Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2019 i Empire

THE MCU HAS done space opera before, in Guardians Of The Galaxy. It’s even explored cosmic characters with near-infallible powers, like Captain Marvel. But The Eternals — a comics deep-cut that even well-read aficionados won’t be too familiar with— looks set to deliver a full-on gods vs gods adventure on an entirely different scale for the MCU. Introducing the new team to the Hall H stage, Kevin Feige described the Eternals as super-powered “immortals who have been on Earth for 35,000 years”. In the comics they were created by another, even older race called the Celestials. We’ve actually already met a couple of Celestials on screen before — Kurt Russell’s Ego in Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2, and the enormous severed head/ecosystem of Knowhere in the first film. Concept…

Alamy, Disney WHEN IT COMES to the title of Rian Johnson’s new movie, it’s tempting to play detective. Knives Out, eh? Surely that’s got to be inspired by the director’s experiences on Star Wars: The Last Jedi, where he was besieged by whingeing fanbabies, furious at the perceived destruction of their childhoods, right? It must, therefore, be a reference to the fact that they had their knives out for him from the moment the movie was released (and, in some cases, before), yes? Well, no. “I’ve had that title for a long while,” says Johnson. “Years and years ago. I just love that title.” Sometimes, we should leave detecting to the detectives. Knives Out, then, is not a reaction to Johnson’s time (which might be an ongoing thing, with his…

ANTHONY ‘FRIDGE’ JOHNSON (SER’DARIUS BLAIN) is now in... PROFESSOR SHELDON OBERON (JACK BLACK) MILO WALKER (DANNY GLOVER) is now in... FRANKLIN FINBAR (KEVIN HART) EDDIE GILPIN (DANNY DEVITO) is now in... DR SMOLDER BRAVESTONE (DWAYNE JOHNSON) MARTHA KAPLY (MORGAN TURNER) is now in... RUBY ROUNDHOUSE (KAREN GILLAN) JUMANJI: THE NEXT LEVEL IS IN CINEMAS FROM 13 DECEMBER…

A FULL DECADE after the original became a cult zomcom hit, Zombieland is back for a second helping. And if our exclusive first look is anything to go by, it’ll be all shook up. It’s unclear why Harrelson, as apocalyptic survivor Tallahassee, is dressed as Elvis Presley here, but it’s clearly a labour of love for the actor. Earlier this year, he revealed to The Late Late Show that his Elvis impersonation was the thing that first got him noticed in drama club, ultimately changing the course of his career. Elvis, it seems, was always on his mind... ZOMBIELAND: DOUBLE TAP IS IN CINEMAS FROM 18 OCTOBER…

CHRIS MORRIS IS an elusive, enigmatic man. For nine years, British comedy fans have wondered where the Brass Eye and The Day Today satirist has disappeared to, having not made a film since 2010 terrorist farce Four Lions. His whereabouts all this time? In the driving seat of a rental car, driving up and down America. “I got hooked into being his travelling companion,” laughs Jesse Armstrong, co-creator of Peep Show and a regular Morris collaborator. But the trip was not for sightseeing: the pair were meeting victims and perpetrators of morally dubious FBI terror stings, in preparation for Morris’ long-awaited second feature film, The Day Shall Come. “These people, they’re not terrorists and yet they spend years in jail,” says Armstrong. The screenwriter was enlisted to help Morris turn…

★★★★ OUT NOW / CERT 15 / 109 MINS DIRECTOR Ritesh Batra CAST Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Sanya Malhotra, Farrukh Jaffar Shy, sweet-hearted photographer Rafi (Siddiqui) takes a picture of student Miloni (Malhotra) who runs off before he can present it to her. With his domineering grandmother (a hilarious Jaffar) expecting him to find a wife, Rafi placates her with the picture — a tactic that backfires when she announces she is coming to stay. Rafi tracks down Miloni and convinces her to pose as his partner for the visit, while she also tries to avoid her own arranged marriage. It’s a slowburn and the outcome is never in doubt, but the craft is impeccable, the performances likeable and there is something warm and comforting about director Batra’s gentle worldview, his faith…

★★★★ OUT 30 AUGUST CERT 12A / 99 MINS DIRECTOR Peter Webber CAST Ken Boothe, Winston McAnuff, Kiddus I, Cedric Myton, Judy Mowatt PLOT British filmmaker Peter Webber follows a group of pioneering reggae musicians as they gather on a Kingston hilltop for an open-air recording session called ‘Inna De Yard’, each reflecting on their personal history and the various struggles that informed their music. “SOME COUNTRIES HAVE diamonds, some countries have pearls, some countries have oil… and Jamaica has reggae.” Though the local historian and reggae enthusiast who utters this doesn’t say it outright, the comparison of the music genre pioneered in Jamaica to various precious resources plundered from Third World countries by colonialist global powers is a telling one. The most cutting moments of Peter Webber’s freewheeling, easy-going…

★★ OUT 30 AUGUST / CERT PG / 91 MINS DIRECTOR Adrian Noble CAST Timothy Spall, Vanessa Redgrave, Stephen Lord Mrs Lowry & Son started life as a BBC radio play and never really transcends its talk-based origins. Set in one bedroom, it charts the unhealthy relationship between meek Lancashire artist L.S. Lowry (Spall) and his domineering, bed-ridden mother (Redgrave), which is put to the test when Lowry receives an invitation to mount an exhibition in fancy-dan London. Spall and Redgrave inhabit their characters, but they never really illuminate them; Martyn Hesford’s script never finds interesting shifting dynamics within the relationship, meaning a static, visually repetitive film feels even more lifeless. It also doesn’t really get under the skin of Lowry as an artist, resulting in a film as dreary…

★★★★★ OUT 30 AUGUST / CERT 15 / 89 MINS DIRECTOR Mark Jenkin CAST Edward Rowe, Mary Woodvine, Giles King, Simon Shepherd SET IN A Cornish fishing village and shot on black-and-white PUmm film, Bait is powered by the social tensions between local fisherman Martin Ward (comedian Edward Rowe on weighty tragicomic form) and the wealthy out-of-towners who bought his family cottage to rent to tourists. Jenkin uses this social set-up to create a symbolic battle that resonates across today’s divided Britain. With one villainous exception, his characters are shaded by enough humanity to make their behaviours unpredictable while visual depth is served thanks to the glorious black-and-white grain and Jenkin’s framing. His eye for tactile detail confers on to this haves vs have-nots story an intoxicating artistic power.…

★★ OUT NOW / CERT PG / 85 MINS DIRECTOR Ross Venokur CAST (VOICES) Demi Lovato, Wilmer Valderrama, Avril Lavigne, Ashley Tisdale, Sia On the shelf for two years, this wannabe Shrek-lite take on fairy-tale lore sees Prince Charming (Valderrama), cursed with more than a dash of irresistible charisma, forced to run the gauntlet to find true love’s kiss before he turns 2P or l’amour is banished from the entire kingdom. Enter tomboy thief Lenore (Lovato), who is immune to his charms to guide him on his quest. There are some good ideas — Sia’s one-eyed Oracle, who is right half the time; John Cleese’s loquacious Executioner — but the set-up is tortured, the storytelling is episodic (there are three tasks to mechanically get through), the gags scattershot, the feminism…

