Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2017 i Empire

MICHAEL FASSBENDER IS singing a few bars of Walking In The Air on The Snowman’s Oslo set. This croaky nostalgia has been sparked by Empire’s mention of Raymond Briggs’ ’80s animation which shares a name, but absolutely nothing else, with his new thriller. There’ll be snowmen, but they’ll be left by a serial killer at murder scenes. Fassbender’s cop, Harry Hole, must solve the case before the leads, well, melt. Originally a Martin Scorsese project set in Detroit and Chicago, The Snowman was entrusted to Let The Right One In’s Tomas Alfredson after Scorsese passed in 2013. Bringing Hole, author Jo Nesbø’s pin-sharp but troubled detective, back to Norway has opened plenty of doors to the production. It’s February and the shoot has moved from the ice-capped cliffs of Telemark…

THE LEGO NINJAGO Movie tells the story of Lloyd (voiced by Dave Franco), a boy whose evil despot dad, Lord Garmadon (Justin Theroux), is a source of great embarrassment. With the city of Ninjago under threat (Dad again), Lloyd finds friendship with a group of teen ninjas. Not only does Ninjago include Lego fight scenes choreographed by Jackie Chan (who voices the group’s mentor, Master Wu), it also has a stellar voice cast of comic actors. Co-director Charlie Bean introduces his six little ninjas. 1 __ KAI (MICHAEL PEÑA) “Peña is so funny. Kai is the Fire Ninja and his sister, Nya, is the Water Ninja. He has this big mech — they all have giant vehicles — with flamethrowers for hands. Accordingly, he’s kind of a hothead. Michael makes…

STYLING: WHO WORE WHAT WHEN. GROOMING: CHETAN KARKHANIS. Turtle neck, yellow jacket, dark trousers and pocket square: Canada Clothing Co. AGE __ 30 PLAYS __ Abdul Karim in Stephen Frears’ based-on-fact period drama Victoria & Abdul. Karim was an Indian clerk who befriended Queen Victoria (Judi Dench — again) and controversially became her teacher, or ‘Munshi’. “It was his confidence and innocence that really attracted me,” says Fazal. BACKSTORY __ “I broke my arm during a basketball match at boarding school and thought my life was over. Then a friend said, ‘Your English isn’t bad. They’re putting on The Tempest and there’s a cute girl playing Miranda. Why don’t you try out?’ That was the beginning of this disease.” EARLY ROLES __ “I started in Bollywood with a cameo in…

ALAMY IT HAPPENS, ROUGHLY, every seven years. Amid relentless runs of the usual goofy fare, Adam Sandler gets plucked away to work his cojones on something more serious. First came Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love (2002), then Judd Apatow’s Funny People (2009), and now, Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories, and it’s possibly the actor’s most affecting performance yet. While the action swirls around bitter old patriarch Harold (Dustin Hoffman), it is essentially the story of his two put-upon sons — the unemployed Danny (Adam Sandler) and his hotshot half-brother Matthew (Ben Stiller). It got a standing ovation at Cannes and will be Empire’s Laugh Gala screening at this year’s BFI London Film Festival. Sandler is terrific throughout, gracefully holding his tongue at some points, gloriously losing his rag at others.…

BANISH MEMORIES OF Robin Williams cavorting with CG rhinos, because Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle has fresh surprises in store. That mystical board game has become an 8-bit adventure game, its players are transforming, Tron-like, into adult avatars of themselves, and there are now movie stars galore. A lot can happen in 22 years. Underpinning this new treatment is some slyly playful casting. “They’re all stylised character archetypes,” explains director Jake Kasdan of his quartet of unwitting jungle adventurers. Karen Gillan plays an all-action commando, Kevin Hart is a panicky zoologist and Dwayne Johnson — “the action hero of his generation, top of a list of one” according to Kasdan — is, well, a wimp. Oh, and Jack Black’s bombastic professor is the avatar of a vain female high-schooler (Madison…

AFTER SEVEN INSTALMENTS and 74 of the most creative deaths in horror movie history, Saw finally crawled to its bloody end in 2010. Except now there’s Jigsaw: a new instalment that renders Saw: The Final Chapter a lot less final than it claimed at the time. It’s simultaneously a jumping-on point for newcomers and a Part VIII for those already up to, well, snuff. We might reasonably expect a fresh encounter with John Kramer, the killer (played by Tobin Bell) nicknamed Jigsaw after the puzzle-piece signature he carves from his victims. As ever with this twisty-turny series, though, nothing is that obvious. Cancer claimed Kramer in Saw III, only for him to pop up in flashbacks for the subsequent sequels, usually to retcon past events in increasingly noodle-baking ways. Now,…

