Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2017 i Empire Australasia

IT WASN’T THE script or even the director that drew Alicia Vikander to her latest film — it was a video game. “I was intrigued,” she remembers of the moment she first saw 2013’s retooled Tomb Raider. “It looked very different from the [Tomb Raider] games I played growing up. I wanted to find out what it was.” For the first time on screen, we’ll meet Lara Croft before she gets into the whole crypt exploration business. The new film is based on that 2013 game, but when we meet Lara she’s a cycle courier in London. And it’s not some priceless lost artefact that sets her off on her journey, but a quest to find her missing father. Then she’s marooned on a mystical, largely hostile island, where she…

THINGS WENT SOUTH in every sense on Dee Rees’ new Mississippi-set drama, Mudbound. “It was absolutely muddy,” laughs the director of a shoot in the sweltering boondocks outside New Orleans. “Between the waders, the mosquitos and the heat, we were always uncomfortable. One of the producers sent me a picture from the set where I’m in ripped jeans and a bandana, and I wondered how we survived it.” The film’s title, of course, isn’t just a description of the on-set conditions. Named after the Hillary Jordan novel on which it’s based, the “mudbound” metaphor refers to a bleak era in post-World War II Southern life. Two families — one black and one white — find themselves mired in racial inequality, eking out lives, and love affairs, in an unforgiving landscape.…

AGE __ 30 PLAYS __ Abdul Karim in Stephen Frears’ based-on-fact period drama Victoria & Abdul. Karim was an Indian clerk who befriended Queen Victoria (Judi Dench — again) and controversially became her teacher, or ‘Munshi’. “It was his confidence and innocence that really attracted me,” says Fazal. BACKSTORY __ “I broke my arm during a basketball match at boarding school and thought my life was over. Then a friend said, ‘Your English isn’t bad. They’re putting on The Tempest and there’s a cute girl playing Miranda. Why don’t you try out?’ That was the beginning of this disease.” EARLY ROLES __ “I started in Bollywood with a cameo in a movie called 3 Idiots [2009], which was a hit. I did have a stint on Fast & Furious [as…

IT’S THREE YEARS since George Clooney last sat in a director’s chair. Following 2014’s The Monuments Men, his new project stems partly from his own obsessions and partly from an old Joel and Ethan Coen script called Suburbicon. “I’d been writing a script about [1957 documentary] Crisis In Levittown. I wanted to talk about building walls and scapegoating minorities,” he says. “Themes that sadly never lose their relevance. At the same time, I pulled out a 1999 version of Suburbicon and thought the two stories were perfect to put together.” In splicing the two scripts with creative partner Grant Heslov — “I write long hand. Grant does the typing, thank God” — Clooney’s tale peers into the idyllic American communities of 1959. If the dark side beyond white picket fences…

HOW DO YOU one-up a dark-edged sci-fi that’s already featured virtual-reality nursing homes, flying robo-bees and Prime Ministerial pig-shagging? That was the challenge facing Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker as he sat down to plot out its fourth season. The answer, it turns out, was by being more ambitious. One new episode, ‘USS Callister’, sees the show blast into space; another, ‘Black Museum’, features three stories in one, which Brooker likens to The Simpsons’ ‘Treehouse Of Horror’. With worldwide recognition and a place in the cultural lexicon secured — Stephen King has praised the show as “like The Twilight Zone, only rated R” — Black Mirror can afford to splash out. Season 4 will treat fans to a “gruelling thriller”, an “indie drama”, and one “quite playful” episode set in…

★★★★ OUT 9 NOVEMBER RATED MA15+ / 143 MINS DIRECTOR Kathryn Bigelow CAST John Boyega, Algee Smith, Anthony Mackie, Will Poulter, Jason Mitchell, John Krasinski, Jack Reynor, Hannah Murray, Kaitlyn Dever PLOT Detroit, Michigan, 1967. In the heat of the infamous 12th Street uprising, a task-force, led by racist cop Philip Krauss (Poulter), raids the Algiers Motel searching for a sniper. When they fail to find him, the mostly African-American guests are subjected to a horrifying storm of hatred and violence that spills into murder. FORTY-THREE DEAD, 1,200 injured, 7,000 arrested, 2,000 buildings scorched. It’s easy to get lost in the shattering scale of the Detroit riots. Over five days in 1967, the Summer Of Love exploded into hate as the civil rights movement tipped into civil war. Powered by…

