Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2017 i Empire

IN A BUCOLIC corner of Hertfordshire, Empire is watching Michael Fassbender and a young lad named Georgie Smith balancing in a towering tree. The pair are shooting a climactic moment in Trespass Against Us, a gritty yarn about a family from the travelling community, and the tension is palpable. In the film, their two characters will leap from this lofty perch. The actors are reprieved, though, to the clear relief of one of them. “Georgie thought we would have to jump out of that tree for real,” grins Fassbender once the two have been safely collected by a cherry picker. “But he was prepared to do it. He’s a tough kid.” The film, from debutant director Adam Smith, casts Fassbender as Irish traveller Chad Cutler and Smith as his child,…

2017 MARKS THE 70th anniversary of the end of the British Indian colonial empire, and of Partition, when that empire was split into the Dominion of Pakistan and the Union of India. Gurinder Chadha’s Viceroy’s House wasn’t originally intended as a project to mark the occasion — she started working on the project seven years ago, and says she can’t believe it’s taken this long. But its arrival is now timely both for historical reasons, and as a reflection of current events. “The partition of India was really about politicians using hate to divide people,” the writer/director tells Empire. “Given what’s going on in the world today, it seems very timely to tell the potential tragic consequences of that kind of politicking. It feels very resonant.” A personal project for…

FOR REBECCA HALL, there are some roles that are easy to leave behind, some that are hard, and there’s Christine Chubbuck. The central character in director Antonio Campos’ (Simon Killer) acclaimed new true-life drama Christine is a Florida news reporter who — it’s no spoiler to say — killed herself live on air in July 1974. Hard-working and driven, but lost in a fug of quiet despair, she’s a tragic figure who demanded all of the actor’s energy on set — and occasionally off it. “I’d wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat thinking I could be doing better,” Hall recalls of the film’s 29-day shoot. “Christine’s voice would be in my head telling me to do better.” It would be a harsh judgment. Her…

THE RELEASE OF Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight has straddled two very different eras. It was released in the US, to rave reviews, in October in a time of progress. The first black President was in power and the first woman President was expected to succeed him. When it’s released in the UK in February Donald Trump will be America’s President. This timing would not necessarily be remarkable if not for Moonlight’s subject. The film tells of three stages in the life of Chiron, a black boy growing up gay in a poor part of Miami. It finds him first when he’s a shy pre-teen, then as an awkward, angry teenager, and finally as an adult who has built himself an identity he wears like armour. It treats everyone from drug dealers…

FORGET DAVID BRENT. If you really want to squirm in your cinema seat, Toni Erdmann is the character for you. Grinning behind a set of fake gnashers, posing as a lifestyle guru or just bringing big-hearted chaos to his ladder-climbing daughter’s life, he’s like a cross between Barry Humphries and a box of Christmas crackers. He’s impish, deeply embarrassing and based on real life. “I was inspired by my father,” laughs Maren Ade. “I gave him a set of fake teeth I got at the Munich premiere of Austin Powers and they became his most important prop. A bit like in the film, he’d put them in if he wanted to tell us something important.” Ade’s hilarious, moving and slightly autobiographical film has been a darling at festivals from Cannes…

YES JAMES WHITE, CONTRIBUTOR LEAVING ASIDE THE obvious similarities for a moment — the outbreaks of bloody violence, the clothing-optional scenes — Westworld is a more than worthy successor to the triumphs and tragedies of Westeros. In just one season, the show has developed into a complex, compelling and vibrant series, full of scenes and ideas that stick in your brain long after the credits have rolled. The show has been accused of being overly concerned with impenetrable mysteries and lacking characters you can truly connect with in the manner of an Arya Stark or Tyrion Lannister. Which is abject rubbish: the fascinating storylines, played out through clever writing and careful drip-feeding of information, kept you thinking. Some fans figured out a few of the bigger reveals earlier than the…

OUT 13 JANUARY CERT 15 / 137 MINS EXCELLENT GOOD OKAY POOR AWFUL DIRECTOR Kenneth Lonergan CAST Casey Affleck, Kyle Chandler, Lucas Hedges, Michelle Williams PLOT Scratching out a living as a handyman in Boston, Lee Chandler (Affleck) is suddenly called back to his home town on the Massachusetts coast by the death of his brother (Chandler). This loss returns him to the scene of an even greater grief, threatening to tip him over the edge for good. “SOME FILMS YOU watch,” hailed Ordinary People’s poster back in 1980, “others you feel.” By that same tagline logic, Manchester By The Sea, another story of grief and loss, is a film you get socked hard in the chops by. It’s an emotional tour de force by a filmmaker and writer, Kenneth…

OUT 1 JANUARY CERT 12A / 108 MINS DIRECTOR J.A. Bayona CAST Lewis MacDougall, Felicity Jones, Sigourney Weaver, Toby Kebbell, Liam Neeson PLOT Twelve-year-old English boy Conor O’Malley (MacDougall) gets bullied at school. His father (Kebbell) lives in California and his mother (Jones) is terminally ill. But he finds a sort of companionship with a gigantic, storytelling tree-creature (voiced by Neeson) who seemingly holds the secret to saving his mum. IT’S DIFFICULT TO think of a film more brazen than A Monster Calls. With its regular transitions from gloomy real-world drama to earthy fairy tale and its narrative focus on a troubled child, it can’t help but be compared with 2006’s elegant dark-fantasy Pan’s Labyrinth. And that’s a high comparison. That Barcelona-born director J.A. Bayona and Pan’s man Guillermo del…

