Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2017 i Empire Australasia

LONG BEFORE HE became The Rock — when he was merely The Pebble, perhaps — Dwayne Johnson was a freshman at President William McKinley High in Honolulu, Hawaii’s state capital. Fast forward 30 years, and Johnson is driving a flame-throwing motorcycle through a jungle half an hour north of his old school, filming the new Jumanji movie as the highest-paid actor in Hollywood. “To be able to come back like this,” he beams, “on a movie of this size, to put a lot of good people to work, it’s very cool.” Johnson is speaking from Kualoa Ranch, Hollywood’s ‘Hawaii backlot’ (it’s recently played host to Godzilla, Kong: Skull Island and Jurassic World). This is the jungle we’ll be welcomed to for Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle, the follow-up to 1995’s…

“I KNEW THAT if it worked, it was the perfect time to step down. And if it didn’t, no-one would want me to do it anyway!” So said J.J. Abrams back in 2016, having announced to the world that he would not be hanging around the wreckage of Starkiller Base to direct Episode VIII. After the better part of a decade in space, relaunching the two biggest franchises in sci-fi, Abrams was owed some long overdue shore leave. The vacation is officially over, however, with the announcement last month that Abrams will be the one to carry the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy over the finishing line, replacing Colin Trevorrow as director on Episode IX. It’s disappointing that we’ll now never see Trevorrow’s vision of the Star Wars universe but, especially…

LIKE ITS MORALLY dubious protagonist Tommy Shelby (as played by Cillian Murphy), Peaky Blinders has grown from humble beginnings to become a major international player. Steven Knight’s intricate, violent between-the-wars Brum-gangster saga grew its audience exponentially through far-and-wide BBC and Netflix distribution. And as it enters its fourth, penultimate season, it’s raising its already high stakes by introducing a major new antagonist in Adrien Brody’s Luca Changretta. “These days I have the luxury of being patient, and I only work on things that inspire me,” Brody tells Empire. “Peaky Blinders was absolutely one of those.” The last we saw of the Shelby family and the Peaky gang, they’d just been gathered together for a meeting with Tommy, only for him to reveal the police were on site to cart them…

“AN UNDERDOG SPORTS movie with a prehistoric twist” is Nick Park’s elevator pitch for Early Man, his first directorial feature since 2005’s The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit. This being another helping of Aardman stop-motion goodness, it’s a lot more than that. There are nods to animation god Ray Harryhausen, a sly critique of soccer overlords FIFA, and all the usual silly visual gags and puns. “We have monitored the number of ball jokes,” reassures Park. The yarn itself pits the dim but cheery Dug (voiced by Eddie Redmayne) and his porcine sidekick Hognob against the warlike denizens of the Bronze Age and an avaricious aristocrat (Tom Hiddleston, complete with daffy French accent). A challenge is set: beat them at soccer to save their village. A team of no-hopers is assembled…

OUT NOW RATED M / 130 MINS DIRECTOR Taika Waititi CAST Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Tessa Thompson, Cate Blanchett, Tom Hiddleston, Jeff Goldblum PLOT Death goddess Hela (Blanchett) returns from exile to claim the throne of Asgard, thrashing Thor (Hemsworth) and banishing him to the fighting pits of Sakaar. There, reunited with the missingsince-Ultron Hulk (Ruffalo), he must battle his way to freedom, return home and unseat the usurper. WITH MARVEL PROPERTIES, as with Betelgeuse, third time’s always the charm. Each hero starts with a carefully pitched origin story; then comes a sequel to jack up the stakes. It’s not until part three that a series is given free rein to cut loose, let its hair down and be a little reckless. Cap set the MCU high-water mark battering his…