★★★ OUT 22 SEPTEMBER CERT U / 100 MINS DIRECTOR Janus Metz Pedersen CAST Sverrir Gudnason, Shia LaBeouf, Stellan Skarsgård, Tuva Novotny PLOT The story of the great rivalry between Wimbledon champion Björn Borg (Gudnason) and turbulent young talent John McEnroe (LaBeouf), which came to a head in the 1980 Wimbledon final in front of a worldwide audience of millions. FOR THE SAKE of argument, let’s accept the 1980 Wimbledon final is the greatest tennis match of all time. It was certainly the greatest at the time — that Nadal-versus-Federer final was still 28 years away. And it’s the focus of this biopic: sworn rivals Björn Borg (Gudnason), the level-headed gentleman, and challenger John McEnroe (LaBeouf ), the fiery “superbrat”, coming together on Centre Court to play out a near…

★★★★ OUT 29 SEPTEMBER CERT 18 / 148 MINS DIRECTOR Martin Koolhoven CAST Dakota Fanning, Guy Pearce, Emilia Jones, Carice Van Houten, Kit Harington PLOT A priest (Pearce) shows up in a frontier town to the intense distress of one of its inhabitants, a mute midwife (Fanning) living there with her family. She knows him, and is terrified, and he soon demonstrates why. What’s in their shared past that leads to this violence? THE HERITAGE OF Westerns in Dutch cinema is short and unremarkable. So short, in fact, that Brimstone is the first notable Western to come out of the Netherlands. But with its bleak outlook and scenes of graphic violence, it’s one hell of a start. Writer-director Martin Koolhoven has crafted a particularly brutal version of the Old West…

★★★★ NETFLIX OUT NOW EPISODES VIEWED 5 SHOWRUNNER Eric Newman CAST Pedro Pascal, Damián Alcázar, Francisco Denis, Alberto Ammann, Pepe Rapazote, Matias Varela PLOT Following the death of its leader Pablo Escobar, the reign of the Medellín Cartel has come to an end, with the Cali Cartel rising to take his place. DEA agents begin work trying to take it down, but soon discover the magnitude of the task in front of them. “PABLO DIES” ANNOUNCED the pre-release publicity for Narcos Season 2, signalling the end for Pablo Escobar was nigh. And so he did. He had to — he died in real life, and there’s very little to be done in terms of writing around that. Which makes Season 3 a soft reset — some characters remain, most notably…

★★★ OUT NOW FORMATS PS4 DIRECTORS Shaun Escayg, Kurt Margenau CAST Claudia Black, Laura Bailey, Usman Ally PLOT Set after the events of 2016’s Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, The Lost Legacy shifts the series’ focus to characters that previously had supporting roles. We follow Chloe Frazer (Black) and Nadine Ross (Bailey) as they search for a priceless treasure from India’s Hindu past, encountering challenges of brain and brawn along the way. UNCHARTED DIDN’T NEED The Lost Legacy, but at the same time, this Uncharted 4 epilogue-cum-new adventure is a mostly welcome addition to the Sony series’ overarching story — one that’s so far been stretched across four main games. And it’s really the story that’s going to make you fight, climb, swim and drive your way through The Lost…

Safety Last! (1923) Harold Lloyd’s death-defying swing from a clock alone earns the dramatic punctuation. The daredevil actor could probably hang from it. Them! (1954) This giant-radioactive-ants classic is the perfect B-movie use of the dramatic screamer. Homaged by Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes! and Mars Attacks!. Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) Russ Meyer’s philosophy was essentially, “If something is worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.” This went for punctuation as well as attitude and campery. Oliver! (1968) Fact! Carol Reed’s toe-tappin’ musical is the only Best Picture-winner to have an exclamation mark in the title. Airplane! (1980) ZAZ’s use of the gasper as an extra level of irony was a recurring weapon in their arsenal. Case in point: The Naked Gun: From The Files Of Police Squad!. ¡Three Amigos! (1986)…

When you think Agatha Christie, what comes to mind? Your grandparents’ bookshelf? Bad local ‘theatre’? Sunday nights on ITV after The X-Factor? If so, director-producer-star Kenneth Branagh wants to throw your preconceptions on the tracks. Murder On The Orient Express, based on Christie’s landmark 1934 whodunnit, sees Belgian detective Hercule Poirot (Branagh) interrogate 13 suspects following the murder of shady American businessman Samuel Edward Ratchett (Johnny Depp) aboard the luxurious train. It’s a story as old as the Alps — Sidney Lumet delivered an okay-ish all-star version in 1974 — but Branagh is shooting for a vision that is big and bold, feeling both classic and contemporary. Like Poirot minus his newly titanic ’tache, Empire grills Branagh and the cast of 2017 to solve a mystery: how do you adapt…

