Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2016 i Empire

“I HAVE KIDS, so I have to sit through a lot of crap,” says director Peter Chelsom. “Do you ever go to see those films that ten-year-olds go to see? It’s like two hours in an ashtray. You’re just exhausted. [But] when I read this script I went, ‘This is the kind of movie Robert Zemeckis would have made in the 1980s,’ and I thought, ‘Well, that’s great.’” The script that so impressed the Serendipity director was The Space Between Us, a science-fiction story about Gardner Elliot (Asa Butterfield), a boy born on a scientific mission to Mars. His astronaut mother dies in childbirth and, too small to survive take-off and a return to Earth, he grows up surrounded by scientists on the Red Planet. It’s only as a teenager…

THE JOHN WICK Kill Counter on YouTube allows you to re-live every fatal shot, stab, snap and boom of the 2014 film’s 101 minutes. They killed his dog, they stole his ’69 Mustang and, in response, Keanu Reeves’ retired contract killer put 76 Russian mobsters in the ground. “That number’s a little light,” corrects director Chad Stahelski. “I saw that video, but they forgot to count the guys in the various SUVs he crashed and blew up. If you include them then it’s actually 84.” Shot for just $20 million, John Wick raked in a respectable $130 million worldwide and showed a hard-edged, ass-kicking side of Reeves that has been largely absent since 1999’s The Matrix — where Stahelski worked as Reeves’ stunt double. John Wick: Chapter 2 picks up…

DOMINATING THE POSTERS for The Great Wall, Zhang Yimou’s latest Chinese historical fantasy epic, is the unlikely face of Matt Damon. And behind the scenes is a writing team that includes Bourne screenwriter Tony Gilroy, World War Z creator Max Brooks and Hollywood writer/director Ed Zwick (who took Tom Cruise to Japan for The Last Samurai). Concerns of ‘whitewashing’ rumbled in opinion pieces and across social media in the wake of the marketing campaign’s earliest salvos, but for the director, the issue isn’t one that’s especially significant. “I like how naturalistic his performances are,” shrugs the director of his star. “Why not seize the opportunity to work with him?” The Great Wall s narrative does call for a Western face to be a part of the proceedings — unlike Zhang’s…

EYEVINE, REX FEATURES YES OLLY RICHARDS, CONTRIBUTOR DISMISSING ENTIRE CATEGORIES of film is getting very boring. Once, sequels were considered lazy and terrible. Then it was remakes. Then it was reboots. Now it’s prequels. These complaints go on until enough good examples are made to kill the argument. The popular ‘name one sequel better than the original’ argument died years ago because there are now far too many. As for reboots, remember when that Mad Max reset, without Mel Gibson, seemed a shaky prospect? The only thing that matters with a Furiosa prequel is that it has a compelling story. Any other theoretical gripes are meaningless and childish. The most common complaint about prequels is that they strip away the mystery. “I don’t need everything to be explained! I don’t…

SEX, STRONG LANGUAGE and violence: this is a new age of Agatha Christie adaptations. Following last year’s Christmas hit, And Then There Were None, it’s now the turn of Christie’s 1930s courtroom drama The Witness For The Prosecution (Crooked House and The ABC Murders are among a further seven BBC Christie dramas pencilled in for the future). Empire is on set in a bare cell, just a desk and two chairs, beneath Manchester’s London Road Fire Station — derelict since the ’80s — where an interrogation is going on. “You sound like the police,” huffs Leonard Vole (Billy Howle) of his defence barrister’s questions. “I sound like the prosecution — because that’s what they’ll ask,” says John Mayhew (Toby Jones). The details he’s dragging out of his client concern a…

OUT 11 NOVEMBER CERT TBC / 126 MINS DIRECTOR Ewan McGregor CAST Ewan McGregor, Jennifer Connelly, Dakota Fanning, David Strathairn PLOT In post-war New Jersey, Seymour ‘The Swede’ Levov (McGregor) seems to have it all: a glittering sporting high-school record, a prosperous business, a beauty queen wife. But when his daughter gets involved in the violent politics of the P9UOs, a seemingly perfect all-American family quickly crumbles. EWAN MCGREGOR, THE actor, has frequently found himself drawn to challenging material — the heroin addiction of Trainspotting, the nourish bleakness of Young Adam, the sex and drugs of Velvet Goldmine. American Pastoral, therefore, certainly fits the bill for Ewan McGregor, the director. But a Pulitzer Prizewinning Philip Roth novel, juggling multiple hefty themes across several narrators of varying reliability, is an ambitious…