OUT NOW CERT MA15+ / 104 MINS DIRECTOR George Clooney CAST Matt Damon, Julianne Moore, George Clooney, Noah Jupe, Oscar Isaac PLOT 1950s America. The reactionary neighbourhood of Suburbicon is appalled by the arrival of a black family, the Meyers (Westbrook, Burke, Espinosa). Meanwhile, across the street, Gardner Lodge (Damon) suffers a home invasion. THE START OF George Clooney’s Suburbicon is familiar but fun: a promo for a ’50s US neighbourhood, described as “a melting pot of diversity” but exclusively white, where kids play catch, housewives gossip and the whistling postman knows everyone by name. Inside this idyllic milieu, Clooney’s film fashions two storylines: one is a noirish potboiler based on a long-lost script by the Coen brothers; the other is a civil rights era drama inspired by a real-life…

OUT 16 NOVEMBER RATED M / 100 MINS DIRECTOR Janus Metz Pedersen CAST Sverrir Gudnason, Shia LaBeouf, Stellan Skarsgård, Tuva Novotny PLOT The story of the great rivalry between Wimbledon champion Björn Borg (Gudnason) and turbulent young talent John McEnroe (LaBeouf), which came to a head in the 1980 Wimbledon final in front of a worldwide audience of millions. FOR THE SAKE of argument, let’s accept the 1980 Wimbledon final is the greatest tennis match of all time. It was certainly the greatest at the time — that Nadal-versus-Federer final was still 28 years away. And it’s the focus of this biopic: sworn rivals Björn Borg (Gudnason), the level-headed gentleman, and challenger John McEnroe (LaBeouf), the fiery “superbrat”, coming together on Centre Court to play out a near four-hour epic…

A wise man — we think it was Aaron Eckhart in The Dark Knight — once said, “The night is darkest just before the dawn.” And, being Aaron Eckhart, he was right. But if that’s right, then the inverse also holds true. After the dawn comes nothing but light. Bright, bright light. Darkness begone, you’ve had your shot. Which is something for Empire to bear in mind as we travel to Leavesden Studios on a bright August day last year to visit the set of Zack Snyder’s Justice League, the fifth film in the burgeoning DCEU (that’s DC Extended Universe for those of you who slept through Acronyms in school), Warner Bros.’ all-star answer to Marvel Studios and their Marvel Cinematic Universe. On paper, it’s comfortably the biggest DC adaptation…

Harry Dean Stanton was 91 when he passed away, but it still landed a painful blow. Much like Sam Shepard, who had provided his friend with the role of a lifetime as desert drifter Travis in 1984’s Paris, Texas, Stanton was proof that America could summon forth the extraordinary. He collected no major awards and had few starring turns, but with him goes an unquiet gift, a restlessness that speaks to the human condition. He was one of the great actors of his generation without the need to prove it. Age did not wither Stanton; he came pre-withered. Adulatory obits have competed to capture those eroded features: the rail-thin figure, the gaunt, hollowed-out face, the yearning, hungry eyes, the crooked smile and the Deputy Dawg jowls. Somehow the camera adored…

“LIFE DOESN’T ALWAYS TURN OUT HOW YOU THINK IT’S GOING TO” reflects Andy Serkis during an agreeably sprawling conversation in the Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank. “A door will open and if you’re willing to take that journey, it can open up incredible things.” He’s talking about the lead character of his directorial debut Breathe — Robin Cavendish, the father of his friend and producing partner Jonathan, who, as a young man in 1958, was paralysed from the neck down by polio (in the film Cavendish is played by Andrew Garfield). But Serkis could just as easily be reflecting on himself. When I first met him 15 years ago, he was a hard-working British actor who’d just achieved sudden international recognition in a groundbreaking role: Gollum in The…

00:05:07 SEEING RED __ Fleeing hot fuzz, Baby (Ansel Elgort) spots an opportunity on the 85 freeway, in the form of two other red cars going in the opposite direction. Wright cites this high-velocity pan as the action shot he’s most proud of. “It was incredibly complicated. Ansel has to look over and turn at just the right moment,” says Wright. “The reset time for the shot was half an hour, so you’re going, ‘Please don’t fuck this up.’” THE EMPIRE VERDICT BABY DRIVER RATED MA15+ What we said: “An awe-inspiring piece of filmmaking from Edgar Wright that plays out as a musical through the lens of an action thriller. Sweet, funny and utterly original.” Notable extras: Two commentaries, deleted/ extended scenes, 10 featurettes, auditions. 00:06:25 STREET WISE __ The…

