM IN which Vanessa Redgrave reflects on a life of regret invites obvious comparison to Atonement. More surprisingly, there’s also a brief and inadvertent whiff of Titanic (actual dialogue, spoken to an elderly woman just before a flashback: “I want to hear your story, Rose”). But ultimately, it has most in a common with The Notebook. The Secret Scripture is a weepie, one…

★★★★ OUT 26 MAY CERT PG / 81 MINS DIRECTOR Michael Dudok de Wit CAST N/A PLOT A nameless man is shipwrecked on a desert island. Desperate to escape, his every attempt to sail away on a jerry-rigged raft is foiled by a huge, red turtle. Eventually, the man makes peace with his situation, one that’s helped by the strange arrival of a woman on the island. IF YOU EVER wondered what the art of Hergé might look like brought to life by Studio Ghibli, then The Red Turtle should finally answer that question. This gorgeous French-Belgian-Japanese co-production was the result of the Tokyo-based animation powerhouse offering a gig to Dutch-British animator Michael Dudok de Wit, so impressed were they with his 2000 Oscar-winning short Father And Daughter. And The…

★★★ OUT NOW FORMATS MAC, PC, PS4, XB1 DIRECTOR Jonathan Stauder CAST Scott Porter, Emily O’Brien, Nolan North PLOT When the Guardians receive a panicked communication from Nova Corps asking them to go after a powerful artefact, they are plunged into an adventure that could see the group torn apart. HAVING TACKLED THE Walking Dead, Game Of Thrones and Batman, Telltale Games turns its attention to another big pop-culture noise: Marvel’s boisterous band of star-rebels. The result is clearly modelled on James Gunn’s movies, albeit with some cosmetic differences, and is pretty successful at recreating their spiky character dynamics. But ultimately the pace of this first instalment (there are four more to go) lets it down. Whereas a slow, investigation-based story suited the Dark Knight, or even the eerily hushed…

JON WATTS FIRST TRIED OUT FOR MARVEL WHEN HE WAS SEVEN YEARS OLD. WELL, KINDA. In 1988, while growing up in Fountain, Colorado, a rural swathe of the Western United States in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, the future Hollywood director was given a Marvel Comics Try-Out Book. It invited its readers to pencil, ink, letter and colour a Spider-Man adventure, with the promise of a possible job at the publishing house if they sent off the results. Unbothered by the fact the DIY comic was already a good five years old and the winners had long since been announced, the young Watts dived in, spending hours obsessively drawing the wall-crawling hero. “That,” he says, “was my personal introduction to Spider-Man.” Ultimately, though, it was filmmaking rather than comics…

Deborah Snyder: When we first started talking about the project, we thought the photograph [above] was a really interesting idea. What was the journey in getting to this moment? We kind of built the story around this photo! Chris Pine: We’re basically a ragtag bunch of ne’er-do-wells. Each [member of the squad] gets their own storyline. Ewen and Saïd especially add humour. They’re a great bunch of guys. Ewen Bremner: It was shot on the backlot at Leavesden, the first thing filmed for the movie. We had to hold our positions for an uncommonly long time without moving, because it was an authentic daguerrotype box camera from the period, with a very long exposure time. Eugene Brave Rock: It was a really great day, coming together in costume for the…

IT SEEMED SUCH an innocuous question. A little icebreaker to start us off. When the Transformers writers room was first assembled in June 2015 to plot potential sequels and spin-offs, was Michael Bay there on Day One? Inadvertently, though, Empire’s query has made the director flash back to one of the most terrifying moments of his life. “Fuck,” he whispers quietly, gazing down at his trainers. “I was in Malta…” A pause. “It was scary. Um…” He looks up and squints ahead at the LA sun. Then he snaps out of it and tells his story. It is peak Michael Bay. He was in a building in Malta, shooting a fire sequence for his real-life Benghazi drama 13 Hours. “We’d practised our escape plan three times. Firemen with hoses either…

