Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2020 i Empire Australasia

SOME BOOKS STICK with you. That’s how it was for Denis Villeneuve, director of Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, when he read Frank Herbert’s Dune. The young Quebecois read the novel — devoured it, really — when he was “maybe 13 or 14” and was instantly captivated by its epic scope, intricately crafted civilisation and Machiavellian plot. But most of all he connected to its young hero, not much older than Villeneuve himself at the time, and that connection lingered. So when he was asked what he would adapt for the screen if money were no object, “My answer was definitely Dune.” That meant recreating the harsh desert planet of Arrakis, nicknamed ‘Dune’, where our hero Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) and his parents, Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac) and Lady…

1 QUARANTINE FILM CLUBS Cinemas might be gone, for now. But the crackle of excitement and sticky-carpeted sense of occasion is being found elsewhere. Movie fans have found inventive new ways to recreate the experience at home, with fancy dress (Mob wives for GoodFellas, big trenchcoats for Casablanca) and book club-style post-film chats proving popular. The Netflix Party browser extension, meanwhile, has given groups of people the chance to watch and pause films simultaneously, with a chat box on the side giving the experience a jolt of retro MSN Messenger-esque energy. 2 ONLINE FILMMAKER Q&AS Many filmmaker-driven events and seasons have simply moved online — the BFI has recruited the likes of Tilda Swinton and Mark Cousins to be guest curators for their BFI Player service, while UK…

IT WILL HAVE SPACE SHARKS While preparing a lamb dinner for his family, Taika Waititi dropped a big revelation on Instagram: the upcoming Thor sequel will have space sharks. Actual sharks. In space. “If you look up space sharks, you’ll get an idea of what the film is going to be,” he teased. The ‘Starsharks’, as they are also known, appear frequently in Jason Aaron‘s run of Thor comics, orbiting a planet and feeding on corpses discarded by the evil Gorr, the God Butcher. At one point, Thor even rides a shark through space. Sharknado’s got nothing on this. IT WILL GO DEEP ON KORG Waititi promised an expanded role for Korg, the Kronan sidekick character he plays in mo-cap. “We do touch on Korg’s culture, and a few cultural…

WE HAVEN’T SEEN Joseph Gordon-Levitt in a while. Save for a couple of Rian Johnson voice cameos (listen carefully to the telenova heard early on in Knives Out), the actor was last seen on screen in 2016’s Snowden. “I took a couple of years off acting when I had kids,” he explains to Empire. Ready to get back to work, he wanted something to get his teeth into. “The temptation when you take time off is you have to, like, attend to your career and get the momentum back and blah, blah, blah... I was just looking for something that I knew would be a creative challenge.” He found that challenge in 7500, a deeply stressful hijacking drama set entirely in the cockpit of a plane beset by knife-wielding terrorists.…

MARK RUFFALO I KNOW THIS MUCH IS TRUE Having spent a decade as two sides of the same Hulk, Mark Ruffalo plays opposite Mark Ruffalo as identical twins with a troubled past in this upcoming series from HBO. Remains to be seen if it doubles his chances of an Emmy. PAUL RUDD LIVING WITH YOURSELF Playing both average company man Miles Elliot and the smarter, more charming Miles Elliot clone who replaces him, the Netflix series has Paul Rudd experience potentially the strangest midlife crisis ever. LETITIA WRIGHT THE SILENT TWINS Letitia Wright is set to play the real-life co-dependent mute twin sisters known as ‘The Silent Twins’. As fun as two Wrights might sound, the real story is closer to Dead Ringers than Marvel mirth — don’t expect Wakandan…

ACTUALLY MAKE A HELLRAISER MOVIE Most of the sequels have seemed like unrelated horror scripts, rewritten to include the franchise poster boy and the puzzle box. Hellraiser: Judgment, for instance, is a Seven rip-off with added chains and Pinhead. So avoid that. GET THE CENOBITES RIGHT Director Clive Barker’s infernal messengers, the Cenobites, mix fetish fashion statements with poetic strangeness. They’re transcendental and transgressive. Don’t just turn them into demons with snappy patter. Even if you can’t persuade him to submit to head-piercing again, at least hire Doug Bradley to do the voice. … AND THE HUMANS, TOO In Hellraiser, the human characters carry the story (about cruelty within a family) and the Cenobites loiter on the fringes. Come up with characters and a situation as compelling as those Barker…

OUT NOW (NETFLIX) CERT MA15+ / 117 MINS DIRECTOR Sam Hargrave CAST Chris Hemsworth, Rudhraksh Jaiswal, Randeep Hooda, Golshifteh Farahani PLOT When Ovi (Rudhraksh Jaiswal), the teenage son of a ruthless Indian drug lord, is kidnapped by a rival, Australian mercenary Tyler Rake (Chris Hemsworth) is deployed to Dhaka with orders to retrieve the boy, and shoot pretty much anyone who gets in his way. But as he gets in deeper, Rake finds that he’s prepared to risk everything to get Ovi out alive. THE FIRST THING you should know about Extraction is that, yes, Chris Hemsworth’s character in this relentless actioner is called Tyler Rake and, yes, in a triumph for nominative determinism, he actually kills a couple of bad guys with a rake. So we should probably thank…