★★★★ OUT 5 OCTOBER RATED M / 90 MINS DIRECTOR Stanley Tucci CAST Geoffrey Rush, Armie Hammer, Clémence Poésy PLOT Early 1960s, France: American writer James Lord (Hammer) agrees to sit for a portrait for Alberto Giacometti (Rush). What begins as a straightforward portrait session stretches out to day after day of fruitless work as the mercurial Giacometti struggles to finish the painting. MOVIES ABOUT ARTISTS can be a dicey proposition. Sometimes they work — Love Is The Devil gives you insights into Francis Bacon no academic text could — but more often you get Anthony Hopkins bellowing his way through Surviving Picasso. Maybe there’s something about drawing too direct a line from the work to the artist that feels reductive on film. Tellingly, John Maybury’s Bacon-opic couldn’t show any…

★★★ OUT NOW RATED MA15+ / 89 MINS DIRECTOR Greg McLean CAST John Gallagher Jr., Tony Goldwyn, John C. McGinley, Adria Arjona, Sean Gunn PLOT American workers in the Colombian office of the Belko Corporation are locked inside their hi-tech building and told by a disembodied voice that they have to kill each other to stay alive. THERE ARE TWO sides to James Gunn. One side contains the family-friendly blockbuster guy, who can write and direct great big crowdpleasers like Guardians Of The Galaxy (both volumes) and (for better or worse) bring Scooby-Doo to the silver screen. Then there’s the other side — let’s call it the smoking Gunn. The horror nut behind the gore-fuelled likes of the terrifically entertaining Slither, the dark, uncompromising Super and Zack Snyder’s Dawn Of…

Atantalising hidden history of Hollywood in the 1970s and ’80s no doubt resides on long-discarded answerphone tapes: tiny C30s lodged in attics, bearing on their thin, magnetic strips ghostly fragments of Hollywood brouhahas long past. “Steven, pick up. I just saw the shark footage from yesterday. We’ve really got a problem...” “Call me as soon as you get this. Coppola’s gone goddamn rogue in the Philippines, and there’s talk of a hurricane. A fucking hurricane. John. I think we have to get someone down there.” Or then there’s this one: “Hey, man. It’s Corey. Corey Haim. Listen, I’m really excited ’cause we’re going to be working together on The Lost Boys. That’s really cool. And we have the same name, so we’re probably going to end up being really good…

Safety Last! (1923) Harold Lloyd’s death-defying swing from a clock alone earns the dramatic punctuation. The daredevil actor could probably hang from it. Them! (1954) This giant-radioactive-ants classic is the perfect B-movie use of the dramatic screamer. Homaged by Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes! and Mars Attacks!. Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) Russ Meyer’s philosophy was essentially, “If something is worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.” This went for punctuation as well as attitude and campery. Oliver! (1968) Fact! Carol Reed’s toe-tappin’ musical is the only Best Picture-winner to have an exclamation mark in the title. Airplane! (1980) ZAZ’s use of the gasper as an extra level of irony was a recurring weapon in their arsenal. Case in point: The Naked Gun: From The Files Of Police Squad!. ¡Three Amigos! (1986)…

THE CALLS ALWAYS come in around Thanksgiving. So when my assistant told me I had five messages from reporters, and two requests for on-air interviews, my response was, “Let me guess: the annual ‘Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?’ debate again?” “No, they’re all about The Running Man.” I admit, I was surprised. True, since election day it had crossed my mind that reality was beginning to mirror my 30-year-old film, but I assumed that was simply my own insular navel-gazing from inside my Hollywood ivory tower. (Actually a one-storey California rancher, but the metaphor holds.) But apparently a film set in the amazing future year of 2017, in which the Department of Justice has an Entertainment Division, the President has a theatrical agent, two actors are future US Governors…

