Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2017 i Empire

THE INTERGALACTIC COLONY of Primo 241 can be found just off London’s A4. The location for Impossible Planet, one of the short films in Channel 4 and Amazon’s ten-part Philip K. Dick anthology series Electric Dreams, has a shabby retro-futurist vibe. It may be set 500 years in the future but the inside of the Dreamweaver spaceship resembles an Atomic Age cocktail bar, all Formica surfaces and moulded furniture. In Impossible Planet, written and directed by The Night Manager’s David Farr, a rich, old, blind woman (Geraldine Chaplin) hires two cosmic tour guides (Jack Reynor and Benedict Wong) to take her to Earth, presumed long dead. They plan to rip her off but discover, says Reynor, “that there’s something happening on a different plane of existence” — a recurring theme…

Jason Isaacs CO-STAR, GOOD “Jodie’s going to own The Doctor for a generation. I already feel sorry for the next one. She’s funny as fuck, kind in a way that’s unfakeable and can simultaneously be utterly innocent and choke-on-your-tongue filthy. I can’t wait for my two majorly Whovian daughters to see her — not as a feminist role model, but because she’s going to blow them away.” Alice Lowe CO-STAR, ADULT LIFE SKILLS “She’s someone you feel like you know when you see her on screen, yet she inhabits the character entirely. She’s got this uncanny ability to switch from heavy drama to comedy, which not many can do. It’s a bit greedy of her, really, to be so good at stuff. She’s going to be an amazing role model…

“IT’S NOT JUST a longer Zodiac,” says David Fincher of MINDHUNTER, his new Netflix series about the birth of serial-killer profiling. “I mean, the first season’s probably only an hour longer…” He’s joking, or course, but there’s something in it. He may have won a BAFTA for The Social Network and an Emmy for House Of Cards, but Fincher knows that Zodiac and Seven will forever link him with this blood-soaked subject. He’s exploring the dark side again in a ten-part run inspired by the memoir of FBI veteran John Douglas. Hamilton star Jonathan Groff plays an upstart agent based on Douglas, who believes killers can be learned from; Holt McCallany is his careworn partner. Together they interview incarcerated killers in order to catch others. “The most comprehensive look at…

“THIS MOVIE IS not about a tennis match,” says Shia LaBeouf, the ‘McEnroe’ of Borg Vs McEnroe. “I don’t think the big reveal is who wins the match. That would be a shitty movie. Our big reveal is the human side of things: the smoke and mirrors of these men being heroes and villains.” The match LaBeouf refers to is the pair’s classic 1980 Wimbledon final, but today’s set-ups swap SW19 for West 54th Street. Empire has joined the production in the middle of a bacchanal. Outside it’s Gothenburg, October 2016. Inside a sleek modern restaurant, it is Studio 54, 1977. Tennis superstar Björn Borg (Sverrir Gudnason) is being inducted into the legendary New York nightspot by fellow player Vitas Gerulaitis (Robert Emms) and is taking in the sights: naked,…

THE TITLE NARCOS was chosen for a reason. The Netflix series, which drops its third season next month, was always intended to be about the rise of cocaine in Colombia and the kingpins — or ‘narcos’ — who controlled it. It was never meant to be about one person. That was proven at the end of Season 2 when drug baron Pablo Escobar (Wagner Moura), the show’s central character, was killed off in a bloody execution. It shouldn’t have come as a huge surprise to anyone who knew anything about the real-life Escobar, but it leaves the show with a big, baddie-shaped hole. “When I conceived the show, years ago now,” says executive producer Eric Newman, “I modelled it slightly like The Wire. You’d have characters die or just recede…

BEST KNOWN AS the birthplace of Woody Allen and Lena Dunham’s Girls, Brooklyn is now the setting for the year’s most unlikely foreign-language film, too. Shot almost entirely in Yiddish and filmed in a quiet enclave nestled within America’s busiest metropolis over the course of a year, Menashe was a bold place for director Joshua Z. Weinstein to kick off his feature filmmaking career — not least because he didn’ t even speak the language. “I speak very, very little,” the New Yorker admits. “I grew up speaking Hebrew, but if Hebrew is like Arabic, then Yiddish is German.” Fortunately, it was his words the cast were speaking. Set in the Hasidic Jewish New York enclave of Borough Park, Menashe began life as 30 pages of loosely connected scenes in…

★★★★ OUT 25 AUGUST CERT 15 / 143 MINS DIRECTOR Kathryn Bigelow CAST John Boyega, Algee Smith, Anthony Mackie, Will Poulter, Jason Mitchell, John Krasinski, Jack Reynor, Hannah Murray, Kaitlyn Dever PLOT Detroit, Michigan, 1967. In the heat of the infamous 12th Street uprising, a task-force, led by racist cop Philip Krauss (Poulter), raids the Algiers Motel searching for a sniper. When they fail to find him, the mostly African-American guests are subjected to a horrifying storm of hatred and violence that spills into murder. FORTY-THREE DEAD, 1,200 injured, 7,000 arrested, 2,000 buildings scorched. It’s easy to get lost in the shattering scale of the Detroit riots. Over five days in 1967, the Summer Of Love exploded into hate as the civil rights movement tipped into civil war. Powered by…

