Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2020 i Empire Australasia

FEW HORROR MOVIES have captured the terror of rail travel better than Train To Busan. Korean director Yeon Sangho’s high-concept zombies-on-a-train movie trapped a bunch of unsuspecting passengers in confined quarters with a rapidly spreading infection, as society collapsed out of the window. (Edgar Wright, a director not unfamiliar with the undead, declared it the “best zombie movie I’ve seen in forever. A total crowd-pleaser”.) But what does that world look like four years down the tracks, after Train reached its terminus? Prepare for Peninsula, Yeon’s follow-up that swaps cramped carriages for a wide-open, post-apocalyptic cityscape, where the running dead are still at large, militant factions rule the streets and one band of returning survivors — led by Gang Dongwon’s Jungseok — is chasing a big abandoned bounty. Just as…

WHEN YOU’VE DESTROYED half the population of the universe with just a click of your fingers (or, in this case, a tap of a computer key), where do you go next? For Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, the writers of Avengers double-bill Infinity War and Endgame, the answer was obvious: they had to go smaller in scale, because going bigger was impossible; but not smaller in import. Their next movie as writers, pandemic permitting, will tackle the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the fallout of which had real-world implications of which Thanos could only dream. “We ended up talking to Chris Wylie, the whistleblower, well before he blew the whistle,” explains McFeely who, along with Markus, is now Co-President Of Story at AGBO, the studio that Joe and Anthony Russo established for…

THE OUTPOURING OF grief over losing Olivia de Havilland, at 104 years old, tells us something about the finality of it, knowing that the last major star of Golden Age Hollywood has left us. From her Technicolor swooning in The Adventures Of Robin Hood (1938) to her quiet strength in The Heiress (1949) and her enduring power in Gone With The Wind (1939), it is certain there will not be another like her. She was the last living co-star of some of the greats of American movie culture; the last woman alive to tell you John Huston and Errol Flynn once got into a fistfight over her; and certainly among the last to intimately describe the experience of a now-bygone studio system which kept its stars carefully corralled and stage-managed…

WHEN THE CORONAVIRUS lockdown first hit worldwide, and Zoom became the videoconferencing app of choice, the question was soon on everyone’s lips: when is someone going to make a movie on this thing? “A couple of months in, nobody had done it,” recalls director Rob Savage. “So, we were like, ‘Fuck it, we might as well do it!’” “Might as well” became Host, an achingly timely chiller about a séance-gone-wrong, set entirely within the confines of Zoom — which has become an instant word-of-mouth hit in the horror community (“the scariest film of the past decade”, declared one blog) and beyond (Elijah Wood is a fan). But this lofty achievement started with a simple prank. “It all just came out of quarantine boredom, really,” Savage recalls. “I was hearing these…

MATTHEW MODINE ACTOR, BIRDY “I met Sir Alan in 1983. I was just one of hundreds of actors vying for a role in his next film, Birdy. Parker was kind, soft-spoken. He had a handheld video camera and moved about my chair as I auditioned. Sometimes, he would be just inches from my face and eyes. It was like a physical examination by a doctor who was searching for something. What that was, only Parker knew. “Months later, I received a call from Parker. ‘Congratulations! You’re going to be in my movie.’ I was thrilled. ‘You’re going to play Birdy.’ ‘What?!’ I said, ‘No. That’s impossible. I auditioned for Al. I’m not right for that.’ He replied: ‘You’re going to be great. Can’t wait to see you get started.’ “Once…

THE CON IS A METAPHOR FOR PARENTING As played by a dream team of actors (Evan Rachel Wood, Debra Winger and Richard Jenkins), the central trio of Kajillionaire — a new comedy about a family of con artists — feels less like a biological family and more like a business arrangement. That’s intentional. “It’s made more extreme in the movie, but I do think there’s a kind of inherent betrayal built into parenting,” its director, Miranda July, says. “As a child, you’ll betray your parents. You’ll leave them. Not just leave them but reverse your position, your alliances.” July, herself a parent, admits this deeper theme snuck up on her. “It came from my unconscious,” she says. “I was like, ‘Really, Miranda? A funny heist film? Where is this going?’…