OUT NOW CERT 12A / 97 MINS DIRECTOR David Frankel CAST Will Smith, Edward Norton, Kate Winslet, Keira Knightley, Michael Peña, Naomie Harris, Helen Mirren, Jacob Latimore PLOT Still mourning his daughter three years after her death, ad exec Howard (Smith) pens letters to Love, Death and Time, concepts that define his work life. Intercepting the mail, his colleagues (Norton, Winslet, Peña) hire actors to embody the three abstracts to shake their boss from his stupor. IF YOU SUBTRACTED the A-list stars (say, swap Will Smith for Steve Guttenberg) and big-budget studio sheen, Collateral Beauty might feel at home on Channel 5 around 3pm. Played out in a twinkly New York, its high-concept idea — a grieving man is taught life lessons by incarnations of Death, Time and Love —…

OUT NOW CERT 12A / 134 MINS DIRECTOR Gareth Edwards CAST Felicity Jones, Diego Luna, Ben Mendelsohn, Donnie Yen, Mads Mikkelsen, Alan Tudyk, Jiang Wen, Forest Whitaker PLOT Rumours abound of a new Imperial super-weapon, powerful enough to crush the Rebellion. Will a ramshackle platoon led by ex-con Jyn Erso (Jones), the daughter of the device’s creator, be able to find its schematics and save countless lives? IT TAKES A pair of Death Star-sized balls to release a Star Wars prequel at this point. As George Lucas learned back in 1999, hitting fans’ nostalgia circuits will only get you so far: you also have to deliver an experience that feels fresh. (The absence of Gungans helps too. ) Gareth Edwards’ Rogue One walks this tightrope with very little wobbling. There…

OUT NOW FORMAT PS4 DIRECTOR Fumito Ueda CAST Tatsuki Ishikawa, Hiroshi Shirokuma, Masaki Aikawa PLOT A young boy (Ishikawa) awakens in a cave next to Trico, a chained and wounded beast. Together the pair must escape, their progress narrated by the boy, now an old man (Shirokuma). NINE YEARS AND one change of console platform into its lingering development, the release of The Last Guardian has been burdened with seemingly unmanageable expectations. The third title from the creator of Ico and Shadow Of The Colossus had become almost mythical, a game players feared they might never see at all. You play as a sandal-wearing boy (Ishikawa) who awakens covered in tribal tattoos in an underground dungeon next to a hulking creature — seemingly once a protector of this place —…

JONNY LEE MILLER WAS BRICKING IT. It had been ten years since he’d seen Robert Carlyle, longer since he’d crossed paths with Ewan McGregor and Ewen Bremner, and two decades since the Trainspotting comrades had all been in a room together, at the film’s wrap party. So when, a week before shooting was scheduled to begin on long-awaited sequel T2 Trainspotting last May, Danny Boyle asked the cast to get together to rehearse some scenes, it was a big deal. Miller was anxious as it was, of making a film that could potentially tarnish the legacy of Trainspotting, of disappointing an entire generation. And, to add to his already fragile condition as he travelled to the set for the first time in Bathgate (midway between Edinburgh and Glasgow), he contracted…

THROUGH THE STREETS of Tokyo? Check. Off a bridge in Brazil? Check. From the top of one Dubai skyscraper to the top of another? Double-check. Could it be that after seven nitro-blasted movies, the Fast & Furious franchise is running out of places at which to throw fast cars? Hell no, says the director of the new one. “Our goal at the outset was to figure out, ‘How do we top 7?’” says F. Gary Gray. “The last Fast was amazing, in terms of the stunts, the action and the set-pieces. But we have a few surprises, you know. Cuba is one of them.” The start of Fast & Furious 8 sees Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel) and Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) finally enjoying their long-delayed honeymoon. Having picked Havana as their…

‘VOL. 1’ WAS Marvel Studios’ biggest gamble to date, zipping into space to hang with a gang of little-known characters. And, boy, was it a hit. Vol. 2 has all that success to trade on. And writer-director James Gunn feels confident. “I don’t wake up at three in the morning wondering if I’m making Pluto Nash 2 anymore,” he laughs. “Now we have characters that a lot of the world loves, there’s a certain amount of anxiety I don’t have this time around.” Gunn is reluctant to share specific plot details for his space-caper sequel, but does confirm that the relationship between Star-Lord (Chris Pratt) and his long-lost father (Kurt Russell) is central, while much of the movie’s conflict and comedy comes from exploring how this group of rejects learn…

WHERE THE FIRST two Thor movies ping-ponged the thunder-wrangler between Earth and Asgard, the latest one goes full cosmic. In the words of producer Brad Winderbaum, it’s an “intergalactic adventure” which has allowed Marvel “to try something new and send him off into space in a very linear plot”. Up until now, space has been the territory of the Guardians Of The Galaxy on screen, but in the Thor comics the hero often headed off to the stars. “And that’s where a lot of fun, trippy stuff that we’re bringing to the screen has come from,” says Winderbaum. For director Taika Waititi, recruited fresh from 2016 fave Hunt For The Wilderpeople, that meant going “over the top — but not in a negative way”. So not only is Thor reunited…

WHILE THEY WERE shooting Logan, the third solo Wolverine film — following X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) and The Wolverine (2013) — the cast had a group outing to see X-Men: Apocalypse. There, Stephen Merchant got his first look at his character, Caliban, on the big screen — but played by another actor, Tómas Lemarquis. “I don’t know how that will upset or offend the die-hard fans who might be frustrated it’s not the same person,” muses Merchant. “He’s more villainous in Apocalypse. He has a German accent there, I think, so whether I’ll end up dubbed into a German accent, I will have to see.” Since Logan is set some 40 years after the events of Apocalypse, perhaps the character has just evolved. But there’s no question that Merchant’s Caliban…