CHUCKY IS HORROR’S Duracell bunny: he keeps going and going. As his 30th anniversary approaches, the devil doll has spawned seven movies of erratic quality but what’s surprising is there are no standalone sequels: all the films are written by Don Mancini, and connect into a saga about a kid called Andy and his sentient doll. A bit like Toy Story for psychopaths. Unleashed in 1988, Tom Holland’s Child’s Play is, pardon the pun, ‘Chucky For Dummies’. Gunned down by cops in a toy store, serial killer Charles Lee Ray voodoos his soul into a Good Guy doll, which is gifted to six-year-old Andy. Cue babysitter massacre and Andy’s mum suspecting her son’s to blame. Voiced by Brad Dourif, Chucky’s brought to cackling life via still-brill animatronics — much of…

“RAILROADS ARE A great prop,” Buster Keaton once said. “You can do some awful wild things with railroads.” The General, Keaton’s 1926 masterpiece, proves his theory 10-fold. Based on a real incident in the American Civil War, Keaton plays locomotive engineer Johnnie, whose train, The General, and girl, Annabelle (Marion Mack), are stolen by Northern soldiers. At one point, giving chase on a stolen locomotive, Keaton jumps off the train, picks up a wooden sleeper from the track, lies back on the cow catcher then throws it at another sleeper to get both out of the way. It’s a stunning mixture of cinematic bravura and extreme accuracy. “When I watch it at home, I go, ‘Wow, that is so precise,’” says Patricia Eliot Tobias, President Emerita of The International Buster…

1 In the film of the same name, Jack Reacher threatens your character, Charlie, over the phone in a colourful way. What is it? He says, “I mean to drink your blood from a boot.” [Hears full answer]. Come on! Surely I get a point there, I got the money phrase! It’s a bloody good line, so maybe I’ll start using it! ½ point. The line is, “I am going to beat you to death and drink your blood from a boot.” 2 In I, Frankenstein, what item of Adam’s does Gideon offer to trade for Leonore’s life? It’s a book... um... Is it Doctor Frankenstein’s notes on him? Correct. The book is Victor Frankenstein’s scientific journal. 3 In A Good Day To Die Hard, how does your character, Jack…

Bryan Cranston: "It's going to sound odd to most people, but it has emotional relevance to me. When I was 11 years old, my parents were going through a nasty divorce, and in order to avoid being around that kind of energy, my brother and I were allowed to go next door to this movie theatre to see whatever was playing. One day, it happened to be a movie called Cat Ballou, with Lee Marvin and Jane Fonda. In it, there's a scene where Cat, played by Jane Fonda, is about to be hanged. Dwayne Hickman plays a priest, and Michael Callan plays her love interest. As soon as the noose goes down, the rope breaks - boom! - she escapes, there's a horse underneath the gallows, and away they…

“IT’S TOTALLY MADDENING,” says director David Ayer. He’s talking about Joel Edgerton’s non-CG orc, a look which takes nearly three hours to apply each morning, then an hour to remove after a 12-hour day shooting. “He wanted the challenge. I think it has driven him mad. But it helps for character and performance, so it’s fine.” Easy for him to say. Edgerton is suffering in the name of Bright, Ayer’s gritty but fantastical first post-Suicide Squad project, written by Max Landis and co-starring Will Smith. So the story goes, 2,000 years ago there was a dark war on Earth, involving all manner of Tolkien-esque creatures, and we won — but instead of banishing the losers, we integrated them into society. Now, in present-day LA, Edgerton’s Nick Jakoby is the first…

GIVEN THAT HIS last film, 2015’s Tangerine, was famously shot on an iPhone, Sean Baker’s The Florida Project is a major step up. Here he’s working with 35mm and — for the first time — a bona-fide movie star in Willem Dafoe. But Baker has no interest in continuing up the Hollywood ladder to $100 million blockbusters. “I’m absolutely not the type,” he laughs. “I’m not looking to make that Marvel movie.” He has a loftier goal in mind: he wants to use the creative freedom that comes with success and (relatively) bigger budgets to become the United States’ Ken Loach. “It takes three years to make a film — that’s my average — and I see it as my responsibility [to tackle] political issues that I feel strongly about.…

