Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2018 i Empire Australasia

AT THIS YEAR’S Venice Film Festival, Roma took home the Golden Lion, the biggest prize; at the London Film Festival, it earned ecstatic reactions. Five years after winning the Best Director Oscars for Gravity, director Alfonso Cuarón is suddenly riding a wave of awards buzz again — this time, for a fastidious recreation of his childhood, set during one year in early ’70s Mexico that goes above and beyond to bring his reminiscences to life. Ninety per cent of the film, he says, is ripped directly from his formative years. “It was about coming to terms with my own life,” he says. ‘So I wanted it to be about creating an approach that felt organic for me.” This meant not only shooting them in the same locations as the actual…

★★★★ OUT NOW / 130 MINS RATED MA15+ DIRECTOR Steve McQueen CAST Viola Davis, Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Debicki, Colin Farrell, Michelle Rodriguez, Daniel Kaluuya, Robert Duvall, Liam Neeson, Cynthia Erivo PLOT In Chicago’s criminal underworld, four men die after a heist goes catastrophically wrong. Their widows are forced to clean up the mess and embark on a heist of their own — against the backdrop of a corrupt political race for the soul of the city. WHEN IT WAS first announced, Widows seemed like an incongruous, Mad Libs, names-out-of-a-tombola project. Turner Prize-winning artist and Oscar-winning director Steve McQueen, adapting a 1980s ITV television series, itself based on a Lynda La Plante novel? What next, Terrence Malick tackling Inspector Morse? Anish Kapoor’s Minder? And yet, somehow, Widows works. There’s a strange…

★★★★ OUT NOW / 134 MINS RATED M DIRECTOR David Yates CAST Eddie Redmayne, Katherine Waterston, Dan Fogler, Alison Sudol, Ezra Miller, Zoë Kravitz, Jude Law, Johnny Depp, Callum Turner, Claudia Kim, William Nadylam, Kevin Guthrie PLOT Hogwarts professor Albus Dumbledore (Jude Law) enlists the help of former pupil Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) to take down Gellert Grindelwald (Johnny Depp), a dark wizard who has escaped incarceration and is hell-bent on raising pure-blood wizards to rule over No-Majs (Muggles). THE CRIMES OF Grindelwald is a weird rather than fantastic beast. The second chapter in J.K. Rowling’s five-part story, it’s a film stuffed with characters, big moments and impressive spectacle but still feels bizarrely underpowered. There are twists and revelations, but very few that alter the outcome of the…

★★★ OUT NOW / 117 MINS RATED MA15+ DIRECTOR Fede Álvarez CAST Claire Foy, Sverrir Gudnason, LaKeith Stanfield, Sylvia Hoeks, Stephen Merchant PLOT When gifted hacker Lisbeth Salander (Claire Foy) is attacked in her apartment, the assailants make off with a dangerous computer program. As she tries to retrieve it, ghosts from her past begin to haunt her at every turn. LISBETH SALANDER CAN handle a lot. She’s been to hell and back, and attacks without prejudice. But now, the ever-mutating righter of wrongs, currently wearing a Claire Foy skin mask, is up against something that may well crush her: a franchise. The Girl In The Spider’s Web is very much the further adventures of Lisbeth Salander, adapted from the 2015 book written by David Lagercrantz following original author Stieg…

★★★★ OUT NOW / NETFLIX EPS VIEWED 5 OF 10 CREATED BY Carlo Bernard, Doug Miro CAST Michael Peña, Diego Luna, Tenoch Huerta, Alyssa Diaz PLOT In the early ’80s, as Pablo Escobar’s cocaine operation is in full swing, an ex-cop (Luna) unites Mexican crime factions to form the biggest marijuana-smuggling cartel in history — until a DEA agent (Peña) and his team start closing in. WHEN WE TALK of expanded TV universes, stories tantalisingly sprinkled with Easter eggs and the satisfying sensation of supposedly separate narrative jigsaw pieces slotting together, we tend to think of superhero shows. But what if that same ethos were applied to the world of a fact-based crime drama? That appears to be the lightbulb ping that led to Narcos: Mexico: a hugely compulsive, sort-of…