GROOMING BY JHIZET PANOSIAN AT FORWARD ARTISTS. SHOT AT EDGE STUDIOS, LOS ANGELES When I first saw Paper Moon as a kid, I didn’t understand what section of the video store it belonged in. The story of two con artists — a man named Moses Pray (Ryan O’Neal) and the nine-year-old Addie Loggins (Tatum O’Neal) who poses as his daughter — it was set during the Depression and filmed in black-and-white, but the VHS box claimed it was made in the ’70s and was a comedy. There were curse words and sexual innuendo but it had a sweetness and humour that felt different from the other ‘classic’ ’70s films I was watching. It was a complete outlier and I loved it from the moment I saw…

COSTUME I looked like a swashbuckler in Jack Of All Trades. It was very dashing and fairly comfortable, except the cape, which was too fucking heavy. They took out half the weight. I said, “I gotta fight in this cape, baby!” For Mindwarp, I played a post-apocalyptic Jeremiah Johnson in a costume made of car parts. My goggles were car heating vents. But I was hitting on the costume designer so I was somewhat distracted. LOCATION Sundown: The Vampire In Retreat. About ’88 we shot that, in Moab, Utah. I’m a huge fan of the West and it completely made me eat up Utah. It’s just spectacular in its desolation and isolation and its solitude. I’ve since come back multiple times to that town as a civilian because it was…

IF THE ONLY thing you know about Shane is the classic last line — “Shane, come back!” — then you have a treat in store. George Stevens’ 1953 Western is a masterpiece, a profound morality tale exploring the thin lines between good and evil and the consequences of violence. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the film’s touching final moments when mysterious stranger Shane (Alan Ladd), who has become an integral part of the Starrett family life, says goodbye to little Joey (Brandon deWilde) after murdering the bad guys. Off he rides, ignoring little Joey’s cries. “The line at the end is, ‘There’s no living with a killing,’ like you cannot change the mould of someone,” says Edward Countryman, author of the BFI Film Classics book on Shane. “There…

BREAK OUT THE Full Metal Cake and get ready to blow out the Full Metal Candles — Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam War masterpiece, Full Metal Jacket, has just turned 30. One of the greatest and most profound “war is hell” movies in cinema history, it also launched the careers of two of its stars — Matthew Modine, as the raw and idealistic Private Joker, and Vincent D’Onofrio, tragic and terrifying as the bullied Private Pyle. Here the duo, who knew each other before filming began, reflect on the movie, working with Kubrick, and nearly walking off set. Do you remember how you got the roles? Matthew Modine: I was in a restaurant called The Source on Sunset Boulevard having breakfast with an actor, David Alan Grier, and there was a guy…

Adam Wingard: “My favourite movie scene of all time is the bartender scene in The Shining with Jack Nicholson and Joe Turkel. I love the performances and the iconic-ness of the whole thing. If it comes on TV, I have to stop what I’m doing and watch it. I love the interactions between those two, but that scene in particular is about as good as movies get.” INT. OVERLOOK HOTEL Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) is in a foul mood. He enters the deserted Gold Room, turns on the lights, goes up to the empty bar. Not a drink in sight. JACK: God, I’d give anything for a drink. I’d give my goddamn soul for just a glass of beer. He puts his heads in his hands. When he opens them…

ALAMY YES CHRIS HEWITT SO, THE WORST-kept secret in movies is out. Daniel Craig is back as Bond for a fifth and, it seems, final time with Bond 25 (a name I’d be delighted if they kept, if only to imagine Adele singing, “Bond Twenty-Fiiiiiiiiive!” at the Oscars). From production company Eon’s point of view, keeping Craig on the team makes sense. As with Skyfall and the 50th anniversary, the 25th Bond will be kind of a big deal, and breaking in a new 007 might be more hassle than it’s worth. There could be any number of reasons behind Craig’s decision to stick around. It might be the notion of becoming the longest-serving Bond when the film is released in 2019, pipping Sir Roger Moore by days. And he…