JUNE 2016 ALMOST EXACTLY 72 years to the D-Day, and Empire is bunkered down in Whitehall’s War Rooms. Well, as good as: we’re in the basement of The Glasgow School Of Art, vividly converted into a smoky replica of Downing Street’s subterranean battle hub. Nearly destroyed by fire in 2014, the location is once again hosting an inferno. As typists clatter and generals loiter, Brian Cox’s Churchill is storming through the enclosed space, fuming cigar clamped between his lips. “Bloody fool!” he rages, grabbing a stack of paper and hurling it into the air. “YOU’RE ALL BLOODY FOOLS!” The target for Winston’s almighty bollocking: Ella Purnell’s quivering secretary, responsible for an inadequately transcribed telegram. When Cox nails his fourth and final take, the crew burst into applause. This tends to…

PHOTOFEST WHEN MARTIN SCORSESE’S Taxi Driver opened in February 1976, its writer, Paul Schrader, was thrilled to see audiences queuing round the block; after all, his film, far from an easy sell, hadn’t enjoyed an easy ride to the screen. Legend has it that at one point Columbia Pictures had such little confidence in director Martin Scorsese that, before it agreed to foot the bill, Steven Spielberg had to commit to finishing the picture if Scorsese screwed it up. But Schrader’s initial relief at Taxi Driver’s box office success was tempered by a nagging concern. On closer inspection of those queues, he spotted many young men in combat jackets and familiar haircuts; they were modelling themselves on the film’s antihero, Travis Bickle. Word had spread of Bickle’s spectacular climactic act…

PERFORMANCE “I think back to the Alex Ross Perry movie I did last year, Golden Exits. I was like, ‘I’m gonna try and go back to some place I was at the start of my career and find that kind of smallness. Be as internal as possible.’” “When I played Shelley on American Horror Story and became a monster. People who were super friendly at the beginning wouldn’t look at me when I was a full-blown monster. It was hard to feel ostracised in that way.” FAN EXPERIENCE “Recently, in all the hubbub around Kids and the 20-year anniversary, a girl said to me — because that movie’s so masculine — ‘Don’t discredit what you represented in that movie.’ I struggle with what that movie means to me and it…

AFTER BEING OSCAR-nominated (and later winning) for The Salesman earlier this year, Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi was propelled into the spotlight when he refused to attend the ceremony in protest at President Donald Trump’s travel ban. The stand cemented the 45-year-old filmmaker’s status as the current darling of world cinema. Here is a quick primer to his genius. TITLES TO NAMEDROP As well as, obviously, The Salesman, have a look at About Elly (2009), A Separation (2011, generally considered his masterpiece) and The Past (2013). THEMES A Farhadi flick typically skewers middle-class Iranian life, butting up against issues of gender and morality. But his films are never didactic, always allowing space for the audience’s interpretation. “Empathy is a common subject to all of my films,” he says. “But in every…

IT’S BEEN A little more than 30 years since the three stars of Rita, Sue and Bob Too were in the same room together, or more specifically on the same patch of grey concrete. Today, Empire has reunited Siobhan Finneran (Rita), Michelle Holmes (Sue) and George Costigan (Bob, in case you hadn’t guessed) exactly where they left off: under the wet skies of the Buttershaw estate in Bradford — the location of the classic Alan Clarke film they wrapped in 1987. The March wind outside is blowing up a storm as we scale the stairs to the room we’re hunkering down in above the community centre. The Buttershaw was the home of troubled, prodigious working-class playwright Andrea Dunbar, who adapted Rita, Sue and Bob Too from two of her plays;…

“WE KNOW EACH other! He’s a friend from work!” Thor’s third solo adventure might share its title with the Viking apocalypse, but those nine words (the best nine words of any trailer so far this year, we’re saying) proved Thor: Ragnarok wasn’t going to be one of those sequels that announces it’s going ‘darker’, then thinks, “Job done.” Of course, if you’re familiar with the work of director Taika Waititi — not least last year’s Empire 2016 Film Of The Year Hunt For The Wilderpeople — you’ll already be expecting the funniest Thor yet. And as much as we’d like it to just be an expansion of Waititi’s brilliant ‘bored Thor’ skits featuring the Thunder God’s flatmate Darryl, the “friend” here is, instead, a big, green, Incredible monster. We’ve already…