1971 / RATED M DIRECTOR MONTE HELLMAN has always felt like a footnote in the grand story of Hollywood’s last Golden Age: an outsider amongst outsiders, rarely mentioned in the same breath as the likes of Coppola, Lucas and Scorsese. But his brief filmography, in Ride In The Whirlwind and The Shooting, a brace of ‘acid Westerns’ he shot for Roger Corman back-to-back and for under $80,000, contains two of the decade’s most distinctive films. And in Two-Lane Blacktop he created arguably the best, possibly the strangest, and certainly the purest, road movie ever made. If Hellman’s minor-key masterpiece never really got the kudos of the other classics of the period, it was cut from the same cloth of its better-known stablemates. In late 1969, after the shocking success of…

KEVIN CONROY RECENTLY had an unusual experience whilst out walking in New York. “A cop car put its siren on as I was crossing the street,” recalls the actor. “I thought, ‘Oh man, am I going to get a jaywalking ticket?’ Then a cop leans out the window and goes, ‘We want a picture of Batman! Come on, Batman!’ Did I do the voice?” He breaks into a booming baritone. “‘Please, officer, don’t give me a ticket!’” Conroy has been doing that voice for 25 years, playing Bruce Wayne and his vigilante alter-ego first in Batman: The Animated Series, then through numerous follow-up shows, video games, and the odd feature-length movie such as the new Batman And Harley Quinn. He’s played the role for longer than the tenures of Adam…

IF THE ONLY thing you know about Shane is the classic last line — “Shane, come back!” — then you have a treat in store. George Stevens’ 1953 Western is a masterpiece, a profound morality tale exploring the thin lines between good and evil and the consequences of violence. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the film’s touching final moments when mysterious stranger Shane (Alan Ladd), who has become an integral part of the Starrett family life, says goodbye to little Joey (Brandon deWilde) after murdering the bad guys. Off he rides, ignoring little Joey’s cries. “The line at the end is, ‘There’s no living with a killing,’ like you cannot change the mould of someone,” says Edward Countryman, author of the BFI Film Classics book on Shane. “There…

THIS MONTH’S FIRST-Take Club inductee is Neil Gibbons, screenwriter and the man who, along with his brother Rob, has breathed life into the second phase of Alan Partridge, across film (Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa), TV (Mid-Morning Matters), and the printed page (Nomad). He’s been far too busy, presumably, to watch the film Empire readers voted the 16th greatest of all time in 2014, so we assembled The Avengers for him. And…? The Avengers, aka Avengers Assemble — also known in my house as ‘Avengers Congregate’, ‘Avengers Muster’ or ‘Avengers Coffee Morning’ — isn’t a film I’ve struggled to avoid. I have a blanket rule to avoid any and all superhero movies. First, to spite my university flatmate Simon Bather, a man who adored comics even more than he loved pissing…

THOR: THE MUSICAL I really wish that when he’s done on Thor: Ragnarok, Taika Waititi just gets that cast back and makes an all-out musical — with dancers and rock guitar and it’s the biggest flop of all time and people will still love it in 30 years. We know that’s not going to happen, but we know that’s the energy he’s bringing to this movie and I can’t wait for the fun to start. MITCHELL HALL, ASQUITH NSW Mitchell, that sounds like a particularly awesome idea (except the “biggest flop of all time” bit — we need this bad boy to make all the dollars so there are more insane Thor musicals for many years to come). ALIEN LOVE Loved your recent piece on famous directors giving their list…