INCEPTION EXPLORED THE human subconscious. The Dark Knight Rises presented an entire city under siege. And Interstellar pushed the very laws of physics to their extreme. Where next for the ever-ambitious Christopher Nolan? The most colossal conflict in human history, that’s where. “Filmmakers always look for gaps in cinema,” Nolan tells Empire. “And Dunkirk is one of the greatest stories in human history, untold in modern cinema.” Joe Wright’s Atonement tackled the epic evacuation of 330,000 Allied soldiers between 26 May and 4 June 1940 after the Battle Of France was lost, but no movie has made Operation Dynamo its focus since Leslie Norman’s Dunkirk in 1958. That film had used Trevor Dudley-Smith’s novel The Big Pick-Up as its chief inspiration, focusing equally on the retreating soldiers and the plucky…

THE MUDDY BATTLEFIELDS of World War I are no place for a superhero. They offer no hissably evil Nazis to stand against, no truth and justice to defend: just a relentless, morally murky struggle for survival. Yet those khaki plains are the setting for the first solo outing of Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman, aka Diana Prince, as director Patty Jenkins takes the iconic heroine from the sheltered, all-female island of Themyscira into the mud and blood of Flanders. “My approach was to focus on telling the story of mechanised war and how that would look to a god visiting our world for the first time,” explains Jenkins, “[I wanted the audience] to understand the horrors that a war of this scale makes possible, and how shocking that would be to…

IN THE 1970s, the Planet Of The Apes films got smaller and smaller, attempts to maximise profits leading to diminishing creative returns. Four decades on, the opposite is true for the revived franchise, where the key word might be “escalation”. Origin story Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes was almost a domestic story, leading to intellectually awakened apes assaulting the Golden Gate Bridge. Sequel Dawn upped the action and had its share of big battles. But writer/director Matt Reeves’ latest instalment in the adventures of chief chimp Caesar (Andy Serkis) is an all-out War For The Planet Of The Apes. “We looked at the original movie, of course,” says Reeves, “but this time we also took inspiration from films like Paths Of Glory and The Bridge On The River…

“I’M HAVING THE time of my life on this, but it is insane for sure,” admits director Denis Villeneuve ( Arrival ), well aware of what it is to follow in Sir Ridley Scott’s Spinner trail. “Because it is so insane, it gives you freedom. A lot of people on this [film] are children of Blade Runner , raised with the imagination and energy of the original, and have been inspired by those images all our lives.” While the new film is based on an idea by Scott and original screenwriter Hampton Fancher, Villeneuve must make his own Blade Runner . The specifics of which are, for now, as hard to pin down as glittering C-Beams. We do know Michael Green’s script returns Harrison Ford’s unverified skin-job Rick Deckard to…

ALAMY, LANDMARK, REX FEATURES BLUMHOUSE PRODUCTIONS, RUN by the indefatigable Jason Blum, has become one of the biggest success stories in Hollywood by sticking to one simple rule: making a succession of horror movies with the emphasis on low budgets and big profits. We asked Blum to talk us through its standouts. PARANORMAL ACTIVITY __ (2007) Oren Peli’s micro-budget (it cost just $15,000), supernatural home-invasion story was looking for a distributor when Blum first saw it. “I didn’t think it was the greatest movie ever made, but I definitely thought it was effective.” Blum hooked up with Peli and screened the film at his house multiple times before he sold it to Paramount. “It took three years,” he laughs. “It was a wild ride.” But one that led to five…

COSTUME When I did Ever After, I had this medieval prince outfit. It had a massive codpiece and I enjoyed parading around in that and wearing a sword and big leather boots. Did I insist on the big codpiece? It was just practical. I remember playing Moses in The Ten Commandments, and wearing a fucking hair shirt. It was so uncomfortable and I didn’t wear underwear, so it was grinding against that. That was a real pain in the arse. Literally. PERFORMANCE I did a [four-part Irish] TV series called Father & Son . I was playing this Manchester gangster [who returns to Ireland after seven years in a British prison]. I’m not that, but I loved the journey of discovery through that process, the research in creating that character.…

AS A DIRECTOR, James Gray likes to ring the changes. Vaudevillian 1920s drama The Immigrant was very different from the modern romance of Two Lovers, which was entirely unlike the gangland rhythms of We Own The Night. And The Lost City Of Z is yet another extreme departure: a historical jungle epic. “You don’t want to repeat yourself,” Gray tells Empire of his latest adventure. “The opportunity to explore new and different stories is a major attraction of this job.” The film, starring Charlie Hunnam as real-life Edwardian explorer Percival Fawcett, is an adaptation of a book by The New Yorker’s David Grann. But Gray jettisoned the parallel story of Grann’s present-day obsession with the yarn and focused entirely on Fawcett, who vanished in the Amazon in 1925 while searching…

NO STRANGER TO post-human concepts, Scarlett Johansson has previously played a super-evolved consciousness (Lucy) and an ultra-advanced AI (Her). In director Rupert Sanders’ Ghost In The Shell — a live-action take on the seminal cyberpunk anime — she’s tethered to physical form, but her body and brain are 100 per cent cyborg; only her soul (or “ghost”) remains human. “I’ve been a person without a body, now I’m a mind in a synthetic body. Eventually I’ll go back to playing a body and brain together,” she laughs. Johansson’s attributes in this case belong to The Major: head of Hong Kong’s multi-ethnic cyber-terrorism countermeasures unit Section 9, which also employs Pilou Asbaek, Juliette Binoche and Takeshi Kitano. The plot remains largely under wraps, but draws on material from across the franchise…

JESSICA CHASTAIN’S LATEST character, Elizabeth Sloane, is hyper-competitive. “If Sloane was a man we’d be like, ‘I know this guy,’” says Chastain. “He’s gonna get things done, he’s the rebel, he’s the renegade. But we don’t see a woman in this kind of role. Someone asked me yesterday, is that because women aren’t like this? I just think that for some reason our industry and our media hasn’t shown women that way.” The protagonist of John Madden’s Miss Sloane is a Washington DC lobbyist for right-wing trade initiatives who armours herself with high fashion, higher heels and layered, Machiavellian plans. Her look is based on one of the “formidable” real lobbyists Chastain met (“She was so done it put me off-guard,” she recalls of one), but Sloane’s drug-abusing, escort-using control…