IT’S MAY 2017 and Empire has come to Lanes & Games, a cavernous bowling alley just outside Boston. It’s seen plenty of strikes over its 75 years, but with its doors about to close for the final time it’s saving the best for last. On the upstairs level Mark Wahlberg, Will Ferrell and Mel Gibson are showing off their tenpin skills for Daddy’s Home 2. Wahlberg, as the macho Dusty, has a smooth and powerful style. Strike. Gibson, as Dusty’s dad Kurt, is more direct and imposing. Also, a strike. Ferrell, as the kinder, gentler Brad, has a style that somehow incorporates a delicate hop and skip. Not a strike. Their contrasting styles sum up the conflict at the heart of the movie, which is, in case you hadn’t guessed,…

PRE.VIEW YORGOS LANTHIMOS KNOWS his work is divisive but he doesn’t quite know why. When The Killing Of A Sacred Deer, the Greek director’s first film since his uncategorisably strange English-language debut The Lobster, debuted at Cannes it was met with both applause (and a Best Screenplay award) and boos. In the reviews, rapturous comparisons to Kubrick and Haneke rubbed up against accusations of sadism. “I’m always surprised when people are scandalised and shocked by things that we’ve been dealing with since the beginning of time,” Lanthimos says amiably, scratching his beard. “We live in a time when there’s a lot of conservatism around.” His first American production is a terrifying, enigmatic psychological thriller with ancient resonances. It began as the story of a troubled teenager who takes revenge on…

AS A LIFELONG Wonder Woman fan, writer-producer-director Angela Robinson (Herbie: Fully Loaded, The L Word) began working on what she believed was a straightforward biopic of her creator, psychologist William Moulton Marston, over eight years ago. The story she ended up with in Professor Marston And The Wonder Women — how a secret polyamorous relationship in 1940s America led to the creation of one of the most iconic comic-book characters in history — turned out rather differently. “He lived in this unconventional relationship with his wife [Elizabeth] and their student [Olive],” Robinson says. But any presumption that Marston (played by Luke Evans) was in a having-his-cake-and-eating-it relationship with his wife and mistress was quickly pivoted by her early research. “There was this one detail,” Robinson recalls of a book she…

OUT NOW RATED TBC/ 91 MINS DIRECTORS Dorota Kobiela, Hugh Welchman CAST Douglas Booth, Saoirse Ronan, Helen McCrory, Jerome Flynn, Chris O’Dowd PLOT 1891, France. A year after Vincent van Gogh’s death, a young man, Armand Roulin (Booth), tries to deliver a letter written by Vincent (Robert Gulaczyk) to his brother, Theo. When Armand discovers that Theo is also dead, it sends Armand on an investigation to find out the truth behind the great artist’s demise. THERE IS SOMETHING brilliantly bonkers about Loving Vincent. Made over seven years, directors Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman recreated the paintings of Vincent van Gogh with actors against green-screen, then employed 125 artists to paint over 62,450 frames to reflect the artist’s style. The result resembles Richard Linklater’s adventures in rotoscoping, Waking Life and…

OUT NOW CERT MA15+ / 108 MINS DIRECTOR Angela Robinson CAST Luke Evans, Rebecca Hall, Bella Heathcote, Oliver Platt, Connie Britton PLOT Years before becoming a comic-book writer, William Marston (Evans) was a university professor, teaching psychology. His wife (Hall) and young assistant (Heathcote) will each play a key role in the creation of a new character called Wonder Woman. FACTUALITY IS WONDER Woman’s stock in trade; after all, the superhero’s weapon of choice is a Lasso-Of-Truth, rather than, say, a Rope Of Righteousness or Cable Of Generosity. So it’s disappointing to find this tale of the character’s creation, purportedly based on real-life events, ringing so false. On paper it sounds like a bold, weird and compelling subject matter for a movie: the secret life of academic-turned-comic-book writer William Moulton…