A DARK SOUNDSTAGE, on the kind of Brooklyn winter’s day that makes the rats in the walls think twice before peeking out, and Empire has come to watch the Punisher — the most feared killing machine in comic books — do some actual, honest-to-goodness punishing. He’s the kind of man whose body counts are so high you can only keep track with a body accountant. But currently, he’s sitting on the floor of a warehouse, nursing a beer, remembering how he met his wife while playing guitar under a tree in Central Park. “Changed my life,” smiles Jon Bernthal’s Frank Castle, and takes a sip. The only things being punished here are the heartstrings. Do not adjust your Netflix connection. The Punisher, the show that sees Bernthal’s vigilante strut his…

IT HAPPENS, ROUGHLY, every seven years. Amid relentless runs of the usual goofy fare, Adam Sandler gets plucked away to work his cojones on something more serious. First came Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love (2002), then Judd Apatow’s Funny People (2009), and now, Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories, and it’s possibly the actor’s most affecting performance yet. While the action swirls around bitter old patriarch Harold (Dustin Hoffman), it is essentially the story of his two put-upon sons — the unemployed Danny (Adam Sandler) and his hotshot half-brother Matthew (Ben Stiller). Buzz has been building for the film ever since it got an enthusiastic standing ovation at Cannes this year. Sandler is terrific throughout, gracefully holding his tongue at some points, gloriously losing his rag at others. “I’ve always liked…

FOR A MAN whose acting career has been somewhat unconventional, it should come as no surprise that Andy Serkis hasn’t taken an orthodox route into directing. Usually, actors-turned-directors start out with an intimate drama. But when Serkis first called “Action!” in 2015, it was on a big-budget, VFX-driven adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. Except that was put on hiatus by Warner Bros. when Disney’s The Jungle Book beat it to release. So Serkis’ second production, shot over seven swift weeks last year, is now his actual directorial debut and it’s, well, a small, manageably intimate drama. Although not quite that straightforward. Breathe relates the story of Robin Cavendish (Andrew Garfield) — the father of Serkis’ producing partner Jonathan Cavendish — who, in 1958, was struck by polio and…

AFTER SEVEN INSTALMENTS and 74 of the most creative deaths in horror movie history, Saw finally crawled to its bloody end in 2010. Except now there’s Jigsaw: a new instalment that renders Saw: The Final Chapter a lot less final than it claimed at the time. It’s simultaneously a jumping-on point for newcomers and a Part VIII for those already up to, well, snuff. We might reasonably expect a fresh encounter with John Kramer, the killer (played by Tobin Bell) nicknamed Jigsaw after the puzzle-piece signature he carves from his victims. As ever with this twisty-turny series, though, nothing is that obvious. Cancer claimed Kramer in Saw III, only for him to pop up in flashbacks for the subsequent sequels, usually to retcon past events in increasingly noodle-baking ways. Now,…

★★ OUT 26 NOVEMBER RATED M / 108 MINS DIRECTOR Ewan McGregor CAST Ewan McGregor, Jennifer Connelly, Dakota Fanning, David Strathairn PLOT In post-war New Jersey, Seymour ‘The Swede’ Levov (McGregor) seems to have it all: a glittering sporting high-school record, a prosperous business, a beauty queen wife. But when his daughter gets involved in the violent politics of the 1960s, a seemingly perfect all-American family quickly crumbles. EWAN MCGREGOR, THE actor, has frequently found himself drawn to challenging material — the heroin addiction of Trainspotting, the nourish bleakness of Young Adam, the sex and drugs of Velvet Goldmine. American Pastoral, therefore, certainly fits the bill for Ewan McGregor, the director. But a Pulitzer Prize-winning Philip Roth novel, juggling multiple hefty themes across several narrators of varying reliability, is an…

★★★ OUT NOW RATED M / 141 MINS DIRECTOR Matthew Vaughn CAST Taron Egerton, Colin Firth, Mark Strong, Julianne Moore, Jeff Bridges, Pedro Pascal, Channing Tatum, Halle Berry, Edward Holcroft PLOT After all of the Kingsman are wiped out save Eggsy (Taron Egerton) and Merlin (Mark Strong), the pair team up with their US equivalent the Statesman to investigate the mysterious Golden Circle drug cartel, whose crazed head Poppy (Julianne Moore) has plans for world domination. DIRECTOR MATTHEW VAUGHN’S Kingsman: The Secret Service was a surprise hit in 2014 for a very good reason: while the ‘B’ spy franchises (Bond, Bourne) had grown increasingly dark and po-faced, here was a balls-to-the-wall spy flick that managed to match the sheer ludicrous fun of mid-era 007 with thrilling action and flagrant R-rated…