PETER JACKSON WAS , of course, assuming that Guillermo del Toro would make The Hobbit. That was the plan. With the Mexican heading into Mirkwood in 2010, he could get down to pre-production on Mortal Engines. New Zealand’s favourite son had picked up the rights to British author Philip Reeve’s quartet of science-fiction adventures in 2008, enchanted by the idea of a future-Earth where cities have upped sticks, shackled on sets of ruddy great wheels, and set about eating one another. Reeve called it “Municipal Darwinism”: town-eat-town consumerism in a world starved of resources. So, leaving Middle-earth behind, Jackson was set to smoothly segue into building a new world. There were other things cooking, too — giant projects sliding into place like… well, like moving cities. “Of course that’s not…

THE DIRECTOR  Danai Gurira [Okoye]: “I got a chance to sit down with Ryan [Coogler] and I was a big admirer of him and his work. I was really proud of him. I didn’t even know him and I’d say, ‘I’m so proud of him, of what he’s accomplished.’ The stories he was telling. The fact that he was giving storytelling new hype.” Daniel Kaluuya [W’Kabi]: “He’s just so personable, man, he just really takes you in, sees people and takes time for everyone. Especially, when he has everything on his plate and everything on his shoulders.” THE STORY  Kaluuya: “Ryan can really just get to the heart of a story, which is one of the hardest things to do, especially in the midst of a massive Marvel world. What…

1. SETTING THE MOOD LIKE THE RUBIK’S Cube or Teddy Ruxpin, Travis Knight is a product of the 1980s. As a kid he thrilled to the likes of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial and The Goonies, but something else that rocked his cerebral cortex was the 98-episode animated Transformers TV series, which aired from 1984 to 1987. “While I loved the comics and toys, [the cartoon] was the thing,” he says. “Optimus Prime was amazing. I loved the ‘waves’: Soundwave and Shockwave. But the one I most connected to was Bumblebee. He was the one who was most like me when I was a kid.” So when, after directing acclaimed 2016 stop-motion fantasy Kubo And The Two Strings, Knight was offered the chance to direct an ’80s-set movie with Bumblebee as the…

IT’S HARD TO tell for sure, but it looks like the elderly man standing silently by himself has no eyes. Judging from the blood oozing from each socket, someone’s gouged them out of his skull. His is an unnerving presence, not least because he seems completely at peace with his predicament. As crew members buzz around preparing to shoot the next scene in Tidelands – Netflix’s first ever Australian original series – there he is, minding his own business, staying out of the way. If he had eyes you’d say he was calmly overseeing everything, but… you know, he doesn’t. So he just stands. Quietly. Looking freaky. A few metres away a Land Rover sits in a clearing, deep in Queensland’s Tamborine Mountain. On this afternoon in late May, dappled…

PAUL SCHRADER’S FIRST Reformed may well be his magnum opus. The story of Reverend Ernst Toller (a never better Ethan Hawke), a priest who undergoes a crisis after he meets a suicidal young man, Michael (Philip Etinger), who can’t bring a child into an ecologically fucked-up world, it is the culmination of the writer-director’s obsessions and interests played out over the last 40 years. Touching base with his screenplay for Taxi Driver plus directorial efforts like American Gigolo and Mishima: A Life In Four Chapters, it’s a slow-burning portrait of a spiritually struggling man trying to keep faith in the face of the realities of modern life: the environment, American big business, church corruption. Here, Schrader unpicks his most compelling film for years and — of…

IF “I LOVE the smell of napalm in the morning” is Apocalypse Now’s most memorable line, the defining image of Francis Ford Coppola’s war epic is Captain Benjamin Willard (Martin Sheen), face camouflaged, hair slicked back, emerging from misty, murky water in the rain to the guitar noodlings of The Doors’ ‘The End’. Surreal and hypnotic, it crystallises many of the film’s concerns: war is hell, the psychedelic nature of the Vietnam conflict, the blurring of civilised and animalistic behaviours, the subsuming quality of nature. It also seems to stand in for the director himself, emerging from chaos to impose order. The origin of the shot lay in John Milius’ first draft of the screenplay, tinkered with by Coppola in a version dated December 1975. The script opens on a…

DAVID GORDON GREEN: “My favourite scene in any movie is the dinner table scene at the very end of Deliverance . It’s one of the four movie posters on my wall. Everyone knows the “squeal like a pig” scene and, “This is the weekend they didn’t play golf,” but very rarely is this referenced — the aftermath of such an emotional journey in the simplicity of a dinner table scene, and the awful, awkward, uncomfortable qualities of these characters around each other, family and food. It’s got a strange simplicity; a mundane sequence after an extraordinary journey always has this eerie, beautiful quality to me. That’s why that scene stands out. It’s burned into my memory.” EXT. BIDDIFORD’S COLONIAL LODGE — NIGHT After coming out of hospital…