THE MOVIES HAVE never lacked for iconic gunslingers. There’s Clint, of course. Han Solo. Clint again. Blazing Saddles’ Waco Kid. One more Clint for good measure. But Idris Elba’s Roland Deschain, the hero of The Dark Tower, will give them all a run for their money. “He has a ridiculous amount of skill,” says Elba. “I did a lot of preparation on gun handling and mechanics. That aspect is definitely not ignored.” Clint Eastwood was an obvious inspiration for Stephen King when he created Roland for — yes! — 1982’s The Gunslinger, the first in an epic series King has revisited throughout his career. He’s a taciturn chap who roams Mid-World (a version of our world with vast differences that will begin shrouded in mystery), shooting first and asking questions……

MAKE-UP BY NINA PARK AT THE WALL GROUP USING CHANEL. HAIR BY OWEN GOULD AT THE WALL GROUP USING LIVING PROOF. STYLING BY CHRISTOPHER KIM. Vintage white T-shirt: stylist’s own. Self-portrait black patent zip front trousers, £240, self-portrait-studio.com. Falke metallic fishnet stocking, £24, net-a-porter.com. Aldo shoes Cadassa in Snowy, £65, aldoshoes.com PHIL FISK/CAMERA PRESS, REX FEATURES AGE __ 28 PLAYS __ Communications and navigations expert Upworth on the colony ship Covenant in Alien: Covenant. “I had a blast, but it was nerve-racking to start with,” recalls Hernandez. “I was hanging around on a spaceship with people I grew up watching. Not to mention Ridley fucking Scott looking me in the eyeballs and giving me direction.” BACKSTORY __ “I always knew I wanted to be a performer, but I was blindly…

ALAMY AROUND 20 YEARS ago, Martin McDonagh was taking an epic road trip across the United States when he spotted two billboards that someone had erected in an effort to find justice. The British writer-director only glimpsed them in passing, but the idea lodged in his brain. “It’s a very sad way of going about trying to get justice,” he says. “What kind of pain is someone coming from to have taken such a drastic step?” Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is McDonagh’s way of answering that question — albeit with the help of an additional billboard. Frances McDormand stars as Mildred Hayes, a grieving mother who has lost both her daughter and her patience with local police officers who she believes are “too busy torturing black folks” to find…

★★★ OUT 12 MAY CERT 15 / 123 MINS DIRECTOR Ridley Scott CAST Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride PLOT 2109. En route to Origae-6 to start a new colony, the crew of USCSS Covenant, tempted by a seemingly rogue transmission, opt for a closer, seemingly equally hospitable planet. Only terraforming officer Daniels (Waterston) has concerns, fears confirmed when the group meet David (Fassbender), a survivor of the ill-fated Prometheus mission. WHEN THE TITLE Alien: Covenant appears on the screen in Ridley Scott’s third entry into the six-film Fox franchise, it slowly emerges in deep space scored by Jerry Goldsmith’s beautiful haunting theme. After the different, divisive Prometheus, it seems like a reaffirmation of core values: this time, in space, no-one will hear you scream. If that is…

★★★★ OUT 2 JUNE CERT PG / 118 MINS DIRECTOR Hirokazu Koreeda CAST Hiroshi Abe, Yôko Maki, Satomi Kobayashi PLOT Ryôta Shinoda (Abe), a once-promising novelist, works as a private detective. Yoshiko (Kiki), his widowed mother, hopes he’ll get back together with his wife and son — but Ryôta worries that he’s turned out so much like his gambling addict father that a reconciliation isn’t possible. WRITER-DIRECTOR HIROKAZU Koreeda specialises in quietly affecting, nuanced films about regret and relationships — perhaps reasonable Western equivalents would be Kenneth Lonergan or Mike Leigh. After The Storm is a title that perfectly describes the situation in which we meet protagonist Ryôta (Abe). The rangy, hangdog guy is on the cusp of middle-age, well after the biggest dramatic events in his life have blown…

