Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2017 i Empire

IS THERE A tougher genre to nail in the 21st century than the good old-fashioned Hollywood musical? Winning over modern (and sometimes somewhat cynical) audiences with a movie where people burst into song for no apparent reason requires a balance of tone so delicate, one bum note could sound the death knell for the whole project. But if anyone relishes a challenge it’s director Damien Chazelle, and with the Oscar-tipped La La Land, he’s poised to pull off one of the riskiest moves of his career. Only too aware of how cringingly terrible all this could have turned out is Chazelle’s leading man, Ryan Gosling. “The trickiest part was to not have these characters suddenly become different people because they were singing,” Gosling tells Empire after La La Land’s rapturous…

THE ORIGINAL ANIMATED Beauty And The Beast in 1991 was the first cartoon ever Oscar-nominated as Best Picture, so the live-action remake from director Bill Condon comes with high expectations and high pressure. But the simple watchword for cast and crew has been to make the story feel relevant and real. “In animation you can get away with a lot you can’t get away with in live action,” says producer David Hoberman. “There were several story points we felt we had to deal with: who was Belle’s mom and what had happened to her? Who was the Beast and what was his backstory? It’s stuff not really discussed in the animated film.” “Belle was one of my idols growing up,” says leading lady Emma Watson. “I knew every word to…

OSCAR SEASON LOVES David and Goliath stories, but debut filmmaker Garth Davis’ true-life drama Lion depicts a man who faced the greatest odds of all: separated from his poor Indian family at the age of five and adopted by a well-to-do Australian couple, 36-year-old Saroo Brierley (Dev Patel) spent hours of his adult life combing Google Earth for images that would jog his foggy memories of his mother, his brother and the fateful train-ride that ripped them apart. Despite the love of his adopted parents, played by Nicole Kidman and David Wenham, Saroo’s past leads him on an epic quest for answers. That he found his birth village is no secret to anyone familiar with Brierley’s book A Long Way Home. Instead, Lion is the psychological study of a young…

ALAMY SIX YEARS AGO, Denzel Washington and his Fences co-star, Viola Davis, were basking in Broadway raves. “Lovers don’t have to be as young and star-crossed as Romeo and Juliet to generate shiver-making heat and pathos,” effused The New York Times. Fast forward to today, and Washington is hoping alchemy translates into an equally fêted big-screen version of August Wilson’s Pulitzer-winning play. So far, so good. Its first LA screening, for awards voters, saw Washington’s film hailed as an Oscar contender. “I’d had to let it go the day before,” its director/star mock-laments to Empire. “You’re never really finished.” In the film, he reprises his Broadway role as embittered baseball player-turned-garbage man Troy Maxson, with Davis as his long-suffering wife, Rose. It’s part of Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle (“One of the…

OUT 2 DECEMBER CERT 12A / 96 MINS DIRECTOR Clint Eastwood CAST Tom Hanks, Aaron Eckhart, Laura Linney, Anna Gunn PLOT When his plane suffers catastrophic damage over New York, Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger (Hanks) has to make a split-second choice about how to safely bring his craft down. His choice saves everyone on board, but his superiors question whether it was the right one. EVERY FEW YEARS, somebody will make the argument that movie stars have become redundant, because it’s brands and spectacle that sell now. While it’s true you no longer need a big name above the title as long as you have a superhero’s name in the title, there are still times when only a movie star will do. Sully: Miracle On The Hudson is one such time.…

OUT 2 DECEMBER CERT TBC / 103 MINS DIRECTORS Ron Clements, John Musker CAST (VOICES) Dwayne Johnson, Auli’i Cravalho, Temuera Morrison, Nicole Scherzinger PLOT On Motunui, a small island in Polynesia, young Moana (Cravalho) is being raised to lead but dreams of nautical adventure instead. Impending disaster causes her to finally head out past the reef, teaming up with a braggart demigod named Maui (Johnson) on a mission involving a magical stone. BACK IN 1963, Disney had huge success with a project tapping into Polynesian culture. It wasn’t a movie, but a theme-park attraction called the Enchanted Tiki Room stuffed with singing animatronic birds. Amazingly, it’s taken 50 years for the studio to make a feature film based around the lore of the Pacific Islands. The good news is, Moana…

