Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2017 i Empire

A DESIGNER KITCHEN in an upmarket north London home is galaxies away from the paradise planet of Scarif, or a 200-storey slum in Mega-City One. But it’s no less exciting for leading man Riz Ahmed and his director, Pete Travis. The Rogue One star and Dredd director have teamed up for an adaptation of Patrick Neate’s noir novel City Of Tiny Lights, and they think they’ve hit upon something special. “This is interesting because it deals with people and places that don’t often get a voice,” notes Travis as he joins Empire at the kitchen island. “You don’t often see an Asian character who isn’t defined by his race.” Travis’ film is shot almost exclusively after dark. The title refers not only to London’s twinkling nightscape, but also its myriad…

1 KEEP THE BOOK HANDY Best known for his play Constellations, Nick Payne’s first film script involved the formidable task of adapting Julian Barnes’ ruminative 2011 Booker Prize winner, The Sense Of An Ending. “I’ve got three copies,” he tells Empire, “with varying degrees of notes scribbled in them. I must have read the book over 40 times.” 2 FIND A CONNECTION The story of an ageing man, Tony Webster (Jim Broadbent), reflecting on the loves and friendships of his youth, Barnes’ novel chimed with Payne. “I loved that it was about memory,” he explains. “How we convince ourselves we’ve behaved honourably, when in fact we behaved awfully.” 3 FOLLOW IN THE CHARACTERS’ FOOTSTEPS The book has a sense of place that Payne carefully replicated. “The script was boringly specific…

SCENE 230, TAKE Five. Bent over a brightly lit mortuary slab, Emile Hirsch and Brian Cox are rummaging inside a corpse spatchcocked like a chicken. “What the hell?” Cox mutters as he tweezers a package from the guts. Wrapped inside an inscribed shroud is a human tooth. Never mind how it got there: Cox is struggling to pull the bloody thing out. Not for the first time, the take collapses into laughter. This really is next-level corpsing. “You need a sense of humour when you’re making a horror as intense as this,” says Cox as he wipes his blood-spattered apron. “But this set is particularly claustrophobic. I think we’re starting to go a bit stir-crazy.” You can sense morgue fever setting in: between takes, Hirsch has sculpted a huge balloon…

JULIE VRABELOVA “WE’RE NOT WAVING tennis racquets around for the sake of it,” says Borg/McEnroe director Janus Metz Pedersen. “Tennis is such a psychologically driven sport. It all comes down to what it means for Borg or McEnroe at a particular moment.” The match at the heart of Pedersen’s film is the legendary 1980 Wimbledon final billed as a battle of opposites: Borg (Sverrir Gudnason) was the ice-cool hero, McEnroe (Shia LaBeouf ) the hotheaded bad boy. With contemporary Wimbledon looking far too modern, the stadium was recreated in Prague with Gudnason and LaBeouf replicating every shot of the four-hour final (“like a ballet” says LaBeouf ), the fluffy balls added in digitally later. “Even their playing style becomes part of telling the story,” says Pedersen. “Borg was a baseline…

OUT 3 MARCH CERT 15 / 100 MINS DIRECTOR Adam Smith CAST Michael Fassbender, Brendan Gleeson, Lyndsey Marshal, Rory Kinnear, Sean Harris PLOT The Cutlers are an outlaw clan feared by others in their Gloucestershire traveller community. Patriarch Colby (Gleeson) cares nothing for authority and masterminds stately home raids. But his son Chad (Fassbender) craves a better life for his own children, and plans to break free. OF THE FEW things Assassin’s Creed got right, the casting of Brendan Gleeson as Michael Fassbender’s father stood out in the muddled video game adaptation as one that made perfect sense. So it’s a treat to get a film so soon after which allows these two magnetic Irish actors to fully explore a father/son relationship across its entire running time, rather than during…

OUT 17 MARCH CERT 12A / 124 MINS DIRECTOR Asghar Farhadi CAST Shahab Hosseini, Taraneh Alidoosti, Babak Karimi PLOT While staying in a flat formerly used by a prostitute, Rana (Alidoosti) is sexually assaulted. Her teacher husband Emad (Hosseini) investigates who was behind it, while the couple are also acting in a production of Death Of A Salesman. THE RAPE/REVENGE subgenre doesn’t exactly drip with prestige, tending to descend into flatulent celebrations of male rage in films such as Death Wish. But trust Asghar Farhadi, Iranian cinema’s leading light in the West since the success of A Separation, to bring some class to proceedings. There’s a seriousness of moral inquiry here that could only come from a culture where shame weighs so heavy. As the central marriage strains under the…