OUT 16 NOVEMBER RATED TBC / 121 MINS DIRECTOR Yorgos Lanthimos CAST Colin Farrell, Nicole Kidman, Alicia Silverstone, Barry Keoghan, Raffey Cassidy PLOT A mysterious teenager (Keoghan) enters a complacent surgeon’s (Farrell) life. Despite the older man’s attempts to build a bond with him, it becomes increasingly clear that the boy intends a terrible revenge. THE GRAND UNIFIED Theory of Colin Farrell goes like this: above a certain budget point (Minority Report being the notable exception), he’s awful. Get him in something where the accommodation isn’t quite as comfy, with a director who’ll stretch him, and he’s quietly become one of our finest actors. This, his second collaboration with Dogtooth director Yorgos Lanthimos after 2015’s well-received The Lobster, is another piece of proof for the theory. Who, watching S.W.A.T. back…

OUT NOW RATED MA15+ / 163 MINS DIRECTOR Denis Villeneuve CAST Ryan Gosling, Harrison Ford, Sylvia Hoeks, Ana de Armas, Robin Wright, Mackenzie Davis, Dave Bautista PLOT Officer KD6-3.7 (Gosling) is a blade runner: a specialised detective/assassin hunting down bio-engineered humans known as replicants. After one encounter, K discovers a buried box which reveals a potentially world-shaking secret and leads him to an entirely new kind of quarry... THERE ARE TEARS in Blade Runner 2049, and there is rain. In its sunlight-starved Californian megatropolis, luridly haired denizens eat East Asian street food as they are dwarfed by adverts promising a new life in distant colonies they can’t afford to reach. Eyeballs feature heavily, as do obscurely distressing psychological tests and vocally controlled analogue gadgets. Identity and memory, meanwhile, remain as…

A TWEET BY by Stephen King started it. Shawn Levy, executive producer of Stranger Things and director of four episodes, remembers seeing it the day of the show’s “small premiere” in LA. The legendary novelist, one of the biggest inspirations for the Netflix show, described the 1983-set, eight-part series as like “watching Steve King’s Greatest Hits. I mean that in a good way”. Then came the email from Steven Spielberg — whose early output was another huge influence. Levy received it, knowing the director from making Real Steel with him, and happily reports Spielberg was “positive and supportive”. Levy suggested he share his thoughts with “the brothers”. Spielberg did. “It blew their minds,” the producer confirms. “The brothers”, of course, are Matt and Ross Duffer, creators of Stranger Things, the…

 In December 1941, a little over two months prior to the ceremony, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and, with that, America was at war. Hardly the time for a spare-no-expense, backslapping awards ceremony. Various alternatives were discussed (including the idea of allowing the public to buy tickets with proceeds going to the Red Cross) before a scaled-back solution was approved. The banquet would become a simpler dinner and formal dress was banned — neckties rather than bow ties, a state of affairs that would last the length of the conflict. And so, with these austerity measures (and more) in effect, on 26 February 1942, the 14th Academy Awards did finally go ahead. At 7.45pm Bob Hope took to the stage in downtown Los Angeles’ Biltmore Hotel’s ballroom to host the…

ON THE SURFACE, A Matter Of Life And Death is the most English of films — a wartime romance between a plucky pilot and his rosy-cheeked sweetheart, bursting with afternoon tea, cricket on the village green, and unironic uses of the phrase “What ho!” But it is also, inversely, the most un-English: co-written by a Hungarian, it boasts a cast of international players, and cinematic ambitions that are pure Hollywood — and all the result, indirectly, of a few rowdy Americans. In 1942, the US Army landed in Britain. Three million GIs would pass through Britain’s borders during World War II. Many were fond of a drink, or more; their conservative, war-weary British hosts soon came to describe the visitors as “overpaid, oversexed and over here”. Dismayed at this…