IT’S TWISTER WITH a twist. It’s Hard Rain with harder rain. It’s 2012 multiplied by 300. Whether you’re ready or not, Geostorm is blowing in like a freak cyclone, and it’s shaping up to be the most preposterous, over-the-top action movie of the year. The man originally responsible for this mega-budget mash-up is Dean Devlin, the producer of apocalyptic blockbusters such as Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow and, yes, 2012, who was hired by Warner Bros. to make his directing debut with Geostorm. Together with writing partner Paul Guyot, he sketched out the story, then threw an all-you-can-sleet buffet of meteorological madness at it, including 14,000 tornados hurtling through Mumbai, a monstrous flash-freeze in Afghanistan and a hailstorm in Tokyo. “There’s a lot of spectacle,” Devlin promised Empire during…

THINGS WENT SOUTH in every sense on Dee Rees’ new Mississippi-set drama, Mudbound. “It was absolutely muddy,” laughs the director of a shoot in the sweltering boondocks outside New Orleans. “Between the waders, the mosquitos and the heat, we were always uncomfortable. One of the producers sent me a picture from the set where I’m in ripped jeans and a bandana, and I wondered how we survived it.” The film’s title, of course, isn’t just a description of the on-set conditions. Named after the Hillary Jordan novel on which it’s based, the “mudbound” metaphor refers to a bleak era in post-World War II Southern life. Two families — one black and one white — find themselves mired in racial inequality, eking out lives, and love affairs, in an unforgiving landscape.…

FOR A MAN whose acting career has been somewhat unconventional, it should come as no surprise that Andy Serkis hasn’t taken an orthodox route into directing. Usually, actors-turned-directors start out with an intimate drama. But when Serkis first called “Action!” in 2015, it was on a big-budget, VFX-driven adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. Except that was put on hiatus by Warner Bros. when Disney’s The Jungle Book beat it to release. So Serkis’ second production, shot over seven swift weeks last year, is now his actual directorial debut and it’s, well, a small, manageably intimate drama. Although not quite that straightforward. Breathe relates the story of Robin Cavendish (Andrew Garfield) — the father of Serkis’ producing partner Jonathan Cavendish — who, in 1958, was struck by polio and…

HOW DO YOU one-up a dark-edged sci-fi that’s already featured virtual-reality nursing homes, flying robo-bees and Prime Ministerial pig-shagging? That was the challenge facing Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker as he sat down to plot out its fourth season. The answer, it turns out, was by being more ambitious. One new episode, ‘USS Callister’, sees the show blast into space; another, ‘Black Museum’, features three stories in one, which Brooker likens to The Simpsons’ ‘Treehouse Of Horror’. With worldwide recognition and a place in the cultural lexicon secured — Stephen King has praised the show as “like The Twilight Zone, only rated R” — Black Mirror can afford to splash out. Season 4 will treat fans to a “gruelling thriller”, an “indie drama”, and one “quite playful” episode set in…

★★★ OUT 8 SEPTEMBER CERT 15 / 82 MINS DIRECTOR Philippe Van Leeuw CAST Hiam Abbass, Diamond Bou Abboud, Juliette Navis, Mohsen Abbas PLOT Two families carry on with their lives in an abandoned apartment block in war-torn Damascus. Outside are snipers and bombs; inside, an attempt at normality that masks a permanent sense of dread. When one resident must brave the snipers’ sights, the war is violently brought home. ITS TITLE MAKES it sound more like an excruciating muscle spasm, but Insyriated is a wartime drama that offers a different kind of pain. Gruelling and occasionally overwrought, though largely gripping, Belgian filmmaker Philippe Van Leeuw’s Syrian drama explores the impact of war on the domestic space. In its 80-odd minutes, it visits enough horrors on its small band of…

★★★★ OUT 15 SEPTEMBER CERT U / 106 MINS DIRECTOR Stephen Frears CAST Judi Dench, Ali Fazal, Adeel Akhtar, Eddie Izzard, Tim Pigott-Smith, Olivia Williams PLOT Late in her reign, the bored, stifled and mournful Queen Victoria (Dench) encounters a young Indian clerk named Abdul Kareem (Fazal). After becoming unlikely friends, their relationship deepens, with Victoria announcing Ali as her “Munshi”, or Indian Secretary — much to the consternation of her courtiers, particularly her son, Bertie (Izzard), the future King Edward VII. TWENTY YEARS ON from John Madden’s Mrs Brown, Judi Dench is back in black, perched once more on the Imperial throne and portraying a Queen Victoria who may be much older (by 24 years, to be precise) but is no wiser (arguably) in her choice of close male…