OUT NOW CERT 12A / 103 MINS DIRECTOR Zhang Yimou CAST Matt Damon, Jing Tian, Pedro Pascal, Willem Dafoe, Andy Lau PLOT In medieval China, mercenary soldier William (Damon) runs into an enormous army charged with defending the Great Wall Of China from marauding monsters. He ends up getting involved in the longer-term battle to protect the human world from the beasts: creatures that must be studied as well as fought if they are to be overcome. AS IS PERHAPS fitting for a film based on a 13,000-mile-long stone structure, The Great Wall bears a huge weight of expectation. It is the biggest-ever China-Hollywood co-production, the most expensive film shot entirely in China, and arrives at a time when the global industry is increasingly facing towards the East. It’s also…

OUT 24 MARCH CERT TBC / 140 MINS DIRECTOR Kim Jee-woon CAST Song Kang-ho, Gong Yoo, Han Ji-min, Park Hee-soon PLOT Despised as a traitor during the Japanese occupation of Korea, Captain Lee Jung-chool (Song Kang-ho) is dispatched to Shanghai to prevent resistance fighter Kim Woo-jin (Gong Yoo) from smuggling explosives into Seoul. WHAT IS IT about South Korean filmmakers and railroads? Following last year’s Train To Busan, and his own The Good, The Bad, The Weird, Kim Jee-woon stages a tense, pivotal sequence aboard an elegant 1920s train in this riveting espionage saga. Inspired by actual events, it represents a departure from Kim’s Hollywood debut, Arnie comeback clunker The Last Stand, but emulates Choi Dong-hoon’s Assassination (2015) and Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden (2016) in exploring Japan’s domination of the…

CERT 15 / 121 MINS OUT 10 MARCH DIRECTOR Anna Biller CAST Samantha Robinson, Gian Keys, Laura Waddell, Jeffrey Vincent Parise, Jared Sanford PLOT Elaine (Robinson), a practising witch, settles in a Northern California town and begins looking for love, using magic potions and rituals. As her search racks up a body count, she sets her sights on Griff (Keys), the cop investigating the deaths. “WHAT YOU CALL love is a borderline personality disorder… or worse!” Few central characters — or films — announce themselves as strongly as Samantha Robinson’s femme fatale Elaine, driving into a small town in a scarlet sports car (with matching lipstick, luggage and cigarette case), fixing the audience with an unblinking gaze. She acts like a feminist hero, in single-minded pursuit of her own fulfilment,…

SKY ATLANTIC STARTS MARCH TBC EPISODES VIEWED 1-4 SHOWRUNNER David E. Kelley CAST Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, Shailene Woodley, Alexander Skarsgård, Laura Dern, Adam Scott, Zoë Kravitz, James Tupper, Kathryn Newton PLOT Relocating the story told in Liane Moriarty’s 2014 novel from Australia to Monterey, HBO’s latest blockbuster seven-parter follows three mothers who seem to have perfect lives, but are revealed to have been involved in a murder. POST THE NIGHT Manager and The Night Of, it feels as though the standalone miniseries is having a moment. Just short enough to devour over the course of a weekend and with satisfying endings that don’t leave you immediately craving a second season, they are the perfect length for a generation hooked on the deep character development that comes with decent, 21st-century…

OUT NOW FORMATS PC, PS4, XB1 DIRECTOR Jason Kingsley CAST Tom Clarke-Hill PLOT As growly voiced Office of Strategic Services agent Karl Fairburne (Clarke-Hill), the player must aid the Italian resistance against the rising force of fascism in Italy, 1943. Mostly it’s all about fatally collapsing Nazi lungs from 200 yards. WE CAN’T ALL go around punching Nazis, Neo- or otherwise, no matter how much some people wish we could. But everyone who gets their eager mitts on this fourth main instalment of British indie studio Rebellion’s Sniper Elite series can absolutely, positively look forward to blowing some Nazi nuts clean off their wicked bodies. Ever since the second game came out in 2012, that’s been the series’ USP: grotesquely moreish close-ups of high-velocity ballistics breaking enemy bodies, courtesy of…

