Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2024 i Empire

HOW MANY CLOWNS can fit in a car? It’s a question that has been pondered for as long as harlequins and automobiles have co-existed. (The answer, according to Greg DeSanto of the International Clown Hall Of Fame, is between 14 and 21; it’s unclear whether DeSanto provided this statement while throwing a custard pie and tooting a giant horn.) Frankly, though, we have a better question: how many clowns can fit on an Empire cover? Well, the jury’s still out, but as this issue proves, it’s at least two. We’ve showcased Jokers before — from Heath Ledger’s knives-and-lint jester to Jared Leto’s glam gangster to Joaquin Phoenix’s sadsack Arthur Fleck. But never before have we featured the clown prince of crime and his clown princess, Harley Quinn. Talk about a…

Definitely Existential Dread, voiced by Werner Herzog. @DAVETHEYOGI Kill the dad. Introduce Grief. @GEORGE0CONNOR88 She’s getting deeper into her teens so we need Sass, Banter and Existential Dread. @THATMASONBOIII Confidence, voiced by George Clooney. @JOURNOADAMB Walking Into A Room And Forgetting What You Went In For. @JONSPAREY Love takes over, shutting down the brain — and the controls don’t work anymore. @ARRONFRANCE WATCH OUR FOR THE NEXT QUESTION VIA OUR X ACCOUNT: @EMPIREMAGAZINE…

WHEN A TRAILER drops for a film starring Paul Mescal, Pedro Pascal and Denzel Washington, it would take something truly huge to draw the spotlight away from that cast. Maybe something as big as… a rhino. When we got our first look at Gladiator II, that armour-plated animal — ridden by a Roman soldier drenched in blood and charging straight for Mescal’s vengeful slave Lucius — became one of the buzziest, most talked-about moments. Judging from its reception, the rhino alone could be worth the 24-year wait for the sequel. It was Ridley Scott’s idea. In the first film, Russell Crowe’s Maximus fought a Bengal tiger who measured 11 feet from nose to tail — with both real and fake giant cats used for the film. In a bid to…

SHE WAS ONCE the highest-paid actress in Hollywood. She’s starred in a cavalcade of iconic ’90s movies, from Ghost to Indecent Proposal. Her pregnant Vanity Fair cover is the stuff of legend. Movie stars don’t get much bigger than Demi Moore, and few have gone through the highs and lows that have come with her decades-long career. But with body-horror The Substance, from French writer-director Coralie Fargeat, Moore is back in her biggest lead role in years — and she’s not just breaking out of her megawatt movie-star image, she’s confronting it, too. “My team sent it with a caveat of, ‘[We] don’t want to say anything about it, just read it,’” Moore, 61, tells Empire. “Because even on paper, it takes you on such a wild ride. Yet it…

AHEAD OF ITS premiere, plot details about The Bear Season 3 were as closely guarded as the Berzattos’ Family Meal Spaghetti recipe. With one exception. “There was no talk in the rooms about any romantic implications [between Carmy and Sydney],” star Jeremy Allen White confirmed in a press conference when asked if his and Ayo Edebiri’s on-screen colleagues might hit it off. It was a resounding answer to an infuriating question, which begs an even bigger one: do co-leads really have to be romantically involved for an audience to root for them? In the case of White and Edebiri, is it not enough that they’ve collectively won two Primetime Emmys, three Golden Globes and a mountain of shiny gold guild and critics’ choice awards for their individual performances? Apparently not,…

RESTAURANT LOVAGE BAKEWELL, DERBYSHIRE — MARCH A cobbled market town received some serious star power when Cruise went out for dinner while filming the eighth Mission film in rural Derbyshire. He and some of the film’s production team reportedly also visited a local primary school’s assembly, where they answered questions about the upcoming film. Empire will be accepting tips-offs in exchange for Haribo. VARIOUS OXFORD, OXFORDSHIRE — JUNE Cruise took a breather from filming Mission to fly his helicopter over to Oxford for a day trip. The actor has made the most of his flying pastime during the summer, after heli-hopping to Battersea a few weeks later. THE ERAS TOUR WEMBLEY STADIUM, LONDON — JUNE When he’s not scaling skyscrapers or hanging off helicopters, it seems Cruise is a Swiftie.…