★★★★ OUT 1 SEPTEMBER CERT TBC / 104 MINS DIRECTOR Francis Lee CAST Josh O’Connor, Alec Secareanu, Gemma Jones, Ian Hart PLOT Johnny (O’Connor), the twentysomething son of an ailing sheep farmer (Hart), doesn’t expect much from his life in rural Yorkshire beyond several pints and an anonymous bunk-up. But his perfunctory existence is turned upside-down when Romanian farmhand Gheorghe (Secareanu) arrives for lambing season. IN HIS POEM Moors, Ted Hughes describes that particular part of the Yorkshire landscape as “a stage for the performance of heaven”. It is this Yorkshire, brutal and beautiful, that Francis Lee conjures for his lyrical debut, God’s Own Country. The film opens on the moors before dawn: an isolated house, silence, then the sound of retching and spitting as farmer’s son Johnny (O’Connor) vomits…

★★ OUT 18 AUGUST CERT 15 / 118 MINS DIRECTOR Patrick Hughes CAST Ryan Reynolds, Samuel L. Jackson, Salma Hayek, Gary Oldman PLOT Disgraced “protection agent” Michael Bryce (Reynolds) is coerced into transporting assassin Darius Kincaid (Jackson) to The Hague to testify against an evil dictator (Oldman). TYPIFIED BY THE work of Shane Black, the buddy action comedy was a Hollywood staple in the ’80s and ’90s, partly because on each occasion the audience knew exactly what they were going to get: a mismatched couple (often one conventional, one rule-breaker; sometimes one black, one white), pitched together to take down a Big Bad, crack wise and teach each other some life lessons along the way. This was all seasoned with car crashes, punishing punch-ups and the obligatory jump off a…

★★ OUT 1 SEPTEMBER CERT 15 / 109 MINS DIRECTOR Juan Carlos Medina CAST Bill Nighy, Olivia Cooke, Douglas Booth, Daniel Mays, Sam Reid, María Valverde PLOT In Victorian London, a spate of murders have police stumped. With the locals terrified, a new detective (Nighy) joins the case, his investigations leading him to an apparently unrelated death which could be the key to the mystery. A SERIES OF ritualistic killings are baffling an incompetent police force in Victorian London. Sound at all familiar? Despite a small shift eastwards in geography (and one being fictional), the Limehouse Golem and the Jack The Ripper murders have much in common. Starting in 1880 (eight years before Jack began his “funny little game”), the Golem has chalked up five murders by the time Inspector…

★★★ OUT 1 SEPTEMBER CERT TBC / 94 MINS DIRECTOR Benedict Andrews CAST Rooney Mara, Ben Mendelsohn, Riz Ahmed PLOT Una (Mara) hasn’t seen Ray (Mendelsohn) in around 15 years, but when she spots his photo in the paper she decides to visit him — raking up an abusive past that he would like to forget, but she is unable to. IT’S ONLY A short while into Una that the signs begin to indicate this may have started life as a play. The cast list is sparse, with only a few brief invasions into a two-hander. Characters move between multiple locations to continue the same conversation. Pregnant silences abound. Some plays translate smoothly to the screen — A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof — but it’s…

★★ OUT NOW CERT 12A / 137 MINS DIRECTOR Luc Besson CAST Dane DeHaan, Cara Delevingne, Clive Owen, Rihanna, Herbie Hancock, Sam Spruell, Ethan Hawke PLOT In the mid-26th century, special agents Valerian (DeHaan) and Laureline (Delevingne) must deal with a mysterious threat to the deep-space metropolis of Alpha, while also dealing with their growing attraction to each other. LUC BESSON’S LATEST is something he’s been itching to make for more than 20 years. It’s based on comic strips that fired his imagination as a petit garçon (the Star Wars-influencing Valérian And Laureline, by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Méziéres). It’s enabled him to let loose with digital techniques he wished he’d had back on The Fifth Element. And he’s made it on his own terms, free of studio interference, despite…

★★★ NETFLIX OUT 25 AUGUST DIRECTOR Adam Wingard CAST Nat Wolff, Margaret Qualley, Keith Stanfield, Paul Nakauchi, Shea Whigham, Willem Dafoe PLOT Student Light (Wolff) picks up a strange notebook that will kill anyone whose name is written in it. After eliminating two miscreants, Light is tempted to rid the world of evildoers. THE DEATH NOTE saga is a phenomenon in Japan. Debuting in 2003, the manga serial scored Stephen King-level sales, which led to an animated series and a run of live-action movies. In Western horror terms, it’s a crossover success akin to Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Lecter properties rather than the likes of, say, the Final Destination franchise. There have been Death Note computer games, stage musicals and novelty notebooks with which to curse your enemies. While comparable J-hits…

What brings you here ? Gillan: We’re here to talk about the release of Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2 on Blu-ray in August. Rooker: That’s right. And the digital release too Gillan: Which is on 8 August. Can’t remember when the Blu-ray is… Rooker: 22 August. Gillan: That’s why he gets paid the big bucks. Rooker: Especially on the Blu-ray, you get 80 minutes of brand-new footage that’s never been seen, including a music video. Gillan: It’s us dancing around in ’70s-inspired costumes, which you need to see. Have you been to Comic-Con before? Klementieff: Last year, for the first time. Gillan: I’ve been here loads of times. Rooker: Yeah, I’ve been many times. Gillan: I think this is maybe my fifth. Sixth, maybe. I was here for Doctor…

