Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2018 i Empire Australasia

THE PREDATORS’ HUNTING grounds have ranged from the Central American jungle to (the then) future LA. But few things can have prepared them for the most challenging terrain of all: the suburbs. Having been on an extended hiatus since Robert Rodriguez’ Predators, one of the mandibled monsters returns in The Predator to stalk the commuter belt: home of 10-year-old Rory McKenna (Jacob Tremblay), who inadvertently draws the creatures’ ire after stumbling across an alien artefact. If the Predator’s latest quarry seems a little leftfield, it’s exactly what we’ve come to expect from director Shane Black. Working from a script co-written with Fred Dekker, Black saw the film as an opportunity to take a welcome trip down memory lane. “I wanted to make a movie me and Fred might have stood…

THE WORD SPOILER used to mean something. You had to earn it. You told someone Bruce Willis was dead in The Sixth Sense — that was a spoiler. You revealed whose head was in the box at the end of Seven — now you were spoiling things. Not anymore. Spoiler sensitivity has reached its absurd apotheosis with Avengers: Infinity War; in opening week, any mention of any scene would cause a ‘that’s a spoiler!’ flap somewhere on the internet. Revealing deaths can be considered a spoiler, certainly. But revealing that Iron Man has a new suit, that Doctor Strange uses his time power or that Thor meets Rocket? No. We need to put down our toys, step away from our prams and define what a spoiler actually is. A spoiler…

SPINNING OUT OF the museum of the supernatural, housed in the basement of paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, James Wan’s The Conjuring has quietly spawned a burgeoning shared cinematic horror universe. So far, it includes a numbered sequel, plus a couple of spin-offs for the killer doll Annabelle, collecting an impressive worldwide box office of $1.2 billion. The Crooked Man, as featured in The Conjuring 2 may also be the subject of a future project — but first, here comes The Nun. We first see the Nun 15 minutes into the original Conjuring — although you’d be forgiven for not noticing the unremarked picture on the wall near the door of the Warrens’ haunted archive. That picture is in the final shot too, reflected in the mirrored lid of…

CABIN IN THE Woods announced Drew Goddard as a highly exciting new filmmaking talent. His directorial debut, it took the horror cliché of a group of young people being terrorised in a rural hideaway and turned it into something bizarre, scary and funny about secret government agencies and giant evil gods. Since then he’s written World War Z and The Martian, and created the TV show Daredevil. It’s only now, six years after his first, that he’s directing his second movie. Like Cabin In The Woods, it sounds like it’s going to be a genre-upending, bonkers ride. “I have to be very careful what I say about it,” says producer Jeremy Latcham (veteran of multiple MCU titles). “It’s full of so many twists and turns.” The film takes…

“THERE’S NOTHING SIMPLE about this movie, my friend,” laughs Graham King. The producer has been working on the Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody for a decade. Now, though, the film is done — and King sounds very relieved. “Ten years of obstacles and different kinds of hurdles,” he says, not least of which was the removal of director Bryan Singer last December. “Bryan Singer is the credited director of the film,” confirms King. Singer had shot the majority of it. “Basically, Bryan had some personal issues going on. He wanted to hiatus the movie to deal with them, and the movie had to get finished. That was what it came down to.” King replaced him with Dexter Fletcher, who was originally slated to direct the film in 2013, and Fletcher shot…

OUT NOW RATED M / 128 MINS DIRECTOR J.A. Bayona CAST Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Rafe Spall, Daniella Pineda, Justice Smith, James Cromwell PLOT When Isla Nublar’s volcanic foundations become active again, Jurassic World’s former manager Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), now a dinosaur rights activist, teams back up with Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) for a rescue mission. “DO YOU REMEMBER THE FIRST time you saw a dinosaur?” asks Claire Dearing (Howard) in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. We do. When Steven Spielberg’s photoreal prehistoric predators hit multiplexes in 1993 they changed cinema forever. And they were terrifying. To paraphrase Dr Ian Malcolm, after the “oohs” and “ahhs” came the running and screaming. But the original Park’s perfectly-attuned moments of pure suspense (the tap-tap-tapping velociraptor claw, the water rippling in…