TEENAGE DIRTBAGS? It’s been 14 years since we left Shrek, Fiona and their young triplets, which, unless magical forces are at play, means we may be meeting some significantly older parents to three teens in Shrek 5. Who’s ready for some hormonal ogres? MEME-FILTRATION? Shrek fandom has manifested in wild ways, from thousands of memes to themed raves. Al Pacino went viral in 2022 for his Shrek phone case. Could internet culture make a meta cameo? Someone should at least sport some Pacino merch. PAINTERLY POWER? As the Oscar-nominated Puss In Boots: The Last Wish proved, taking a Spider-Verse-inspired stylistic swing can sometimes pay off. The cavalier cat’s acclaimed solo outing could have paved the way for similar, storybook-illustration-style animated adventures for his co-stars. PHILOSOPHICAL ASS? Eddie Murphy has confirmed…

OUT 2 AUGUST / CERT 15 / 94 MINS DIRECTOR Sean Wang CAST Izaac Wang, Joan Chen, Shirley Chen It takes a brave filmmaker to voluntarily revisit their adolescence, with all its shame and disappointments. Sean Wang’s debut, Dìdi, is worth the relived trauma. Set in 2008, when social media was starting to amplify the insecurities of teens, 13-year-old Taiwanese-American Chris (Izaac Wang) is desperately trying to belong. The director, who also wrote the screenplay, uses Jackass-style prank videos of the era as a strangely emotive narrative tool, with newcomer Wang’s expressive face working magic in the flickering glow of his computer screen or within the few square inches visible under his drawn hood. A tumultuous yet tenderly framed comedy-drama that eschews nostalgia in favour of something raw and far…

OUT NOW (NETFLIX) / EPISODES VIEWED 5 OF 5 SHOWRUNNERS Josh Heald, Jon Hurwitz, Hayden Schlossberg CAST Ralph Macchio, William Zabka, Xolo Maridueña, Martin Kove, Peyton List Since 2018, Cobra Kai has been an un-guilty pleasure. Now, with its giant sixth and final season (15 episodes, split into three chunks), it is ending. Does it have anything left to say, though? It begins with the Miyagi-Do supergroup thriving, former foes now allied — but with harmony among the karate kids, cheap contrivances are conjured up. Not to mention the return of sadistic sensei John Kreese as the bad guy… again. Everybody seems to have outgrown the show, with a storyline that feels like a shrug. The cast rise above the material — they are, as ever, obscenely likeable — but…

OUT NOW / CERT 12A / 122 MINS DIRECTOR Lee Isaac Chung CAST Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell, Anthony Ramos, Brandon Perea, Maura Tierney, Sasha Lane, David Corenswet, Katy O'Brian PLOT Meteorologists Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Javi (Anthony Ramos) test a new tornado-tracking system that could save lives — before crossing paths with storm-chaser Tyler (Powell). FOR A GENERATION, Jan de Bont’s 1996 rip-roaring tornado rager Twister was a definitive movie-going experience. A white-knuckle spectacle that practically made you feel the wind whipping through your hair, it also, through its pack of rogue, impassioned meteorologists, made weather cool. Nearly 30 years later, Twisters (like Aliens, a pluralised sequel title) embarks on a similar mission, following largely in its predecessor’s tyre tracks but with a few fresh tune-ups. Weather still handily exists,…

OUT NOW / CERT 18 / 94 MINS DIRECTOR Chris Nash CAST Ry Barrett, Andrea Pavlovic, Cameron Love Just when you think that horror is all out of fresh ideas, along comes In A Violent Nature. The lightly experimental conceit here is: what if there were a slasher film told from the perspective of the guy doing the slashing? Johnny (Ry Barrett) is a fearsomely effective boogeyman, like a Canadian cross between T-800 and Leatherface. Meanwhile, in the distance, we hear the kind of dialogue that in any other film would be placed front and centre. The effect is a fascinatingly jarring experience — like watching Jaws entirely from the depths of the ocean. It’s a shame, then, that this experiment is kind of abandoned relatively early. Still, this is…

THE BEAR: SEASON 3 TV “It’s not quite the decadent triumph of last season. But in its moments of high emotional insight, it is still — to borrow a food-writing cliché — meltingly tender. Maybe that’s enough for now.” JOHN NUGENT DESPICABLE ME 4 FILM “An awful lot is going on in Gru’s latest adventure. There are roughly half a dozen plots, none of which come together meaningfully. There are glimpses of an interesting story — but it’s the most disconnected entry yet.” BARRY LEVITT JANET PLANET FILM “The complexity of a shifting mother-daughter relationship is at the heart of this intimate coming-of-age drama. The glacial pacing might prove frustrating — but captivating performances pack an emotional punch.” NICOLA AUSTIN SUNNY TV “This is a show that multitasks like…

