Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2020 i Empire Australasia

THE LAST TIME George Clooney went to space, it didn’t go so well for him. In Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, he ended up floating into an endless void; earlier in Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris, he found himself in a metaphysical one. But somehow, despite all that, he’s been tempted back. For his seventh film behind the camera, Clooney adapts the acclaimed 2016 novel Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton, which imagines a mysterious mass-extinction event in the near-future, told from two perspectives: those of Augustine (played in the film by Clooney), a grizzled astronomer stranded at an Arctic observatory; and Sully (played by Felicity Jones), an astronaut whose ship is stranded in space when Mission Control stop responding. Speaking from his home in Los Angeles, while putting finishing touches to the film,…

STUCK FOR INSPIRATION this Halloween? Go see Possessor. Brandon Cronenberg’s startling new horror features a mask so frightening, and so instantly iconic, it makes Leatherface’s look like a bratwurst balaclava. “I kept that prop from the set,” the director laughs down from the phone from Toronto. “And I’m wearing it right now as I talk to you…” Exploring parasitical technology and featuring eye-frying practical FX, it’s as if Cronenberg’s picked up where his father, body-horror royalty David Cronenberg, left off with his last great weird-out, 1999’s eXistenZ. (Even Jennifer Jason Leigh is cast in both.) We have to ask: is dad a creative influence? “Yeah, in the sense that he literally created me,” he laughs. “I have a good relationship with my father, but it’s not like we sit around…

ROCKY IV IS a story about honour, courage, the conflict between East and West, and muscular men standing atop mountains screaming. But it is also a story about the touching relationship that develops between a hard-drinking slob and the robot butler he is given for his birthday. In one of the strangest subplots of the 1980s, Paulie (Burt Young) first spurns bulbous-headed mechanoid Sico — “I wanted a sportscar for my birthday, not no walking trash can” — then warms to him, reprogramming him to have a female voice and ultimately telling Rocky, “That’s my girl. She loves me.” Fans embraced the peculiarly affecting weirdness, and Sico became a cult phenomenon, all part of Rocky IV’s unique, OTT charm. Until now. Because in August, with an Instagram post about his…

1. TARANTINO ACTS, A LOT The 1996 simulation game — designed to help wannabe directors understand filmmaking — features Quentin Tarantino as a convict on Death Row (with a Pulp Fiction poster in his cell). The director has rarely acted as much as he did here; the choose-your-own-adventure online version at one point gives the viewer the option of “Serious Tarantino” or “Comedy Tarantino”. 2. PENN & TELLER POP UP A ubiquitous sight throughout the ’90s, the magician duo play the roles of the nominal villains who frame Tarantino’s character for the crime. As far as Spielbergian scumbags go, they’re more Hook than Jaws — though that depends on whether you choose “Creepy Magician” or “Appropriate Magician”. 3. FRIENDS LIKE THESE Jennifer Aniston makes a surprising appearance at the height…

Do you have a favourite joke? It’s a lame joke but it’s one of my favourites. “What did the zero say to the eight? Nice belt.” It’s so innocent! Have you ever been starstruck? When I was a little girl I used to love Carol Burnett. She was almost like a god to me. I remember watching her show and thinking about how she was such a big part of my life and she had no idea, and that she wouldn’t know me if she saw me. Then many years later I was backstage at Carrie Fisher’s one-woman show and Carol Burnett was there, and she recognised me and said nice things to me. I was blown away. She probably said something very simple. But it wasn’t so much the…

OUT NOW CERT TBC / 106 MINS DIRECTOR Miranda July CAST Evan Rachel Wood, Richard Jenkins, Debra Winger, Gina Rodriguez PLOT The Dyne clan eke out a meagre living turning low-end cons. Needing to find $1,500 in rent, daughter Old Dolio (Wood) comes up with a lucrative new scheme but, much to her annoyance, Mom (Winger) and Dad (Jenkins) invite new pal Melanie (Rodriguez) to join the gang. ARTIST AND FILMMAKER Miranda July is many things — offbeat, iconoclastic, absurd — but one thing she is not is prolific. Following her classic calling card Me And You And Everyone We Know in 2005, it took her six years to follow up with The Future and now a further nine years to deliver Kajillionaire . But happily, it’s worth the wait.…