IN HER VERY FIRST APPEARANCE , within the pages of All Star Comics #8, Wonder Woman appeared to leap out of the page, one booted leg forward, arms pumping, star-spangled skirt swirling around her. She looked powerful, beautiful, unlike anything seen before. “AT LAST, IN A WORLD TORN BY THE HATREDS AND WARS OF MEN,” the accompanying text boomed, “APPEARS A WOMAN TO WHOM THE PROBLEMS AND FEATS OF MEN ARE MERE CHILD’S PLAY…” It was December 1941, the United States had just joined World War II, and this goddess had come to fight for truth, justice and a better world. She was an instant sensation, prompting a flood of enthusiastic letters from readers and winning a comic of her own. But despite that debut, in the 75 years (and…

As eerie music swells, a figure takes shape on the giant screen. Identifiably female, it rises from a pool of fluid, its ivory-white outer layer detaching and flying from it in paper-like shreds. LED lights twinkle on either side of the screen; the monitor glitches. And as the soundtrack builds to a crescendo, the figure completes its metamorphosis. It’s Scarlett Johansson. Hollywood has for some time been on a quest to crack anime. With intricate mythologies and devoted armies of fans, the medium has obvious appeal for movie producers. But adapting it is no easy task. James Wong’s Dragonball: Evolution (2009) is a cautionary tale, grossing $57 million from a $30 million budget but drawing scorn from critics. Even the biggest names in moviemaking have struggled. An adaptation of 1988’s…

Some superhero origin stories require more suspension of disbelief than others. Take Iron Fist. Danny Rand is the gilded heir to Manhattan’s billion-dollar Rand Corporation until, at the age of ten, he loses both his parents during a trip to Asia and is adopted by the warrior monks of K’un Lun, a mystical city that rarely intersects with the Earthly plane. Under their guidance, he becomes a formidable fighter and earns the title of the Iron Fist by slaying the ancient dragon Shou-Lao. When the portal finally reopens 15 years later, Danny decides to return to New York to reclaim his identity and discover who’s to blame for his parents’ untimely end. Got it so far? Now, in the context of Marvel comics, Danny’s story is par for the course,…

ALAMY, MARTINE BERTRAND WHEN DIRECTOR DENIS Villeneuve first read the Ted Chiang short story that inspired Arrival, the prospect of creating a new, alien language was “a dream”. After all, the film hinges on the efforts of linguist Louise (Amy Adams) and physicist Ian (Jeremy Renner) to communicate with the seven-limbed ‘heptapod’ aliens who arrive on the planet. But the process of creating the symbols or ‘logograms’ of Heptapod B, the aliens’ unique written form of communication, was far more challenging than Villeneuve could ever have anticipated. “I wanted a new form of language that would seem fresh for the audience, something away from any human language,” he explains. “I was looking for something that would have nightmarish qualities, something that could have subconscious patterns like Rorschach drawings.” There was…

ALEJANDRO JODOROWSKY HAS done many things in his 88 years on this planet. The Chilean-French filmmaker has presided over the marriage of Marilyn Manson and Dita Von Teese. He claims to have invented Marcel Marceau’s ‘trapped in a glass box’ routine. And he’s directed some of the most psychedelic, indelible and influential movies of all time. If your knowledge of one of the movies’ most enduring leftfield auteurs is lacking, this should see you through… THE VISION QUEST Part-Western, part-odyssey, utterly unique, El Topo (1970) stars Jodorowsky as a man in black on a dangerous metaphysical quest (it’s likely Stephen King had this on his mind when he was writing The Dark Tower). Dark, powerful and surreal, it also features a Russian roulette scene even more horrifying than The Deer…

THOSE WHO THOUGHT director Ken Loach may, at the age of 80, have lost the fire or ability to make a searing social polemic were firmly silenced by last year’s I, Daniel Blake. Not only did it win the Palme d’Or in Cannes and two British Independent Film Awards, it racked up the biggest box office opening of Loach’s career, sparked furious rows in Parliament and attracted the derision of certain newspaper columnists on social media. Few films, and certainly no British film, last year caused rucks and recriminations like I, Daniel Blake. Four months on from its initial release in cinemas, has the dust settled? And has real change come from the flecks and flakes? It was precisely the deafening silence and lack of controversy around the welfare system…