OUT 11 NOVEMBER CERT 18 / 93 MINS DIRECTOR Paul Schrader CAST Nicolas Cage, Willem Dafoe, Christopher Matthew Cook PLOT A trio of ex-cons (Cage, Cook, Dafoe) reunite to hatch a plan that will make them all some serious money so they can retire. It involves kidnapping a baby. There will be complications. And blood. YOU MIGHT THINK — might hope — that the man who wrote Taxi Driver and Raging Bull (and directed, amongst others, American Gigolo) would be okay for work for the rest of his days. But that hasn’t been the case for Paul Schrader. Since his Exorcist prequel was shelved then reshot by Renny Harlin 13 years ago he’s struggled, with this decade being particularly unkind to him. In 2013, there was The Canyons: the notoriously…

OUT NOW CERT TBC / 101 MINS DIRECTOR Greg Mottola CAST Zach Galifianakis, Jon Hamm, Isla Fisher, Gal Gadot, Matt Walsh PLOT Jeff and Karen Gaffney (Galifianakis and Fisher) are an ordinary married couple who begin to suspect their new neighbours, the Joneses (Hamm and Gadot), may well be assassins. THERE’S A GREAT comedy to be made about a nice guy who starts to suspect that his new next-door neighbours are up to no good, and whose resultant paranoia leads to an explosive escalation of events that threatens his marriage, his home, and his life. And it already exists. It’s Joe Dante’s The ’Burbs, not Greg Mottola’s Keeping Up With The Joneses, a rather muddled effort which doesn’t even begin to explore the comedic potential of its premise: what would…

REX FEATURES OUT 4 NOVEMBER CERT TBC / 86 MINS DIRECTOR Louis Black CAST Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy, Matthew McConaughey, Jack Black PLOT How Richard Stuart Linklater went from a baseball-obsessed student to one of the most distinctive voices in American film. BLOCKBUSTER SEASON MAY have underwhelmed, but here’s some consolation: it’s a good year for engaging documentary portraits of filmmakers. Following Hitchcock/ Truffaut and De Palma, Richard Linklater: Dream Is Destiny is a portrait of one of the most compelling, idiosyncratic filmmakers working today. Employing the standard mix of talking-head interviews, on-set footage and archive TV appearances, all linked by Linklater talking through his private journals, Louis Black’s film shares many traits with the man himself — candid, intelligent, warm and relaxed — although it perhaps lacks…

NETFLIX OUT NOW EPISODES VIEWED 1-6 SHOWRUNNERS Charlie Brooker, Annabel Jones CAST Bryce Dallas Howard, Alice Eve, Jerome Flynn, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Kelly Macdonald PLOT Six one-off dramas presenting nightmarish scenarios for where the rapid pace of technological change could be taking us. IT’S OBLIGATORY TO discuss Black Mirror as if creator Charlie Brooker is some kind of pre-cog, given his anticipation of posthumous chat-bots, digital demagoguery and our former PM’s alleged porcine pursuits. That said, the darkest future this suggests is one where newspaper columnists are given hefty budgets to pour their minds into Netflix’s servers. Despite the media love-in, there are dramatic limitations here. Brooker chooses to structure most of these six new episodes in the same way, leaning on writer’s crutch the mystery box, where every character knows…

OUT NOW FORMATS PSVR DIRECTOR Sefton Hill CAST Kevin Conroy, Mark Hamill PLOT Part murder mystery, part kidnap drama, Arkham VR places you in the shiny boots of the titular crusader who must find out what’s happened to two of his closest allies. ACCORDING TO THE tech mavens, it’s been the “year of VR” for several years now. But with the launch of Sony’s PSVR this month — a black-and-white headset that looks like a prototype prop for a stormtrooper — the medium has finally and fully emerged into the world. Its launch line-up allows you to be bodily transported into the seat of an Aston Martin Vanquish in DriveClub, a starfighter in Eve: Valkyrie or to the ledge of the GCPD rooftop looking over Gotham City in Arkham VR.…