“The course of true love never did run smooth.” A portion of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the first thing we see being performed in Sing Sing. And it’s being recited by incarcerated individuals. It’s the first clue that this is going to be a different type of prison movie. There are no corrupt prison guards. There is no evil warden. There is no hint of physical harm enacted on prisoners. Instead, a group of men huddle around each other quoting Shakespeare. The film upends your expectations in the best possible way. “When I was in prison watching prison movies, I never really saw myself or the community I gravitate towards depicted in any of those,” says Clarence Maclin, who plays himself in Sing Sing. “The humanity that exists inside…

IN OCTOBER 2017, ANYBODY LUCKY enough to be invited to a particular Halloween party in Providence, Rhode Island, would have been greeted by an unbelievable sight: one of the voice stars of stop-motion animation classic Coraline, transformed into her character in real-life. “I bought a very cheap white-and-black polka-dot dress from Amazon,” Teri Hatcher recalls. “Then I quickly whited up my face and lined it with the sort of crackery of what [my character] becomes at the end.” The role of Coraline’s mother, who exists as both a harried housewife and the terrifying, button-eyed Other Mother, had been part of Hatcher’s life almost a decade earlier. She had moved onto other things. But her thoughts kept being pulled back to Coraline. And so, surely one of that year’s most mind-blowing…

THE ORIGIN It’s one of the most startling endings to a horror movie — or, in fact, any movie — in recent years. For much of its running time, Michael Mohan’s Immaculate has been mainly founded on shadows and suspense, as Sydney Sweeney’s young novitiate finds that the Italian convent she’s just joined is actually a breeding programme for the second coming of Christ. Nun more gnarly. But nowhere near as gnarly as the film’s denouement, in which Sweeney’s heavily pregnant Cecilia, having eluded the clutches of the sect, gives birth to the baby, bites off its umbilical cord and then, having gazed at it in horror, picks up a rock and bludgeons it to death. “The ending certainly leaves a mark,” laughs Mohan. “It’s what I live for, when…

ALEX GODFREY SPOKE TO TODD PHILLIPS FOR OUR COVER STORY “You know what you get when you meet Todd Phillips in LA to discuss Joker: Folie À Deux? You get — as somebody once put it — what you fucking deserve. Which is a two-hour interview over breakfast, involving chat about controversy, expectation, Charles Manson and showtunes.” BETH WEBB INTERVIEWED SAOIRSE RONAN FOR ‘ON A ROLE’ "It was perhaps no coincidence that I spoke to Saoirse Ronan on the one good day of British weather that we got this month. A ray of light, who spoke about the troubles and triumphs of her character in The Outrun.” CHRIS HEWITT HOSTED A JEFF GOLDBLUM Q&A “Jeff Goldblum called me ‘a vision in beige’ when I hosted an Empire VIP Club Q&A…

Empire has featured other Jokers on our cover, including Joaquin Phoenix’s first go-around in 2019, and Jared Leto’s short-lived stint in 2015. But our very first cover-clown was for The Dark Knight, back in 2008. At the time, Heath Ledger was still considered an unlikely choice for the role — not yet the Oscar-winning performance we all now rightly venerate. “I certainly had to put on a brave face,” Ledger admitted to us on set. His co-star, Michael Caine, was blunter. “If I put myself in a producer’s shoes, I think: ‘Wait a minute, we are making a movie about the Joker,’” the then-74-year-old actor ruminated. “Now, we have had Jack Nicholson, who is one of the greatest Jokers and one of the greatest characters in this kind of movie.…

FIXERS HAVE LONG been a fascination of filmmakers. From Harvey Keitel’s calm, collected Winston ‘The Wolf’ Wolfe in Pulp Fiction to Jodie Foster’s sharp-talking Madeleine White in Inside Man, these smooth operators always fly solo and keep their cards close to their chest. Which is precisely why Jon Watts decided to write a dark comedy about two of them. “I just wanted to know what it would be like if two of those guys met,” he tells Empire. “Would they kill each other? Or would they become best friends?” The two guys in question are played by Brad Pitt and George Clooney, who first worked together on the Oceans trilogy. “[They’ve] both played that guy. It’s like two Michael Claytons,” says Watts in reference to Clooney’s seminal fixer movie. In…