OUT NOW CERT 12A / 133 MINS DIRECTOR David Yates CAST Eddie Redmayne, Katherine Waterston, Colin Farrell, Samantha Morton, Dan Fogler, Alison Sudol, Ezra Miller, Carmen Ejogo PLOT Newt Scamander (Redmayne) arrives in New York to pursue his work promoting the care of magical creatures, but finds himself drawn into a conflict between the wizarding world and witch-hunters led by Mary Lou Barebone (Morton). YOU HAVE TO credit J.K. Rowling. Rather than spin off new big-screen adventures for the generation-defining boy wizard, she and the Warner Bros. team have opened a completely different wizarding saga: a new era, new country and entirely new characters (at least so far). That’s a lot of world-building to do, so this film has a bit of the same dense exposition of the first two…

OUT 25 NOVEMBER CERT TBC / 113 MINS DIRECTOR Jim Jarmusch CAST Adam Driver, Golshifteh Farahani, Barry Shabaka Henley PLOT Paterson (Driver) is a bus driver and poet who lives in Paterson, New Jersey, whose existence follows a quiet, humdrum pattern. And it’s him the film follows, over eight typical days in his life. YOU CAN BE sure nothing much will happen in a Jim Jarmusch film, but that it will fail to happen in interesting ways. Even when he dabbled in Westerns with Dead Man, or vampires with Only Lovers Left Alive, Jarmusch focused on languorous pauses and non-events, finding his drama and comedy in the tiny shifts of everyday life. That’s never been more true than in this profoundly understated character study, which is stuffed with charm and…

OUT 2 DECEMBER CERT TBC / 134 MINS DIRECTOR Oliver Stone CAST Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Shailene Woodley, Zachary Quinto, Melissa Leo PLOT After injury kills his dream of being a soldier, computer whizz Edward Snowden (Gordon-Levitt) finds success as a government intelligence agent — and love with a spirited photographer (Woodley). But when he learns about the NSA’s secret global surveillance, he risks it all to reveal the truth. THE PHRASE “TOO soon” doesn’t seem to apply when it comes to big-screen adaptations of politically charged global scandals. Not long after WikiLeaks’ name-making Guantanamo Bay files, Benedict Cumberbatch was slipping on a Malfoy wig for The Fifth Estate. Leonardo DiCaprio has already optioned an unpublished book on Volkswagen’s 2015 emissions cover-up. And now — just three years after Edward Snowden’s NSA…

“THERE’S A DEEP, BLACK PIT INSIDE OF ME THAT STORIES COME OUT OF. IF I WROTE EVERYTHING I’D GO INSANE.” Max Landis cannot walk into a room unnoticed. The LA house in which Empire meets him couldn’t be more Hollywood if Jerry Bruckheimer were standing in the middle of it smoking a stogie: there’s glass everywhere, white walls, a glittering pool, valley views and furniture that may actually be sculpture. But from the second Landis strides in — well over six feet tall, dressed like a cartoon on a date, half his hair shaved and the rest rainbow-streaked, carrying a little white dog he found on the way in — he pulls focus from everything else, including the dog. “DOES THIS BELONG TO ANYONE?” he enquires, in a voice that…

STYLIST: MICHAEL ANTHONY BRADLEY @ MANDY COAKLEY. GROOMING: SARA CLARKE USING DERMALOGICA AND BUMBLE+BUMBLE “IT DOES GET weird,” says Julian Dennison of the fame he’s experienced since Taika Waititi’s Hunt For The Wilderpeople became New Zealand’s biggest-ever homegrown hit. “Like, if you’re rushing to the loo and someone asks for a photo, I’m like, ‘You won’t get a very nice photo!’ I think it raised $12 million in New Zealand and our population is only four million, so everyone saw it three times. It’s sort of like Pokémon Go.” The 14-year-old’s “bad egg” Ricky Baker is a comedy creation for the ages, dispensing great lines as he wanders the wilds with grumpy foster carer Uncle Hec (Sam Neill). “We didn’t learn much about the outdoors because we had catering, we…