OUT NOW (PRIME VIDEO)/ CERT TBA / 87 MINS DIRECTOR Marc Meyers CAST Alexandra Daddario, Maddie Hasson, Amy Forsyth, Johnny Knoxville In the midst of a late-’80s satanic cult killing spree, three metalheads (Alexandra Daddario, Maddie Hasson, Amy Forsyth) drive through the Midwest to see a metal band, meet three keen male rockers (Keann Johnson, Logan Miller, Austin Swift) and head back to an empty pad for an after-gig party. For half an hour this film is a well-played teen comedy, as we hang out with likeable kids spouting believable dialogue and playing Never Have I Ever... games. It then plays its horror hand, which changes the game but paints itself into a corner as slasher antics (involving a hedge trimmer and Belinda Carlisle’s Heaven Is A Place On Earth)…

OUT NOW (NETFLIX) / CERT MA15+ / 88 MINS DIRECTOR Michael Dowse CAST Ed Helms, Terrence Little Gardenhigh, Taraji P. Henson A throwback to ’80s cop movies, Coffee & Kareem pitches inept white cop Coffee (Ed Helms) with streetwise Black kid Kareem (Terrence Little Gardenhigh), who go on the lam after the latter hires a gangster (RonReaco Lee) to scare Coffee off from dating his mum (Taraji P. Henson). But the plot — a dull tread through drug deals and bent cops — is an excuse for Coffee and Kareem to bicker in witless exchanges shot through with homophobia before — of course — learning to love each other. It has its moments (a chase around a roundabout), but the result is a surprisingly slow, tonally uneven ’80s-style high-concept thriller…

OUT NOW (NETFLIX) / EPISODES VIEWED 6 OF 6 DIRECTOR Ricky Gervais CAST Ricky Gervais, Penelope Wilton, Ashley Jensen, Kerry Godliman Finding surprising laughs in a man who wants to kill himself after his wife dies of cancer, After Life Season 1 ended with Ricky Gervais’ local journo, Tony, finding some kind of peace. This means the second season lacks the clearly defined arc of the first, with Tony still lamenting Lisa (Kerry Godliman, affecting in flashback), paying forward to those who helped him (Penelope Wilton) and pursuing his relationship with carer Emma (Ashley Jensen), all set against his newspaper folding. The attempts to push PC boundaries are hit and miss, but the mix of empathy, generosity, big emotional beats (watch out for episode five) and salty laughs chime with…

OUT NOW (NETFLIX) EPISODES VIEWED 8 OF 8 DIRECTORS Damien Chazelle, Houda Benyamina, Laïla Marrakchi, Alan Poul CAST André Holland, Joanna Kulig, Amandla Stenberg, Tahar Rahim, Leïla Bekhti PLOT American jazz musician Elliot Udo (Holland) runs The Eddy, a struggling nightclub in Paris. When tragedy suddenly strikes, Elliot and his house band find themselves embroiled in the city’s seedy underworld — complicated by the arrival of Elliot’s teenage daughter, Julie (Stenberg). JAZZ IS “CONFLICT, and it’s compromise, and it’s very, very exciting,” declares Ryan Gosling in Damien Chazelle’s La La Land. There’s plenty of conflict and compromise in The Eddy (which sees Chazelle as executive producer and lead director), but excitement takes a different form; this is less ‘Another Day Of Sun’, more ‘Another Night Of Misery’. Where the Oscar-winning…

(AMY HECKERLING, 1982) “It came out when I was almost done with high school. I remember our yearbook had a photo and they’d changed the sign at the movie theatre so it said ‘Fast Times At Syosset High’. It’s maybe the most inspirational movie for me because, on some level, I thought, ‘That’s my sense of humour, that’s the world I live in.’ It had broad humour, but was also very grounded; it was a tone that I related to. I remember there was a kid who worked at the movie theatre, a nerdy kid [Mark ‘Rat’ Ratner, played by Brian Backer], and I’m sure everything I’ve ever done is based on seeing that type of person portrayed so well in film.” (PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON, 2002) “It’s not that hard…

MY LOVE AFFAIR with cinema began, I suppose you could say, with ‘The End’. In 1979, as a deeply impressionable 15-year-old, I went to see Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam War masterpiece Apocalypse Now, in glorious 70mm. From the opening explosion, soundtracked by The Doors’ epic lament, to “the horror” of its climax, I was totally absorbed. It was a huge epiphany. For the first time, I realised the power of cinema: how it can give you such a completely visceral, emotional experience. For the two (or more) hours that you’re watching a movie, you’re taken out of the moment into a space that can be mind-expanding and health-giving. It’s almost medicinal. Of course, the way films are made has changed hugely since Coppola toiled in the jungles of the Philippines…

BETH WEBB ON LITTLE WOMEN UGC SWINDON, 1994 There’s a magical feeling that comes with seeing your first on-screen namesake. At six years old, a visit to the cinema with my dad was a major event, so seeing Claire Danes’ Beth as part of this loving female ensemble caused uncontainable excitement. Then Beth got sick. Already stung by Amy’s betrayal of Jo, my nerves were shot, and when Beth died I was so inconsolable that I had to be carried out of the cinema. Through the tears, though, for a wonderful moment I felt like I was part of this stubborn band of sisters. I still do. DAN FREER ON E.T EMPIRE LEICESTER SQUARE, 1982 As a 15-year-old Steven Spielberg nerd, I had never waited for anything longer (or so…