ROGUE YUM Dear Empire, do you dig the attached piccie of a Yorkshire pudding that my wife made that kind of looks like the Millennium Falcon? It’s the pud that made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsnips! I’ll get my Star Wars-themed coat. PHIL SLOAN, BEXLEY To steal a joke from The Simpsons, hope you used the forks, Phil. Readers, have you spotted a sausage that looks like Mon Mothma or a piece of cabbage resembling the planet Hoth? Please send in photos of any Star Wars foodstuff lookalikes you may encounter as a matter of urgency. Empire's star letter wins a Picturehouse Membership, plus one for a friend! Valid for one year at 2R Picturehouse Cinemas across the UK, including the Picturehouse Central in London’s West End,…

“I STARTED WRITING this film in the era I call the post-racial lie America,” says Jordan Peele, pulling no punches. “After Obama was elected there was this sentiment going around that we were in this post-racial America. The movie was meant to point out that no, in fact, racism is in our DNA. It’s in the marrow of the country.” Following that through, Peele busted out of the gates with the sort of debut the word “audacious” was invented for. Deftly serving up scares, thrills and incisive social commentary, Get Out centres on young couple Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) and Rose (Allison Williams). Off to meet her (white) parents for the first time, he’s concerned that she hasn’t told them he’s black. She assuages his fears, but when they arrive at…

CHRIS PRATT WANTS to make one thing very clear about Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2: “You can expect to see everything you loved in the first movie, but you’re also going to… but it… oh, I should rephrase that.” Clearing his throat, the man who plays Star-Lord (aka Peter Quill) has another go: “Don’t expect to see everything you saw in the first movie. But expect to be charmed and thrilled and entertained like you were watching the first movie.” For most of us, ‘more of the same’ would have done just fine. Guardians Of The Galaxy was a triumph of group chemistry, interstellar spectacle and action-driven comedy. Still, writer-director James Gunn knew he had to push Peter, Drax and their fellow loveable space-rogues on to bigger challenges, with…

WHEN WILL IT AIR? Pour yourself a pot of damn fine coffee. The two-hour season opener — reputedly a real head-scrambler — premieres at 2am GMT on Monday 22 May on Sky Atlantic, a simulcast with the US broadcast. Non-night owls can catch it on Tuesday 23 May, at the more sensible time of 9pm. Yet Showtime president David Nevins has suggested the show might not follow “a traditional release pattern”, hinting at erratic episode running times. However it plays, Nevins expects it to be addictive. “We’ve seen the whole thing and the version of Twin Peaks you’re going to see is the pure-heroin version of David Lynch,” he said at January’s Television Critics Association (TCA) showcase. “I hear heroin is a very popular drug these days!” quipped Lynch. WHAT’S…

ALAMY, KERRY BROWN, REX FEAT TURES. ILLUSTRATION: DA AVID MAHONEY Hold on: Silence is 161 minutes long. YES CHRIS HEWITT ASSOCIATE EDITOR/EMPIRE PODCAST HOST THE OTHER DAY I wanted to take my wife to the cinema (paid for with actual money; not one of these fancy-dan screenings where you are given sandwiches and can’t laugh too loudly in case you offend the bloke from the Daily Mail), so I called up a popular movie times app on my phone. And realised that Hollywood has a major problem. The app, you see, not only lists start times for films, but their running time. Choices included Scorsese’s Silence (two hours, 41 minutes), Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (two hours, 14 minutes), and Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them (two hours,…

THE THREE EMPIRE AWARDS 2017, with a city of stars bigger than La La Land, is back on 19 March. Following the initial round of voting, the Empire readership has created a stunning shortlist of candidates marked by the impeccable taste that comes from the most film-savvy audience on the planet. Which makes the task ahead of you now even more challenging. This shortlist has to be whittled down to the winners who will grace the stage of London’s Roundhouse to collect the coveted awards. Let’s face it. Stealing Death Star plans is a doddle in comparison. The past 12 months have been a banner year for movies of every stripe. At the blockbuster end of the scale, the shortlist gives us the derring-do suicide mission of Gareth Edwards’ Rogue…

OUT 10 MARCH CERT 18 / 131 MINS DIRECTOR Paul Verhoeven CAST Isabelle Huppert, Anne Consigny, Charles Berling, Laurent Lafitte, Alice Isaaz, Jonas Bloquet PLOT Michèle (Huppert) is raped by a stranger who invades her house. She goes on with her life as head of a company producing violent video games, but as her attacker taunts her, she begins to investigate who he could be. ONLY IN A French film would a woman emerge from a violent rape, take a long bubble bath and basically give a Gallic shrug before continuing on about her business, glass of wine in hand. It’s shocking in her refusal to be devastated by the brutal attack, but thanks to Isabelle Huppert’s multifaceted performance, the scenario is not just convincing but powerful. The contradiction at…