MAYBE, JUST AYBE, YOU’VE SEEN one yourself. A pi feather, twitching in a tree. A rown blur, wriggling down a beach. A pair of eyes, intently gazing at you from behind a rock. Then you blinked, and it was gone. Nothing left but the feeling you’d seen something way, way out of the ordinary. “There are magical creatures everywhere,” confirms David Yates cheerily. “Some of them live in the most remote places on the planet. Some are just very good at disguising themselves. One can actually make itself invisible. They’re incredibly difficult to find.” Let’s get one thing straight: Yates, the director of the final four Harry Potter films and this year’s The Legend Of Tarzan, has not packed the whole thing in to play Pokémon Go. Instead, he’s putting…

EVERYONE WHO’S WORKED with Nicolas Cage has a Nicolas Cage story. Justin Bartha, co-star of the National Treasure films, recalls a glorious, schnapps-fuelled dinner with Cage and Crispin Glover at LA’s Madeo restaurant that went on and on and on. “Like going to a rock ’n’ roll voodoo ceremony with a hilarious vampire wearing an orange crocodile jacket... and your skull’s on fire,” is how Bartha sums up the experience. Alison Lohman, Cage’s con-job protégée in Matchstick Men, flashes back to a more sedate but equally memorable night aboard his private jet in 2003. “Sam Rockwell and I were talking when Nic came up and told us he was going to bed,” she says. “He walked into the bathroom and five minutes later came out in full pyjamas with a…

IT’S A WHIRLWIND once you get involved in a project like this,” reflects Amma Asante of A United Kingdom. “You don’t talk to anyone, and family and friends go on pause.” The making of the director’s third film, after A Way Of Life (2004) and Belle (2014), proved to be a testing endeavour. It tells the true-life story of Seretse Khama (David Oyelowo) and Ruth Williams (Rosamund Pike), whose against-the-odds romance makes Cinderella’s trip to the ball look like a Tinder encounter. He was Botswana royalty; she was a wartime ambulance driver-turned-Lloyd’s insurance clerk. They met, fell in love and decided to marry. The hitch? The British Empire had other ideas. To capture the epic scope of the stirring interracial love story, director, cast and crew travelled from London to…

THE EMPIRE VERDICT THE NEON DEMON CERT 18 What we said: “Imagine America’s Next Top Model written by Sofia Coppola and directed by Dario Argento — it’s cool, baffling, darkly funny, super-slow, vapid, stunning, at times tedious and – in its last third – utterly bat-shit crazy. Notable extras: Refn commentary, featurettes. 00:03:01 JESSE’S ‘DEAD’ __ When we first meet her, aspiring model Jesse (Elle Fanning) is lying on a chaise longue covered in blood, posing for a morbid shoot by amateur photographer Dean (Karl Glusman), soon to be her boyfriend. “That was the idea that started the whole journey,” says Nicolas Winding Refn, the film’s co-writer and director. “Before I even had a story, I came up with this idea: death and beauty in one shot.” 00:17:30 THE SCOUT…

LOCATION I believe Islay in the Hebrides of Scotland is the most beautiful place on Earth. I shot an episode of Parks And Recreation there, when Ron Swanson goes on a treasure hunt. It was so gorgeous I openly wept. But it was a wide shot so you couldn’t see. Also from Parks And Rec. North of LA there’s a place called Antelope Valley, where they have ranches. It was not the location, but the heat. We were pretending it was Christmas at the height of summer. I was wearing a sweater. Unpleasant with the amount of body hair I boast. COSTUME I just made a movie called The Little Hours, which is set in the Middle Ages. I’m a lord and I got to have a castle in Tuscany…

THIS MONTH: SPIDER-MAN WATCHING SPIDER-MAN’S evolution as a live-action hero is quite an experience. In fact, it’s weirdly similar to Peter Parker’s struggles with his own powers: there are soaring highs, wonky landings, skids, scrapes and face-plants into brick walls, but he always gets back up again. Canned after 13 episodes, CBS’ ’70s series offers an unforgiving lesson in how not to adapt Marvel’s mascot and is where our Spider-Binge begins. Nicholas Hammond was pushing 30 when he played Peter Parker, but that’s the least of its problems; the analogue era simply couldn’t cope. Armed with Silly String web-shooters, wobbly abseiling skills and eyes that look suspiciously like egg poachers, Hammond’s Spidey has all the agility of a concrete chimp. The ropey FX are understandable; what’s baffling is the vision:…