IT SOUNDED, AT first, a bit incongruous. The bloke from The Office — and The Rock — made a film about an East Anglian wrestler? Yet Stephen Merchant’s Fighting With My Family has quickly become a for-all-ages favourite for its funny, warmhearted retelling of the true story of Paige (Florence Pugh), the Norwich-born wrestler who makes an improbable rise to the top of the WWE. The film’s climax, in which Paige makes her soul-stirring WWE debut by winning the Divas Championship, leaves few dry eyes in the house — but as Merchant explains, it wasn’t an easy journey to the screen. Why did you choose to end the film with this particular match? The hardship was always that it was artificial — a fake sport. How do you make people…

THERE’S SOMETHING OF It’s A Wonderful Life to Guiseppe Tornatore’s Oscar-winning Cinema Paradiso. As with Frank Capra’s film, we meet our hero, Salvatore ‘Toto’ Di Vita (Jacques Perrin), in adulthood as he receives bad news, and then see, through rose-tinted specs, the small-town childhood that shaped the man. Instead of an angel, Toto has a grumpy cinema projectionist, Philippe Noiret’s Alfredo — but he’s not quite as quick at his work as It’s A Wonderful Life’s Clarence. Far from gadding about the cosmos, Alfredo spends his days in a small Sicilian town of the late 1940s. He tends to the films of the titular cinema and edits out kisses or nudity at the behest of the local priest (Leopoldo Trieste) who deems them “pornography”. The childless Alfredo reluctantly takes the…

FOR A MOVIE presented in a single shot, Sam Mendes’ 1917 gets about a bit. His World War I epic follows two British soldiers (George MacKay’s Schofield and Dean-Charles Chapman’s Blake) on an epic quest to deliver crucial orders to stop an ill-fated attack. Along the way, they encounter obstacles at every turn. For the soldiers, their journey is haphazard and improvised, but for Mendes and his co-writer, Krysty Wilson-Cairns, it was meticulously planned, and every location they visit upon the way was there for a reason. Here, they talk us through the journey, step by step. THE BRITISH TRENCHES “Sam and I had always talked about the concept of nature, and what war does to nature,” says Wilson-Cairns. “And so we wanted to start with greenery and trees and…

IF YOU’D VENTURED onto the Borehamwood Studios set of 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1967 hoping to find Stanley Kubrick playing with rocket ships and astronauts, you’d have been justifiably surprised by what you found. A soundstage dressed like a parched stretch of African veldt, with rocks, spiny kokerboom trees and animal skeletons. Huge backdrops flickering with images of prehistoric-looking vistas, the travel-phobic Kubrick having pioneered cutting-edge techniques to effectively front-project photography of modern Namibia. And a troupe of mime artists, each swathed in black fur, their faces hidden by detailed prosthetic ape masks designed by make-up genius Stuart Freeborn. With all his impeccably researched, groundbreakingly captured future visions now in the can, Kubrick had, by this late point in the shoot, turned his attention to the film’s extended prologue,…

Chris: 1999 was a fantastic year for cinema. Everyone was on their A game. Helen: Let’s be honest. George Lucas was not on his A game. Chris: Let’s start with Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace, a movie Beth was old enough to see in cinemas. Helen: It’s not very good. Beth: My dad was reviewing films in 1999. He took me to Bristol to see it at a press screening. And I thought afterwards, “That must have been a terrible film,” just to see his crestfallen, solemn face. Helen: We had heard the bad word about it and how bad Jar Jar Binks was, and so I was braced for it being worse than it was. So I wasn’t absolutely appalled. There are good things about it.…

ADAM McKAY: “The scene in Lost In America where Albert Brooks goes to Garry Marshall and says, ‘Can I have my money back? I’ll turn it into an ad campaign for you.’ I think it’s the funniest scene I’ve ever seen in any comedy ever. I bow down.” INT. CASINO MANAGER’S OFFICE — NIGHT David (Brooks), desperate to recoup the savings his wife has gambled away, is talking to the casino manager (Marshall) of The Desert Inn. DAVID: Alright. I’m going to tell you this idea now and please be secretive, because if another hotel hears about this, they’ll take it. This is my business. As the boldest experiment in advertising history, you give us our money back. MANAGER: I beg your pardon? DAVID: Give us our money back. Think…

WHERE: Vancouver, Canada WHEN: 13 November 2018 WHY? To visit the set of the latest adaptation of Snowpiercer, the 1982 French graphic novel that became a cult 2013 Bong Joon-ho-directed film — and now an ambitious Netflix-backed TV series. It imagines a near-future world (just seven years from now), in which Earth has frozen over, with the only survivors living permanently on a rigidly hierarchical train that barrels, non-stop, around the globe. Talk about the commute from hell. WHAT DID YOU SEE? A trainspotter’s dream. The production dominates six soundstages at a Vancouver studio, each stage filled with different train carriages that are constantly being repurposed. The largest set has five 40-foot-long carriages stacked in a row, mounted on gimbals that mimic the movements of a real train. In the…