YOUR FAVOURITE MOVIE franchises are boldly going where film franchises have rarely gone before. “It’s fascinating to explore parts of worlds we see in movies in ways we couldn’t do in live action,” says Mike McMahan, writer/ producer for Rick And Morty and now creator of Star Trek: Lower Decks — an animated new comedy series with its phasers set to fun. “Star Trek is often quite serious and introspective. There’s never been a straight-up funny version of Star Trek before. The idea of putting it into a modern, adult animation format such as Rick And Morty, that was a love letter to Star Trek and not a disposable parody, was my dream.” He’s not alone in taking a beloved film property into cartoon terrain. Last year saw an animated…

Do you have a nickname? I actually don’t have a nickname. I’m Welsh, and the Welsh word “craig” [means] “rock”. But that’s been taken by Dwayne Johnson. Do you have a signature dish? Scrambled eggs. I’ve watched enough Gordon Ramsay videos, and I’ve been shouted at enough by him via his YouTube page to know how to beat some eggs and put a lot of butter in it. There have been loads of scrambled eggs in lockdown. But that seems to be my limit — I’m not a great cook. When were you most starstruck? Meeting Dr. Dre. It was at a club and I don’t really find myself in a club very often. But I was at one and Kendrick Lamar was performing and I saw Dr. Dre in…

OUT NOW (PRIME VIDEO) / CERT TBC / 93 MINS DIRECTOR Richard Tanne CAST Lili Reinhart, Austin Abrams, Sarah Jones Teen love has rarely been lacking in cinema, but it’s always refreshing to see it depicted with depth and integrity. Chemical Hearts breaks down stages of grief, frustration and desire, letting Austin Abrams (Euphoria) and Lili Reinhart (Riverdale) give young adults another story to hold on to. With a script full of lines ready-made for social media posts, the film boasts eloquent rationalisations of emotions delivered in an atmospheric package. It’s a shame, then, that it’s experienced through the eyes of the boy, who has lived so little, fascinated with a girl who has done so much — but this film is still certainly more bravely and beautifully realised than…

OUT NOW (STAN) CERT TBC / 116 MINS DIRECTOR Unjoo Moon CAST Tilda Cobham-Hervey, Danielle Macdonald, Evan Peters PLOT Aussie singer Helen Reddy arrives in New York in 1966 but struggles to find a foothold in the music industry thanks to entrenched sexism. She then hooks up with ambitious manager Jeff Wald and skyrockets to fame with her huge hit I Am Woman, an empowering rally cry for women everywhere. But her volatile marriage eventually causes Helen to re-evaluate her career and life. A BIOPIC ON Helen Reddy is long overdue. It’s a remarkable story of an Australian singing sensation who bucked the male-centric pop music business of the 1960s and '70s to achieve superstardom on her own terms. The key factor for that success was her 1972 pop classic…

1 MEETING ‘THE MAN’ Christina Newland: When we first see a troubled-looking Russell Crowe, known simply as ‘The Man’, sitting in his car outside someone’s house in the pouring rain, it’s difficult to imagine the terror to come. Armed with a claw hammer and some lighter fluid, Crowe jumps out of his car and goes on a murder spree, setting the house alight in a final flourish of pure, hulking malice. Derrick Borte: I wanted to keep the camera in the truck, because for someone to get to the point of doing something like that, they have to be so detached from reality. But when you get on set and see Russell in character, you want to cover it from other angles. My initial thoughts probably would have featured less…

BALDWIN “I took a lot of the Clueless slang either from things I heard in real life or from old linguistics dictionaries, but ‘Baldwin’ I actually made up myself. It means a cute guy, because the Baldwin brothers were all cute. And there were so many of them.” JEEPIN’ “I would ask every actor that came in to audition for Clueless to tell me their favourite slang phrase, so maybe ‘jeepin’’ got to me that way. Or maybe it came from a rap song. It means hooking up with somebody in a car. Nowadays they probably say ‘pluggin’ in’ or something, because of electric cars.” WHATEVER “I heard this a lot from my gay friends. It was a good way to totally dismiss something someone was saying: ‘Ugh, what-ever...’ They’d…

5/9/42 THE DAY HE WAS BORN IN MUNICH (HE’S 77) 73 NUMBER OF CREDITS AS DIRECTOR, INCLUDING DOCUMENTARIES, TV MOVIES, VIDEOS AND SHORT FILMS 1 Number of times he’s been shot with an air rifle while in the middle of an interview with Mark Kermode 1 Oscar nomination (for Encounters At The End Of The World — Best Documentary, Features, 2009) 5 FILMS HE MADE WITH KLAUS KINSKI (Aguirre: The Wrath Of God, Woyzeck, Nosferatu The Vampyre, Fitzcarraldo, Cobra Verde) $1,500 The seminar fee payable upon acceptance to Herzog’s Rogue Film School (plus $25 application fee) 18 NUMBER OF OPERAS HE’S DIRECTED ON THE STAGE (MOSTRECENTLY PARSIFAL, IN VALENCIA IN 2008) 3 NUMBER OF EPISODES OF THE MANDALORIAN IN WHICH HE APPEARED…

