Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2024 i Empire

“DIFFICULT TO SEE. Always in motion is the future,” said a certain wrinkly green bog-dweller in The Empire Strikes Back. As always, Yoda had a point. Not least when it comes to the movie industry — the last few years have seen Hollywood roiled by one seismic change after another, from the rise of Netflix and subsequent streamers, to studio takeovers, to the recent AI boom. It’s been head-spinning, for filmmakers and film fans alike. Now, in late 2024, things look uncertain, even scary, for cinema. But as another Star Wars character (played by an actor brought back to life by cutting-edge VFX) said in Rogue One: there’s hope. New technology means new opportunities, and there’s exciting talent everywhere you look, with this year having seen the release of one…

A Lewis Hamilton biopic with a CGI turtle/tortoise. @JESSSCHLTN The Monty Python story, featuring a giraffe (Cleese), a gopher (Chapman), an owl (Palin), a donkey (Idle), a fox (Jones), and a sloth (Gilliam). @W_SCHWANEBECK Is it too obvious to suggest Barry White as a walrus? @TIMIREDALE1978 Seal as a seal. So we get ‘Kiss From A Rose’, sung by a seal. @MATTALL70333850 The Beatles played by beetles. @PHILIPSLATTERY WATCH OUT FOR THE NEXT QUESTION VIA OUR X ACCOUNT: @EMPIREMAGAZINE…

ALMOST 25 YEARS after Peter Jackson’s original trilogy of films, The Lord Of The Rings is having a major resurgence. In the wake of The Rings Of Power’s second season, Kenji Kamiyama (Blade Runner: Black Lotus) releases his Tolkien anime adaptation The War Of The Rohirrim. Then there are two new live-action instalments incoming, including a Gollum adventure to be directed by franchise veteran Andy Serkis. Speaking with Empire, another long-standing LOTR linchpin — writer-producer Philippa Boyens — discusses these upcoming sagas. How does it feel to be back in Middle-earth with The War Of The Rohirrim? It’s been a really nice entry back to the world. I worked a lot with the writers, but it’s been nice to pass it into the hands of the next generation. It was…

THE INSTINCT Hall’s popular English teacher finds her life upended when she begins to hear a hum that no-one else can hear, with no medical explanation. ‘The Hum’ is a real worldwide phenomenon — one in Mexico was the subject of an episode of Unsolved Mysteries — but Hall didn’t go deep into the research of the real-life instances. She read the novel by Jordan Tannahill, on which the show is based, and his script, but didn’t want to know more than her own character did. “It felt like the best way to approach it was just to bring a version of myself,” she tells Empire. “Often it’s the opposite of that — I’m hiding and doing something completely different. But because it’s such an immediate, odd thing that happens…

FOLLOWING HIS OSCAR-WINNING Johnny Cash biopic Walk The Line, co-writer-director James Mangold carried over one mandate for new Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown. “I expect my actors to play and sing live on camera,” he says simply. So, while in wide shot or seen from behind, Timothée Chalamet, who plays Dylan, could mime along to the track — but when the camera was on his face, the actor had to do the singing and guitar-strumming thing for real. “For 90 per cent of the film, it’s a single human’s musical expression,” Mangold explains, in reference to the fact that whereas Johnny Cash played with a band, Dylan is a solo artist. “To try to do that in the default setting of musical filmmaking, where everything is pre-created and played…

KIERAN CULKIN WON an Emmy this year for his role in Succession. Yet when Empire catches up with the actor, he reveals that Jesse Eisenberg, his director and co-star in family drama A Real Pain, had never seen him perform before. In anything. Instead, Eisenberg’s sister read the script and suggested Culkin. “What a bold fucking move on his part,” he reflects. “He hired somebody who he has not auditioned and whose work he has not seen. He’s going on a recommendation he got from his sister and the fact I met him briefly at, like, two parties and was nice to him or something.” Not only that, but Eisenberg waited a year for Culkin to finish filming Succession’s final season so that he could be a part of the…

A NEW BUT familiar face will greet those passing through London’s Leicester Square this month. Rubbing shoulders with fellow statues including Mary Poppins, Batman and a lamppost-swinging Gene Kelly is Daniel Kaluuya’s Get Out character Chris, a new permanent fixture. Here’s how the latest addition to the famous tourist spot came to be. THE WINNING VOTE The public was canvassed to decide upon the latest statue in the ‘Scenes In The Square’ initiative, asked to spotlight a young British acting talent. “We wanted to have a statue that was really contemporary and represented the present day and the future of film,” explains Clare Morris, who helped to oversee the project. Kaluuya won with 20 per cent of the vote. It was a poignant moment for the actor, who took to…