OUT NOW CERT U / 104 MINS DIRECTOR Chris McKay CAST Will Arnett, Zach Galifianakis, Michael Cera, Rosario Dawson, Ralph Fiennes PLOT Slighted by Batman’s (Arnett) refusal to recognise him as his arch enemy, the Joker (Galifianakis) hatches a plan to make him take notice — involving the Lego universe’s greatest villains descending on Gotham to take control of the city once and for all. HISTORICALLY, THE PREVAILING wisdom about Batman is this: dark and moody is good, comedic and silly is bad. Just compare and contrast the reputations of The Dark Knight (anarchy and politics) and Batman & Robin (ice skating and Bat-nipples). The truth (as is usually the case) is more complex, but it highlights the problem facing The Lego Batman Movie — can this comedic take on…

OUT NOW CERT 15 / 133 MINS DIRECTOR Peter Berg CAST Mark Wahlberg, Michelle Monaghan, J.K. Simmons, Kevin Bacon PLOT 15 April 2013. It’s the day of the Boston Marathon and Sgt Tommy Saunders (Wahlberg) is reluctantly back in uniform and on station at the finish line to babysit the VIPs in attendance. Then at 2.49pm, two homemade bombs go off and the event is plunged into chaos. TOPICAL, GRITTY AND competent to a tee, Peter Berg’s movies have also become stonkingly predictable of late. The hallmarks — a maverick everyman-in-peril, a thinly sketched wife back home, bursts of well-choreographed violence, and a moody post-rock soundscape (Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross here) — are so dependable, you can play Berg bingo with them. They’re coming thick and fast, too. Patriots…

Welcome to your childhood,” says Josh Gad, greeting Empire on the beautifully realised village set of Beauty And The Beast at Shepperton Studios. Following on from Maleficent, Cinderella and The Jungle Book, this is Disney’s latest flesh-and-blood reimagining of a legendary title from its animated back catalogue. The watchword here is realism, both aesthetically and psychologically. Set in 18th century France, rather than an airy-fairy once upon a time, the period has informed all the artistic choices. “We wanted to give it as much depth and detail as possible,” says Emma Watson, who plays Belle. “It’s our job to fill in the gaps, to give it more layers and detail than you could ever get in an animation.” This project is a challenge, even by Disney-reboot standards. In 1991, Beauty…

LOCATION My first job out of drama school was [post-World War I TV drama series] The Orchid House. We shot on the Caribbean island of Dominica for two-and-a-half months. We were there so long that it felt like where I lived. For [’90s BBC police drama] Out Of The Blue we needed a run-down neighbourhood and we went to a part of Rotherham so run-down that there were only a few people living there. Most had moved out. It was heartbreaking, seeing a dead community. AUDITION Snatch. There were two actors cast in the roles Robbie Gee and I played, but Guy Ritchie wanted more experienced actors. Robbie and I were paired for the audition, and we left it all in the room, as they say. We didn’t speak about…

THIS MONTH: ROCK DOCUMENTARIES ROCK DOCUMENTARIES — or, if you will, rockumentaries — are cinema’s backstage pass, turning fans into voyeurs and pop idols into humans. They’re also weirdly contradictory. Whereas pop videos construct an image, rockumentaries deconstruct them. Some in this month’s marathon are revealing, others unwise and one utterly devastating. There’s only one place to start: Bob Dylan: Dont Look Back, the rockumentary’s big bang. Shot 52 years ago, D.A. Pennebaker’s pioneering chronicle of Dylan’s UK tour captures the troubadour awkwardly adjusting to rock-star status. Groupies attack. The press lay siege. No wonder he’s dying to get on stage. The genius of the movie is that its fly-on-the-wall style separates Dylan’s folk-hero public persona from the private man, revealed as an itch of contradictions: mean, benign, crabby, calm,…

ALAMY, REX 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 Who shouts, “Give ’em hell, 54!” in Glory? That was Kevin Jarre. He wrote the first draft of the script before I rewrote it and I wanted to honour him in that moment. He died soon after. Correct. 2 In The Last Samurai, Katsumoto gives Nathan Algren a sword. On it is an inscription. What is the inscription? Ooh. Ooh. “To the man who dadadada dadadada.” [Hears the answer] That sword, I would have loved to have kept. I think Warner Bros. has that in a vault somewhere. The correct answer is:…