SHELLEY DUVALL WAS uncategorisable. A skilful, mercurial talent who could switch effortlessly between comedy and drama, her quality of being simultaneously off-kilter and charming attracted the attention of Stanley Kubrick, Robert Altman and more. Following her death in July, we delve into her defining roles. KEECHIE (THIEVES LIKE US, 1974) Duvall excels in her first lead role as local girl Keechie, who falls for inept gangster Bowie (Keith Carradine) to become the Bonnie and Clyde of the Depression-era South. Duvall’s beguiling presence makes the tragic outcome even more moving. MILLIE LAMMOREAUX (3 WOMEN, 1977) The zenith of Duvall’s seven collaborations with Altman is her semi-improvised turn as a narcissistic spa worker who befriends colleague Pinky (Sissy Spacek), leading to a dream-like fusing of their identities. Duvall is immense, by turns…

FROM THE MOMENT Travis Knight first glimpsed an unfinished draft of Colin Meloy’s novel Wildwood 13 years ago, he knew it was a story he and his team at Laika had to tell. Set in, as Knight describes it, “an American Narnia” hidden among the woodlands of his native Portland, Oregon, the book — a coming-of-age fantasy epic, with illustrations by Meloy’s wife Carson Ellis — reminded him of stories his mother read to him as a boy. “It had magic, it had wonder, it had danger, and it drew breath from the same air as Tolkien and Baum and Dahl,” the Kubo And The Two Strings filmmaker tells Empire. “But it also had this contemporary edge I’d never really seen before. I just fell in love with it.” That…

THE BOOK It was during the pandemic that Ronan was enthusiastically handed Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun by her partner, Jack Lowden. “Addiction has affected my life in some way, and has caused pain and frustration and confusion, and it was a topic that I knew eventually I would need to tackle as an actor,” she tells Empire. She admired how Liptrot takes her journey with alcoholism, which developed after moving to London from her native Orkney in her twenties, and “builds a life around the struggle”, leading her back home to Scotland and onto the difficult path of recovery. She and Lowden got the wheels turning as producers, and Ronan and Liptrot began work on the role. “It was Amy’s idea to change the character’s name to Rona, to give…

UNTIL MATT REEVES’ The Batman, the Penguin was largely known as a gentleman of crime; a creepy morning-suit-sporting oddball who hails from big money. Yet with the introduction of Colin Farrell’s smooth-talking iteration — “Take it easy there, sweetheart” — a fresh Os Cobb (this universe’s spin on Oswald Cobblepot) entered the game, and now has his own HBO eight-episode miniseries to run amok in. The show’s creator, Lauren LeFranc, was approached to work on the show ahead of The Batman’s release. She had grown up reading DC comics and describes Danny DeVito’s slippery, flippered take on the villain in Batman Returns as “seminal”, but after reading Reeves’ script, she saw the character in a whole new light. “Oh, he’s a gangster, and this is very grounded,” she recalls thinking.…

OUT NOW (NETFLIX) / CERT 15 / 118 MINS DIRECTOR Mark Molloy CAST Eddie Murphy, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Taylour Paige, Kevin Bacon Given the series’ hit-rate so far, the prospect of a new Beverly Hills Cop sequel may not inspire much enthusiasm. Somehow, happily, the fourth film in the series is the most enjoyable since the 1984 original. It’s not anywhere close to the quality of that film, but this is a light, funny and nostalgic couple of hours. Detective Axel Foley (Eddie Murphy, eccentric and mischievous) is still causing trouble, and still crossing paths with his old colleagues Rosewood (Judge Reinhold) and Taggart (John Ashton), as well as his estranged daughter, Jane (Taylour Paige). First-time director Mark Molloy gives it all the feel of a 1980s movie without over-egging it.…

OUT NOW / CERT 18 / 105 MINS DIRECTOR Nikhil Nagesh Bhat CAST Lakshya, Tanya Maniktala, Raghav Juyal, Ashish Vidyarthi This thunderous action film from Nikhil Nagesh Bhat smashes expectations of what can come from India’s film industry. It is relentless: breathless and ferociously gory, landing somewhere between the one-man-against-the-terrorists high-concept of Die Hard, the non-stop ultraviolence of Gareth Evans’ The Raid, and the public-transport-disaster of Yeon Sang-ho’s Train To Busan. There are terrorists on a train, and a commando taking them on, each side trying to kill each other in an increasingly gruesome manner. It’s often ludicrously alpha male, and not always coherent. But that becomes less important in a plot-light film like this. Kill, as you might expect, is simply about the kills. All aboard!…