★★★ OUT 16 AUGUST / CERT 15 / 106 MINS DIRECTOR Justin Kelly CAST Kristen Stewart, Laura Dern, Diane Kruger, Jim Sturgess, Courtney Love Justin Kelly’s low-key but entertaining film tells the remarkable true story of Savannah Knoop (Stewart), who spent six years of her life masquerading as the titular author, a completely fabricated literary persona dreamed up by her sister-in-law Laura (Dern). The story gets caught in a repetitive groove as Savannah/JT is presented to the world at parties, literary events and finally the Cannes Film Festival, Kelly’s film showing admirable restraint at the expense of memorable drama. But the movie wins out with its two leads; Dern is a tour de force of mannerisms and personas (her Cockney publicist is a hoot) and Stewart — fragile, introspective and…

★★★★ OUT 23 AUGUST CERT 15 / 113 MINS DIRECTOR Pedro Almodóvar CAST Antonio Banderas, Penélope Cruz, Asier Etxeandia, Leonardo Sbaraglia PLOT Ageing Spanish filmmaker Salvador Mallo (Banderas) is invited to a ROth anniversary screening of his ’8Os hit ‘Sabor’. The tribute brings him into contact with drug-addled lead actor Alberto Crespo (Etxeandia) who fell out with Mallo during the original shoot. The meeting forces the director to re-evaluate his past. OVER HIS 40-YEAR plus career, there have been at least three Pedro Almodóvars. There is Pedro The Subversive, who makes fast, funny, colourful camp entertainments (Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown); Pedro The Respectable, who makes thoughtful emotional, often awards-friendly classics (All About My Mother, Volver); and Pedro The Genre-Bender, who delivers his own takes on popular…

OUT NOW ANNABELLE COMES HOME ★★ CHARMING ★★ FOSSE/VERDON (FROM 2 AUGUST) ★★★ HOLIDAY ★★★★ THE LION KING ★★★ PHOTOGRAPH ★★★★ 9 AUGUST BLINDED BY THE LIGHT (ABOVE) ★★★★ PLAYMOBIL: THE MOVIE ★★ 14 AUGUST ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD ★★★★ 16 AUGUST JT LEROY ★★★ TRANSIT ★★★★ 23 AUGUST CRAWL ★★ HAIL SATAN? ★★★★ PAIN & GLORY ★★★★ 30 AUGUST ASTÉRIX: THE SECRET OF THE MAGIC POTION ★★ BAIT ★★★★★ INNA DE YARD ★★★★ MEMORY: THE ORIGINS OF ALIEN ★★★ A MILLION LITTLE PIECES ★★ MRS LOWRY AND SON ★★ THE SOUVENIR ★★★★ FOR MORE REVIEWS, VISIT EMPIREONLINE.COM…

THE SUMMER OF 1989 saw madness erupt all over the globe, and it was all thanks to a nocturnal mammal. “It was crazy, weird and bizarre,” says Sam Hamm, co-writer of Tim Burton’s Batman and one of the people responsible for the ensuing Batmania. “There’s nothing you could do but disassociate from it. To be honest, I found it kind of scary. I was grateful when things calmed down a little bit.” The project, a fresh big-screen spin on the 1930s-created Caped Crusader, had been in development throughout the ’70s and ’80s, nobody quite sure how to make it work. CBS considered shooting a film where Batman went into space. Bill Murray and Eddie Murphy were, at one point, suggested for Batman and Robin. Peter O’Toole was in talks to…

Back in 1992, Empire met an excitable unknown director named Quentin Tarantino. These were our first impressions of the man who’d soon conquer Hollywood. TALL, RANGY AND sporting an unkempt thatch of hair, Quentin Tarantino is not your immediate idea of a “man of the moment”. Tucked away in the corner of a Whitehall pub, he is more interested in this, his third pint of draught Guinness, than buying into the Next Big Thing malarkey. Probably because he wolfed down too many E numbers as a child, Tarantino is extremely animated. He is also eminently likeable, which probably explains how he got away without a dressing-down from the world’s number-one female recording artist [Madonna], having described her as a “regular fuck machine” in his script. Speaking quickly in a voice…

IT COULD HAVE been just a chilly, technical exercise in computer-generated imagery, but instead Toy Story became one of the most heartfelt, resonant films of the P99Os. A hellish production period, forging a path into untested territory, taught the studio the essential elements they would need to establish the most successful animation house in history... THE AMBITION Pixar had been a software company for its first decade of existence, with John Lasseter’s short films designed chiefly to showcase the company’s image-rendering product. Stepping into feature animation required an untested team to do something that was — at least when they started — impossible. So, inspired by the success of the short Tin Toy, Pixar chose a story that their technology could (theoretically) handle: toy characters composed of mostly hard, shiny…

A MAN DONNING a baseball cap shouldn’t be significant. But when Mahershala Ali walked on stage in Hall H at the tail-end of Marvel Studios’ Comic-Con presentation just a couple of weeks ago, and nonchalantly placed a cap on his head with a logo that revealed not only that Marvel was planning a Blade movie, but that he — a two-time Academy Award winner, no less — was going to play the title role, it was laden with significance. Because Blade is where, in a roundabout way, the Marvel Cinematic Universe began. When discussing the origins of the MCU, and the larger comic-book movie bubble (which still shows no signs of slowing its expansion, let alone popping), the ill-informed will often cite Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man. And yes, that film was…

In 2001, Empire ran its first major report on Peter Jackson’s The Lord Of The Rings trilogy. This excerpt gives a sense of the scale and intensity of the high-risk endeavour — not to mention the passion that was being poured into it. AS THE SHOOT wore on and the pressure mounted, Jackson could be seen cycling from set to set at the Wellington studio on an old bicycle, eager to save time. Orlando Bloom remembers one miraculous day when he traversed the whole country by helicopter to get to his next shot, complete with stick-on ears and blond wig. Promised breaks came and went, six-day weeks of 14- to 15-hour days became the norm. And somehow throughout it all, spinning every plate, Jackson just kept going. “I’m totally unfit,…

EDGAR WRIGHT AND Simon Pegg’s romzomcom is that rarest of things: a universally beloved British horror comedy. Perhaps it connected because of its whip-smarts and its whip-pans. Or its emphasis on character work amidst the gore. Or maybe because it’s really, really funny. Either way, it launched Wright and Pegg’s movie careers, and established the former as a significant new directorial voice. But it wasn’t always thus. As Wright explains, it took a while for the first flavour of the Cornetto Trilogy to be hailed as a classic. NIGHT OF THE SHAUN Coming off their sitcom Spaced, Wright and Pegg struggled with scepticism, and a low budget. “People would be dismissive of us to our faces. I remember vividly being in the reception at Pathé, and the receptionist said, I…