★★ OUT 19 MAY CERT 12A / 126 MINS DIRECTOR Guy Ritchie CAST Charlie Hunnam, Katie McGrath, Annabelle Wallis, Jude Law, Hermione Corfield, Eric Bana PLOT Exiled as a boy after the murder of his parents, Arthur (Hunnam) grows up on the streets of Londinium with no idea if he’s the rightful ruler of England. Then, after pulling a mystical sword from a stone, he joins a band of outlaws to take on the king — his evil uncle Vortigern (Law). YOU CAN’T REALLY fault the logic of letting Guy Ritchie bring some mayhem to the traditionally chivalrous world of King Arthur. Back in 2009, when Benedict Cumberbatch’s modern-day consulting detective was yet to usher viewers into his Mind Palace, Ritchie’s first Sherlock Holmes film proved a gleefully incendiary revelation,…

★★★ OUT 9 JUNE CERT 15 / 94 MINS DIRECTOR Craig Johnson CAST Woody Harrelson, Laura Dern, Isabella Amara PLOT Isolated after his dad’s death, petulant loser Wilson (Harrelson) decides to reconnect with his ex (Dern). When he discovers he has a teenage daughter born after their split, Wilson attempts to reunite the family... with calamitous results. FROM JACK NICHOLSON in As Good As It Gets to Walter Matthau in, well, just about anything, American cinema has a rich history of cantankerous but loveable grouches. Adding another portrait to the grump gallery, Woody Harrelson delivers a spectacularly boorish performance in Wilson, an adaptation of Daniel Clowe’s alt-comic that depicts the mid-life crisis of a snarling underdog. The film has plenty of bark but a curiously soft, gummy bite. Wearing his…

★★★★ OUT 26 MAY CERT 12A / 100 MINS DIRECTOR Aki Kaurismäki CAST Sherwan Haji, Sakari Kuosmanen, Tommi Korpela PLOT After winning big at poker, salesman Wikström (Kuosmanen) buys an unloved Helsinki restaurant. Across town, Syrian refugee Khaled (Haji) escapes from his state facility. Their paths will soon cross. A DROLL CHRONICLER of the mundane rhythms of life, Aki Kaurismäki wouldn’t have been the first director you’d imagine regularly tackling the current refugee crisis. Until his previous film, African migrant drama Le Havre, the closest the Finnish writer/director had come to a full-blown migration crisis was getting the Leningrad Cowboys’ quiffs into America. Yet with The Other Side Of Hope he delivers what is easily his most political movie yet, a two-finger salute to cold-hearted bureaucracy and his homeland’s apathy…

“SOME OF THE DESIGNS GOT REALLY INSANE,” says Luc Besson. “A few times I wanted to call the police and say, ‘You should lock this guy up. He’s crazy!’” The French auteur is casting his mind back to the extraordinary pre-production period for his new movie, mad sci-fi epic Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets, a process which took five years, involved 1,000 Skype sessions, and yes, nearly saw a few of Besson’s underlings wheeled off in straitjackets. “We had a back-up team in place,” he continues, “because I figured after two years the first bunch would be cooked.” The movie, an adventure involving space-cops Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and Laureline (Cara Delevingne), is based on the world created by writer Pierre Christin and artist Jean-Claude Mézières over 29 graphic…