“I DON’T WANT WHOEVER DID THIS KILLED,” SAYS DAVID FINCHER, “BUT I DO WANT A DIGIT.” It’s a crisp September morning in 2016 and the 54-year-old director is standing amid his crew in the lobby of a police station in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, doubling for the late ’70s Adairsville Police Department, Georgia. He’s brandishing his new show’s “sides” in his hand: the day’s script pages, which have been stapled together in the wrong order. “Okay, we’re almost ready,” he calls out, unpicking staples. “Bring in the master thespians!” Moments later, the lead actors of MINDHUNTER walk across the room’s sapphire-tiled floor, past a cigarette machine and a wall plastered with “Wanted” posters. Holt McCallany wears cropped hair around a handsome pitbull face, a short-sleeved white shirt over an imposing frame and…

Jon Watts: It’s so good to meet you. You showed The Cat’s Meow when I was at NYU and I remember there was a big Q&A but I didn’t get a chance to talk to you afterwards. I’ve always wanted to. Peter Bogdanovich: Well, here we are. Watts: I tried to come up with some questions that are not the ones everyone has asked for a thousand years about Paper Moon, and I’ve found that directors love the movie. Everyone loves it, but directors seem to especially love it. It’s always on Top 10 Films Of All Time lists. I was trying to figure out why that is, and I think it’s because there’s a precision to it you don’t always see in films. I have a hard time imagining…

CHERRY 2000 (1987) The age-old tale of a man trying to take his sex-bot back to the factory for repairs, this curio had its release repeatedly postponed, before making just $14,000 from a $10 million budget. The plot sees tracker Edith (Melanie Griffith), businessman Sam (David Andrews) and his robotic love-mate Cherry (Pamela Gidley) travel across a ravaged wasteland, heading for the town of Glory Hole. HOW CLOSE TO REALITY? Sexy robots haven’t really caught on outside of certain technology conferences. Neither has the crimson bouffant hairdo sported by Griffith. FORTRESS (1992) The US government decrees that families may only have one child, so ex-soldier John Brennick (Christopher Lambert) and his wife (Loryn Locklin), who is pregnant for the second time, make for Canada. Alas, they’re busted and Brennick is…

COSTUME I looked like a swashbuckler in Jack Of All Trades . It was very dashing and fairly comfortable, except the cape, which was too fucking heavy. They took out half the weight. I said, “I gotta fight in this cape, baby!” For Mindwarp, I played a post-apocalyptic Jeremiah Johnson in a costume made of car parts. My goggles were car heating vents. But I was hitting on the costume designer so I was somewhat distracted. LOCATION Sundown: The Vampire In Retreat. About ’88 we shot that, in Moab, Utah. I’m a huge fan of the West and it completely made me eat up Utah. It’s just spectacular in its desolation and isolation and its solitude. I’ve since come back multiple times to…

BREAK OUT THE Full Metal Cake and get ready to blow out the Full Metal Candles — Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam War masterpiece, Full Metal Jacket, has just turned 30. One of the greatest and most profound “war is hell” movies in cinema history, it also launched the careers of two of its stars — Matthew Modine, as the raw and idealistic Private Joker, and Vincent D’Onofrio, tragic and terrifying as the bullied Private Pyle. Here the duo, who knew each other before filming began, reflect on the movie, working with Kubrick, and nearly walking off set. Do you remember how you got the roles? Matthew Modine: I was in a restaurant called The Source on Sunset Boulevard having breakfast with an actor, David Alan Grier, and there was a guy…