HE’S MADE CARS fly, Tom Hanks run (and run), and pushed the boundaries of CGI filmmaking — but with new drama Here, Robert Zemeckis is taking on a whole new challenge. “When I presented this idea to my longtime crew,” he tells Empire, “they thought, ‘Oh, this is going to be kind of easy.’ It turned out to be maybe the most difficult thing we’ve ever done.” That idea was to bring Richard McGuire’s unique graphic novel of the same name to the big screen, presenting a multitude of interwoven narratives throughout American history, all from one perspective. One fixed camera angle, pointed at one single spot, as it becomes home to everything from dinosaurs to early humans to a living room inhabited by one family after another. “If everything…

OUT 1 NOVEMBER / CERT 12A / 98 MINS DIRECTOR Tim Mielants CAST Cillian Murphy, Emily Watson, Eileen Walsh, Michelle Fairley Perhaps it’s appropriate that a story about a coal man should be an extremely slow burn, but there isn’t much warmth for Cillian Murphy’s fuel-seller as he figures out how to challenge the exploitation of young women by nuns in this drama about the Magdalene laundries scandal. It’s typical of Murphy that he’s used his Oscar-winner clout to adapt a sparely worded novel by Claire Keegan (Foster). The result is powerful, even if it’s as deeply understated as its terminally taciturn protagonist. Director Tim Mielants places the film on Murphy’s shoulders and leaves him to explain how good people let bad things happen, and how we might push back…

OUT 1 NOVEMBER / CERT 18 / 139 MINS DIRECTOR Sean Baker CAST Mikey Madison, Mark Eydelshteyn, Yura Borisov, Karren Karagulian, Vache Tovmasyan PLOT Sex worker Anora (Madison) crosses a powerful Russian family after she marries heir Ivan (Eydelshteyn) in a shotgun wedding. SEAN BAKER SEES the world differently. He found a magic kingdom in the pastel purple of The Florida Project’s multi-storey inn. Made a washed-up porn star an avatar for the American Dream in Red Rocket. Set Tangerine’s frenzied tale of a transgender woman’s revenge against the glittering backdrop of Christmas Eve. And now in Anora, his Palme d’Or-winning odyssey, turns Take That’s ‘Greatest Day’ — a song largely adored by a mum demographic — into a sex-worker anthem. It makes for one hell of an opening sequence:…

OUT 8 NOVEMBER / CERT 15 / 119 MINS DIRECTOR Andrea Arnold CAST Nykiya Adams, Barry Keoghan, Franz Rogowski Andrea Arnold delivers another signature kitchen-sink-meets-magical-realism coming-of-ager, which sees Nykiya Adams play Bailey, a spiky, impulsive presence longing for connection. Stuck in a squatted home with eccentric father Bug (Barry Keoghan), she worries about her siblings and mother living with an abusive new partner, when the mystical, childlike Bird (Franz Rogowski, mesmerising as ever) wanders into her life. This film is full of tenderness, idiosyncrasy and emotional gut-punches, as the characters explore the difference between the family they hoped for and the one they have — though the flashes of violence, mostly grounded as they are, make for some tonal whiplash. You will well up at the end.…

NINTENDO SWITCH, PC, PS4, PS5, XBOX ONE, XBOX SERIES X|S A retro-style scrolling beat-’em-up is perfect for The Karate Kid, a franchise rooted in ’80s nostalgia. Street Rumble largely proves that point, offering a condensed retelling of the original trilogy, styled like arcade games of the time. With four playable fighters — Daniel, Miyagi, Ali, and Kumiko — recreated in beautifully animated pixel form, it’s fun for fans, but lacks surprises as a brawler.…

OUT 8 NOVEMBER / CERT PG / 94 MINS DIRECTOR Morgan Neville PARTICIPANTS Pharrell Williams, Gwen Stefani, Kendrick Lamar, Timbaland, Justin Timberlake, Busta Rhymes, Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg PLOT A documentary about the life and career of singer, rapper, über-producer and polymath entrepreneur Pharrell Williams — told entirely through the medium of LEGO. “IT’S HAPPENING,” GOES a lyric sung over the opening titles of Piece By Piece. “Yes… It’s real.” Just to be sure, here is confirmation, early doors: yep, this is a real film. We’ve had LEGO Movies about Batman, Ninjas, Scooby-Doo. But a music documentary LEGO Movie? Made with the full participation of self-described “hybrid thinker” Pharrell Williams, Piece By Piece is a surprisingly sincere and serious film about a sincere and serious artist, some distance from the irony-led…