★★★★ OUT 29 SEPTEMBER CERT 18 / 112 MINS DIRECTOR Michael Winterbottom CAST Leah Harvey, James McArdle, Paul Popplewell, Shirley Henderson, Wolf Alice PLOT As indie rock band Wolf Alice tour the UK over the course of a year, they’re joined by a young woman (Harvey) who works for their management. Becoming part of their daily life, she makes a big impact on one of the crew (McArdle). THERE IS A great line from Charlie Watts — always the most quotable member of The Rolling Stones — in which he accurately sums up the reality of a quarter of a century’s worth of life in a touring rock band. “Five years working,” he sniffs, “and 20 years hanging around.” Understandably, most on-tour-with films tend to focus more on the former…

★★★ OUT 8 SEPTEMBER CERT 15 / 91 MINS DIRECTOR Dan Bush CAST James Franco, Taryn Manning, Francesca Eastwood, Scott Haze PLOT Leah (Eastwood) and Vee (Manning) try to help their brother Michael (Haze) out of debt by taking part in a robbery. A heist turns into a siege and bank employee Ed Maas (Franco) tells the gang the real money is in a seemingly disused, possibly haunted bank vault. IT USED TO be a movie convention that supernatural horror films would transform into crime movies in the final reel. As in Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, any ghosts, monsters or zombies would turn out to be gangsters or smugglers in disguise and all the spooky stuff written off as trickery. That sub-genre has faded, but its mirror image has been…

MY INTRODUCTION TO STEVE BUSCEMI IS EVERYTHING you’d fear, which, perversely, is everything you’d want. Due to some miscommunication, I’m in the adjoining room to the Brooklyn photo studio, gormlessly unaware that the shoot wrapped ten minutes ago. “He was about to leave!” the photographer says when he finds me, leading me into the studio, where Buscemi looks agitated. “You were hiding in plain sight!” says Buscemi, looking like Mr Pink, sounding like Mr Pink, in a space not unlike a warehouse. It’s not good for your nerves. Of course, he’s absolutely fine, and gentlemanly too. There’s just all that baggage. From Reservoir Dogs to Fargo to this month’s The Death Of Stalin, Buscemi is all too convincing as cerebral hotheads, unleashing machine-gun diatribes and not letting go, a dog…

Atantalising hidden history of Hollywood in the 1970s and ’80s no doubt resides on long-discarded answerphone tapes: tiny C30s lodged in attics, bearing on their thin, magnetic strips ghostly fragments of Hollywood brouhahas long past. “Steven, pick up. I just saw the shark footage from yesterday. We’ve really got a problem...” “Call me as soon as you get this. Coppola’s gone goddamn rogue in the Philippines, and there’s talk of a hurricane. A fucking hurricane. John. I think we have to get someone down there.” Or then there’s this one: “Hey, man. It’s Corey. Corey Haim. Listen, I’m really excited ’cause we’re going to be working together on The Lost Boys. That’s really cool. And we have the same name, so we’re probably going to end up being really good…

00.04.41 DANCING GROOT __ After a brief prologue set on Earth in 1980, GOTG Vol. 2 thumbs its nose to action movie protocol by keeping an epic space battle in the background in favour of Baby Groot (mo-capped by Gunn himself) dancing to ELO’s Mr Blue Sky. With many elements filmed early on in the process and using over 4,000 layers, Gunn calls this “probably the most complicated visual effects shot ever created for film.” 00.26.57 CLIFFHANGER 2 __ On the brothel planet of Contraxia, Yondu (Michael Rooker) has a shouting match with his old Ravager buddy, Stakar Ogord (Sylvester Stallone). “Rooker is an incredibly intense actor and it’s very difficult to have another actor yelling at him and have it be believable that Rooker is diminished,” says Gunn of…

TOM BAKER IS one of the most iconic Doctors, defining the character’s key traits of whimsy, charm and manic unpredictability. Here, the ever-mercurial actor walks us through his time in the TARDIS. ROBOT (1974) In his first appearance, Baker was given the line, “There’s no point in being grown-up if you can’t be childish sometimes.” “When I took over, Jon Pertwee had stamped on it so hard that the writers, for quite a while, they were all still writing for him. I was wrenching Jon’s idiom, to make it my own. And of course, over time, they began to write for me. But that line, it’s quite a charming bit of nonsense, isn’t it? It’s the one that people still ask me to quote.” GENESIS OF THE DALEKS (1975) The…

