Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2017 i Empire

THOR: RAGNAROK MAY have only just hulk-smashed into the world, but the next, the 18th film from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is just three months away, and though it may be the latest in a fairly long line, it promises to be anything but more of the same. Not only is Black Panther the first solo black superhero movie in the current MCU — having been the first black superhero in mainstream comics when it was created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the 1960s — but also the first big-budget comic-book tent-pole movie with a predominantly black cast and filmmaking crew. We first met Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa — the young ruler who must protect Wakanda, the Afro-futurist paradise and most advanced nation on Earth, from outside threats —…

POP QUIZ. WHAT links Brokeback Mountain, Blue Valentine, My Week With Marilyn and Manchester By The Sea? They all feature an Academy-acclaimed turn from Michelle Williams — now officially the most Oscar-nominated actor born during the ’80s. Renowned for inhabiting haunted, heartbreaking figures, the early buzz suggests Williams’ streak is set to continue as the lead in Ridley Scott’s kidnap drama, All The Money In The World. Crashing back down to Earth after Alien: Covenant, Scott’s film spins a tragic true story. In the summer of ’73, the Mafia snatched 16-year-old John Paul Getty III from the streets of Rome. Paul’s billionaire granddad, John Paul Getty (Kevin Spacey), refused to pay the $17 million ransom, leaving his mother, Gail Harris, to negotiate her son’s release. After a five-month stand-off, Getty…

IT TAKES EXTRAORDINARY confidence to begin production on four sequels without waiting to see if there’s appetite for one. Considering the first of them won’t arrive until a decade after the original, it’s easy to see the ongoing Avatar project as a monument to hubris. But James Cameron is no ordinary filmmaker and Avatar was far from an ordinary film. Perched atop a worldwide gross of nearly $2.8 billion, it is quite comfortably the most successful film in history, and if Star Wars’ return dominated cinema in the 2010s, then Avatar’s resurgence may well define the 2020s. Here’s what we hope Cameron has in store. 1 __ MORE PANDORA From the levitating peaks of the Hallelujah Mountains to the colossal, gnarled boughs of the Hometree, Cameron created a vast new…

ALEXANDER PAYNE DOESN’T do blockbusters. From Citizen Ruth to Nebraska, this is a man whose most complicated visual effect as a director involved the removal of a boom mic, and whose biggest film was About Schmidt — “and half of the budget was Jack Nicholson’s salary,” laughs the director. But that’s all changed. With Downsizing, Payne is going large. Well, sort of. It’s a charming and ramshackle comedy about a normal guy (Matt Damon) who takes advantage of a new scientific process that shrinks people to just five inches and moves into a ready-made community for the downsized. And so, for the first time in his storied career, Payne found himself working on a movie that required visual-effects shots — 650, to be precise — as he depicted the contrast…

THE PORGS “They’re mischievous and inquisitive. Rian felt it was very important you were able to look at them and read their emotions, which is difficult in a character that is essentially a bird. We were able to do a lot practically by swapping a sad-looking porg to a happy-looking porg, an aggressive porg or a roaring porg. We have a whole porg menagerie that we use. Chewie befriends one, and that porg in particular shows some very Wookiee traits in the way he’s coloured; his patterning is very similar to Chewie’s.” THE CRYSTAL FOXES “We started with real dogs and made a little suit covered in drinking straws. Then we created a scale version which had over a thousand crystals in it. They’re really beautiful creatures; we had one…

EVERY THANKSGIVING, WHILE family members whipped up a turkey dinner in the kitchen, Jodie Foster would sit in front of the TV and watch The Twilight Zone. “Every single year,” she recalls. “It was like a 48-hour marathon. Non-stop Twilight Zone. It was my favourite thing.” Today, when Empire meets her on an appropriately bleak January morning in an appropriately bleak part of west London, she’s finishing post-production work on Black Mirror — the Netflix show routinely described as The Twilight Zone’s spiritual successor — for which she’s directed a new episode. Foster’s ‘Arkangel’ is one of the entries in the latest anthology and, following a shoot in Hamilton, Ontario, she’s now in Twickenham, where Empire’s been invited to see some raw footage. Together we watch Rosemarie DeWitt fretting over…

★★★★ OUT NOW CERT 12A / 130 MINS DIRECTOR Taika Waititi CAST Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Tessa Thompson, Cate Blanchett, Tom Hiddleston, Jeff Goldblum PLOT Death goddess Hela (Blanchett) returns from exile to claim the throne of Asgard, thrashing Thor (Hemsworth) and banishing him to the fighting pits of Sakaar. There, reunited with the missing-since- Ultron Hulk (Ruffalo), he must battle his way to freedom, return home and unseat the usurper. WITH MARVEL PROPERTIES, as with Betelgeuse, third time’s always the charm. Each hero starts with a carefully pitched origin story; then comes a sequel to jack up the stakes. It’s not until part three that a series is given free rein to cut loose, let its hair down and be a little reckless. Cap set the MCU high-water mark…