SO WHAT EXACTLY IS ITS TITLE? This is a surprisingly tough question. In the US, it’s officially Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, but here in the UK it will be subtitled Salazar’s Revenge. And in France, Spain, Italy and a few other countries it’s slightly different again, going by The Revenge Of Salazar. Perhaps all these aliases are useful to conceal its piratical identity — or it could be down to a conflict with the BBC documentary Dead Men Tell No Tales. WHAT’S THE STORY? Well, we can deduce that Javier Bardem’s Captain Salazar, the “deadly ghost pirate” — them again — who looks like a drowned man in the teaser trailer, is out for revenge on his nemesis, Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp). Salazar and his…

JOHN BAER/UNIVERSAL PICTURES SPLIT DOES NOT feel like a movie from the writer-director of The Last Airbender and After Earth. It feels more like something from the man behind The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable. Receiving a surprise premiere at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas, this macabre abduction drama was greeted as a triumphant return for M. Night Shyamalan (below). The director is certainly buoyed by the positive reaction when Empire speaks to him two days after the screening, and admits he’s enjoyed going back to “darker, more bizarre lands”. At first glance, Split is just another kidnap drama, in which three teenage girls (including The Witch s Anya Taylor-Joy) are chloroformed and imprisoned in a basement. But their abductor, Kevin (James McAvoy), suffers an acute form of dissociative identity disorder,…

ASIDE FROM THE risk of bruising or a groin strain, there was little peril in 2015’s Fifty Shades Of Grey. But its sequel, Fifty Shades Darker, raises the stakes. “The action of the movie opens up,” says director James Foley, taking over the reins from Sam Taylor-Johnson, who chose not to return. “It’s not a classic Fatal Attraction thriller, but it’s an interesting hybrid of the ups and downs of a relationship with these plot devices accentuating it.” The plot devices he mentions are “external forces” that threaten the renewed relationship between Jamie Dornan’s billionaire Christian Grey and Dakota Johnson’s recent graduate Anastasia Steele. “It’s the forces that impinge on all relationships and pressure them to fall apart; it’s just externalised more. Conflict drives drama, so it’s a more dramatic…

CEPHALOPODAPHILES BE WARNED: legendary South Korean director Park Chanwook’s new movie, The Handmaiden, features another octopus. But unlike its counterpart in the director’s Oldboy, this one should make it through. “That was a common octopus in Oldboy,” explains Park, gently schooling Empire on molluscs between sips of black coffee. “They’re part of the Korean diet. Then there are these big ones, but it’s just coincidence you’ve seen octopuses in two of my films.” What’s not coincidental is that the director’s return to South Korea has seen him again winning rave reviews. That tentacled critter is just one of the unexpected touches in a period potboiler that bears Park’s unmistakeable stamp. Few other filmmakers could entwine breathless romance, explicit sex, lurid splashes of violence and twists of pure depravity with such…

OUT 28 OCTOBER CERT 15 / 118 MINS DIRECTOR Yeon Sang-ho CAST Gong Yoo, Ma Dong-seok, Jung Yu-mi, Ahn So-hee, Kim Eui-Sung PLOT Banker Seok Woo (Gong) agrees to take his daughter (Ahn) to visit her mother in Busan. But a zombie epidemic breaks out as they leave Seoul, and the passengers on the train find themselves under threat from a horde of the undead. TERRORISTS IN A skyscraper, alien in a spaceship, snakes on a plane: the mix of dangerous antagonists and enclosed space is a perennial favourite of filmmakers, for obvious reasons, and the combinations are formed and reformed in an endless kaleidoscope. Now South Korean director Yeon Sang-ho has put zombies on a train, and it’s a match made in heaven — or somewhere much lower down.…

OUT 4 NOVEMBER CERT 15 / 117 MINS DIRECTOR Tom Ford CAST Amy Adams, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Shannon, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Isla Fisher, Ellie Bamber, Armie Hammer PLOT Susan (Adams) is materially successful but emotionally unfilled. When she’s sent a manuscript by her ex (Gyllenhaal), telling a tale of vengeance in the Texas desert, she reminisces on her former life and confronts the mistakes she’s made. WHEN A FASHION designer turns to filmmaking, it seems the least we should expect is for it to look the part. And so it’s proved with Tom Ford. His debut feature, A Single Man, managed to find beauty in the bottom of a sock draw, and this, his second, which he adapted from Austin Wright’s novel Tony & Susan, looks similarly exquisite. The man is…

