Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2019 i Empire Australasia

IF YOU KNOW anything about Sam Mendes’ 1917, you’ll know that it’s a World War I drama told in real time in a one-take deal. What you might not realise is that after seven films as a director, 1917 marks the very first time Mendes has written a screenplay. “Being in the writers’ room for so long with two Bond movies [Skyfall and Spectre] made me more confident about my ability to write something from scratch,” he begins. “At a certain point, I felt, ‘Why am I sitting around waiting to find something I want to direct. Why don’t I just make the thing myself from scratch?” There were other reasons that forced Mendes to boot up his laptop. The seeds of the screenplay came from his listening to the…

DEBORAH CHOW IS suddenly a huge deal. The first female director to take on Star Wars, she’s helming the upcoming Disney+ Obi-Wan live-action series, plus an episode of The Mandalorian. But the filmmaker has been working steadily for over a decade. THE HIGH COST OF LIVING (2010) Chow’s breakout indie melodrama film doesn’t necessarily mark an obvious trajectory towards a Star Wars TV show, but it does show her latent and versatile talent as a director. Starring Zach Braff, it won Best Canadian First Feature at the 2011 Toronto Film Festival. MR. ROBOT (2015) ‘EPS1.5_BR4VE-TRAVE1ER.ASF’ Chow’s direction on the Rami Malekstarring thriller series compounds a dark twist with the decision to simply let the camera linger with an agonising long take. It’s the kind of keen visual sensibility that would…

BACK TO THE SPIDER-VERSE  A sequel to the Oscar-winning animation was in the works. The beauty of the Spider-Verse is that, by definition, there are infinite possibilities. The witty post-credit sting with Oscar Isaac as Miguel O’Hara, aka Spider-Man 2099, suggests one character who could join Shameik Moore’s Miles Morales next time. But is it wrong to hope that he goes tripping through dimensions, and especially the cartoon world of Peter Porker’s Spider-Ham? VENOM 2 Andy Serkis’ sequel to the 2018 hit will begin filming this year, with Tom Hardy back as Eddie Brock and alter-ego, Michelle Williams returning as Anne Weying (plus reportedly She-Venom), and Woody Harrelson as Carnage, the film’s true menace. The big question is whether this Venom outing will link to the Tom Holland-led Spider-universe —…

MICHAEL WINTERBOTTOM IS used to filming Steve Coogan at fancy restaurants, for their TV comedy The Trip. But for their new collaboration, satirical drama Greed, he had to think a lot bigger. The film is a study of a venal high-street-fashion tycoon who tries to distract from the controversies swirling around him by throwing a massive party on a Greek island. That meant Winterbottom was faced with mounting a convincingly luxurious shindig. “When a retail billionaire throws a party, they spend more on the party than we spent on the whole film,” he laughs. Here’s how he went about it. THE THEME Sir Richard ‘Greedy’ MacCreadie (Coogan) is not a subtle man. “The Great Gatsby meets Gladiator meets The Godfather” is his vision for the event, leaning heavily towards the…

WHERE? Longcross Studios, Surrey WHEN? 17 December 2018 WHY? Because after Hollywood hits (Aladdin) and misses (King Arthur), Guy Ritchie is back making cleverly constructed crime flicks. Formerly known as ‘Toff Guys’, then ‘Bush’, Ritchie calls The Gentlemen “an interesting sojourn through the highest and lowest echelons of English culture.” WHO’S IN IT? Charlie Hunnam, Matthew McConaughey, Michelle Dockery, Henry Golding, Jeremy Strong, Jason Wong, Colin Farrell — and Hugh Grant who, working against his tabloid-slaying, privacy-crusading image, plays an investigator working for a tabloid newspaper who’s digging up dirt on the crims. WHAT DID WE SEE? Today’s workload features some tasty confrontations in a garage run by Ros (Dockery), English wife of American drug lord Mickey Pearson (McConaughey) who grows marijuana under the grounds of country estates. Mickey is…

THE MEN... POPE BENEDICT ANTHONY HOPKINS “He is a scholar. He’s very old. He’s got the voice of a rather older man, and the vocal cords are a bit husky. So I imitated that. I’ve got a baritone voice — I can’t use that. Also, [Joseph Aloisius] Ratzinger’s [Pope Benedict’s birth name] got quite a distinctive German accent. I touch it on certain consonants. But I don’t make a hard edge. Jonathan’s got the major task. POPE FRANCIS JONATHAN PRYCE “The day [Pope Francis] was elected to the papacy, the internet was full of images of him and me, constantly compared. I don’t see it myself! But I took a great interest in him. His statements on the economy, on globalisation, on the environment — all the things you want…