AQUEDUCT On the dried-out bed of the Los Angeles River, under the Sixth Street Bridge, Chance and Vukovich have to weave through a number of assailants. “There has not been water in the river since I’ve been in Los Angeles, in 1965,” says Friedkin. “It’s a wonderful setting for something like this. It’s almost like having miles of freeway to yourself.” PANKOW’S PANIC During the chase, Vukovich — a helpless onlooker in the back of the car — panics and has visions of himself falling off a building to his death. Although the chase was safer than that of The French Connection , Friedkin says Pankow’s panic was real. “He was genuinely terrified!” laughs Friedkin. “He didn’t know what the hell was going to happen. All he knew is that…

ALAMY, CAPITAL PICTURES, GETTY, PHOTOFEST, REX FEATURES PAUL DINI, THE man behind Harley Quinn, can pinpoint the moment when he knew his creation had truly made it. It was this October, in fact. The Saturday before Hallowe’en, a time for most Los Angelenos to have a massive hooley. And then Dini peered out of his window. “I saw a roving gang of Harley Quinns going down the street,” he laughs. “There was a schoolgirl Harley, in a red-and-black outfit with the mask, a steampunk Harley, and the regular movie Harley. They were everywhere. I looked at my wife and said, ‘Well, there’s Daddy’s little monster.’” Yes, 24 years after Dini, then a writer on Batman: The Animated Series, first introduced Harley Quinn, it’s fair to say she’s having a moment.…

ALAMY, ALLSTAR, PHOTOFEST 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 name of the punk band that drives Reno to homicidal mania in The Driller Killer? The Roosters. We just did a show in Paris and we did some of those songs. Tony Coca-Cola, the guitarist from The Roosters, is actually D.A. Metrov, the artist I based my character Reno on. Those were his girlfriends in the movie, it was his apartment, his paintings, the whole deal. It was like a documentary of his life, minus the drilling — I hope. Correct. 2 In 1985, you directed two episodes of…

IF YOU PLAN to watch Lemony Snicket’s A Series Of Unfortunate Events with small children, please check first that there is space to hide behind the sofa. Assuming director Barry Sonnenfeld and star Neil Patrick Harris have done their job, the eight-part Netflix series — all dropping at once in January — will be one of those TV shows that makes people pleasantly shudder at its memory well after they’ve progressed to adulthood, like Doctor Who, The Box Of Delights or The Singing Ringing Tree. The novel series by Daniel Handler on which the show is based tells the dark tale of the Baudelaire children, Violet (Malina Weissman), Klaus (Louis Hynes) and baby Sunny, orphaned when their parents are killed in a fire. To make a bad situation worse, they…

SHERLOCK’S FOURTH SERIES starts with a great big hole in it. A Moriarty-shaped one. Sherlock’s (Benedict Cumberbatch) long-time nemesis has definitely gone. “Moriarty is dead,” says series co-creator Steven Moffat. “Shot himself through the head. He is dead.” But that means Sherlock needs someone new to rattle the walls of his mind palace. On the set of Sherlock, on a dark and (artificially) rainy night, that new villain is nowhere in sight. But somewhere lurks Toby Jones’ Culverton Smith, who Moffat calls “the darkest villain we’ve ever written”. In print, Smith was a poisoner who killed his nephew and tried to bump off Holmes. In the TV series he’s a quiet character, at least on the surface. “He’s very unnerving,” says Moffat. “I hope Toby won’t mind me saying, but…

KATE BECKINSALE’S SELENE, the vampire-warrior hero of the Underworld saga, usually beats her enemies black and blue in a world shaded in the same colours. But Blood War, the latest instalment in the vampires-versus-werewolves showdown, casts things in a different light. “In Blood Wars, Selene is at a really low ebb,” says Beckinsale. “You see a different side to her. [Her one-time mentor] Viktor has emerged as a traitor. [Her lover] Michael has disappeared. She’s had a baby that she didn’t know about. She’s always been really passionate but now, in a way, she doesn’t give a shit.” As well as that new attitude for its lead, there’s a new director in Anna Foerster. She cut her teeth in visual effects and as a cinematographer on Independence Day, Alien: Resurrection…