THE COEN BROTHERS and Cormac McCarthy are not an obviously heavenly match. The directors, even at their most serious, are poets of absurdity, while humour is about the last thing you associate with the black-souled characters of McCarthy’s gorgeous, violent novels. But look closer and there are common threads between the two works. Both McCarthy and the Coens delve into the tragic ironies of human existence and the universe’s lack of concern for our little plans, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that the match turned McCarthy’s book into a Best Picture Oscar-winner and fuelled a trend for warped, reimagined Westerns. We know what to expect from this story, or we think we do. Josh Brolin’s resourceful, basically decent Llewelyn Moss is clearly our hero, so he’s probably going to…

WHEN VISUAL-EFFECTS supervisor Paul Franklin first read the script for Inception (in a locked, guarded room in LA, late February 2OO9), he couldn’t wrap his head around it. “I was left reeling,” he admits. He was expecting it to be another modest, relatively low-budget film, like 2OOU’s The Prestige. Then Christopher Nolan revealed there would be 800 VFX shots — more than in either of his Batman movies to date. “I thought, ‘Ooh, what have I gotten myself into?’” Franklin says. “It was an extraordinary confluence of all different types of filmmaking, with a genius director given full rein to do whatever he wanted.” As these four gobsmacking set-pieces prove… THE "BALLET OF DESTRUCTION" When Ariadne (Ellen Page) realises she and Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) aren’t in a Parisian café but…

IT’S THE FILM that puts the ‘pace’ into ‘space’. Ten minutes into the 9P-minute runtime of Gravity, debris travelling faster than a speeding bullet hits the Space Shuttle Explorer, and our heroes, Dr Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) and Lt Matt Kowalski (George Clooney), are almost immediately in the gravest peril. Latecomers will not be admitted. Things hardly slow down after that, director Alfonso Cuarón barely stopping for whatever breath is left in the astronauts’ fast-fading oxygen tanks. That opening sequence runs an astonishing P7 minutes without cutting, and in fact, the entire film has just PTU shots, far fewer than most conventional films. Cuarón loves a long, uninterrupted take — his filmography, from Children Of Men to Roma, is full of them — and watching Gravity is like bearing witness…

“CAREER SUICIDE” IS a phrase Barry Jenkins heard a lot during the eight-year struggle to get Moonlight made. “We are going to follow a young black boy struggling with his sexuality and his mom is addicted to crack cocaine,” Jenkins told Empire in 2OP8 about the pitch. “We’re going to cast three actors to play him and the last actor looks nothing like the other two.” The finished film not only gifted Jenkins the most famous Best Picture win in Oscar history, but became a cinematic rarity. Brokeback Mountain had tackled homosexuality and masculinity, while Crash highlighted the hardships of growing up black in America. Moonlight, though, is the only Best Picture to hang a lantern on black/queer intersectionality — and do so in such delicate, nuanced ways. It also…

ON A DECOMMISSIONED AIR FORCE BASE IN NORFOLK, UNDER a vast blue dome of a sky, are dotted a number of ageing military structures. Here’s an enormous empty hangar, once used for aircraft storage, as big as a football pitch. Over there is a small Nissan hut, corrugated, rotting. In the distance is a Martello tower, refurbished in Grand Designs style, overlooking the airfield like a lighthouse surveying the sea. They, and other buildings, are plonked randomly on the flat grass, as though God’s been playing Lego. And over here, by a clump of trees, is a small caravan. Nothing special, just one you might clip to the back of your car for a quick weekend break to Cromer. Inside, sitting at the table, writing in her notebook, is director…

OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN (2013) With Banning stranded outside the White House, terrorists launch an attack on the US’ political HQ, forcing him to rush to the rescue. This brutal sequence sets up the sheer skill of the opponents he must banish. LONDON HAS FALLEN (2016) On the run with President Asher after most of the world’s leaders have been killed, Banning must use all he has to take out some bad guys on the Underground. Charing Cross? Charing really Cross, more like.…

THIS MONTH DAVID KOEPP, SCREENWRITER AND NOVELIST, FILLS IN A MISSING CINEMATIC BLANK: MARTIN McDONAGH’S IN BRUGES IT MAKES NO sense that I never saw In Bruges. I love Martin McDonagh’s stuff and have seen, to my knowledge, everything he’s ever done on stage or screen, and enjoyed them all. Some I enjoyed outrageously. But In Bruges, which from all reports is a fine, fierce and funny movie, I have studiously avoided. Why? What do I have to do that’s so goddamn important I can’t finish off this guy’s oeuvre? I, who for years have kept annual lists of every movie I watched during the year and consider any year where I fail to reach 150 a failure; I can’t manage a measly 107 minutes for In Bruges? Why not?…

JOSÉ RAMÓN LARRAZ The Spanish director José Ramón Larraz (1929-2013) — billed as J.R. Larrath, Joseph Larraz and several other variations — did his oddest work in Britain. In 1974, he made the same story (lesbian homicidal mania in an old, dark house) twice, as the sleazy art-film Symptoms (available on the BFI’s Flipside label), starring proper actress Angela Pleasance, and the arty sex-horror Vampyres (available in Arrow’s box set Blood Hunger: The Films Of José Larraz), starring nude models from top-shelf magazines. They make a terrific double bill with continental quantities of sex and blood exploding into the sombre world of British social realism. Blood Hunger also includes the 1970 psycho movie Whirlpool (aka She Died With Her Boots On) and the 1978 Spanish erotic drama The Coming Of…

DEEP IMPACT Choosing a film for the subscriber cover was difficult. Right now we need something light, that shows us how wonderful the world is and inspires us to strive for more. That’s why I pick The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty. It has flaws, but it makes me laugh and feel a sense of adventure that means so much to me and my wife, who I met while travelling. Its sense of fantasy and freedom makes the real world full of friendly faces again. CRAYG WARD, VIA EMAIL Walter Mitty didn’t make it, sadly, but it’s been a genuine pleasure hearing about a film that truly matters to you. Use these Picturehouse passes for more big-screen adventures! Empire’s star letter wins a Picturehouse Membership, plus one for a friend!…

1. THE FILM WAS INSPIRED BY HIS PASSION FOR SMALL REPTILES A decade ago, Harmony Korine — the enfant terrible filmmaker behind Kids, Gummo and Spring Breakers — went to Miami to write. And because he is an avid lizard fan. “I love them,” he says, speaking from Miami, where he now lives permanently. “There are so many iguanas here. I mean, they shit everywhere.” While visiting the Florida Keys, he began to notice a certain type of slacker: “The kind of person who would just be drinking, smoking weed, pissing into the ocean, dancing on the boardwalk, rejecting the politics and embracing a lack of ambition.” Soon, the character of Moondog, a wildly hedonistic slacker poet, began to take shape. 2. McCONAUGHEY ACCIDENTALLY WENT FULL ‘METHOD’ “Obviously Matthew can’t…

Chris Hewitt (ReView Editor): When this was first announced, I was nervous but also excited about how terrible this film might be. Nobody sets out to make a bad film. But I’m hoping that they’ve made the worst of all time. Nick de Semlyen (Features Editor): Where are the humans? Is Cats a bit like Cars? Joanna Moran (Photography Director): The white cat is played by Francesca Hayward, who is the principal dancer at the Royal Opera House. Nick: I quite like that they’ve got hair inside the ears. That is quite faithful to, er, cats. Chris Lupton (Creative Director): So does she have six nipples? James Dyer (Editor-in-chief, Digital): Judi Dench! Chris L: She looks like Pat Butcher from EastEnders. James: Is she wearing a fur coat? This is…