OUT NOW RATED M / 96 MINS DIRECTOR Baltasar Kormákur CAST Shailene Woodley, Sam Claflin PLOT After being caught in a hurricane, sailor Tami Oldham (Woodley) wakes to find her yacht damaged, her partner injured and little hope of rescue. Can she get them home? WHILE IT RARELY comes up in lists of cinema’s greatest villains, the ocean as an antagonist is something Hollywood keeps coming back to. And not even because of the things in it (the sharks, the barracuda, the sharktopuses). Bigger than a kaiju, more emotionless than a Terminator, it can’t be bargained with, it can’t be reasoned with and, when you scan the horizon and there’s no land in sight, it can seem as though it absolutely does not stop, ever. In recent years Robert Redford…

OUT NOW/ 122 MINS RATED MA15+ DIRECTOR Stefano Sollima CAST Benicio Del Toro, Josh Brolin, Isabela Moner, Matthew Modine, Catherine Keener PLOT After a US bombing is linked to Mexican people-smugglers, covert ops experts Graver (Josh Brolin) and Gillick (Benicio Del Toro) are enlisted to help the CIA incite war between rival cartels. However, when a druglord’s kidnapped daughter (Isabela Moner) is deemed expendable, the two men find themselves on opposing sides of a violent war. APPRAISE THE DETAILS of this sequel to 2015’s drug war masterpiece — no Denis Villeneuve, no Roger Deakins, no Emily Blunt — and you’d be forgiven for hearing the steady klaxon of multiple alarm bells. Well, those warnings won’t sound for very long after the lights go down in the cinema. Sicario: Day Of…

OUT 26 JULY RATED M / 120 MINS DIRECTOR Kevin Macdonald CAST Ellen White, Mary Jones, Clive Davis, Pat Houston, Cissy Houston, L.A. Reid, Michael Houston, Gary Garland-Houston PLOT Since Whitney Houston’s death from an overdose six years ago, many attempts have been made to tell the singer’s story. But this documentary is the first to feature interviews with those closest to Houston, resulting in never-before-heard revelations. when she was still in training to become the biggest singer of our lifetime. It’s the backdrop for the early trauma of her parents’ divorce after her father’s multiple infidelities and her mother’s eventual affair with a minister. These demons — which, as she signs with record producer and music executive Clive Davis and starts to rack up number one hits are still…

“ There was no moment on Sicario where I wanted to do this again,” says Josh Brolin, on the set of the sequel to Sicario. It’s December 2016 and, for now, this film is called Soldado, Spanish for “soldier”, referring to Brolin’s CIA agent Matt. Later it will be retitled Sicario 2: Soldado, and later still, in Australia at any rate, Sicario: Day Of The Soldado, but today it is simply, confidently Soldado. The crew have been shooting in New Mexico, making the most of the region’s Native American reservations, including Laguna Pueblo, where we are today — a gorgeous vista and home to, at least this evening, a mountain sunset Instagrammers would die for. It is also freezing. Way below zero. Empire has been warned to bring “your warmest…

In the summer of 1997, reeling from the box-office failure of his horror-comedy The Frighteners, Peter Jackson was desperate to get his mooted adaptation of The Lord Of The Rings off the ground. Fortunately, a powerful Hollywood force seemed eager to make it as two films. Unfortunately, that person was Harvey Weinstein, the tempestuous and often terrifying head of Miramax — who has since been disgraced over multiple accusations of sexual assault — to whom Jackson was bound by a first-look deal. “Fran remembers this stuff much better than I do,” says Peter Jackson stoically. “It’s like a car crash, I tend to sort of wipe out all the bad memories. Fran hangs on to every detail.” With their initial treatment completed, Jackson and [producer/co-screenwriter] Fran Walsh flew to New…