OUT 25 NOVEMBER CERT 12A / 111 MINS DIRECTOR Amma Asante CAST David Oyelowo, Rosamund Pike, Jack Davenport, Vusi Kunene, Tom Felton PLOT Late 1940s London, and law student Seretse Khama (Oyelowo) falls for office worker Ruth (Pike). But he is heir to the leadership of the Bamangwato people, and their union draws the ire of both them and the British Empire. AMMA ASANTE’S LAST film, 2013’s Belle, emphasised the link between the personal and political in the story of a slave’s daughter who helped end slavery. A United Kingdom manages a similar feat, offering a touching romance then hitting the audience with the dehumanising evils of colonialism. Both stories would seem implausible if they weren’t fact-based but, if anything, this one struggles to cram in the dramatic ups and…

OUT NOW CERT 12A / 115 MINS DIRECTOR Scott Derrickson CAST Benedict Cumberbatch, Mads Mikkelsen, Tilda Swinton, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Rachel McAdams PLOT After mangling his hands in a car crash, neurosurgeon Stephen Strange (Cumberbatch) finds his career in ruins. Desperate for healing, he heads to Nepal, where a secret order of magicians led by the enigmatic Ancient One (Swinton) induct him into the mystic arts. JAMES MANGOLD RECENTLY tweeted a page from the script of his upcoming Logan, in which a note on the action states it will not be a “hyper choreographed, gravity defying, city-block destroying, CG fuckathon”. The three-clawed dig at Marvel Studios is not wholly undeserved. New York, Washington, London, Sokovia and half the planet Xandar have all been victims of Marvel third acts, wholesale destruction of…

NETFLIX OUT 25 NOVEMBER EPISODES VIEWED 1-2 SHOWRUNNERS Amy Sherman-Palladino, Daniel Palladino CAST Lauren Graham, Alexis Bledel, Kelly Bishop PLOT Almost a decade after we last saw them, Lorelai Gilmore (Graham) still lives in Star’s Hollow with boyfriend Luke (Scott Patterson). But when her daughter Rory (Bledel) visits and her mother Emily (Bishop) is bereaved, all three face a life crisis. IMAGINE IF HIS Girl Friday’s Hildy Johnson moved to Bedford Falls, had an equally fast-talking kid and genned up on pop culture. That’s Gilmore Girls, which returns on Netflix with four feature-length, seasonally themed episodes. It’s essentially a family drama, set in a small town that really is straight from It’s A Wonderful Life. But it’s also one of the fastest-talking, smartest shows ever made. These four films, with…

OUT NOW FORMATS PC, PS4, XBOX ONE DIRECTOR Taylor Kurosaki CAST Brian Bloom, Kit Harington, Claudia Black PLOT With colonies across the Solar System, humanity is heading to the stars, but disaster looms when the Settlement Defence Force launches a strike for independence, forcing UN Space Alliance lieutenant Nick Reyes (Bloom) to lead the charge against SDF leader Salen Kotch (Harington). THE LATEST INSTALMENT of Activision’s perennial shooter franchise packs in a lot — single-player campaign, multiplayer, a new Zombies mode, flight missions for PlayStation VR, and even a fully fledged remake of 2007’s Modern Warfare in higher-tier packages. Whatever else, you’re definitely getting bang for your buck. The solo campaign is serviceable, although it does a good job of drawing you into Nick Reyes’ (Bloom) real conflict: whether the…

WE’RE IN THE THICKEST PART of the nuttiest time of the show,” says John Knoll with a weary chuckle. “Full factory mode.” It’s late October and Rogue One, the fourth Star Wars movie that the veteran ILM visual-effects supervisor has worked on (unless you count the 1997 Special Editions), isn’t going to bed without a fight. This is often how it is with big-studio blockbusters in post-production, lightspeeding to meet their release-date deadlines. Always more chunks of data to crunch, always further finessing to be done on photo-real CG shots. But Rogue One has proven a pricklier beast than most. It’s not been easy for Knoll, and his exhaustion is evident in the weighty sighs that punctuate our conversation. Yet this is also, he insists, his favourite part of the…