GIVEN HIS POSITION as a pioneer of performance capture, it’s hardly surprising Andy Serkis’ take on Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book involves the same hi-tech techniques used to bring characters like Gollum and Planet Of The Apes’ Caesar to life. But what is surprising is the way he’s doing it. When Empire observes Serkis playing ursine mentor Baloo on a tropical plant-smothered soundstage at Leavesden Studios in March 2015, the Mowgli director is familiarly donned in a grey onesie liberally dotted with motion-capture tech. But curiously, he isn’t the only person playing the bear. Behind him stands another unitarded actor, tethered to Serkis via a four-foot-long pool noodle. As Serkis growls his lines in a cockney accent, this guy (named Ben), sways slightly from side to side, helping provide the…

EVER SINCE MISSION: Impossible — Rogue Nation catapulted her into Hollywood’s field of vision, Rebecca Ferguson has shown up with such regularity (Florence Foster Jenkins, Life, The Greatest Showman, The Girl On The Train) that we began to suspect that she was actually trying to take over the world. Now, though, with her new movie, The Kid Who Would Be King, she is trying to take over the world. Joe Cornish’s movie, the long-awaited follow-up to his cracking 2011 debut Attack The Block, is an updated, family-friendly take on the legend of King Arthur. There’s a young boy (Louis Ashbourne Serkis as Alex) who discovers the fabled Excalibur, and just might be the fabled king of ancient prophecy. There’s a Merlin, played as a teenager by…

1 __ The Mandalorian will take place several years after the events of Return Of The Jedi — thus some decades before the rise of the First Order in The Force Awakens. With the New Republic still figuring out the ramifications of the end of the Empire, the scene is set for an era of lawlessness where no rules apply — if Star Wars didn’t already feel like the Wild West, it certainly will now. The only piece of canon that intersects with that timeline is Daniel José Older’s novel Last Shot, which depicts the further adventures of Han Solo and Lando Calrissian, so it is unlikely The Mandalorian will share storylines. 2 __ Iron Man and Jungle Book director Jon Favreau will be the showrunner and writer on the…

1 MILES MORALES/SPIDER-MAN  (Shameik Moore) Peter Ramsey, co-director: A few years ago, Marvel created this whole other line of comics, with alternate versions of classic characters. The Ultimate Spider-Man version was Miles Morales. Bob Persichetti, co-director: The movie is an origin story for Miles. He’s a young Brooklyn teen, half African-American, half Puerto Rican. He has a very different life history to Peter Parker. We introduce the Spider-Verse, but we kind of use the Miles Morales origin story as our vehicle to do that. Rodney Rothman, co-director: When we meet him, he’s basically an average 13-year-old kid. He just started a new school. His relationship with his dad has been getting more complicated. His life has become more complicated. And it’s about to get a lot more complicated. 2 PETER…

MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY IS not alright, alright, alright. At least, he’s not in White Boy Rick, the new thriller from director Yann Demange, about a youngster (Richie Merritt) sliding into a life of crime while his fretting, helpless dad Richard Wershe Sr (McConaughey) watches. The star is most often seen on screen as idealistic heroes or charismatic villains; what he doesn’t usually play are schlubby losers with a mullet. McConaughey explained to Empire why he couldn’t turn it down. Was this a different kind of character for you? Yeah, it was. This is my sad country song. I had never really done a sad country song before. Vulnerable is a word that people throw around a lot, but boy, talk about vulnerable — this guy is done unto. He does not…

★★★★★ OUT 26 DECEMBER RATED TBC / 88 MINS DIRECTOR Pawel Pawlikowski CAST Joanna Kulig, Tomasz Kot, Borys Szyc, Agata Kulesza PLOT Poland, 1949. Musician Wiktor (Kot) enlists mountain girl Zula (Kulig) into a state propaganda troupe. They begin a tumultuous romance that lasts for decades and spans both sides of the Iron Curtain. POLAND IN THE late ’40s was a country in ruins, still ravaged by the effects of having not one, but two of the most brutal armies in modern history fighting their way across it. It’s here that writer-director Pawel Pawlikowski sets Cold War, his first film since 2013 Oscar-winner Ida. Taking loose inspiration from his parents’ lives, he’s created something that’s moving, rich with period detail and startlingly well-acted. With the country’s newly created Communist government…