OUT NOW (APPLE TV+) / EPISODES VIEWED 10 OF 10 SHOWRUNNERS Jemaine Clement, Iain Morris, Taika Waititi CAST Kal-El Tuck, Lisa Kudrow, Roger Jean Nsengiyumva, Charlyne Yi, Kiera Thompson PLOT Nerdy kid Kevin (Tuck) travels through time with a gang of thieves, on the run from the Supreme Being (Waititi) and Pure Evil (Clement). ON PAPER, IT looks like the perfect comedy storm: a cult-classic post-Monty Python adventure from Terry Gilliam and Michael Palin, adapted and updated by the dudes behind What We Do In The Shadows and The Inbetweeners. But, for all its pedigree and Apple-funded VFX budget, this 21st-century Time Bandits doesn’t deliver the swag. The main culprits are the titular gang. Portrayed in the original by dwarf performers including David Rappaport, Kenny Baker and Jack Purvis, the…

OUT NOW (PRIME VIDEO) / EPISODES VIEWED 8 OF 8 SHOWRUNNERS Ariel Shaffir, Kyle Hunter CAST Seth Rogen, Kristen Wiig, Michael Cera, Edward Norton It’s easy to feel like the 2016 R-rated animated feature film Sausage Party was some sort of fever dream; this eight-episode TV sequel is equally mind-boggling. From the moment when anthropomorphic foodstuffs have an extremely graphic mass orgy in a car park, you won’t quite believe what you’re watching. There’s evident, enjoyably juvenile glee at how naughty this all is, but outside of the outrageous stuff, the writing does not quite pack enough comedic punch. There is admittedly solid pun work on show here (shout out to Megan Thee Scallion and Tina Turnip) and some big ideas (the prospect of food-fascism looms large), but this is…

OUT 9 AUGUST / CERT TBC / 111 MINS DIRECTOR Daina O. Pusić CAST Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Lola Petticrew, Leah Harvey, Arinzé Kene, Justin Edwards PLOT When Death (Kene) arrives — in the form of a parrot — to end the life of terminally ill Tuesday (Petticrew), Tuesday’s mother Zora (Louis-Dreyfus) fights back. HERE IS ANOTHER film that ponders the big life-or-death existential questions, in the grand cinematic tradition of 1946’s A Matter Of Life And Death or, say, 1990’s Ghost. Tuesday, the ambitious debut feature from Croatian filmmaker Daina O. Pusić, in fact bears most similarities to 2016’s A Monster Calls: as with J.A. Bayona’s tear-jerking drama, this is a devastatingly moving fairy tale about a gravelly voiced, anthropomorphised fantasy character making friends with a human grappling with the terminal…

SOLDIERS WERE ON STANDBY. The FBI was on the case. The Army was at the ready. Not for the first time, the Joker was causing chaos, and anarchy was in the air, the city on high alert. This was real, though. Really real. It was late September, 2019. “Army officials are alerting soldiers about potential mass shootings at theatres showing the film,” an ABC news reporter gravely stated. “This coming after some have criticised the film for romanticising Gotham’s clown prince of crime, some fearing the film may become an inspiration for real-world criminals.” Days later, CBS news show Inside Edition ran footage of counter-terrorism cops with automatic weapons outside a New York cinema on opening night, police-cars lined up around the block, audience members being searched before going in.…

KATE WINSLET DOESN’T DO THINGS BY HALVES. Come on, we know this by now. Classic Winslet. But still, it’s always quite the thing to experience her roaring passion face-to-face (or, you know, face-to-Zoom) and right now, she’s in full-flow, even her “attention-seeking” dog unable to knock her off-track. “Every inch of the poster, the sizing of the letters, the spacing between the top of my head and where the letters fall, where the logo sits…” Empire had asked Winslet how across everything she’d been on Lee: the film about photojournalist Lee Miller that she stars in and produced, that she originated, developing it from 2015. So, yes, we soon learn that the answer is that she was, still is, across everything. Big time. From that poster to the financing, the…

THE PRAYING MANTIS “I was always fascinated by praying mantises. I had some as a kid. We would put them on the roses because they would eat aphids and things like that. They’re fascinating. They’re killing machines, and they’re wonderful.” CORALINE’S CAP “I went to Japan to promote The Nightmare Before Christmas, and I loved the design of some of the school uniforms. A little militaristic. I just thought that Coraline found one of those and it makes her stand out. She’s in charge.” THE WELL “When I was four, my older sister and I were going through some snow to visit our neighbours. And suddenly she dropped away. Turned out there was a dry well in the ground and she’d fallen into it. Now, it’s just a coincidence, because…