IT’S FAIR TO say, no-one saw the new Cars 3 trailer coming. Skipping comic beats entirely, it showed Pixar’s doughty red stock car Lightning McQueen (voiced by Owen Wilson) spiralling through the air and being scattered across the track. It was dark. Very dark. And hugely popular. Within a week it racked up 40 million YouTube views, while the film’s Facebook page was abuzz with freaked-out fans. Two of the calmer posts read: “OMG, I can’t let my kids see this trailer!” and “Why so dark?????” Parents were rushing to reassure their children that their hero wasn’t about to put the ‘rev’ into The Revenant. “The reaction I hear most is that this was not what people were expecting,” says director Brian Fee, with some understatement. “But I’ve not personally…

THE DARKLY COMIC anthology series Inside No. 9 (which sets each instalment in a place linked to the titular digit) has become a cult TV favourite since its launch two years ago, with creators Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton recruiting a roster of fresh stars, from Gemma Arterton to David Warner, for each new show. With the first episode of Series 3 airing over the festive season and five more following early in 2017, we asked Shearsmith and Pemberton to talk us through their latest twisted tales… 1 THE DEVIL OF CHRISTMAS  Steve Pemberton: It’s about a group on holiday in an Alpine cabin, who become convinced they’re being plagued by the Krampus. The beauty of doing an anthology series is you’re free to take it off in any direction,…

OUT 1 JANUARY CERT 15 / 161 MINS DIRECTOR Martin Scorsese CAST Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver, Liam Neeson, Yôsuke Kubozuka, Tadanobu Asano PLOT 17th-century Japan. Two priests, Father Rodrigues (Garfield) and Father Garrpe (Driver), set out to find Father Ferreira (Neeson), their mentor, believed to have committed apostasy (renounced his religion). The pair struggle to survive as they try to stay true to their beliefs. AT THE TIME of writing, it is not clear what Pope Francis thought of Martin Scorsese’s Silence (the rumour is four out of five mitres) after the special Vatican screening, but he surely must have admired its burning sincerity. Adapted from Shūsaku Endō’s 1966 novel (previously made into a film in 1971), it is a passion project as personal to the director as anything involving…

OUT 1 JANUARY CERT TBC / 108 MINS DIRECTOR Justin Kurzel CAST Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, Jeremy Irons, Brendan Gleeson, Charlotte Rampling, Michael K. Williams PLOT Death row prisoner Callum Lynch (Fassbender) is taken to a secret facility after his ‘execution’. There, he’s introduced to a secret society who want to import him into the memories of a PTth-century ancestor, Aguilar de Nerha, so they can track an important artefact... WHEN IT COMES to video game adaptations, cinema has notoriously been an elephant’s graveyard. After Warcraft became the most recent title to stagger in and immediately keel over, all eyes now turn to Assassin’s Creed... The film’s pedigree is impeccable, having been made by the trio that drove last year’s Macbeth to notable heights: director Justin Kurzel and the starring…

OUT 20 JANUARY CERT 15 / 117 MINS DIRECTOR M. Night Shyamalan CAST James McAvoy, Haley Lu Richardson, Anya Taylor-Joy, Jessica Sula PLOT Teenagers Casey (Taylor-Joy), Marcia (Sula) and Claire (Richardson) are abducted by multiple-split-personality Kevin Crumb (McAvoy). Casey plays Kevin’s alter egos off each other, and learns they’re expecting the arrival of a malign new personality. AROUND THE TURN of the century, writer-director M. Night Shyamalan essentially created his own genre with The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs: suspenseful character studies with a paranormal vibe, a reverse spoof approach whereby subjects (ghosts, superheroes, alien invaders) usually played tongue-in-cheek are presented in high seriousness, through intense, anguished central performances from established male movie stars, and the sort of last-reel twists associated with The Twilight Zone (all Shyamalan’s other traits can…

OUT NOW CERT 12A / 116 MINS DIRECTOR Morten Tyldum CAST Jennifer Lawrence, Chris Pratt, Michael Sheen PLOT Three decades into a P2O-year trip to colonise a new world, two of the starship Avalon’s passengers emerge from cryosleep prematurely. With nearly a century to go and no way back, Jim (Pratt) and Aurora (Lawrence) are, for all intents and purposes, the last two people alive. IF YOUR MONEY was on Bridget Jones’s Baby or Allied for 2016’s most heart-fluttering romance, The Imitation Game’s Morten Tyldum just cost you some cash. Neither the stammering charms of Mark Darcy nor Marion Cotillard and Brad Pitt’s torrid World War II affair manage the emotional tug of this unlikely three-hander about a pair of space travellers and a robot bartender. New lovers act like…

AMAZON PRIME OUT NOW EPISODES VIEWED 1-3 SHOWRUNNER Frank Spotnitz CAST Alexa Davalos, Rufus Sewell, Rupert Evans, Luke Kleintank, Stephen Root, Bella Heathcote PLOT In the defeated USA of 1962, erstwhile resistance operative Juliana Crain (Davalos) endeavours to discover the truth behind the mysterious underground film reels that somehow show it wasn’t the Nazis and Japanese who were victorious in War World War II. WHILE HBO’S BIG, shiny, humourless new headliner Westworld has hogged all the Twitter acclaim and pop theorising, Amazon’s flagship sci-fi show has quietly been getting on with its dystopian business with great assurance. Faithful to the framework of Philip K. Dick’s classic — far closer, in fact, than Blade Runner or Total Recall ever kept to their texts — ex-X-Files alumnus Frank Spotnitz has fashioned a…