★★★ OUT NOW RATED G / 90 MINS DIRECTORS Yarrow Cheney, Scott Mosier CAST Benedict Cumberbatch, Rashida Jones, Kenan Thompson, Cameron Seely PLOT There’s nothing the residents of Whoville love more than Christmas. But the Grinch, the grouchy green creature who lives just outside of the town, hates it and this year, he’s setting out to steal everything festive on the eve of the big day. CHRISTMAS, DESPITE BEING the most wonderful time of the year, can be annoying. Whether it’s making small talk at work parties, dealing with your neighbours’ garish light displays or simply fetching the decorations from whichever corner of the loft you stashed them in, there’s plenty worth moaning about. Perhaps that’s why the Grinch, Dr Seuss’ iconic character who despises all things festive, is so…

ON.SCREEN ★★★★ NETFLIX / OUT NOW RATED TBC / 112 MINS DIRECTORS Joel and Ethan Coen CAST James Franco, Brendan Gleeson, Bill Heck, Zoe Kazan, Harry Melling, Liam Neeson, Tim Blake Nelson, Tom Waits PLOT Six tales of the West: a guitar-playing shootist (Nelson) meets his match; a bank robber (Franco) heads to the gallows; a travelling impresario (Neeson) faces waning interest in his show; a prospector (Waits) digs for gold in an unspoiled meadow; a young woman (Kazan) takes a fateful wagon train journey West with her brother and his dog; and five strangers converse on a stagecoach. JOEL AND ETHAN Coen may have grown up in the lawn-fringed suburbs of Minneapolis, but they’ve never been far from the Wild West’s vast, stretching vistas. From Blood Simple’s Texan setting,…

★★★★ NETFLIX / OUT NOW 137 MINS DIRECTOR David Mackenzie CAST Chris Pine, Florence Pugh, Stephen Dillane, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, James Cosmo PLOT After the defeat of William ‘Braveheart’ Wallace, Robert The Bruce (Pine) reluctantly swears loyalty to the English King Edward I (Dillane). But after the English execute Wallace, Robert raises the banner of rebellion once more and sets out to unite, and free, his country. THE SHADOW OF Braveheart looms large. Without that depiction of gloriously chaotic battles where underdogs defeat a superior foe, we wouldn’t see half as many knights in muddy armour on screen today, nor the steady stream of medieval Scottish romances and rebellions on TV and film ever since. Early looks at director David Mackenzie’s take suggested he was aiming for something darker and…

★★★★ OUT NOW NETFLIX EPS SEEN 6 OF 13 SHOWRUNNER Erik Oleson CAST Charlie Cox, Deborah Ann Woll, Elden Henson, Vincent D’Onofrio, Wilson Bethel, Jay Ali, Joanne Whalley PLOT While Matt Murdock (Cox) mends his body and spirit following the climactic events of The Defenders, the manipulative Wilson Fisk (D’Onofrio) returns to the spotlight. WHILE DAREDEVIL’S INAUGURAL season is widely and deservedly regarded as one of the highlights of Marvel’s Netflix output thus far, its sophomore outing was a bit of a mixed bag — a poorly paced plot involving Elektra and The Hand ultimately undoing a strong, Punisher-focused start. It’s little surprise then that with all of the ninjas now out of the picture this third season reaps the benefits. New showrunner Erik Oleson (Arrow)…

★★★★ BBC FIRST OUT NOW EPS VIEWED 1-2 CREATED BY Simon and Stephen Cornwell DIRECTED BY Park Chan-Wook CAST Alexander Skarsgård, Michael Shannon, Florence Pugh PLOT Set in the late 1970s, politically conscious, enigmatic actress Charlie (Pugh) is spotted by an Israeli Mossad agent (Shannon), and recruited to infiltrate a Palestinian terror cell, via the charms of cool Israeli intelligence officer Becker (Skarsgård). And so begins a tale of spies, intrigue and love. THE BEEB HAS been knocking drama out of the park this year: it’s finally getting its hands dirty, with Killing Eve and Bodyguard, so the question: can The Little Drummer Girl rise to meet expectations? Well, maybe. The story originates from a classic John le Carré novel, le Carré no stranger to a BBC adaptation, having previously…