WHEN IT CAME out in 1982, John Carpenter’s The Thing boasted the tagline, “Man is the warmest place to hide.” As it turned out, the best — if not warmest — place to hide for any alien bastard hell-bent on assimilating the human race would have been in a cinema showing The Thing, for nobody turned up. Carpenter, who was coming off a hot streak that included Halloween, The Fog and Escape From New York, had been drawn to Bill Lancaster’s script about a group of scientists at an Antarctic research facility who unfreeze an alien that can imitate living things. A remake of one of Carpenter’s favourite films, Christian Nyby and Howard Hawks’ The Thing From Another World, it seemed like it would be another hit for the director.…

NETFLIX OUT NOW EPISODES VIEWED ALL CREATED BY The Duffer Brothers CAST Winona Ryder, David Harbour, Finn Wolfhard, Millie Bobby Brown, Noah Schnapp, Sean Astin, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, Natalia Dyer PLOT Late 1984. Will Byers (Schnapp) is haunted by his trans-dimensional abduction. But are his visions of the Upside Down merely memories? With a shifty scientist lurking (Reiser), police chief Jim Hopper (Harbour) and Will’s friends investigate the new shadowy presence threatening Hawkins. “I’VE ALWAYS THOUGHT stuff like this only happened in movies and comic books, not here,” says Bob Newby, Sean Astin’s aptly named new Stranger Things character, as the small town of Hawkins once again finds itself the focus of an inter-dimensional war. It’s a question that gets to the central problem facing the show’s creators, the…

THE IDEA BEHIND the First-Take Club is simple: we ask a notable someone to watch a film they haven’t seen before (chosen from our 301 Greatest Movies Of All Time list, published in 2014), watch it, and write about it. This month’s inductee is Paul Franklin, who’s won two Oscars, for his work as visual effects supervisor on Inception and Interstellar, and is about to make the leap into directing. But even an Oscar winner can miss a classic, and Paul had never seen the final film from Stanley Kubrick. So, would Eyes Wide Shut leave his eyes wide open? Let’s get something straight: I am a huge, huge Stanley Kubrick fan. I have spent endless hours watching and analysing his films (and happily pinching any clever stuff I can…

NETFLIX NOW NOW EPISODES VIEWED ALL SHOWRUNNER Steve Lightfoot CAST Jon Bernthal, Amber Rose Revah, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Ben Barnes, Jaime Ray Newman, Jason R. Moore PLOT Frank Castle (Bernthal) thinks he’s done being The Punisher. But six months later, he’s drawn back into a life of gun-toting vigilantism by a self-ghosted hacker and a Homeland Security agent, both determined to expose a CIA conspiracy in which Frank was possibly involved. IT’S HARDLY SURPRISING Marvel and Netflix chose to pull The Punisher from their NY Comic-Con schedule in the light of the Las Vegas Strip mass shooting on 1 October. Virtually every episode features such flagrant gun violence, it wouldn’t be out of place in a John Wick movie. Despite sharing the same world as Daredevil, Jessica Jones and Luke Cage,…

Dear Empire, In the awesome Star Wars: The Last Jedi issue (#199), you asked for some art and cosplay photos. I am very happy to oblige! PIC 1 This shows my kids at a convention in Melbourne. You can see my beautiful daughter (Ava, age 8) as Princess Leia and my son (Jake, age 5) as Poe Dameron. Then yours truly on the right... I soon became known as “Obi-Wan Glenobi”! PIC 2 Here’s Jake being an awesome Indiana Jones! PIC 3 Is a little present for you. I’m sure that you know who he is… GLEN SUGDEN, VIA EMAIL Love it, Glen! Your cosplay work is exemplary, as is your ability to transform into a transparent Force Ghost. As for the pic above, it may explain my awesome ‘Robot…

“I’VE ALWAYS LOVED sea creatures,” says Guillermo del Toro. “I wanted to be a marine biologist when I was growing up.” A fine ambition, but when del Toro stood clutching the Golden Lion award for Best Film at the Venice Film Festival in September, he must have been glad he made a different choice. The prestigious award was for his latest movie, The Shape Of Water, which is a tender love story. But, this being Guillermo del Toro, cinema’s premier purveyor of Gothic fantasy, there’s a twist: the love story is between Sally Hawkins’ mute cleaning lady and an amphibian creature (del Toro stalwart Doug Jones) that she frees from the government facility where she works. “I always think that when beauty and the beast fall in love, they should…