ACCORDING TO HOLLYWOOD lore, Predator is the result of an industry in-joke. As the story goes, film studio types were riffing on that fact that Rocky Balboa would have to fight an alien now that he’d beaten all of Earth’s finest opponents by the time the credits rolled on Rocky IV. Deciding there was a grain of a worthy idea in the throwaway gag, screenwriting brothers Jim and John Thomas took the idea and ran with it, producing a screenplay titled ‘Hunter’. All it took was legendary producer Joel Silver – a man who already had 48 Hrs., Commando and Lethal Weapon under his belt – to get the muscles vs. mandibles action classic to the screen, with a little help from the most bicep-busting men in his Rolodex. To…

IN 1959, WILLIAM Wyler’s Ben-Hur was the most expensive film ever made ($15 million), won a record-breaking number of Oscars (11) and saved a studio (MGM) from bankruptcy. Yet from this perspective, its most lasting influence comes from its chariot race, as Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston) speeds around the ancient circus in Jerusalem. The nine-minute set-piece is a tour de force of jaw-dropping stunts, huge, never-to-be-repeated production design and break-neck editing, creating the template for practically every car chase (Goldfinger borrowed Ben-Hur’s spiked wheels gambit) and Podrace ever since. “One of the first things I remembered was the chariot race in Ben-Hur, how exciting it was,” recalled George Lucas about conceiving The Phantom Menace’s set-piece. “I decided I would create a modern version of that race; instead of horses and…

JEAN-LUC GODARD ONCE said, “Cinema is truth 24 frames a second.” He might have to revise that opinion upon seeing I, Tonya. Craig Gillespie’s account of the rise and fall of Olympic ice skater Tonya Harding, who was implicated in and disgraced by an attack on her rival Nancy Kerrigan in 1994, has a deliberately slippery relationship with the idea of objective truth, as it presents different viewpoints: Harding’s (Margot Robbie), her ex-husband Jeff Gillooly’s (Sebastian Stan), and her venal mother, LaVona’s (an Oscar-winning Allison Janney). We spoke to Gillespie, and the movie’s writer, Steven Rogers, about the truth, the whole truth, and anything but the truth. How did you know where to begin in capturing the truth of Tonya Harding’s story? Rogers: I interviewed Tonya Harding to start with.…

EVERYONE IS SCARED of giving away spoilers on the set of The Girl In The Spider’s Web — which seems odd, considering the novel it’s adapted from, by David Lagercrantz, was published three years ago. Instead of rebooting The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (again), or moving on to its follow-up, The Girl Who Played With Fire, Sony has opted to tackle the fourth instalment in the Millennium series (and the first not written by original author Stieg Larsson, who died in 2004), which sees Lisbeth Salander and journalist Mikael Blomkvist embroiled in a world of government spies and cyber criminals. Here, Claire Foy stars as Salander, taking over the role from Rooney Mara, who starred in David Fincher’s 2011 English-language adaptation. Having shot to fame in The Crown, the…

In The Breaker Upperers your characters provide a service where they split up couples for a fee. Were there any personal bad break-ups that inspired that idea, where you wish there was a service like that available to you? Madeleine: It’s kind of wish fulfilment for other stories that I’ve heard about, or other friends that have been in relationships. Maybe it’s a fantasy for people, to have someone else do it for you. Jackie: A lot of people can certainly relate to that feeling of dread, when you realise that you need to break up with your partner, and you don’t want to hurt their feelings. You don’t want to do it. You don’t know what to say, and you’re thinking “It’d be so great…

THERE’S ALWAYS BEEN something of the movie mogul about Matthew Vaughn. A producer-turned-director who works both inside and outside the studio system, self-funding blockbusters such as Kingsman: The Secret Service and its sequel, last year’s The Golden Circle. So, it’s perhaps no surprise to find that he’s going all in with the formation of Marv Studios. “I’d like to be the modern version of what a studio can be,” he tells Empire. “One where creativity really does win and is at the foremost of every decision. The older you get, the more responsible you start feeling. But we’re going to go for it.” To that end, Vaughn is lining up a slew of eye-catching films with which to launch his new venture over the next couple of years. To wit:…