Which character were you in your first school play? I played a banana in the first act and a tree in the second. My tree was fine, just sort of part of the crowd, but the banana was where I really got to show what I could do. What one thing do you do better than anyone else you know? Pack. Like a motherfucker. I’m Mary Poppins. I anticipate my family’s needs, so I know what they might want two days from now, even if they don’t. And I was great at Tetris as a child. There is no wasted space. I might be the world’s best packer. How much is a carton of milk? I’m going to say $5.49. That’s really expensive? Good. I want the cows to be…

OUT 1 JANUARY CERT TBC / 135 MINS DIRECTOR Greta Gerwig CAST Saoirse Ronan, Florence Pugh, Emma Watson, Timothée Chalamet, Laura Dern, Eliza Scanlen, Chris Cooper, James Norton, Louis Garrel, Meryl Streep, Bob Odenkirk PLOT Jo March (Ronan) is struggling to make it in 19th-century New York as a writer, when she’s called home to the bedside of sick sister Beth (Scanlen). Through flashbacks, we see how the pair grew up with sisters Meg (Watson) and Amy (Pugh). IF THERE WERE any remaining doubts that Greta Gerwig is a major talent in American cinema, put them to rest now. Her solo debut, Lady Bird , was a delight; this follow-up adaptation of an American classic takes an overly familiar story and makes it immediate and important and daring. In a…

OUT NOW CERT PG / 103 MINS DIRECTOR Paul Feig CAST Emilia Clarke, Henry Golding, Emma Thompson, Michelle Yeoh, Lydia Leonard PLOT Kate (Clarke) is a damaged, sloppy elf, working in an all-year-round Christmas shop in London’s Covent Garden. After a chance meeting, handsome stranger and part-time cycle courier Tom (Golding) seeks to help Kate find the joy in not just Christmas, but life itself, while she struggles under the weight of family estrangement and past illness. FROM THE OPENING minutes of Last Christmas , it’s clear that Kate (Clarke) — or Katerina, as her traditional mother from the former Yugoslavia calls her — is a mess. Not just a mess. But a hot mess. And every trope that term carries is delivered with a wallop: she has casual sex…

1 RAMONA TAKES THE STAGE Lorene Scafaria: That was the most nervous I’ve been during the entire shoot. In the script originally, I didn’t know what the capabilities were of whoever was going to be Ramona so it just says, “Ramona does one final flourish.” Then Jennifer came aboard and threw herself into it. My DP, Todd Banhazl, and I didn’t see the dance until two weeks before we shot. It took a minute to get our jaws off the ground. Once we did, we thought, “Okay, how do we shoot this like the stunt that it is? And how do we shoot it like the live event that it is?” We were thinking of Raging Bull, and wanted to give her those boxer-entering-the-ring vibes. We basically applied the sense…

IT WASN'T THE MOUSTACHE THAT BOTHERED HIM MOST Nor the straightened, dyed hair, pasted down over his forehead. Nor the jackboots or the brown shirt. Nor even the sweat-inducing fat suit clinging beneath it all. When Taika Waititi first looked at himself in the mirror as Adolf Hitler, the thing that really made him uncomfortable was the swastika band wrapped around his left arm. “It’s so bright and in your face,” he grimaces. “It’s just a horrible thing to look at.” Today, late September in Hollywood, Waititi’s hair is back to its springy, grey-flecked self, and he’s stretched out on a couch wriggling his toes in a pair of odd houndstooth socks. Unlike, say, Charlie Chaplin, who lampooned der Führer in 1940’s The Great Dictator , Waititi couldn’t look any…

IF YOU CAN make a good Christmas movie, you’re pretty much set for life. The popular ones — It’s A Wonderful Life, Elf, Home Alone, Love Actually — go into rotation indefinitely, cramming TV schedules and Secret Santa shopping lists every December. Paul Feig’s Last Christmas has a pretty solid shot of making that list. With a script by Emma Thompson and Bryony Kimmings, Last Christmas takes, somewhat randomly, the songs of George Michael as inspiration (the title is, of course, lifted from the Wham! Christmas hit). Emilia Clarke plays Kate, a young woman who works in a Christmas shop all year round. She’s surrounded by joy, but following a major illness — last Christmas — she’s lost her own faith in the world. Then a very handsome stranger, played…

