Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2020 i Empire Australasia

ONE OF MY favourite things to do is sit in the dark watching a movie. Whether I am with loved ones, a group of friends or just all on my lonesome (but with the tasty company of some Cadbury Dairy Milk Giant Buttons), going to the cinema has been the closest thing I have to a religion in my life. Sometimes people use the word escapism as a negative term, but there is real pleasure in being transported when the lights go down. The ongoing pandemic on this planet has made that experience a little darker than I care for, as silver-screen projector lights the world over are being switched off. Before this crisis I could, like many, appreciate the convenience of watching movies at home but, deep down for…

WITH THE MUMMY’S lukewarm reception in 2017, Universal’s Dark Universe, a new era of interlinked films resurrecting the studio’s classic monsters, crashed and burned. But then Leigh Whannell and Blumhouse rode into town, unleashing a fresh take on The Invisible Man perfectly suited to 2020. Lean, mean and cost-effective, this $7 million, relatively lo-fi exercise in terror was a one-off — but its success may well see those old monsters out for blood again. “It was always something that I’d wanted to do,” says producer Jason Blum, of getting to play in the Universal Monsters toybox. “I loved monsters as a kid. I was Frankenstein for Halloween when I was eight years old.” Talking to Empire on the phone from his home, working remotely during the Covid-19 pandemic, he says…

THE SAYING GOES: if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. For his first film as a producer, Stephen Graham saw this as a challenge. Graham and his wife Hannah Walters’ newly formed Matriarch Productions is opening its account with Boiling Point, a drama about a chef on the verge of a breakdown, set and filmed, literally, in a kitchen. To turn the gas up higher, it’s improvised, filmed as one shot with dozens of speaking roles, and is also a debut feature for director Phil Barantini. It begs the question: why? “I saw a lot of chefs struggling with their mental health,” says Barantini, who once worked in the restaurant industry, when Empire visits rehearsals on location at Jones & Sons in East London. “I want…

WHERE? Longcross Studios, Surrey WHEN? 12 April, 2018 WHY? Because Kenneth Branagh is adapting Eoin Colfer’s tooled-up fantasy novel into a spared-no-expense Disney blockbuster. Think Harry Potter, if Harry Potter was a cunning, Irish criminal mastermind who kidnapped a fairy to extort its gold. So, not actually much like Harry Potter. WHAT DID YOU SEE? A whacking great mansion — Fowl Manor has been built in its entirety, inside and out. Empire pores over the shelves of Fowl Library, stocked with 12,000 books (from Simone de Beauvoir to Nick Hornby), peeps into the master suite (gold bedsheets, pure luxury), walks the portrait gallery decked with paintings of Fowls past, and wanders around Artemis’ bedroom. 3D printer? Check. LEGO Death Star? Check. Raspberry Pi computer? Check. it’s the ultimate geek-kid haven.…

STEVE TREVOR WONDER WOMAN 1984 The nature of exactly how Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) made a miraculous recovery from his plane exploding remains unclear. Theories range from possible (parachute!) to confusing (time travel!) to absurd (he’s powered by a magic fanny pack!). RAY GARRISON BLOODSHOT After finding fame in the resurrection-friendly Fast & Furious franchise, it’s fitting that Vin Diesel now plays a man resurrected by nanobots — who live their life a quarter millimetre at a time. WILDEN LIGHTFOOT ONWARD Elven brothers Ian (Tom Holland) and Barley (Chris Pratt) use a spell to bring back their dead dad — the latest, after Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2, in the ‘Chris Pratt Has Daddy Issues’ series.…

IN 1994, SPIKE JONZE and the Beastie Boys made one of the best music videos of all time for their track Sabotage. Twenty-four years later, they teamed up again for a stage show, to promote Beastie Boys Book, which Jonze has now expanded into a doco about the trio’s 30-year career, from their rowdy New York adolescence to the death of founding member Adam ‘MCA’ Yauch in 2012. They ended as a band that day, but Beastie Boys Story is a typically eccentric and irreverent reminder of their wild ride. The surviving Boys — Michael ‘Mike D’ Diamond and Adam ‘Ad-Rock’ Horovitz — hopped on a Zoom call with Empire to explain how it came about, and where this fits in their somewhat chequered cinematic canon. So, how did the…