BFI, MOVIESTORE COLLECTION, RONALD GRANT Scorsese on set. THINK MARTIN SCORSESE, what comes to mind? Men. New York. Violence. Swearing. ’70s rock. Which makes Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, his 1974 ‘woman’s picture’ ( just after Mean Streets, just before Taxi Driver) all the more fascinating. The story of Alice Hyatt (Ellen Burstyn) who, following her husband’s death, hits the road on a trip from New Mexico to Arizona with her young son (Alfred Lutter) to pursue her dream of becoming a singer, it joins New York, New York and The Age Of Innocence in the Doesn’t Fit Into Any Category category in Scorsese’s back catalogue. “Most Scorsese films are about a young man making his way in the world,” says Ian Christie, co-editor of the 1996 book Scorsese On…

THE ALIEN FILMS have a long history of synthetic characters villainous and heroic, but Alien: Covenant offers the first visual evidence that Weyland-Yutani manufactures identical models on an industrial scale. That’s how we get Michael Fassbender’s second synthetic, Walter, joining his doppelgänger David in Ridley Scott’s prequel-sequel. So how does Walter differ from the previously beheaded David? “Walter is the next evolution of David, or several evolutions down the line,” explains Fassbender. “[He was] made in a way that doesn’t incorporate emotions, because, as we found out, that started to make people uncomfortable.” Alien: Covenant sees the crew of the Covenant colony ship emerge onto the surface of a new world. It’s not their original destination: they have detoured to answer a distress call. And given this franchise, it’s a…

Samantha Robinson, photographed exclusively for Empire in Los Angeles on 17 January 2017. HAIR AND MAKE-UP: BLONDIE FOR EXCLUSIVE ARTISTS MANAGEMENT USING ORLANE PARIS AND OLIVIA GARDEN AGE __ 25 PLAYS __ Elaine, a modern-day sorceress who uses her powers to seduce men in Anna Biller’s retro fantasy The Love Witch. BACK STORY __ “I was born in New York, moved to the UK when I was three and stayed until I was 14. Then I moved to Miami for high school, and studied performing at UCLA. When I lived in London I trained at LAMDA... The Love Witch is a very theatrical, stylistic style of acting and I think my theatre training helped me.” EARLY ROLES __ “I was in the chorus of Joseph And His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat…

WHEN LONE SCHERFIG signed up for British World War II comedy Their Finest, she didn’t realise she’d be taking on Christopher Nolan. Well, not literally. But, in a twist of timing, it turns out she’s releasing a movie about the 1940 Dunkirk evacuation three months before he is. Though Scherfig seems as excited by Nolan’s epic as she is people seeing her own film. “I’m a big fan of his,” she says, “and it’s so obvious someone had to tell that story. I’m really looking forward to seeing it on screen at the scale he can operate in...” The Danish director of An Education and The Riot Club pauses. “But maybe it’s a good thing they come out in that order!” Their Finest isn’t strictly a film about Dunkirk. It’s…

Starz’s new fantasy epic American Gods follows Shadow Moon (Ricky Whittle), an ex-con who encounters the mysterious Mr Wednesday (Ian McShane) and learns that ancient and modern gods are fighting a covert war in our midst. We spoke with writer Neil Gaiman to learn more. 1 IT’S HUGELY TOPICAL “If there was ever a completely right time or a completely wrong time to be making American Gods, it’s now,” says Gaiman of a show that pulls no punches in its diverse casting or its story. “It’s about America as an immigrant country, which I think the people currently running America would like to be forgotten. Either people will love us or, at this point in time, they will lynch us.” 2 IT’S BIGGER THAN THE BOOK This first season will…

ARTHUR, TRUE KING of the Britons, is addressing the land’s eight greatest barons, calling them to war. He stands on a hillock in the Forest Of Dean, decked in a brown leather jacket, his blond hair cropped short: a modern-looking figure in a dark-age setting. And he’s not happy. “You lot,” he announces, “haven’t got a bollock among you.” This is what happens when you let Guy Ritchie loose on a legend. “The fundamental challenge with King Arthur is to make him likeable,” the director tells Empire. “If you’re not careful, he’s worthy. And once someone’s worthy they’re not likeable. So we had to create a character naughty enough for us to like him and simultaneously have him go on a journey that makes him respectable.” That journey will involve…