PETER CAPALDI’S DOCTOR still has one journey to make: the Christmas special airing this December. But with Jodie Whittaker confirmed as the next occupant of the TARDIS, it’s the end of an era for both Capaldi and showrunner Steven Moffat, who got to navigate through time and space together for just over three years. As they prepared to bid farewell to thousands of fans at Comic-Con, we sat them down together, plus guest writer and Christmas special co-star Mark Gatiss, to hear their memories of some key Capaldi episodes. DEEP BREATH (SERIES 8, EPISODE 1) In which the freshly formed 12th Doctor is startled by his new, craggier face. Specifically the “attack eyebrows”. Capaldi: Steven is a hugely gifted writer, obviously, but one of his quirks is that he loves…

Have you been to Comic-Con before? Yes, I have. Bizarrely, it was for the DVD release of Look Around You, the blockbuster BBC eight-to-ten-minute-episode cult series that is beloved by its small but loyal bunch of followers. We did a panel and there wasn’t far off a thousand people there. I was just surprised that a thousand people ever even watched it. What brings you here? The Tick. It’s a show for Amazon and it’s created by Ben Edlund, and I play The Tick. He’s a blue superhero, and it was a comic book, a cartoon series and a live-action series a few years ago starring Patrick Warburton. They were quite big shoes to fill. No, they were quite uncomfortable shoes to fill. Who’s the most famous person you’ve crossed…

YORKSHIRE HAS ALWAYS BEEN HOME TO ME. Its landscape formed me both emotionally and physically, and even though I ‘escaped’ to London when I was 20 to train as an actor, it’s a place I’ve never been able to get out from underneath my flesh. When I decided to quit acting and start making films about five years ago, it felt like the most rich and emotive territory to set my work — the most natural place on Earth to make my first feature film. I had wanted to leave London for some time. The ‘urban’ lifestyle had depleted my resources massively and God’s Own Country was an opportunity to move back to the Pennine Hills. My dad is still a sheep farmer there, his farm is not dissimilar to…

THIS MONTH: NICOLAS CAGE DTV MOVIES IT’S A TOUGH time to be a Nic Cage fan. After splurging his fortune on dinosaur skulls, shrunken pygmy heads and America’s most haunted house, Cage’s financial woes have resulted in a manic pile-up of DTV releases to pay off the debts — this year alone, Cage will blurt out seven movies. Question is, do the films match the talent? If the following marathon proves anything, Cage switches genres more times than most people change socks, swinging from horror to thriller, action to comedy, biopic to disaster flick. Let’s start with a disaster. And boy, is it a disaster. USS Indianapolis: Men Of Courage (2016) subjects Cage to shipwrecks, sharks and Microsoft Paint-level CGI in a dramatisation of the World War II naval tragedy.…

LEADER BOARD 1 In World War II drama Their Finest, Sam Claflin tells Gemma Arterton, “Films are like life with the boring bits cut out.” Who originated that quote? Alfred Hitchcock. It’s an anachronism. Hitchcock is a big influence on me. I’ve taught some of his work. The Hitchcock/Truffaut book is still the best film book I own. Correct. 2 “Pancreas”, “woman’s handball team”, “sorbet”. These IMDb plot keywords describe which film? I don’t know. [Hears answer] Ah yes, it is the mother who has pancreatitis but it is also a disease that turns up in Wilbur Wants To Kill Himself. The correct answer is Italian For Beginners . 3 In The Riot Club, how does Alistair (Sam Claflin) correct the mugger who wants to take his…

DIRECTOR RIAN JOHNSON and the cast of The Last Jedi braved armies of Cinderella cosplayers at Disney’s D23 Expo to unveil a new behind-the-scenes video. A treasure trove of clues and rumour confirmations, we break down the five big ones below. WARNING! SPOILERS! 1. REY WILL TAKE ON THE KNIGHTS OF REN Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver’s training clips raise a few tantalising possibilities. Rey is seen fending off three assailants with her lightsaber, feeding speculation her nascent Jedi will go head-to-head with the Knights Of Ren, glimpsed briefly during her vision sequence in The Force Awakens. What’s more, we see Driver battling two similar opponents. Will he, too, fall foul of his former crew? Could Ren and Rey team up? 2. FINN RETURNS TO THE FIRST ORDER John Boyega’s…

THERE HAVE BEEN other films about Vincent van Gogh — Lust For Life with Kirk Douglas, most notably — but Loving Vincent is unique. Designed entirely in the artist’s deliriously beautiful style, it required 65,000 frames of oil-painted detail. Together they tell a story set just after the artist’s death and incorporating many of his most famous works. “His paintings represent his life and himself,” explains director Dorota Kobiela. “They’re very personal, very pure. The range of subjects is almost like storytelling: it shows where he slept, what he ate, who he spoke to.” Kobiela studied fine art before becoming a filmmaker, and in 2011 dreamed up a way to combine training and film. She had the idea for a painted short based around van Gogh’s work and created in…