OUT NOW (NETFLIX) CERT R / 94 MINS DIRECTOR Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia CAST Iván Massagué, Antonia San Juan, Zorion Eguileor PLOT Every day, a platform covered in a sumptuous feast is presented to a prison tower with innumerable floors. The inmates of each floor must eat what they like, then leave the rest for the floors below. Greed and selfishness are rife, but one new inmate hopes that he can change that, one way or another. AN ACCIDENTALLY PERFECT parable for current times, The Platform has an ingeniously simple premise: Goreng (Iván Massagué) wakes up in a concrete room. In the centre of the floor and ceiling are large, rectangular holes, through which he can see other identical rooms stretching above and below across innumerable storeys. Each room contains two people.…

OUT NOW (DIGITAL) / CERT R / 115 MINS DIRECTOR Rob Lambert CAST Zachary Ray Sherman, Sally Kirkland, Timothy V. Murphy There are plenty of similarities between Joker and Cuck, which follows Ronnie (Zachary Ray Sherman, effective and committed), an angry, racist loner who cares for (and steals from) his sick mother. But while there’s something to be said for an unflinchingly honest depiction of an alt-righter’s ugly worldview, Rob Lambert’s debut fails to illuminate anything new about those who embrace hate. It doesn’t help that Ronnie is shown to be an overt bigot from the outset; this gives his slide into more explicit xenophobia and violence more than a hint of inevitability, while ensuring zero audience sympathy. Additionally, a strange mid-movie pivot involving Ronnie’s neighbour (Monique Parent) and her…

OUT NOW (DISNEY+) / CERT PG / 107 MINS DIRECTOR Julia Hart CAST Grace VanderWaal, Graham Verchere, Giancarlo Esposito A teen movie for the younger Disney+ audience, Stargirl follows Leo (Graham Verchere), an unconfident high schooler who finds love in a quirky new student (former reality show star Grace VanderWaal). With her rainbow knitwear and ukulele, bohemian Stargirl brings out a new side in Leo, until her outsider attitudes lead her to be shunned, causing him doubts. Herein lies Stargirl’s central issue. At a time where well-observed movies like Eighth Grade and Love, Simon are empowering the misfit, Stargirl fails to keep up. VanderWaal fans may enjoy the musical numbers, but nothing else exists in the film that hasn’t been done better by Stargirl’s more progressive coming-of-age peers.…

OUT NOW (APPLE TV+) CERT M / 120 MINS DIRECTOR George Nolfi CAST Samuel L. Jackson, Nicholas Hoult, Anthony Mackie, Nia Long PLOT In 1960s America, two African-American businessmen — Bernard Garrett (Mackie) and Joe Morris (Jackson) — see an opportunity to buy a bank in Garrett’s deeply racist Texan hometown. The catch: to succeed, they need to use a dimwitted white guy (Hoult) as their front. Complications soon arise, with potentially serious implications… ON PAPER, THE BANKER was a banker. As a film highlighting a little-known but very relevant true story about two Black men who used their smarts to outwit the American banking system, starring two bona-fide, Marvel-approved leading men, it seemed tailor-made to make a splash during Oscar season. And when Apple picked up the movie as…

1 CECILIA’S ESCAPE Chris Hewitt: Now this is how you start in medias res. Not with a bang, but a whisper, the suspense ratcheting up to unbearable levels as Elisabeth Moss’s Cecilia makes her meticulously planned escape, in the middle of the night, from her abusive partner, Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen). Soundtracked just by the crashing of nearby waves (and the occasional whirring of cameras to suggest the presence of one of Griffin’s fancy-dan invisible suits), this wordless sequence, tight with tension, tells us everything we need to know about Cecilia’s situation. And without even properly introducing us to Griffin, who is asleep the entire time, it renders us terrified of the threat he holds. Leigh Whannell: I wanted to keep the character of Adrian mysterious. One of my…

