Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2016 i Empire

1 The latest trailer gives us a longer look at Jedha. We now know it is “a moon frosted by a permanent winter” (starwars.com) and, as one of the first places to embrace the Force, it’s a place of pilgrimage for those seeking spiritual sustenance. Think Thailand in the ’90s. 2 Jedha is also occupied by the Empire as kickass Imperial tanks crawl the streets and rebel insurgents score victories when they can. Director Gareth Edwards has hinted it plays host to something “very important” that serves both the Jedi and the Empire. This could be a reference to Kyber crystals, the gem stones that power both Jedi swords and the Death Star. 3 The new trailer suggests the weapons test mentioned by Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly, who played the…

YOU KNOW YOU’VE created something truly memorable when the parodies start to appear. In December 2014, Netflix made Charlie Brooker’s nerve-racking anthology series Black Mirror available worldwide, and the cult British show became a phenomenon. “Terrifying, funny, intelligent,” tweeted Stephen King. “It’s like The Twilight Zone, only rated R.” Shortly afterwards, satirical website The Toast imagined ten future episodes with snarky synopses such as, “What if phones, but too much?” Black Mirror has ranged from the nightmarish (‘White Bear’) to the tender (‘Be Right Back’), each episode exploring a different genre and theme, but it’s easily stereotyped as a series of jeremiads about the perils of technology. “I think if you said to people, ‘Picture the first episode of the new series of Black Mirror,’ they would imagine someone frowning…

HIS FAUX-DOCUMENTARIES have delved into some fertile subcultures: dog shows (Best In Show), folk music (A Mighty Wind), amateur dramatics (Waiting For Guffman). But with his latest film, Mascots, Christopher Guest may have found his juiciest subject yet. The tale of folks who dress up in outlandish costumes for sporting events, its characters include a steampunk armadillo (Parker Posey), her envious sister (Susan Yeagley) and an ebullient man-hedgehog (Tom Bennett). We caught up with them, plus Guest and co-writer Jim Piddock, to find out why they found this topic so compelling. The concept of mascots is an odd one. Did you have to exaggerate things at all? Christopher Guest: There is no actual mascot competition like the one in the film. But if anything my films diminish the strangeness of…

OUT 30 SEPTEMBER CERT TBC / 127 MINS DIRECTOR Tim Burton CAST Eva Green, Asa Butterfield, Samuel L Jackson, Ella Purnell, Chris O’Dowd, Terence Stamp PLOT Confused by the mysterious murder of his grandfather, Jake (Butterfield) travels from Florida to Wales in search of answers. There, he finds a time loop that takes him from 2016 to 1943, and a school populated by extraordinary children — and their even more extraordinary headteacher. WE KNOW TIM Burton’s Batman. We came very close to seeing his Superman. And if you ever wanted to know what Burton’s X-Men would look like, here’s your chance. For not only does Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children come from Fox, the studio that owns Marvel’s mighty mutants, and is written by Jane Goldman, who was responsible…

OUT 7 OCTOBER CERT TBC / 93 MINS DIRECTOR Jim Hosking CAST Michael St Michaels, Sky Elobar, Elizabeth De Razzo PLOT By night, Big Ronnie (St Michaels) covers himself in grease and strangles folks who irritate him. When his son Big Brayden (Elobar), with whom he lives, begins seeing Janet (De Razzo), Ronnie schemes to take her away from Brayden. SOME CULT MOVIES seem to fall through wormholes from an alternative universe. When folks who’ve caught them early describe what they’ve seen to friends, they get accused of making them up. Surely The Greasy Strangler can only be one of those film-within-a-film skits. But, yes, it does exist, and you do have to see it to believe it. Though shot on far-from-glamorous Los Angeles locations, this is set in an…

OUT 7 OCTOBER CERT 15 / 98 MINS DIRECTOR John Michael McDonagh CAST Michael Peña, Alexander Skarsgård, Tessa Thompson, Theo James PLOT Corrupt cops Terry Monroe (Skarsgård) and Bob Bolaño (Peña) have a cushy lifestyle, framing hoodlums and stealing narcotics as they patrol their beat in Albuquerque. But when an evil British lord (James) pings onto their radar, they find themselves in way, way over their heads. “IT STARTS AND ends with the script,” says one lowlife to another in War On Everyone, as they disapprovingly watch a low-grade porn flick. “If you ain’t got a good script, you ain’t got shit.” Fortunately, the person who wrote and directed this coal-dark crime comedy is John Michael McDonagh, the Irish auteur behind The Guard and Calvary. Both of those films are…