FIRST IT WAS confined to hard surfaces and solid objects; then it conquered water and fire; then fully-CG characters became a feasible, convincing option. Today, there is little that the VFX industry can’t do with enough time and money. The problem is finding both. Photo-realistic people were a final frontier for years, but even that is now achievable, at least with a big budget and in short bursts. Think the blend of Alyla Browne and Anya Taylor-Joy as the young Furiosa, or the de-ageing of Tom Hanks in Robert Zemeckis’ upcoming Here (both AI-assisted). “Digital humans work fine if they’re not doing much — looking moody and soulful is way easier than delivering Henry V’s St Crispin’s Day speech,” says Paul Franklin, a two-time Oscar-winner for his VFX work and…

IT STARTED WITH The Simpsons. In 1996’s ‘Bart On The Road’ (Season 7), Bart and pals — Milhouse, Martin and Nelson — get fake IDs, abscond from Springfield, and road-trip to the World’s Fair Park. Their alibi? They’re attending the ‘National Grammar Rodeo’. On the way, everything goes wrong. Decades later, director Jon Watts (flying high from his MCU Spider-Man trilogy) and regular collaborator Christopher Ford devised a Star Wars pitch. Codename: ‘Grammar Rodeo’. The result is Skeleton Crew (set concurrently with The Mandalorian and Ahsoka), in which four suburban space kids — Wim (Ravi Cabot-Conyers), Fern (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), KB (Kyriana Kratter) and elephantine alien Neel (Robert Timothy Smith) — discover something mysterious in the woods, and are blasted far, far away into an Amblin-esque adventure comprising pirates, hyperspace…

JOHN NUGENT SPOKE TO BONG JOON HO FOR OUR COVER STORY “I spent a delightful hour on Zoom with Director Bong. It was his first interview for Mickey 17 and he was on smashing form — talking about human cloning, inventing a fictional Robert Pattinson twin brother, and a little bit of magic he likes to call ‘Bong sauce’.” CHRIS LUPTON OVERSAW OUR CYNTHIA ERIVO PHOTOSHOOT “It was a joy to go to New York for our shoot with Cynthia Erivo, by legendary Hollywood photographer Mark Seliger (above, left). She was so collaborative and open — happy to get the perfect shot, and we had a shared passion for early-’90s fashion editorial. A dream shoot!” JAMES DYER CO-HOSTED A LORD OF THE RINGS SCREENING AND PODCAST “There are few things…

THE BRITISH A-LISTER is our latest (double) cover star — but it’s not the first time he’s graced our pages. We spoke to him in 2008, just as the Twilight juggernaut was about to kick off (“Edward is a 108-year-old virgin, so he’s obviously got issues,” Pattinson admitted to us). And by the time we caught up with him the following year, for sequel New Moon, the then-23-year-old was a bona fide megastar. Our correspondent met him on the beach at Cannes, finding Pattinson baffled and bemused by his new-found fame; on a nearby promenade, hordes of screaming teenage girls were desperately vying for a glimpse of their new vampiric hero. “This is really bizarre,” Pattinson confided. “Especially when I haven’t even seen the movie yet.” Read our latest interview…

AS SOON AS Nicholas Hoult’s real-estate agent Thomas Hutter begins his approach to Nosferatu’s gothic manor in the new film of the same name, things go south. In Robert Eggers’ take on F.W. Murnau’s 1922 horror classic, Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) seems like evil incarnate — and Eggers ensured the bloodsucker’s surroundings were suitably diabolic. Here, the director talks us through the character’s unwelcoming environs. THE CASTLE Nestled on the top of a wretched hill in the Carpathian Mountains, its spires stabbing the sky, the grand old pile in Eggers’ film is, in fact, Transylvania’s Hunedoara Castle (aka Corvin Castle). Even if the action itself — anything involving human beings or vampires — wasn’t filmed there. “We wanted to shoot Transylvania for Transylvania, but at the end, it wasn’t financially…