“IF YOU GET the look of a character right,” says Julian Barratt, co-writer and star of Mindhorn, “you don’t have to do much. The comedy is baked in by the costume.” And when it came to putting together the look for Mindhorn, the hero of an ’80s TV detective show, Richard Thorncroft, the actor who plays him and Clive Parnevik, Thorncroft’s former stuntman-turned-nemesis, Barratt and fellow writer/star Simon Farnaby were doing a whole lot of baking. RICHARD THORNCROFT THE HAIR BARRATT: That’s a wig. A good wig for the early days, and a bad wig, which was supposed to look like a wig, for later Thorncroft. We didn’t want to get too Jason King. I shaved my head for the part, not that it was necessary. I found that out…

ALAMY, REX FEATURES 1 In Miss Sloane, when Schmidt (Mark Strong) says, “Dildos are illegal in Texas but Joe Public can walk into a sports store and walk out with a shotgun”, how does Sloane (Jessica Chastain) respond? She says, “That would explain the low rate of dildo-related murders in Texas.” Correct. 2 In Shakespeare In Love, what are the three things Henslowe (Geoffrey Rush) says audiences want? “Comedy, love and a bit with a dog.” That was a challenging film to make. People standing on the sidelines said it could never work. For the Weinsteins, it was about how to get an audience to see a film that had “Shakespeare” in the title. They put the title out to some creative thinking outfits and they came back with some…

HE’S TAKEN ON Whitehall and tackled the White House, and now it’s the Kremlin’s turn. In The Loop’s Armando Iannucci, the creator of The Thick Of It and Veep, is returning to the big screen with The Death Of Stalin. A blackly comic satire, it sifts through the political machinations that unfolded immediately after the Soviet dictator popped his murderous clogs in 1953. Loosely based on fact, the story takes Fabien Nury’s French graphic novel of the same name as its starting point. But Iannucci’s script — and direction — ramps up the laughs even as the bodies amass. Potential successors to Stalin, Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi), Beria (Simon Russell Beale) and Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor), all jockey for position, each out-scheming the others. “We’ve been very careful not to trivialise history,”…

IT’S THREE YEARS since George Clooney last sat in a director’s chair. Following 2014’s The Monuments Men, his new project stems partly from his own obsessions and partly from an old Joel and Ethan Coen script called Suburbicon. “I’d been writing a script about [1957 documentary] Crisis In Levittown. I wanted to talk about building walls and scapegoating minorities,” he says. “Themes that sadly never lose their relevance. At the same time, I pulled out a 1999 version of Suburbicon and thought the two stories were perfect to put together.” In splicing the two scripts with creative partner Grant Heslov — “I write long hand. Grant does the typing, thank God” — Clooney’s tale peers into the idyllic American communities of 1959. If the dark side beyond white picket fences…

IT WASN’T THE script or even the director that drew Alicia Vikander to her latest film — it was a video game. “I was intrigued,” she remembers of the moment she first saw 2013’s retooled Tomb Raider. “It looked very different from the [Tomb Raider] games I played growing up. I wanted to find out what it was.” For the first time on screen, we’ll meet Lara Croft before she gets into the whole crypt exploration business. The new film is based on that 2013 game, but when we meet Lara she’s a cycle courier in London. And it’s not some priceless lost artefact that sets her off on her journey, but a quest to find her missing father. Then she’s marooned on a mystical, largely hostile island, where she…

23 SEPTEMBER 2016 is a landmark day on Goodbye Christopher Robin, a tightly focused biopic of Winnie the Pooh creator A.A. Milne. Empire is in the Ashdown Forest in East Sussex on the actual bridge where Poohsticks, the game played by Pooh and friends, was invented (a stone noting the fact has been discreetly covered up). Tourists from Canada, Scotland and Japan wait to pass as Domhnall Gleeson as A(lan) A(lexander) Milne and nine-year-old Will Tilston as his son Christopher Robin drop sticks, then leg it to the other side of the bridge to see whose emerges first. A props man stands in the water to recycle sticks. “This is the point in the film where Alan and Christopher Robin are getting to know one another,” says Gleeson, retaining a…

A DARK SOUNDSTAGE, on the kind of Brooklyn winter’s day that makes the rats in the walls think twice before peeking out, and Empire has come to watch the Punisher — the most feared killing machine in comic books — do some actual, honest-to-goodness punishing. He’s the kind of man whose body counts are so high you can only keep track with a body accountant. But currently, he’s sitting on the floor of a warehouse, nursing a beer, remembering how he met his wife while playing guitar under a tree in Central Park. “Changed my life,” smiles Jon Bernthal’s Frank Castle, and takes a sip. The only things being punished here are the heartstrings. Do not adjust your Netflix connection. The Punisher, the show that sees Bernthal’s vigilante strut his…