THE GRAPHIC NOVEL A story of two awkward loners, a mother and metal-obsessed teenage son, forced to unexpectedly spend a suburban summer together, Days Of The Bagnold Summer is based on the 2012 graphic novel of the same name by Joff Winterhart. But when Simon Bird first read it, he didn’t immediately see big-screen potential. “I didn’t go, ‘Oh my God, this is such an obvious film,’” he recalls. “Years later, when I started to think about making a feature, it just stayed with me — much more for the tone of it. Certainly not the plot. I mean, there’s no plot to it!” Bird describes Winterhart’s book as “basically perfect. The characters are so...well, I was going to say well-drawn. Pun unintended. But they are well-drawn.” THE SIGNIFICANT OTHER…

WHAT DOES A Hollywood director do while stuck in self-isolation with a bunch of equipment and a spooky corridor? The answer, for Shazam! director David F. Sandberg and his regular collaborator (and wife) Lotta Losten, was to make a lo-fi, high-concept mini-movie. Returning to their horror-short roots (Sandberg’s feature debut Lights Out originated that way), the pair made Shadowed — a three-minute scary movie with jump-scares, creeping dread and a closing jolt. It took a mere week or two of quarantine for their artistic instincts to kick in. “We’d talked about making another short for so long,” says Losten. “We just decided to start making something. It’s a good time to make things for everybody right now.” Once Sandberg devised a chilling concept (“I had this idea of something invisible…

FOR MANY DIRECTORS, a failed film is something to be swept under the carpet and moved on from as swiftly as possible. But Richard Kelly just cannot let Southland Tales go. His ambitious, lengthy, psychedelic sci-fi follow-up to Donnie Darko infamously made a disastrous debut at the Cannes film festival in 2006, then was drastically re-edited and released in a shorter, budget-compromised form over a year later — only, sadly, to flop in cinemas. Tackling Hollywood, the military-industrial complex, space-time rifts, terrorism and “teen horniness”, it contained a lot to chew on, not least because Kelly envisioned it as the final three instalments of a six-chapter saga, whose first half was published in graphic-novel form. A saga which, he tells Empire, remains unfinished. “I will spend the rest of my…

OUT NOW (APPLE TV) CERT M / 119 MINS DIRECTOR Spike Jonze CAST Adam Horovitz, Michael Diamond, Adam Yauch PLOT In 2018 and 2019, the Beastie Boys’ surviving members, Adam Horovitz and Michael Diamond, went on a storytelling tour, leading audiences through the history of the band, and their extreme highs and lows. This is an edited version of the final Brooklyn show, filmed by long-time cohort Spike Jonze. THE BEASTIE BOYS, they once told us, have got more stories than J.D.’s got Salinger, a lyric that sounds like it might make sense, but doesn’t at all. The same can be said of the Beastie Boys — an almost impossible band, three white rappers who started off in punk, accidentally became frat superstars, then reinvented themselves as an uncategorisable hybrid…

OUT NOW (NETFLIX) CERT PG / 91 MINS DIRECTOR Alan Yang CAST Tzi Ma, Christine Ko, Lee Hong-Chi PLOT Grover (Ma) is an ageing man reflecting on his life between two cultures. He grew up in Taiwan, working in a factory alongside his mother, and moved to the US with his new wife. Years later, he reconnects with his estranged daughter, his memories tinged with regret over a lost love. ALAN YANG’S DEBUT feature Tigertail is one man’s life story, beautifully played in fragments and careful observations. Things move gently, with details of environments and feelings taking precedence over strict chronology. The end result reveals the scars left by a life led in pursuit of a dream, but lived without always believing in the importance of everyday happiness. The narrative…

OUT 3 DECEMBER / CERT TBA / 85 MINS DIRECTOR Simon Bird CAST Monica Dolan, Earl Cave, Tamsin Greig, Rob Brydon After Metallica-loving teen Daniel (Earl Cave) is denied a visit to Florida for the school holidays, you expect Days Of The Bagnold Summer to be a coming-of-age story involving girls, high jinks and finding yourself. But, more Hal Ashby than John Hughes, Simon Bird’s film takes a gentler tack, as he creates a sensitive portrait of the relationship between Daniel and his 50+ mum Sue (Monica Dolan). Surprisingly, DOTBS gives as much emphasis to Sue’s sadness and frustrations as it does to Daniel’s desire to sing in a band and survive the embarrassment of shoe-shopping with his mum. It’s a small film, low on dramatic incident, but well-observed and…

OUT NOW (NETFLIX) EPISODES VIEWED 7 OF 7 SHOWRUNNERS Ryan Murphy, Ian Brennan CAST Darren Criss, David Corenswet, Jeremy Pope, Laura Harrier, Samara Weaving PLOT In late-1940s Hollywood, a disparate mix of wide-eyed aspiring movie stars, conniving agents, marginalised artists and the like strive for fame and recognition. Their paths cross during the production of a revolutionary new film, Meg. DRAWING FROM BOTH real life and fiction, Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s Hollywood offers a seductive premise for film fans, setting a cast of characters against the backdrop of the dream factory in the late 1940s. Its take on Old Hollywood (visually well-appointed, unnervingly clean) opens with Jack (David Corenswet), a young man with movie-star aspirations who moonlights as a sex worker. Many vivid characters are soon introduced, including the…