RON HOWARD IS currently considering one of pop-culture’s biggest conundrums. Just which three John Williams scores would you take to a desert island? “My three choices would have to be: Schindler’s List, for its emotion and gravitas,” he says, “Raiders Of The Lost Ark for its energy and fun, and Star Wars, for the uplifting effect it has on me every time I hear it.” Alongside long-time Williams collaborators Steven Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy, Howard is behind a new Disney+ documentary, Music By John Williams, a portrait of the master of modern-day movie scoring. Directed by Spielberg biographer Laurent Bouzereau, it traces Williams’ adventures with sharks, Jedi, aliens, archaeologists, dinosaurs and wizards, aka the soundtrack to all our lives. “We wanted to celebrate John both as an artist and an…

IT’S PART OF THE CORPORATE BIOPIC TREND Cola Wars arrives hot on the heels of other how-they-invented-it films loosely based on true brand-origin stories from recent American history. Air, Ben Affleck’s take on the creation of the Air Jordan basketball shoes, was followed up by Unfrosted, Jerry Seinfeld’s madcap reimagining of the business battle over Pop-Tarts. Consider also BlackBerry, Tetris, and Beanie Baby tale The Beanie Bubble, and it seems the corporate biopic is the trendiest genre in the game right now. IT’S BASED ON A 100-PLUS-YEAR RIVALRY Coke and Pepsi have been battling it out for soft-drink supremacy since the late 19th century. Coke was consistently ahead of Pepsi partly thanks to its cutesy Christmas ads, but in 1975 Pepsi dealt a major blow with the ‘Pepsi Challenge’, a…

THE PHRASE “FRESH perspective” gets bandied about a lot, but new film Nickel Boys is taking it to the next level. Based on Colton Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel, the drama — set mostly in Jim Crow-era Tallahassee, Florida — is not only a commanding story, but is largely filmed with first-person point-of-view cameras that put us firmly in its lead characters’ headspace. The film chronicles the journey of Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson), two Black teenagers who form a friendship at the Nickel Academy, an abusive reform school in the ’60s. The idea to literally tell the story from their viewpoints came courtesy of first-time feature director RaMell Ross, whose 2018 experimental documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening — about the lives of the Alabama county’s…

IN ITS SOPHOMORE season, The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power chucked a lot at us. A heavy-metal Troll. A Dwarf charging a Balrog. A sea-beast moonlighting as a high-court judge. But despite all the furore and marauding beasts, one character punched through to quietly prevail as fan-favourite season MVP. The Elven smith Celebrimbor, who is tricked by Sauron into forging magical rings, only to discover his world-threatening folly when it’s already too late. “I think there are exactly four sentences within the legendarium (the writings of Tolkien) about Celebrimbor,” says co-showrunner J.D. Payne. “So from that we had to extrapolate an entire personality. But when you cast someone like Charles Edwards, they bring a depth of pathos to the character that we could never have hoped for…

OUT 25 OCTOBER / CERT 12A / 102 MINS DIRECTOR François Ozon CAST Nadia Tereszkiewicz, Rebecca Marder, Fabrice Luchini, Isabelle Huppert For a film that is mostly pure homage to 1930s cinema, there is nothing stale about The Crime Is Mine, a lavish period romp with a post-MeToo sensibility. After actor Madeleine (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) absconds from the mansion of a theatre producer, she becomes a prime suspect in his murder. Handily, Madeleine’s roommate (Rebecca Marder) is a lawyer, hatching a plan to get her off the hook while landing some publicity. François Ozon’s latest operates at the surface-level, but knowingly so. Revelling in its gorgeous costumes, set designs and swoony score, it might be a mash-up of different genres — there are nods to noir and screwball comedy — but…

OUT NOW / CERT 18 / 125 MINS DIRECTOR Damien Leone CAST David Howard Thornton, Lauren LaVera, Jason Patric, Elliott Fullam PLOT Five years after his decapitation, supernatural serial killer Art the Clown (Howard Thornton) returns at Christmas to torment his arch-enemy, Sienna Shaw (LaVera). THE SAGA OF writer-director Damien Leone’s signature horror character Art the Clown began with The 9th Circle, a 2008 short which was recycled with other mini-movies (including a 2011 first draft of Terrifier) into a 2013 anthology film, All Hallows’ Eve. David Howard Thornton didn’t take over the role of the clown until the breakout feature version of Terrifier (2016). His exceptionally committed evil-mime performance — imagine Harpo Marx possessed by the Driller Killer — remains the centrepiece of an ongoing series which shows no…