Adam Wingard: “My favourite movie scene of all time is the bartender scene in The Shining with Jack Nicholson and Joe Turkel. I love the performances and the iconic-ness of the whole thing. If it comes on TV, I have to stop what I’m doing and watch it. I love the interactions between those two, but that scene in particular is about as good as movies get.” INT. OVERLOOK HOTEL Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) is in a foul mood. He enters the deserted Gold Room, turns on the lights, goes up to the empty bar. Not a drink in sight. JACK: God, I’d give anything for a drink. I’d give my goddamn soul for just a glass of beer. He puts his heads in his hands.…

YES CHRIS HEWITT SO, THE WORST-kept secret in movies is out. Daniel Craig is back as Bond for a fifth and, it seems, final time with Bond 25 (a name I’d be delighted if they kept, if only to imagine Adele singing, “Bond Twenty-Fiiiiiiiiive!” at the Oscars). From production company Eon’s point of view, keeping Craig on the team makes sense. As with Skyfall and the 50th anniversary, the 25th Bond will be kind of a big deal, and breaking in a new 007 might be more hassle than it’s worth. There could be any number of reasons behind Craig’s decision to stick around. It might be the notion of becoming the longest-serving Bond when the film is released in 2019, pipping Sir Roger Moore by days. And he doubtless…

23 SEPTEMBER 2016 is a landmark day on Goodbye Christopher Robin, a tightly focused biopic of Winnie the Pooh creator A.A. Milne. Empire is in the Ashdown Forest in East Sussex on the actual bridge where Poohsticks, the game played by Pooh and friends, was invented (a stone noting the fact has been discreetly covered up). Tourists from Canada, Scotland and Japan wait to pass as Domhnall Gleeson as A(lan) A(lexander) Milne and nine-year-old Will Tilston as his son Christopher Robin drop sticks, then leg it to the other side of the bridge to see whose emerges first. A props man stands in the water to recycle sticks. “This is the point in the film where Alan and Christopher Robin are getting to know one another,” says Gleeson, retaining a…

MICHAEL FASSBENDER IS singing a few bars of Walking In The Air on The Snowman’s Oslo set. This croaky nostalgia has been sparked by Empire’s mention of Raymond Briggs’ ’80s animation which shares a name, but absolutely nothing else, with his new thriller. There’ll be snowmen, but they’ll be left by a serial killer at murder scenes. Fassbender’s cop, Harry Hole, must solve the case before the leads, well, melt. Originally a Martin Scorsese project set in Detroit and Chicago, The Snowman was entrusted to Let The Right One In’s Tomas Alfredson after Scorsese passed in 2013. Bringing Hole, author Jo Nesbø’s pin-sharp but troubled detective, back to Norway has opened plenty of doors to the production. It’s February and the shoot has moved from the ice-capped cliffs of Telemark…

IT’S TWISTER WITH a twist. It’s Hard Rain with harder rain. It’s 2012 multiplied by 300. Whether you’re ready or not, Geostorm is blowing in like a freak cyclone, and it’s shaping up to be the most preposterous, over-the-top action movie of the year. The man originally responsible for this mega-budget mash-up is Dean Devlin, the producer of apocalyptic blockbusters such as Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow and, yes, 2012, who was hired by Warner Bros. to make his directing debut with Geostorm. Together with writing partner Paul Guyot, he sketched out the story, then threw an all-you-can-sleet buffet of meteorological madness at it, including 14,000 tornados hurtling through Mumbai, a monstrous flash-freeze in Afghanistan and a hailstorm in Tokyo. “There’s a lot of spectacle,” Devlin promised Empire during…

BANISH MEMORIES OF Robin Williams cavorting with CG rhinos, because Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle has fresh surprises in store. That mystical board game has become an 8-bit adventure game, its players are transforming, Tron-like, into adult avatars of themselves, and there are now movie stars galore. A lot can happen in 22 years. Underpinning this new treatment is some slyly playful casting. “They’re all stylised character archetypes,” explains director Jake Kasdan of his quartet of unwitting jungle adventurers. Karen Gillan plays an all-action commando, Kevin Hart is a panicky zoologist and Dwayne Johnson — “the action hero of his generation, top of a list of one” according to Kasdan — is, well, a wimp. Oh, and Jack Black’s bombastic professor is the avatar of a vain female high-schooler (Madison…