THIS MONTH OLWEN FOUÉRÉ JON KEEYES’ Irish-made, anonymously titled Cult Killer is a solid-enough modern noir, with Alice Eve as an alcoholic ex-librarian private detective who’s survived hideous abuse. She teams up with the serial-killer vigilante (Shelley Hennig) who stabbed her mentor (Antonio Banderas, mostly in Yoda-type training flashbacks) to bring down a highly placed gang of torture-porn enthusiasts. Eve is good, the story has twists and it’s suitably grim/angry… but the performance you remember comes from Olwen Fouéré, who is fast moving in on Lin Shaye’s ‘mature woman in bizarre role’ territory. In the last decade, Fouéré has gone from you-know-the-face to her-name-in-the-credits-guarantees-at-least-one-good-scene status. When the rights-holders of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise wanted to ape recent Halloweens with a reboot which brings back the final girl of the…

LETTER OF THE MONTH ARCADE FIRE Just wanted to say an amazing thank you for your latest issue with a feature about The Last bloody Starfighter [‘Changing The Game’, issue #430]! When I turned to that page I audibly said, “No fucking way!” I remember watching it as a kid and being creeped out when the guy’s head gets melted, and I think it’s a thoroughly underappreciated piece of ’80s filmmaking. Bring on the remake and/or sequel. ‘The Last Starfighters’, surely! PETER BEE, VIA EMAIL Yes fucking way! Thanks for your enthusiasm, Peter — have a Picturehouse membership on us. Hopefully you’ll still be a member by the time ‘The Last Starfighters’ gets greenlit. Empire’s star letter wins a Picturehouse Membership, valid for one year at all Picturehouse Cinemas across…

EXCLUSIVE INVITES TO EVENTS CURATED BY THE EMPIRE TEAM THE ULTIMATE EMPIRE EXPERIENCE Reading the magazine is only the beginning. To get closer to Hollywood than ever before, join the Empire VIP Club. Screenings with A-listers in the house, our deep-dive Spoiler Special podcast, the magazine direct to your door with bespoke covers, plus free cinema tickets. All for the incredible value of £8.99 a month. Join us today! SIGN UP NOW: GREATMAGAZINES.CO.UK/EMPIREVIP OR SCAN THIS QR CODE VIP MEMBERSHIP ONLY £8.99 PER MONTH* Worth over £130! INCLUDES: ✔ Exclusive live events, including preview screenings and Q&As ✔ 13 print issues of Empire a year ✔ Choice of an annual Picturehouse Membership or a Cineworld regular Combo deal, with two cinema tickets** ✔ Access to the Empire Spoiler Special podcast ✔ Exclusive…

BASED ON ONE of the biggest stage musicals of this century, Wicked will tell the story of how an unassuming young woman, Elphaba (played by Cynthia Erivo), became the Wicked Witch Of The West, the scourge of the land of Oz. Carrying the expectations of millions of fans, Jon M. Chu, director of the two-part adaptation, talks us through key songs from the first film, and his quest to give his Wicked its own brand of magic. ‘NO ONE MOURNS THE WICKED’ “In those first 60 seconds, you’re going to experience Oz in a totally new, more raw way,” says Chu of the film’s opening number, which flies over Oz (“you’ll see the nine million tulips that we really planted”) and finds the Munchkins celebrating the Wicked Witch’s death. “The…

IT’S A TALE as old as time. A pair of pals find themselves gradually growing apart ideologically, until they wind up on opposite sides of a terrible war, each pitted against the other as they lead their forces in bloody conflict. Oh, and one of them can transform into a truck, and the other into a gun. We’re talking, of course, about Optimus Prime and Megatron, the giant, shapeshifting robots who are the twin pillars of the Transformers universe. In the live-action Transformers franchise that began in 2007, that’s the only way we’ve seen them, as the leaders of the Autobots and the Decepticons, duking it out on Earth. But there was a time, many millennia ago back on their home planet of Cybertron, when they were a pair of…

IT’S NOT OFTEN that the 9.18am train from Paddington takes you not only to a different country, but a different century. Yet that is exactly what happened on a sunny morning in October 2022, when Empire visited the set of Alice Lowe’s Timestalker, a historical science-fiction romantic-comedy (a hi-sci-fi-rom-com?) set across hundreds of years. It follows Agnes (played by Lowe), who chases her true love across multiple lifetimes with harrowing results. During a busy, fast-moving day in Cardiff (standing in for ’80s New York), we asked the team how they’re bringing Lowe’s vision to life. HOLD A CANDLE TO IT For cinematographer Ryan Eddleston, shooting a film like Timestalker is really like shooting five films. Each time period, he explains during a brief break, has its own distinct look and…