BEFORE SUNRISE (1995) IN OCTOBER 1989, 29-year-old Richard Linklater entered a toy shop in Philadelphia and met Amy Lehrhaupt serving behind the counter. The pair sparked and spent the evening walking and talking around the city — and then went their separate ways. The night inspired Before Sunrise (1995), starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy as US slacker Jesse and French student Celine, who meet on a train bound for Paris, get off at Vienna and fall in love before our eyes. Marked by a unique collaboration between director and actors, who shaped the script through controlled improv, the film birthed the greatest romance in modern movies, spawning two unlikely sequels, Before Sunset (2004) and Before Midnight (2013), at neat nine-year intervals. As the three films bow on Criterion UK,…

Schindler’s List SCHINDLER’S LIST’S girl in the red coat is Steven Spielberg at his most powerful: as German industrialist Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) and his mistress Ingrid (Béatrice Macola) survey the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto from a hill on horseback, a girl (Oliwia Dabrowska) in a bright red coat walks blithely through the carnage, ignored by the Nazi soldiers and seemingly oblivious to the violence around her. It’s the film’s master image, a grace-note of colour in a black-and-white film, a moment of light in a world of darkness. Spielberg’s decision to make Schindler’s List in black-and-white became a battle. Universal chairman Tom Pollock implored the filmmaker to shoot his three-hour dive into Holocaust history on colour negative stock so a colour version could be made for the then…

Sleuth Chosen by RIAN JOHNSON RIAN JOHNSON: “There’s a scene where Michael Caine and Laurence Olivier are dancing around the fact that Caine is having an affair with Olivier’s wife. And they’re doing this while playing billiards. It’s the most beautifully staged scene, a little bit of perfection with two of the greatest actors in the world.” INT. BILLIARDS ROOM — DAY Over a game of billiards, Andrew Wyke (Olivier) and Milo Tindle (Caine) are talking about Milo’s affair with Wyke’s wife. Wyke’s mistress, Tea, also comes up. MILO: Are you going to marry her? WYKE: Oh no no no, I just want to live with her. MILO: So, what’s stopping you? WYKE: Basically, the firm of Prurient and Pry Ltd whom you and Marguerite have seen fit to employ.…

DID YOU FORGET? Dear Empire, I enjoyed your 2020 preview issue. But I have a bone to pick – how could you not mention Blade Runner anywhere in the entire issue? The film was set in November 2019 for chrissakes! Huge missed opportunity by you guys. PHIL, SUBIACO, WA You’re right, Phil, an absolute shocker on our part. We were too wrapped up in NEXT YEAR to think about what was happening right now. RIGHT IN THE ED! What an intriguing insight Ed Norton’s editorial was in the previous issue. An inside look into the creative process of a man at the top of his game is a unique experience and I would love more of this type of article. One penned by Harmony Korine would be my dream choice…

PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE, director Céline Sciamma’s 18th century-set queer romance, which stunned critics at Cannes this year and won both the Queer Palm and Best Screenplay awards, is not a film of many words. Instead, it’s a forbidden love story between two women that lives and dies by stolen glances. “The women’s characters in the film are oppressed by the borders that society closes in on them,” says Noémie Merlant, who plays Marianne. “But with our eyes, with the looks that we have in secret, there is life and desire.” Set on a desolate island in Brittany, the film charts the lesbian affair between Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), a wealthy young woman headed into an arranged marriage, and Marianne, an artist hired to paint her portrait in secret…

Why was it important for this trio to come back to Jurassic? I’ve been really protective of these characters. Some might argue too protective. In the first film, I wanted to focus on creating new heroes. They weren’t modelled after Alan Grant [Neill], Ellie Sattler [Dern] or Ian Malcolm [Goldblum]. I wanted them to find their place in the larger story and earn the right to stand alongside the legacy characters. I feel like they’ve done that now. So when you see Owen Grady [Chris Pratt] alongside Alan Grant, hopefully that will be a bit more meaningful. How long ago did you know they would be part of the story? [Regular Trevorrow co-writer] Derek Connolly and I took a road trip a couple of weeks after Jurassic World came out.…