JUST A FEW weeks before the cameras were set to roll on Gladiator, director Ridley Scott and his leading man Russell Crowe sat down for a pre-production meeting with high-powered Hollywood executives. The clock was ticking and there was trouble ahead. Released in May 2000 to a fanfare of critical acclaim, the film would, later, dominate the Oscars: nominated for 12, it won five, including Best Picture and Best Actor. But before taking its place in cinematic history, there was a long, arduous road to navigate. It would involve changing up everything, from the lead character’s name (originally Narcissus) to major story beats. It would, tragically, include the demise of Oliver Reed (cast as grizzled gladiator trainer Proximo), who died from a heart attack in a pub on a day…

ELLIOTT’S FIRST KISS To illustrate the idea that Elliott (Henry Thomas) increasingly feels E.T.’s feelings, Spielberg delivers a moment of low comedy combined with high romance. An increasingly sozzled E.T. watches John Ford’s The Quiet Man on TV. Just as John Wayne pulls Maureen O’Hara into his arms for a passionate clinch, so Elliott, hopped up on Dutch courage by E.T.’s vicarious boozing, does the same with a class mate (Erika Eleniak, who later found fame in Baywatch)— only Elliott is standing on another kid to reach the taller girl’s lips. A simple idea beautifully executed. PETER PAN It’s one of E.T.’s most tender moments: E.T. eavesdropping on Mary (Dee Wallace) reading Gertie (Drew Barrymore) a bedtime story, Peter Pan (don’t forget Spielberg went on to make Hook), while simultaneously…

THE THING THAT is often forgotten about The Shawshank Redemption is just how long we have to wait for the redemption. Like It’s A Wonderful Life and, more recently, Paddington 2, Shawshank takes a deep dive into one character’s misery, putting them through the wringer, making them crawl through a river of shit. In the case of Shawshank, that river isn’t metaphorical, but when Tim Robbins’ Andy Dufresne emerges on the other side, it transforms the entire movie. The last 30 minutes or so (including credits) of Frank Darabont’s Stephen King adaptation, in which we discover how Andy escaped, how the evil Warden Norton (Bob Gunton) receives judgement and how Morgan Freeman’s Red reunites with his old friend, is among the most uplifting in cinema. Time for a little deep…

ALAN FURST, THE fabulous novelist of World War II occupations and spies, sets his books in the war years before the Nazi defeat at Stalingrad because, up until then, the German army seemed invincible and Nazi Germany was sure to rule one side of the world. The Japanese Empire, with its sudden attack of Pearl Harbor, other bases and civilian populations across the Pacific, had conquered the territory it called The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Furst’s characters, then, have but three choices on how to conduct their lives — as heroes, as villains or as cowards. Now, that is a harsh sentence to pass onto the kids and old folks who were alive then, but it does capture the personal dramas that I find so relentlessly fascinating, human and…

COUNT YOUR LUCKY stars that you weren’t hanging around the Empire office late last year. Because, for a couple of weeks in the run-up to Christmas, Benoit Blanc was everywhere. Every conversation, every bit of throwaway badinage had a Blanc reference or quote in there somewhere. And you couldn’t move for impressions; bad take-offs of Daniel Craig drawling, “I suspect foul play,” or “I have eliminated no suspects,” or, most fun of all to say, “I am a passive observer of the truth.” All of which echoed the rest of the world’s reaction to the master detective created by Rian Johnson for his wonderful whodunnit, Knives Out. Johnson made no bones, from the off, about his desire to create a cinematic case-cracker to rival Poirot, and in the shape of…

DAME JUDI DENCH: WORE A SILLY HAT What happens when you stick a national treasure in a dog-shaped hat with ears that spring up on command? Via her daughter’s Twitter account, the behatted Dench sent a resilient message to fans: “Just keep laughing. That’s all we can do.” SETH ROGEN: GOT STONED AND WATCHED CATS “WHAT IS JELLICLE?!,!?”, a high Rogen asked of his Twitter followers during his running commentary, which also saw him baffled by Jason Derulo’s feet and Judi Dench’s jacket. He later gave up and watched 90 Day Fiancé instead. SHARON STONE: TRIED HER HAND AT PAINT-BY-NUMBERS One small upside to self-isolation was that the world got a peek into what the Hollywood elite might do for downtime. For Stone, this was a spot of arts and…