1 BESKAR James Dyer: When Mando agrees to take on a job tracking down The Child, he isn’t paid in credits, but rather in pristine ingots of dull, grey metal worth more than diamonds — beskar. Colloquially known as ‘Mandalorian steel’, beskar is the Star Wars universe’s answer to adamantium, a rare alloy that is traditionally used to forge Mandalorian armour. Once smelted and shaped, beskar can withstand a colossal amount of damage, keeping its occupant safe from heavy-duty blaster fire and even lightsaber blows (Jango Fett might still have a head if his armour had been forged from it). Due to that rather handy property, the Mandalorians were able to successfully take on the Jedi order, during a number of wars, and thanks to the immense value of…

LIKE JACK DAWSON handcuffed in a cabin in Titanic, Sarah Connor in Pescadero State Hospital in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, or Ellen Ripley in that water-lashed chamber of facehuggers in Aliens, James Cameron is currently in lockdown. His plans to do a further stint of filming for the Avatar sequels have been temporarily thwarted, and for now he remains at home in California. “We were about to shoot down in New Zealand, so that got pushed,” he tells Empire on the phone from Malibu. “We’re trying to get back to it as quick as we can.” However, like all three of those tenacious Cameron heroes, his iron resolve remains intact. He’s staying busy, staying positive, doing what he can. He still has the ability to do “a bit of editing”…

MUSICALS BRIM WITH joy. They’re not coy. They don’t need to be cool. They just have to unashamedly bring the emotion — and, of course, the singing. Sure, we might not all break into song at a moment’s notice in real life. But real life was always overrated. Damien Chazelle loves musicals. For him, they represent hope and romance, bringing us into something fantastical — the perfect genre for characters with big dreams. La La Land, his passion project for aeons, would draw from the classics — from The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg to Singin’ In The Rain — and just as those films did, he wanted his to have its own world, with its own songs. In the pre-Whiplash years, though, Hollywood was not biting. “The verdict was that this…

A FEW WEEKS AFTER Black Panther’s UK release in February 2018, there was an unseasonal March snowfall in London that left maybe three inches of snow on the ground. In at least one south-east London park, as this writer witnessed, kids hurled snowballs at each other, as is only right and proper. But that day they did something new. After each barrage, they crossed their arms across their chests and made fists, shouting, “Wakanda forever!” before pelting off in circles until the school-bell rang. It was a tiny moment, but it showed a shift in the zeitgeist, a transformation for a generation. These kids will grow up knowing that not all superheroes are white, aligning themselves with an imaginary country that’s free of the stain of colonialism or racism. They…

BRIGHTON UGC, 1991 Dave and I had bunked off art college to check out this new horror movie, which The Sun had predicted “was so scary it’d cause people to have heart attacks during its terrifying climax”. By the time of Buffalo Bill’s night-vision POV of Clarice stumbling around that basement, my pulse throbbed and my mind wandered: “Would I be one of them???” But I didn’t die and we strode out, elated, into the sunshine. No-one, including Dave, knew how close I’d brushed with the Grim Reaper. THE URGEL, BARCELONA, 1978 I was three years old and my parents took me to see Richard Donner’s Superman, in the largest screen in Barcelona. The instant Christopher Reeve took flight hit me in such a way my brain decided to keep…

AS WE FIND the titular cranky oceanographer (Bill Murray) in Wes Anderson’s fourth film (The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, to give it its full title), he has spent years on a revenge mission, hunting the jaguar shark that killed his friend Esteban. Over the past few months, a ragtag extended family has haphazardly formed around Steve, who has pissed them all off multiple times, including his long-lost son Ned (Owen Wilson), who, searching for the shark with Steve, dies in a plane crash. On the verge of finding the beast, Steve and the crew, in a tiny yellow submarine, descend into the deep, into a fantastical dreamscape, an underwater world of stop-motion wonder. Sigur Rós’ transcendent Starálfur kicks in and the jaguar shark (an eight-feet-long creature created by Henry…

TWISTS, BY AND large, aren’t meant to make the heart soar and the eyes moisten. They’re meant to punch you in the gut, pull the rug out from under your feet. But Planes, Trains & Automobiles is the glorious exception to this rule. Having bonded slowly across a hellish journey in which they suffered every indignity known to man, Steve Martin’s uptight exec, Neal Page, and John Candy’s exuberant shower-curtain-ring salesman, Del Griffith, have finally reached Chicago on Thanksgiving and, after an awkward hug, gone their separate ways. But then Neal, on the train home, begins to piece things together. He returns to the platform to find Del. Alone. No home to go to. The wife he often spoke of with tender affection, long dead. So, Neal does the decent…