AFTER NEARLY A decade working in Hollywood with Snowpiercer and Okja, Bong Joon-ho came back to his native South Korea for Parasite, his seventh film. A darkly funny thriller about a poor family who con their way into a rich family’s house (with unexpected consequences), its themes are both very Korean and extremely relatable to pretty much anyone. This, Bong says, is deliberate. “I think this is a very universal story about the era of capitalism that we live in today,” the director, who originally wrote the script as a play, tells Empire. “There are elements in the film that are specific to Korea — for example, the house the protagonists live in is a very eerie and unique residential structure we have in Korea. But international audiences can grasp…

THE LAST TIME we saw an English-language Grudge film was 2009, more than 20 MCU films ago. It’s not been for lack of trying — a new instalment has been in development since 2011 — but it finally arrives courtesy of Nicolas Pesce, whose debut film, The Eyes Of My Mother, convinced producer Sam Raimi that he had the right stuff to go back to the wrong house. Andrea Riseborough leads the cast as a single mother investigating a suburban home that seems to doom all who enter it to death; Demián Bichir, John Cho, Betty Gilpin, Lin Shaye and Jacki Weaver fill out the cast around her. Expect things going bump in the night. And the day. Non-stop, really. THE GRUDGE IS IN CINEMAS FROM 30 JANUARY 2020…

HEARTBREAK COMES IN two distinct forms in Trey Edward Shults’ sprawling, sensitive Florida-set family drama Waves. The film, a surprise hit at Toronto film festival, focuses on a suburban African-American family, and is split between the perspectives of the two children, Tyler (Kelvin Harrison Jr) and his sister Emily (Taylor Russell). Halfway through, the film makes the bold choice to completely upend its structure, switching from Tyler’s viewpoint to Emily’s when tragedy hits. His love story with his girlfriend Alexis (Alexa Demie) gives way to hers with her boyfriend Luke (Lucas Hedges). “We knew the structure would be polarising,” says Shults (whose last film was the apocalyptic thriller It Comes At Night) “but we just had to go for it”. The filmmaker, who describes it as his most autobiographical film,…

OUT NOW CERT MA15+ / 99 MINS DIRECTOR Brian Kirk CAST Chadwick Boseman, Sienna Miller, J.K. Simmons, Stephan James, Taylor Kitsch PLOT When two criminals’ raid on a restaurant leaves several NYPD cops dead at the scene, detective Andre Davis (Boseman) orders Manhattan to be put on lockdown. He has until 5am to hunt them down — but can he capture them alive, when another senior officer (Simmons) is baying for blood? THERE ARE THREE things to know about 21 Bridges . One: it does not star Jeff or Beau Bridges (talk about missing an open goal). Two: it was originally called ‘17 Bridges’, after the number of water-crossings connecting Manhattan to elsewhere, until somebody realised mid-shoot that they’d missed a bunch. Three: it’s the kind of high-concept, low-VFX, grown-up…

OUT NOW CERT MA15+ / 151 MINS DIRECTOR Mike Flanagan CAST Ewan McGregor, Kyliegh Curran, Rebecca Ferguson, Alexandra Essoe PLOT Decades after his ordeal at the Overlook Hotel, Dan Torrance (McGregor) is a hospital orderly who uses his psychic gifts to help the dying pass on. But then a more powerful young girl, Abra Stone (Curran), makes contact with him — and in doing so attracts the attention of a vampire group who will stop at nothing to hunt Abra down... PERHAPS IT’S APT that Doctor Sleep is a movie about dealing with the ghosts of the past, because it has a couple of doozies of its own to contend with. As, despite the title, Mike Flanagan’s movie is not a remake of the 2002 Goran Višnjić psycho-thriller, but instead…

OUT NOW EPISODES VIEWED 10/10 SHOWRUNNER Peter Morgan CAST Olivia Colman, Tobias Menzies, Helena Bonham Carter PLOT It’s 1964, and Britain has a new left-wing Prime Minister in Harold Wilson. Over the next decade, the country will see miners’ strikes, the moon landings and the arrival of David Bowie. It’s all changing a bit quickly for the Queen, who is struggling to see where her family fits. THINGS ARE CHANGING in Buckingham Palace, and the country it’s fenced off from, in Season 3 of The Crown . For starters, everyone looks different. The Queen, Prince Philip and Princess Margaret are now played by Olivia Colman, Tobias Menzies and Helena Bonham Carter. All fabulous, of course, which will be a surprise to nobody. The changes are more than cosmetic. Where the…