 As well as starring in Assassin’s Creed, you’re producing it. Is that a different kind of satisfaction? “I WANT TO PRODUCE AS MUCH AS I CAN WHEN I’M AT MY BEST. MAYBE I’M AFRAID I’M GONNA DIE.” I’ll tell you at Christmas! I mean, I enjoy it. It’s something that has always interested me, from the beginning when I stumbled upon acting through [theatre guru] Donie Courtney. He was a pupil at my school who went off and studied at the Gaiety School Of Acting. We had no drama class, so it never occurred to me that was an avenue I could go down until he came back [to teach] classes. I joined a company he set up and then six months after set up my own production company, Peanut…

DIGITAL IMAGING: JUSTIN METZ. STYLIST: MICHELLE KELLY @ CAROL HAYES MANAGEMENT. WEARING: BURBERRY. HAIR AND MAKE-UP CAROL MORLEY AT CAROL HAYES MANAGEMENT USING NARS MOST ACTORS TREAD the boards for the first time in a school play. For Millie Bobby Brown, it was at the 2016 Emmy Awards, performing Uptown Funk with her Stranger Things co-stars to an audience of 7,000, plus 11.3 million more at home. As stage debuts go, it’s pretty extreme. But Brown shrugs it off. “I’d done a Comic-Con before,” she says. “I’ve never been shy of big crowds.” Big crowds are starting to become standard for the 12-year-old best known as Eleven, the smash Netflix show’s psychokinetic, Eggo waffle-loving heroine. There have been talk shows. There have been magazine covers. There’s been an audience at…

THE FIRST MEETING of Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark and Tom Holland as the brand-new Peter Parker, which comes just over an hour into Captain America: Civil War, is a thing of joy: a quickfire back-and-forth as Stark, who has shown up at Peter’s New York apartment unannounced, cajoles and teases the reluctant Parker into joining his superteam. It’s funny, poignant and wonderfully written and performed — all without a mention of Peter’s Uncle Ben or a “with great power comes great responsibility” in sight. “Our mandate wasn’t to mention those things,” says co-writer Christopher Markus. “Our mandate was to write a good scene. The fumbling over topics and Peter trying to evade being discovered gave it its own energy.” INT. PETER’S BEDROOM — DAY Tony looks around the room.…

IF YOU HAVEN’T seen Yonderland, Sky1’s fantasy-tinged sitcom from the original Horrible Histories gang, then we’ll cut to the chase: you’re missing one of the most inventive, surreal and, crucially, hilarious TV comedies of recent years. Still not convinced? Well, think of it as Monty Python meets Labyrinth. And if you’re somehow still on the fence, we asked its six creators/writers/stars to pick their favourite moments from its three series to date… ‘THE INTERROGATION’ (S1, E3) CHOSEN BY MATHEW BAYNTON As bounty hunters interrogating the monks who cannot lie, me and Jim Howick decided we wanted to both be made up like Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider. Their dialogue was threatening but we started imagining their backstory and they became a couple with a long history. We were really excited…

THIS MONTH: ICE AGE FIVE FILMS. THREE billion dollars. The Ice Age movies have made more money than the Superman franchise, The Hunger Games, and even the entire Star Trek series. Somehow, I’ve had my head in the permafrost for 15 years: I’ve never seen one. Guzzling all five in one enormobinge is like being hit in the brain by an asteroid-sized Skittle. After a fun start, the animation gets so manic my eyes start clacking like Newton balls. Back we go, then, to a snowballed Earth in the Paleolithic era and Chris Wedge’s 2002 original. Critter movies usually deliver a corny, kid-empowering be-yourself message. Not Ice Age. It’s more a CG revival of vintage Looney Tunes. In fact, series mascot Scrat is basically Wile E. Coyote redrawn as a…

#6 IAIN MORRIS ON TITANIC WHEN WE LAUNCHED The First-Take Club, which asks people to choose a film they haven’t seen from our 301 Greatest Movies Of All Time list (published in 2014), watch it, then write about it, we expected to uncover gaping holes in cinematic CVs. But we didn’t expect to find someone who hadn’t seen the second-biggest film of all time. A film that remains one of only three to have crossed the $2 billion barrier, made James Cameron king of the world, and won 11 Oscars. It is, of course, Titanic. And the person who somehow hasn’t seen it? That would be Iain Morris, the co-creator and co-writer (along with Damon Beesley) of The Inbetweeners. So, Iain, how on earth did this hugely successful film manage…