OUT NOW (CINEMAS), JANUARY (DIGITAL) / CERT MA15+ / 95 MINS DIRECTOR Alister Grierson CAST Ben O’Toole, Meg Fraser Ex-soldier and ex-con Rex (Ben O’Toole, most recently seen in Halifax: Retribution) heads to Finland to start a new life and is immediately invited to dinner by a local family. Unfortunately, they happen to be cannibals and he’s the main course! But the meat-eaters don't now their latest meal is even crazier than them and they may have...ahem, bitten off more than they can chew. Fans of the Ozploitation era of the ’70s and ’80s will love this gruesome black comedy that lays on the jokes and ultra-violence thick and fast. It’s insane, it gruesome and it’s a lot of fun. If it was a scratchier, jumpier print and there were…

OUT NOW (APPLE TV+) CERT M / 96 MINS DIRECTOR Sofia Coppola CAST Rashida Jones, Bill Murray, Marlon Wayans PLOT Laura (Jones), Dean (Wayans) and their two kids live a picture-perfect life in Manhattan, until she begins to suspect that he’s cheating on her. As her worries mount, Laura turns to her ageing-Lothario dad Felix (Murray) to help her get to the bottom of her husband’s behaviour. IT’S ALMOST TWO years since the announcement that Apple and indie film heroes A24 would partner on original films. The first film they’d produce: Sofia Coppola’s eighth feature, drama comedy On The Rocks , which reunites the director with sometime muse Bill Murray. Writer Laura (Rashida Jones) is struggling with two small kids, writer’s block and the creeping suspicion that her apparently perfect…

OUT NOW (ABC IVIEW) / EPS VIEWED 6 OF 6 DIRECTOR Simon Evans CAST David Tennant, Michael Sheen What do you do when you’re an actor and the world shuts down? Well, if you’re Good Omens’ David Tennant and Michael Sheen you make a sitcom using Zoom. They play themselves, going mad during lockdown after their new play is put on hold due to the pandemic. When the director Simon suggests they rehearse via the internet, the actors are just bored enough to agree. It’s a clever concept with even the actors’ family members roped in for supporting roles. The humour is sharp and witty and the two leads are wonderful as they trade barbs. The star cameos are clever and there’s even a plot; it develops organically and plays…

1 THE OPERA HOUSE Nick de Semlyen: Christopher Nolan likes to start a movie with a bang. And here he orchestrates — literally — a memorable one, with the conductor at the Kiev Opera House raising his baton, cueing up the gunshot that kills him and the subsequent mayhem. The next ten minutes is sometimes incomprehensible on a first watch, but it’s breathlessly exciting stuff, phalanxes of militarised police marching in, inverted bullets whizzing (technically gnizzihw) past the hero, and even a suspenseful moment in the cloakroom. It’s an almost intolerably intense way to kick off a film, and enough to put you right off a cultured night out. James Dyer: The explosive set-piece at the film’s start is, arguably, the least comprehensible sequence in the entire 151 minutes. The…

What happens when we die? What’s the point of it all anyway? Pixar has been asking such big questions of little people since 1995’s Toy Story , and the films directed by Pete Docter are among the finest exemplars of the studio’s craft. He’s the imagination behind fear fable Monsters, Inc. (2001), Up (2009), about a grieving widower who dreams of escape, and Inside Out (2015), the journey of an angry pre-teen who struggles to control her moods. Yet even by those standards, Docter’s latest is a particularly deep dive into the human condition. Soul tells the story of Joe, a New Yorker who, like so many Pixar protagonists before him, goes on a journey. This trip is not just through a meticulously rendered modern city, but also into ‘The…

IT’S FAIR TO say that the French Foreign Legion weren’t particularly happy. “They thought we were going to do a gay porno movie about the Legion,” says director Claire Denis bluntly. The film in question: 1999’s Beau Travail and what could have already — and accurately — been described as a challenging production. It hadn’t begun that way, though. It had started much more optimistically. Denis — already with several shorts and breakthrough debut feature Chocolat under her belt — was approached with a commission from French and German television production company ARTE. “The theme I was offered was how you could describe what it is to be foreign,” she remembers. “I took it for granted to keep the word ‘foreign’. I was thinking about the word and I thought…