The Alien and Predator franchises Chris: This is the first time we’re doing a combo of two series, and all because someone at Fox realised that they owned both Alien and Predator . That’s how it all began, with that little Easter egg in Predator 2 . Dan: That was so exciting. I remember spotting that when I was watching Predator 2 on VHS and going, “There’s an Alien skull on the wall in the background! Predators have been hunting Aliens!” James: I’m going to jump right in and Predatorsplain to you. Predator 2 was not actually the genesis of Alien Vs Predator . It was, in fact, Dark Horse Comics in 1989 with the first Alien Vs Predator comic, a full year before Predator 2 came out. Dan: I…

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: “I’m gonna go to the clichéd screenwriter handbook. The scene in Chinatown where Jake finally confronts Noah Cross, and Noah very calmly explains why he did what he did. ‘It’s the future, Mr Gittes. The future.’ Jake is nailing this guy with his guilt, and the guilty party is like, ‘What the fuck are you talking about? It’s fine.’ It’s just evil laid bare.” EXT. MULWRAY HOME — NIGHT Noah Cross (John Huston) and Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) are talking in the courtyard of Cross’s daughter’s house, where Gittes has been waiting for his adversary. GITTES: Got something I’d like to show you, Mr Cross. [He reaches into his pocket] CROSS: What is it? GITTES: An obituary column. Can you see alright in this light? CROSS: I guess…

THE NUMBERS GAME Once you remove the TV show, the short film and the multiple references to the same movies, I counted only 226 individual flicks in last month’s ‘Ultimate Movie Playlist’ not 235 as advertised on the cover. I loved the feature, but what gives, Empire? MICHAEL, BRUNSWICK, VIC There were 235 entries in the feature, but you’re technically correct. We bet your favourite movie is Trainspotting, eh? GOT MILK? Enough is enough, Empire. Asking stars “How much is a carton of milk?” every issue is offensive on so many levels. In the lactose-cancelled 21st century, may I suggest, “How much is a container of water-based soy squeezings?” Or “What would you barter for a gourd of pressed almond seepage?” This dairy-based white prejudice must end! IAN, VIA EMAIL…

NIA DACOSTA WAS 16 years old when she first saw Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now. As the film started, she wanted to be a writer. But by the time it ended, her life — and path — had changed. “It was just so crazy, and had so much to say. It was super-audacious,” she remembers. “When I watched it, I thought, ‘Oh, you can do anything.’” Which could be the understatement of the century. Now, at just 30 years old, DaCosta is one of the most exciting and in-demand filmmaking voices in the business. With Candyman coming out on October 15, and the keys to a billion-dollar superhero franchise reportedly next up, it is a fairly stratospheric rise. That journey began in her native New York, studying…

WHERE? Hayes, Middlesex WHEN? November 2, 2019 WHY? It’s a Saturday, and one of the final days on Truth Seekers, the Amazon TV show from Simon Pegg and Nick Frost’s new production company, Stolen Picture. And one of the vast units in a business park has been converted, temporarily, into the headquarters of fictional communications giant Smyle, the company for whom Frost’s character, Gus, works. There’s a buzz in the air — because not only is most of the crew keeping a surreptitious eye on the Rugby World Cup final between England and South Africa, but today is A Simon Pegg Day. MEANING? Meaning that Pegg isn’t just a producer and co-writer on the show, along with Frost, Nat Saunders and James Serafinowicz. Today he’s bringing his acting chops to…

GHOSTWATCH (1992) The participant ID for the Zoom call in the film is 31101992. “Which is the release date for Ghostwatch,” Shepherd explains. “It was a big influence on us.” ALICE, SWEET ALICE (1976) The creepy mask that hangs off the demon — a gag on the built-in masks found in video software — is the same one used in this influential slasher horror from the ’70s. “That’s a film we really love,” says Savage. SATAN’S SLAVE (1980) This cult Indonesian horror is homaged during one of the key scares. “The sheet gag, where Emma [Louise Webb] throws the bed sheets over the demon, is a reference to that film,” says Savage. WAIT UNTIL DARK (1967) The Polaroids featured at the film’s…