OUT 21 OCTOBER CERT PG / 124 MINS DIRECTOR Mira Nair CAST David Oyelowo, Lupita Nyong’o, Madina Nalwanga PLOT A young girl growing up in one of the poorest areas of Uganda discovers she has a natural aptitude for chess. Her new skill puts her on a path to become a world champion, and changes her life in ways she never dreamt. MIRA NAIR’S UNABASHEDLY heart-string-tugging drama, her best movie in over a decade, tells the true story of Phiona Mutesi (Madina Nalwanga). Raised in a Ugandan slum, by a single mother (Lupita Nyong’o) determined not to resort to begging or worse to make her way, Phiona is reasonably happy, until she wanders into a small classroom one day, enticed by an offer of free porridge. There she is introduced…

OUT NOW (DOWNLOAD) CERT 12 / 111 MINS DIRECTOR Takeshi Nozue CAST Lena Headey, Aaron Paul, Sean Bean PLOT The kingdom of Lucis stands alone against the all-conquering Niflheim Empire. After years of war, King Regis (Bean) is offered peace if he weds his son Noctis (Ray Chase) to Princess Lunafreya (Headey). But can the Emperor be trusted? FINAL FANTASY IS an institution. Since its inception back in 1987, this Japanese saga has grown into what is arguably the world’s most respected gaming franchise. Despite a slight wobble of late, it is synonymous with cinematic storytelling. However, if your only experience thus far has been its actual movie output, though, you’ll probably have a very different impression. 2001’s Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within’s attempt at photorealistic CG storytelling was ahead…

SKY ATLANTIC OUT OCTOBER EPISODES VIEWED 1-4 SHOWRUNNERS Jonathan Nolan, Lisa Joy CAST Anthony Hopkins, Ed Harris, Thandie Newton, Evan Rachel Wood, Jeffrey Wright PLOT The creation of Dr Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins), Westworld offers a unique immersive experience for wealthy tourists to engage their every whim (sex, violence, wearing bad headwear) in an authentic Wild West environment. There’s only one cloud on the horizon — the artificial attractions are on the blink. “THESE VIOLENT DELIGHTS have violent ends,” warns Evan Rachel Wood’s Dolores Abernathy at various points during Westworld. This Shakespearean quote (Romeo And Juliet, Act 2, Scene 6, Bard-fans!) lies at the heart of the JJ Abrams-produced reboot of Michael Crichton’s 1973 theme-park-goes-ape-shit classic. On one level, Westworld 2016 offers a cautionary tale about the dangers of indulging…

VICTIM __ 1961 Dirk Bogarde’s closeted barrister is the victim of blackmail in the first English-language film to use the word “homosexual”. Its sympathetic portrayal is often credited with helping to liberalise British laws and soften prejudice. MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE __ 1985 This one is an examination of tolerance all round, dealing with issues of poverty, racism and extremism. Amid the chaos that those bring, the love story between Gordon Warnecke’s Omar and Daniel Day-Lewis’ Johnny is a place of comparative safety. __ e. __ __…

2001: A SPACE Odyssey may now be seen as arguably the greatest sci-fi movie of all time but, back in April 1968, it wasn’t even the greatest sci-fi of the month. That honour went to another hominid-heavy astronaut movie, Planet Of The Apes, a more accessible but less technical picture. While critics went apes for Charlton Heston, Stanley Kubrick’s space drama got the sharper end of their pens. They damned its languid pacing, lengthy runtime, even its mysterious monolith. “Why doesn’t Pauline Kael like my movie?” fretted Kubrick to his marketing team. The revered New Yorker critic had damned his film’s determinist outlook as “a celebration of a cop-out”. What Kael and her peers couldn’t have known was that Kubrick’s time-travelling movie would itself travel gloriously through time. It remains…

COSTUME The most fun was Diana Vreeland in Infamous. She was an iconic editor of Vogue. She wore her hair in a helmet of hairspray and everything was red. She wore a huge amount of rouge, red clothes, red furniture, red everything. The most challenging was in Drowning By Numbers. It was filmed on the East coast [of England] in winter. I had to spend the shoot in a swimming costume, high heels and a red beret. I was always wet and I was freezing cold. MOMENT Around 1992 I won Best Actress at the Olivier Awards for Death And The Maiden, and Best Actress at the BAFTAs for Truly Madly Deeply. It was amazing, to get awards for film and theatre in the same year. It felt like an…

