Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2018 i Empire

AN ADAPTATION OF a 1962 science-fantasy novel about an American teenager who has to travel through time and space to rescue her scientist father may not initially seem like the obvious choice for award-winning director of Selma and 13th, Ava DuVernay. But there was one person who thought it was perfect for her. That person was Tendo Nagenda, Executive Vice President of Production at Walt Disney Studios. “He championed me as the director of this film and brought the material my way,” she remembers. “He said, ‘Ava, imagine the world you can build.’ I thought, ‘What is he talking about?’ Then I read it.” DuVernay herself has always enjoyed sci-fi and fantasy and speaks of its importance to marginalised people, while recognising its current and historical limitations in culture. “It…

WHEN THE FIRST trailer for Proud Mary dropped back in July — featuring two minutes of Hidden Figures star Taraji P. Henson frantically firing bullets every which way, set to Tina Turner’s Proud Mary cover, naturally — comparisons were quickly and rather unimaginatively drawn to John Wick and Atomic Blonde. As it turns out, there is a loose connection to the Wick universe (director of photography Dan Laustsen worked on both John Wick Chapter 2 and Proud Mary), but director Babak Najafi insists those films are not an influence. “To be honest, I haven’t seen them,” says the Swedish-Iranian director. “I just didn’t want to have any influence or flavour, even subconsciously.” Viewers might be forgiven for spotting similarities between the trigger-happy assassins, but a more obvious inspiration might be…

IT WAS AROUND three years ago when Lionsgate pitched director Otto Bathurst the idea of a Robin Hood reboot. “It was the easiest ‘no’ ever,” he laughs. “Why does the world need another Robin Hood movie?” It’s a fair question. There have been more than 70 filmed versions of the folk tale, but Bathurst feels he has found a fresh way into the 800-year-old legend. Featuring a non-classically trained cast — Taron Egerton as Robin Hood, plus Jamie Foxx, Ben Mendelsohn, Jamie Dornan, Tim Minchin and Eve Hewson — his approach is decidedly modern. No tights, no thigh slapping, no Bryan Adams. This is a Robin Hood for 2018. “We’re trying to flesh out a reality to the legend that has relevance to what we see in the world today,”…

IT’S HARD TO summarise 2017’s Palme d’Or winner in a sentence. A sprawling, surreal Swedish satire with flashes of eccentric genius, The Square tells the story of Christian (Claes Bang), an art gallery owner and divorced father of two, who steams up into a paranoid fury after the theft of his mobile phone. The satirical element stems from the fact that the latest art installation at his Stockholm gallery is supposed to be “a sanctuary of trust and caring”, and yet Christian, throughout the film, is shown repeatedly to be suspicious and selfish. To research the film, director Ruben Östlund (who won praise for 2014’s Force Majeure) visited a slew of contemporary art museums. “What I saw,” he says, “was that they have pretty much the same things in those…

★★★★★ OUT 12 JANUARY CERT 15 / 115 MINS DIRECTOR Martin McDonagh CAST Frances McDormand, Sam Rockwell, Woody Harrelson, Lucas Hedges, Clarke Peters, Abbie Cornish, Peter Dinklage PLOT Mildred Hayes (McDormand) is seeking justice for her dead daughter, provoking local police — including sympathetic Chief Bill Willoughby (Harrelson) and racist officer Jason Dixon (Rockwell) — into action by paying for messages on three giant billboards. But will Mildred ever get that justice, and who’ll still be standing when she’s through seeking it? THE THIRD FILM written and directed by profane poet Martin McDonagh is a rough meditation on the true nature of loss, grief and vengeance. Yet, it is not a tale simply of loss, grief and vengeance. And it’s certainly not the simple tale you presume it to be…

★★★ OUT 26 DECEMBER CERT TBC / 95 MINS DIRECTOR Michael Gracey CAST Hugh Jackman, Michelle Williams, Zac Efron, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson PLOT P.T. Barnum (Jackman) is a near-penniless dreamer determined to build a better life for himself and wife Charity (Williams). A circus brings profit but not respectability — so he gambles it all on a tour for opera singer Jenny Lind (Ferguson). A YEAR AGO, La La Land was hailed as the saviour of the movie musical, but it only went so far, aping the look but not the tone of the old classics. The Greatest Showman, on the other hand, is an unabashed throwback, consciously modelling itself on the likes of Carousel and The Greatest Show On Earth, but adding modern pop tunes and a whole heap…