OUT 26 JULY RATED TBC / 103 MINS DIRECTOR Adrian Shergold CAST Maxine Peake, Paddy Considine, Alun Armstrong, Tony Pitts, Lindsey Coulson PLOT Funny Cow (Peake) is a woman who defies every expectation of the men in her world, whether they’re her abusive father, loutish husband, needy boyfriend, or all the blokes in the working men’s clubs she frequents who don’t believe for a second she could ever make ’em laugh. DESPITE THE TITLE, Funny Cow is not a comedy. There are a lot of jokes, but — trust us — you’re not supposed to laugh at them. Even when the title character (whose real name we’re never told) gets her big, on-stage moment, her finally unveiled material is neither groundbreaking nor elevating. She’s really no better than any of…

OUT 26 JULY RATED TBC / 90 MINS DIRECTORS Madeleine Sami, Jackie Van Beek CAST Madeleine Sami, Jackie Van Beek, James Rolleston, Celia Pacquola PLOT Pals Jen (Van Beek) and Mel (Sami) run a business breaking up relationships for clients unwilling to do it themselves. Their friendship is tested when Mel falls for a young client (Rolleston) and befriends one of their victims (Pacquola). AS THE 1962 Neil Sedaka hit Breaking Up Is Hard To Do so sagely points out, breaking up is, indeed, hard to do. Deciding there’s comedic gold to be mined from people’s pathological fear of splitting up with their significant others, New Zealand actors/writers/comedians Madeleine Sami (kiwi comedy series Super City, whose first season was directed by Taika Waititi; he executive produces here) and Jackie Van…

OUT NOW RATED PG / 118 MINS DIRECTOR Brad Bird CAST Craig T. Nelson, Holly Hunter, Sarah Vowell, Samuel L. Jackson, Huck Milner, Catherine Keener, Bob Odenkirk PLOT The Incredibles are back out in the open, and with support from wealthy siblings Evelyn (Keener) and Winston Deavor (Odenkirk), hope to restore their legal status as superheroes. But can they stop the evil hypnotising villain Screenslaver — and raise three super-kids in the process? 14 YEARS HAVE PASSED since we last saw the Incredibles, the Pixar superhero family to rival the likes of the Richards or the Els — but as far as returning writer/ director Brad Bird is concerned, no time has passed at all. The first movie’s epilogue now forming the second movie’s prologue, the Underminer (voiced by Pixar…

His preconceptions were challenged “When I was first approached, I wasn’t interested. Nicole David, who was Whitney’s film agent, said she never understood why her life went the way it did. That was intriguing. And then she sent me a New Yorker article about Whitney that took her seriously as a musical genius whose social impact was enormous. I was fascinated and thought maybe I had underestimated her.” the family got on board The family were incredibly brave and it’s been difficult for them. But they were as good as their word. Right at the start I said to them I’d only do this if they’d give me final cut. There are things they didn’t want in there, but they accepted it when I said they…

OUT NOW / NETFLIX EPISODES VIEWED ALL CREATED BY Cheo Hodari Coker CAST Mike Colter, Simone Missick, Rosario Dawson, Alfre Woodard, Theo Rossi, Mustafa Shakir, Gabrille Dennis PLOT After the deaths of Diamondback and Cottonmouth, Luke Cage (Colter) is now Harlem’s most famous man, expected to stop every crime. With Mariah Dillard (Woodard) even more powerful and a new enemy in town, can he be the hero required? “IS IT EVER okay to do the wrong thing for the right reason?” That line, spoken by Misty Knight (Missick) in episode six, is the key to the excellent second season of Luke Cage. Every one of its major characters is playing a game without rules, a game to save the district of Harlem, and there’s no way to win by playing…

“Holy shit, whose car is this? Is this your car, McQuarrie? Come out here!” Those were the first words Christopher McQuarrie ever heard Tom Cruise say. In real life, that is. He’d heard him utter plenty before, on the big screen. But as far as in the flesh was concerned, this was it. It was 2007 and McQuarrie had made a breakthrough with his World War II script, Valkyrie: Tom Cruise was interested in producing it. So, McQuarrie found himself summoned to Cruise’s house to meet the man himself. Only there was a dilemma. “My car broke down,” recalls McQuarrie. “I had a choice of either driving the family mini-van, with a dent in the side and baby seats in the back, or this old ’64 Cadillac I’ve hung onto…