THE FIRST PERSON we see in Richard Linklater’s Slacker is, well, Richard Linklater. As a character credited only as ‘Should Have Stayed At Bus Station’, Linklater climbs into a taxi at the bus station, talks his cab driver’s ear off about parallel universes and roads not taken (metaphorically), and ends up inspiring a generation of filmmakers. Though not his debut film (that honour belongs to the little-screened Super 8 film It’s Impossible To Learn To Plow By Reading Books), Slacker is Linklater’s breakout, a DIY cult hit that put him on the map as an indie filmmaker, and launched a thousand other films just like it. Shot on location in the director’s hometown of Austin, Texas, in 1989, with $23,000 and a 16mm Arriflex camera (the film going on to…

THIS MONTH AUTHOR SCOTT INNES FILLS IN A MISSING CINEMATIC BLANK: PAUL VERHOEVEN’S ROBOCOP “I’D BUY THAT FOR A DOLLAR!” This was something my friend Michael would say regularly. Fancy meeting for a drink on Saturday? He’d buy that for a dollar. Did you see the new Coen Brothers film? He’d buy that for a dollar. It wasn’t until a few years ago that RoboCop came up in conversation and I mentioned idly that I’d never seen it. Michael looked astounded — a reaction I’d half-expected given that basically everyone has seen RoboCop. “I know, I know,’ I said pre-emptively. “I’ve just never got round to it.” “It’s not that,” he replied. “It’s just that, I say, ‘I’d buy that for a dollar,’ all the time. Did you never wonder…

THE blockbuster fantasy adventure film Artemis Fowl – based on the series of novels by Eoin Colfer – is coming to Disney+ on Friday, June 12. Artemis Fowl II (Ferdia Shaw) is a 12-year-old genius who discovers an incredible secret – he is the latest in a long line of criminal masterminds – after the mysterious disappearance of his father Artemis Fowl I (Colin Farrell). Soon, Artie Jr comes into contact with a magical hidden world and is soon up to his elbows in fairies, goblins, elves and more! To celebrate the movie’s exclusive release on Disney+, we have TEN prize packs to give away. Each pack contains an adult T-shirt, sunglasses case, cap, 2-in-1 USB and charging cable, flashlight and backpack! TO ENTER, TELL US WHAT MYTHICAL CHARACTER APPEALS…

MATTHEW McCONAUGHEY played bingo with a group of senior citizens in Texas via Zoom JOHN KRASINSKI hosted a virtual prom night with Billie Eilish and the Jonas brothers OLIVIA WILDE recruited other on-screen doctors to thank real-life doctors RICHARD E. GRANT recited daily Withnail And I quotes for his ‘Withnail & Isolation’ series JUSTIN THEROUX enjoyed candlelit dinners with his pet rescue dog, Kuma SAM NEILL sat in a bath (with a socially distant Hugo Weaving) for a short film…

HE WAS A TEAM PLAYER Brian Dennehy was a great supporting actor, antagonist, co-lead or one-scene cameo artist. He starred in a few films — Peter Greenaway’s The Belly Of An Architect, which knowingly imported such an American presence into a European art movie, is a rare instance of a movie built entirely around him — and took lead roles in the odd television project, including a chilling turn as serial murderer John Wayne Gacy in To Catch A Killer, but was most often used to give a star tough competition or a worthy scene partner. He’s the sheriff Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo feuds with in First Blood, giving a personal bite to the generational clash of embittered war veterans, and also perfect as the ‘straight man’ cop in the F/X…

IN ONE OF those unusual examples of symmetry that seem to hit the screen world every so often, two new properties called Stargirl have both arrived on streaming platforms of late: a superhero TV show on DC Universe (with Brec Bassinger in the titular role) and a standalone movie on Disney+ (starring Grace VanderWaal). Confused? Here’s a handy guide to the major character differences. ORIGINS DC’s Stargirl, Courtney Whitmore, is the successor to a classic DC Comics superhero named Starman, and forms part of the Justice Society Of America. Disney+’s Stargirl, meanwhile, comes from a young adult novel which made Teen Vogue’s ‘Must Read’ list. HEROES Courtney is the kooky new girl in town who wears a brightly coloured outfit and fights crime with a cosmic-powered staff. Susan, on the…

“DRAMATICALLY LIMP.” SO read the one-star review of Showgirls in Empire, way back in 1995. Paul Verhoeven’s outrageously excessive follow-up to erotic thriller Basic Instinct was significantly panned on release, denting the reputation of all involved (in particular, its star Elizabeth Berkley), scraping just $37 million worldwide at the theatrical box office (thus not breaking even) and ignominiously scooping seven Razzies — in the same year that the much-maligned Waterworld came out. But in spite of its critical and commercial flogging, a cult following has grown in the 25 years since release, inspiring dance-along screenings, a Vegas art exhibition and high-profile advocates (Quentin Tarantino and Jim Jarmusch are fans). It’s within this community that director Jeffrey McHale cultivated his own film, the documentary You Don’t Nomi (the title is a…