HOW THE HELL DO YOU END STAR WARS? After eight core films, 42 years and a single story that has shaped the childhoods of three generations, placing a worthy capstone on something so colossal is no trivial task. For J.J. Abrams, concluding the franchise he’d worshipped since childhood was never going to be a case of simply placing a full stop, tipping his hat and waving goodbye. So long, and thanks for all the Sith. Abrams’ has been a task more daunting by far: to create one great film that wraps up three films, while being a worthy climax to nine films, which just happen to make up the most famous series in history. How do you tackle a proposition of such magnitude? The answer, it turned out, was simpler…

IT WAS SUPPOSED to be a small film. Some vindictive seagulls and a mermaid aside, it was primarily two men in a lighthouse, toiling, squabbling, drinking, mentally unravelling. After the success of his debut film The Witch , director Robert Eggers was juggling ideas for a follow-up and threw this into the mix: a cheaper, contained little drama. Or so he thought. Nothing about this startling slice of lunacy was small, at all. And nothing was easy. “It was a little bit more challenging than I expected,” says Eggers, meeting Empire in London. “I knew that it was going to be challenging, and I also knew that it was going to be more challenging than I could understand. And it was even a little bit more challenging than that.” He…

David Fincher didn’t think Fight Club was violent enough. At least, not until he started showing it to people. “They were alternately horrified and titillated,” he tells Empire . “Depending on which side of the hallway you stopped after the screening, you were either getting, ‘I was really not expecting this and I was taken with it,’ or, ‘Oh my God, what have you done ?’” A lot of critics took the latter view. The gleefully acerbic story of an office drone (Edward Norton’s Narrator) inspired by Arctic-cool anarchist Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) to feel through fighting, it smacked eminent noses out of joint. Legendary US critic Roger Ebert called it “the most frankly and cheerfully fascist big-star movie since Death Wish”. The Evening Standard’s Alexander Walker labelled it as…

“I’M AN ACCIDENTAL trilogist,” laughs Asif Kapadia. “Well, I’m an accidental documentary filmmaker!” There’s truth in that. When Kapadia, the director of fiction feature films such as The Warrior and Far North , turned his hand to documentaries with 2010’s Senna , the story of the life and death of the great Formula 1 driver Ayrton Senna, “it was a one-off as far as I was concerned.” But the universe had other plans and now, almost a decade later, Kapadia finds himself the director of two more documentaries — Amy , the story of the tragic life of Amy Winehouse, which won him an Oscar; and now Diego Maradona , which focuses on a brief period in the life of the most controversial, and arguably best, footballer of all time,…

Keanu Reeves movies Chris: When did we first meet Keanu Reeves? Beth: A VHS of Much Ado About Nothing . I would go so far as to say that this was an early crush for old Beth Webb. Nothing says lust like Keanu Reeves in leather trousers. Chris: You’ve come in talking like a Cornish fisherman. Beth: My dad was hoping to get me onto the harder stuff early on, but my mum swept in with Much Ado and I’ve been in love ever since. Chris: There’s an argument to be made that in Much Ado he’s the handsomest man ever. Amon: He’s not even the most handsome man in that movie. Denzel Washington is in that movie. Chris: I thought you were talking about Robert Sean Leonard. Helen: Everybody…

AFTER A SOLID decade working in visual effects on Star Wars video games and the Avengers films, Dave Wilson marks his directorial debut with Bloodshot. Vin Diesel plays Ray Garrison, a Marine who is murdered and resurrected and subsequently transformed into a living, breathing killing machine by a team of scientists who inject some nanobots into his bloodstream. It’s a rare non-Fast & Furious entry for Diesel, who returns to that franchise later next year. But as our exclusive image shows, there will still be cars here. Phew. BLOODSHOT IS IN CINEMAS FROM 5 MARCH 2020…