When you name your film A Monster Calls, you’d best deliver on the monster. And that’s exactly what director J.A. Bayona has done, creating one of the most memorable big-screen creatures of recent times: a 40-foot-tall talking tree that bludgeons its way into the world of a 12-year-old boy (Lewis MacDougall) at the most fragile moment of his young life. But Bayona didn’t pull it off alone. Here, he and his key collaborators, including a rather tall Northern Irish actor, tell us how they forged it from the roots up. CREATING THE MONSTER The monster was always going to be a yew tree. That’s one thing novelist Patrick Ness knew when he started to write A Monster Calls in unusual and tragic circumstances. Siobhan Dowd, who had come up with…

AS ROGUE ONE rolls out across the world, we are less than a year away from the next saga instalment, for the moment known only as Episode VIII. After filming in Skellig Michael (the island at the end of The Force Awakens), Pinewood, Dubrovnik, Croatia and County Cork, principal photography wrapped on 22 July 2016. Although deep in post-production — John Williams has already started recording the score — writer/director Rian Johnson took the time to answer Empire’s burning questions about the current state of play, the film’s influences and his cameo in Rogue One — did you spot him? How are things going on Episode VIII? Great! We’re in the thick of editing, really digging into it. It’s taking shape and I’m very excited. Name three non-Star Wars films…

“IT’S GOT ROBOT dementia,” says Michael Bay. That’s his medical diagnosis of a shapeshifting World War I tank we’ll see in Transformers: The Last Knight, the franchise’s latest and, says Bay, biggest outing yet. The director has lots to say about upgrades, revamps and new characters, as The Last Knight sets the stage for the expanded mythology we’re going to get from here on (the next two films are already outlined). “This movie is much more of an adventure than the others,” he explains. “There’s a ton of legend stuff.” He likes legend stuff. Age Of Extinction had terraforming alien ‘Seeds’ destroying the dinosaurs, and this one will feature Arthurian knights and, for good measure, Hitler. Bay, then, is fiddling with history again? “Absolutely,” he grins. “That’s the fun of…

“I WAS WITH my family at the Mexican Pavilion at Disney World promoting Toy Story 3,” remembers director Lee Unkrich, “and it reminded me I’ve had this long-standing interest in Día De los Muertos. I pitched an idea to John Lasseter and within weeks I was on a plane down to Mexico on a research trip.” Yes, Coco sees Pixar tackle the most famous Mexican holiday: the Day Of The Dead. “It’s colourful and celebratory,” Unkrich says of the film. “It’s a very music-filled movie, although not a break-out-into-song Disney-style musical.” The story sees 12-year-old Mexican villager Miguel (Anthony Gonzalez) stumbling into the Land Of The Dead. There he tries to track down his idol, a long-dead singer called Ernesto de la Cruz (Benjamin Bratt). But while death is a…

FOR YEARS, STEPHEN King hasn’t been able to write a grocery list without Hollywood snaffling it up and turning it into a film. Yet The Dark Tower, an eight-volume epic that spans the author’s career, remained stubbornly out of reach, thought too intricate, too ambitious to adapt. Until, as they say, now. For here comes The Dark Tower, with Danish director Nikolaj Arcel at the helm. Inspired by, but not slavish to, the first instalment of the series, The Gunslinger, it follows Jake Chambers (Tom Taylor), a New York teen drawn into Mid-World, a dark version of our Earth. Once there, Jake finds himself amid a conflict between gunslinger Roland Deschain (Idris Elba) and Matthew McConaughey’s Man In Black. The driving force behind their enmity: the eponymous edifice that sits…

IF ALEX KURTZMAN, director of The Mummy, is feeling the pressure of kickstarting a cinematic universe populated by Universal’s classic monsters, he is wearing it very lightly, like an unravelling bandage. “It’s so much fun to be able to make a real monster movie at this level,” he says. “Let’s travel all around the world, film in the most exotic locations and do crazy things like literally shoot a sequence in zero gravity. How can you have more fun than that?” The plot follows traditional Mummy lines, as Tom Cruise’s Nick Morton unearths — and unleashes — a long-buried malevolent force. Yet there are tweaks to keep things fresh. As opposed to the ’20s-set Brendan Fraser romps, this Mummy is rooted in the here and now. “All of our modern…

WHILE THERE’S NO questioning the continued popularity of the Pirates franchise — 2011’s On Stranger Tides made over $1 billion — it’s not been the same since the early, funny one. Good news! Jerry Bruckheimer says Salazar’s Revenge recaptures the spirit of Curse Of The Black Pearl. “We previewed the picture recently,” says the producer. “A lot of the audience says it harkens back to the first.” And that’s not purely down to tone. This is a reunion. As well as Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow and Geoffrey Rush as Barbossa, who have appeared in every movie, Pirates 5 will bring back Orlando Bloom as Will Turner, last seen doomed to a life as captain of the cursed ship the Flying Dutchman. “Will’s son [Brenton Thwaites] has been hunting for…

COLLECTION CHRISTOPHEL, REX FEATURES 1 BUILDING CHEMISTRY A four-hander with Jeff Bridges and Gil Birmingham as laconic cops on the trail of bank-robbing brothers Chris Pine and Ben Foster, Hell Or High Water offered an immediate kind of alchemy that made it stand out as one of the best films of last year. “Usually there are big fights in casting,” says screenwriter Taylor Sheridan, “but here it just seemed obvious. The chemistry worked so well, and you care about these characters.” Having the pairs shoot their scenes in two separate blocks in New Mexico added depth to their dynamics, explains director David Mackenzie. “The first half was a real adrenaline ride with the young ones, because we shot so quickly, but we found lots of lovely pleasures in that second…