BACK IN 1979, DAVID LYNCH wasn’t a revered, surrealist filmmaker, responsible for numerous iconic works. He was a broke 33-year-old, with only one movie under his belt: the deeply weird Eraserhead , which Lynch had shot over several years on a budget so small, he was forced to work as a newspaper delivery man during production. For his second feature, he hoped to make another story just as strange, Ronnie Rocket , about a three-foot-tall person who can control electricity. But then along came an opportunity to do something very different: a studio picture with big stars, based on an incredible true story. Here,in his own words, Lynch explains how he came to create The Elephant Man . Ronnie Rocket wasn’t…

“ THIS IS MY BIG MY DRINK AND DRUGS HELL!’ INTERVIEW ISN’T IT?” laughs Simon Pegg, leaning forward on a ridiculously oversized sofa in a Los Angeles photo studio. It’s important to note, or possibly even emphasise, the ‘laughs’ part of that equation. For today, our chat — just the latest of a long string of interviews we’ve done together since I first met Pegg back in 2004 — has taken an unexpected detour, into a soul-baring revelation about an ongoing battle with depression, and drinking, that had, until now, been known to only a handful of the actor’s closest family and friends. But he’s come through that now, and today he’s ebullient and effervescent; bouncing around with a brolly and a bowler hat for our photographer, cracking wise with…

After discovering their daughters have made a pact to lose their virginity on prom night, parents Mitchell (John Cena), Lisa (Leslie Mann) and Hunter (Ike Barinholtz) set about trying to ‘cock block’ the girls’ would-be suitors. In an effort to gain access to a teen house party, Mitchell agrees to go up against a young opponent in a round of ‘butt chugging’ – essentially having beer funnelled directly into his arse... KAY CANNON: The shooting of it wasn’t that difficult, because there was so much prep. The amount of conversations that I had with the crew and production, if you could’ve been a fly on the wall, they were ridiculous. We’d have many long conversations about the length of the tube, and where the kid would be, and all that…

So in the last few years my wife and I have had two children, I work full-time shift work, and have been doing my PhD. A couple of months ago one of our boys just started school, and I just finished my PhD (wooooh!). I can see no one caring to this point. My reason for writing is I thought that I would catch up on some of my many unread Empire issues collected via subscription in the hope I could stop the bookcase from collapsing due to the weight. I did not realise I was so far behind in reading, until I looked on the back cover of the Empire issue I was enjoying (above). Naturally, I took a picture of the iPhone 6 advert, with my iPhone 6.…

“VENOM IS UNIQUE within the canon of Marvel,” asserts director Ruben Fleischer, speaking from the depths of post-production at Sony Pictures in LA. “You can’t say there are a lot of other heroes like him.” This is partly because Venom isn’t really a hero at all. As revealed in the 300th issue of The Amazing Spider-Man in 1988, this alien symbiote — fused with the bitter, vengeful Eddie Brock — is one of the friendly neighbourhood crimefighter’s deadliest foes. One who’s already faced off against Spidey on screen in Sam Raimi’s less-than-loved Spider-Man 3, with Topher Grace in the role. Not that this put off the director of Zombieland and Gangster Squad. “Always a fan” of the character, he was drawn to the idea of a movie that put the…

VETERAN GERMAN DIRECTOR Wim Wenders has always been an unconventional traveller into exotic environments. He’s responsible for the definitive Harry Dean Stanton performance in 1984’s Paris, Texas, the American Southwest so alive you can smell it; and 1999’s Oscar-nominated documentary Buena Vista Social Club, a joyful celebration of all-star Cuban musicians. And long before Matt Damon and his gleaming gnashers showed up in The Talented Mr. Ripley, the filmmaker gave us a much scuzzier Tom Ripley in 1977’s The American Friend. Even he, though, was illuminated and educated by Submergence, the 2013 book by foreign correspondent-turned-novelist J.M. Ledgard, set in a windowless Somalian cell and the depths of the Greenland Sea. It’s in the water where we meet French-Australian biomathematician Danielle Flinders (Alicia Vikander), who is determined to uncover the…