IN THE ELECTRIFYING first Judas And The Black Messiah trailer, Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya) first introduces himself to a viewer peering through a narrow window. But Hampton’s vision of liberation was anything but narrow. The Rainbow Coalition, the multicultural movement he founded in 1969, was built on the premise that equity is a birthright; one that should be given to the people. And his legacy as a Black Panther further reinforced a central belief: where there’s people, there’s power. Born in 1948, in the suburbs of Chicago, Hampton’s ability to assemble a group of people to action became clear in his early work as a NAACP youth organiser. This skill was further displayed when he quickly rose up the ranks of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party. As…

IT’S BEEN SIX years since we last got a Tomm Moore movie, the beautiful, tear-jerking Song Of The Sea. But his latest, WolfWalkers, sounds well worth the wait. “The way we make these films is very hand-made, very craft-orientated,” Moore explains via Zoom from his animation studio Cartoon Saloon in his home town of Kilkenny, Ireland. “It’s a long process.” Set in Kilkenny during the Oliver Cromwell-dominated 1650s, where an English hunter’s daughter learns to transform herself into a wolf, Moore’s third film (co-directed with Moore’s lifelong friend Ross Stewart) is as distinctly hand-drawn and locally rooted as Moore’s previous (including his 2009 debut, The Secret Of Kells) — factors that have earned him favourable comparisons with Hayao Miyazaki. Unsurprisingly, the Studio Ghibli co-founder is a big influence on Moore,…

OUT NOW CERT M / 150 MINS DIRECTOR Christopher Nolan CAST John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Kenneth Branagh, Elizabeth Debicki PLOT Having more than proved his worth, CIA superspy The Protagonist (Washington) is inducted into secret organisation Tenet, on the trail of bullets that go backwards in time. From there he finds himself facing off against arms dealer Andrei Sator (Branagh) in a bid to avert World War III. THE BLAMS COME thick and fast. Tenet , in fact, might be Christopher Nolan’s blammiest film yet. BLAM! A terrifying thing just happened. BLAM! A shocking moment of revelation. BLAM! Here’s a speedboat. (There really is a massive blam accompanying an otherwise ordinary shot of two people on a speedboat.) It’s not even Hans Zimmer this time — here the great…

OUT OCTOBER 8 CERT TBC / 99 MINS DIRECTOR Channing Godfrey Peoples CAST Nicole Beharie, Kendrick Sampson, Alexis Chikaeze PLOT In Fort Worth, Turquoise Jones (Beharie) is a job-juggling mum and former Miss Juneteenth pageant queen. The competition complements the Texan celebration of the 1865 emancipation from slavery and this year ‘Turq’ is determined her 15-year-old daughter, Kai (Chikaeze), will win. MISS JUNETEENTH IS an impressive first stride for Texan writer and director Channing Godfrey Peoples. Nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and Best Texan Film at SXSW, Peoples turned her childhood trips to Miss Juneteenth, a pageant held to mark the emancipation of the enslaved on June 19, 1865, into this sumptuous, tender family drama. The film gently etches the co-dependent mother-daughter relationship between Turquoise (Nicole Beharie)…

OUT NOW (SHUDDER) / CERT TBC / 56 MINS DIRECTOR Rob Savage CAST Haley Bishop, Radina Drandova As we’ve learned in lockdown, Zoom calls can be pretty hellish. It’s not connection issues or a family quiz stretching on for eternity that’s the problem in Rob Savage’s Host, however: filmed remotely during the coronavirus crisis, this horror pits six quarantined friends against a demonic presence that invades their houses after a Zoom conference gone spectacularly wrong. Over the past few years, ‘desktop movies’ like this, shot entirely through computer screens, have told feature-length stories through characters using apps to communicate and solve mysteries. Host, full of original ideas and plentiful jolts, points to a bright post-COVID future for the genre and for Savage. A pandemic-era Poltergeist that will leave you shaking.…