A FANTASY SHOT through with reality, A Monster Calls is shaping up to be one of the essential films of 2017. Now, thanks to our friends at Entertainment One, we are offering you the chance to see it first and for nothing at special screenings on Tuesday 6 December. Based on the novel by Patrick Ness (who also penned the screenplay), A Monster Calls is a fresh take on the classic coming-of-age story. At its heart is the unlikely friendship between pre-teen Conor (Lewis MacDougall) and a huge, ancient yew tree-like creature (voiced by Liam Neeson) who stomps up to Conor’s window and helps him make sense of the world. The monster promises to tell Conor three stories on successive nights — in return, Conor must regale the monster with…

BEN ROTHSTEIN ONE GLANCE AT the greying beard or thick scars, and it’s clear director James Mangold and star Hugh Jackman are attempting something very different with Logan. For Mangold’s second Wolverine film and Jackman’s final performance as the character after nine films in 17 years, the pair focus on the fast-healing mutant’s vulnerable side. “The goal was to make something human,” says Mangold. “We made an effort to scale back on the gloss and greenscreen.” Jackman echoes this. “It’s essential you see this as the story of a man who is struggling with mortality and legacy, and whether the world has been better off with him or without him.” Logan has reason to fret. This story is set in a world where no new mutants have been born in…

“SO WHAT HAVE you been up to?” asks Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller) when Renton (Ewan McGregor) appears in his pub. “For 20 years.” After two decades of anticipation, murmurs and rumours, the T2: Trainspotting trailer posed similar questions. When we last left the gang, Kevin McKidd’s Tommy was dead, Renton had legged it with a bag of cash, and an enraged Begbie (Robert Carlyle) was busily obliterating a hotel room. So where do we go from here? Surely, after all this time, business as usual is impossible. Well, it is and it isn’t, according to producer Andrew Macdonald. He has returned to the fold along with all of the key cast and crew of 1996’s junkie epic Trainspotting, including director Danny Boyle, for the very long-awaited sequel. “They’re still…

MINERS HAVE CANARIES, but Stephen Gaghan had an even better early-warning system on the arduous jungle set of his new treasure-hunt adventure. “On the first day of filming the water buffalo were miserable,” recalls the Gold director, “but on the second day they were suddenly really happy, and by the third day I was floating ten feet above our set in a boat.” For three months in remote Thailand, Gaghan’s crew and his stars, Matthew McConaughey and Edgar Ramírez, faced monsoon, fetid heat, rockslides, spiders the size of dinner plates and the odd python. Like one of its inspirations, The Treasure Of Sierra Madre, Gold focuses on the fallout of a gold strike. Loosely riffing on the Bre-X mining scandal of the early ’90s, Gaghan’s first big-screen effort since Syriana…

OUT 25 NOVEMBER CERT 15 / 124 MINS DIRECTOR Robert Zemeckis CAST Brad Pitt, Marion Cotillard, Jared Harris PLOT Casablanca, P9S2. Parachuted into enemy territory, Max Vatan (Pitt) embarks on a fateful mission with beautiful French agent Marianne Beausejour (Cotillard). The pair must pretend to be husband and wife, a façade that soon gives way to something deeper — and more dangerous. FANS OF BRAD Pitt eating things in movies, rest easy: your man tucks into an entire Moroccan tagine in Robert Zemeckis’ stolid, old-fashioned spy thriller. It’s one of the few reliable things in a curiously underpowered performance from an actor who should, on paper, lend exactly the kind of star wattage this tale of double-crosses and derring-do needs to spark into life. Posing as a Parisian mining executive,…

OUT 2 DECEMBER CERT 15 / 127 MINS DIRECTOR Spike Lee CAST Nick Cannon, Teyonah Parris, Wesley Snipes PLOT The streets of Chicago are blighted by gang war and death. With the police unable to control the violence and people being killed every day, the women of the community decide there’s only one way to end the war: until the men agree to put down their guns, the women won’t be putting out. FOR THREE DECADES Spike Lee has made films that shout against the imbalances and injustices inherent in being black in America. He was doing it when very few others were, always passionately, sometimes electrifyingly, occasionally incoherently. When you’ve been part of an argument for that long, your voice can become just part of the growing roar, losing…