FILM 1: SHAME (1968) Max von Sydow came to the cinema in the stock company of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman — in The Seventh Seal, their first collaboration, von Sydow is the raw-faced knight playing chess with Death. They made 11 films together in total; the best when teamed with co-star Liv Ullmann — Hour Of The Wolf, The Passion Of Anna and most notably Shame, in which he is a failed musician in a troubled marriage, struggling on a farm as war causes the breakdown of society. Filmed and released while the war in Vietnam raged, it reflected the real-life conflict through themes of shame and moral decline. FILM 2: THE EXORCIST (1973) When Hollywood needed a Christ for the all-star The Greatest Story Ever…

OUT NOW (DISNEY+) CERT PG / 103 MINS DIRECTOR Charlie Bean CAST Tessa Thompson (voice), Justin Theroux (voice), Kiersey Clemons, Thomas Mann, Sam Elliott (voice) PLOT Pampered pooch Lady (Thompson) thinks she’s got it made, at least until her family grows by one. Replaced in her owners’ affections by the new baby, she accidentally ends up on the street in the company of crafty, scruffy Tramp (Theroux), and discovers there’s more to life than home comforts. AS PART OF Disney’s swathe of animated-to-live-action adaptations, Lady And The Tramp was chosen to skip cinemas and instead ported straight to the company’s streaming service Disney+, to form part of the line-up of original films and shows bolstering the hefty back catalogue — though we doubt people were rushing to sign up to…

OUT NOW (NETFLIX) CERT MA15+ / 94 MINS DIRECTORS Mike Ahern, Enda Loughman CAST Maeve Higgins, Barry Ward, Will Forte PLOT Rural Ireland. Sweet-hearted Rose (Higgins) is a paranormal investigator-turned-driving instructor who blames herself for the death of her dad. When local widower Martin (Ward) asks for help dealing with the abusive ghost of his deceased wife, she soon finds herself in the middle of a Satanic plot involving a washed-up American pop star (Forte). THERE ARE MORE examples of exorcisms in horror-movie history than you can shake a projectile-vomiting infant at. Ex-wife-orcisms, on the other hand, are rarer in the horror canon. Extra Ordinary, a devilishly Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace-esque romcom courtesy of first-time writer-directors Mike Ahern and Enda Loughman, delights in exactly this kind of invention. The film centres…

OUT NOW (DISNEY+) / CERT PG / 99 MINS DIRECTOR Tom McCarthy CAST Winslow Fegley, Ophelia Lovibond, Wallace Shawn, Craig Robinson Tom McCarthy follows 2015’s Spotlight with this Disney+ original, based on the series of Stephan Pastis novels. It’s a sweet, surreal dive into the life of an oddball 11-year-old (Winslow Fegley), wrapped in the trappings of classic film noir as Timmy runs his own ‘detective agency’ from his mum’s attic, with the aid of imaginary polar bear Total. That Timmy’s reality is clearly the result of past trauma is only lightly touched upon; the film instead choosing to embrace his quirky antics without peering too hard beneath the surface. The result is a frothy fantasy that, thanks to its ursine antics and a healthy dose of magical realism, makes…

1 IAN LIGHTFOOT Ian Freer: There aren’t many cinematic heroes called Ian to root for (Jurassic Park’s Dr Ian Malcolm, maybe?) so I was particularly delighted Onward’s protagonist shares my name. As the movie starts, elf Ian Lightfoot (Tom Holland, channelling Peter Parker) is a gawky, diffident kid, afraid to ask the other children to come to his birthday party and overwhelmed by his loud, brash brother, Barley (Chris Pratt). Ian’s father died before he was born (Barley knew him a little bit) and director Dan Scanlon (with co-writers Jason Headley and Keith Bunin) does an economic-but-telling job of sketching the absence in his life, while covertly suggesting the importance Barley plays without showing his hand. Ben Travis: One of Onward’s most touching scenes comes early on — a…