★★★★★ OUT 3 NOVEMBER CERT 15 / 121 MINS DIRECTOR Yorgos Lanthimos CAST Colin Farrell, Nicole Kidman, Alicia Silverstone, Barry Keoghan, Raffey Cassidy PLOT A mysterious teenager (Keoghan) enters a complacent surgeon’s (Farrell) life. Despite the older man’s attempts to build a bond with him, it becomes increasingly clear that the boy intends a terrible revenge. THE GRAND UNIFIED Theory of Colin Farrell goes like this: above a certain budget point (Minority Report being the notable exception), he’s awful. Get him in something where the accommodation isn’t quite as comfy, with a director who’ll stretch him, and he’s quietly become one of our finest actors. This, his second collaboration with Dogtooth director Yorgos Lanthimos after 2015’s well-received The Lobster, is another piece of proof for the theory. Who, watching S.W.A.T.…

★★★★ OUT 24 NOVEMBER CERT 12A / 121 MINS DIRECTORS Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris CAST Emma Stone, Steve Carell, Andrea Riseborough, Bill Pullman, Elisabeth Shue PLOT Angry that they are not paid the same as men, tennis star Billie Jean King (Stone) and a group of other top female players form their own tour. Sensing an opportunity, former male star Bobby Riggs (Carell) challenges them to a ‘Battle Of The Sexes’ — a match to settle the debate once and for all. TENNIS MOVIES ARE like buses. Nothing for years, then two in the space of two months: first Borg Vs McEnroe, and now Battle Of The Sexes, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’ dramatised retelling of the 1973 match between tennis queen Billie Jean King (Stone) and former US Open…

★★ OUT 10 NOVEMBER CERT 15 / 108 MINS DIRECTOR Angela Robinson CAST Luke Evans, Rebecca Hall, Bella Heathcote, Oliver Platt, Connie Britton PLOT Years before becoming a comic-book writer, William Marston (Evans) was a university professor, teaching psychology. His wife (Hall) and young assistant (Heathcote) will each play a key role in the creation of a new character called Wonder Woman. FACTUALITY IS WONDER Woman’s stock in trade; after all, the superhero’s weapon of choice is a Lasso-Of-Truth, rather than, say, a Rope Of Righteousness or Cable Of Generosity. So it’s disappointing to find this tale of the character’s creation, purportedly based on real-life events, ringing so false. On paper it sounds like a bold, weird and compelling subject matter for a movie: the secret life of academic-turned-comic-book writer…

★★★ NETFLIX NOW NOW EPISODES VIEWED ALL SHOWRUNNER Steve Lightfoot CAST Jon Bernthal, Amber Rose Revah, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Ben Barnes, Jaime Ray Newman, Jason R. Moore PLOT Frank Castle (Bernthal) thinks he’s done being The Punisher. But six months later, he’s drawn back into a life of gun-toting vigilantism by a self-ghosted hacker and a Homeland Security agent, both determined to expose a CIA conspiracy in which Frank was possibly involved. IT’S HARDLY SURPRISING Marvel and Netflix chose to pull The Punisher from their New York Comic-Con schedule in the light of the Las Vegas Strip mass shooting on 1 October. Virtually every episode features such flagrant gun violence, it wouldn’t be out of place in a John Wick movie. Despite sharing the same world as Daredevil, Jessica Jones and…

OF ALL THE grenades thrown at Dale Dye, only one has come close to causing lasting damage. The thrower? Tom Hanks. “The shitbird,” grumbles Dye, mock-outraged at the memory. “He just got up and fired it right into my groin from 35 metres. I doubled over.” The rogue projectile struck Dye — website motto: “You just don’t get it” — during the pre-shoot military boot camp his company, Warriors Inc., had organised for Saving Private Ryan. Unfortunately, when it came to hand-grenade training, Hanks had got it. Too well. “The standard dude can’t throw that hard,” rues Dye. “I underestimated Tom.” The 72-year-old Dye has survived 31 combat operations in Vietnam, helped make Platoon a Best Picture winner, spent 30 years working to reinvent the Hollywood war movie, and can…