1941 JIM CROW DUMBO Dumbo included a gang of African-American stereotypes disguised as crows, with their leader named ‘Jim Crow’ in a nod to the South’s segregation laws. These scenes will reportedly be omitted when aired on Disney+. 1992 PRINCESS JASMINE ALADDIN Alamy, Capital Pictures, Eyevine, Getty Images, Landmark If you were a little brown girl growing up in the 1990s, Princess Jasmine was a thrilling addition. Between that excitement and Robin Williams’ Genie, we may have overlooked the dodgy orientalist ‘othering’. 1995 POCAHONTAS POCAHONTAS Pocahontas was Disney’s first lead woman of colour. Sadly, they also made her a colonial apologist fantasy, based on scant historical evidence and no consultation with the Powhatan Nation. 2009 PRINCESS TIANA THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG From the Grimms’ tale and the cultural setting…

FOUR YEARS AGO, director Sam Mendes opened his Bond movie Spectre with a daring, carefully choreographed four-minute tracking shot following 007 through a Mexican Day Of The Dead parade. How do you top that? Shoot an entire movie in this style. 1917, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Colin Firth and Richard Madden, tells the harrowing story of one day in World War I through the eyes of two shell-shocked soldiers shot in one continuous take. “One-shot movies” are notoriously hard to pull off: if a single person misses their mark, the whole production has to start again. Three veterans of this unique filming method offer up their advice. DON’T DO IT UNLESS YOUR STORY DEMANDS IT There’s no point using this style as a gimmick, says Martin Otterbeck, director of photography on…

★★ OUT 23 AUGUST / CERT 15 / 87 MINS DIRECTOR Alexandre Aja CAST Kaya Scodelario, Barry Pepper, Morfydd Clark, Ross Anderson As the category T Hurricane Wendy barrels towards Florida, swimmer Haley (Scodelario) heads home, only to come under threat from rampaging alligators. You’d think that the combined talents of producer Sam Raimi and director Alexandre Aja would be the perfect duo to exploit the inherent scare factor in the thin premise, and yet Crawl never quite bites down hard enough. Awash in stodgy family drama and poor CGI, the film trims the running time fat but sacrifices entertainment value too. As the water level and the body count rises, Crawl struggles to find engaging new twists on the slither-and-snap genre, but it remains a diverting enough creature feature…

★★★ OUT 30 AUGUST CERT 15 / 93 MINS DIRECTOR Alexandre O. Philippe CAST Tom Skerritt, Veronica Cartwright, Ben Mankiewicz, Roger Corman PLOT A documentary tracking the cultural and mythological foundation stones that led to Alien, the landmark P979 film that changed science-fiction forever. MEMORY IS HARDLY the first documentary to attempt to get under the obsidian, acid-bleeding skin of the Xenomorph. Practically every DVD and Blu-ray release of Ridley Scott’s influential sci-fi has come with a doc attached, even the 1987 LaserDisc. But this feature-length take from director Alexandre O. Philippe has loftier ideas than any studio-mandated featurette. It begins with a slightly bonkers pre-titles sequence in the Temple of Apollo in Athens, as three alien witches awaken from a lengthy slumber: these are the Furies, the Greek mythological…

★★★★ OUT 30 AUGUST CERT 15 / 120 MINS DIRECTOR Joanna Hogg CAST Honor Swinton Byrne, Tom Burke, Tilda Swinton, Richard Ayoade PLOT P98Os London, and film student Julie (Swinton Byrne) is desperate to tell stories that aren’t only shackled in privilege. While she attempts to find her way as a filmmaker, she’s also challenged as a woman: falling in love, for the very first time, with an enigmatic, manipulative diplomat. JOANNA HOGG IS not for everyone. Joanna Hogg might not even be for most people. But those who she is for will be enthralled by her fourth feature film, which triumphed at Sundance in February. Already literate in stories that explore the tension tucked into the shadows of privilege (Archipelago) and women in times of transformation (Unrelated), The Souvenir…

★★ OUT NOW / CERT 15 / 106 MINS DIRECTOR Gary Dauberman CAST Mckenna Grace, Madison Iseman, Katie Sarife, Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson ANNABELLE COMES HOME is gifted with what might be the ultimate haunted house set-up, setting the evil doll loose in the spooky artefact-laden home of The Conjuring’s veteran paranormalists, Ed (Wilson) and Lorraine Warren (Farmiga). But this threequel never quite kicks into gear, rolling out the clichés without twisting them into something new and fun. The doll itself takes a back seat for much of the runtime, instead compelling other spirits to terrorise the trio of teen leads — most effectively, the folklore-tinged Ferryman, who feels most likely to get his own spin-off. Sluggishly paced and lacking in inspiration, Annabelle Comes Home proves that this doll works…

★★ OUT 30 AUGUST / CERT TBC / 85 MINS DIRECTORS Louis Clichy, Alexandre Astier CAST (VOICES) Ken Kramer, John Innes, C. Ernst Harth To date, there have been PT released movie adaptations of Goscinny and Uderzo’s Astérix stories, but The Secret Of The Magic Potion is only the second to not be based on the original albums. Judging by its contents, we’re hoping it’s the last. It at least asks a smart question: What happens when Getafix (Innes) — the only druid in Gaul who knows how to make the Roman-repulsing, ultra-energising brew — dies? The film concerns his quest to find a successor, but soon descends into a hyperactive, mostly directionless scramble, in which Astérix (Kramer) himself is barely seen. The animation’s bold, bright style lives up to…

★★ OUT 9 AUGUST / CERT U / 99 MINS DIRECTOR Lino DiSalvo CAST (VOICES) Anya Taylor-Joy, Daniel Radcliffe, Kenan Thompson, Adam Lambert Just as Playmobil is like Lego with less scope for creativity, Playmobil: The Movie is much like The Lego Movie without the clever ideas. This is a generic ‘rediscovering the joy of childhood’ movie with merchandising opportunities grafted on. Marla (Taylor-Joy) has grown stern and unadventurous in the years she’s had to care for her younger brother, since a car crash killed her parents. She’s forced to rediscover her adventurous side when both siblings are transported into a world of living Playmobil products. It has disappointingly little fun with the fact these are stiff plastic toys, with none of the cheerful self-mockery of The Lego Movie or…

THERE’S NO BETTER time to head to the cinema than over the August bank holiday weekend — when you’ve got time to switch off from the outside world, and the summer’s biggest and best movies are taking over the big screen. And if you buy a Lotto ticket this coming bank holiday weekend, you’re in luck — not only having a chance to win a life-changing jackpot, but to bag a free cinema ticket too. With The National Lottery Cinema Day — back for its second year — if you buy a ticket for the Lotto Double Prize Event draw on Saturday 24 August you can redeem it for one free ticket to watch the film of your choice on Sunday 25 August at any participating cinema, with more than…