TIM BURTON’S BIG Fish is a guaranteed weep-fest. Adapted from Daniel Wallace’s 1998 novel about a father-son reconciliation, it ends with Albert Finney’s story-spinner Edward Bloom in his dying moments, asking his son Will (Billy Crudup) to tell him how it all ends. Later, at his funeral, reality is served, with Will meeting characters from Edward’s life and realising that his father’s tales weren’t quite as tall as he’d first thought. Love floods the sadness. Writer John August seeded his relationship with his own dad into the screenplay, and Burton, who had lost his father a couple of years before filming, has called the movie a personal catharsis. For many others, it cuts just as deep. This film elicits an intense emotional response from people. What’s that like for you?…

NO DOUBT ABOUT it: Requiem For A Dream is painful. The film is flooded with hurt. It hurts to watch it. It hurt to make it. Which is as it should be — Requiem For A Dream was forged from pain. Hubert Selby Jr, author of the 1978 novel, knew pain intimately. At 18 he was hospitalised with tuberculosis. He suffered a collapsed lung and got hepatitis. Six months before writing Requiem For A Dream he contracted pneumonia. All of this fed into the book, a compassionate exploration of addiction, and a feverish nightmare if ever there was one. Darren Aronofsky wanted his film to feel the same. He succeeded, turning Selby Jr’s richly painted interior worlds into a soul-scarring assault. Aronofsky was 30 when he shot Requiem For A…

CONCEPTION Neal Scanlan [creature and special effects creative supervisor]: Babu was one of J.J.’s [Abrams, director] early ideas. Ivan Manzella [creature concept designer]: [J.J.] says, “I’ve got this character, he’s nine inches tall, I want him kind of cute.” For two weeks I drew loads of aliens. I sketched a helmet from the side with a little hood. J.J. was like, “That’s kind of cool.” I made a seven-inch maquette, and they loved it. Scanlan: J.J. and Michelle Rejwan [producer] looked at it and went, “Oh that’s adorable.” Manzella: I didn’t make him cute, I made him ugly-cute, like a pug. My inspiration was Egg Shen from Big Trouble In Little China — he had one eye slightly closed. I said, “His eye has to be mechanically limited so he’s…

EMPIRE RANKED VERTIGO as one of the 100 Greatest Movies Ever Made, and an unmentionable film magazine even anointed it the best ever made. For any film fan, never having seen Hitchcock’s masterpiece would be inexcusable, but as a screenwriter and erstwhile proud San Franciscan, I should probably surrender both my WGA card and BART pass. To make matters worse, Vertigo even features one of my favourite character actors of all time — the Golden Gate Bridge itself. So how did this happen? It began with a case of mistaken identity. For much of my life I believed I’d seen Vertigo, and any time it came up I would declare it overrated. When I recently did this, then proceeded to badmouth Sean Connery’s performance, my friend laughed. And that was…

Chris: So, Best Picture Oscar-winners. The best place to start is with an incontrovertible statement: these are the best pictures of the years in which they were eligible. Olly: No question. The best movies ever. That’s how it works. Dan: That’s why Citizen Kane’s not on this list. Or Pulp Fiction. Chris: Or The Shawshank Redemption. Or Paddington 2. Or Ant-Man And The Wasp. Olly: Are any of those as good as Green Book? No. No, they’re not. Chris: They do get it wrong. And sometimes for an entire decade at a time. Helen: Hello, the ’80s. Chris: Forrest Gump is a fine film, well-made… Dan: If Forrest Gump were a person, I’d kick it in the balls. Chris: Forrest Gump is a person, Dan. Yes, Forrest Gump won Best…