00:05:07 SEEING RED __ Fleeing hot fuzz, Baby (Ansel Elgort) spots an opportunity on the 85 freeway, in the form of two other red cars going in the opposite direction. Wright cites this high-velocity pan as the action shot he’s most proud of. “It was incredibly complicated. Ansel has to look over and turn at just the right moment,” says Wright. “The reset time for the shot was half an hour, so you’re going, ‘Please don’t fuck this up.’” 00:06:25 STREET WISE __ The opening-credits sequence sees Baby dance down an Atlanta street for two minutes and 45 seconds, from the Healey Building to the (fictional) Octane coffee shop. “The Healey was Tom Hanks’ hotel in Sully,” says Wright of the location. The song (Harlem Shuffle by Bob & Earl)…

ALAMY WHEN HUSBAND AND wife Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon sat down to write The Big Sick, the witty romcom that tells the real-life tale of how their budding relationship was rudely interrupted when Emily became seriously ill and fell into a coma, they knew they wanted to draw heavily upon the details of their lives; the coma, particularly. But they also had to write a movie that worked very much on its own terms, and wasn’t just a strict retelling. Which is why Emily’s surname in the movie has been changed to Gardner. (She is played by Zoe Kazan.) But what of the other details, big and small, in the movie? What’s real life? What’s not? We grilled the duo for all the sick details. MOMENT: The pair…

MOMENT Easy. It would be the first time I ever did a film, shooting Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides in Hawaii. I remember being sat for the read-through with Johnny Depp on my right and Penélope Cruz on my left and thinking, “What is happening?!” I was, like, a year out of drama school. For My Cousin Rachel, I had to swim naked in the English Channel and have a boat full of people watching — mainly men. It was a cold day and a freezing cold ocean. I remember getting out of the water and asking, “Did you see everything?” Everyone was like: “Yep.” That was horrific. AUDITION There was one I was really proud of that I didn’t actually get: the Green Goblin in The Amazing…

HERE’S HOW INFLUENTIAL Ray Harryhausen is. He didn’t direct Mysterious Island — that was Cy Endfield. Nor Jason And The Argonauts, which was a Don Chaffey joint. And he didn’t call the shots on First Men In The Moon, either, for which the credit goes to Nathan Juran. Yet when those three films are released in a box set later this month, they’ll be under the title The Wonderful Worlds Of Ray Harryhausen. Because the stop-motion animation effects that Harryhausen provided have become the films’ defining glory; and so completely in control of the process was he that he was, effectively, those movies’ director. Here are Harryhausen’s five greatest creations. MIGHTY JOE YOUNG Harryhausen got into the business after being inspired by Willis O’Brien’s pioneering work on the 1933 King…

HE ROCKS UP ROUGHLY halfway through Hellraiser, Clive Barker’s astonishing 1987 debut as writer-director; summoned by a demonic puzzle box, he has perhaps less than ten minutes of screen-time, but uses it wisely, politely growling threats (“We’ll tear your soul apart”), and turning a two-up two-down into a gore-soaked S&M torture dungeon. He isn’t even given a name — the credits refer to him simply as Lead Cenobite — but you never forget a face. Especially that face, with nails hammered into it at regular intervals. He became the breakout star of Hellraiser, the film’s literal poster child, and was quickly given a nickname that well and truly stuck: Pinhead. Now, with Hellraiser about to turn 30, Barker and Doug Bradley, the man who played Pinhead for the first eight…

HAVING CO-WRITTEN Frances Ha and Mistress America with Noah Baumbach, Greta Gerwig has now struck out alone as a writer-director with Lady Bird. Starring Saoirse Ronan, it’s a personal story that, Gerwig says, is not quite as it seems. Would you call this a coming-of-age film? I wanted to construct the movie as a Trojan horse. One person’s coming of age is another person’s letting go — I’m just as interested in the letting go. Ostensibly it seems like the lead character is Lady Bird, but it turns out to be her mother. It’s been really interesting to watch people respond to that. Particularly parents. Have you spoken to them? A lot of people have come up to me to say they just dropped their daughter or son at college…

AARON SORKIN SAYS he’s “never thought of being a screenwriter as a stepping stone to being a director”. He had considered directing The Social Network, but happily handed it over to David Fincher. When it came to Molly’s Game, though, he felt differently. Adapted from the memoirs of Molly Bloom (played by Jessica Chastain), who went from being a Hollywood PA to running high-stakes poker games that got her mixed up with the Russian Mafia and the FBI, it made Sorkin feel protective in a way he hadn’t before. “There were emotional moments I wanted to preserve,” he tells Empire. “It would be very easy to make this a film about the shiny objects: decadence, glamour, money, gossip.” His directorial debut received a warm response on the festival circuit. In…