OUT 10 FEBRUARY CERT 15 / 122 MINS DIRECTOR Chad Stahelski CAST Keanu Reeves, Ian McShane, Common, Ruby Rose, Lance Reddick, Riccardo Scamarcio, Laurence Fishburne, Bridget Moynahan PLOT Legendary hitman John Wick (Reeves) travels to Europe to take on a contract against his will, triggering a chain of events that puts him firmly in the sights of the world’s greatest assassins. OF ALL THE characters Keanu Reeves has played since hanging up Neo’s sunglasses a decade and change ago, it’s probably fair to say he didn’t expect John Wick to be the one to stick around. When the hirsute hitman first showed up in the self-titled 2014 film, it seemed to be just another entry in the recent cycle of geriaction movies (although Reeves, then just about to hit 50,…

OUT 3 MARCH CERT 12A / 107 MINS DIRECTOR Kelly Reichardt CAST Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Lily Gladstone, Kristen Stewart PLOT A look at the intersecting lives of four Livingston, Montana women: smalltown lawyer Laura (Dern), wife and mother Gina (Williams), an unnamed horse rancher (Gladstone) and law grad/teacher Elizabeth (Stewart). CERTAIN WOMEN COMES laden with a certain expectation — writer-director Kelly Reichardt’s follow-up to 2013’s Night Moves was a Sundance favourite and won Best Film at the 2016 London Film Festival. Based on Maile Meloy’s tellingly titled short story collection Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It, it presents a snapshot of four Montana women’s lives in three lightly connected vignettes. Make no mistake, there are no fireworks here in the conventional narrative sense — even lawyer…

OUT 17 MARCH CERT 15 / 105 MINS DIRECTOR Olivier Assayas CAST Kristen Stewart, Lars Eidinger, Sigrid Bouaziz PLOT Maureen (Stewart) lives in Paris, working as a personal shopper. She is also a medium, an ability also possessed by her twin brother. Following his death, from a condition she shares, Maureen cannot move on with her life until she’s had a sign from her brother that he’s now at peace. THERE’S NO ONE aspect of Olivier Assayas’ latest film that entirely works. As a ghost story it swoops between being genuinely creepy and almost laughably silly, with some theme park-level scares. As a mystery-thriller it takes you down frightening roads but to a glaringly obvious destination. And by its end, it’s left an unruly pile of loose ends. Yet as…

OUT NOW CERT 18 / 117 MINS DIRECTOR Danny Boyle CAST Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller, Robert Carlyle, Anjela Nedyalkova PLOT After living in Amsterdam for the past 2O years following his P99U drug swindle, Mark Renton (McGregor) returns to Edinburgh to reconnect with old pals Spud/Daniel (Bremner) and Sick Boy/Simon (Miller). Yet as he moves into a business partnership with Sick Boy, Begbie (Carlyle), the psycho he betrayed, escapes from prison. “HELLO MARK,” SAYS Jonny Lee Miller’s Simon aka Sick Boy to Ewan McGregor’s Renton near the start of T2 Trainspotting. “So what have you been up to… for 20 years?” It’s a question that felt like it would never get an answer. Danny Boyle’s 1996 adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s 1993 novel became the movie avatar of…

SKY ATLANTIC STARTS 10PM, 13 FEBRUARY EPISODES VIEWED 1-3 CREATOR Lena Dunham CAST Lena Dunham, Allison Williams, Jemima Kirke, Zosia Mamet, Adam Driver, Alex Karpovsky PLOT After documenting the relationship between her ex Adam (Driver) and best friend Jessa (Kirke), Hannah (Dunham) is finally thriving as a journalist. But can she stay clear of Marnie (Williams) and Shoshanna’s (Mamet) romantic dramas? And aren’t they all getting a bit old for millennial dysfunction? IF YOU WERE feeling especially uncharitable you might suggest that, since its launch in 2012, Girls has been famous for garnering as many angry blogposts as actual viewers. But in recent years, something curious has happened to Lena Dunham’s embattled cult dramedy. Just as the invective about the series died down, the team behind the show found their…

CILLIAN MURPHY POINTS TO A SMALL , BLOODY HOLE IN THIS LEFT ARM . “That’s a ricochet,” he says. “That’s from the first time I’m shot. Then he gestures to a makeshift tourniquet wrapped tightly around his right thigh. “And I got one in the leg. We’re all fucking wounded.” That’s an understatement. “I get clipped on top of the shoulder,” sighs Sharlto Copley. “I got shot in the arm,” says Armie Hammer, pointing out a flesh wound. “And the calf.” Brie Larson, with a certain glee, admits to an arm wound and “my leg, the back upper thigh. I’m running away and get shot there.” Welcome to Ben Wheatley’s Free Fire, a blackly comedic thriller that is built around one of the most extraordinary and elaborate shoot-outs in cinema…