OUT 25 OCTOBER / CERT 15 / 95 MINS DIRECTORS Max Eggers, Sam Eggers CAST Brandy, Kathryn Hunter, Andrew Burnap, Neal Huff A horror-thriller which might also be attempting comedy — it’s sometimes hard to tell. Black, pregnant anthropology professor Belinda (Brandy) and her white husband Norman (Andrew Burnap) are forced to remain on guard when the latter’s estranged, deeply religious stepmother Solange (Kathryn Hunter) moves in. It feels like an ill-conceived Get Out knock-off without a fraction of the insight into American racism, and what ought to be unnerving is mostly off-putting. Hunter does set the screen ablaze with her hilariously cartoonish performance, pratfalling and gesticulating wildly. Unfortunately, her presence alone isn’t enough to rescue a movie that feels conceptually doomed.…

EPISODES VIEWED 8 OF 8 / OUT 21 OCTOBER (SKY/NOW) SHOWRUNNER Jon Brown CAST Himesh Patel, Aya Cash, Jessica Hynes, Billy Magnussen, Lolly Adefope, Richard E. Grant, Daniel Brühl PLOT As filming on superhero movie ‘Tecto: Eye Of The Storm’ inches towards disaster, first assistant director Daniel (Patel) desperately tries to keep things on track. THERE’S BEEN NO shortage of superhero movies in the last few years — and no shortage of some less-than-heroic behind-the-scenes reports to go along with them, too. So it’s almost surprising it’s taken this long for a show like The Franchise to come along. The brainchild of producers Armando Iannucci, Sam Mendes and showrunner Jon Brown, this is — like The Thick Of It or Veep — a workplace satire, one that shines a cutting,…

OUT 25 OCTOBER / CERT 12A / 107 MINS DIRECTOR Pedro Almódovar CAST Julianne Moore, Tilda Swinton, John Turturro, Alessandro Nivola PLOT Suffering from a terminal illness, Martha (Swinton) asks her longtime friend Ingrid (Moore) to be with her when she ends her own life. IT IS STRANGE to watch a Pedro Almodóvar film where characters speak English. This is the veteran Spanish filmmaker’s 23rd feature film and the only one not in his native Spanish, New York swapping in for the familiar streets of his hometown of Madrid. It’s a brave move for an artist in his mid-seventies to temporarily relocate to a new country and language, and the experience for the audience is initially a little uncanny. His regular trademarks — a sumptuous colour palette; women on the…

MY OLD ASS FILM “It is essentially a hang-out movie. Smart, and sharp enough to balance the sweetness of its simple yet profound message. All we have is time, and this film reminds us, movingly, that it matters how we spend it.” HELEN O’HARA INDUSTRY: SEASON 3 TV “This is the most disparate season yet — but the plot-twists, back-stabbing character drama and endlessly high stakes keep the show as gripping and raucous as ever.” SOPHIE BUTCHER THE PLATFORM 2 FILM “It dissolves into a bloated, murky haze, never quite sure of its satirical target. At one point, it suggests it is in fact a prequel rather than a sequel, but by the end of the movie you may find you’re not invested enough in the story to truly care.”…

It was 4 July 2020. The red-letter day (a Saturday) when word first reached Barry Jenkins that the powers-that-be at Disney wanted him to direct a prequel to The Lion King. Having spent the past 112 days working on the epic (and excellent) Apple TV + show The Underground Railroad, Jenkins had been ready for a break, so had decided to head out with partner and fellow filmmaker Lulu Wang on a last-minute road trip. As they cruised up the coast of California, the sea twinkling in the perma-sunshine, his phone pinged to inform him he had been sent the screenplay for Mufasa’s origin story. His immediate response? “Extreme scepticism.” It was an understandable reaction. Since his feature debut, Medicine For Melancholy, in 2008 — a movie made for the…

THAT ELUSIVE BDE — “BIG DOG ENERGY” — is a quality almost as difficult to define as it is to achieve. So when it came to Nightbitch, in which Amy Adams stars as a frustrated stay-at-home mom (simply referred to as ‘Mother’) by day and a stray, street-roaming dog by night, the filmmakers could only be sure of what they didn’t want. “Do you remember me barking for you, Mari?” Addressing Nightbitch’s writer-director Marielle Heller on our three-way Zoom, Adams is smiling — half-sheepish, half-proud — as she recalls those early days of prepping for the role. She’s seated in front of a large window at her home, red hair falling loose on her shoulders and wearing a soft grey, cowl-neck sweater, which happens to match the small, grey dog…