ALAMY SET IN A small town, heavily influenced by ’80s pop culture, about people mysteriously disappearing — it’s safe to say Netflix’s German drama Dark has more than a little in common with one of the streaming service’s biggest hits. But it wasn’t intentional. “We’d already started shooting when Stranger Things aired,” says Jantje Friese, who co-wrote every episode of the murky sci-fi crime show with her filmmaking partner Baran bo Odar. But she’s not complaining too hard about the comparison. “If the Netflix algorithm recommends Dark to people who watched it, that’s good for us. But if you look closely, I think they are quite different.” And, to prove her point, she and Odar are happy to explain their show’s core elements. THE INSPIRATIONS __ Like the Duffer brothers,…

GROOMING: CHARLIE TAYLOR. STYLING: MOLLY DICKSON AT THE ONLY AGENCY. Dress: REDValentino. Boots: Ash AGE __ 15 PLAYS __ Schoolgirl Max in Stranger Things 2. “She’s a tomboy and she skateboards a lot,” says Sink. “She’s pretty closed-off and has a stepbrother who’s bad news.” BACKSTORY __ “I didn’t start acting professionally until I was ten. I’m originally from Texas, but the whole family moved to New Jersey when me and my brother got into Broadway shows.” THE BIG BREAK __ “Annie [on Broadway] because at the time that was my dream. Then I moved into the world of film, and now that’s what I want to do.” BEST DIRECTION __ “The director for one of the Broadway shows I did told me, ‘The best acting advice I could give…

WITH THE NUCLEAR dust settling on Blade Runner’s resurrection, thoughts can now turn to the next one. “Ridley and Hampton Fancher, who co-wrote our screenplay, had ideas they have been kicking around for a couple of decades,” says producer Andrew Kosove. Enough material to form “a trilogy” of sequels. Here’s what Empire’s man in the know thinks that could entail. A Replicant Uprising What began with Roy Batty’s gang looks set to continue with the one-eyed Freysa (Hiam Abbass) and her revolutionary group taking on humanity with the replicant child as their figurehead. Return of the Blade Runner Deckard could be coming out of retirement. Fancher told the LA Times that Deckard originally died at the end. With that changed, his mind returned to P98U when he came up with…

★★★★ OUT 17 NOVEMBER CERT 15 / 105 MINS DIRECTOR Paul McGuigan CAST Annette Bening, Jamie Bell, Vanessa Redgrave, Julie Walters PLOT Once a Hollywood star, Gloria Grahame (Bening) is now doing theatre in the UK. When she collapses one night, she calls an old flame (Bell) and asks him to take her to his family home in Liverpool. As she gets sicker, he remembers the romance they had that changed both their lives. DESPITE ROLES IN It’s A Wonderful Life, The Big Heat and Oklahoma!, plus an Oscar on her shelf, Gloria Grahame’s fame hasn’t endured like other stars of her era. She’s more a good answer to a quiz question than a household name these days. Paul McGuigan’s drama is a fond look at the final years of…

★★★★ OUT 24 NOVEMBER CERT 15 / 98 MINS DIRECTOR Eliza Hittman CAST Harris Dickinson, Madeline Weinstein, Kate Hodge, Erik Potempa, Anton Selyaninov PLOT Handsome, charismatic and P9 years old, Frankie (Dickinson) is an alpha male in the Brooklyn pack with which he runs. He’s also secretly gay. Will he be able to reveal his true feelings or does a darker, lonelier path await? FRANKIE (DICKINSON) LEADS a simple life. He lives in a cramped house in Brooklyn with his father, who is dying of cancer on a hospital bed in the living room, his mother, who is trying her best to hold things together, and his younger sister, who is growing up fast and pleading for permission to get her belly button pierced. Frankie himself looks calm on the…

★★★★ OUT 17 NOVEMBER CERT 15 / 98 MINS Director Matt Spicer CAST Aubrey Plaza, Elizabeth Olsen PLOT Ingrid (Plaza) doesn’t know how to make friends. She’s spent time in a psychiatric hospital for attacking someone she became obsessed with on Instagram. Newly free, Ingrid’s found herself a new Instagram idol, Taylor (Olsen), who is going to be her friend — whether she likes it or not. THE WORLD OF Instagram celebrity is incredibly easy to make fun of. There’s no shortage of triple-filtered, self-consciously curated phonies with a string of hashtags trailing their every carefully framed move. Ingrid Goes West jumps into their world but it doesn’t go for ‘kids today!’ mockery. It uses Instagram stardom as the basis for a very dark comedy about the false face shown…