The Party Crasher (The Hard Way, 1991) “I was coming off a big hit on Broadway, as the original Colonel Jessup in A Few Good Men . Coming off a Marine haircut, the idea of doing something funky and fun was appealing. We built up the look — Chuck Taylor sneakers, peroxide hair, this wonderful silky shirt — and turned him into something akin to a cartoon character. I remember bits of my hair would break off from time to time. And I remember Michael J. Fox knocking me out cold with a frigging two by four. He was meant to bring it across my shoulders and brought it across my head. I was gone for 30 seconds.” Colonel Miles Quaritch (Avatar, 2009) “I ran into Steve Guttenberg the other…

THIS MONTH: SEVEN SAMURAI AND ITS REMAKES RELEASED IN 1954, Seven Samurai is one of cinema’s elastic classics: it’s been stretched, twanged and jerked into countless contortions. How a movie set in feudal Japan can re-materialise in space one minute, an ant-hill the next, is down to its universal three-act blueprint: all the films here feature an under-siege community, a gathering of heroic misfits and a Pyrrhic victory over impossible odds. So, here we go. Seven versions: 13 hours of the same story, again and again. Akira Kurosawa’s epic spawned numerous men-on-a-mission imitators, but its remorseless mood remains unique. Get this for desolate: the Seven Samurai aren’t in it for glory; they’re fighting for food. Add crop-stealing bandits to a world that hostile, and any heroics hit all the harder.…

“DANE PUT UP with a lot on this film,” confesses director Gore Verbinski of his A Cure For Wellness star. Sure enough, early footage of the psychological horror shows its protagonist, Dane DeHaan’s cocky Wall Street gun, submerged, doused and generally over-hydrated as he endures the “false escape” of a mysterious Alpine sanatorium. There, he’ll find the spa’s woozy ambience much more hypnotic than he bargained for, even before its darkest secrets emerge. A contemporary Gothic that promises blind corners, curveballs and old-fashioned spooks, it sees the Pirates Of The Caribbean veteran swap summer tentpoles for more wintry chills. It’s a return to the genre roots that saw him remake The Ring, and it’ll drill deep into the zeitgeist. “I’m hoping to tap into this sickness we all feel,” he…

IF YOU WANT to work with director Kelly Reichardt — and plenty of actors do — a role in a recent punk-rock biopic probably wouldn’t hurt. “I’ve worked with three of the band members in The Runaways,” she laughs of recent collaborations with Kristen Stewart in her latest, Certain Women, and Dakota Fanning and Alia Shawkat in Night Moves. With a rep as an actor’s director nurtured over two decades of quietly uncompromising work, A-listers now queue up to work with her. For Certain Women, a Montana-set tableau of working women judged Best Film at 2016’s BFI London Film Festival, she’s added non-Runaways Laura Dern and her Meek’s Cutoff lead Michelle Williams, as well as newcomer Lily Gladstone, who delivers a standout performance. Embroidered with moments of connection, it’s a…

A RED FLAG emblazoned with a giant swastika hangs from the ceiling at Central Saint Martins art school in London. Beneath it, two SS men slouch against a wall; rifles in one hand, iPhones in the other. Dressed in a navy overcoat and trilby, Sam Riley leans out of a window and lights a cigarette. Empire is on the set of SS-GB, Robert Wade and Neal Purvis’ take on Len Deighton’s 1978 thriller. It’s set in an alternative 1941 where Germany has won World War II, the Nazis control London and Scotland Yard is run by the SS. Still, “no smoking” signs must be obeyed. The five-part BBC One series pitches Riley into this murky world as homicide cop Douglas Archer, who faces a bleak moral dilemma: collude with the…

OUT 20 JANUARY CERT 15 / 100 MINS DIRECTOR Pablo Larraín CAST Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard, Billy Crudup, John Hurt PLOT In the days following the assassination of JFK, his wife Jackie (Portman) battles with her private grief and her determination to make sure that her husband’s life is remembered as it should be — and she’s remembered along with him. WHY DO WE remember Jackie Kennedy? The mention of her name still evokes images of the perfect First Lady, ever camera-ready, a fashion plate, cool and poised by the President’s side. Or the darker vision of a grainy shock of incongruous pink crawling across the back of a limousine as her husband lay dying on the back seat, his skull shot open by Lee Harvey Oswald. We remember her…

OUT 13 JANUARY CERT 12A / 128 MINS DIRECTOR Damien Chazelle CAST Emma Stone, Ryan Gosling, John Legend, J.K. Simmons PLOT Following a soulless LA party, wannabe actress Mia (Stone) meets frustrated jazz pianist Seb (Gosling) in a bar. The pair get together and their future looks set, until Seb lands a lucrative gig with an old musician buddy (Legend), an offer that tests the strength of the couple’s bond and dreams. PURE UNADULTERATED JOY is in short supply these days, both on the big screen and off. Which makes Damien Chazelle’s irresistible La La Land all the more cherishable. More than just a throwback to MGM musicals, it is a funny Valentine to the entire history of the genre, as light on its feet as Fred Astaire, as big…

OUT 13 JANUARY CERT 15 / 129 MINS DIRECTOR Ben Affleck CAST Ben Affleck, Zoe Saldana, Chris Cooper, Elle Fanning, Sienna Miller, Robert Glenister PLOT Disillusioned by his experience fighting in World War I, cop’s son Joe Coughlin (Affleck) becomes a small-time hood operating in Boston. But after falling foul of Irish gangster Albert White (Glenister), he winds up working for the Mafia in Tampa, Florida, fuelled by vengeance and ambition. BEN AFFLECK’S FOURTH film as director is also his second to adapt Boston-noir master Dennis Lehane. In 2007, he ably demonstrated his behind-the-camera nous with taut, focused crime mystery Gone Baby Gone, which proved a sign of such great things to come that it wasn’t long before people were giving him the ultimate actor-turned-director accolade by calling him “the…