STYLING: ABENA OFEI. GROOMING: ALEXIS DAY USING SKYN ICELAND AND WAHL. Navy and red jersey track top by Gucci at MatchesFashion (www.matchesfashion.com). White and blue T-shirt by Christopher Raeburn (shop.christopherraeburn.co.uk). Black denim jeans by APC at MatchesFashion (www.matchesfashion.com). Burgundy brogue ‘Sacramento’ boots by Weder Hodel Feder (www.weberhodelfeder.com). AGE __ 16 PLAYS __ Jake Chambers, the teen hero of fantasy epic The Dark Tower, opposite Idris Elba’s Gunslinger and Matthew McConaughey’s The Man In Black. “Jake has visions of other worlds, he’s bullied for it. [So] travelling to different worlds, it’s like he belongs there.” BACKSTORY __ “I’m one of seven [kids] and we all went to a theatre school on Saturdays to give my parents a break. An agent visited when I was about 11. I had to do some…

TALKING ABOUT HIS filmmaking process brings out Luca Guadagnino’s inner Swiss Toni. Like The Fast Show’s resident lothario, a man who likened everything to making love to a beautiful woman, the Call Me By Your Name director turns sensuous when discussing his critically acclaimed romance. “My casting director recently said to me, ‘Every movie you make, it’s a way of making love to your partners in the film, whether they are actors or crew members,’” he explains. Yes, even the sweaty key grip was inducted into the Italian director’s sexy filmmaking world. This metaphorical on-set orgy was in aid of an indie drama critics have been showering with praise since its Sundance debut in January. Suffused with a heat-haze eroticism and nostalgic hues, and featuring some show-stopping (and potentially non-consensual)…

THERE WAS MORE to George A. Romero than zombies. A Romero triple-bill could avoid flesh-eating fiends and still take in the likes of psychological vampire thriller Martin, or modern Arthurian fable Knightriders, or the barminess of his Stephen King collaboration, Creepshow. But zombies and Romero, who died in July after a short battle with cancer, will remain forever linked. When Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg pitched Shaun Of The Dead to Working Title, they called it “Richard Curtis shot through the head by George Romero”. The Walking Dead and Resident Evil wouldn’t exist if it hadn’t been for the man who basically created the modern zombie with Night Of The Living Dead (1968), and refined it with gallons of gore in the pulpy Dawn Of The Dead (2004) and 1985’s…

★★★★ OUT 25 AUGUST CERT TBC / 119 MINS DIRECTOR Steven Soderbergh CAST Channing Tatum, Adam Driver, Daniel Craig, Katherine Waterston, Sebastian Stan, Seth MacFarlane PLOT West Virginia miner Jimmy Logan (Tatum) loses his job; desperate, he enlists his brother Clyde (Driver) to plan a robbery on the Coca-Cola UOO, one of the biggest NASCAR races of the year. DID ANYBODY REALLY believe Steven Soderbergh was retired? Certainly not people who watched The Knick, which was more ‘cinematic’ than most theatrically released films. And now the pioneer of ’90s indies makes a welcome return to theatres with this well-acted, slickly directed, if somewhat familiar redneck heist flick — and after last year’s dull Masterminds, Lord knows we needed a good one. Channing Tatum is on loveable beefcake duty once again,…

★★★★ OUT 18 AUGUST CERT 15 / 90 MINS DIRECTOR Stanley Tucci CAST Geoffrey Rush, Armie Hammer, Clémence Poésy PLOT Early 1960s, France: American writer James Lord (Hammer) agrees to sit for a portrait for Alberto Giacometti (Rush). What begins as a straightforward portrait session stretches out to day after day of fruitless work as the mercurial Giacometti struggles to finish the painting. MOVIES ABOUT ARTISTS can be a dicey proposition. Sometimes they work — Love Is The Devil gives you insights into Francis Bacon no academic text could — but more often you get Anthony Hopkins bellowing his way through Surviving Picasso. Maybe there’s something about drawing too direct a line from the work to the artist that feels reductive on film. Tellingly, John Maybury’s Bacon-opic couldn’t show any…

★★★ OUT 18 AUGUST CERT TBC / 116 MINS DIRECTORS Bonni Cohen, Jon Shenk CAST Al Gore PLOT Ten years on from An Inconvenient Truth, environmentalist Al Gore travels the world, visiting the effects of global warming and taking an active role in the UN 2015 Climate Change Conference. YOU CAN ALMOST count the number of documentary franchises on one hand. From Michael Apted’s 7up series — the James Bond of documentary film — to Joshua Oppenheimer’s brace, The Act Of Killing and The Look Of Silence, few documentaries achieve the cut-through, both artistically and financially, to warrant a follow-up. So it says something about 2006’s An Inconvenient Truth that it earned, even demanded a sequel. Grossing $50 million at the worldwide box office and a Best Documentary Oscar, ex…

★★★★ OUT 1 SEPTEMBER CERT 15 / 109 MINS DIRECTOR Geremy Jasper CAST Danielle Macdonald, Mamoudou Athie, Cathy Moriarty, Siddharth Dhananjay, Bridget Everett PLOT A white female rapper (Macdonald) dreams of escaping her smalltown existence and becoming a star. With the help of her misfit friends, she hits upon a unique sound and sets about getting their demo tape into the hands of anyone who matters. IN THE LAST half decade, “cultural appropriation” has become an accusation commonly levelled at any white rapper who dares to so much as throw a gang sign. In 2013, we saw Lily Allen get it in the neck from the Twitterati for the twerking black and Asian back-up dancers in the video for Hard Out Here. At the end of last year, Honey G…