OUT NOW (PRIME VIDEO) EPISODES VIEWED 3 OF 10 SHOWRUNNER Eric Kripke CAST Jack Quaid, Antony Starr, Karl Urban, Erin Moriarty, Aya Cash, Chace Crawford PLOT Anti-superhero vigilantes The Boys are wanted and in hiding, while their leader Billy Butcher (Urban) has gone off the grid. However, new recruit Hughie (Quaid) and sympathetic ‘Supe’ Starlight (Moriarty) have a plan to bring down bad guys The Seven — and their parent company Vought — from the inside. “FUCKIN’ DIABOLICAL.” AS character catchphrases go, Billy Butcher’s (Karl Urban) couldn’t be more on the money. Barely an episode of The Boys’ first season went by without at least one totally outrageous, potentially triggering, “what the actual?” moment. An invisible man being exploded by a grenade up his jacksie, for example. Or a sex-crazed…

OUT NOW (BINGE, FOXTEL'S SHOWCASE) EPISODES VIEWED 5 OF 10 SHOWRUNNER Misha Green CAST Jurnee Smollett, Jonathan Majors, Aunjanue Ellis, Abbey Lee, Courtney B. Vance PLOT Atticus Freeman (Majors), his friend Letitia (Smollett) and his Uncle George (Vance) embark on a road trip across 1950s America, encountering the equal monstrosities of racist hatred and Lovecraftian beasts along the way. EARLY ON IN Lovecraft Country , main character Atticus Freeman (Jonathan Majors) says that sometimes we have to learn to accept the deep flaws of the work we love along with the good parts — to do otherwise would be dishonest. This line is more-or-less the entire basis for Misha Green’s show, which attempts to embody the contradiction of loving art made by prejudiced people — specifically, H.P. Lovecraft, a foundational…

1 THE PIVOTAL DEATH James Dyer: Given we spent most of the original The Last Of Us living in his skin, Joel’s death hits like a truck. When you, as Ellie, hear the grunts and thuds before bursting in, and are subsequently held down and forced to watch him beaten to death with a golf club, it perfectly sets in motion everything that follows. You may not agree with what Ellie decides to do afterwards, but you sure as hell understand it. Neil Druckmann: In that moment, when Joel is taken out, we want you to feel dread and disgust and anger. There were all sorts of different versions, including one where he turned his back to Abby, she stabbed him in the spine and twisted the blade, severed the…

You were the first one cast in the film. How did it happen? Well, I knew just from the film blogs that Denis had been working on it. I’d already done a good bit of research on the history of the project. I’m not alluding to Jodorowsky’s or David Lynch’s version, more around [production company] Legendary picking up the rights ten years ago. When I was fortunate enough to go to many of the awards-related events, I got to meet Denis a couple of times, and already had it in my head… You know, I was feeling a deep desire to be involved. Then when he was on the jury of the Cannes Film Festival, he asked me to fly out there to meet with him about it. I had…

THERE’S NO GETTING around it. Even if you could get around it, it would take some time. In her books, Agatha Christie variously described Belgian detective Hercule Poirot’s facial furniture as gigantic, amazing and just plain enormous. In 2017’s Murder On The Orient Express , Kenneth Branagh’s debut outing as Poirot, it was overwhelming, and in sequel Death On The Nile , it is back with a vengeance. Russell Brand, who plays Dr Bessner, admired it on the set “the way one might a follicular mandala”, he tells Empire . “I don’t know how you would endeavour to construe such an extraordinary moustache. On close inspection it seems to be covering five or six mouths. It’s like an Escher drawing it’s an endless moustache, spiralling off into the infinite. An…

Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse IT’S A CLICHÉ, but there’s truth in clichés (which, itself, is a cliché): virtually every frame of Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse belongs in a frame. The Phil Lord/Chris Miller-produced, Peter Ramsay/Rodney Rothman/Bob Persichettidirected superhero flick rewrote the animation rulebook, blending hand-drawn animation and CG wizardry, fusing the aesthetic of comic books and comic-book movies in a way that made it even more unfathomable that it hadn’t been done before. But the standout shot — the one you’d dedicate an entire wall to — is Miles Morales’ leap of faith. Towards the end of the movie, Miles, whose control of his powers has been spotty and inconsistent all the way through, knows it’s time to Spider-Man up. So he stands on the edge of an especially tall…

EIGHT MONTHS INTO a global pandemic, movie theatres across the world continue to ask themselves the question: how can we tempt viewers back to the big screen? Well, here’s one idea: make them feel as if they’ve just stumbled into the Galactic Senate. “We didn’t actually have Star Wars in mind when we came up with this concept,” laughs Nicolas Chican, co-founder of Ōma Cinema, France’s new ‘vertical movie theatre’. “The Galactic Senate [comparisons] are surprising because our design is based on old opera houses and theatre balconies. And I should point out, our pods do not move...” Bad news for anyone hoping to glide about like an Alderaanian trade delegate, but on all other fronts Ōma represents an exciting prospect. Set to open in Paris next year — with…