1 THE PARENTS Ben Travis: The thing that lingered with me most from Hereditary is the sheer dread and emotional trauma that director Ari Aster conjured — and in Midsommar, that’s most keenly felt in the opening sequence. It could almost be its own short film, a kind of miniature companion piece to Hereditary where a family implodes from within — though this time there’s no supernatural get-out to blame. It’s just sheer human tragedy, shot in a way that creates unbearable anxiety with filmmaking that is utterly calm and considered. Nick de Semlyen: Midsommar’s been compared endlessly to The Wicker Man, but it actually has more in common with Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, another tale that opens with a heinous family tragedy. Intentionally or not, Aster follows the…

THE SCRIPT  11 May is GoodFellas Day. Henry Hill’s final 2S hours as a wiseguy is played out in one epic sequence that ends when he’s busted by the Feds. Inspired by the voiceover in Truffaut’s Jules Et Jim, Martin Scorsese and Nicholas Pileggi’s narration delineates how the wired Hill can’t differentiate between anything; picking up his brother and making tomato sauce are as important as off-loading guns and the Pittsburgh drug deal — everything’s on the same level to the strung-out gangster. THE CAMERAWORK  Stylistically, Scorsese is trying to give the audience the feeling of spinning recklessly out of control on drugs. Much of this is evoked by Michael Ballhaus’ restless camera movement. When Henry takes a hit of coke, the camera flies towards his eyes. Elsewhere, it whip-pans,…

SO ASTONISHING ARE the film’s effects, it’s still hard not to believe that Spielberg and co rocked up to an actual secret tropical island and just filmed the creatures they found there. Five Empire writers select the dinosaur closest to their heart. TRICERATOPS  None of the BC beasts is more tangible than the Triceratops. She reacts with astonishing realism thanks to some flawless puppeteering, both convincingly alive and visibly unwell, creating the sort of heart-filled spectacle that Spielberg does best. She brings out the best in the characters — Ellie’s compassion and curiosity, Tim’s excitement, Alan’s bliss as its inhalations lift him up and down. When he calls her ‘the most beautiful thing I ever saw’, I can only agree. She’s one sick Trike. BEN TRAVIS, ONLINE STAFF WRITER VELOCIRAPTOR…

Corin Hardy, director of The Hallow and The Nun, recalls how seeing Wes Craven’s meta murder-thon for the first time blew his mind. WHEN WES CRAVEN decided to — spoiler! — murder Drew Barrymore in the opening ten minutes of Scream, it was just the start of a series of smart and very considered wrong-footings that would play on the common traits of the slasher movies of the past RO years (from Black Christmas, through Halloween and Craven’s own A Nightmare On Elm Street). But ultimately Scream would draw in a much wider audience than the films it had satirised, leading to a mega meta-franchise and changing the landscape of scary movies from that point on. That point was P99U. I was in my second year of a Theatre Design…

WHAT IS THE Matrix? On paper, it’s high-concept hokum. A cyberpunk thriller soaked in pseudo-philosophy, with a pair of little-known directors pushing camera tricks as the film’s central gimmick. When the Wachowskis pitched the movie to Will Smith, that was certainly his impression, and the reason he turned down the role of Neo to star in Barry Sonnenfeld’s Wild Wild West instead. But the Wachowskis’ first movie, neo-noir Bound, had been critically lauded, and that gave the pair just enough juice to convince Warner Bros. that their sci-fi vanity project, fronted by Keanu Reeves instead, might just be worth the risk. The gamble paid off. And then some. With that flo-mo kick from Carrie-Ann Moss’ Trinity, sending Agent Brown (Robert Taylor) flying across a room in the film’s prologue, the…

FOR A FILM full of stink spirits, faceless ghosts, dragon boys and kimono-wearing frogs, Spirited Away seems oddly real. Sure, Hayao Miyazaki’s 2OOP Studio Ghibli animation is set in a magical dreamland accessed through an abandoned amusement park, one where parents are turned into pigs and sentient balls of soot scurry around characters’ feet. But to anyone able to recall the emotions of growing up, Spirited Away felt familiar: a fantasy rooted in the reality of being a kid, in an oversized world that at once enchants and terrifies. The film follows Chihiro, a cherub-cheeked ten-year-old forced to leave her friends and move to a new town. En route, her family happens upon a strange woodland and set out to explore. Soon, Chihiro finds herself lost in a supernatural realm…

IT FEELS STRANGE now that, back when Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal were cast as cowboys in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, people thought playing characters in a same-sex relationship would permanently knock their careers out of shape. It was risky, kissing another man on screen when, people seemed to argue, there were plenty of parts going that required you to snog a woman. Fast-forward PS years and straight actors are more than happy to play LGBT roles — from Rami Malek to Timothée Chalamet via Cate Blanchett — so much so that a higher degree of devotion to understanding queer themes is now expected of anyone signing up to such a project. Wherever you stand on the issue, it’s clear we’ve come a long way. In Brokeback Mountain, adapted from…

On 24 August, 2007, Empire’s Dan Jolin met Heath Ledger on the Chicago set of Christopher Nolan’s second Batman film. Less than five months before Ledger’s tragic death by accidental overdose of prescription drugs, it was the first time he’d ever talked about playing the Joker. LEDGER WAS IN civvies, a battered grey trilby pulled low over his head. He’d never seemed comfortable talking to the press, and that day he seemed more nervous than usual. Understandable: he’d never taken a role in such a big movie before, let alone one so tightly shrouded in secrecy. At the time I suspected we’d see something very different from Ledger’s Joker — this was Nolan’s ‘play it for real and make it for grownups’ take on Gotham, after all. But nobody outside…

BRIDESMAIDS LANDED LIKE an oestrogen-studded bomb in 2OPP, blowing apart almost every single assumption about female-fronted comedies. That they were too big a risk. That they wouldn’t make any money. That men wouldn’t buy a ticket (because, ewww, women making jokes). That women would be too busy buying a ticket to the latest romcom, (with the emphasis firmly on rom). Because, you see: women didn’t want to watch funny women; men certainly didn’t want to watch funny women, so what sense would it make to produce a film that relied on both these maxims being dead wrong? It’s fair to say that cinema oftentimes likes its comfort zone. But Bridesmaids challenged the softness under its arse — even if it did so in the Trojan horse of a ‘wedding movie’.…

THE FIRST BEST Picture winner to win with a parenthesis in its title, Alexander G. Iñflrritu’s Birdman Or (The Unexpected Virtue Of Ignorance) is perhaps the magic trick of Empire’s lifetime. The PP9-minute movie — about fading movie star Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton), who attempts to reclaim his fame (and himself) by mounting a Raymond Carver play on Broadway — is constructed to look like one seamless shot, even though the action takes place over three days and numerous locales. Here’s how invisible tricks delivered Iñflrritu’s virtuoso vision... MAN IN THE MIRROR As befits a film about ego run rampant, mirrors abound in Birdman. To free up the camera, a lot of effort went into removing the crew’s reflections digitally. A 2.TD digital matte painting of the reflected environment was…