OUT OCTOBER 28 CERT 12A / 101 MINS DIRECTOR Joachim Lafosse CAST Bérénice Bejo, Cédric Kahn, Marthe Keller, Catherine Salée PLOT Boris (Kahn) and Marie (Bejo) are separating after 15 years of marriage — however, cash-strapped Boris is unable to move out of the family home, and disputes arise over how best to divide the couple’s assets. THERE’S A LONG and unproud history of non-English language titles being reworked into boring mush for the British market — and After Love is just the latest. L’Economie Du Couple, its French title, is far more apposite, but in fairness you can imagine how the distributors struggled to see a marketing strategy for something called The Political Economy Of Contemporary Divorce, even if it would tell audiences far more specifically what they’re getting.…

OUT 28 OCTOBER CERT TBC / 94 MINS DIRECTOR Roger Mainwood CAST (VOICES) Jim Broadbent, Pam Ferris, Brenda Blethyn PLOT Animation based on author and illustrator Raymond Briggs’ graphic novel about his parents (Blethyn and Broadbent). The story follows their marriage through the war years and beyond. THERE’S A LIVE-action prologue to Ethel & Ernest, in which Raymond Briggs explains how his parents would have been pleased, but slightly embarrassed, to see their story on a bestseller list. Imagine, then, what they’d make of this — a film adaptation where they’re voiced by Brenda Blethyn and Jim Broadbent. They lived an ordinary life, but this is what makes the film so refreshing. We’re so accustomed to seeing World War II through the eyes of soldiers on the front line, or…

OUT NOW CERT 12A / 118 MINS DIRECTOR Edward Zwick CAST Tom Cruise, Cobie Smulders, Danika Yarosh, Patrick Heusinger, Aldis Hodge, Robert Knepper PLOT When Major Turner (Smulders), Reacher’s (Cruise) successor in the Military Police, is arrested for espionage, he starts poking around. When he’s then framed for murder, he busts her out and they set out to clear their names. SURE, HE’S A fine actor, but what Tom Cruise does really well is run. And Ed Zwick, having directed him before, clearly knows that. So, as Never Go Back approaches the half-hour mark and with Cruise yet to break into anything above a brisk walk, Zwick cuts to him sprinting for a cab. And then, to make up for lost time presumably, a few minutes later he runs for…

ON-SET PHOTOGRAPHY: DALE ROBINETTE IT WAS MAY 2002, just seven months after his debut movie had died horribly, when Richard Kelly found himself on East 3rd Street in New York. He was lost in thought, still pondering how the metaphysical, science-fiction high-school drama Donnie Darko, over which he’d toiled and fought bitterly for years, could have flopped so badly the previous Hallowe’en. Then, as he passed a pizza joint named Two Boots on the corner of Avenue A, he saw a familiar face. The long-eared, metallic, smiling-skull visage of Frank the bunny stared at Kelly from the restaurant window. Curious, Kelly stepped inside. “Why do you have my movie poster up?” he asked. Two Boots, it turned out, was affiliated with the single-screen Pioneer Theater next door. “We’re playing your…

Stephen Daldry needed a train. It was a tall order for any project, let alone a TV series. But soon enough, a rare 1950s steam locomotive (BR Standard Class 9F) was sourced for the single shot. He was hard at work directing the first episode of The Crown, the Netflix show that traces the evolution of Queen Elizabeth II from post-war princess to reluctant regent and the most famous woman in the world. It was a sequence where the royal family were heading to Sandringham for what would prove to be the last Christmas for King George VI (Jared Harris). “We’d shot most of it,” says Daldry. “Then I went, ‘We really need a shot of the King on the train. Can we get one?” “It cost £300,000,” Daldry admits.…

“BREDREN!” booms Adam West. Right from the moment he greets Empire, on the phone from his Idaho home, the star is exactly as playful and off-the-wall as you’d hope. “A title like Empire, it’s so grand!” he declares. “Is it the Byzantine Empire, the Roman Empire...?” Everything’s a hoot; nothing’s taken too seriously — each time he catches himself dwelling on something, he exaggerates it for comedic effect. He’s pure, uncut Adam West. And by Adam West, of course, we mean Batman West has been synonymous with the character now for five decades. His Batman TV show was first broadcast on the ABC network in January 1966, followed six months later by a film. Since then, West has been inseparable from his do-gooding, super-droll take on the Caped Crusader. Having…