OUT 20 JANUARY CERT PG / 118 MINS DIRECTOR Garth Davis CAST Sunny Pawar, Dev Patel, Rooney Mara, Nicole Kidman, David Wenham PLOT The true story of Saroo Brierley (Pawar), who was separated from his family as a child and adopted by a Tasmanian couple (Kidman, Wenham). As an adult, Saroo (Patel) uses Google Earth to locate his home. IT’S AN ALMOST universal childhood memory: you go out with a parent, perhaps to a supermarket, carnival or sports event. Then you suddenly realise you’ve mislaid them. They were there a few moments ago, their hand wrapped around yours, but something caught your eye and now the hand you’ve just clutched belongs to a stranger. You look up and find yourself in a towering forest of unknown adults and you’ve never…

NETFLIX OUT NOW EPISODES VIEWED 8 OF 8 DIRECTOR Zal Batmanglij CAST Brit Marling, Emory Cohen, Scott Wilson, Patrick Gibson PLOT Seven years after she disappeared, a young woman (Marling) is rescued from a river where she has attempted suicide. Not only that, when she went missing, she was blind — and now she has her sight. Where has she been all this time? And how is it possible she can see again? THERE’S AN UNDENIABLE confidence to The OA, co-written by star Brit Marling and director Zal Batmanglij. Take the cold open for the first episode — it’s 57 minutes long. Only when the scene is well and truly set do the credits appear and the story begins for real. This conviction runs throughout the show. It’s clearly been…

BBC ONE OUT 1 JANUARY / 88 MINS / EPISODES VIEWED 1 OF 3 SHOWRUNNER Steven Moffat CAST Benedict Cumberbatch, Martin Freeman, Amanda Abbington, Louise Brealey PLOT With Moriarty dead and Watson (Freeman) a new dad, things at 221B Baker Street are looking up. Yet Holmes (Cumberbatch) is convinced trouble is on its way. Could it be that his diabolical nemesis is still alive after all? Or is something even worse on its way? 2015’S SHERLOCK CHRISTMAS special, ‘The Abominable Bride’, proved divisive: a mash-up of horse-drawn Victorian melodrama and Inception-esque mind-trickery, it pleased some and made others fling their remotes across the room. The show returns to steadier ground with ‘The Six Thatchers’, this opener for Series 4, a comparatively straightforward mystery, but one which still manages to fit…

PORTRAITS: CAMERA PRESS/HENNY GARFUNKEL, PA. ADDITIONAL IMAGERY: ALAMY, , GETTY, PHOTOFEST, SCOPE FEAT TURES There’s a scene in Taken 3 where Liam Neeson climbs over a fence. As crack CIA operative Bryan Mills, the actor jogs over to a parked car, scrabbles onto the roof and heaves himself over the eight-foot, chain-link fence before landing on someone’s lawn. The sequence lasts just six seconds, but is cut together from 15 separate shots of Neeson (and a swarthy stunt double) vanquishing the obstacle. Quick cuts and clever angles, as much as bullets and bombs, have become the weapons of choice for modern action movies. Whether employed by Greengrass, Nolan or Taken 3’s Olivier Megaton, vertiginous camerawork can create powerful illusions: be it Jason Bourne taking out a dozen assailants in the…

OUT 10 MAR KONG: SKULL ISLAND THE RULES OF engagement are clear: fight fur with fire. As this piece of exclusive concept art shows, adventure epic Kong: Skull Island will see everybody’s favourite big-screen (and just plain big) ape pitted against modern combat technology. Well, not quite modern. Rather than yanking the traditionally old-school tale into the present day, the blockbuster reboot is set in the early ’70s, at the tail end of the Vietnam war. That inferno you’re looking at might just be caused by the source of Colonel Kilgore’s favourite smell: napalm. “The script I first read took place in 1917,” says director Jordan Vogt-Roberts. “But when I started talking to the Legendary [Entertainment] guys, I was thinking, ‘What weird King Kong movie would I want to see?’…

IT’S THE ARTHOUSE, not Hollywood, that’s pushing the boundaries of horror. Centred on a vegan veterinary student who turns cannibal after a hazing ritual, French indie Raw has huge crossover potential. Unlikely as it sounds, it’s this year’s The Witch. “It’s weird, but the films have a lot in common,” says debut director Julia Ducournau. “They’re both about a girl struggling with sexual awakening while trying to escape her family.” Powered by a breakout turn from teenager Garance Marillier, Raw’s realistic, chewy effects have caused walk-outs and faintings on the festival circuit, but don’t believe the hard-gore hype: chances are you’ll be too taken by the characters to think about puking. “It’s a risky movie to digest because it doesn’t present a taboo like a circus freak,” adds Ducournau. “I…

THE MOST COMMON criticism of Ridley Scott’s 2012 Alien prequel Prometheus was that it wasn’t terrifying enough. Hardened fans expected more creeping dread with their space exploration and less philosophy. After all, while other directors had added action beats or conspiracy theories to the series, Scott’s original was a straight-up horror, a haunted house in space that chilled generations. The good news is that his Prometheus follow-up, Alien: Covenant , should keep everyone happy. “It’s going to be really scary, this film,” says Michael Fassbender, the only returning cast member. “It’s going to be scarier than Prometheus , definitely. More along that line of Alien .” The tonal blend of Scott’s two previous instalments reflects the film’s timeline, since this is both sequel to Prometheus and prequel to Alien .…

IN A PARALLEL dimension, Mute would have been Duncan Jones’ debut feature, but in the real world, because of a confluence of happy accidents — including a writers’ strike that freed up the soundstages of Shepperton Studios — that honour went to cerebral thriller Moon . Jones followed up with the futuristic Source Code and, after detouring into fantasy with Warcraft , he is now returning to sci-fi and his long-gestating passion project, a tale set in a neon-soaked Berlin 30 years from now. Ironically, though, Mute (which is coming directly to Netflix) was supposed to play out in the modern day, telling the neo-noir story of Leo, a mute American ex-pat looking for his missing girlfriend in the city’s seedy underworld. But after a lot of “tinkering”, Jones’ story…