IT SPEAKS TO the phenomenal staying power of Get Out — a rare horror movie that’s told from the black perspective — that its writer-director Jordan Peele picked up the Best Screenplay Oscar over a year after it first debuted in US cinemas. The Academy hadn’t been able to get the film out of their head, and neither, it turned out, could the rest of us. There are few films which have infiltrated the public consciousness quite like the story of Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya), a black photographer who discovers some terrifying secrets when he visits the parents of his white girlfriend. It didn’t take long for terms like ‘The Sunken Place’ to become part of the vernacular, or for jokes like, “I’ve watched Get Out three times” — a…

THERE ARE MANY THINGS Jessie Buckley could reasonably have expected to be doing this summer. Shooting a film, perhaps. Going on holiday, possibly. Sitting at home watching Wimbledon and the World Cup, for another. Going on tour, not so much. Yet that’s exactly what Buckley is about to do when she rings Empire late one June afternoon. She’s fixing to head off on a mini-jaunt around Scotland and Ireland with her band, singing songs from Wild Rose, the film which confirms that Buckley is an astonishing, dynamite talent. “I’m so excited to be on a tour bus,” she laughs. “And so are all the band. We’ve got little bunk beds. It’s a nice way to round up a good old journey.” It’s a journey that began when she signed on…

Capernaum PUTTING AN ENTIRE film on the shoulders of a small child is always an immense gamble. It’s one that really paid off in Nadine Labaki’s Capernaum, the story of a young boy living in the slums of Beirut, who tries to sue his parents for bringing him into a world that offered him no shot at a good life. Labaki tells us how she created her Oscar-winning hit and how she drew one of the performances of the year from a child with no experience. FROM A TO ZAIN Labaki used largely non-professional actors in her film and shot chronologically to give them the chance to develop with the characters. Her P2-year-old lead, Zain Al Rafeea, was discovered in the slums where the film is set. “The first scene…

BFI Dr. Strangelove ONCE HE REVIEWED the footage, Stanley Kubrick knew he had to cancel the custard pie fight. His megawatt farce was due to conclude with the American President, nutball generals, Soviet ambassador, and titular paraplegic former Nazi engaged in apocalyptic flan-flinging. But Kubrick realised that there is nothing as unfunny as actors having fun. What he needed was the ultimate symbol of man’s urge to self-destruction. Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb became a black comedy, said Kubrick, when he “woke up and realised that nuclear war was too outrageous, too fantastic to be treated in any conventional manner.” Literally overnight, he flipped a Cold War thriller (based on Peter Bryant’s bestseller Red Alert) into a “Kafkaesque” satire, calling upon counterculture…

Illustration: Jacey Tim Burton movies Chris: Why do we keep being drawn to the films of Timothy Burton? Dan: I can speak personally, having grown up as someone who considered himself something of a social outcast in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Chris: Yeah, you weirdo. Dan: Exactly. I was called weirdo, gothic… Chris: That’s because you’re a gothic weirdo. Dan: Yeah. Weirdo gothic freak, all that sort of thing. Chris: Parents can be so cruel. Dan: But the films of Tim Burton kind of spoke to me and people like me. They felt like, these are for us. Though I confess that I kind of grew out of it. And he didn’t. So by the end of the ’90s, I was rolling my eyes at Sleepy Hollow. Nick:…

Getty Images WITH THE THREE-phase Infinity Saga dusted and done, there was a strangely muted excitement ahead of Marvel’s San Diego Comic-Con presentation this year. Sure, there’d be announcements, but could it really measure up to what we’d lost? Happily, the signs point to yes, with this imperial phase for a studio on top of the world (literally, box office-wise) promising to be a bigger and more daring universe. Here’s how they’ll pull it off. BIGGER AND BETTER REPRESENTATION The billion-dollar grosses of Black Panther and Captain Marvel torpedoed the notion that only white men called Chris or Robert could lead a Marvel movie, and now we begin to see the benefits of that trailblazing. There was only a single piece of white male casting announced (or rather, confirmed) on…

“ENGAGE,” SAYS JEAN-Luc Picard towards the end of the trailer. Because of course he does. But while the line was entirely predictable, the rest of our first look at the belated Star Trek: The Next Generation sequel was anything but. The Borg! Data! Seven Of Nine! A glimpse of the new series not only shocked with some unlikely reappearances but offered hints as to what the galaxy has endured in the two decades since Star Trek: Nemesis. Until Comic-Con, almost all of the Picard imagery had revolved around the character’s vineyard — where he retired after leaving Starfleet and hanging up his Admiral’s pips for good. Picard is lured from his bucolic dotage by the arrival of Dahj (Isa Briones), a woman with a portentous heritage (“She’s the end of…

HORROR HAS A new face. Glimpsed in the first trailer for It: Chapter Two is the mysterious Mrs Kersh (Joan Gregson), who lives in the childhood home of Beverly (Jessica Chastain) — a seemingly innocent elderly woman who, it emerges, is actually a form of It, the cosmic demon better known as Pennywise the Dancing Clown. The trailer scared the bejesus out of anyone who watched it. Including, it seems, Mrs Kersh herself. “I’m not a horror fan,” Gregson says to Empire with a chuckle. “I get scared easily.” The French-Canadian actor has six decades of work on her CV (including, notably, the 1999 Stephen King miniseries Storm Of The Century), but nothing like the terrifying Mrs Kersh. “It’s my first horror, and I had a wonderful time,” says Gregson.…

TECHNICALLY SPEAKING, OFFICIAL Secrets is another Keira Knightley period drama. “I was thinking of it as completely modern,” Knightley admits with a smile. “But when I got on set, [I realised] the clothes are actually a period thing.” That period is the early 2000s — no corsets here — and the story is a tough, serious political thriller about a real-life Iraq war whistleblower. The British actor has made many interesting choices since her early Pirates Of The Caribbean/ Pride & Prejudice era — but never a meaty real-life political drama. The prospect intrigued her. “I’ve always loved political thrillers,” she says. “It’s a film genre I would always watch. But the opportunity is not one that’s come to me before. I was excited to do something completely different.” Gianandrea…

FINDING THE STORY Ken Loach and Paul Laverty’s 15th collaboration focuses on zero-hours delivery drivers and care workers, and the impact the work has on their lives. But there was no easy way ‘in’ to this world. Franchisee drivers are private entrepreneurs, and proved hard to track down. “What I eventually started doing was just going out to car parks and speaking to people, listening to their stories.” He spoke to “dozens and dozens” of drivers, but finding willing talkers was the easy bit. GAINING TRUST “People who speak out could lose their jobs,” Laverty says. “You meet them in a place where they feel safe and guarantee you’ll never reveal their identity.” Laverty admits the stories he uncovered were worse than those in the finished film. “I spoke to…