★★★ OUT 11 AUGUST CERT 12A / 92 MINS DIRECTOR David Lowery CAST Casey Affleck, Rooney Mara PLOT Musician ‘C’ (Affleck) and his wife ‘M’ (Mara) prepare to move out of their modest rural bungalow. Their relationship seems to fluctuate, until out of the blue, he’s killed. Rising from a mortuary slab in a white sheet, he returns to his home to observe as his old life drifts slowly away. THE TALE OF a dead man who haunts his old home wearing a bed sheet with the eyes cut out, A Ghost Story’s semi-absurdist premise shouldn’t work. The shot lengths are somewhere between long and interminable, its star is a faceless presence throughout, and there’s a seven-minute scene with a pie. Some will find it overly grandiose (if you’ve ever…

★★★ NETFLIX OUT 18 AUGUST EPISODES VIEWED 1-4 CREATORS Douglas Petrie, Marco Ramirez CAST Charlie Cox, Krysten Ritter, Mike Colter, Finn Jones, Sigourney Weaver, Élodie Yung PLOT Under the leadership of the mysterious Alexandra (Weaver), shadowy criminal organisation The Hand steps up its nefarious plans for New York City — plans which threaten widespread death and destruction. It’s up to four dysfunctional super-vigilantes to put aside their hang-ups and join forces to stop them. FROM DAY ONE, when Netflix and Marvel first heralded a set of series based on some of the comic-book company’s fringe superheroes, we knew this was coming. And just as the early MCU movies teased the Avengers over four years, so its smaller-scale small-screen cousin has been gradually, inexorably building up to a crossover that sees…

★★★★ OUT NOW FORMATS SWITCH DIRECTORS Yusuke Amano, Seita Inoue, Shintaro Sato CAST N/A PLOT Set nine months after the first game’s Splatfest event, tournament winner Marie finds that her cousin Callie and the Great Zapfish have gone missing. Suspecting the evil Octarians are responsible, Marie resolves to track them down. THE FIRST SPLATOON was a welcome blast of originality in the often risk-averse (and remaster-obsessed) world of video-game development. A twist on the competitive third-person shooter, it added platform elements and — most interestingly — the ability to turn into a squid. There was a problem, though. It only existed on the unloved Wii U — a machine that, unlike its predecessor, failed to take the world by storm, or even conjure a light, localised shower. Commercially Nintendo’s worst-performing…

MOST DIRECTORS, WHEN they’re talking about sequels, tend to go for the obvious platitudes: bigger, better, faster, stronger, explodier. Not Matthew Vaughn. When he was making Kingsman: The Golden Circle, the follow-up to 2014’s audacious, hilarious and button-pushing spy caper Kingsman: The Secret Service, he had a mantra in mind. “If you didn’t like the first movie, you’ll fucking hate this one,” he laughs. “I’ve made this for people who liked the first film.” Which means they should love this one. And while Vaughn wasn’t physically present at Comic-Con this year, there was plenty of evidence in the footage that his all-star, mostly Oscar-winning cast brought with them to suggest The Golden Circle isn’t playing it safe, from a gloriously inventive, breakneck car chase-cum-fight scene to evil henchmen being turned…

MARVEL STUDIOS DIDN’T bring the entire cast of Avengers: Infinity War to Comic-Con. Probably because the convention centre isn't big enough. But Marvel chief Kevin Feige did bring footage from the next few MCU films, and dropped a few info-bombs into the bargain… THE ORIGINAL WASP At the end of Ant-Man, we see a picture of Janet van Dyne, the original Wasp and wife of Michael Douglas’ Hank Pym, long thought lost to the mysterious Quantum Realm. Well, almost — her face was obscured, so Marvel could cast the role down the line. Which they have in style, with Michelle Pfeiffer joining the cast of the currently filming Ant-Man And The Wasp. “We used to say, ‘It would be great if they go to rescue someone like Michelle Pfeiffer,’” Feige…

What brings you here? Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. We’re in the middle of the new season and resume shooting on Monday. There are a lot of Douglas Adams devotees around so we had a built-in audience, in that regard, but I think people really fell in love with the show in its own right, which is great. It’s a crazy show — funny but gritty and intense — and it gets even weirder in the second season. Which of your characters is biggest at Comic-Con? I mean, it would be Frodo Baggins. I haven’t actually been out amongst anything so far, so I’ve not seen any cosplay at all, but I’ve seen my fair share of Hobbit costumes. What I’m starting to see over the last few years are…

WITH THE RECORD-BREAKING commercial (not to mention critical) success of Wonder Woman giving both Warner Bros. and DC a boost, the companies brought their big guns to Comic-Con , putting Ben Affleck (Batman), Ezra Miller ( The Flash), Gal Gadot (Wonder Woman ) and Jason Momoa (Aquaman) on stage to talk Justice League, Aquaman and more, including indications that the DC Extended Universe is about to get pretty darn big. COMING ATTRACTIONS Following this year’s Justice League and next year’s Aquaman, Warner Bros. has another eight DCEU movies in the works. Shazam is due for April 2019, while Wonder Woman 2 will follow that in December 2019. Also coming, but currently undated, are Joss Whedon’s Batgirl, Matt Reeves’ The Batman, Suicide Squad 2, Green Lantern Corps and Justice League Dark…