REX FEAT TURES PERHAPS THE MOST surprising thing about Thunderbolt And Lightfoot, arguably Clint Eastwood’s best film and certainly his most interesting, is that for a movie that revels in its own unpredictability and freewheeling style, one that nods both to the French New Wave and its scion, the New Hollywood, its origins were almost wholly corporate. In the early ’70s Eastwood’s William Morris agent, Leonard ‘The Smiling Jackal’ Hirshan, had been handed a screenplay by Michael Cimino, another Morris client and a hot former advertising kid-turned-writer of Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running. Unusually Hirshan forwarded it to Eastwood, who generally preferred to generate projects in-house at his production shingle Malpaso. It was an earlyish example of the wholly agency-driven deal, the Hollywood model that was fast taking over, and which…

IN THE BEGINNING, there was just a story. Of a boy, the most ordinary of boys, and his bird. “It’s a very simple tale,” says Ken Loach of Kes as we talk in the Soho office of his production company, Sixteen Films. “It begins with the writing and with the central image of the bird that flies free and the boy that is in chains.” That writing, and the origins of Kes, was Barnsley-born Barry Hines’ 1968 book A Kestrel For A Knave, set in a South Yorkshire mining town. Though Hines never specified an actual town, by the time Ken Loach and long-time producer Tony Garnett scooped it up, they had located it in North Athersley, near Barnsley It was, in the late 1960s, a town sat on seams…

DENNIS MUREN HAS a confession to make about the first time he saw Steven Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. “I didn’t get it,” laughs the ILM visual effects supervisor. “I saw an early version of the film with temporary sound and temporary music and it just didn’t work. You could hear the motors on E.T. when he was turning his head.” Priced at a thrifty $10 million E.T. was, according to Muren, “low on ILM’s totem pole” in early 1982, due to big effects hitters Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan and the Spielberg-produced Poltergeist. Still, Muren and his team created one of cinema’s most indelible images: Elliott (Henry Thomas), E.T. in basket, flying his bicycle across a rich full moon. E.T.’s signature shot was not in Melissa Mathison’s screenplay.…

#5 AMELIE THE IDEA OF The First-Take Club is simple. Every month, we ask someone to select a film they haven’t seen from Empire’s 301 Greatest Movies Of All Time list (published in 2014). Then they watch it and tell us what they thought. This month’s inductee is Ian Rankin, one of Britain’s finest novelists and best known as the creator of the hugely successful John Rebus series. Read a Rebus novel and you’ll know Rankin is a man with his finger on the pop-culture pulse, so we worried he might have seen the whole list. Turns out one had escaped his gaze: a French movie renowned for its whimsy, achingly cool lead character and ace score. It is, of course, Amélie. So, Ian, what did you make of the…

“I WAS VERY sorry for the people who fainted,” says Raw director Julia Ducournau of two viewers at the film’s Toronto Film Festival screening in September. “Consequently, the film was presented as a gore-fest, which it is not.” Raw is a cannibal coming-of-age tale, in which 16-year-old vegetarian Justine (Garance Marillier), encouraged by her sister Alexia (Ella Rumpf ), eats raw chicken liver as a college prank, and begins a slide into cannibalism. “I wanted [to put] the audience in the shoes of [someone] they might consider a monster, in order to realise she is not a monster,” says Ducournau. “She is not a werewolf. Cannibalism is a taboo of humanity but it belongs to humanity.” The prosthetics and ragged sex make Raw undeniably visceral, but at its (tasty) heart,…

MOST FILMMAKERS MELLOW with age. Not Paul Verhoeven. Returning to feature films after a decade-long absence, the 77-year-old director has made one of his most provocative projects ever: an unclassifiable black comedy that ruthlessly subverts the rape-revenge genre, and every audience expectation. In Elle, Isabelle Huppert plays Michèle, a Parisian video-game exec who, in her opening scene, is viciously raped by a masked intruder. But rather than report the assault she engages in a twisted game of cat-and-mouse with her attacker. “It’s been called a ‘rape comedy’, but that’s not right,” says Verhoeven when Empire meets him in London. “The rape isn’t funny, and definitely not entertaining. Shooting those scenes was tense, dangerous and very carefully choreographed. Isabelle was given complete freedom, and had no problem filming the sequences: we…