IT’S BEEN 21 years since Kevin Bacon and David Koepp first worked together, on the haunting (and slightly overlooked in all The Sixth Sense hubbub) Stir Of Echoes . Since then they’ve remained friends, but stayed apart professionally. Until horror brought them back together again, reuniting them on the Wales-set psychological chiller, You Should Have Left . Empire spoke to them both, over Zoom, to talk about how their friendship began, how it’s changed, and what scares them. ON FIRST WORKING TOGETHER… David Koepp: One of the ideas [for Stir Of Echoes ] was to do this working-class story. Kevin’s name came up right away as someone who could play that believably, and not as a rich man in a poor man’s shirt. I’d been a big fan since She’s…

The Nightmare On Elm Street series Chris: The received wisdom about this franchise is that there are only three good films — the original, Dream Warriors , and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare . Is that the case? Owen: I don’t really like New Nightmare very much. James: What’s wrong with you? Owen: I think it’s a bit ponderous and full of itself. James: Speaking as someone who’s both ponderous and full of himself, I think it’s great. Owen: It was an attempt to make Freddy scary again, and I think the cat was out of that bag. Mike: I loved it. It felt like that was Wes Craven’s Scream before he did Scream . It was tackling horror films and the effect horror films have on audiences. It always felt…

HAPPY!: SEASON 2 OUT NOW / CERT MA15+ / 450 MINS Disgraced cop and former hit man Nick Sax (Christopher Meloni) has turned over a new leaf after the horrific events of the first season of Happy!. He’s even stopped drinking booze ...kinda. But his daughter Hailey’s annoying imaginary friend, the flying blue horse Happy (voiced by Patton Oswalt), is still around to pester him. And Nick’s enemies — from deranged children’s entertainer Sonny Shine to the currently incarcerated and demon-possessed crime boss Francisco “Mr Blue” Scaramucci — are looking for revenge. And who is this new maniac only known as “The Bunny”, who’s blowing up nuns and stalking Hailey? And what does it have to do with Easter? Following on from the acclaimed first season, the answers are both…

HERE’S TO HELEN It was ironic just after I read your review of the Helen Reddy biopic (October Empire) that I learned about her passing. I greatly enjoyed the film and, in retrospect, I consider it a wonderful tribute to an iconic singer and women’s rights trailblazer. ANDREA, MELBOURNE, VIC WHERE ARE THE BLU-RAYS? After reading Shaun’s comments about the Blu-ray backlash (‘Comment’, September), I have to agree. Most stores are reducing their Blu-ray stock…they seem to be on the way out. It’s getting harder to find independent titles, on download or physical copies. We movie fanatics demand a change. DREW, ATHERTON QLD WE WANT MORE FANS LIKE… (PART 2) I first came across Empire in March 2005 as a 15-year-old with Chewbacca on the front (issue #48). The big…

“THERE’S A LITTLE bit of Romeo And Juliet about it, actually,” writer-director Adam Mason laughs, describing his upcoming Michael Bay-produced thriller Songbird. Where Shakespeare’s timeless romance divided its characters into Montagues and Capulets, however, Mason’s film separates its star-crossed lovers a different way — by immunity to COVID-19. Nine months after the start of the coronavirus crisis, there’s a wave of movies now emerging that embrace and acknowledge our new normal, and Songbird aims to be among the first. “It’s set in a world where LA has been under lockdown for 200 weeks,” he explains. “There’s a slight proportion of the population who have immunity to the virus, and they’re forced to carry out essential services to keep society functioning. Our hero is a bike courier who delivers packages, and…

AS ENDINGS GO, it was a stunner. His Dark Materials Series 1 concluded with the same spine-tingling image as Philip Pullman’s original novel Northern Lights: Dafne Keen’s Lyra Belacqua (aka Lyra Silvertongue) walking through a shimmering rift in the Arctic sky, leaving her world — similar but not identical to our own — behind, and going…where, exactly? The answer is Cittàgazze, a mysterious Mediterranean-style city, beyond Lyra’s reality in a parallel world where all the adults have vanished, and youth gangs roam the streets. And she’s not the city’s only new arrival — there, too, is Will Parry (Amir Wilson), the teen carer from our world, who fled through a hole in the sky in the Series 1 finale after inadvertently killing an intruder in his house. Finally, our two…