PREACHER, GARTH ENNIS and Steve Dillon’s shocking, darkly funny comic about a man of God who turns on his creator, was long considered unadaptable. Well, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg stuck a fork in that one with the show’s hugely enjoyable first season. At its core was a great turn from Dominic Cooper as Jesse Custer, the minister thrown into a world of angels, vampires, and a bloke with an arse for a face… Did you know the comic before taking this on? I heard the name of a script that was being bandied around and it was a good one. And I found a copy [of the comic] at my friend’s house. I sneaked off with it and read it and loved it. Then I started looking online, then…

IF, AS FAR back as you can remember, you always wanted to be a gangster (without the criminal record), the Mafia video-game series could be an offer you can’t refuse. Launched in 2002 on the foundations of dramatic realism, strong anti-heroes and good, old-fashioned epic storytelling, the original game felt like a genuine step forward. It was as compelling as the best Mob movies; as thrilling as the most sophisticated games of its day; as authentic as Mama’s own meatball recipe. Mafia’s first entry was set in the city of ‘Lost Heaven’, an approximation of Chicago and San Francisco during the 1930s; the sequel, set in the New York-esque ‘Empire Bay’, saw a GI return from World War II only to get mixed up with the wrong crowd; Mafia III,…

IT’S NOVEMBER 2015, and the peace of prenatal yoga class at alternative London health centre Clerkenwellbeing has just been shattered by a blood-curdling scream. Everyone in the room jumps, for real. Alice Lowe — the screamer — sits up delightedly and calls cut. She does a second take. Everyone jumps that time, too. Pregnancy for most working women means maternity leave. Not for Lowe. Rather than take time out from her career, the Sightseers star decided to channel her child-bearing experience into writing, directing and starring in Prevenge. “There’s never a right time to direct your first feature,” she grins. “It’s a lot like having a baby in that way.” A violent comedy about a rage-fuelled, baby-bumped woman with a death list — Kill Umbilical, if you will — Prevenge…

GIVEN PORTRAYALS OF Churchill are way beyond dart-score figures, you’d think there was little left to say about Britain’s jowly leader. Well, think again. Set during the 48 hours leading up to D-Day, Jonathan Teplitzky’s time-bomb drama bunkers down in Downing Street’s War Room where Churchill faced a battle on three fronts: the Nazi war machine, his own obdurate generals and an internal conflict with debilitating depression. With the mighty Brian Cox as its lead, this promises to recast a mythical figure in all-too human form. “What we’ve uncovered flies in the face of public perception,” says Teplitzky. “Many people will be shocked to hear Churchill was in total opposition to D-Day. He feared Operation Overlord would be another Gallipoli.” Joined by a stellar ensemble including Miranda Richardson as Clemmie…

MILES TELLER HAS a letter from Martin Scorsese framed on his wall. An executive producer on boxing drama Bleed For This, the director of Raging Bull wrote to the actor just before shooting started. “It was on his letterhead and typed on an old typewriter,” says Teller. “It said, ‘To play the part of Vinny you are going to have to show hard work and perseverance, and I know that you are the right guy for this job.’ For him to reach out to me was something.” Scorsese’s note wasn’t lost on Teller. Empire’s gala film at this year’s BFI London Film Festival, Bleed For This tells the true story of Vinny Pazienza, a junior middleweight champion boxer whose career ended after he broke his neck in a car crash.…

ILZE KITSHOFF AS THE NAME suggests, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter marks the conclusion of the zombie action franchise. “We’re taking the audience back, like a Möbius strip, to the beginning,” writer/director/producer Paul WS Anderson tells Empire on the South African set. “There’s a whole bunch of secrets, that we’ve had in mind for a long time now, that pay off in this movie. I want it to end on a high.” Going back means a return to Raccoon City, site of the outbreak five films ago in 2002’s original Resident Evil (loosely adapted from the video games). Early-days sets such as The Hive — the lab complex of the evil Umbrella Corporation — have been reconstructed, but for tonight, we’re in a wind-blasted quarry in the hills outside Cape…

OUT 14 OCTOBER CERT 15 / 164 MINS DIRECTOR Andrea Arnold CAST Sasha Lane, Shia LaBeouf, Riley Keough, Arielle Holmes PLOT Teenager Star (Lane) leaves home to travel around the US with a group of hard-partying young salespeople led by Krystal (Keough) and Jake (LaBeouf), but must earn her place in the crew. DIRECTOR ANDREA ARNOLD is now cinema’s foremost chronicler of youthful passion. Fish Tank, Wuthering Heights and this new road movie focus on characters on the brink of adulthood, throwing themselves headlong after love and life. They appear heedless, but the common thread between Arnold’s heroines is they’re already familiar with life’s cruelties, and risk everything to find a place of safety. Semi-improvised on a route across the Midwest, a young woman called Star (newcomer Lane) leaves an…