THE BOYS: SEASON 1 OUT 6 MAY / CERT R / 472 MINS Taking a simple but effective premise (what if the Justice League were arseholes?), this adaptation of the Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson comic takes a walk on the seedier side of superheroism. Jack Quaid stars as Hughie Campbell, a man whose girlfriend is inadvertently liquified before his eyes by high-speed hero A-Train (Jessie T. Usher). Traumatised, he teams up with foul-mouthed former spook Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) to expose super-team The Seven for the hedonistic, corrupt and occasionally homicidal monsters they really are. It’s an effective skewering of the superhero genre that takes a heavy swing at both celebrity culture and corporate corruption. Gleefully violent and blackly funny, The Boys has a stand-out turn from Antony Starr…

STEVEN SODERBERGH: “I’m a huge Joseph Losey fan and the three movies that he made with Harold Pinter were gigantic influences on me. The Servant is something I go back to again and again. This is a really long take. You can tell when he set this thing up and shot it that he didn’t go like, ‘Oh, I had this crazy elaborate shot in mind and I want you guys to hit all these marks.’ No, they rehearsed the scene and he let them go where they needed to go. And he figured out how to pull this off in one shot. It’s not just a gimmick, because of what the scene is about and the tension between these two characters that continues to escalate. It’s just my favourite…

TOTALLY BOGUS BEHAVIOUR When I saw the preview of Bill & Ted Face The Music (Empire, March 2020) I laughed out loud. I mean REALLY loud. These guys made their first Bill & Ted movie in 1989. Decades went by and while Keanu Reeves added many blockbusters to his resume, poor Alex Winters did very little. When I saw the article with Keanu’s face right in the middle of the page and poor Alex standing to the side with only a third of his face showing, I laughed my head off. I bet Mr Winters felt really proud finally being pictured in a movie magazine after nearly 30 years. Well done, Empire. It’s great to see you have a sense of humour. FABIAN, HINCHINBROOK, NSW We’re glad you found it…

IN A SHORT period of time, the movie landscape around the world, including Australia, became unrecognisable. In late March, the Federal Government ordered cinemas in this country to close their doors. Going to the movies, at least for a while, would have to take place outside of an actual cinema. For the studios, the response to this crisis has been simple: delay their films’ releases until all of this blows over. But some have taken the near-unprecedented step of making high-profile movies available to download, weeks or even days after their theatrical releases. Onward, Birds Of Prey, The Hunt, The Invisible Man and Bloodshot moved their digital release dates forward. Meanwhile, Easter holiday family fare Trolls World Tour just abandoned its theatrical release, moving, remarkably, to digital-only. Industry expert and…

QUESTS OF YORE: BARLEY’S EDITION The Dungeons & Dragons-alike role-playing game that guided the guileless Barley (Chris Pratt) through Onward’s adventure is soon to be available as a real-life tabletop experience. One player takes the role of the ‘Quest Master’ who runs the show, the others become intrepid heroes heading off on their own jaunts in Pixar’s fantasy world of Clovendell. Seems aimed at younger players, but is attractively shot through with top Pixar production values in its miniature figures and components. BACK TO THE FUTURE: DICE THROUGH TIME With Biff buggering up the timeline, it’s up to two-to-four players to work together to travel to the past (and future) and tidy up his mess, grabbing scattered items and restoring order to Hill Valley’s chronology. All this is done through…

IN CASTING-NEWS terms, the recent report that Clone Wars veteran Ahsoka Tano would be appearing — in the flesh! — in The Mandalorian Season 2 could hardly be more exciting for long-time Star Wars fans. Over the years, we have come to know this former Padawan of the Togruta race extremely well, watching her evolve from an overly perky, slightly irksome 14-year-old apprentice to a pivotal, shady figure in the Rebel Alliance, as seen in Clone Wars sequel show Rebels. It’s hard to think of another female Star Wars character who’s been given such a detailed and developed arc. We received a hint that she’d be moving over from the series’ animated strand, Saw Gerrera-style, when she was heard (courtesy of voice actor Ashley Eckstein) among the disembodied Jedi aiding…