THE ’80s FANTASY boom turned out to be more of a bust. But between the twee likes of Legend and the overblown prog-rock knock-offs like Krull, there is at least one genuine treasure. Rob Reiner’s The Princess Bride is a comic delight and a subversive fairy tale that’s been much imitated (Shrek, Ella Enchanted) but never bettered. Sometimes the stars just align — or perhaps it’s testament to the unstoppable power of true love. The story is admittedly hokey. A farm girl called Buttercup (Robin Wright) agrees to marry a prince after her boyfriend, Westley (Cary Elwes), goes off to seek his fortune and is lost to pirates. Then she’s kidnapped by three ne’er-dowells at the prince’s command, and rescued by a mysterious man in black — who turns out…

LETTER OF THE MONTH HAKUNA MATATA I’m just reading your new issue in bed this evening and I couldn’t believe you missed out The Lion King from your top films of 2004 [‘The Ranking’, issue #430]! I understand it didn’t make the top ten (11 in this case), but to not even give it a mention! I cannot feel the love tonight! RACHEL WHITE, VIA EMAIL OMG. Sleep-deprived mom here. Lion King was 1994, not 2004. Please don’t judge me; hopefully you haven’t even read these messages. RACHEL WHITE, “VERY EMBARRASSED MOTHER OF A 13-MONTH-OLD”, VIA EMAIL Rachel, this realisation made us all smile. Have a much-deserved Picturehouse membership on us. In the meantime: they say the lion sleeps tonight — let’s hope you do too. Empire’s star letter wins…

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MILFS KINDLY TAKE a back seat; 2024 is the year of the MWLF. After generations of filmmakers have framed motherly characters through the male gaze — from the iconically stockinged Mrs Robinson to Jennifer Coolidge’s smouldering Stifler’s Mom in American Pie — women are seizing the lens. Middle-aged female characters are charging the screen with renewed sexual agency, playing characters who are at once complex, exalted and empowered. At the forefront: Nicole Kidman, who won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival in September for her role as a lustful CEO in Babygirl. “[It’s] obviously about sex, it’s about desire, it’s about your inner thoughts, it’s about secrets, it’s about marriage, it’s about truth, power, consent,” said the actor at the festival’s press conference. The erotic…

Beth Webb (News Editor): This is one of those great instances where out of nowhere you hear a one-line concept and instantly you’re all in. “Robbie Williams but played by a CG chimpanzee.” [1] What a bold swing. Joanna Moran (Photography Director): I was a massive fan of Take That when I was 11 and 12. I had all their videos, I’d record them when they were on The Big Breakfast, so I’m excited for this. Graham Jones (Deputy Art Director): I think that a chimp sums up Robbie Williams really well. You see him in interviews, you read about his life, and he’s all about chaos. It’s clever and I think it’ll be a fun movie. John Nugent (Reviews Editor): It’s weird that music biopics have to have a…

PANIC HAS FLOODED the grand foyer of Müpa Budapest, Hungary’s prestigious concert hall, on a freezing January day. Hundreds of people are scattering down red-carpeted stairs and out of exits in the aftermath of an attack by the Jackal, the assassin driving a modern, serialised adaptation of Frederick Forsyth’s classic espionage novel. Empire has a front-row seat to the chaos, and watches as the Jackal himself, a lone assassin played by Eddie Redmayne, sneaks out amid the concert-goers in disguise. This is just one instance of the Jackal escaping MI6’s clutches, much to the chagrin of Lashana Lynch’s driven agent, Bianca, who is hot on his tail. “Ultimately, it’s a cat-and-mouse story, with the clever cop putting herself in the shoes of this man who doesn’t really exist,” producer Christopher…

AT ONE POINT in Vatican thriller Conclave, a cardinal does about the least cardinal-y thing a cardinal could do. He whips out a vape pen, then takes a puff. “It’s just so important to find these moments of levity,” laughs director Edward Berger of the unlikely sight. “But also, I was trying to find the contrast between this archaic world and modernity. Thus the vape, thus the cell phones, the photocopier, the Pope in a funny plastic bag… We’re just like them, you know? We’re all the same. We all end up in a body bag, basically.” Ah yes, the body bag. Just like dire 1991 Robbie Coltrane comedy The Pope Must Die, Conclave opens with the death of the supreme pontiff. Instead of shenanigans involving the Mafia, however, what…