OUT 30 SEPTEMBER CERT 12A / 108 MINS DIRECTOR Peter Berg CAST Mark Wahlberg, Kurt Russell, John Malkovich, Kate Hudson, Dylan O’Brien, Gina Rodriguez PLOT Based on the true story of a heroic band of oil rig workers on Deepwater Horizon, the submersible offshore drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico that exploded in 2OPO, this follows the dramatic events that followed as the workers desperately fought to stay alive in the aftermath of the worst oil spill in US history. MARK WAHLBERG AND Peter Berg’s last movie together as an actor-director pairing took the unusual step of spoiling itself with its title: Lone Survivor. There are no such spoilers in the title of their next movie together, just a matter-of-fact statement of intent. Deepwater Horizon is, the title says,…

OUT 30 SEPTEMBER CERT TBC / 84 MINS DIRECTOR Babak Anvari CAST Narges Rashidi, Avin Manshadi, Bobby Naderi PLOT Tehran, 1988. Shideh (Rashidi) looks after her daughter Dorsa (Manshadi) while her husband Iraj (Naderi) does military service. As Iraqi missiles fall on the city, Dorsa insists they are being haunted by a supernatural creature called a djinn. RELOCATING A FAMILIAR story to an unfamiliar setting often pays off, especially in horror and suspense. Here, circumstances unique to Tehran during the Iran-Iraq War mean heroine Shideh (Rashidi) has to deal with troubles above and beyond being targeted by an evil spirit. If this were Poltergeist, JoBeth Williams could flee a haunted house in the middle of the night without being arrested by religious police who think a woman on the streets…

OUT NOW CERT 12A / 133 MINS DIRECTOR Antoine Fuqua CAST Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke, Vincent D’Onofrio, Byung-hun Lee, Peter Sarsgaard, Haley Bennett PLOT Rose Krick, 1887. Terrorised by robber baron Bartholomew Bogue (Sarsgaard), the townspeople send newly widowed Emma Cullen (Bennett) to find a band of men crazy enough to tackle him. Enter dead-eyed bounty hunter Sam Chisolm (Washington), chirpy gunslinger Josh Faraday (Chris Pratt) and five more lethal recruits. IF REMAKING ONE classic is tough, remaking two at the same time feels like an impossible mission. So it proves with Antoine Fuqua’s heavy-handed retread of the team-up yarn that birthed both John Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven and Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. Lacking the froth and fun of the former, and the humanist joys of the latter, it’s…

OUT NOW CERT 15 / 123 MINS DIRECTOR Sharon Maguire CAST Renée Zellweger, Colin Firth, Patrick Dempsey, Jim Broadbent, Gemma Jones, Emma Thompson, Sarah Solemani PLOT Bridget is back. She’s older (the film opens just shy of her 43rd birthday), more successful, but not much wiser, as she becomes pregnant and is unsure by whom: long-term love interest Mark Darcy or new American suitor Jack Quant. As the birth nears, who will turn out to be the daddy? THE THIRD IN the Bridget Jones franchise opens in a familiar fashion: Bridget (Zellweger) is alone, an overflowing glass of white wine in clenched fist as she sadly sways on her sofa to the strains of All By Myself Until suddenly she stops, exclaims, ‘Fuck off!’, switches off Sad FM and flips…

OUT NOW FORMATS: PC, XB1 DIRECTOR Mark Pacini CAST Erika Soto, Connor Trinneer, Harry Shum Jr PLOT Joule Adams (Soto) awakes from a cryo-sleep to find Far Eden, the planet she was sent to colonise, is overrun by robots. With her mechanical helpers, she must restore order and find her father. RECORE’S INGREDIENTS ARE comfortingly familiar. Squint and you’d be forgiven for mistaking protagonist Joule (Soto) for Star Wars newcomer Rey: both women are of a similar age and share both a style (brown, sweeping headscarf; forehead-mounted goggles), a vocation (scavenger of scrapped technology) and a love of mechanical companions. Joule’s planet, Far Eden, is as sandblasted and sweltering as Jakku, pocked with Zelda-esque dungeons, each of which must, as in Miyamoto’s classic adventure series, be salvaged and solved, usually…