OUT 30 NOVEMBER CERT 15 / 104 MINS DIRECTOR Kelly Fremon Craig CAST Hailee Steinfeld, Haley Lu Richardson, Blake Jenner PLOT Everything that happens to Nadine (Steinfeld) is unfair, at least in her eyes. She lost her beloved dad and now she’s about to lose her only friend, who has started dating her despised brother. The world is out to get her and nobody knows what’s she’s going through. She is, in short, a teenager. NADINE BYRD IS a self-declared “old soul”. This tells you a lot about her. 1) She thinks about herself an enormous amount; 2) She doesn’t believe she fits in with the rest of her generation; 3) She’s kind of a dick, because really, who says that? Kelly Fremon Craig’s debut is a bravely honest, very…

OUT 9 DECEMBER CERT 15 / 120 MINS DIRECTOR Nate Parker CAST Nate Parker, Armie Hammer, Aja Naomi King, Jackie Earle Haley, Dwight Henry PLOT Virginia, P8RP. Plantation preacher Nat Turner (Parker) broods over a plan to lead an uprising of fellow slaves against their tyrannical masters. But the likely consequences for him, his wife (King) and their young child give him pause. NATE PARKER’S FIERCE, flawed paean to one of America’s most contentious figures would, in any normal situation, be crashing into awards season like grapeshot. A name-checking repudiation of D.W. Griffith’s mythologising, racist 1915 epic of the Deep South, it seemed destined to clean up on Oscars night. Then its creator’s own troubled past resurfaced to overshadow it and the buzz dissipated. But the performances are strong, its…

JUSTIN KURZEL HAS DONE HIS BACK IN. Damaged a disc. It’s October 2016, and the 42-year-old Australian behind last year’s acclaimed take on Macbeth is deep into post-production on his follow-up, a project so intense it has led to him popping painkillers. The film that is demanding such fearsome dedication? Well, it’s not a fresh spin on The Tempest. Instead, it’s an adaptation of a video-game franchise about a parkouring hitman: Assassin’s Creed. The Ubisoft series has sold 93 million copies and counting. It blends science-fiction with historical fact, engulfing you in a worldwide conspiracy while allowing you to jump off tall buildings and skewer enemies with wrist-mounted blades. And this big-screen version has a lot riding on it. Not only do all involved hope it will be a franchise-launcher;…

AUGUST How did you celebrate the success of your movie? I had the cast of Sesame Street fired. What’s the most extravagant thing you’ve bought with all that cash? It’s a Fox film. I was paid in cocaine. Who’s your unlikeliest celebrity fan? Deathstroke. What was your favourite movie of 2016? (Not your own.) Hunt For The Wilderpeople. (Serious answer.) Which film of 2016 would have been improved by you being in it? The Amanda Knox documentary. What’s the strangest fan encounter you’ve had this year? I got my wife pregnant. You filmed a video intro for our Deadpool issue. How was that? Inexplicable hell. Don’t ever ask me to do that again or I’ll buy your shitty little magazine company and burn it to shapeless ash. Then I’ll go…

Grooming: Rebecca Afford @ Schneider Entertainment Agency. Stylist: Abena Ofei. Black slim fit shirt by Canali at Mr Porter. Blue self-stripe trousers (part of suit) by Brunello Cucinelli. Brown leather lace-ups by Brunello Cucinelli. Previous page: Black wool, double-breasted overcoat by Dries Van Noten at Harvey Nichols. Blue self stripe suit by Brunello Cucinelli. White cotton shirt by Alexander McQueen at MatchesFashion. Brown leather lace-ups by Brunello Cucinelli “SUN OF A BITCH!” Here you are complaining.” Casey Affleck grins as he bounces around a hotel room, comparing sleep-deprivation stories with Empire. He wins, having turned in at 2am after flying in from Los Angeles for the BFI London Film Festival screening of Manchester By The Sea, written and directed by You Can Count On Me’s Kenneth Lonergan. A gripping study…