OUT 17 SEPT / CERT G / 91 MINS DIRECTORS Walt Dohrn, David P. Smith CAST (voices) Anna Kendrick, Rachel Bloom, Justin Timberlake, Sam Rockwell The sequel to the deeply average 2016 Trolls movie is more of the same, with a greater sprinkling of famous voices. After finally getting everything in autotuned harmony at the end of the last film, the Trolls are now threatened by a new foe, rock-singing troll Barb (Rachel Bloom), who wants to force the troll world to mosh to the beat of her drum. It’s up to Queen Poppy (Anna Kendrick, likeable as ever) to thwart her. This journey through music-themed lands is all very episodic and predictable (like Smurfs or Angry Birds, Trolls is more product than film), building to the inevitable genre mash-up…

OUT TBA CERT TBA / 101 MINS DIRECTOR Eliza Hittman CAST Sidney Flanigan, Talia Ryder, Théodore Pellerin, Sharon Van Etten PLOT When 17-year-old Pennsylvanian girl Autumn (Flanigan) discovers she’s pregnant, she heads to New York with her cousin Skylar (Ryder) for an abortion. But getting the procedure — and keeping it secret from her parents — won’t be so easy. “DON’T YOU EVER wish you were a dude?” teenager Skylar (Talia Ryder) asks her cousin Autumn (Sidney Flanigan) in the latest film from Beach Rats director Eliza Hittman. It’s a resonant question that speaks to the vastly differing experiences of young men and women as explored in Never Rarely Sometimes Always — a film in which women, teenage girls especially, get the raw end of the deal at every level.…

OUT NOW (PRIME VIDEO) / CERT TBA / 97 MINS DIRECTOR Tayarisha Poe CAST Lovie Simone, Jharrel Jerome, Celeste O’Connor With echoes of Rian Johnson’s directorial debut Brick, Selah And The Spades is an ambitious teen drama that follows a finely tuned high-school hierarchy. Selah (Lovie Simone) runs the Spades, one of five factions that peddle drugs to students. On the lookout for a protégé, Selah finds hope in transfer student Celeste (Celeste O’Connor), and the pair embark on a rocky journey full of danger and betrayal. It’s a well-cast, plucky first film from Tayarisha Poe, with solid chemistry between Simone and O’Connor and a Gen X-meets-Alice In Wonderland aesthetic. But a meandering script means the film’s substance fails to keep up with its style, meaning SATS doesn’t quite join…

OUT NOW (APPLE TV) EPISODES VIEWED 8 OF 8 SHOWRUNNER Mark Bomback CAST Chris Evans, Michelle Dockery, Jaeden Martell PLOT Assistant DA Andy Barber (Evans) is assigned to a murder investigation, and discovers that the victim is a classmate of his son Jacob (Martell). When Jacob becomes the chief suspect in the crime investigation, the lives of Andy and his wife Laurie (Dockery) are thrown into chaos. APPLE TV’S STRATEGY of hiring very big names and placing them in proven genre fare continues, after The Morning Show and Spielberg’s Amazing Stories, with this sombre, almost Scandi, crime drama starring Chris Evans. Written by Outlaw King’s Mark Bomback and directed by Headhunters’ Morten Tyldum, it’s not a cheery or uplifting tale, but thanks to a slow build it feels frighteningly realistic…

1 THE ZHAT VASH James Dyer: We all know Romulan intelligence agency the Tal Shiar (right?), but sub-sect the Zhat Vash is another matter. This shadowy group exists solely to exterminate synthetic life for the good of organics. Odd, then, that they didn’t trouble Data once during seven seasons of The Next Generation. Patrick Stewart: [The Romulans] are not just bad people; they’re people who have suffered and are frightened of suffering again. Therefore they were going to extremes in taking precautions against that. One aspect that I love is the fact that in Chateau Picard, Jean-Luc was being looked after by two Romulans. I wanted to see more of them, and I’m limited as to what I can say, but watch this space. 2 MASTER OF DISGUISE…

MERIMBULA TOWN HALL, NSW, 1987 There was no cinema in Merimbula in those days so when the town hall was converted into a makeshift movie theatre it was a big deal. My best friend Jason and I took our 12-year-old selves and, although the fold-up seats were punishing and there were no popcorn or choc-tops in sight, to this day I have never laughed so much or so hard in one sitting. It’s a priceless memory. STATE CINEMA, HOBART, TAS, 2013 I went to see Singin’ In The Rain at the State Cinema for its centenary celebration. It was a packed house and a beautiful experience; the audience applauded after Donald O’Connor performed Make ‘Em Laugh, and again as the credits rolled. The next day I came back to watch…

FROM A HARSH Miami housing project to a house in the Hollywood Hills, Barry Jenkins has come a long way. When his second feature, Moonlight, won three Oscars including Best Picture at the 2017 Academy Awards, it was an underdog triumph. A small coming-of-age story about a gay man battling prejudice and poverty, it wasn’t anyone’s idea of an Oscar-winner. Jenkins knew it. And showed it. This wasn’t a filmmaker who felt entitled. From the promotion to the podium, he just seemed exhilarated. He’d spent years with his filmmaking frustrated — writing screenplays that were never made, doing some work for the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado, more curator than creator — and here he was: Hollywood at his feet. Now he’s enjoying the view, while trying to keep those…