OUT 12 JULY RATED M / 120 MINS DIRECTOR Luke Sparke CAST Dan Ewing, Stephany Jacobsen, Temuera Morrison, Charles Mesure, Izzy Stevens, Zachary Garred, Rhiannon Fish PLOT Game night in a small Outback town is rudely interrupted by an alien invasion resulting in a big loss for the home team. With most of the town’s inhabitants either dead or held captive, it’s up to a straggle of survivors to save mankind. FOR ALL THOSE naysayers out there proclaiming that low-budget Australian cinema is riddled with depressing drug addicts, ocker stereotypes, squalor and abuse, welcome to Occupation, the entertaining low-budget Aussie sci-fi actioner with ideas a little above its (space) station. Channelling ’80s invasion classics like Red Dawn and Invasion USA, Occupation plays like a high-octane remake of V, without the…

THERE’S BEEN A lot of talk, over the last few years, about the rights and wrongs of gender-swapping film remakes and film characters, and the general efforts to make sure that not all the leading characters in all films are white, straight men. Lots of people (white men, mostly) have complained about the practice as it relates to Ghostbusters, or Star Wars, or most recently the Ocean’s films. But Ocean’s 8 demonstrates neatly that, with a thoughtful translation and a great cast, gender swapping can go a long way to redress one long-standing imbalance in cinema. Namely, the fact that women so rarely get to play cool. Let’s get the inevitable objection to any female-dominated take on an existing property out of the way first: why not develop your own…

PRIME VIDEO OUT NOW EPISODES VIEWED 1-4 CREATED BY David E. Kelley, Jonathan Shapiro CAST Billy Bob Thornton, Ana de la Reguera, Mark Duplass, Morris Chestnut, Tania Raymonde PLOT Alcoholic lawyer Billy McBride (Thornton) is reluctantly pulled into defending the innocent son of a local barman in a murder trial. As the case develops, it begins to encompass an unconventional real estate developer (Duplass) and the insurgent mayoral candidate he backs (de la Reguera). SECOND SEASONS ARE when good TV shows start to show their cards: The Wire made clear its mind was on more things than cops ’n’ gangs, and Sex And The City ditched its fourth wall-breaking gimmick. What does Goliath’s second season tell us about what it wants to be? Not much, sadly. The first season successfully…

When Constantin Stanislavski, the legendary acting theorist and teacher, said, “There are no small parts, only small actors,” he clearly didn’t have the Marvel Cinematic Universe in mind. There are few parts smaller — literally (and we don’t mean the new definition of literally; we mean the old definition, which literally means literally) — than Ant-Man and the Wasp, the half-size heroes who spend much of their time shrinking down to the size of… well, you can probably guess. So Stanislavski was wrong about small parts. And, sorry, Constantin, but you’re wrong about the “only small actors” part too. (Stanislavski’s having a shocker.) Paul Rudd and Evangeline Lilly played the roles in 2015’s energetic and entertaining Ant-Man. Well, sort of. That movie saw Rudd’s Scott Lang be chosen to wear…

IT STARTED ON JACK REACHER “On Jack Reacher Tom said, ‘I’m going to start flying [a helicopter]”. He got with Airbus and did some lessons. Then we put him in touch with a world-renowned stunt pilot.” IT GOT SERIOUS ON MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 5 “On Mission 5 Tom and I would helicopter to a lot of places together. He said, ‘One day I’m going to do the ultimate helicopter sequence.’” CRUISE HAD TO GET GOOD FAST “To do what we wanted to do in high altitude, in the mountains of New Zealand… you should be looking at 7,000 hours seat time. The big guys are 10,000-hours-plus. Tom had to learn all this in a couple of hundred hours.” THE SEQUENCE WOULD KILL MOST PEOPLE “Tom’s doing some…

On a chilly afternoon in May 2017, Empire finds itself in the far-northern NSW town of Murwillumbah, enjoying the serenity and spying several things beginning with ‘A’ at the local showground (currently dressed up to look like a town fair is in progress): acres of open bushland that stretch as far as the eye can see; athletes warming up on a field in preparation for a game of AFL and several recognisable actors (Australian film and TV stalwart Roy Billing and former Home And Away star Dan Ewing – kitted up in AFL gear – among them). And considering the synopsis of the feature film Occupation – whose set we’re currently on – bills it as an “action/sci-fi film about a hostile ground invasion”, we’re keeping our keen eyes peeled…