SATURDAY 22 JULY, 11:18AM __ Hall H, right at the end of the San Diego Convention Centre, is the place where Hollywood shows off its wares to the Comic-Con massive. And massive is about right — it’s a CostCo of cinema, a Glasto of geekery, that can host 6,500 people, many of whom have camped out all night to try to get in for the Con’s biggest day. 11:30AM __ Warner Bros. are first up with their signature move: giant screens that wrap around the hall. 11:39AM __ Ready for Ready Player One? Here comes former Empire editor Sir Steven of Spielberg. It’s only his second visit to the Con, but he knows the drill: don’t come empty-handed. He's brought the teaser for his pop culture-tastic film, a visual treat…

RAGNAROK, IN CASE you don’t know your Norse coda, means The End Of All Things. And Things certainly don’t appear to be going well for Thor Odinson right now. When Empire arrives on the set of Thor: Ragnarok at Village Roadshow Studios in Oxenford, Australia, on 20 August 2016, we find the thunder-bending Avenger doing battle with his latest, deadliest foe: Hela, Goddess Of Death. It is fair to say he’s getting his Asgardian arse kicked. They are fighting, it turns out, amid the swirling, interdimensional turmoil of the Bifrost — that handy, hyper-spacey bridge between worlds. Which is why actors Chris Hemsworth (in leather battle armour, his mighty hammer Mjolnir noticeably missing) and Cate Blanchett (in fractal-decorated mo-cap gear, which allows for an all-CGI Hela outfit that’ll twist, morph…

00:02:35 ONE SHOT __ Life begins, not at SO, but with the attempts of astronauts on the ISS to catch an out-of-control vessel carrying samples from Mars. It’s presented as one six-minute, RU-second shot by director Daniel Espinosa, but writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick suggested it be a ‘oner’ in their script. “It’s easy to write it down,” laughs Wernick. “Then someone’s got to execute it and set the tone for the movie with all this craziness happening.” 00:15:09 CALVIN COOL-ISH __ Said vessel, the Pilgrim 7, carries the film’s bête noire, a Martian organism that is initially nurtured by the space station crew as it grows. And grows. And grows. The creature is given its name by a group of schoolkids back on Earth. That name? Calvin. “It’s…

JORDAN VOGT-ROBERTS’ Kong: Skull Island, a fun, ’70s-set reinvention of King Kong’s origin story, may well boast the record for cinematic references, video-game winks and comic-book nods. “A great book is layered with symbolism and metaphors, just different textures,” suggests the affable filmmaker. “When I am designing a movie I just love the idea of creating layers, some of which are intentional things for the fans and others are for myself, acknowledging the influences that have been meaningful to me.” Here, the director calls out some obvious and not so obvious gems. JURASSIC LARK As the Sky Devils, a ’Nam war helicopter squadron, take off for Skull Island, Samuel L. Jackson’s lieutenant colonel Preston Packard can clearly be heard to say, “Hold on to your butts,” a line Jackson uttered…

LOCATION I’ve just shot Welcome Home in this beautiful Italian town, in Umbria right next to Tuscany. I was out there for five weeks. That was cool. I’ve also shot out in South Africa a few times, Eye In The Sky most recently, and just really loved it, loved the people out there. It was beautiful. Not to shit on the place because I loved the people there, but The Canary Islands on Exodus: Gods And Kings. I’m a foodie and where we shot there was no food around so you could only put two pieces of bread together. It was also full of soft dirt that you’d walk through and create dust clouds. COSTUME I’ve got to be honest, anytime I put on my meth suit on Breaking Bad,…

1. FAKE IT “When you’re skint, you have to innovate. Take the night-drive scene at the end of the film. That was Tom [Meeten, who plays undercover cop Chris] in a parked car in Twickenham, with our producer using two torches gaffer-taped to a box. Stand behind the car, sway from side to side and you recreate the effect of passing headlights.” 2. CAST YOUR FRIENDS “Anyone can make a film using the resources you have. The Ghoul cost a fag and a fiver. I’ve known Tom and Alice Lowe [who plays Chris’ former colleague and ex, Kathleen] since the early 2000s when we were doing the Ealing Live sketch show, so it’s helped being part of this emerging British indie scene. Tom’s famous for his grotesque comedy characters, and…

DISCOUNTING THAT FLYING saucer in Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, Ready Player One is Steven Spielberg’s first dip into his beloved sci-fi genre since 2005’s War Of The Worlds. An adaptation of Ernie Cline’s 2011 bestseller, it sets his formidable world-building powers to work in a dystopian 2044 where big cyber is all-powerful. There, Tye Sheridan’s gamer, Wade Watts, teams up with his crush, Olivia Cooke’s whip-smart blogger Samantha Evelyn Cook, to find a life-changing Easter egg within virtual reality simulator, the OASIS. For Watts, it’s love at first MacGuffin. Tantalisingly, Spielberg is presiding over a quest filled with ’80s Easter eggs referencing everything from Stephen King to WarGames. “It felt like pure adventure,” says Cooke of the eye-popping adaptation. “It was Willy Wonka, it was…