CHRIS PRATT IS singing Salt-N-Pepa’s Push It and popping moves until director Morten Tyldum (The Imitation Game) orders him back to work with Jennifer Lawrence. “Usually [actors] come in for three hours a day and get Thursdays off,” Pratt laughs. “Here I’m like, ‘I have to be here the whole day? In every shot? Fuck this.’” It’s day 47 of the Atlanta shoot and Empire is playing gooseberry on the first date of writer Aurora (Lawrence) and mechanic Jim (Pratt) while genial bartender Arthur (Michael Sheen) serves drinks. But their Art Deco bar is aboard a spaceship taking 5,000 people in hibernation pods on a one-way, 120-year journey to a new colony, and Arthur is a legless android. The problem is, Jim and Aurora have awoken 90 years early. The…

STAPLING TINSEL TO your nethers. Nude selfies on your boss’ phone. Listening to Slade. If you think your workplace shindigs are bad, wait ’til you see Office Christmas Party, the latest from Will Speck and Josh Gordon (Blades Of Glory). When Clay’s struggling business faces closure, the hapless boss throws a giant party to secure a new client and save the branch. The result is the blow-out to end all blow-outs. Speck and Gordon introduce the guests. CAROL (JENNIFER ANISTON) Gordon: “Since her father died, Carol has been CEO. There’s sibling rivalry between her and [T.J. Miller’s] Clay, because she feels she was ignored [by their parents]. Having worked with Jen before [on The Switch], she looks for things that are new. She’s very brave that way. The idea of…

OUT 1 NOVEMBER CERT 12A / 133 MINS DIRECTOR Derek Cianfrance CAST Alicia Vikander, Michael Fassbender, Rachel Weisz, Caren Pistorius, Emily Barclay PLOT World War I veteran Tom (Fassbender) takes a job as a lighthouse keeper, and is joined by his wife Isabel (Vikander). The pair long for a child and when a baby washes up in a boat, they decide to raise her Ñ but are faced with an agonising dilemma when they discover her true heritage. PERHAPS SURPRISINGLY GIVEN he made Blue Valentine, the latest drama from Derek Cianfrance is an unashamedly romantic affair. Set at the end of World War I, it stars Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander as a couple beginning their life together off the coast of Western Australia. Pairing those two actors together is…

OUT 15 NOVEMBER CERT 15 / 125 MINS DIRECTOR Gavin O’Connor CAST Ben Affleck, Anna Kendrick, J.K. Simmons, Jon Bernthal, John Lithgow PLOT Autistic maths wizard Christian Wolff (Affleck) has a lucrative business as a freelance accountant for dangerous criminal organisations. But when the US treasury closes in, he takes on a legitimate client only to discover corruption and murder afoot. IN 1988, OSCAR-GRABBING blockbuster Rain Man drew the blueprint for portraying autism in mainstream cinema, painting the condition as a kind of adorable super power, thanks to Dustin Hoffman’s shuffling performance as maths savant Raymond Babbitt. The Accountant riffs on this now familiar approach, imbuing its autistic lead character Christian Wolff (Affleck) with a supernatural talent for preparing accurate tax returns, but also shooting guns — especially the gigantic…

OUT NOW CERT 12A / 121 MINS DIRECTOR Ron Howard CAST Tom Hanks, Felicity Jones, Omar Sy, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Irrfan Khan PLOT Symbologist Robert Langdon (Hanks) wakes up in a Florence hospital bed with memory loss. When he’s attacked, Dr Sienna Brooks (Jones) must help him escape and find out what’s going on. AFTER THE PROFITABLE but little-praised The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons, this third Ron Howard and Tom Hanks adaptation of a Dan Brown book sees the filmmakers once again elevating weak material. Sadly, with lines like, “He has the Faraday pointer!” even their best efforts can’t quite make this gripping. We’ve seen James Bond and his mates save the world from bioweapons multiple times already, and replacing a remote-controlled BMW with a Botticelli isn’t…

NETFLIX OUT 4 NOVEMBER EPISODES VIEWED 1-10 SHOWRUNNER Peter Morgan CAST Claire Foy, Matt Smith, John Lithgow, Victoria Hamilton, Jared Harris PLOT After the sudden death of her father, King George VI (Harris), Princess Elizabeth (Foy) ascends to the throne. Dogged by problems with her husband Philip (Smith), her sister (Kirby) and cantankerous Prime Minister Winston Churchill (Lithgow), the new queen struggles to balance her personal life with her royal duties. YOU WAIT YEARS for a lavish period drama about the inner life of an era-spanning British queen and then… well, you can see where we’re going with this, can’t you? With ITV’s hit Victoria still just about visible in the cultural rearview, here comes another regal retelling from Netflix. So is there room in the age of Peak TV…