AS BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH dashed down Manhattan’s East 32nd Street in his last scene as surgeon-turned-sorcerer Doctor Strange, he couldn’t help but notice the JHU Comic Books shop. Once the shot was in the bag, still in his full blue-and-red regalia, he decided to pop in. “I thought, ‘You are literally ending where this began,’” Cumberbatch recalls “The loop of serendipity was too much to not go in and acknowledge it. I wanted to see the look on their faces.” Photographs of Cumberbatch in the shop went viral, but an experience the day before may be even more revealing. Cumberbatch, again in costume, took a quick coffee break New York nonchalance, most of the customers glanced up and immediately went back to their drinks. “It was fantastic,” he says. “I was…

TWEEZY DOES IT Newton reveals his true self to Mary-Lou (Clark) by removing his contacts via tweezers, exposing his alien eyes. “It’s one of my favourite shots in the movie,” says Richardson. “Nic and I were in that tiny bathroom trying to keep out of the mirrors ourselves. We just got it done.” IF YOU’RE LOOKING for a David Bowie origin story better than the prosaic “he was born in Brixton”, then you can pretend that Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell To Earth is it; that Bowie came from a planet where orgasms are represented by expert trampolinists bouncing 15 feet high in the air, spinning alien semen (actually buckets of wallpaper glue — we asked) against a black sky. Makes sense. Four decades on, Roeg’s sci-fi is as…

NOT FOR THE first time, monster. Originally intended as a Syfy schedulepadder, when Sharknado aired back in July 2013, the accompanying tweet-storm turned it into a WTF phenomenon. Or, go on then, finomenon. Sharknado’s been huge for its makers, Asylum, and it hasn’t wasted a second. We’ve had four instalments in three years. Bingewatch the lot and your brain slowly curdles into cheese. Graduating from the Snakes On A Plane school of title-first-movie-later, Sharknado is what it is: a tornado full of sharks. A stupid-genius mash-up of disaster flick and creature-feature, the original lobs a fish-infested water-spout over LA. Enter Ian Ziering who, armed with a chainsaw and a gobful of direlogue, is like a Poundshop Evil Dead Ash. Rendered in the kind of fluffy CG last seen in a…

PAUL VERHOEVEN REMEMBERS a party he and a buddy attended in the Netherlands in the ’60s, where they met an attractive blonde who, it quickly became apparent, was not wearing underwear. Verhoeven’s friend, more audacious than the future director of Showgirls, spoke up: “You know, we can see your vagina.” The woman smiled, “Of course — that is the reason I do it.” Almost 30 years later, Verhoeven took his Basic Instinct star, Sharon Stone, to dinner and told her that story, suggesting a similar act would transform the scene where Stone’s maybe-murderer Catherine Tramell is grilled by a roomful of sweaty cops. Stone, he says, was “really excited by the idea”. It was something shocking, yes, but in every sense revealing. What followed became one of the most talked-about…

#4 CITY LIGHTS THE LATEST MEMBER of The First Take Club is one of the finest comedy writers around. Not only did he co-write TV shows such as Fresh Meat and Babylon, and Christopher Morris’ film Four Lions, but he’s the co-creator of seminal sitcom Peep Show. So when we asked Sam Bain to choose a film he hadn’t seen from Empire’s 301 Greatest Movies Of All Time list (published in 2014), correct that oversight and then tell us all about it, it seemed natural that he would gravitate towards a classic comedy. Namely, Charlie Chaplin’s 1931 classic, City Lights, in which Chaplin’s The Tramp tries to raise money to save the sight of a blind girl with whom he’s in love. Over to you, Sam… So basically I’ve never…

LEADER BOARD Ben Kingsley 9.5 Christopher Lee 9.5 David O. Russell 9.5 Quentin Tarantino 9.5 Robert Rodriguez 9 Guillermo del Toro 9 Werner Herzog 9 Christian Slater 8.5 Bryan Singer 8.5 Jeffrey Combs 8 1 In The Man With Two Brains, your character prepares Kathleen Turner for brain surgery by instead shaving her pubic hair into what shape? A heart, because it’s Valentine’s Day! I got to work with the great Steve Martin. The joke is he pointed at it and goes, “What is that?” I look at my cohort and go, “He doesn’t know what that is?” And I whisper, “It’s a vagina.” And Steve Martin said, “Whisper, ‘It’s a pussy.’” I was so shocked Steve Martin said, “It’s a pussy.” Correct. 2 With which director have you worked…