00:03:19 CARMAGEDDON __ Greta Gerwig’s stunner gets into gear when Christine, aka Lady Bird (Saoirse Ronan), arguing with mom Marion (Laurie Metcalf) about college, chucks herself out of the car. “It felt heightened, as if it was emotionally true rather than literally true,” Gerwig says. She rejected greenscreen and stunt doubles in favour of a harnessed Ronan throwing herself onto a trailer. “It was still scary just watching it at my monitor.” 00:11:25 RELIGIOUS EDUCATION __ Attending Immaculate Heart Catholic school, Lady Bird and bestie Julie (Beanie Feldstein) talk sex in a school corridor. “I’ve always been so interested in how mortal teenage girls fit into this structure which is all priests, bishops, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost,” Gerwig says. “Lying down eating Communion wafers talking about…

MAKING $1.3 BILLION at the worldwide box office and receiving the kind of raves most blockbusters don’t come within a mile of receiving, Marvel Studios’ Black Panther was a true phenomenon. More than that, though, it was a groundbreaking film in many ways, with director Ryan Coogler shaping the kind of tentpole we had constantly been told Hollywood couldn’t, or wouldn’t, make — the received wisdom being that films aimed at diverse audiences just wouldn’t connect. Last year alone, the likes of Get Out, Girls Trip and The Big Sick proved that little theory wrong, but Black Panther eclipsed them all and, in doing so, rewrote the rule book. Here three BAME film experts, Ellen E Jones, Jimi Famurewa and Amon Warmann, get together to talk about the movie’s impact…

GIVEN IT’S ABOUT one of the world’s top fashion designers (albeit one who’s slightly on the wane, at least creatively speaking), you’d have expected Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread to deliver handsomely on the snazzy suits and divine dresses. And you’d have been right. Mark Bridges snagged an Oscar (and a Jet Ski, for making the ceremony’s shortest speech) for his work on PTA’s dark love story. Here, he tells us how he came up with just some of the looks for the film’s three lead characters: Vicky Krieps’ Alma Elson (1-3), Lesley Manville’s Cyril Woodcock (4) and Daniel Day-Lewis’ Reynolds Woodcock (5). 1 LONDON DATE DRESS “This is the dress that Reynolds is draping on Alma at the country house. The plum colour was Daniel’s idea. It’s Reynolds’ love…

AT FIRST GLANCE, Armando Iannucci’s The Death Of Stalin, about the battle for political supremacy in 1950s Russia after Josef Stalin buys the farm, is based on a French graphic novel by Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin. But when it came to the film’s coruscating comedic set-pieces, Iannucci and his writers (David Schneider, Ian Martin and Peter Fellows) looked to history for inspiration. Here, they talk us through six of the film’s best, and blackest, moments. 1. THE MUSICAL EMERGENCY Joseph Stalin (Adrian McLoughlin) calls a concert organiser (Paddy Considine), demanding a copy of the evening’s performance, a Mozart piano concerto. The only problem: it hasn’t been recorded. Cue a mad scramble to do it all over again. Armando Iannucci: This actually happened. Except in reality it was even worse,…

REECE SHEARSMITH: “I love the moment where Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis) is greeted at home by Robert De Niro’s Rupert Pupkin in The King Of Comedy . I just remember it as being one of the most excruciating things to watch through your fingertips, long before the comedy of embarrassment caught on. It surpasses any of that.” INT. LOUNGE — DAY Jerry Langford has been summoned from a game of golf to find Rupert Pupkin and Rita (Diahnne Abbott) making themselves at home. Jerry, still holding a golf club, stands in the middle of the room with his arms folded and a look of fury. RUPERT: Where is everybody? JERRY: What everybody? RUPERT: [laughing] What everybody? The guests, Jer! I mean, to tell you the truth I’m…