PRODUCED BY ANDY Serkis’ The Imaginarium, The Ritual sends four old uni pals deep into the Swedish wilderness to face unexpected terrors. Empire asked the cast and crew behind the adaptation of Adam Nevill’s outdoorsy 2011 novel to share their tips for creating an effective chiller. 1. MAKE YOUR VICTIMS RELATABLE The casting for the film’s Deliverance-like premise, in which a group of old college mates find themselves out of their comfort zone (and depth), required a little star power and a lot of relatability. Director David Bruckner called on Rafe Spall to provide a recognisable lead, with Arsher Ali (Four Lions), Rob James-Collier and Sam Troughton completing the ill-fated quartet. “They’re very rounded characters,” says Spall. “To me, any horror film should hold up as a story even without…

★★★★ OUT 15 SEPTEMBER CERT 18 / 124 MINS DIRECTOR Jung Byung-gil CAST Kim Ok-bin, Kim Seo-hyeong, Sung Jun, Shin Ha-kyun PLOT Sook-hee (Kim Ok-bin) slaughters her way through a drug den and emerges bloodied, to be given facial reconstructive surgery and trained as an assassin by shadowy yet powerful forces. Slowly, her violent past and violent future unfold as she grapples with her role. IT’S ALWAYS A treat to see the film that a hundred Hollywood action directors are about to rip off (okay, lawyers, pay homage to) before they reach it. The Villainess opens with one of those sequences that will leave you wondering how they did it, and marvelling at the sheer kinetic impact. It finishes with another equally laws-of-physics-defying flourish of a fight scene. And in-between…

★★★ OUT 8 SEPTEMBER CERT 15 / 107 MINS DIRECTOR Taylor Sheridan CAST Elizabeth Olsen, Jeremy Renner, Kelsey Chow, Jon Bernthal PLOT A game tracker (Renner) discovers a dead girl while hunting. An FBI agent (Olsen) arrives at the Wind River Reservation and they join forces. TAYLOR SHERIDAN WROTE Sicario and Hell Or High Water. With both well-received and his profile raised, he’s cashed in his chips to make this, his ‘proper’ debut as director, sheepishly nudging 2011 torture porn Vile off his CV. And while Wind River has all the grit and desperation of the Denis Villeneuve and David Mackenzie films, that pair are two of the greatest directors of their generation. Here, Sheridan’s shortcomings are laid brutally bare. The opening is striking: Natalie Hanson (Chow), barely dressed, is…

★★ OUT NOW CERT 12A / 95 MINS DIRECTOR Nikolaj Arcel CAST Idris Elba, Matthew McConaughey, Tom Taylor, Claudia Kim, Fran Kranz, Abbey Lee, Jackie Earle Haley PLOT Jake Chambers (Taylor) is plagued with nightmares about the Man In Black (McConaughey) following the death of his father. He learns that his dreams are real, and teams up with the Gunslinger, Roland (Elba), to protect the universe from the terrifying stranger. STEPHEN KING’S SWEEPING sci-fi-fantasy-Western-horror epic The Dark Tower is full of cool lines, memorable characters and film-friendly imagery, but low on film-friendly brevity. Hollywood has been tinkering with the eight-book series for a decade and has here distilled elements of several books into one brief and — for some reason — PG package. The result is more like The NeverEnding…

★★★ SKY ATLANTIC OUT 4 SEPTEMBER EPISODES VIEWED ALL CREATOR Rowan Joffe CAST Tim Roth, Christina Hendricks, Genevieve O’Reilly, Abigail Lawrie, Christopher Heyerdahl, Kevin Hanchard, Oliver Coopersmith PLOT Struggling with alcoholism and haunted by a mysterious past, former London cop Jim Worth (Roth) has moved his family to a quiet town in the Canadian Rockies. Then, personal tragedy strikes, forcing him to tangle with criminals and shady oil execs in a dangerous, bloody quest for retribution. A SELF-DESTRUCTIVE anti-hero grappling with personal demons, a conflicted wife forced into murderous complicity with her husband, horrifying criminal deeds in a picturesque rural setting, hard-drinking cops willing to bend the rules to see justice done; not even the most charitable observer would describe Tin Star’s primary components as particularly box-fresh or under-explored. In…