★★★★★ OUT NOW CERT 15 / 163 MINS DIRECTOR Denis Villeneuve CAST Ryan Gosling, Harrison Ford, Sylvia Hoeks, Ana de Armas, Robin Wright, Mackenzie Davis, Dave Bautista PLOT Officer KD6-3.7 (Gosling) is a blade runner: a specialised detective/assassin hunting down bio-engineered humans known as replicants. After one encounter, K discovers a buried box which reveals a potentially world-shaking secret and leads him to an entirely new kind of quarry... THERE ARE TEARS in Blade Runner 2049, and there is rain. In its sunlight-starved Californian megatropolis, luridly haired denizens eat East Asian street food as they are dwarfed by adverts promising a new life in distant colonies they can’t afford to reach. Eyeballs feature heavily, as do obscurely distressing psychological tests and vocally controlled analogue gadgets. Identity and memory, meanwhile, remain…

★★ OUT 24 NOVEMBER CERT 15 / 104 MINS DIRECTOR George Clooney CAST Matt Damon, Julianne Moore, George Clooney, Noah Jupe, Oscar Isaac PLOT P9TOs America. The reactionary neighbourhood of Suburbicon is appalled by the arrival of a black family, the Meyers (Westbrook, Burke, Espinosa). Meanwhile, across the street, Gardner Lodge (Damon) suffers a home invasion. THE START OF George Clooney’s Suburbicon is familiar but fun: a promo for a ’50s US neighbourhood, described as “a melting pot of diversity” but exclusively white, where kids play catch, housewives gossip and the whistling postman knows everyone by name. Inside this idyllic milieu, Clooney’s film fashions two storylines: one is a noirish potboiler based on a long-lost script by the Coen brothers; the other is a civil rights era drama inspired by…

★★★★ NETFLIX OUT NOW EPISODES VIEWED ALL CREATED BY The Duffer Brothers CAST Winona Ryder, David Harbour, Finn Wolfhard, Millie Bobby Brown, Noah Schnapp, Sean Astin, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, Natalia Dyer PLOT Late P98S. Will Byers (Schnapp) is haunted by his trans-dimensional abduction. But are his visions of the Upside Down merely memories? With a shifty scientist lurking (Reiser), police chief Jim Hopper (Harbour) and Will’s friends investigate the new shadowy presence threatening Hawkins. “I’VE ALWAYS THOUGHT stuff like this only happened in movies and comic books, not here,” says Bob Newby, Sean Astin’s aptly named new Stranger Things character, as the small town of Hawkins once again finds itself the focus of an inter-dimensional war. It’s a question that gets to the central problem facing the show’s creators,…

★★★★ NETFLIX OUT 17 NOVEMBER / 98 MINS SHOWRUNNER Dee Rees CAST Carey Mulligan, Jason Clarke, Garrett Hedlund, Jason Mitchell, Rob Morgan, Jonathan Banks, Mary J. Blige PLOT The story of two farming families living in rural Mississippi, dealing with poverty, hardship and, in the case of sharecroppers the Jacksons, the rampant racism of the time. MUDBOUND IS A film set during a tumultuous period in history that has worrying parallels with current events. Something we’ve sadly heard too often in recent months. From the police brutality and race riots of Detroit to the egotistical political scheming of The Death Of Stalin, some of the more unsavoury elements of the 20th century are sadly alive and thriving in 2017. Set in 1940s Mississippi, Mudbound is the tale of two families.…

ON 17 APRIL 2002, a 48-year-old financier arrived at Michael Ovitz’s office with some very bad news. Ovitz’s ambitious company, Artists Management Group, was bleeding cash and the super-agent was out of options. This meeting was to negotiate the sale of AMG to an aggressive rival called The Firm. Ovitz was hoping for $40 million. The man from The Firm offered $5 million. After a stunned pause, Ovitz said: “If I didn’t know you personally, I’d throw you out of the room.” Fourteen years later, the same man who humiliated Michael Ovitz was responsible for the undoing of Hillary Clinton. The man from The Firm was Stephen K. Bannon, a former Navy officer and Wall Street banker who became the canniest far-right propagandist in Hollywood and then the brains behind…

When did you first hear from David Lynch? In 2012 he saw my YouTube video [which Wardle made in 2010, aged 18, and in which he performs 24 different accents]. He Skyped me and said I had a naturalness about me and that he really wanted me in one of his projects. Then in 2014 he said, “Have you ever seen Twin Peaks? We’re making a new one and you’re gonna be in it.” He explained that I was gonna be playing a Cockney guy called Freddie who has a magic green glove. When I read the script I was like, “Oh my gosh, I get to kick some arse!” How much did you know about what you’d end up doing? The episode 17 scenes were kept secret from me.…