CHARLIE MARRIAGE STORY There’s a lot to Driver’s heartbreaking take on a dad in Noah Baumbach’s tale of a relationship unravelling. In such a poignant film, his face is a rollercoaster of emotion — from “intense” to “very intense”. DANIEL JONES THE REPORT Practicality is key for Driver’s sharp-eyed detective in this anti-torture drama. A few jazzy ties throw in some surprises, but in a tough procedural like this, it’s the face you need to keep an eye on, ranging between “intense” and “really quite intense”. KYLO REN STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER The cape, the scar, the mask: Kylo is a tough cookie. And gives Adam his biggest acting challenge yet: veering between “intense”, “slightly intense” and “really bloody intense, actually”.…

IT’S A QUIRKY ANIMATED FANTASY ABOUT A DISMEMBERED HAND SEEKING ANSWERS “Backers were sceptical when I told them the premise,” Clapin laughs. IT’S THE ADDAMS FAMILY’S ‘THING’ MEETS AMÉLIE Based on Happy Hand by Amélie’s Guillaume Laurent, it’s also a love story. Clapin says, “I wanted his [the owner of the hand] meeting with [librarian] Gabrielle to be a tiny spark in the dark that would inspire him to take control of his destiny.” THE HAND HAS A MIND OF ITS OWN “It went in an otherworldly direction that I wasn’t expecting,” says Clapin. “To get the story just right, we needed to go weirder.” I LOST MY BODY IS OUT NOW ON NETFLIX…

BACK IN THE 1980s, ‘The Amazing Johnathan’ — real name John Edward Szeles — was a staple of late-night TV, whose subversive mix of magic and stand-up comedy made him an icon among comedy nerds. Skip forward to 2014 and Szeles revealed on stage that, due to a heart condition, he had a year to live, and would be embarking on a farewell tour. First-time film director Ben Berman and his crew were there to follow him for the journey. “I thought I was gathering footage for a short film,” Berman recalls, “about a magician confronting his mortality with humour and seriousness. And then, right before we were going on tour, he let me know about the other crew.” It soon emerges that the Oscar-winning team behind Man On Wire…

“CRITICAL HIT” IS not a phrase you often associate with Adam Sandler these days. But that’s exactly what Uncut Gems, the latest film from New York filmmakers the Safdie brothers, offers. Sandler’s turn as grimy gambler Howard Ratner has earned him the best reviews of his career. Here, the brothers explain their process. THE LEADING MAN While Sandler might seem a strange choice for a dark thriller, he was the obvious choice for his directors. “Look at his early comedies,” says Benny. “The absurdity of the situations he faces — you believe these things are happening to him.” Sandler’s intensity was matched off-screen, too, says Josh: “[We] have yet to come across somebody who matches our work ethic and output. He trumped us. It was intense.” THE SETTING The film…

OUT TBC JANUARY 2020 CERT M / 126 MINS DIRECTOR Alex Gibney CAST Mikhail Khodorkovsky PLOT A study of oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky who, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, earned a fortune in banking and oil production, becoming Russia’s wealthiest man. Yet, speaking out against Putin’s regime, he was arrested, accused of fraud and tax evasion and sentenced to 13 years in prison. “HE WANTS TO be Jesus Christ but he has a past,” says a commentator about oil oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and it stands beautifully as a high-concept encapsulation of the dramatic appeal of Citizen K . Alex Gibney’s enthralling documentary has a central figure most dramas would kill for: a shady baron who duped his way to a fortune yet, following a 13-year stretch after being imprisoned…

OUT NOW CERT PG / 103 MINS DIRECTORS Jennifer Lee, Chris Buck CAST Idina Menzel, Kristen Bell, Josh Gad, Jonathan Groff PLOT The kingdom of Arendelle is at peace. Kristoff (Groff) is planning a proposal to Anna (Bell), snowman Olaf (Gad) is loving life in the sun, and Elsa (Menzel) is content in her role as queen — until she hears a mysterious song calling her out into the wilderness. AS A RULE, animated Disney princess movies don’t get theatrical sequels — they end, by definition, with ‘happily ever after’. But then, 2013’s Frozen went far beyond your average animated Disney princess movie, a $1.2 billion box office behemoth that subverted fairy-tale notions of true love, with an earworm soundtrack that sent frazzled parents loopy on endless repeat listens. So…