CONCEPTION Growing up in Manhattan Beach, Darren Aronofsky was obsessed with the Cyclone. Something about the intensity of Coney Island’s famous wooden rollercoaster spoke to the embryonic director: the slow, ratcheted upward climb; the freefalling and switchbacks; the chorus of screams. It was terror by design. He would ride it every summer. And watch other riders get off with jelly legs and huge grins. Zoom forward 30 years and Aronofsky is a filmmaker notorious for taking studio movies with big, beautiful stars to violent and hallucinatory extremes. His $60,000 black-and-white debut, Pi, depicted a paranoid number theorist who thinks he’s discovered a code sent by God. His second, a devastating adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr’s heroin-seeped tragedy Requiem For A Dream, descended into a vortex of sexual degradation and amputation.…

“I DON’T WANT WHOEVER DID THIS KILLED,” SAYS DAVID FINCHER, “BUT I DO WANT A DIGIT.” It’s a crisp September morning in 2016 and the 54-year-old director is standing amid his crew in the lobby of a police station in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, doubling for the late ’70s Adairsville Police Department, Georgia. He’s brandishing his new show’s “sides” in his hand: the day’s script pages, which have been stapled together in the wrong order. “Okay, we’re almost ready,” he calls out, unpicking staples. “Bring in the master thespians!” Moments later, the lead actors of MINDHUNTER walk across the room’s sapphire-tiled floor, past a cigarette machine and a wall plastered with “Wanted” posters. Holt McCallany wears cropped hair around a handsome pitbull face, a short-sleeved white shirt over an imposing frame and…

DIRECTOR MONTE HELLMAN has always felt like a footnote in the grand story of Hollywood’s last Golden Age: an outsider amongst outsiders, rarely mentioned in the same breath as the likes of Coppola, Lucas and Scorsese. But his brief filmography, in Ride In The Whirlwind and The Shooting, a brace of ‘acid Westerns’ he shot for Roger Corman back-to-back and for under $80,000, contains two of the decade’s most distinctive films. And in Two-Lane Blacktop he created arguably the best, possibly the strangest, and certainly the purest, road movie ever made. If Hellman’s minor-key masterpiece never really got the kudos of the other classics of the period, it was cut from the same cloth of its better-known stablemates. In late 1969, after the shocking success of Easy Rider, bewildered executives…

KEVIN CONROY RECENTLY had an unusual experience whilst out walking in New York. “A cop car put its siren on as I was crossing the street,” recalls the actor. “I thought, ‘Oh man, am I going to get a jaywalking ticket?’ Then a cop leans out the window and goes, ‘We want a picture of Batman! Come on, Batman!’ Did I do the voice?” He breaks into a booming baritone. “‘Please, officer, don’t give me a ticket!’” Conroy has been doing that voice for 25 years, playing Bruce Wayne and his vigilante alter-ego first in Batman: The Animated Series, then through numerous follow-up shows, video games, and the odd feature-length movie such as the new Batman And Harley Quinn. He’s played the role for longer than the tenures of Adam…

THIS MONTH: AMERICAN HORROR STORY: ROANOKE AFTER GHOSTS, ASYLUMS, witches, freak shows and haunted hotels, the latest season of anthology series American Horror Story was hyped by its showrunner Ryan Murphy as a radical rebirth. It sounded like pre-release puff. In some ways, it’s business as usual. Keeping with the show’s tradition, season six is inspired by true events — in this case, the Roanoke New World colony that mysteriously evaporated in the 1590s. What’s rogue is the format: the series unravels as a spot-on Paranormal Witness spoof. To North Carolina then, where married couple Shelby and Matt Miller (Sarah Paulson and Cuba Gooding Jr) are happily settling into their lovely new home that looks as welcoming as an abattoir. When sister-in-law Lee (Angela Bassett) comes to visit, the three…

#16 NEIL GIBBONS ON AVENGERS ASSEMBLE THIS MONTH’S FIRST-Take Club inductee is Neil Gibbons, screenwriter and the man who, along with his brother Rob, has breathed life into the second phase of Alan Partridge, across film (Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa), TV (Mid-Morning Matters), and the printed page (Nomad). He’s been far too busy, presumably, to watch the film Empire readers voted the 16th greatest of all time in 2014, so we assembled Avengers Assemble for him. And…? Avengers Assemble — known alternatively in my house as ‘Avengers Congregate’, ‘Avengers Muster’ or ‘Avengers Coffee Morning’ — isn’t a film I’ve struggled to avoid. I have a blanket rule to avoid any and all superhero movies. First, to spite my university flatmate Simon Bather, a man who adored comics even more than…