IN THE BASEMENT CONFERENCE ROOM OF an upmarket West London hotel, a dozen actors and stuntpeople are charging around on all fours like damn dirty apes. The smell of sweat hangs in the air as they pound the carpet with the short, black crutches they’re using to extend their arms to simian lengths. Their teacher, a square-jawed man of 5’ 7” with expressive eyes, raises himself upright. “Now you’re tapping back into your roots,” says Terry Notary, encouragingly. “This is how we were designed.” When he’s not running movement workshops like this one, Notary is one of the world’s leading performance-capture performers. Having started as an acrobat with Cirque du Soleil, he gracefully tumbled into acting when he was cast alongside other circus artists in Ron Howard’s 2000 film How…

WE’RE FINDING OUR HAPPY PLACE WITH OUR FAVOURITE BITS OF FEEL-GOOD MOVIE MAGIC. THIS MONTH: BOLLYWOOD DANCERS, WRESTLERS AND A JAGUAR SHARK T’S BEEN 12 YEARS since Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire slowly but surely became an awards-season-sweeper, box-officeobliterator and global sensation. Yet today it still sits firmly in our hearts, a hopeful story about soulmates that culminates in a gloriously uplifting dance sequence on the platform of Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. Freida Pinto, in her film debut, plays Latika, who along with Dev Patel’s Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? champion Jamal, leads a rowdy band of dancers to the tune of A. R. Rahman’s foot-stomping anthem Jai Ho, written especially for the film. Speaking with Empire from her home in Austin, Pinto reflects on that joyful closing number, as…

IF THE WORD “comfort” were a movie character, it would be Totoro. Conceived for a never-published children’s book by Hayao Miyazaki in 1976, then brought to hand-drawn-animated life 12 years later in the director’s pastoral masterpiece My Neighbour Totoro, this secretive forest-dweller looks like the ultimate cuddly toy. A soft-furred blend of bear, owl, rabbit and giant cushion, with expressively wide eyes and a smile that could out-dazzle a Cheshire cat, it is no surprise that he swiftly became the mascot for Miyazaki’s studio, Ghibli, and a Japanese merchandising phenomenon. He is inherently huggable. Inherently reassuring, too. There is no drama with Totoro. You can imagine how an American film might have handled his discovery by four-year-old girl Mei: instinctive shock or surprise, with mutual fear turning cautiously to playful…

IF NOT FOR Covid, an adaptation of John Carney’s Sing Street would recently have opened on Broadway. But while we wait, there’s still the gloriously nostalgic 2016 film, which sees 1980s Dublin teenager Conor (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) start a band to impress wannabe model Raphina (Lucy Boynton). As Conor and his mates slowly figure out their sound and look, Carney crafts a love-letter to his own musical youth. “It was a beautiful summer in Dublin,” he says four years on. “All those kids were just delighted to be on set. That really shows in the way the film ended up.” He takes us through its biggest numbers. THE RIDDLE OF THE MODEL “That’s basically a re-enactment of my first video. We borrowed the school camcorder to make pop videos around the…

“I knew that eventually we would switch back to the original configuration,” says Kasdan, which is how Bethany ultimately winds up back inside Jack Black’s portly professor. Initially, though, Shelly is home to Fridge, and he’s the last place a serious athlete wants to end up. Kasdan says he and Black were mindful that he was a white guy pretending to be an African-American guy (in a white guy’s body). “But I had this sense that if we were really true to the character that Ser’Darius and Kevin had built, Jack could do it in a really elegant and honest way, and be incredibly funny.” The only member of the main quartet who doesn’t entirely get to cut loose is Karen Gillan, who spends most of the movie in the…

DIRECTORS JENNIFER LEE and Chris Buck and producer Peter Del Vecho talk the songs and standout moments of Anna and Elsa’s second adventure. MOTHER’S MELODY Disney’s mega-sequel begins in surprisingly low-key fashion — a lullaby-laden flashback with a young Anna (Kristen Bell) and Elsa (Idina Menzel) being serenaded by their mysterious mum, now voiced by Evan Rachel Wood. “The mother has one line in Frozen, so little they had me do it,” says Lee. “On this one we actually got an actress who can act and sing.” Wood proved the perfect fit. “Her singing voice is right between Idina’s and Kristen’s: it hits this sweet spot,” says Buck. The lullaby All Is Found foreshadows Elsa’s quest to mythical river Ahtohallan. “The secret lies in that song, the gift a mother…

BOMBSHELL OUT NOW (DOWNLOAD, DVD, BLU-RAY) CERT M / 109 MINS Precise, powerfully performed and boasting a cast to be reckoned with, Bombshell is a benchmark film for post-#MeToo Hollywood. Charting the real, longstanding stream of sexual abuse at Fox News orchestrated by CEO Roger Ailes (John Lithgow), Bombshell draws on three women’s stories: news anchors Gretchen Carlsen (Nicole Kidman) and Megyn Kelly (Charlize Theron), and Margot Robbie’s Kayla, who embodies the multiple women who fell prey to Ailes. Each actress throws their full weight behind their roles, be it Theron’s dedicated physical transformation or Robbie’s raw, devastating interpretation of a woman trying to stay afloat in a culture built on exploiting people just like her. It’s a challenging, occasionally difficult story to watch unfold —stoked by the relentless pace…