YOU PROBABLY HAVEN’T heard of Dr Clifford V. Johnson. But the fingertips of the British-born physicist from the University of Southern California have been all over Hollywood. If you’re a filmmaker with a time-travel question, he’s the guy you call. “There is no industry standard for what a science advisor does,” Johnson tells Empire. “The point for me is to try to encourage filmmakers to get science right in some sense. By ‘right’, I don’t mean necessarily that it’s going to fit all the physics textbooks, but ‘right’ in some sense of internal logic.” On Avengers: Endgame, for example, Johnson threw around ideas with the writers, directors and producers about how time travel might work in a quasi-realistic way — what he has dubbed ‘Marvel Science’. “We brainstormed about time…

WITH ITS SWEETLY crooning retro soundtrack, its iconic dialogue and the ever-sexy pairing of Baby and Johnny, Dirty Dancing is a bona fide modern classic. Thirty-three years after the film was released — and went from low-budget gamble to a full-blown box-office phenomenon — Lionsgate has confirmed that a sequel to the film is in the works. And unlike the maligned 2004 prequel Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, this one will star the original ‘Baby’, Jennifer Grey. The 1987 movie's popularity has sometimes obscured the fact that it is deeply feminist in its intent, charting a young woman’s coming-of-age in the early ’60s, a deeply patriarchal time. It tells that story not just with tenderness but a deep understanding of how the world judges young women and their choices; the main…

NEARLY AN HOUR into Saint Maud, the buzzy British horror from debut director Rose Glass, Maud — a God-fearing nurse with a dark secret, played by Morfydd Clark — begins to float. After a boozy night, she suffers what appears to be a seizure, before gently lifting off the ground. It’s the kind of gorgeous, arresting imagery most horror films would kill for. But it’s inspired, Glass says, from real life — at least, the seizure part. “The Passion Of Joan Of Arc was a film I watched quite a few times,” Glass tells Empire. “Some psychologists believe that Joan Of Arc may have suffered from ecstatic epileptic seizures, where the seizures are preceded by intense, ecstatic sensations. I found that quite interesting: is she having a religious experience or…

OUT NOW / CERT PG / 90 MINS DIRECTOR Brandon Trost CAST Seth Rogen, Sarah Snook, Jorma Taccone Everything about An American Pickle screams screwball comedy. There’s its zany premise, in which a man awakens in the present day after being preserved in pickle brine for a century. There’s also its star, Seth Rogen, whose filmography is a carnival of stoner hilarity, and he’s superb as both pickled protagonist Herschel Greenbaum and his great grandson, Ben. But this is a film with more heart and fewer gags than the Pineapple Express funnyman’s usual fare, that finds Rogen fighting with issues around identity and ancestry. The result is a surprisingly poignant essay on the importance of understanding your roots. It doesn’t excel as a comedy but as a drama, this is…

OUT NOW CERT PG / 93 MINS DIRECTOR Dean Parisot CAST Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter, Brigette Lundy-Paine, Samara Weaving, Kristen Schaal PLOT Nineteen years after their last adventure, life isn’t going well for Bill (Winter) and Ted (Reeves), with both their band and marriages on the brink of collapse. The duo are contemplating growing up — until a visitor from the future tasks them with writing a song that saves the universe... “THE ONLY TRUE wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing...” “That’s us, dude!” Bill S. Preston Esq and Ted Theodore Logan once remarked to each other. How much wisdom there is in getting the loveable metalhead misfits back together for another time-travelling caper, two decades after their last, has been hotly debated since word first emerged of…

OUT NOW (STAN) / EPS VIEWED 1 of 4 DIRECTORS Heidi Ewing, Rachel Grady Richard Scott Smith spent two decades wooing wealthy, lonely, middle-aged women across America via online dating services. Once he found his mark, he’d shower her with attention and soon she'd fall hopelessly in love with the handsome con man. Following a quick marriage, Smith now had access to his wife’s bank account, which was soon emptied. He’d then fly the coop and start a new scam in another state. By all accounts, Smith had more than 10 wives under his belt by the time several of his victims joined forces and hired a no-nonsense female bounty hunter to track him down. This gripping four-part doco shows how Smith was caught while giving viewers the backstory on…