★★★★ OUT 14 AUGUST CERT 18 / 161 MINS DIRECTOR Quentin Tarantino CAST Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Emile Hirsch, Margaret Qualley, Al Pacino PLOT LA, P9U9. TV actor Rick Dalton (DiCaprio) and his stunt double Cliff Booth (Pitt) are increasingly yesterday’s men. The new Hollywood is embodied by Rick’s neighbour, rising star Sharon Tate (Robbie). Their fates will collide in the most unexpected way. ONCE UPON A Time In Hollywood features perhaps the most Quentin Tarantino-y shot of any Quentin Tarantino movie yet: wannabe movie star Sharon Tate (Robbie) with her dirty bare feet up on a cinema seat watching pretty much forgotten 1969 James Bond rip-off The Wrecking Crew starring Dean Martin. Yet foot fetishisms and cult movies are not the only QT obsession to be celebrated…

★★★★ OUT 9 AUGUST CERT 12A / 117 MINS DIRECTOR Gurinder Chadha CAST Viveik Kalra, Kulvinder Ghir, Meera Ganatra, Aaron Phagura, Nell Williams, Hayley Atwell PLOT Sensitive poetry-writing teen Javed (Kalra) faces racism in the streets and strictness in the home from his disciplinarian father (Ghir). Yet his life is transformed when he is introduced by new buddy Roops (Phagura) to the music of Bruce Springsteen. Soon after, a world of writing, love and optimism opens up for him. AT ONE POINT during the 1984/85 ‘Born In The USA’ tour, in-between ‘Follow The Dream’ and ‘Born To Run’, Bruce Springsteen would regularly tell the assembled head-banded throng hanging on his every word: “No-one wins unless everyone wins.” Based on Safraz Manzoor’s memoir Greetings From Bury Park, Blinded By The Light,…

★★ OUT 30 AUGUST / CERT 15 / 103 MINS DIRECTOR Sam Taylor-Johnson CAST Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Billy Bob Thornton, Odessa Young This begins with a blast as, after Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s alcoholic crack-addict James Frey enjoys a narcotic blowout, he suffers a seismic comedown: what a horrible mess he is. Here, Taylor-Johnson, in a film he co-wrote with his wife, director Sam Taylor-Johnson, is rivetingly ruined, a career best. Alas, in rehab, the more things pick up for James, the more the film goes downhill. This is based on Frey’s 2OOR memoir, which turned out to be filled with falsehoods, and that in itself is more interesting than the story adapted here; maybe Frey’s presence as executive producer explains why a more innovative account wasn’t explored. Instead, we get a bit…

★★★★ OUT 23 AUGUST CERT 15 / 95 MINS DIRECTOR Penny Lane CAST Lucien Greaves, Jex Blackmore PLOT As US politics becomes more influenced by evangelical Christian beliefs, an alternate church is rising: The Satanic Temple. But this group of supposed Devil worshippers, led by Lucien Greaves, are a progressive, politically active bunch who seem more invested in upholding the separation of church and state than raising hell. IN TRADITIONAL CHRISTIAN mythology, Satan is the original ultimate villain — the fallen angel, the anti-God, the corrupter of Adam and Eve. As for Satanists, horror movies and tabloid scares have taught us that they’re pentagram-clad cultists, primed to ritually sacrifice virgins and unsuspecting babysitters in deference to their Dark Lord. Or not. Meet The Satanic Temple — an American religious organisation…

★★★★ OUT NOW / CERT 18 / 92 MINS DIRECTOR Isabella Eklöf CAST Victoria Carmen Sonne, Lai Yde, Thijs Römer, Michiel de Jong For an hour or so, Isabella Eklöf’s debut feature comes on like a sinister Love Island as Sascha (Sonne), girlfriend of Danish gangster Michael (Yde), arrives in Turkey, hangs around a big house and flirts with a likeable Dutch guy (Römer), all the while being manipulated by her crime boss boyf. It doesn’t coalesce into anything tangible until a Shocking Moment sends the film in a different orbit altogether. Eklöf’s eye is at once cool and dispassionate but at the same time provocative, daring you to firstly stick with the meandering first two-thirds, then goading you to tear your eyes from the action as it develops. The…

★★★★ OUT 16 AUGUST / CERT 12A / 102 MINS DIRECTOR Christian Petzold CAST Franz Rogowski, Paula Beer, Godehard Giese, Lilien Batman, Maryam Zaree In P9S2, German-Jewish refugee Anna Seghers finished writing a novel about her experiences in the war. In a fascinating creative choice, director Christian Petzold has adapted the book for film by transposing the action to today, turning the Nazi occupation of France into a non-specific 2Pst-century dystopia. That choice transforms Seghers’ story — about a refugee who takes on the identity of a dead writer — from a highly specific World War II account into a dark, more universal thriller about the psychological and existential effects of fascism. It’s a tough watch, but finds clear-eyed parallels with the recent humanitarian crisis, and rich character detail to…

★★★ FROM 2 AUGUST / BBC TWO EPISODES SEEN ALL 8 SHOWRUNNERS Steven Levenson, Thomas Kail CAST Sam Rockwell, Michelle Williams, Norbert Leo Butz, Margaret Qualley PLOT This visually lush FX miniseries is an exploration of the power dynamics of the artist/ muse and husband/wife relationship between debauched maverick Bob Fosse (Rockwell), of Cabaret fame, and superstar dancer Gwen Verdon (Williams), during key moments in their careers. Ultimately, their decadence and genius was a short-lived burst that would be creatively legendary but personally destructive. ALTHOUGH IT MAY be a difficult sell to audiences not already familiar with the work of Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon, FX’s new miniseries, screening on BBC Two, does its best to plunge the viewer into their world; the razzmatazz glamour of both stage and screen…

1 THE CIRCLE OF LIFE Helen O’Hara: A few shots are framed differently and it’s a little more leisurely, but this is the same sequence. It does make you marvel at the technology involved, but would it really have been less The Lion King if they had changed a few details? Have we discovered no interesting new facts about how wildlife on the Serengeti interact since P99S that they could have added in? Even the detail is similar, with the same colour of bird landing on an elephant’s tusk as they walk through the watering hole. 2 THE ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD Ian Freer: The Elephant Graveyard scene, where Simba and Nala, disobeying orders, head out of the confines of Pride Rock to prove their bravery, is one of the more effective…

Marvel Studios VFX supervisor Jake Morrison remembers how seeing the morphing-machine madness of Terminator 2 changed his life. “I WAS 16 or 17 when I first saw Terminator 2, at the ABC in Ewell, Surrey. This was well before visual effects was a focus or interest, because in those days it didn’t exist as a thing you could aim for. I remember walking out with my mate Fergus, and saying, ‘Anything’s possible now.’ Which, looking back, was true. Terminator 2 fundamentally did things that absolutely could not be done before. “To me, the most exciting thing about visual effects is when it’s applied intelligently to storytelling and isn’t just spectacle for the sake of it. That moment when the T-1000 [Robert Patrick] dissolves through the bars is extremely effective. As…

THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION, to adapt a line from its narrator, is a film that crawled through a river of shit and came out on the other side. Commercially ignored upon release, Frank Darabont’s adaptation of a little-known Stephen King prison-set novella has become widely considered one of the greatest films of all time: beautifully acted, uplifting, a film that makes you believe in the power of hope. Here, director Darabont reflects on the long journey of his beloved debut film. Shawshank is one of the films of our lifetime. How does that make you feel? Buoyant and delighted and extremely grateful. Gosh, it was so long ago now. Twenty-five years. Twenty-six, I guess, since we shot it. To know that it’s had this kind of lasting effect on people is…