A funny thing has happened to Chris Evans lately. The man who has played Steve Rogers — the ultimate bastion of American decency, honour and nobility — in Marvel movies since 2011 appears to be morphing into a real-life righteous warrior. Or as close as we’re going to get without super-soldier serum and indestructible shields. Over the last year or so, Evans has become increasingly outspoken, standing up for what he believes in, for truth, justice and that other one. Mostly, this has been through his Twitter handle, @ChrisEvans (heaven knows how the former Top Gear host, who was given the name first after all, feels about having to do with @aChrisEvans). If Steve Rogers knew the meaning of the phrase “social media”, you can imagine that his account would…

GARTH JENNINGS’ SING, a joyous animated musical in which talking animals take part in an X-Factor-style singing contest, might well hold the record for the highest number of songs in a single movie. According to Jennings the final number, ranging from brief snippets to full tracks, is anywhere between 65 and 84. “It was never about, ‘How many can we cram in?’” he says. “You can only put in songs that you think will work for the narrative, and songs you love.” Here, the director talks us through his favourite cuts. GOLDEN SLUMBERS A deep cut from The Beatles’ Abbey Road album, it kicks off the movie, sung by Jennifer Hudson. As a goat. Naturally. “It was vital to us that the film opened with a big, emotional song. It…

#12: THE FILM YOU WISHED YOU WERE IN — BUGSY MALONE BETWEEN THE AGES of five and nine, I was mostly performing. Not publicly — hair in tight bun, pushy stage mother driving me from ballet class to tap recital — but alone, on the living-room carpet, wearing glittery tat from my mum’s wardrobe, and learning all my lines and routines from a worn-out VHS of Bugsy Malone, bought for a couple of quid from the ex-rental bin. While no-one else was around (which in the 1980s was frequently), I became a 1920s lounge singer, tap-dancing janitor, boxer or cigarette girl. It’s not that I longed to be a star; more that I wanted to wear a feathered hat and sip sarsparilla through a stripy straw, then do a runner…

AT FIRST GLANCE, Bill Strother had an unremarkable career. Search his name on IMDb and it returns one credit, and one credit only, for Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last! in 1923. Strother is credited with two roles — Bill and The Pal —and an additional tag for ‘stunts — uncredited’. It’s the latter that’s most important, for without these stunts — uncredited, one of the most iconic visual gags in history would never have happened. For Strother was the human fly — or guinea pig — who scaled the ten storeys of the International Bank Building in downtown Los Angeles on 17 September 1922, all caught on camera by producer Hal Roach as part of the preparation for the most nail-biting comic sequence in movie history: Harold Lloyd ascending the face…

ALAMY, CAPITAL PICTURES, PHOTOFEST, REX FEATURES LEADER BOARD 1 Can you name every actress who played the Red Queen? PAUL: No. I can’t. I’ll tell you why — there’s been so many of them. Sometimes we’d use somebody’s face as visual reference and then revoice. The best by far is Ever Gabo Anderson [Anderson and Jovovich’s daughter, who appears in The Final Chapter], because she actually played the part and did all the dialogue. Half a point. The correct answer is Michaela Dicker, Megan Charpentier, Ave Merson-OÕBrian, and Ever Gabo Anderson, their daughter. MILLA: Ever Gabo Anderson! [Laughs] I’m so not on it. Did Paul get that one? No way. I’ve only met two of them in real life. Half a point. 2 Which is the highest-grossing Resident Evil movie…

Barry Jenkins: “In Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light, there’s a very simple scene where the family goes to the lake to bathe. Even right now I can see the little girl, the daughter’s face. She’s looking right at the camera during the scene. These are non-actors [local Mennonites] attempting to act in that moment. It brings me to my knees every time I see it. It’s beautiful.” EXT. LAKE — DAY Esther (Miriam Toews) and Johan (Cornelio Wall) have taken their children — Alfredo (Alfredo Thiessen), Sara (Irma Thiessen), Autghe (Autghe Loewen), Anita (Elisabeth Fehr), Jackob (Jackob Loewen), Daniel (Daniel Thiessen) and baby Cornelio (twins Gerardo and Alex Thiessen) — to a pond to swim. Alfredo is sitting on a log by a lake with his shoes off. Jackob comes up…