EYEVINE THAT THING MEN do in Michael Mann films, that obsessive and nihilistic act where they burn down their lives and bail when they feel the heat around the corner — that all arrived fully formed in Thief, Mann’s first feature film as writer and director. Released in 1981 with a Tangerine Dream score, Thief is the emotional blueprint for every film he’s made since. James Caan stars as Frank, a thirtysomething, no-nonsense, safe-cracking jewel thief who’s been out of the joint for four years after 11 behind bars. “You gotta forget time,” he says, explaining how he made it through prison. “You gotta not give a fuck if you live or die. You gotta get to where nothin’ means nothin’.” But now time is all he can think about:…

RONALD GRANT ARCHIVE PRO HALLOWE’EN COSTUME tip. Don’t go as Peter Venkman, Harley Quinn or Archbishop Of Canterbury Justin Welby. Instead, go as Michael Myers Dressed As Bob In Halloween. It will not only bestow you with instant film buff kudos but also earn the seal of approval from the Horror Master himself, John Carpenter. “It’s the cheapest of the cheap,” he suggests. “You want to go to a Hallowe’en party and you don’t have a costume, just put a sheet over you and off you go.” And glasses, too. Otherwise people will think you’re cosplaying as Casey Affleck from A Ghost Story. You’ll remember the scene from Carpenter’s 1978 slasher classic. Party girl Lynda (P.J. Soles) sends her boyfriend Bob (John Michael Graham) to the kitchen for a beer…

ALAMY LEADER BOARD Ben Kingsley 9.5 Christopher Lee 9.5 David O. Russell 9.5 Quentin Tarantino 9.5 Paul W.S. Anderson 9 Werner Herzog 9 Robert Rodriguez 9 Robert Rodriguezo 9 Guillermo del Toro 8.5 Christian Slater 8.5 1 What’s the last line of The Howling? “Rare.” It came from John Sayles. You assumed at that point that the other werewolves had died, and this character [Elisabeth Brooks’ Marsha Quist] was going to go on to maybe do other things. What was interesting was that they didn’t use her when they made the sequel — this character that was so set up for a sequel. Correct. 2 What two movies are on the marquee at the Kingston Falls Movie Theater when we see it at the beginning of Gremlins? A Boy’s Life…

ONE OF THE most colourful aspects of Pacific Rim, along with the fearsome creatures, was the spectacular monicker of Idris Elba’s apocalypse canceller: Stacker Pentecost. The sequel features John Boyega as his son, so what do we get this time? Boring old Jake. “I felt the same way,” laughs Boyega on set at Fox Studios in Australia. “Jake? I wonder if Stacker is a nickname that stuck.” Set a decade after the first film, in Pacific Rim: Uprising the alien monsters, known as Kaiju, have returned. And although he knows his way around a Jaeger — the giant mech suits used to fight them —Boyega’s Jake is no hero. “At the start of the film, he is an absolute crook,” says Boyega. “There are rogue Jaegers where people have collected…

“I’M NOT A violent person,” claims Kelly Reilly, the suitably Celtic-looking star of Britannia. “I never considered myself fierce in that way. Fierce in spirit, yes, but not necessarily physically. But I did pretty well.” It’s December 2016, and Empire is talking to Reilly in a field outside Tyrovice in the Czech Republic, where an ancient British war camp stands on frosty ground. Britannia is a show that takes ancient history and gooses it with both mythology and a whole lot of blood and guts. Which is where Reilly’s formidable Kerra comes in. “I guess she’s a princess,” she muses, “but to me that conjures up very pretty people in castles and it’s not like that. These are indigenous tribes so they wouldn’t be interested in ‘pretty’. We do have…

IN LATE FEBRUARY this year, newbie screenwriter Liz Hannah received a life-changing phone call. Her first-ever movie screenplay The Post, written simply to secure an agent but snapped up by producer Amy Pascal, was now being circled by Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep. “I just went into a corner and hid for a while,” she laughs. “I then realised it wasn’t a big prank. They were actually considering it.” And they went for it, too. Directed by Spielberg, The Post charts the relationship between Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham (Streep) and executive editor Ben Bradlee (Hanks), filtered through the pair’s history-changing decision in 1971 to publish the Pentagon Papers, the leaked government documents that exposed the escalating deaths of US soldiers during the Vietnam War. However, Spielberg wanted…