1 GOTHAM 1981 Ben Travis: Every screen adaptation of the Bat-verse gets the Gotham it deserves — and Joker’s take on the city of crime is perhaps the bleakest. The realism conjured by Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy remains, but where those films reflected the urban fears of the 2000s — the threat of grand terrorist plots and the spectre of white-collar crime on Wall Street amid a cold, gleaming cityscape — Joker dials things back to the urban decay of late-’70s/early-’80s New York. The streets, appropriately considering the level of Scorsese homage on display, feel mean, populated by petty criminals who skulk in dark, graffiti-strewn alleys, the city’s sidewalks piled high with rubbish and playing host to seedy porn cinemas. More than any other Batman film, Joker’s Gotham is…

HERMIT • LIFE OF BRIAN This is what you get when, living alone, you’re left to your own devices and let it all go. We’ve all been there. The juniper bush hermit’s beard is long enough to cover his modesty. Not that he cares. TERL • BATTLEFIELD EARTH Good heavens above, would you look at that. The not-quite dreadlocks cascade from every section of the Psychlo’s face. Some of it is head hair. Some of it is beard hair. All of it is silly. ASH • ARMY OF DARKNESS He slept too long! Having swallowed one too many drops of his time-travel potion, dunderheaded deadite-killer Ash wakes up a few centuries too late, in dire need of a shave, a manicure and a bath. DAVY JONES • PIRATES OF THE…

GRETA GERWIG THERE WERE MANY THRILLING ASPECTS of making Little Women — the chance to bring to life a story and characters that were so close to me that they almost felt as if they belonged to my own autobiography, the challenge of stretching myself on a larger cinematic canvas, to build the world of the 1800s, to create a big environment for this big story to unfold in, to intellectually play with the intersection of women, art and money, which is always what I’ve thought the book was truly about, to finally write an ending that Louisa May Alcott might have enjoyed. But all of these paled in comparison to the ultimate thrill of working with the genius cast that agreed to come lend their talents to this project.…

What is your biggest pet peeve on set? MATT WILLIAMS I think it’s hard for people to understand how little, incidental conversation just takes away from focus. Everybody just goes into pause mode instead of record mode. Also, when you shoot a lot of takes, as people do stuff repetitively, you see in your peripheral vision people go to their iPhones. Might be the iPhone on set — biggest pet peeve. If you could remake any film in history, which would it be? PAUL LEACH I never thought about it. I mean, there are some films I feel like, “That was a great two-thirds of an idea and it didn’t stick the landing.” Some of those films I’ve actually made. Whatever happened to your Arthur C. Clarke project Rendezvous With…

Toy Story 4 FOLLOWING THE BASICALLY perfect Toy Story trilogy was, for director Josh Cooley, “terrifying”. He had so much to lose and little to gain by dipping back into the toy box. But, miraculously, in Toy Story 4 he created a new instalment that extended the journey of Buzz and Woody in a totally new direction. As Woody rediscovers his long-lost love, Bo Peep, he learns that there is life beyond simply being a child’s plaything. Cooley explains how he tackled a near-impossible task. ONCE UPON A TIME Working out where to begin was one of the biggest decisions of the production. Cooley and his team went through several iterations before deciding to start with the day Bo left Andy’s toys. “We had versions where we started way back…

Assault On Precinct 13 IT’S LIEUTENANT ETHAN Bishop’s first day on the job. He’s been reassigned to supervise the Anderson precinct, even though they’re closing it down and there’s nothing left to do there but stare at the packing crates. His superior Captain Collins asks him, “You want to be a hero your first night out?” Bishop does. Collins counters: “There are no heroes anymore, just men who follow orders.” During one night of ultra-violence, Bishop proves him wrong. Assault On Precinct 13 is John Carpenter’s second feature-length film, which he wrote, directed, scored, and edited himself. It’s a claustrophobic pulp thriller and modern Western that blends Rio Bravo , Night Of The Living Dead and exploitation films with hints of home-invasion horror and a heavy dose of paranoia. For…

APOLLO 11 OUT 4 DECEMBER / CERT G / 93 MINS Originally released to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing back in July, this stellar documentary offers a new perspective on a historical milestone, turning a half-century-old story we all know into a masterpiece of nail-biting, knuckle-whitening tension. Weaving together hitherto unseen 70mm footage of Apollo 11’s eight-day mission, editor/director Todd Douglas Miller places us inside the drama, without recourse to talking heads or narration. Instead he deftly cuts between Messrs Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins going where no man had gone before, the chain-smoking scientists and engineers at Mission Control, with their slide rules and antiquated computers, and a world united in anxiety and awe. From lift-off to splashdown, it’s a marvel of endeavour and emotion,…