ALAMY LET’S GET SOMETHING straight. Bambi remains the most primal piece of cinema there has ever been, the key work in Walt Disney’s rapturous early phase, proof that the animated greats were not gentle, folksy lullabies but a test of our psychic mettle. It was at Uncle Walt’s knee — specifically this tale of a whitetail fawn’s growing pains — that children first comprehended their parents could die. And QED: so could they. No other film gets close to the existential vertigo of Bambi. Walt had considered adapting Austrian Felix Salten’s novel Bambi, A Life In The Woods as his second animated feature, buying the rights from MGM who had been unable to fathom what to do with this grim (but not Grimm) Germanic tale of a deer’s wake-up call.…

COSTUME I’m working with a pretty cool costume right now on the TV series Outcast. I’m a mysterious character who wears a black suit and a black hat. I look much more threatening and interesting than I ever have before. Certainly more interesting than I did when I was wearing gold make-up! The first-season costumes on Star Trek: The Next Generation were horrendous. They were spandex one-pieces and strapped under the boots, so they pulled your shoulders down all day long for 16 hours. It was so uncomfortable! But they got better after that, and became two-piece. FAN ENCOUNTER There have been so many, but if I have to narrow it down to one, I’ll go with Dr Oliver Sacks. He was, of course, renowned for his work in the…

FAREWELL, MARGARET ‘PEGGY’ Carter. You will be much missed. If that sounds like the beginning of an obituary, that’s with good reason. For this was the year that Hayley Atwell’s indefatigable, boundary-breaking spy-cum-S.H.I.E.L.D.-co-founder, who rose from humble origins to become one of the most vivid and beloved characters in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, died. Not once, but twice, just for good measure. The first time was in April, when she was bumped off off-screen in Captain America: Civil War. No surprises there — after all, that version of the character was now in her nineties. The second time, somehow more conclusively, came soon after, with the news that Agent Carter, the slick and stylish TV show that saw Atwell reprise and expand upon the role she originated back in 2011’s…

COLLECTION CHRISTOPHEL AT ONE POINT in Federico Fellini’s 1987 curio, Intervista, the great Italian director and his muse, Marcello Mastroianni, visit Anita Ekberg’s villa and project a very significant scene on her living room wall. It is, of course, the moment from La Dolce Vita — ‘The Sweet Life’ — where Ekberg’s alluring starlet Sylvia climbs into Rome’s famous Trevi Fountain, the climax of a night spent leading Mastroianni’s journo Marcello Rubini through the streets of night-time Rome, and possibly astray. Watching the scene, almost 30 years after she shot it, Ekberg’s eyes well up with tears. A bittersweet reaction to a bittersweet, beautiful scene. It was shot over nine dawns in the winter of 1959 — Ekberg remembered January, Fellini cited March. Arriving at the location, Fellini discovered the…

THE WES ANDERSON COLLECTION BY MATT ZOLLER SEITZ AND WES ANDERSON, PUBLISHED BY ABRAMS, IS OUT NOW IT HAS BEEN 15 years since director Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums arrived in cinemas, providing a fascinating lesson in the language of costume design. Each character in this dysfunctional mash-up of family, friends and hangers-on can be read via their seemingly absurd clothing choices. As costume designer for the film Karen Patch tells us, there’s far more to these fancy threads than just kook… 1 CHASWhen it comes to Ben Stiller’s maths genius, it’s all about that red three-stripe Adidas tracksuit, which didn’t even exist at the time. “I had them made in-house,” notes Patch. “I was able to obtain fabric from Adidas as well as permission to redesign and use their…

“I’m surprised this scene hasn’t been picked before,” says Peter Strickland. “It encapsulates Michael Haneke’s unflinching worldview in which the realities of mortality are devoid of any semblance of reassurance. It remains one of his most restrained, assured and brutal moments.” INT. HOUSE — DAY Rudolf (Miljan Châtelain) and his sister Anna (Roxane Duran) are eating soup in silence. Earlier that day, Rudolf saw a dead woman for the first time. RUDOLF: The woman today, what was wrong with her? ANNA: Which woman? I see. She was dead. RUDOLF: What’s that? ANNA: What? RUDOLF: Dead. ANNA: What’s “dead”? Quite a question! It’s when one doesn’t live anymore. When one has stopped living. RUDOLF: When does one stop living? ANNA: When one is very old, or very ill. RUDOLF: And the…