SO, IS THIS HAPPENING? It’s much more than a hunch. Deadline reported recently that Booksmart’s Olivia Wilde (below) has signed to direct a film about a female Marvel character. Wilde then dropped some not-so-subtle hints about who this could be on social media, tweeting a spider emoji. WHICH SPIDER-WOMAN WILL WE SEE? It’s likely to be Jessica Drew, the first and best-established Spider-Woman, who debuted in the comics in 1977. Suffering uranium poisoning in childhood, Drew’s father injected her with a life-saving spider serum. Drew spent decades in stasis before awaking in her teens with exceptional superpowers. LIKE WHAT? She can stick to any surface — and produce a ‘Spider-Aura’ which causes confusion and ‘bioelectric energy’, a venom-blast to stun enemies. Which is pretty cool. WHAT’S HER HISTORY? She’s skilled…

SICO MAY BE down, but he’s not out. In a development so outlandish that it may as well have been a plot twist in Rocky IV, the news that Stallone is cutting him from the boxing fourquel comes just as the robot is poised to make an appearance in an animated spin-off from the franchise. Due out in early 2021, the as-yet untitled and unauthorised series is set to hop all over the Rocky timeline. “We plan for each episode to be like a 20-minute Rocky movie, with a fight with a new villain each time,” says the man behind it, Chris Ramzie. “They will vary in tone, too, with some being more drama-heavy like the first, and others being more outlandish like Rocky IV. The pilot will be as…

IN 2015, A fire broke out during a rock gig at the Bucharest club Colectiv. Twenty-seven people were killed that night, but another 38 people died later in the following weeks, due to substandard hospital conditions, watered-down disinfectant and repeated lies by the government. The scandal, which is the subject of a new documentary feature, Collective, forced the Romanian Prime Minister to resign. Improbably, it was exposed by a sports newspaper, the Gazeta Sporturilor, which mainly focuses on football. “They've done investigative journalism for 20 years,” explains Alexander Nanau, the film’s director. “Just in the sports world. [The journalist] Cătălin Tolontan had brought down sports ministers who had to go to jail for corruption. That’s why he started to investigate the healthcare system and the authorities — because of a…

OUT NOW CERT TBC / 91 MINS DIRECTOR Curtis Vowell CAST Rose Matafeo, Matthew Lewis, Rachel House, Emily Barclay PLOT Having a baby is a tumultuous, life-changing experience at the best of times, but an unexpected pregnancy is a complete disaster for tree surgeon and free spirit Zoe (Matafeo). While her boyfriend Tim (Lewis) is set to embrace parenthood, Zoe is in complete denial about the whole thing and her dogged refusal to face reality threatens to fracture her relationship with Tim. NEW ZEALAND HAS been exporting some wonderful comedies in recent years and Baby Done comfortably joins that long list. That’s no surprise when you realise its executive producer is Taika Waititi — he of What We Do In The Shadows and Hunt For The Wilderpeople fame — and…

OUT NOW (NETFLIX) CERT M / 134 MINS DIRECTOR Charlie Kaufman CAST Jessie Buckley, Jesse Plemons, Toni Collette, David Thewlis PLOT A young woman (Buckley) embarks on a road trip with her new boyfriend (Plemons) to meet his parents (Collette, Thewlis) — while she considers ending the relationship. But when they arrive, her grip on reality begins to falter. THE LAST TIME Charlie Kaufman attempted to adapt a book, the 2002 meta-mindfuck Adaptation , he was hit with such brutal writer’s block that he placed himself into the movie as a character, and invented himself a twin brother, too. There’s no sign of him as a character in this, his eighth film as writer and third as director, so we can presume the writing process went a bit better. But…

OUT TBA (FOXTEL) EPISODES VIEWED 5 OF 7 SHOWRUNNERS Dennis Kelly, Felix Barrett CAST Jude Law, Naomie Harris, Paddy Considine, Emily Watson, Katherine Waterston PLOT Troubled Sam (Law), trying to out-run both his business mistakes and his personal life, finds himself on the mysterious island of Osea where everything starts to get very spooky. Meanwhile, another visitor, Helen, (Harris) comes to Osea — will she uncover the truth about what happened? THE NEWEST DRAMA from Dennis Kelly is the sort of series that it’s almost impossible to review because to say too much would be to spoil its well-earned twists and turns. What we can say is that Kelly, whose cult drama Utopia was one of the most inventive television programs of recent years, is on magnificent form here, both…