JAKE GYLLENHAAL was terrified before his first meeting with Jeff Bauman. In order to play him in Stronger, Gyllenhaal knew he’d be spending a year learning to ‘become’ Bauman — an ordinary guy who was bestowed unwanted fame after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, which killed three people and left 256 injured. Among them Bauman, then a 29-year-old deli counter worker, who lost both his legs. His survival and determination to walk again made him the symbol of a city’s refusal to cower before terror. “I was really nervous,” says Gyllenhaal. “I felt this sense of fraudulence. I know what I’m doing is pretend. When you meet someone who’s been through what Jeff’s been through and survived the impossible, there’s just something that calls you out for what you do.”…

★★★★ OUT 10 NOVEMBER CERT 12A / 99 MINS DIRECTOR Michael Almereyda CAST Lois Smith, Jon Hamm, Geena Davis, Tim Robbins PLOT Some time in the 2OSOs. Dementia sufferer Marjorie (Smith) is provided with a ‘prime’, a hologram of her late husband Walter (Hamm) as he appeared in his forties. Aided by daughter Tess (Davis) and son-in-law Jon (Robbins), Marjorie’s fragile memory brings a traumatic past into focus. IF VALERIAN AND The City Of A Thousand Planets is at the splashy, effects-driven, fluffy end of the movie sci-fi scale, then Marjorie Prime stands at the opposite pole. Thoughtful, intimate and driven by the big ideas of sci-fi literature, Michael Almereyda’s film shares some of the brainy, out-there qualities of his earlier work (Nadja, Hamlet) but finds a warmth rare in…

★★★★ OUT 3 NOVEMBER CERT 15 / 92 MINS DIRECTOR Alexandre O. Philippe CAST Alan Barnette, Justin Benson, Peter Bogdanovich, Marco Calavita, Tere Carrubba, Pepijn Caudron PLOT A documentary breaking down the inspirations and influence of Psycho’s famous shower scene, examining in detail its 78 shots and 52 cuts. ALFRED HITCHCOCK WAS a slippery old thing, constantly telling anyone who listened that Psycho was a wind-up, an almighty prank on the viewing public by one of 1960’s few celebrity filmmakers. If he was telling the truth, he sank a lot of graft into a mere wheeze — the shower scene alone took a week to film. Its countless tricks and nuances are the subject of this exhaustive documentary, which breaks down in forensic and fascinating detail just how and why…

★★★★ NETFLIX OUT 3 NOVEMBER EPISODES VIEWED ALL WRITTEN BY Sarah Polley CAST Sarah Gadon, Edward Holcroft, Zachary Levi, David Cronenberg PLOT Dr Jordan (Holcroft) arrives in P8TOs Toronto to interview convicted murderer Grace Marks (Gadon). As she reveals her life before the incident, he struggles to reconcile this apparently meek woman with her alleged crimes. AFTER LAST MONTH’S Mindhunters, Netflix continues its (unofficial) ‘Talking With Murderers’ season with an adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace. Once again, a notorious convicted killer is examined by a psychologist anxious to unravel their mystery, but it’s unclear whether Grace is even guilty, to what extent, and whether she was actually justified in any case. Sarah Gadon plays Grace Marks, a (real-life) poor Irish immigrant to Canada in the 1840s who escapes her…

★★★★★ OUT NOW FORMATS PC, PS4, XBOX ONE DIRECTORS JB Blanc, Michael de Plater CAST Troy Baker, Alastair Duncan, Laura Bailey, Robin Atkin Downes, Jennifer Hale, Steve Blum PLOT Ranger Talion (Baker) and Celebrimbor (Duncan), the elf spirit possessing him, forge a new Ring Of Power to try to defeat Sauron (Blum). But they swiftly lose it to giant spider Shelob (Pollyanna McIntosh), who can also appear in human form. SEVERAL HOURS INTO Middle-earth: Shadow Of War Talion (Baker), the player’s character, gets the chance to ride a drake (basically a dragon) to survey an orc-occupied fortress from the sky above, before commanding his mount to breathe a steady stream of flame onto the green-skinned foes below. As these adversaries are cooked from a safe distance, Talion’s orc allies —…

PREVIOUS SPREAD: LINDA R. CHEN “Are you gonna bark all day, little doggie or are you gonna bite?” Lawrence Bender (producer): I first met Quentin at a summer party. Then we ran into each other again in the line for a 3D midnight screening of House Of Wax. He had already written this script called True Romance and said, “Next I’m gonna write a jewellery-heist thriller.” Roger Avary (friend of Tarantino/co-writer of Pulp Fiction ): Quentin and I were trying to get True Romance made, with him directing and me producing. We were running into roadblocks. One day, while walking around the Miracle Mile of Los Angeles, we discussed that it was cheaper and easier to get short films made, and if we got three filmmakers together…