IT MAY HAVE proved one of the most hotly debated shows in the Star Wars canon, but ultimately The Acolyte fulfilled its creator Leslye Headland’s goal: to tell a story from the perspective of the dark side. With a major bodycount and big reveals, the series ignited that notion like a blood-red lightsaber. And in the wake of the season finale, it’s apparent that The Acolyte didn’t just expand the galaxy by taking audiences 100 years before the events of Episode I — The Phantom Menace; it truly committed. Where Star Wars traditionally veers towards hope and redemption, The Acolyte proved to be a tale of regret and reconciliation, revealing a Jedi cover-up over a historic tragedy that wiped out a coven of Force-witches — presenting an alternative vantage point…

OUT 2 AUGUST / CERT PG / 84 MINS DIRECTORS Neil Boyle, Kirk Hendry CAST Aaron MacGregor, Ken Watanabe, Cillian Murphy, Sally Hawkins PLOT A shipwrecked boy (MacGregor) struggles to survive by himself on a remote Pacific island — until he encounters a prickly resident (Watanabe). MICHAEL, THE CHILD (voiced by Aaron MacGregor) at the centre of British animated adventure Kensuke’s Kingdom, has a ruinous obsession with his dog. When his parents (voiced by Cillian Murphy and Sally Hawkins) lose their jobs and embark on a global family trip on their trusty sailboat, the mischievous Michael defies their orders and smuggles the pet aboard. Predictably, Stella the dog is not fit for sea life, and her dangerous antics result in a lot of amusing screaming of her name, as if…

OUT 9 AUGUST / CERT TBC / 109 MINS DIRECTOR Pamela Adlon CAST Ilana Glazer, Michelle Buteau, John Carroll Lynch, Oliver Platt, Stephan James, Hasan Minhaj PLOT When Eden (Glazer) falls pregnant, her lifelong friendship with struggling mother Dawn (Buteau) is tested. GIVEN THAT PREGNANCY is quite literally a matter of life and death, it’s striking how few films address it. Blame the ickiness perhaps, or more likely the fact that it’s seen as a women’s issue, but Hollywood considers something that 40 per cent-odd of the population experiences and 100 per cent of the population owes their lives to a little bit less important than zombies. So one would like to cheer this effort from actor/comedian-turned-director Pamela Adlon, except that it’s inconsistent in its tone and fatally lacking in…

OUT 23 AUGUST / CERT 18 / 105 MINUTES DIRECTOR Rich Peppiatt CAST Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, Naoise Ó Cairealláin, JJ Ó Dochartaigh, Simone Kirby, Michael Fassbender PLOT Belfast, 2017. Two drug dealers (Ó hAnnaidh, Ó Cairealláin) and a music teacher (Ó Dochartaigh) team up to start an Irish-language rap outfit. “EVERY FUCKING STORY about Belfast starts like this,” intones rapper and protagonist Naoise Ó Cairealláin in voiceover as cars explode and protestors clash with soldiers in grainy footage. Happily, Kneecap has no truck with such tired tropes. The “mostly true” origin story of the titular rap trio — Ó Cairealláin, Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh and JJ Ó Dochartaigh winningly playing themselves — British-Irish writer-director Rich Peppiatt’s predominantly Irish-language feature bursts with energy, laughs, fizzy filmmaking and a big heart,…

OUT 1 AUGUST (PRIME VIDEO) / EPISODES VIEWED 10 OF 10 SHOWRUNNER Ed Brubaker CAST Hamish Linklater, Haley Joel Osment, Christina Ricci, David Krumholtz PLOT In 1940s Gotham City, the wealthy Bruce Wayne (Linklater) lives a double life as Batman, the Caped Crusader at war with criminals at night. IT’S A TESTAMENT to the timelessness of Batman that he and his carnivalesque rogues’ gallery is open to all manner of interpretations. The 1940s-set Batman: Caped Crusader makes the most out of that fact. Developed by Bruce Timm, best known for co-creating the landmark ’90s classic Batman: The Animated Series with Paul Dini, it feels like a visual offshoot of their past work. The Gotham of the previous Bat-show (nominally set in the present day) was designed to look like it…