CAPITAL PICTURES “My favourite scenes are more about mood. This long holding shot of Dirk Diggler in the firecracker/drugs heist in Boogie Nights was supposed to last seconds, but Mark Wahlberg kept going and this little moment of magic was created as we see him gathering himself to get up and leave. It’s a belter of a scene.” Dirk (Wahlberg), Todd (Thomas Jane) and Reed (John C Reilly) have come to Rahad’s (Alfred Molina) place to sell him cocaine — actually baking soda. As Rahad’s bodyguard checks the coke, the trio are on a sofa, watching Rahad dance in his robe. The mood is tense – not helped by a young Asian man, Cosmo, randomly letting off firecrackers. Rahad crosses the room and produces a large box. RAHAD: Now you…

IN A CAREER of groundbreaking firsts, Allied represents another for Robert Zemeckis: his first full-blown cinematic romance. Just don’t ask him why he is doing it. “Why directors are attracted to material is like love affairs,” says the man behind Back To The Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and last year’s The Walk. “It either happens or it doesn’t; there’s no real science. It was fun and challenging to do something I’d never done before.” Allied sees Special Operations Executive agents Max Vatan (Brad Pitt) and Marianne Beausejour (Marion Cotillard) fall in love on a mission to assassinate a high-ranking German official. With an early stretch that follows Max as he learns to pose as Marianne’s husband in the glamorous environs of 1940s Casablanca, the movie explores the idea that…

“I NEVER DO things my way,” says Mel Gibson (right) with a smile. “No, when I do things my way, I get into serious trouble.” It’s true. When a drunk Gibson called a female traffic cop “Sugar Tits” in 2006, the scandal threatened to sink his career. But after a decade of semi-retirement, not only is he finally making inroads back into Hollywood, strong test screenings and a release date in awards season suggest he may achieve the ultimate redemption by bagging next year’s Best Picture Oscar. Starring Andrew Garfield, Hacksaw Ridge, Gibson’s fifth film as director, tells the story of Desmond Doss, a war hero who was decorated for bravery — despite never firing a shot. “It’s a true story,” says Gibson, “about a man who was a conscientious…

“I AM VERY pleased with the reception,” says director Denis Villeneuve, on the phone to Empire from Hungary. “I wasn’t able to leave my set, so I sent both my actors there alone. If the movie had been badly received I would have felt very bad for them.” “There” is the Venice Film Festival. “The movie” is alien-visitation drama Arrival, which was unveiled in early September to rapturous applause. Starring Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner, it sees a talented linguist (Adams) urgently trying to ascertain whether an alien vessel has come in peace. As for the film that prevented Villeneuve from blessing the Lido with his wry, Canadian presence, it’s a little project known as Blade Runner 2, currently shooting in Budapest. With the likes of Sicario and Prisoners, the…

“IT’S A FASCINATING challenge,” begins David Frankel, director of Collateral Beauty. “The movie starts as a broad comedy, then slams into some pretty dramatic stuff. The plot is kinda from a ’30s film, but at the same time the emotions feel utterly real. The phrase I use to describe it is ‘screwball drama’.” Set in New York just before Christmas, Collateral Beauty follows ad-agency exec Howard Inlet (Will Smith), whose life spirals out of control after a tragic event. Surrounding Smith is one of the glossiest casts of 2016. Edward Norton, Kate Winslet and Michael Peña play Inlet’s co-workers, trying to save their boss and the agency; Helen Mirren, Keira Knightley and Jacob Latimore play a troupe of “off-off-Broadway” actors who intersect with Inlet in important ways. Frankel describes it…

IS IT RENEWED? Yes. In late August, Netflix finally confirmed a second season. Released at some point in 2017, it will feature nine episodes — that’s one more than the first season! Creators Matt and Ross Duffer, aka the Duffer Brothers, are hard at work. “We’ve been talking about Harry Potter, even though it’s weird to compare it,” Matt tells Empire. “I like that you’re revisiting these characters and watching them grow up on a year-to-year basis.” SO WHAT DOES THAT MEAN? Real time will have passed for the now-rescued Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) and his friends (Finn Wolfhard, Gaten Matarazzo and Caleb McLaughlin), so it will be set in 1984 and reflect the films of that year — especially Temple Of Doom, apparently. Ross Duffer describes next season as…

OUT 30 SEPTEMBER CERT TBC / 97 MINS DIRECTORS Dan Kwan, Daniel Scheinert CAST Paul Dano, Daniel Radcliffe PLOT Hank (Dano), a suicidal man stranded on a beach, finds a washed-up corpse (Radcliffe) that is not only somehow alive, but has incredible abilities. Dubbing it Manny, Hank sets off home. IN THIS MEDIA-saturated world, where we’re bombarded 24/7 by images that are usually inspired by or based on or downright ripped-off from other sources, originality has become an endangered species. Everything’s been done, it seems. Played out. It’s increasingly rare for a movie to show you something you haven’t seen before. That’s not a problem for Swiss Army Man. Two minutes in, and Paul Dano’s Hank is thwarted in his attempts to commit suicide on a beach by the sudden…