OUT NOVEMBER 6 (STAN) CERT MA15+ / 111 MINS SHOWRUNNERS Gareth Evans, Matt Flannery CAST Sope Dirisu, Joe Cole, Lucian Msamati, Michelle Fairley, Paapa Essiedu PLOT When crime lord Finn Wallace (Colm Meaney) is shot dead under mysterious circumstances, the delicate network of alliances holding London’s underworld together threatens to shake apart. Not least because Wallace’s heir, Sean (Cole), is out for revenge whatever the cost. Meanwhile, Wallace organisation grunt Elliot (Dirisu) is so desperate to earn Sean’s trust and approval, he puts his very life on the line. FOR TOO LONG now, the British modern-day gangster thriller has been typified by unsavoury, cheap-as-chips, straight-to-video fare, which on the whole has felt just a little too enamoured of its carelessly violent, “fack”-spitting, shooter-toting, predominantly white male pro-antagonists. There have been…

IT’S A DRY AND WARM DAY when I first meet Chadwick Boseman in Atlanta. Three years and six months later, the same sun is setting on one side of the world and rising on the other as the simple statement is posted. Chadwick Boseman had died, at the age of just 43. The world responded with shock and devastation. Only his very closest family knew that Chadwick had been diagnosed with colon cancer four years previously. As I processed the news, my memory delivered me straight to Atlanta, February 2017. To the conversation on the sprawling set of Black Panther . A conversation in which he will have known he was ill. We spoke once more, six months on, when the film was in post-production. This time, it was raining.…

“His last text to me was telling me to keep going” MISCHA WEBLEY (ABOVE, FAR LEFT; DIRECTOR, THE KILL HOLE) I FIRST MET Chadwick on a casting call for The Kill Hole . We saw dozens of actors for the two lead roles, but it was very clear when we walked away that he had to be in the film, one way or the other. What really stood out about Chadwick is that he was committed in a way that’s rare. He will completely absorb the character; everything from how they talk, to a lot of subtext that you’ll never actually see, all the way up to the physical training. We shot mountain scenes in the Pacific Northwest. Most of the crew and cast would go and stay at a…

RASHIDA JONES IS wondering what to do. Everybody is. Empire is on a three-way Zoom video call with Jones, Marlon Wayans and Sofia Coppola — two of the stars, and the director, of On The Rocks . Bill Murray, the film’s other star, is supposed to be here, too, but he’s mysteriously absent. Jones and Coppola, joining us from California, are trying to reach him on the East Coast, to no avail. Time zones have already caused confusion. “SHALL WE DO AN INCANTATION TO GET BILL HERE?” On The Rocks is a reunion for Coppola and Murray, 17 years after they worked together on 2003’s wistful Lost In Translation . They reteamed for 2015’s Netflix song-and-dance special A Very Murray Christmas , in which Jones also appeared and, from there,…

“THE PENIS IS evil.” Levitating over a desolate wasteland, this granite visage is worshipped as a god by scantily clad warriors on horseback — one of whom is revealed as Sean Connery, making only his second big-screen appearance since his last as James Bond. There are no slick tuxedos for him here in this post-apocalyptic vision of the 23rd century. He sports a ponytail, a big moustache and not much else: thigh-high leather boots, some bandoliers and, most strikingly, a tiny scarlet loincloth. Later, we will see him mobbed by death-craving geriatrics; experimented on by psychic immortals fascinated by his ability to achieve an erection; and forced into wearing a bridal gown — all in a movie which, clearly, couldn’t better have satisfied the star’s early ’70s urge to avoid…

The Parallax View ALAN J. PAKULA was the master of paranoia. Between 1971 and 1976, he directed three thematically rich and stylish psychological thrillers, each dealing with differing aspects of politics, the abuse of power and surveillance. Dubbed the ‘Paranoia Trilogy’, it began with Klute , which starred an Oscar-winning Jane Fonda as a Manhattan call girl in the crosshairs of a killer, and concluded with All The President’s Men , which chronicled The Washington Post’s investigation into the Watergate scandal, and won four Academy Awards. In-between came The Parallax View , arguably the pick of an exceptional bunch. Loosely based on the novel by former OSS operative Loren Singer, the film follows newspaper reporter Joe Frady (Warren Beatty) as he investigates the deaths of several witnesses to a political…