★★ OUT NOW RATED TBC / 121 MINS DIRECTORS Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris CAST Emma Stone, Steve Carell, Andrea Riseborough, Elisabeth Shue, Bill Pullman, Alan Cumming, Martha MacIsaac, Sarah Silverman PLOT While at the top of her tennis game, Billy Jean King (Emma Stone) is challenged to an exhibition match with a former male pro (Steve Carell), where she must prove that when it comes to sport and to life, there’s nothing inferior about her gender. WHETHER OR NOT a film is considered enjoyable or not, a singular cinematic staple never fails to send a lump into most people’s throats — a, enthusiastic crowd rousing at the moment of the hero’s or heroes’ triumph. Whether it’s The Karate Kid or School Of Rock or even Dodgeball, big public wins can…

★★★★ OUT 5 OCTOBER RATED M / 128 MINS DIRECTOR Terrence Malick CAST Michael Fassbender, Ryan Gosling, Rooney Mara, Natalie Portman PLOT Texas. Struggling musician Faye (Mara) is drawn to both good guy songwriter BV (Gosling) and manipulative music mogul Cook (Fassbender). The relationships get strained when Cook screws BV over a copyright issue and offers Faye a recording contract, and then the situation becomes more complex when new partners enter the picture. WELCOME BACK TO Malickland, the perma-twilight world where Hollywood’s most beautiful wander around fields/beaches/city underpasses while their disconnected musings whisper on the soundtrack. Terrence Malick’s eighth drama doesn’t deviate a jot from his normal MO. Thematically, it is perhaps closest to the portrayal of jealousy and betrayal in 2012’s To The Wonder, but Malick finds a more…

SAN QUENTIN PRISON, STANDING- room-only venue for Johnny Cash and the former residence of both Charles Manson and Danny Trejo, is the most famous landmark in Marin County, California. The second is built around a striking cream and grey house with candy-striped blue awnings on the aptly named Lucas Valley Road. If there’s a bright centre to the Star Wars universe, then this property, with its view across Lake Ewok, is most definitely it. Skywalker Ranch has been the spiritual home of Star Wars since George Lucas bought it in 1978. Home to Lucas’ offices, Skywalker Sound and a small vineyard producing a surprisingly cheeky Pinot Noir, the ranch has nurtured almost every Star Wars project since The Empire Strikes Back. It’s rumoured to have cost Lucas $100 million, but…

When you think Agatha Christie, what comes to mind? Your grandparents’ bookshelf ? Bad local ‘theatre’? Sunday nights on ABC in the 1980s? If so, director-producer-star Kenneth Branagh wants to throw your preconceptions on the tracks. Murder On The Orient Express, based on Christie’s landmark 1934 whodunnit, sees Belgian detective Hercule Poirot (Branagh) interrogate 13 suspects following the murder of shady American businessman Samuel Edward Ratchett (Johnny Depp) aboard the luxurious train. It’s a story as old as the Alps — Sidney Lumet delivered an okay-ish all-star version in 1974 — but Branagh is shooting for a vision that is big and bold, feeling both classic and contemporary. Like Poirot minus his newly titanic ’tache, Empire grills Branagh and the cast of 2017 to solve a mystery: how do you…

CONCEPTION  Growing up in Manhattan Beach, Darren Aronofsky was obsessed with the Cyclone. Something about the intensity of Coney Island’s famous wooden rollercoaster spoke to the embryonic director: the slow, ratcheted upward climb; the freefalling and switchbacks; the chorus of screams. It was terror by design. He would ride it every summer. And watch other riders get off with jelly legs and huge grins. Zoom forward 30 years and Aronofsky is a filmmaker notorious for taking studio movies with big, beautiful stars to violent and hallucinatory extremes. His $60,000 black-and-white debut, Pi, depicted a paranoid number theorist who thinks he’s discovered a code sent by God. His second, a devastating adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr’s heroin-seeped tragedy Requiem For A Dream, descended into a vortex of sexual degradation and amputation.…