OUT 21 OCTOBER CERT 15 / 100 MINS DIRECTOR Ken Loach CAST Dave Johns, Hayley Squires, Dylan McKiernan PLOT Widowed joiner Daniel Blake (Johns) finds himself trapped in Newcastle’s benefits bureaucracy as his heart condition means he can neither take a job nor claim Jobseekers’ Allowance. As he struggles to maintain his dignity, he befriends single mother Katie (Squires). THERE’S A SIGN doing the rounds at this year’s boom in protests that reads, “I can’t believe I’m still protesting this shit in 2016.” You can imagine Ken Loach must feel the same way. After five decades of socially progressive dramas, and documentaries so politically hardcore they were suppressed like degenerate art, he came out of retirement to make this — a profound sigh of a survey of today’s marginalised and…

OUT 2 OCTOBER CERT 15 / 117 MINS DIRECTOR Mat Whitecross CAST Noel Gallagher, Liam Gallagher, Alan McGee, Paul Arthurs, Peggy Gallagher, Tony McCarroll, Mark Coyle PLOT Documentary tracing the early years of Oasis from their council estate beginnings to their two shows at Knebworth in 1996, taking in all the breakthroughs and bust-ups along the way. ON 31 MAY 1993, five lads from Manchester hired a van to drive up to Glasgow, where they played a show to “seven people”. A little over three years later, they headlined the biggest gigs in history when a quarter of a million people went to see them at Knebworth over two nights. Supersonic documents that rise. It also throws into sharp focus just how rapid it was. The film opens with Oasis…

OUT 7 OCTOBER CERT 15 / 88 MINS DIRECTOR Jean-François Richet CAST Mel Gibson, Erin Moriarty, William H Macy, Diego Luna, Michael Parks PLOT Recovering alcoholic ex-con John Link (Gibson) is scraping out a living as a trailer park tattoo artist clinging to the hope of reuniting with his estranged, wayward daughter. But when the young woman (Moriarty) suddenly shows up in serious danger, Link will have to draw on his criminal past if they’re to survive. SINCE HIS DRUNKEN 2010 outbursts and other revelations landed him in career jail, Mel Gibson’s mostly just kept his head down, done his time and, more recently, tried to dip his toe back into working both behind and in front of the camera, with varying results. It’s tempting to think he took the…

OUT 7 OCTOBER CERT 15 / 95 MINS DIRECTOR John Dower CAST Louis Theroux, Tom De Vocht, Marty Rathbun PLOT BBC filmmaker Louis Theroux sets out to make a documentary about Scientology, but is soon stymied by its leaders’ refusal to participate. Instead, he decides to cast actors to do the job for them. MAKING A SCIENTOLOGY documentary will always guarantee you an audience. A small army of lawyers, in the first instance. Alex Gibney estimates 160 legal eagles watched last year’s Going Clear before its release, and it’s hard to imagine Louis Theroux’s addition to L Ron Hubbard’s DVD cupboard wasn’t given a similarly fine-toothed treatment. Few people are more likely to goad this litigious organisation than a man who’s turned the tables on everyone from white supremacists to…

NETFLIX OUT 30 SEPTEMBER EPISODES VIEWED 1-6 SHOWRUNNER Cheo Hodari Coker CAST Mike Colter, Mahershala Ali, Alfre Woodard, Simone Missick, Theo Rossi, Frank Whaley PLOT Luke Cage (Colter) is living a quiet life in Harlem, trying to lie low so as not to reveal his superpowers. However, the actions of criminal Cottonmouth (Ali) hit Cage very close to home and force him to step up to become the hero he’s not entirely sure he wants to be. THE THIRD OF Netflix’s Marvel superhero shows, following Daredevil and Jessica Jones, is barely superhero-y at all. Special abilities rarely figure for more than a few minutes per episode, but it’s powerful in other ways. Its strength is in the ‘real’ stuff. If you watched Jessica Jones you will have met Luke Cage…