THIS MONTH JAMIE McKELVIE, COMIC BOOK WRITER/ ARTIST EXTRAORDINAIRE, BREAKS HIS 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEYDUCK… I’M A HUGE fan of science-fiction, so I can’t really explain why I’ve never seen 2001: A Space Odyssey . Maybe because it’s so ubiquitous and has been referenced and parodied so many times, I felt like I already knew it. That’s a stumbling block from the very start. I’m so used to variations on the opening sequence — the Earth, moon and sun moving into alignment, scored dramatically by Thus Spoke Zarathustra — being played for laughs that it is hard to take it seriously. Even attempting to view it on its own merits, it seems heavy-handed. It’s an issue which pops up more than once in the rest of the film. A shot…

YOU CAN’T KEEP recovering alcoholic hit man Nick Sax and his imaginary unicorn friend Happy down for long. Happy! might have been prematurely axed last year, but the bloody TV horror-comedy won’t go away quietly, with the second season about to be released on DVD. After thwarting a child-abducting Santa Claus in season one, Sax is attempting to stay on the straight and narrow while trying to be a good dad to his daughter Hailey. But when he uncovers a monstrous Easter-themed conspiracy involving some old foes, he and his relentlessly upbeat blue buddy must spill copious amounts of bad-guy guts to defeat evil. Empire caught up with the series’ star Christopher Meloni to find out what fans can expect on the DVD. (Hint: it involves a lot of gratuitous…

JOSEPH GORDON-LEVITT: “[I chose] when Atreyu gets to ride the luckdragon, Falkor, in The NeverEnding Story [because] part of what cinema can do that other storytelling mediums can’t is bring you something so visceral and magical. There is no such thing as a luckdragon. In a novel you have to imagine it, and if you see it portrayed on stage, it’s going to be a puppet or something. But in a movie you can feel the reality of riding on a luckdragon.” EXT. CLOUDS — DAY Across a seemingly endless swirl of clouds, we see Falkor the luckdragon (voiced by Alan Oppenheimer) glide into view. He’s carrying Atreyu (Noah Hathaway) on his back. As they fly serenely through the clouds, Atreyu urges Falkor on. ATREYU: Hurry, Falkor! The Nothing’s everywhere!…

WE WANT MORE FANS LIKE… (PART 1) I’m an aspiring director/screenwriter obsessed with everything film. A few months back I found out about Empire and now I can’t get enough. The interviews, the reviews and the other talk about all things film is entertaining for days. The posters now cover my walls (sorry, family photos). Might I suggest you do an issue on Studio Ghibli, the Japanese animation film studio responsible for Oscar-winning Spirited Away and more. I can’t believe you’ve never done an issue about them! PAZ, VIA EMAIL We’re huge fans of Spirited Away, so thanks for the suggestion. We’ll see what we can do. And we appreciate for your enthusiastic support of the mag.…

COVID-19 DIDN’T AFFECT the making of Australian short film Abduction, but it messed up director Paul Komadina’s plans to attend the overseas festivals screening it. “We were finished by the time COVID started, but it affected the festivals themselves,” he told Empire. “Atlanta Film Festival was the first one we got into and it was going to be our world premiere, but it was delayed to September, so it became our second festival. We had plane tickets booked but COVID and lockdown happened, so we weren’t able to go.” The same thing happened with the North Bend Film Fest in Washington, which morphed into online festival Nightstream in October. It was an unanticipated bump in the road for Komadina and his film, which deals with the serious subjects of date…

THE ‘TIMESTILE’ TENET Director Christopher Nolan has said Tenet is “not a time travel film”. Except it is a bit, isn’t it? Those giant industrial turnstiles merely ‘invert entropy’, of course, but that can be quite useful for travelling in a time sort of way. THE PICKLE VAT AN AMERICAN PICKLE Here, Seth Rogen plays an Eastern European immigrant who falls into a vat of pickles and wakes up a century later. If you’re thinking, “That’s not how pickling works, he’d surely die” — don’t worry, it’s all explained off-camera. THE CAVE PALM SPRINGS The premise of this upcoming romcom? Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti wander into a cave and get sucked into a Groundhog Day-esque time vortex. It’s the most terrifying cave mishap since The Descent Part 2.…

THE SLEEPY MOUNTAIN town of Bend, Oregon (population: 76,693) is fairly unremarkable, by most measures: it boasts a ski resort, the headquarters of the Les Schwab tyre company — and a strange slice of movie history. For it is home to the world’s last operating branch of Blockbuster Video. Netflix may have won the war, but Blockbuster Bend still battles on. And now, improbably, you can stay overnight in it. “Y’know, we’re fighters here in Oregon,” chuckles Sandi Harding, the general manager of the store for the past 16 years. “We don’t go down without a good fight.” Opened as an independent video store by Ken and Debbie Tisher in 1991, it became a Blockbuster franchise in 2000; when Blockbuster Corporate went bankrupt in 2010, a handful of franchises were…