P997 WAS A cool year for cinema. What were the auteurs doing? L.A. Confidential. Boogie Nights. Jackie Brown. Lost Highway. This was independent spirit writ large, the indie boom having blossomed big-time. Even the blockbusters — Face/ Off, Men In Black, The Fifth Element, Starship Troopers, Con Air — were postmodern, satirical and hip (as always, let’s forget Batman & Robin ever happened). But the biggest film of them all? It was so wonderfully uncool. Until this point, James Cameron had been pretty cool himself — all of his directorial output was genre work, sometimes sci-fi, sometimes action, mostly both. Now, though, he wanted to make an old-fashioned romantic drama. Nobody expected this to work, including, eventually, Cameron himself: as the troubled production dragged on (PUO arduous days), the budget…

MOST ICONIC MOVIE monsters are not renowned for their grooming. You wouldn’t seek moisturising tips from Frankenstein’s Monster, or ask Pinhead if you can borrow his lip balm. The exception to the rule is Patrick Bateman, the immaculately turned-out and dispassionately homicidal protagonist of American Psycho. Mary Harron’s 2000 satirical horror movie, based on the Bret Easton Ellis novel, is a character study of a man who isn’t really a man; as he explains in chilling voiceover, “There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman; some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me: only an entity, something illusory... I simply am not there. He’s all soulless surface — but in the hands of Harron and star Christian Bale, it’s a surface that’s endlessly hypnotic. THE FACE Even now,…

THERE WERE BIGGER films in 2OOR — this was the year of Finding Nemo and The Return Of The King — and those more garlanded, the final Lord Of The Rings film winning a whopping PP Oscars. But while in January of that year, if you were to overhear film connoisseurs discussing Coppola or Scarlett they likely meant Francis Ford or O’Hara, come December, chances are they’d be referring to Sofia or Johansson. Lost In Translation is a film both timeless and deeply of its time. A vignette on loneliness and the craving for genuine connection, it was released just two months after the launch of MySpace in August 2OOR, arguably the gateway to this newfangled thing, ‘social media’. You’ll see no smartphones on the bar at the Park Hyatt,…

AS GUILLERMO DEL TORO stood on the stage of the Dolby Theatre in February 2OP8, holding his Best Picture Oscar aloft for The Shape Of Water, it’s important to remember that this wasn’t his first awards rodeo. Eleven years prior, he had already shattered the glass ceiling of fantasy films and rode roughshod over the notion that the Academy has disdain for genre pics when Pan’s Labyrinth won three Oscars, including a nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. Not bad for a deeply personal Spanish-language film featuring fairies, fauns and fascists. Here, Doug Jones, del Toro’s long-time friend and collaborator, who played two roles in the film — the Faun and the chilling Pale Man — reflects on del Toro’s masterpiece. ON ITS ENDURING APPEAL: “The convention fan circuit is…

HAVING ALREADY SPENT CPOO million on Avatar, James Cameron was three years into the four-and-a-half-year production before he saw a completed shot that gave him any confidence it would work. The first trailer didn’t give the public much confidence either, treated with about as much positivity as the recent Cats unveiling. People mentioned FernGully. They mentioned the Smurfs. How goofy it all looked. What a joke this would be. Right? Titanic had consumed Cameron. For years after he explored the deep. When he finally emerged, he set to work on something that seemed even more ambitious than the biggest film of all time. This was unprecedented world-building, in which we would all virtually visit a 22nd century jungle moon. He would pioneer the medium to get there. Cameron wanted the…

IN 2OP2, THERE was an idea. An idea to bring together a group of remarkable people, to see if they could create something more than just a regular sequel. To see if multiple superheroes could work together without making one almighty mess. It was the Avengers Assemble Initiative, and it changed the game for good. Here’s how. SUPER-SIZING THE CAST Marvel Studios had already risked frontloading its less well-known (Iron Man) and goofier (Thor, Captain America) characters through Phase 1, but that was nothing compared to the risk of bringing them all together — to have Tony Stark rubbing shoulders with a literal Norse god, while fighting hordes of space aliens. But thanks to a sharp script from geek god Joss Whedon — who knew a thing or two about…

ASK ANY ACTION director worth their salt — your Edgar Wrights, your Gareth Evans, your Chris McQuarries — about George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road, and chances are a strange, beatific smile will cross their face. A single tear may even roll down their cheeks. For them, and for us, Mad Max: Fury Road is the movie that raised the bar on action filmmaking. And it’s all down to the genius of a quiet, septuagenarian Australian doctor who had spent the last couple of decades making movies about dancing penguins, talking pigs — anything but rollicking, high-octane, desert-set chase movies. But when he came back to action, Miller knew exactly what he was aiming for. “I wanted to do virtually a silent movie with sound and music,” he says. “And…

Empire went on set of Black Panther in Atlanta in 2017 for a cover story the following year. Producer Nate Moore had developed the story in the Marvel writers’ programme and was key in the film making it to screen. This excerpt from a second interview with him, just before Black Panther’s release, revealed the personal, cultural and cinematic significance of the film that would go on to gross a billion dollars in just 26 days. Can you remember when you first encountered Black Panther? It was as a kid. There was a Captain America cover with Captain America in the foreground, flanked by the Falcon and Black Panther. That was the first time I saw Black Panther and he was awesome. The character design was really unique. When I…

WHEN YOU ABSOLUTELY, positively need to protect the President of the United States Of America from danger and hordes of deadly assassins, there is only one man to whom you can turn: Secret Service agent extraordinaire, Mike Banning (Gerard Butler). Accept no substitutes. When terrorists attacked the White House in 2013’s Olympus Has Fallen, only one thing stood between them and their target, President Benjamin Asher (Aaron Eckhart): Mike Banning. When terrorists (a different set, mainly because Banning killed the first lot) took down most of the world’s leaders in 2016’s sequel, London Has Fallen, once again only one thing stood between them and President Asher: Mike Banning. But in Angel Has Fallen, the third part of the Banning trilogy, the tables have turned. Once again, there is an assassination…

SHAZAM! Alamy, Capital Pictures OUT NOW (DOWNLOAD), 12 AUGUST (DVD, BLU-RAY) CERT 12 / 132 MINS Finding the fun has been lucrative for the DC movie universe, and while Shazam! may not have hit the box-office highs of Wonder Woman or Aquaman, it’s still a crowd-pleasing delight, poking fun at superhero tropes like a less-vulgar Deadpool (the phrase “dead kiddie pool” comes to mind, then is immediately dismissed for creepiness). Director David F. Sandberg, known for the horror likes of Lights Out and Annabelle: Creation, shows a lightness of touch here, revelling in the chance to inject some weirdness, but handles the origin story without overplaying the camp. His secret weapon is star Zachary Levi, who inhabits the enthusiastic/troubled role of the titular hero with gusto. Paired with an appealing,…