OUT 1 NOVEMBER / CERT 12A / 104 MINS DIRECTORS Ian Bonhôte, Peter Ettedgui  PARTICIPANTS Christopher Reeve, Robin Williams, Susan Sarandon, Glenn Close, Jeff Daniels PLOT Christopher Reeve, the Hollywood icon best known for playing Superman, dedicates his life to disability advocacy after a horse-riding accident leaves him paralysed. IN OUR ERA of cinematic universes, it feels like every actor has donned a cape at some point, but back in the days of Christopher Reeve’s Superman, being a superhero represented something larger than life. There was a responsibility, a moral code to abide by. You weren’t just playing a superhero — you were one. Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story is not afraid of equating Reeve to the Man Of Steel he played in four Superman films between 1978 and 1987.…

OUT NOW (DISNEY+) / EPISODES VIEWED 4 OF 9 SHOWRUNNER Jac Schaeffer CAST Kathryn Hahn, Joe Locke, Aubrey Plaza, Patti LuPone, Debra Jo Rupp PLOT Three years after her battle with Wanda, Agatha (Hahn) breaks free from her spell, and sets about getting her powers back. MUCH AS KATHRYN Hahn’s mischievous witch Agatha Harkness was the MVP of the excellent WandaVision, one wouldn’t be blamed for wondering if a spin-off series about her was really necessary. Four episodes into Agatha All Along, the primary reason it exists is clear: because Kathryn Hahn is simply too deliciously devious and charismatic in this role to not be unleashed on a bigger scale. We find Agatha trapped in Wanda’s spell — but where the Scarlet Witch played out her narrative via sitcoms, Agatha…

OUT 8 NOVEMBER / CERT 12A / 127 MINS DIRECTOR Malcolm Washington CAST Samuel L. Jackson, John David Washington, Ray Fisher, Erykah Badu, Danielle Deadwyler, Corey Hawkins PLOT An elaborately carved piano becomes a symbol of grief, legacy and honour for one warring family in 1930s Pittsburgh. PLAY-TO-FILM adaptations can often flourish thanks to the little tricks and turns that only the silver screen can provide: whether it’s Jack Nicholson’s claustrophobic close-up as he exclaims guilt in A Few Good Men, or the frantic editing of Amadeus. On the other hand, some adaptations do too little and end up feeling literally ‘stagey’ as a result. With The Piano Lesson in particular, it feels like not much has been gained by re-rendering this Pulitzer-winner on celluloid. Adapted from August Wilson’s play…

OUT NOW (NETFLIX) / EPISODES VIEWED 8 OF 8 SHOWRUNNER Tasha Huo CAST Hayley Atwell, Allen Maldonado, Earl Baylon, Richard Armitage, Zoe Boyle PLOT When a magical Chinese artefact is stolen from Croft Manor, Lara Croft (Atwell) ventures out on a mission across the globe. EVER SINCE DEBUTING as a blocky adventure video game back in 1996, the Tomb Raider series has shown remarkable sticking power. Lara Croft has appeared in over 20 games, three live-action films (with another reboot planned), comics, novels, and now this new anime-inspired animated series. Set between the recent game reboot trilogy and the original ’90s series, The Legend Of Lara Croft looks to find the balance of the character, landing somewhere between the brutally violent recent games and the less serious adventurer from the…

OUT 25 OCTOBER / CERT TBC / 132 MINS DIRECTOR Jacques Audiard CAST Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz, Mark Ivanir, Édgar Ramírez PLOT Rita Moro Castro (Saldaña), a lawyer in Mexico City, is forced into taking an unexpected job: arranging for a gang leader (Gascón) to transition into becoming a woman. HERE IS AN unusual film from a restless mind. French filmmaker Jacques Audiard’s eclectic career has already seen a gritty prison drama (A Prophet), a comedy Western (The Sisters Brothers) and a romantic drama about orcas (Rust And Bone). His latest, Emilia Pérez, is part drug-cartel gangland thriller, part trans coming-of-age drama, part grand melodrama, and part opera libretto musical. It’s nothing if not unique. Zoe Saldaña stars as an exhausted, hard-working lawyer in Mexico…