IT HIT ME hard when I heard Diana Rigg had passed away. Even though I had not been Bond for over 50 years, it shows how much people love the movie and our chemistry that I was overrun with requests to speak about her. I first met her at a dinner just before the big press conference where they announced me as Bond, in London in October 1968. So much has been made of my supposed difficult relationship with Diana. It was not true. (The story about Diana eating garlic before a love scene with me got blown out of all proportion. She herself said it was a playful quip, picked up by the press at Pinewood.) She was hired to help me out as I was inexperienced on screen.…

OUT NOW (DISNEY+) CERT PG / 115 MINS DIRECTOR Niki Caro CAST Liu Yifei, Donnie Yen, Jet Li, Gong Li, Jason Scott Lee PLOT When the Emperor Of China (Jet Li) decrees that one man per family must join the Imperial Army to defend the country from vengeful Northern invaders, Hua Mulan (Liu Yifei) disguises herself as Hua Jun and secretly rides out to take the place of her frail father (Tzi Ma). BITTERSWEET COMES THE news that Niki Caro’s Mulan is not only the best live-action Disney adaptation to date, but also a dazzling, moving, hair-prickling spectacle. Because in a move from Disney that at the time felt controversial, and now feels like a crying shame, a VOD release through Disney+ is for many the only way to watch…

OUT NOW (NETFLIX) / CERT M / 123 MINS DIRECTOR Harry Bradbeer CAST Millie Bobby Brown, Henry Cavill Well-intentioned if sometimes simplistic, Millie Bobby Brown’s feminist spin on Sherlock Holmes is often sweet, family fun. The Stranger Things star plays Enola, Sherlock (Henry Cavill) and Mycroft’s (Sam Claflin) teen sister, who sets out on her 16th birthday to find their missing mother (Helena Bonham Carter). What ensues is a sprightly adventure through Victorian London, as Enola discovers herself through her disdain for men (yes, all of them), her admiration for her stubbornly independent mother, and an unexpected new friendship with a runaway young lord (likeable Louis Partridge). Jack Thorne’s script might contain a few heavy-handed morals, but Brown’s valiant attempt to entertain the viewer, paired with Harry Bradbeer’s playful direction,…

OUT NOW CERT M / 94 MINS DIRECTOR Josh Boone CAST Blu Hunt, Maisie Williams. Anya Taylor-Joy, Charlie Heaton, Henry Zaga, Alice Braga PLOT Illyana Rasputin (Taylor-Joy), Rahne Sinclair (Williams), Sam Guthrie (Heaton) and Roberto da Costa (Zaga) are four mutant teens who are sequestered in a hospital run by Dr Cecilia Reyes (Braga). When newcomer Danielle ‘Dani’ Moonstar (Hunt) joins them at the facility, strange events begin to occur, with each mutant experiencing their greatest fear come to life. THE ROAD TO the big screen has been long and fraught for The New Mutants . Originally due to arrive in cinemas in April 2018, it’s been beset by delays, a corporate merger and, thanks to a global pandemic that brought the world to a halt, yet more deferrals. After…

OUT NOW (STAN) EPISODES VIEWED 9 OF 9 SHOWRUNNER David Wiener CAST Alden Ehrenreich, Jessica Brown Findlay, Harry Lloyd Aldous Huxley’s dystopian classic undergoes a modern reimagining, with Alden Ehrenreich as John, the American ‘savage’ trying to assimilate into New London’s caste-based social order. Thrust into a world where feel-good soma pills are popped to combat the slightest hint of upset, John brings an emotional tension, particularly for Harry Lloyd’s awkward Alpha, Bernard, and Jessica Brown Findlay’s discontented Beta, Lenina. Across the series we see the love triangle become more pointed and John’s disruptive influence magnify, but it’s here that it loses momentum. While the earlier, character-led episodes are compelling, when the revolution comes, interest starts to wane.…