IT SOUNDS IRRESISTIBLE. Gary Oldman, arguably Britain’s finest actor, as Winston Churchill, widely regarded as history’s finest Brit. But Oldman’s first reaction was to laugh. “Not because I didn’t think I could do it,” he says. “I knew I could play him, but the physicality was crazy.” This was about more than resemblance, because, at 59, Oldman remains trim. Months of prosthetic tests went into persuading the actor that he could be Churchill. Key was leaving room for the performance. “We went full-on Churchill,” he says. “But the more I resembled him, the weirder it looked. You’ve lost me. So we had to pull it back.” Directed by Joe Wright and written by The Theory Of Everything’s Anthony McCarten, Darkest Hour concentrates on the critical period in 1940 when Churchill…

SCOTT FRANK LOVES the Old West. “As I got older I realised so many of my favourite films also happened to be Westerns,” explains the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Out Of Sight and Logan. The latter of those, of course, owed as much to Shane as Stan Lee. “What I love is that morality is always in the grey areas; there are a lot of classic themes that are fun to write.” And so, in 2000, Frank began writing one of his own, producing a screenplay called Godless that he hoped Out Of Sight’s Steven Soderbergh would direct. But Soderbergh had issues. “He said, ‘I love this script, I don’t like horses,’” Frank recalls. “We talked to other directors and it almost came together with a couple.” At one point Sam…

IN 1999, BILL Bennett had his life saved under strange, profound circumstances: while driving early one morning, a voice from out of nowhere advised him to “slow down”. He heeded the advice, seconds later narrowly avoiding a truck that ran a red light that would have caused a fatal collision. The experience led the Kiss or Kill and The Nugget director / former journalist to throw caution to the wind and embark on a quest to discover what the voice was, where it came from and why it warned him of impending danger. Seventy-eight interviewees, 120 hours of footage and several years later, Bennett has unveiled PGS — Intuition Is Your Personal Guidance System, a theatrical feature documentary focussed on the subject of intuition (something Bennett defines as “a sudden…

OUT 7 DECEMBER RATED TBC / 130 MINS DIRECTOR Sunao Katabuchi CAST (VOICES) Non, Megumi Han, Yoshimasa Hosoya, Natsuki Inaba PLOT Following the tumultuous life of Suzu (Non), touching on her childhood in 1930s Hiroshima and the early years of her arranged marriage. Though the day-dreamy Suzu yearns to be an artist, both her domestic responsibilities and the climax of World War II stand in the way. ONE OF THE most devastatingly affecting portrayals of Japanese civilian life during World War II is, perhaps surprisingly, an animated film: Studio Ghibli’s Grave Of The Fireflies. Since its release in 1988, Isao Takahata’s depiction of the plight of two young, homeless siblings in 1945 shocked and impressed Western audiences more used to their cartoon movies featuring songs and talking animals. It felt…

OUT 23 NOVEMBER RATED TBC / 107 MINS DIRECTOR Simon Curtis CAST Domhnall Gleeson, Margot Robbie, Kelly Macdonald, Will Tilston PLOT Suffering PTSD after returning from World War I, playwright A.A. Milne (Gleeson) moves his family to the countryside and attempts to write an anti-war book. But while suffering from writer’s block he begins bonding with his young son (Tilston) and envisages a story for children instead. CHRISTOPHER ROBIN WAS real, and he wasn’t happy about it. More specifically, he wasn’t happy to be put in a situation where people discovering he was ‘the real Christopher Robin’ meant something — that his childhood games had been packaged and sold by his father across four books and countless items of tie-in merchandise. When you see him as a six-year-old being doorstepped…

George Clooney is doing an impression of the Coen brothers. Not Joel or Ethan, but an indistinguishable combo of Joel and Ethan, conjoined in hurdy-gurdy amusement. “‘That’s funny. Okay. Why not? Huh-huh-huh-huh-huh…’” After nearly 20 years of being the butt of their jokes on screen, he had called them to ask a favour. How would they feel if he directed their next movie? The script he had in mind was named Suburbicon and featured a familiar brew of multiple poisonings, insurance scams, inept hitmen and wanton venality, located, as the title suggests, in a pristine American suburb. He would cut the necessary deals, cast, shoot, edit, and dispose of the corpses. They could stay in bed. One other thing — rather than take their unmade home-invasion-themed crime spree verbatim, would…