OUT NOW (NETFLIX) EPISODES VIEWED 10 OF 10 SHOWRUNNER Jessica Goldberg CAST Hilary Swank, Josh Charles, Ray Panthaki PLOT Emma (Hilary Swank) is a former navy pilot and commander of the first mission to Mars. But once she’s embarked on the three-year journey, Emma begins to wrestle with the guilt of leaving her family on Earth, while her international team begin to question her abilities as a leader. “SPACE IS NOT about swagger or ego, it’s about resilience,” recites Hilary Swank’s Emma in a late episode of Netflix’s sci-fi family drama Away . It doesn’t take a rocket scientist (although there are a few to hand) to draw the comparison between this lesson in navigating through space as an astronaut with Emma’s experiences as a mother. Both take vast mental…

1 THE PROLOGUE Ian Freer: An American Pickle’s prologue might be its most charming section. Shot in a squared-up aspect ratio with muted Malick-y tones and a voiceover, it paints a picture of the hard-knock life of ditch-digger Herschel Greenbaum (Rogen) in the made-up Eastern European shtetl of Schlupsk, 1919. It’s a lovingly drawn Fiddler On The Roof world of rickety carts and faulty shovels that only brightens for Herschel when he meets the formidable Sarah (Succession’s Sarah Snook), wooing her with dead fish. Their relationship is funny — “Her parents were murdered by Cossacks! My parents were murdered by Cossacks!” — and sweet, sharing plans and dreams (she wants her own gravestone, he wants to taste seltzer water) in a beautiful bog. Disarming, it grounds the film in a…

WHAT DO YOU DO WHEN YOU’RE GIVEN THE chance to make your dreams come true? We’re talking dreams you’ve had for 30 years, dreams of a desert planet and the extraordinary characters and creatures that inhabit it. Do you shy away, leave all those images safely in your head where they’re pure and uncompromised? Or do you dive in and try to bring them to life? If you’re Denis Villeneuve, and you’ve just been given the green light to film Frank Herbert’s Dune, you remember the book’s mantra: I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. “It’s not easy to bring the dreams of your teenage years in front of a camera,” Villeneuve admits from his editing room this July. “The teenager that I was was really a big dreamer.…

Over the course of his seven movies, the director has compiled a kill list longer than your arm. Death by suffocation, death by hammer, death by bullet (that happens a lot), death by knitting needle, death by immolation, death by falling from a great height, death by having your head crushed by the wheel of a slow-moving van. You name it, chances are that Wheatley has offed someone on screen with it. BEN WHEATLEY HAS GOT BLOOD ON HIS HANDS. LOTS OF BLOOD. But too much killing can corrode the soul. And, like Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven , Wheatley was done with it. “You can end up with a run of movies which are all gruesome and horrific,” he says. And so, quietly, he has been moving in a different…

Grizzly Man EVERY SUMMER FOR 13 years, Timothy Treadwell lived with bears. Former drug addict, failed actor, environmentalist and self-styled “kind warrior”, Treadwell would pitch camp in the Alaskan wilderness of Katmai, unarmed even with pepper spray, and flagrantly break National Park Service laws to bring himself hazardously close to the creatures he loved. Creatures he identified with more than humans, to the degree that he considered himself “one of them”. Then, on October 5, 2003, he and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard were killed and eaten by a grizzly, leaving only a few gnawed bones, a wristwatch and more than 100 hours of film footage. Throughout his 59-year career as a filmmaker of both narrative features and documentaries, Werner Herzog has remained enthralled by obsessive outsiders who — like him…

Fanny Lye Deliver’d WRITER/DIRECTOR THOMAS CLAY on his eerie, English Civil War-era psychological thriller. TWO STRANGERS ARRIVE The film’s opening scene, shot on location in Shropshire in early spring, sees two naked runaways cut through the misty thicket surrounding the Lye family farmhouse. “Mystery is key for the beginning of the film,” says Clay of the scene, which establishes Freddie Fox and Tanya Reynolds’ fugitives. The filmmaker — who shot on 35mm — called upon a “very old giraffe crane” that had been salvaged from a warehouse in Germany to capture the majority of the film’s action sequences. FANNY PREPARES FOR CHURCH To watch Maxine Peake’s stoic heroine dutifully tend to her home is to behold Clay’s steadfast commitment to the Cromwellian era. Not only did he insist that the…