THE STORY OF medical students who experiment with stopping their hearts to visit the afterlife, Joel Schumacher’s 1990 culty Flatliners is a sky-high concept ripe for reworking. Director Niels Arden Oplev talks us through his five steps to update it for 2017. 1_ RESPECT THE CONCEPT Keeping the essence of the idea intact was key. “I loved the ensemble feeling of doing something outrageous together like a secret society,” says Oplev. However, he did change the constitution of the ensemble. “To make it four guys and one girl would feel wrong in the modern world today.” It’s now a mixed-race group of three women (Ellen Page, Nina Dobrev, Kiersey Clemons) and two men (Diego Luna, James Norton). 2_ MIX UP THE CASTING Leading this group is Ellen Page as a…

SOME FILMMAKERS GO after every demographic. For Peter Mackie Burns, director of UK indie Daphne, he was after “the mythical figure of a British woman going to the cinema and seeing her own life on screen”. The ace in Burns’ pocket is star Emily Beecham. Best known for a turn in the Coen brothers’ Hail, Caesar!, her performance delivers that rare cinematic thing: a complex, contradictory, recognisable woman. “We felt we related to things in the character you don’t [often] see represented,” she says. “You do in American indies like Margaret and Obvious Child, but not films set in Elephant And Castle.” Daphne is a chef, drinking, drugging and shagging her way around South London. She owns a pet snake (Scratch), reads philosophy (Zizek), and exercises a sharp tongue (“You,…

1 Tin Star is the latest Sky Original production, offering a blend of revenge thriller and psychological drama that is set to bake your noodle. In a good way. 2 It stars the wonderful Tim Roth as Jim Worth, a British cop who gets drawn into the investigation of his life in his new Canadian home. 3 That new home is an idyllic community in the Rocky Mountains — idyllic, that is, on the outside. Filmed in the beautiful environs of Calgary, High River and Bragg Creek, Alberta, Sky Atlantic has created a stunningly cinematic piece of television. 4 When Jim, as the new sheriff, takes a stand against the crime wave that hits the town, an assassination attempt on his life takes place. He survives, but it claims someone…

★★★ OUT NOW CERT 15 / 115 MINS DIRECTOR David Leitch CAST Charlize Theron, James McAvoy, John Goodman, Sofia Boutella, Toby Jones, Eddie Marsan, Bill Skarsgård PLOT Lorraine Broughton (Theron) is an MI6 agent sent to Berlin to recover a lost list of secret agents. But with the Cold War coming to an end, both sides want the list so they can control the post-conflict future. PERHAPS WE SHOULD be worried, geo-politically speaking, by the resurgence of Cold War themes and tropes. Are filmmakers sensing the growing political tension, or just tapping a nifty, paranoid aesthetic? Atomic Blonde thankfully leans to the latter — that it’s about style not substance. Cool is prioritised over cunning as Charlize Theron’s secret agent cuts a swathe through Cold War Germany. Theron’s Lorraine Broughton…

★★★★★ OUT NOW CERT 12A / 106 MINS DIRECTOR Christopher Nolan CAST Fionn Whitehead, Mark Rylance, Tom Hardy, Kenneth Branagh, Harry Styles, Cillian Murphy, Jack Lowden PLOT May, P9SO. Overpowered by the Nazis in mainland Europe, the British army has been forced to retreat to a small enclave on the French coast. With the enemy advancing on their position and the route home blocked, it looks like only a miracle will prevent calamity. At stake: SOO,OOO lives and the course of the entire war. CHRISTOPHER NOLAN’S NEW film may be his The Longest Day, but it’s very close to being his shortest film. In fact, at a mere 106 minutes, Dunkirk is the first Nolan movie to dip beneath two hours since Insomnia, and is only undercut by his micro-budget…

BEN MENDELSOHN LOVES Pac-Man. He’s a wizard on the pinball table. But when it comes to virtual-reality gaming, his experience amounts to a single session on a horror simulator. “You’re in a house and there are gobliny-type dudes coming towards you as the lights go out,” the Australian actor recalls. “I’d hear a noise — GRAAH! — and look over and there’d be some beast that’s advanced.” So he got a little scared? “No, I’m not giving you that,” he shoots back, fixing Empire with a gimlet glare. “I found myself immersed.” Now, with Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One, Mendelsohn finds himself back in a VR world, but this time as the baddie. Not a gobliny-type dude, mind, but money-grabbing CEO Nolan Sorrento, who’s bent on beating plucky teenager Wade…

THE LAST TIME director David Ayer came to Comic-Con, in 2015, it was straight from the set of Suicide Squad without grabbing even a single Z. “I was fucking shooting, I jumped on a plane, and they dragged me over,” he recalls, unhappy at the memory. This year, it’s different. “I’ve gotten some sleep lately. It ’s novel and I recommend it.” It’s not just Ayer — the entire Bright crew is on ebullient form, not least Will Smith, who accuses Joel Edgerton of grabbing his ass during Empire’s shoot, later asking, “ Anyone got a tissue? David made me laugh and cry and mess up my eyes.” They’re in town for a sneak preview of their gritty, LA-set fairy tale, described as Training Day meets The Lord Of The…