NETFLIX OUT NOW EPISODES VIEWED ALL WRITTEN BY Sarah Polley CAST Sarah Gadon, Edward Holcroft, Zachary Levi, David Cronenberg PLOT Dr Jordan (Holcroft) arrives in 1850s Toronto to interview convicted murderer Grace Marks (Gadon). As she reveals her life before the incident, he struggles to reconcile this apparently meek woman with her alleged crimes. AFTER LAST MONTH’S Mindhunters, Netflix continues its (unofficial) ‘Talking With Murderers’ season with an adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace. Once again, a notorious convicted killer is examined by a psychologist anxious to unravel their mystery, but it’s unclear whether Grace is even guilty, to what extent, and whether she was actually justified in any case. Sarah Gadon plays Grace Marks, a (real-life) poor Irish immigrant to Canada in the 1840s who escapes her abusive…

FEW TV SHOWS of recent years have confounded expectation and subverted convention as deftly as Damon Lindelof’s HBO series, The Leftovers. The show charts the emotional, social and spiritual fallout of ‘The Departure’: a phenomenon where two per cent of the world’s population vanished without a trace. After being burned by fan reaction to his Lost finale, Lindelof bid adieu to The Leftovers with a send-off as resonant as it was unexpected. Here, he talks us through some of the best moments from the show’s three-year run. THE BABY VANISHES SEASON 1, EPISODE 1: PILOT The Departure, which both Lindelof and Tom Perrotta (co-creator and writer) agreed never to explain, is dealt with to devastating effect in the first scene. “We asked what would be the most deeply profound loss…

WHEN HUSBAND AND wife Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon sat down to write The Big Sick, the witty romcom that tells the real-life tale of how their budding relationship was rudely interrupted when Emily became seriously ill and fell into a coma, they knew they wanted to draw heavily upon the details of their lives; the coma, particularly. But they also had to write a movie that worked very much on its own terms, and wasn’t just a strict retelling. Which is why Emily’s surname in the movie has been changed to Gardner. (She is played by Zoe Kazan.) But what of the other details, big and small, in the movie? What’s real life? What’s not? We grilled the duo for all the sick details. MOMENT: The pair meet…

NETFLIX OUT 17 NOVEMBER / 98 MINS DIRECTOR Dee Rees CAST Carey Mulligan, Jason Clarke, Garrett Hedlund, Jason Mitchell, Rob Morgan, Jonathan Banks, Mary J. Blige PLOT The story of two farming families living in rural Mississippi, dealing with poverty, hardship and, in the case of sharecroppers the Jacksons, the rampant racism of the time. MUDBOUND IS A film set during a tumultuous period in history that has worrying parallels with current events. Something we’ve sadly heard too often in recent months. From the police brutality and race riots of Detroit to the egotistical political scheming of The Death Of Stalin, some of the more unsavoury elements of the 20th century are sadly alive and thriving in 2017. Set in 1940s Mississippi, Mudbound is the tale of two families. One…

Write a brilliantly witty caption to the image above from James and Dave Franco’s new comedy The Disaster Artist (based on the making of The Room, the “Citizen Kane of bad movies”!) Entries to empiregiveaways@bauer-media.com.au THE DISASTER ARTIST IS IN CINEMAS FROM 30 NOVEMBER FIVE WINNERS WILL SCORE A CARS 3PRIZE PACK CONTAINING A DVD, CAP, MUG, NOTEBOOK AND TRAVEL BAG. PIXAR’S CARS 3IS OUT NOT ON DVD, BLU-RAY AND HD DIGITAL DOWNLOAD. SEPTEMBER WINNER Stepping on Lego: always painful. Dylan Waldron! You and two others have won an awesome Taboo prize pack!…