30 THE SORTING HAT Screentime: 3 mins The finest sentient head-topper in the Harry Potter universe, the Sorting Hat is, it seems, also indirectly responsible for many of the troubles in the wizarding world, placing the most-likely-to-be-evil students in dorms together to scheme wicked deeds. Then again, he did help Harry Potter defeat the Basilisk in Chamber Of Secrets Fantastic fact: J.K. Rowling originally considered sorting students via talking statues of the four house founders 29 LILY POTTER Screentime: 4 mins As a result of having died horribly while Harry was a baby, Lily Potter (Geraldine Somerville) isn’t blessed with a wealth of screentime. Still, that’s hardly an obstacle when there are Pensieves, Resurrection Stones or Mirrors Of Erised lying around. While still alive, she stuck up for a friendless…

MARK HAMILL Hamill grew up watching the Batman show, and years later, before it was available to buy, had Fox send him tapes of every episode. “Adam is so underrated as an actor,” he said recently. “He walked the line between sincerity and parody and set the tone.” NICOLAS CAGE “Adam West was my favourite Batman,” Cage once said. “I always wanted to be him.” He achieved that by channelling the star in Kick-Ass . Later, when Jay Leno got them together on his talk-show, Cage said to West, “Thank you for saving my childhood.” JERRY SEINFELD When asked in 2011 which TV series the comedian would take with him to a desert island, he chose Batman . “It’s funny, it’s got adventure, it’s got some romance, it’s very colourful…

“I HATE DOING THESE kinds of commentaries,” says J.J. Abrams, approximately five minutes into his Star Wars: The Force Awakens talk track. As opening gambits go, it’s a startling one. Especially considering Abrams’ commentary (he didn’t provide one for the initial home entertainment release) is arguably the major selling point of this new version, eclipsing the 3D presentation and the addition of five new featurettes. Happily, the director soon settles into his task and provides plenty of insight, self-deprecating humour and revelations about Episode VII Here’s what we gleaned from this reawakening... 1 _ Poe Dameron was meant to die. His disappearance from the crashed TIE Fighter on Jakku was initially meant to be the last we were going to see of the dashing pilot. But Oscar Isaac was wary…

ALLSTAR, CAPITAL PICTURES, SCOPE FEATURES 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 John Waters 8 1 What is The Woman In Black’s real name? Jennet Humfrye. I remember that quite well. And it’s spelled in a weird way. I’ve got a fairly good memory. Correct. 2 What is the first thing you say as Harry Potter, in The Philosopher’s Stone? Dudley rushes down the stairs… It’s either, “Yes, Uncle Vernon,” or, “Yes, Aunt Petunia,” because I’m making breakfast. I’ll go for, “Yes, Aunt Petunia.” I actually saw that scene not very long ago. I was someplace that only had one English channel on TV and that…

IF ALL THE world’s a stage — as some playwright once put it — then America is one gigantic, continent-sized movie set. It’s the home of Hollywood and Humphrey Bogart, Star Wars and Star-Lord, Greta Garbo and The Goonies. It’s ripe ground, in fact, for a film-inspired vacation — and here, American Airlines can help. The world’s largest airline flies direct from London to LA, New York JFK, Chicago, Philadelphia and many more — not to mention offering a huge network of internal US flights, with over 240 destinations in North America alone. Here are three cities, in particular, worthy of the cinematic pilgrim. ROCKY LOCATION: PHILADELPHIA Pound-for-pound, Rocky is the best boxing movie ever made — yes, even counting Raging Bull — and more to the point, it’s intrinsically…

“There are so many brilliant scenes from the late Curtis Hanson, that most eclectic of directors, but I’m going with the final rap battle of 8 Mile . The last act is a bravura sequence, beautifully shot, structured and played, where Eminem’s Jimmy finally shows us what the fuss has been about for the previous hour-and-a-half. As he lays himself bare, exposes all his secrets and stuns his opponent, it’s Jimmy’s, Eminem’s and all of our stories. And Curtis Hanson proving yet again that there was literally nothing he couldn’t do as a director.” INT. THE SHELTER — NIGHT It’s the final of the rap battle. Jimmy (Eminem) faces off against bitter rival Papa Doc (Anthony Mackie). Papa Doc wins the coin toss and insists Jimmy go first. The MC,…