THE 14TH ACADEMY AWARDS ALMOST DIDN’T HAPPEN. In December 1941, a little over two months prior to the ceremony, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and, with that, America was at war. Hardly the time for a spare-no-expense, backslapping awards ceremony. Various alternatives were discussed (including the idea of allowing the public to buy tickets with proceeds going to the Red Cross) before a scaled-back solution was approved. The banquet would become a simpler dinner and formal dress was banned — neckties rather than bow ties, a state of affairs that would last the length of the conflict. And so, with these austerity measures (and more) in effect, on 26 February 1942, the 14th Academy Awards did finally go ahead. At 7.45pm Bob Hope took to the stage in downtown Los…

PHOTOFEST THE POINT OF BRIAN De Palma’s Blow Out is laid out in the opening moments: it’s all about finding a better scream. A low-budget sleazy horror-film director and his sound technician sit in a dark theatre somewhere in Philadelphia, playing back their showcase murder: the college dorm, the naked girls, the raising of the knife, the shower curtain pulled back by the gloved hand. The schlocky tension creeps to a white buzz and is swiftly deflated by a completely flaccid scream. It’s just some actress who doesn’t mean it, they only hired her for her tits. The sound guy has to do better. John Travolta is Jack Terry, that sound guy, who inadvertently records a murder while out at night collecting sounds by the river — a toad, a…

ALAMY, CAPITAL PICTURES, PHOTOFEST THE GUNFIGHT AT The O.K. Corral is arguably the most famous shootout in history. It took place on 26 October 1881 in an alleyway that was actually a few doors down from the Old Kindersley corral, and saw lawmen Wyatt Earp, his brothers Morgan and Virgil, and their compadre Doc Holliday face off again a collection of ne’er-do-wells including Ike and Billy Clanton. Despite its reputation, it only lasted roughly 30 seconds. Still, that hasn’t stopped the movies and TV from replaying it over and over again. As John Ford’s majestic My Darling Clementine is reissued on Blu-ray, we look at some of the finest versions and separate the OK from the Oh No… 1 MY DARLING CLEMENTINE (1946) GUN MEN: Henry Fonda (Wyatt Earp), Ward…

URSULA ANDRESS HAS never understood the love for her iconic entrance in Dr. No. “I was just standing there doing my thing with shells by the sea and I couldn’t believe it appealed so much. That’s the fantastic opening? That was luck.” Honey Ryder (Andress) emerging from the water, watched by Bond (Sean Connery), is significant on more than one count: in the first 007 film, it cemented not only the notion of the ‘Bond girl’ but the feel of the series itself: impossibly glamorous, slightly cheeky and sexy in a PG way. Producer Cubby Broccoli was looking for “an unknown with a new face who wouldn’t demand an outrageous salary”, effectively the criteria applied to his Bond. He cast the 25 year-old Andress after seeing a picture of her…

#9 ANDY DIGGLE ON THE APARTMENT THE NOTION BEHIND the First-Take Club is simple. Each month, we ask someone to have a butcher’s at our list of the 301 Greatest Movies Of All Time (as voted for by the Empire readers in 2014), choose one they haven’t seen, watch it and tell us all about it. This month’s selection is widely regarded as one of the greatest comedies of all time. Featuring wonderful performances from Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine, it’s a hugely quotable satire that scooped five Oscars. It is, of course, Billy Wilder’s The Apartment , and to the shame of Andy Diggle — acclaimed writer of comic books such as The Losers , Green Arrow:…

Derek Cianfrance: “When I was 23, I went to see The Gospel According To St. Matthew by Pier Paolo Pasolini, at the international film series at my film school [the University of Colorado]. I had loved Accattone and was curious to see what an atheist, homosexual neo-realist would do with a religious epic. My friend and I arrived at the theatre about six minutes late, and had to park about a mile away, so we sprinted there. When we finally made it, I sat down in the darkened theatre, covered with sweat and out of breath. I grew up Catholic, but I never really paid attention in church. I was always daydreaming. Yet I found myself sitting in that dark theatre, trying to catch my breath, witnessing all these stories…