MEET DAN MAKTA — he’s kind of a big deal. An ambassador usually found at council meetings on Alpha Station, aka the City Of A Thousand Planets, he belongs to just one of roughly 2,000 species of alien you’ll meet in Luc Besson’s sci-fi epic. “Most of the time when you see aliens in a film, they’re trying to destroy things,” says the director. “But Alpha is the city of science and culture: everybody is exchanging knowledge. It’s a very rich world.” As cops Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and Laureline (Cara Delevingne) chase a case across the planet-sized space station, they’ll encounter all manner of beings. Many are peaceful, like the information-trading Doghan Daguis and oceanic Poulong farmers. Some are not. “The K-Trons are the mercenary robots on Alpha,” grins Besson.…

A NEW GARMENT is about to join Columbo’s mac, Dick Tracy’s yellow trench and Bergerac’s leather jacket in the pantheon of screen-detective accoutrements. The green parka worn by Michael Fassbender’s driven Oslo ’tec Harry Hole in The Snowman may soon be just as recognisable, the kind of statement made by a man too busy solving murders to fret about fashion. “An iconic outfit is important for these things,” says Fassbender. “Will it become ubiquitous? I hope so. I have different jumpers, but they’re the only things that’ll change.” The creation of Norwegian crime writer Jo Nesbø, Harry Hole has starred in ten different novels, with another on the way. Number seven, 2007’s The Snowman, is the first to get a movie adaptation, bringing the offbeat gumshoe (his favourite band: Slipknot)…

SO YOU’RE MAKING the sixth Spider-Man movie in 14 years. Not only that, you’re restarting with the third actor to slip their limber limbs into the red-and-blue skintights. How do you freshen up the most cinematically familiar Marvel character and serve the audience something new? The answer, it seems, is to do a Rodney Dangerfield and… go back to school! Though our hero again faces a scientifically enhanced threat, in the form of Michael Keaton’s winged menace The Vulture, Homecoming is as much high-school movie as superhero adventure, harking back to the earliest Spider-Man comics in which Peter Parker’s school life was central to storylines with a distinct teen-soap flavour. It’s a point of difference emphasised by the fact Spider-Man is now, finally, sharing a universe with other Marvel heroes.…

SPACED FEATURED A character called Tyres. Hot Fuzz saw Simon Pegg pursue Timothy Dalton in a police cruiser. So perhaps it was inevitable that sooner or later Edgar Wright would make a full-on car movie. Baby Driver is that car movie, and it will be full-on. “The chase in Hot Fuzz was pretty small, and there’s a tiny bit of car stuff in The World’s End as well,” reflects the director. “But this is something else.” The tale of hearing-impaired getaway driver Baby (Ansel Elgort), who gets caught up in a series of high-stakes heists, Baby Driver is the first film written solo by Wright. Expect something grittier than your average Cornetto. “I saw that it’s listed on Box Office Mojo as an action-comedy,” says Wright. “And I was thinking,…

EDGAR WRIGHT: “I FIRST SAW Walter Hill’s second film, The Driver, as a teenager, late at night on the BBC, quite possibly sitting too close to the telly. Given that this 1978 slice of neo-noir takes place almost entirely in the dark streets of a deserted downtown LA, it’s really a perfect midnight movie. I discovered it through having enjoyed Walter’s later successes, 48 Hrs. and The Warriors, and because of a short Leonard Maltin review that stated it had ‘great car chases’. That was more than enough to convince me to stay up and watch it on a school night. But 91 minutes later I was totally spellbound by this diamond-tight, minimalist masterclass, which stars Ryan O’Neal as a getaway driver (known only as The Driver) and Bruce Dern…

TO SAY THAT in the early ’70s Gene Wilder was in the midst of a career slump might sound absurd. The string of flops he was enduring included the incontrovertibly brilliant The Producers and the now cult hit Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory. Sure, people may love them now, but not many wanted to see them then. Off the boil as an actor, it was both the worst and best time for Wilder to venture into screenwriting. On the downside, nobody was really watching him. On the plus side, nobody was really watching him. Wilder started playing with an idea he’d had for a little while: what if Victor Frankenstein, the hero/villain of Mary Shelley’s classic novel Frankenstein, had a grandson who was embarrassed by his ancestor’s experiments with…

BILLY WILDER GOT right to the heart of it. Billy Wilder got right to the heart of a lot of things, but on this day in 1995, he was getting right to the heart of Jerry Maguire. Cameron Crowe, a huge Wilder fan, had been trying to persuade the great director to cameo in his movie as Dicky Fox, a mentor to the title character, a slick sports agent who develops a conscience, only for it to derail his life. Wilder had said no, but Crowe arranged one last meeting and brought along his wildcard: his star, Tom Cruise. “We told him the story briefly,” recalls Crowe, over 20 years later. “We get to the end and he goes, ‘But why would you care about this sports agent?’” Crowe laughs…

EYEVINE, PHOTOFEST IT BEGINS, ALWAYS, with a sound. DUN-DUN (or chung-chung, or even doinkdoink, depending on phonetic preference). A sound that, along with the authoritative voiceover proclaiming, “In the criminal justice system, sexual-based offences are considered especially heinous…”, is the rigorously adhered-to opening gambit of a show that, while being dismissed as pulpy, remains one of the longest-running and most successful procedural dramas in television. After 17 years, with countless “I’m sorry, what?!” plotlines and most of its police procedural kin — CSI, NYPD Blue, Cold Case, all the other Law & Orders — lying cold in the telly graveyard, what is it about SVU? SVU APPEARED IN 1999, EXPELLED FROM the brain of the creator of the original Law & Order, Dick Wolf. Wolf, an ex-staff writer on Hill…