OUT NOW (NETFLIX) EPISODES VIEWED 8 OF 8 SHOWRUNNERS Ryan Murphy, Evan Romansky CAST Sarah Paulson, Jon Jon Briones, Finn Wittrock, Sharon Stone, Judy Greer PLOT It’s 1947, and former army nurse Mildred Ratched (Paulson) arrives at Lucia State Psychiatric Hospital looking for a job. Hospital boss Dr Hanover (Briones) reluctantly takes her on, just before the arrival of convicted multiple-murderer Edward Tolleson (Wittrock). But everyone is hiding secrets that will turn the hospital upside down. RYAN MURPHY’S LATEST show has been billed as the untold history of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’s Nurse Ratched, unforgettably brought to life by Louise Fletcher in Milos Forman’s 1975 multiple-Oscar-winning film. Fletcher’s power lay in chilling restraint, a smiling passivity that hid a lust for absolute control. But restraint and passivity are…

JACKIE ROBINSON , 42 (2013) IT’S PERHAPS NO surprise that 42 was the movie that brought Chadwick Boseman to Marvel’s attention, and ultimately set him on the path to Wakanda. Jackie Robinson, the first Black player in baseball’s Major League, was a reserved man who, for the most part, kept his inner feelings buried. Those are qualities that can be found in T’Challa. And they’re qualities that, according to 42’s writer-director Brian Helgeland, resonated deeply within Boseman as well. Boseman had just two movies — Express: The Ernie Davis Story and The Kill Hole — under his belt when he got the role. He was already in his mid-thirties (but looked younger), allowing him to bring experience and accrued wisdom to the role of Robinson as he navigates his way…

DAVID FINCHER IS in a Los Angeles studio housing a recreation of the dining room of Hearst Castle, San Simeon. It is Friday, January 31, 2020, and he has a night shoot ahead, but has eked out rehearsal time this afternoon for a crucial scene due to film the following week. Gary Oldman, in ’30s suit trousers and half-buttoned shirt (dressed partially for comfort, partially for the part), has rounded the table and stopped less than a yard away from Empire as his character — Herman Mankiewicz: screenwriter, raconteur, genius, drunk — addresses a circus-themed dinner party. Arliss Howard is at the table, playing legendary MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer, alongside Charles Dance as William Randolph Hearst, the real-life model for cinema’s great publishing playboy, Charles Foster Kane. After…

WHO WAS HE? King of the high-brow Hollywood thriller, Pakula made complicated, character-driven, adult thrillers like Klute and, later on, Presumed Innocent and The Pelican Brief. HOW DID HE BEGIN HIS CAREER? He started out as an assistant in the cartoon department at Warner Bros., but quickly switched to producing. One of those movies was To Kill A Mockingbird, for which he received his first Oscar nomination. FIRST? HOW MANY DID HE RECEIVE? Three in total: one for producing, one for directing (for All The President’s Men), and one for writing (for Sophie’s Choice). Sadly, though, he never won. WHEN DID HE START DIRECTING? In 1969, with The Sterile Cuckoo. From the off, his was an assured, unshowy cinematic voice. In many ways, Klute, The Parallax View and All The…

THOMAS JANE IS one of those actors who you sense could go off at any time. Filled with restless energy, he’s the archetypal powder keg waiting to explode. A quality he’s used well throughout his long and varied movie career — and even when he’s playing against type, there’s a sense that you’re never more than a couple of minutes away from drama. Empire caught up with him recently and asked about some of his signature roles. “I didn’t know I had any signature roles!” Well, he does. Here they are... TODD PARKER BOOGIE NIGHTS (1997) Moustachioed and coked off his eyeballs, Todd is the bad-egg buddy who drags Dirk Diggler and Reed Rothchild to the fateful meeting with Alfred Molina’s flamboyant drug dealer, Rahad Jackson “I was…

KATIE HIGGINS AND TOM & JERRY DANGEROUS WHEN WET (1953) The trio – led by Katie (Esther Williams) – are graceful in this underwater sequence, but they don’t have the slick moves of Nick when he’s sliding around in a pool of blood, nor the poise of Happy as he’s flung out the window of a speeding taxi. 7/10 EDDIE VALIANT AND ROGER RABBIT WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT (1988) Eddie (Bob Hoskins) is as disheveled as Nick on his worst day and Roger is waaaaaaay more annoying than Happy. But in the end, Roger is merely a funny bunny while our magic unicorn faces down the genuinely terrifying The Bunny and comes out the victor. 8/10 FRANK HARRIS AND HOLLI WOULD COOL WORLD (1992) There’s no doubt Frank (Brad Pitt)…