★★ OUT 5 JANUARY CERT 12A / 105 MINS DIRECTOR Steven Quale CAST J.K. Simmons, Ewen Bremner, Sylvia Hoeks, Sullivan Stapleton, Clemens Schick, Charlie Bewley PLOT When US Navy SEALS stumble on Nazi gold at the bottom of a Bosnian lake, they embark on a rogue mission to recover it for the rightful owner, while avoiding the firepower of local militants. EVEN LUC BESSON’S most ardent fans would admit that the Bessoniverse has been a patchy place, flitting between nailed-to-wall action classics (Leon) to guilty pleasures (Lucy) to full-throated disasters (The Family). Renegades boasts a Besson script, if not his sparkly directorial hand, but the fact that this film’s release date has been pushed back by nearly two years might hint as to which end of the scale it falls.…

★★★★ OUT 19 JANUARY CERT 15 / 135 MINS DIRECTOR Alexander Payne CAST Matt Damon, Kristen Wiig, Christoph Waltz, Hong Chau PLOT Norwegian scientists discover how to shrink humans to 5” tall as a solution to the planet’s overcrowding problem. Strapped for cash, Paul Safranek (Damon) and his wife Audrey (Wiig) volunteer for the scheme to get a better life, fully aware that the process is irreversible. GIVEN THAT ALEXANDER Payne is perhaps best known for humanist road trips across a kooky if recognisable America — About Schmidt, Sideways, Nebraska — it is easy to forget his 1999 calling card, Election, runs thick with satire. It’s a quality that courses through Downsizing, which adds new colours for Payne to play with. Ambitious, playful, thoughtful and emotional, Downsizing takes a Pixar-level…

★★★★ OUT NOW CERT 12A / 152 MINS. DIRECTOR Rian Johnson CAST Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Adam Driver, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Domhnall Gleeson, Andy Serkis, Kelly Marie Tran, Laura Dern, Benicio Del Toro PLOT The Resistance, led by General Leia (Fisher), are on the run. As the First Order close in, their only hope is if Rey (Ridley) can tempt Jedi Master Luke Skywalker (Hamill) back to the fight. “THIS IS NOT going to go the way you think!” Luke Skywalker warns Rey on the Jedi Temple island of Ahch-To. It sounds like a quote designed for a trailer but now feels like the opening line from Rian Johnson’s pitch. The Last Jedi delivers everything you want from a Star Wars movie — fierce lightsaber action, space…

★★★★ OUT 12 JANUARY CERT PG / 125 MINS DIRECTOR Joe Wright CAST Gary Oldman, Lily James, Ben Mendelsohn, Kristin Scott Thomas PLOT May, 1940. With Hitler rampant and Europe on the brink, Prime Minister Winston Churchill (Oldman) is under pressure. Calls are intensifying for him to make peace, but he resolves to fight on, whatever the cost. WITH DARKEST HOUR, director Joe Wright takes history at its most momentous, wraps it around a figure who couldn’t be more iconic, and places this rich but heavy package almost entirely in the hands of Gary Oldman. An actor who, despite his chameleonic aptitude and emotive heft, has astonishingly received only a single Oscar nomination (for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, in 2012). If this film can’t change that, nothing will. Complemented rather…

★★★ OUT 5 JANUARY CERT TBC / 102 MINS DIRECTOR Mike White CAST Ben Stiller, Austin Abrams, Michael Sheen, Jenna Fischer, Jemaine Clement, Luke Wilson PLOT Brad Sloan (Stiller) has a loving wife and a talented, music-loving son. But he’s fuelled by envy, anger and self-loathing, all of which come to the boil during a visit to Harvard University. YOU COULD FILL a very large sack with all of the sadsacks played by Ben Stiller over the past two decades. From Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums to Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg, via The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty and Flirting With Disaster, the star has found a groove playing neurotic, tightly coiled middle-aged men trying to get to grips with the meaning of life. Brad’s Status continues the trend — writer-director…

★★ NETFLIX OUT 22 DECEMBER DIRECTOR David Ayer CAST Will Smith, Joel Edgerton, Lucy Fry, Noomi Rapace PLOT In an alternate Los Angeles where fantasy creatures are a fact of life, Detective Ward (Smith) and his orc partner Jakoby (Edgerton) respond to a call, only to discover a terrified elf (Fry) with a magical artefact that practically everyone is willing to kill for. IF YOU CAN imagine a world in which Peter Jackson’s The Lord Of The Rings is classed as a historical documentary, then you’re not far off the setting of David Ayer’s Bright. Two thousand years after ‘The Dark Lord’ was defeated, a menagerie of fantasy creatures co-exist in modern America. Elves swan around Rodeo Drive shopping for Gucci loafers, fairies sift through rubbish like sparkly, winged raccoons,…