1. THAT ENDING Chris Hewitt (Associate Editor, Re.View) Across 10 years and 19 movies, Marvel Studios has pulled off some pretty bold moves. Putting a sentient tree and a talking raccoon in the same movie, and making you care about them. Plonking a musical number in the middle of Captain America: The First Avenger. Casting Edward Norton and hoping for the best. But they all pale into insignificance next to the ending of Avengers: Infinity War, where the bad guy wins and the good guys lose. That feels a little too simplistic. It’s an ending in which the bad guy wins and the good guys get their arses kicked all over the galaxy. A quick recap in case you’ve somehow forgotten. Having assembled all six Infinity Stones, a grievously wounded…

INITIALLY, A QUIET PLACE sounded like a horror film with a nice gimmick, a monster movie in which to make a single sound meant death. But John Krasinski’s third film as director, and first working with his wife Emily Blunt, was much more than that. A moving family drama about loss and letting go, in fact, as well as an ingenious sci-fi and, yes, a really, really scary horror that demanded to be seen in a packed cinema with a rapt, soundless audience. It was a cinema experience unlike any other this year and justly became one of 2018’s biggest hits, grossing $335 million on a $17 million budget. A sequel is,of course, on the way. In a rare joint interview, Krasinski and Blunt reflecton how A Quiet Place became…

Tony Kaye, 66, with a beard to shame Gandalf, is sitting in an east London pub, painting in a sketchbook. It’s a balmy sunny evening during this UK summer’s heatwave, and just four punters await the weekly open-mic music spot. After the opening act, Kaye is called to the stage and sits on a stool to sing a song or two of his own, backed by the resident band. “Los Angeles, you tore me to pieces,” he sings, proper pain in his voice. “Los Angeles, you broke my heart.” Afterwards, the modest audience applauds. “Thank you,” he says. “My name’s Tony Kaye, I’m a filmmaker. And I live in a place called Hollywood Jail. But I’m being released.” Kaye had always wanted to make it in Hollywood. He began in…

00:05:11 HEADS UP __ After completing a somewhat hazy mission, in a single unbroken take we see Joaquin Phoenix’s enforcer Joe walk down the street, get attacked by a ne’er-do-well, only to plant the nut on him. It’s efficient, brutal, and a far cry from movies like Taken. “We didn’t have time for big, balletic sequences,” says Ramsay. “We were trying to set up the unpredictability of Joe. You don’t know what to expect from him.” 00:16:47 ALPHABET SONG __ Such unpredictability is evidenced by the scene where Joe shares a tender sing-song with his mother (Judith Roberts). “I remember singing the ‘Alphabet Song’ with Joaquin during prep,” laughs Ramsay, who included it from there on. “He and Judith had the best time. She’s in her eighties and is an…

What an amazing moment, to get the mag I have bought every issue since day one, to find my loyal lovely wrinkly old face represented on the cover by the endlessly amazing Jamie Lee Curtis! (Empire, October 2018.) I looked and instead of thinking, “Sigh, I used to be gorgeous too,” I looked and yelled, “Fuck yeah, I look like Jamie Lee Curtis!” Kudos for putting her face on the front cover. ANN STUHT, VIA EMAIL Thanks Ann! We were lucky enough to meet the delightful Jamie Lee during her Australian promotional visit for Halloween, and can happily report that she is just as amazing and funny in real life as you’d hope her to be. Who knows, with the inevitable follow-up to Halloween she may be back on the…

WHEN IT BECAME clear Ryan Coogler’s 2015’s Rocky spin-off Creed would earn a sequel, the immediate question was: who would direct? Coogler, unable to juggle his Black Panther commitments, passed on directing Creed II. It turned to series creator Sylvester Stallone, director of four previous Rockys, to triumphantly return to the director’s chair. For about five seconds. Then he vacated it again. If boxing is a young man’s game so, it seems, is directing a boxing movie. “I realised youth must be served,” says Stallone. “Doing this kind of film is incredibly taxing. And this kid had such a great vision and an energy.” That kid was Steven Caple Jr., a relative newcomer with just one film (2016’s The Land) under his belt. Yet that caught the eye of Coogler,…