BEFORE COMIC-CON, Star Trek: Discovery — the first new Trek series in more than a decade — was shrouded in the kind of secrecy that would frustrate a Ferengi. We knew it takes place before the events of the original series — Kirk, Spock et al — and that it would embrace diversity and inclusivity even more openly than Trek, a show famous for both, had in the past. But we knew little about its characters, until its principal cast beamed up to the Empire studio… SONEQUA MARTIN-GREEN __ FIRST OFFICER MICHAEL BURNHAM “Michael’s a xenoanthropologist and she studies other things too — you’ll see! She’s an incredibly flawed but incredibly principled woman. There’s the Vulcan way of life, which she learns from her surrogate father, Sarek, but then there’s…

ALAMY IN 1995, THE name “Michael Bay” meant something quite different to what it means today. The man who now makes “movies for teenage boys” (his words) was just a glint on his camera lens. Then a 30-year-old director with music video and advertising experience, he had just one film to his name — action comedy Bad Boys. It may have received (at best) mixed reviews, but he was an exciting young talent, with an obvious flair for visuals. And it didn’t hurt that Bad Boys made over seven times its budget at the US box office. So naturally producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson immediately hired him again. This time to direct The Rock. The Rock holds a rarefied position in Bay’s filmography. Of all the films he’s directed…

#15 THE FILM YOU CAN’T LEAVE ALONE — THE DEER HUNTER HAVE YOU EVER had a friend whom you love, think charming, incomparably wise, intelligent, insightful or interesting, but can only face seeing once a year, maybe even less? It’s not that you’d want to imagine the world without them in it, but seeing them can wring dry your emotional core for several weeks? Well, this is essentially how I feel about The Deer Hunter, Michael Cimino’s 1978 epic about a group of friends from a close-knit community of Russian-Americans in a Pennsylvania steelworks town, who leave their families to fight in Vietnam. Over three-plus-change harrowing hours, Cimino, through his extraordinarily talented cast including Christopher Walken, Robert De Niro, John Cazale (already suffering from terminal cancer during filming) and his…

WHAT DO THE following flicks have in common? Foreign Correspondent, The Godfather, The Untouchables, Revenge Of The Sith and The Naked Gun 33 1/3. The answer is they all worship at the altar of Battleship Potemkin’s Odessa Steps sequence. One of the most revered, imitated set-pieces in cinema history, it sees tsarist soldiers open fire on a crowd of mutinous civilians in the port of Odessa. The sequence remains a dazzling showcase of director Sergei Eisenstein’s ability to elevate indelible images, including the iconic baby rolling down the steps in a pram, through stunning editing (montage) techniques. But despite its totemic status, it wasn’t even in Eisenstein’s original screenplay. “It’s a very improvised sequence,” says Ian Christie, author of Eisenstein Rediscovered. Once he decided to do it, he threw himself…

THERE ARE 312 shots fired in anger (and panic, and fear, and rank incompetence) in Free Fire, Ben Wheatley’s riotous tale of an arms deal-turned-shoot-out. But not all those bullets have the same impact. Wheatley talks us through the bullets that matter the most. SHOT #1 Harry shoots Stevo Things kick off when Harry (Jack Reynor) shoots Stevo (Sam Riley) in the upper chest as payback for Stevo’s unprovoked attack on Harry’s cousin in a Boston bar. “It was always going to be those two characters because they’re the least sensible. The hard bit of that was making sure that Jack Reynor’s performance was internal enough that you could buy that he would go that crazy. Originally, the insult Stevo lobs at him wasn’t enough. I’d had a few goes,…

#15 DAVID BADDIEL ON TOKYO STORY THIS MONTH’S FIRST Take Club inductee is David Baddiel, comedian, author, and man who had managed to avoid seeing a Japanese classic that placed 231st on our 301 Greatest Movies Of All Time list back in 2014… When I was 17, my favourite film was Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract. Not because it moved me, or made me laugh, or punch the air with joy. It was my favourite film because I was a twat, and genuinely thought cold, unengaging art films were what I liked. What I thought I didn’t like — and this was the point I was no doubt trying to make to the various arty girls who were not getting off with me anyway — was Hollywood pap. Then, for…

JAMES GRAY SHOT the vast majority of The Lost City Of Z, his superb movie about the long-lost British explorer Percy Fawcett, in Northern Ireland. But when it came to the film’s many jungle scenes, he, along with his cast and crew, relocated to Magdalena, Colombia, for ultra authenticity. Filming in the jungle has long had its risks — just ask the cast of Predator, or Werner Herzog — but in this frank interview, Gray refutes some of the more popular clichés... The Lost City Of Z bears some relation to Werner Herzog ’s Aguirre, The Wrath Of God . Was he a particular influence? It was impossible to avoid the influence of Werner Herzog, because you’re in the same locations that he was, more…

James McAvoy: “This is one of my favourite scenes of all time. It’s the ‘up there it’s their time, down here it’s our time’ speech, where Mikey makes his plea for why the Goonies should carry on with their adventures and find One-Eyed Willy, and not just go back up the well and find safety and go back to their houses to have chocolate marshmallows and watch TV. Because this is their last moment to be children. ‘Up there is their time.’ That symbolises, if you go up there you become an adult and have to deal with adult issues. You stay here and you get to be children. I think that’s fucking beautiful.” INT. CAVERNS — NIGHT Having been trapped in a network of underground caves on a search…