ROCKY REFERENCES! In Creed II, the main face-off came between Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan) and Viktor Drago (Florian Munteanu), the son of Papa Creed’s in-the-ring killer, Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren). Seeing Drago go toe-to-toe with Rocky — this time both as trainers to the respective opponents — was an immense pleasure. It would be equally thrilling to see some other familiar faces from the Rocky franchise pop up in the latest sequel. In other words: where’s Mr T? SOCIAL COMMENTARY! The best films about boxing are about other things, too: especially masculinity, class and racial tension. Don’t forget that Adonis is the son of the Muhammad Ali-esque Apollo. In Creed 3, it’d be great to see some awareness of the legacy of the boxing film looking askance at the…

WHEN QUENTIN DUPIEUX — the French DJ known as ‘Mr Oizo’-turned-film director — started writing his new movie, the pitch was simple. “It was supposed to be a stupid comedy about a fat guy buying small jackets,” he says. “That was it.” Anyone who sees Deerskin, his very funny and bizarre portrait of a man having a fashionable and violent mid-life crisis, will know that, in fact, it’s much more than that. In the film, Jean Dujardin plays divorcé Georges, whose life is upended when he buys a new jacket — a garish, fringed, mud-brown deerskin jacket, to be precise. His love for the garment turns into a dark obsession, to the extent that Georges decides every other jacket in the world must be destroyed — and the people wearing…

OUT NOW (APPLE TV+, FETCH, GOOGLE PLAY, YOUTUBE) CERT MA15+ / 81 MINS DIRECTOR Robbie Studsor CAST Liam Graham, Richard Mellick This ambitious local film aims to be many things – a crime noir, a perverse thriller, a quirky indie – but never quite succeeds. Six years after a hit-and-run incident killed his wife and left him a cripple, ex-policeman Edmond (Mellick) is confronted in his house by Max (Graham), who was behind the wheel of the deadly car. The young man seeks forgiveness but, instead, Edmond forces Max to be part of a sinister plan that will bring the former cop fame and redemption...unless it goes pear-shaped. Which it inevitably does. Filmed in Perth, Burning Kiss is lovely to look at, has nice visual effects...and there’s enough nudity to…

OUT NOW (YOUTUBE, RENT OR BUY) CERT MA15+ / 102 MINS DIRECTOR Safy Nebbou CAST Juliette Binoche, Nicole Garcia, François Civil, Guillaume Gouix PLOT To cyber-stalk her younger ex (Gouix), middle-aged Claire (Binoche) creates a much younger online alter ego, Clara — who soon attracts the attention of her former lover’s roommate, Alex (Civil). THE STORY OF a fifty-something divorced mother (Juliette Binoche) who lives another life online as a twenty-something, Who You Think I Am could take a number of approaches to its promising premise. It could be a comedy drama where a mature woman finds her true self through the prism of new-fangled social media. Or it could be a psychological thriller played out from the rarely observed point of view of the perp rather than the victim.…

OUT TBA CERT TBC / 107 MINS DIRECTOR Pablo Larraín CAST Mariana Di Girolamo, Gael García Bernal PLOT Following the short-lived adoption of a young boy which ended traumatically, Ema (Di Girolamo) and Gaston (Bernal) come to a crossroads in their relationship. She’s a dancer, he’s a choreographer, and through the movement in their professional lives, their personal ones begin to unravel. THERE ARE DENSE, delicious layers of poetry and physical language to sink your teeth into in Pablo Larraín’s incendiary drama Ema (his first since Jackie), in which the limits of human desire are stretched and tested. The somewhat simple premise — a couple suffering through the aftermath of a loss — unravels with serious intensity, with gripping performances and a labyrinthian story that just keeps unfolding. As the…

OUT NOW (DISNEY+) EPISODES VIEWED 12 OF 12 DIRECTORS Nic Stacey, Karen McGann, Simon Lloyd CAST Jeff Goldblum PLOT Goldblum digs into the history and appeal of a variety of topics, including pools, jewellery, coffee and gaming, meeting people who are enthusiastic and channelling his own curiosity about the world around him. Along the way, he tries such varied practices as making his own ice-cream and eating grilled crickets. WHEN YOU LOOK at the list of subjects that Jeff Goldblum is tackling in this first series of his eponymous documentary series for Disney+, you might wonder whether he came up with them simply by pointing at objects around his home. Sneakers! Ice-cream! Denim! But the series’ choices were made by show producer National Geographic, though he’s happy to wander around…