HERE’S A PUB quiz question: who is the most portrayed literary character in film and television history? It is, according to Guinness World Records, Sherlock Holmes; in the last five years alone, there have been seven separate screen adaptations, including modern Holmes (Sherlock and Elementary), elderly Holmes (Mr. Holmes), and even animated garden-ornament Holmes (Sherlock Gnomes). Holmes & Watson, a comedic take on Arthur Conan Doyle’s consulting detective, might seem like it’s entering a saturated marketplace. But this has been cooking for over a decade — well before the current Holmes goldrush. “We started [writing the script] before the first Robert Downey Jr film,” explains director Etan Cohen, “and they beat us to the starting line.” As it goes, the sheer volume of Holmes adaptations could work in the film’s…

FROM BACK TO The Future to Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Forrest Gump to The Polar Express, filmmaker Robert Zemeckis has always blazed trails, creating innovative visuals to tell magical stories. Welcome To Marwen promises to continue the tradition, dramatising the true story of Mark Hogancamp (Steve Carell), who built an alternate universe of World War II dolls in his backyard to deal with the trauma of being violently assaulted. Here, Zemeckis tells us how he brought it all to life. THE GENESIS “I came across the Marwencol documentary in 2010. It speaks to the healing power of art and imagination. I think that’s the whole point of art, to make sense of emotionally complex things. Mark Hogancamp spoke about these elaborate stories that took place in…

When were you most starstruck? Meeting the Coens. I dreamed always of getting to work with them. Then I met them, and that felt enough. Then they gave me the role in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and my dreams came true in that regard. What’s the worst thing you’ve ever put in your mouth? Persimmon. It tastes great, and then your whole mouth suddenly goes dry. It’s radically unpleasant. Do you have a signature dish? I cook for the family every night I can. I have a really good rotation: pasta puttanesca, Cornish game hen, rack of lamb, jerk chicken. I’ve spent decades perfecting how to make a steak. Do you have a nickname? People call me TBN. My wife calls me Timmy. My real name is actually Tim…

★★★★ OUT 6 DECEMBER RATED TBC / 96 MINS DIRECTOR Gaspar Noé CAST Sofia Boutella, Romain Guillermic, Kiddy Smile, Claude Gajan Maull PLOT After a successful rehearsal, a recently established dance troupe celebrate their upcoming tour of France and the US. But someone has spiked the punch with a powerful hallucinogen, and the night turns into a violently bad trip. “GOD IS WITH us!” crows Sofia Boutella’s Selva, arm in the air like Liberty Leading The People, early in the new Gaspar Noé film. If she’s right — and subsequent events suggest otherwise — the relevant deity is a vengeful, mischievous type who torments a dance troupe for its own amusement. From the fuzzy, VHS-style opening and the overheard shot of a bloodied woman struggling through deep snow (the only…

★★★★ OUT 6 DEC / 133 MINS RATED MA15+ DIRECTOR Scott Cooper CAST Christian Bale, Rosamund Pike, Wes Studi, Jesse Plemons, Rory Cochrane PLOT New Mexico, 1892. Army captain Joe Blocker (Bale) is tasked with escorting a dying Native American chief (Studi) and his family to their home in Montana. It is a journey fraught with danger — from outside threats, and also from within the party itself. IN THE FIRST few minutes of Scott Cooper’s Western, a man is gunned down and scalped, before his two screaming daughters and swaddled infant are shot dead. All in front of their mother, Rosalie Quaid — superbly played by Rosamund Pike with a strange kind of brittle strength (at least after the mind-scrambling trauma ebbs a little). Things don’t get much easier…

★★★ OUT 6 DEC / 109 MINS RATED MA15+ DIRECTOR Julius Avery CAST Jovan Adepo, Wyatt Russell, Pilou Asbaek, Iain De Caestecker PLOT As the hours tick down to D-Day, four American soldiers are dropped behind enemy lines in France on a mission crucial to the success of the Normandy landings. But their objective is complicated when they stumble upon a monstrous Nazi experiment in a fortified church. J.J. ABRAMS’ MONSTER-sci-fi Cloverfield projects have always been streaked-through with horror: the 2008 original had its subway tunnel of spider-beasties, 10 Cloverfield Lane had an acid-soaked John Goodman, and this year’s Paradox was a bit of a nightmare full stop. And while the Bad Robot-produced Overlord turns out not to be a Cloverfield movie after all, despite the rumours, it also…