OUT NOW / CERT 15 / 101 MINS DIRECTOR Osgood Perkins CAST Maika Monroe, Nicolas Cage, Blair Underwood PLOT Up-and-coming FBI agent Lee Harker (Monroe) is assigned to a serial-killer case with unexpected links to the occult — and her own history. THE FIRST FEW minutes of Osgood Perkins’ unsettling new psychological thriller Longlegs are some of the most effective in recent memory. Playing with sound, sharp cuts and curiosity-inducing creepiness, Perkins delivers a series of jump-scares that get your heart pounding out of your chest. Trust us, you’ll feel it. It’s a hell of an opening, that says: this is a film to simultaneously lean into and wince away from; a film prepared to pull the rug from under you at any point; a film that delights in playing…

OUT NOW (APPLE TV+) / EPISODES VIEWED 7 OUT OF 7 SHOWRUNNER Alma Har'el CAST Natalie Portman, Moses Ingram, Y'lan Noel, Mikey Madison, Sean Ringgold, Brett Gelman, Noah Jupe PLOT Baltimore, 1966. The lives of Maddie Schwartz (Portman) and Cleo Johnson (Ingram) become entangled when a young girl disappears on Thanksgiving. “YOU WANTED TO tell everyone’s story but your own.” It’s one of many cryptic and accusatory remarks made by Cleo Johnson (Obi-Wan Kenobi’s Moses Ingram) after her death. In Lady In The Lake, Cleo narrates her life from beyond the grave to an ambitious aspiring reporter, Maddie Schwartz (Natalie Portman), whose quest to investigate her murder leads her down a path of obsession and intrigue. Like all good mysteries, Lady In The Lake sets its stall high — and…

‘THE PHOTOJOURNALIST’ (DENNIS HOPPER) APOCALYPSE NOW (1979) The unnamed ‘photojournalist’ has minimal screen time, but in Hopper’s hands, maximum impact. Inspired by US war correspondent Sean Flynn, the PJ is lap-dog to the renegade Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), and is a ball of frenetic energy who mangles poetry greats (Eliot, Kipling) into his own cod philosophy — “‘If’ is the middle word in ‘life’.” Deep, man. RICHARD BOYLE (JAMES WOODS) SALVADOR (1986) Oliver Stone’s Molotov cocktail of a movie is co-written by its subject, Richard Boyle — a hedonistic photojournalist who covered the Salvadoran Civil War. Boyle negotiates with left-wing guerrillas and the right-wing militia, all the while trying to help his old flame (Elpidia Carrillo) leave the country. From this viewpoint, it is amazing to see right-wing blowhard James Woods be…

ONCE UPON A time in Texas, there was a young man called Robert Rodriguez. A tyro barely out of his teens, with dreams of following in the footsteps of multi-hyphenate moviemakers like John Carpenter. To manifest those dreams, he begged, borrowed and took part in medical experiments in order to shoot his first movie, the Spanish-language action movie El Mariachi, just across the border, with his best friend Carlos Gallardo in the title role. Rodriguez didn’t have a DP, or a sound guy, or an editor, or a camera operator, or anyone. As his must-read book on guerrilla filmmaking says, he was a rebel without a crew. Well, he was the crew. The very best boy. Then, something unexpected happened. El Mariachi, which cost around $7,000, exploded. Columbia bought it,…

1 INSIDE NO. 9 (OUT NOW, DVD) Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith’s extraordinary achievement came to an end with — naturally — its ninth series. All 55 episodes are in this collection, which further highlights what a gem the anthology show was. But whether it was making you laugh, scaring you shitless, or even moving you to tears, it never became solely about the twists, thanks to its co-creators’ excellent array of performances and precise writing. One of the great British series of the 21st century. 2 THE FIRST OMEN (OUT 5 AUGUST, DVD/BR/DIGITAL) A prequel that could have gone wrong in countless (well, 666) ways. Yet, thanks to Arkasha Stevenson’s assured direction, and a wonderful no-holds-barred performance from Nell Tiger Free, this tale of how the Antichrist Damien Thorn came to…

RIGHT AT THE end of Xavier Gens’ gloriously daft French shark thriller Under Paris (aka ‘Shark De Triomphe’, ‘Deep Bleu Sea’, ‘In Seine’, ‘Chomp Élysées’ and a hundred other titles suggested by fans after it hit big on Netflix in June) comes the credit, “Xavier Gens remercie”. And, among the many people the director remercies the hell out of, one name stands out: Gareth Evans, the director of The Raid and The Raid 2. “For me, it was important. He’s like a big brother, teaching me how to make my work better,” Gens tells Empire. “On Under Paris, he was talking about the pace and the visuals.” In fact, the French director and the Welsh wizard have known each other for a few years, and worked together on the first…