Oh, everyone knew the 2017 film was coming, but nobody expected the scale of its success. It had been budgeted as, and written about, like just another superhero movie, a nice-to-have while we got ready for the real business of Justice League. Despite the long history and popularity of the character, and the warm reaction to Gal Gadot’s first appearance in the role in Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice, when it finally arrived, the film still had the air of a sleeper hit. “We were underdogs,” Gadot tells Empire now. “It was the first time for all of us to shoot a tentpole movie by ourselves, and I don’t think anybody thought it was going to perform the way it performed.” That was to the tune of $800 million…

NATIONAL ANTHEMS SUCK. They’re tub-thumping, militaristic and usually include naff pleas to some god or king or, in the case of the UK, both. But every so often you get one that’s so genuinely rousing that it inspires passion far beyond its homeland. That’s the case for La Marseillaise, the French national anthem, and it rings out around the world at least partly due to Casablanca’s most uplifting scene. It starts, as so many shouting matches do, with a knees-up down the pub. A few visiting Nazis are living it large, and have a sing-song to Die Wacht am Rhein (‘The Watch On The Rhine’), an old German patriotic number. They’re so loud and obnoxious (the latter probably goes without saying) that Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) and Czech resistance leader…

“OH MY GOSH, I love this song!” yells The Lego Movie’s everyman hero, Emmet, at his toy car stereo. Popstars Tegan And Sara have come on the radio, singing the hook of the film’s Oscar-nominated anthem Everything Is Awesome. It’s a relentlessly bouncy, synth-powered ode to teamwork, positivity and, as the title suggests, all things awesome, be it brand-new pants, possums or a book of Greek antiquities. This platinum-selling pop song was the brainseed of Shawn Patterson (with later contributions from The Lonely Island and JoLi), who drew on a series of surprising influences to create one of the most cheerful movie theme tunes in years. How did you get involved? It started when I got a call from [The Lego Movie animation director] Chris McKay, who I’d worked with…

IF YOU’RE TRYING to gauge the impact of the Catalina Wine Mixer — the fictional corporate event that provides the backdrop for the triumphant climax of Adam McKay and Will Ferrell’s Step Brothers — this is all you need to know: it’s no longer a fictional event. It’s the fuckin’ Catalina Wine Mixer, and it’s as real as a drum solo performed in the middle of an opera song. There can be no greater tribute to the strangely euphoric sequence, in which Ferrell’s Brennan Huff and John C. Reilly’s Dale Doback, estranged stepbrothers and butts of a never-ending joke, step up to the plate (and the mic, and the drumkit), and rock the hell out of it. Empire caught up with McKay for a deep dive into the scene. Where…

THE EARLY CAREER OF HOLLYWOOD’S most famous costume designer gave no hint of superstardom. Edith Head would go on to become an icon not just of her profession, winning eight Academy Awards for her work — still a record for the category — but of Hollywood itself, memorialised in pop culture thanks to her trademark blunt black bob, dark round glasses and stern expression. But she cut her teeth on two near-disasters that might have ended her career before it truly began. In 1924, shortly after joining Paramount as a sketch artist, she was asked to design the ladies’ gowns for the infamous ‘Candy Ball’ scene in Cecil B. DeMille’s extravagant 1924 picture The Golden Bed. It was her first major assignment, and told the story of a rich girl…

STANLEY KUBRICK WAS never one to go easy on his actors. But few had it so hard as Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange. He received a real on-stage beating, suffering a blood clot under one rib; he had his head dunked in filthy water for a terrifyingly long time; and, most notoriously, underwent ocular torture for the film’s harrowing aversion therapy scene. At one point during the shoot, McDowell recalled, a crew member leaned over to him and said, “Hey Malcs, I think he’s trying to kill you.” It wasn’t, as far as the then-28-year-old actor could tell, meant as a joke. To be fair to Kubrick, filming the pivotal ‘Ludovico Technique’ sequence, in which unrepentant delinquent Alex DeLarge is tethered to a chair and forced to watch atrocities…