★★★★ NETFLIX / OUT NOW 142 MINS DIRECTOR Orson Welles CAST John Huston, Susan Strasberg, Peter Bogdanovich PLOT Returning from years of exile in Europe, feted filmmaker J.J. ‘Jake’ Hannaford (Huston) struggles to finish his innovative comeback film The Other Side Of The Wind. Then, during a riotous 70th birthday party thrown on a desert ranch, his life and art come to a head. ORSON WELLES’ LAST film The Other Side Of The Wind gives new meaning to the phrase “long-awaited’. Following 11 years in Europe, Welles, aged 55, returned to the US and shot the picture in dribs and drabs between 1970 and 1976. It languished for over 40 years in movie prison until a team of archivists and technicians, part funded by a stellar line-up of benefactors such…

BART LAYTON’S AMERICAN Animals, a retelling of a real-life heist in 2004, brilliantly blurs the lines between fiction and fact. Layton cast actors to play the would-be thieves, but also included to-camera testimonials from the real guys, now several years past their prison stints. Happily they were naturals: funny, and brutally honest. “There’s something about the connection you make with them,” says Layton. “You’re not suspending disbelief. Your engagement becomes deeper.” ERIC BORSUK The seeds of American Animals took a long time to sprout. Layton, a noted documentarian, first got in touch with the group in 2008, when they were still in federal prison, about turning their story into a film. “Early on it was much more of a documentary,” says Eric Borsuk, played in the film by Jared…

THERE’S NO PROOF that Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie finish each other’s sentences, but it wouldn’t come as a great surprise. The duo have worked together so closely over the last decade, during which time McQuarrie has graduated from one of the best writers around to one of the best directors, that over the course of our conversation with them they do finish each other’s sentences. Just like an old married couple. In Hollywood terms, 10 years is a lifetime, but their creative partnership isn’t slowing down any time soon. They’ve collaborated on nine films, including Edge Of Tomorrow and Jack Reacher, and are currently on Top Gun: Maverick, with Cruise top gunning again and McQuarrie top penning. But we’re here to talk about their crowning glory, the flat-out action…

Tonight, the premiere of her new film, The Wife, takes place in the courtyard of Somerset House in London. After months of blistering, scorching heat, today is the day that the skies are fat and grey with the threat of rain. And it’s an important day. One that’s been coming for five years — since Close first read the script (adapted from a book), ostensibly telling the story of a wife, that hadn’t even secured financing yet. She was intrigued by Joan, the wife of the title, who we meet as her husband, writer Joe Castleman (Jonathan Pryce), is awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. As they travel to Stockholm for the ceremony, their marriage begins to unravel under the weight of a secret they’ve shouldered between them for 40…

THAT THE WALKING Dead remains one of the biggest shows on television as it enters its ninth season is in no small part down to Greg Nicotero. The ‘N’ in effects giants KNB, he started off on the show as its zombie wizard, the man who could make an endless array of deadly undead. But his role, and influence, on the show has grown immeasurably. These days he’s one of its greatest creative forces, and main directors, often tasked with starting and ending seasons, and bidding a bloody farewell to key characters. So he’s perfectly placed to gauge the merits and demerits of each season. Note: this interview took place before both Season 9 began, and the tragic death of Scott Wilson, who played Hershel. SEASON…

LIKE MANY OF the best sports films, Field Of Dreams isn’t really about sport at all. Oh sure, it’s in love with sport — in this case baseball. The sights, the sounds, the smells. The way it can make people feel, the way it brings them together. But ultimately, it’s about something greater. Based on the 1982 novel Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella, Field Of Dreams is the story of Iowa-based farmer Ray Kinsella (Costner), who hears a voice while tending to his crops saying, “If you build it, he will come.” Convinced the maddeningly non-specific instruction is telling him to plough under acres of farmland to build a baseball diamond, he sets to work, putting his family’s livelihood in jeopardy in the process. The “he” who will come being…

IT’S A HOT July day in London. Jessie Buckley and Johnny Flynn, stars of this year’s acclaimed psychological-thriller Beast, are laughing and talking over each other warmly as the sun streams through the window. It’s a disturbing scene. After all, the last time we saw them together, when she was choking him to death down a dark country lane, her eyes turned black. And they couldn’t be further away from the tangled, raw, feral characters in Michael Pearce’s film — Flynn as murder-suspect Pascal, and Buckley as Moll, the woman who falls for him in the tiny Jersey town that keeps her small. As Buckley shows us a new tattoo inspired by Pascal’s Viking symbols in the film, the two of them help us to unpick the beasts within... How…