Steve Ditko is a comic-book legend, but hasn’t been interviewed or photographed by the press since the 1960s. “It’s not what I’m like that counts; it’s what I did and how well it was done,” the artist said in one of his last on-the-record conversations, a 1968 article that billed him as “The Man Of Mystery”. Hating attention as much as Stan Lee loves it, he has never been involved in a Spider-Man movie, nor did he have a hand in this year’s Doctor Strange. “Ditko’s like JD Salinger,” says Scott Derrickson, director of the latter. “He’s a famous recluse. I don’t know why I would be the one to change his mind!” Ditko began drawing comic books in 1953. Two years later he teamed with Lee on Marvel’s precursor,…

BLAZING MONOLOGUE Blazing Saddles (P97S) Selected by Kim Newman, contributing editor Gene Wilder wasn’t a comedian — he was a comic actor. At the centre of Mel Brooks’ anything-fora-laugh Blazing Saddles, Wilder delivers an affecting performance as town drunk/fast-draw artist Jim. He ambles through his performance taking cues from Gregory Peck in The Gunfighter. “Well, it got so that every pissant prairie punk who thought he could shoot would ride into town to try out the Waco Kid,” begins his big monologue, delivered with a wistful smile. “It got pretty gritty. I started to hear the word ‘draw’ in my sleep. Then, one day, I was just walking down the street when I heard a voice behind me say, ‘Reach for it, mister!’ I spun around and there I was…

TOM CRUISE HAS A RULE: UNLESS it’s Mission: Impossible, he doesn’t do sequels. Throughout his 35-year career, without fail he has left every iconic role behind except super-spy Ethan Hunt. There is no Jerry Maguire 2. No Born On The Fifth Of July. No Rain Men. That changes next month with Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, in which Cruise once more fills the shoes of Lee Child’s nomadic hero, last seen in 2012’s no-frills thriller Jack Reacher. So how did this character, an ex-military policeman who wanders across America, righting wrongs with his fists and smarts, succeed where the likes of Cole Trickle, John Anderton or even Les Grossman failed, by burrowing into Cruise’s subconscious and demanding to be taken for a second spin? “He’s such a fascinating character to…

RATHER FITTINGLY, IT started and ended with fur. The beginning: Doris Fish, famous (and infamous) San Franciscan drag queen and lead member of drag troupe Sluts-A-Go-Go, returned from a trip to New York in 1983 and exclaimed to friend and young filmmaker Phillip R Ford in her thickest Australian accent, “I’ve spent a thousand dollars on fun fur, so we have to make a Barbarella-type movie!” Nearly nine years later, the end: Ford was at Sundance Film Festival with Vegas In Space, the film they ended up making, but without Doris Fish by his side. It was snowing and, clad in a fur coat, he made his way up the hill to a glitzy evening event. “Pardon me,” a gentleman queried. “Do you know the way to the queer party?”…

THE EMPIRE VERDICT THE NICE GUYS CERT 15 What we said: “Quick on its wits and fast with its fists, this is Black firmly back doing what he does best. And nobody out there does it better.” Notable extras: A couple of featurettes, cast interviews, ’70s trailer. 00:03:16 THE MISTY MOUNTAINS COLD __ The movie opens with a boy (Ty Simpkins) ogling a porn centrefold, then the same model (Murielle Telio’s Misty Mountains) crashes through his house in a car, and dies in the same position as she’s in in the photo. “It stems from the idea of the expectation of Los Angeles versus the disappointing outcome,” says Black. “In reality, things are very different than when you’re sequestered in your fantasy.” › 00:09:03 PORN POSTER PARADISE __ As we…

PENNY DREADFUL, WE hardly knew ye. In an age where hit TV shows seemingly trundle on forever — The Walking Dead look like they’ll never get to sit down — John Logan’s gloriously gory and vastly underrated Gothic horror finished its run this summer after just three seasons. The end, when it came, was so sudden that there was much speculation among fans that Showtime, the network behind the show, had pulled the plug. The dreaded C-word was mentioned. “It certainly wasn’t a cancellation,” says Logan. “It just seemed right. And I knew it would be very difficult for some of the fans, because it’s such a full stop. I mean, the words ‘The End’ come up and that’s what it is. It was an ending.” If you didn’t catch…

MAIN TITLE Covered by everyone from South Park to the Buckingham Palace guards, the blood-stirring Game Of Thrones theme is as sweeping and epic as its continent-hopping title sequence. Djawadi — who has composed the music for all 60 episodes of Game Of Thrones to date — only had two directions from showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss when putting the theme together. First, it needed to evoke the mood of a journey. Second, no flutes. “That was the rule,” laughs Djawadi. “It’s something you might expect from a genre like this and they really didn’t want that. So I went with the cello, because it’s a dark show and the cello is really expressive. Then the solo violin joins it and at the end the all-female choir kicks in.…