THE EMPIRE VERDICT GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2 ★★★★ RATED M What we said: “There’s plenty to enjoy here, whether it’s the perfectly deployed Baby Groot moments, or the anarchic weirdness that still feels unique to this franchise.” Notable extras: A Gunn commentary, deleted scenes, some featurettes and a gag reel. 00.04.41 DANCING GROOT __ After a brief prologue set on Earth in 1980, GOTG Vol. 2 thumbs its nose to action movie protocol by keeping an epic space battle in the background in favour of Baby Groot (mo-capped by Gunn himself) dancing to ELO’s Mr Blue Sky. With many elements filmed early on in the process and using over 4,000 layers, Gunn calls this “probably the most complicated visual effects shot ever created for film.” 00.26.57 CLIFFHANGER 2…

TOM BAKER IS one of the most iconic Doctors, defining the character’s key traits of whimsy, charm and manic unpredictability. Here, the ever-mercurial actor walks us through his time in the TARDIS. ROBOT (1974) In his first appearance, Baker was given the line, “There’s no point in being grown-up if you can’t be childish sometimes.” “When I took over, Jon Pertwee had stamped on it so hard that the writers, for quite a while, they were all still writing for him. I was wrenching Jon’s idiom, to make it my own. And of course, over time, they began to write for me. But that line, it’s quite a charming bit of nonsense, isn’t it? It’s the one that people still ask me to quote.” GENESIS OF THE DALEKS (1975) The…

THIS MONTH: AMERICAN HORROR STORY: ROANOKE AFTER GHOSTS, ASYLUMS, witches, freak shows and haunted hotels, the latest season of anthology series American Horror Story was hyped by its showrunner Ryan Murphy as a radical rebirth. It sounded like pre-release puff. In some ways, it’s business as usual. Keeping with the show’s tradition, Season 6 is inspired by true events — in this case, the Roanoke New World colony that mysteriously evaporated in the 1590s. What’s rogue is the format: the series unravels as a spot-on Paranormal Witness spoof. To North Carolina then, where married couple Shelby and Matt Miller (Sarah Paulson and Cuba Gooding Jr) are happily settling into their lovely new home that looks as welcoming as an abattoir. When sister-in-law Lee (Angela Bassett) comes to visit, the three…

1 In Miss Sloane, when Schmidt (Mark Strong) says, “Dildos are illegal in Texas but Joe Public can walk into a sports store and walk out with a shotgun”, how does Sloane (Jessica Chastain) respond? She says, “That would explain the low rate of dildo-related murders in Texas.” Correct. 2 In Shakespeare In Love, what are the three things Henslowe (Geoffrey Rush) says audiences want? “Comedy, love and a bit with a dog.” That was a challenging film to make. People standing on the sidelines said it could never work. For the Weinsteins, it was about how to get an audience to see a film that had “Shakespeare” in the title. They put the title out to some creative thinking outfits and they came back with some ludicrous ones. ‘Romeo,…

Write a brilliantly witty caption to the image above from new Aardman Animations stop-motion animated comedy Early Man from director Nick Park and score big! To enter, email empiregiveaways@bauer-media.com.au EARLY MAN IS IN CINEMAS FROM 29 MARCH, 2018 FIVE WINNERS WILL SCORE A CHICKEN PEOPLEPRIZE PACK CONTAINING A DVD AND MOUSE MAT. THE FUNNY DOCO IS ABOUT THREE CONTENDERS AT A TOP US POULTRY SHOW. AUGUST WINNER “Flattering, but no, I didn’t ‘American Pie’ this dessert.” Dave Dowman! You and four others have won an awesome Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 prize pack!…