SOME CALL IT “MOVIE MAGIC”. SOME CALL IT “MOJO”. THE FRENCH CALL IT “JE NE SAIS QUOI”. FOR DIRECTOR BONG JOON HO?“BONG SAUCE”. In Director Bong’s eighth feature film, Mickey 17, Toni Collette plays a character obsessed with sauce, desperate to discover a new one on a distant planet. Her character describes the condiment as “the true litmus test of a civilisation”. It provided the perfect metaphor for how the filmmaker adapted the novel the film was based on, Edward Ashton’s Mickey7 (more on that name change later). “Edward Ashton is such a great writer,” Bong tells Empire, through his regular interpreter Sharon Choi. “The novel is such a great read. Basically, what I tried to do was put my strange intuition onto that story. Like the sauce that Toni…

“THIS IS MY entire team behind me,” laughs Takashi Yamazaki over Zoom, gesturing at the ten or so people in his small Tokyo office. The director is explaining how his 2023 epic Godzilla Minus One — made for just $15 million — managed to beat the $200-million-plus likes of Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3 and Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One to the Oscar for Best Visual Effects earlier this year. And, apparently, the film’s skeleton crew was a major factor. “A small team is key,” Yamazaki explains. “[I have] heard that in Hollywood the process to check [VFX] material can be quite complicated — artists must create multiple options, so filmmakers can choose between them. That takes time and [requires] more people working. With a small team,…

IN ALL BEGAN WITH FRANK HERBERT’S AUNTS. Ten of them, on his mother’s side. They were Irish Catholic, and insisted that young Frank, during his childhood in the 1920s and ’30s, be raised in their faith and educated as a Jesuit, despite his agnostic father’s objections. Years later, after achieving literary fame for his grand sci-fi epic Dune, Herbert would reflect on their familial coup as an “attempted brainwashing”. They made a profound impression on him, those formidable aunts. He would recast them as the most powerful women in the universe: the mysterious, cloistered and exclusively feminine power behind his distant-future universe’s throne. The Bene Gesserit Sisterhood. Women with the ability to detect lies, manipulate bloodlines and dominate minds. As Herbert’s son, Brian, noted in his biography of his father,…

WILL FERRELL IS not a stranger to big, bold creative swings. This is the man who, after all, made a Lifetime movie (A Deadly Adoption) and played it with a straight face. He made a musical comedy dedicated to the greatness of the Eurovision Song Contest. And, lest we forget, he also made Casa De Mi Padre, a movie entirely in the Spanish language. The common denominator in all of these — other than ‘let’s do it because we can’ — was a writer then called Andrew Steele, whom Ferrell had met on Saturday Night Live when they were both newbies. They bonded right away. Then, one day in 2022, Ferrell received an email from Steele which informed him that she had transitioned to live as a woman called Harper.…

1 JUGGERNAUT (OUT 18 NOVEMBER, BR) Often omitted from disaster-movie best-of lists, this 1974 thriller about a bomber who’s rigged an ocean liner to explode is a million times better than Speed 2: Cruise Control. Starring Richard Harris, Omar Sharif and Anthony Hopkins, it’s 109 minutes of clammy-palmed wire-snipping and nervy phone calls; a treat for anyone who enjoys feeling stressed. 2 HÄXAN (OUT 28 OCTOBER, BR) The idea of watching a Scandinavian silent film about witchcraft made over a century ago may not seem hugely appealing, but stick this on this Halloween and you’re unlikely to regret it. (Reece Shearsmith, for one, revisits it every year.) With its fear-drenched mood and jittery imagery, it still haunts. 3 THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (OUT 11 NOVEMBER, BR) And while we’re on the subject of…

JUDE LAW: “Paul Newman, I was very lucky to work with once. He’s just a hero of mine, as a man and an actor. Cool Hand Luke, when he encourages the chain gang to finish their work and they go at top speed, that’s just such invigorating, beautiful cinema, and very little said. And then you get this beaming smile at the end — Newman’s brilliant smile, and those blue eyes.” EXT. COUNTRY ROAD — DAY Luke (Paul Newman), Dragline (George Kennedy) and the rest of the chain gang have been tasked with sanding a road as it’s tarred. It’s backbreaking work that should take them all day. But Luke is attacking the work with vigour, shovelling sand quickly onto the road. Dragline notices. DRAGLINE: Hey buddy, slow down. That’s a…