Brown Ambition “In those days, Quentin was just euphoric and on a natural high from being allowed to do what he wanted to do. He was flying on adrenaline. He was not only getting to make a movie, but he was starring in it too. His dream was to be an actor originally, so that was important to him. We all knew, both in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, that he was pretty terrible as an actor. But he didn’t care. He knew that he sucked, he knew that everyone else knew that he sucked, and he still wanted to be in it!” Gun Play “It looks like Tim [Roth] was so bored he was on the verge of suicide. You can see the prop guy on the floor behind…

THE ORIGINAL 1990S INCARNATION OF TWIN PEAKSINFECTED THE TELEVISION LANDSCAPE AND POP CULTURE AT LARGE FOREVER. Its effects are still seismically rippling, the mere title an evergreen touchpoint for anything approaching small-town surrealism. So when word hit a few years back that co-creators David Lynch and Mark Frost were resurrecting the series, mouths foamed and minds boggled. What joy it would be to hang out with old friends, to luxuriate in a bit of nostalgia. Right? Wrong. The third season was a beast, actively defying such decadent notions. When we left Twin Peaks in 1991, FBI agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) had been trapped in the Black Lodge, swapped on the outside for a doppelgänger inhabited by evil spirit BOB, and for the revival Lynch and Frost ran with the…

Bright is almost done. It’s late September 2017 and there are only some musical cues left to drop in; otherwise we’re good to go and director David Ayer, sitting in his office in Silver Lake, LA, accompanied by barky dogs, is buoyant. Bright, a genre-bending, R-rated stew of LAPD grit and Tolkien-esque fantasy, seems to have ended up exactly as intended, and he sounds relieved. His positivity has context. In January this year, in response to a Twitter compliment about Suicide Squad, Ayer broke into unprompted candour. “Wish I had a time machine,” he wrote. “I’d make Joker the main villain and engineer a more grounded story.” As his tweets went on, it became clear how hurt he was by critical responses to the film, which made $745 million at…

“HOW MANY YEARS is it now?” asks M. Emmet Walsh, who memorably portrayed Blood Simple’s private eye Loren Visser, first of many villainous windbags to crop up in the films of Joel and Ethan Coen. Thirty-three years have passed since this keenly plotted tale of vengeful husbands, cheating partners and corpse disposal proclaimed a singular cinematic voice with two brains. Indeed, the three-minute tighter Directors’ Cut could easily be their latest release. Not only does it contains most of their hallmarks, it also defined the attitude that has served the Coen brothers well since... PREPARATION WAS EVERYTHING… The Coens took a leaf out of the book of their friend and sometime colleague Sam Raimi, who had raised money for The Evil Dead, by going door-to-door among the dentists and wealthy…

#18 RICK EDWARDS ON GRAVITY THE IDEA BEHIND Empire’s First Take Club is simple: each month, we ask a famous type to watch a film they haven’t seen before then write about it. The catch: it must come from our 301 Greatest Movies Of All Time list, published in 2014. This month’s First-Taker is an almost unfeasibly tall TV broadcaster, whose new book tackles the thorny issue of science in the movies. So, Rick Edwards, how come Alfonso Cuarón’s Oscar-winning sci-fi thriller, Gravity , passed you by? There are few things that will put me off anything more than insistent recommendations. I’m talking about the type that veer from ‘thoughtful suggestion’ to ‘accusatory command’. I was getting a lot of the latter when…

ALAMY, PIERRE FUTSCH THERE’S AN ART TO crafting a good setlist. To start with a quiet one, or hit ’em loud and hit ’em hard from the off? That is the question. Do you deluge an audience with the hits, or throw in a few deep cuts for the real fans? Those decisions have been on Hans Zimmer’s mind for the last couple of years as he’s been travelling the world, with an orchestra, playing tracks from his extensive back catalogue of movie scores. We asked the German composer to give us an insight into his setlist choices... DRIVING/DISCOMBOBULATE/ ZOOSTERS BREAKOUT For a man capable of LOUD NOISES, the show starts with Zimmer, alone, playing the theme from Driving Miss Daisy on a piano. “I used to have stage fright,…

Ethan Hawke says: “Mine would be the “Goddammit, at least I tried” scene from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest . Jack Nicholson bets them all that he can rip the sink out, but he can’t. And then he says to them, “At least I tried!” That scene has been a huge inspiration to me my whole life. I remember being 14 and being ripped up about him showing them the importance of trying — that you don’t need to do it, but if something is worth doing, then it’s worth all of us trying. And it relates to me in regards to the arts because I think a lot of people struggle with insecurity — why should I make a movie when there are so many great movies that…