★★★★ NETFLIX OUT 29 DECEMBER EPISODES VIEWED 6 CREATED BY Charlie Brooker CAST Kiran Sonia Sawar, Andrea Riseborough, Joe Cole, Georgina Campbell, Rosemarie DeWitt, Jesse Plemons, Michaela Coel PLOT A memory-scanning insurance claim investigator, two singletons navigating a matchmaking platform, a retro space adventure and the parental filter you can insert into a child’s head... Charlie Brooker’s dark tech-themed anthology series returns with six more twisted tales. FOUR SERIES AND six years into its disquieting existence, Black Mirror returns at something of a critical stage. It’s not only that real life is increasingly putting Netflix’s dystopian anthology series out of business. No, more specifically, plenty of viewers will simply be wondering how creator Charlie Brooker will follow a breakthrough like ‘San Junipero’: the uncharacteristically hopeful 2016 episode that became an…

MICHAEL B. JORDAN IS... VILLAIN ERIK KILLMONGER You’re playing a villain for the first time! For me, this is a chance for me to go furthest away from who I am. As far as just the darkness of the guy. Because the guy was really dark, even though you may empathise with him, and understand his point of view. I think that the greatest villains are the ones where you can see their point of view. How did you get into the psyche of this character? It took me to a dark place. Honestly, I can’t really go through all I went through to get into it because I want to keep that close to me. But it stuck with me afterwards. You see performances as an actor, and as…

BY NOW, WE’RE used to seeing people legging it from prehistoric beasts on screen. So Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is going to give us something fresh: people running towards them. “One of the ideas in this film is that the world has flipped upside down,” director J.A. Bayona tells Empire. “Our heroes are on a rescue mission; they’re trying to save the dinosaurs. I had a lot of fun designing shots which homage moments from the previous movies, but with humans taking the place of animals.” There’s a very good reason for this radical switcheroo. A reason that’s hundreds of feet tall, angry, and belching torrents of red-hot lava. It turns out that Islar Nublar, that ill-fated tropical island 120 miles to the west of Costa Rica, was a terrible…

FOLLOWING MIDDLE-EARTH, Skull Island, the afterlife, and wherever it was the Feebles were infesting, Peter-Jackson-watchers have been eagerly awaiting news of where he and his world-building crew might head next. The answer: London. Only it’s not the UK capital as you know it, but London 2,000 years in the future, transformed into a multi-tiered edifice from the wreckage of global obliteration. Pictured here via exclusive concept art, think Minas Tirith with Tube signage. Running on titanic wheels, it hunts down smaller, weaker cities or towns, and gobbles up their resources. “It’s called Municipal Darwinism,” says Jackson, “and I thought, ‘I have never seen this before.”’ Wait until visual-effects wizards Weta Digital get hold of not only battleship-like cities cruising the dried-up bed of the North Sea, but dog-fighting airships, cloud-level…

“THE THING I said when putting this idea to people,” says director Josie Rourke, “was, ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing if you could do a Renaissance version of Heat with two women?’” This is the highly compelling pitch for Mary Queen Of Scots, a face-off between Saoirse Ronan’s titular, tragic monarch, and her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I (Margot Robbie). To be clear, no-one should be on the look out for anachronistic automatic rifles or Scottish lairds sporting Val Kilmer ponytails. But Rourke’s vision — the tale of Mary’s doomed marriages and thwarted attempt to seize the English throne, told with a somewhat modern sensibility — has permeated every corner of the Working Title production. “The language is period but the pace of it is like a thriller,” adds Ronan. Guy Pearce,…

WHEN YOU’VE THREATENED the planet five times, unleashed a robot with massive wrecking-ball testicles and featured the line, “How do you say, ‘Get the fuck out of the way’ in Chinese?”, there’s only one direction to turn the volume dial: down. Hence Bumblebee, the very first Transformers spin-off movie and one which promises to change the pace in drastic ways. “We’ve talked a lot about Logan,” explains executive producer Chris Brigham. “A great example of a large franchise that went small, in a successful way.” The first fresh element: a new director. After delivering a quintet of gigantically scaled robo-thrillers, Michael Bay is stepping aside (although is still on board as producer), and animation dynamo Travis Knight (Kubo And The Two Strings) is coming in, with the ambition of making…

AMERICAN PIE HAD pastry-fucking. Sausage Party had a food orgy. And next year’s big R-rated comedy, Blockers, is about to get everyone talking about “butt-chugging”. The tale of three parents (John Cena, Leslie Mann and Ike Barinholtz) desperately trying to interfere with their daughters’ pact to lose their virginities on prom night, it has as its central set-piece a sequence in which beer is pumped into Cena’s rectum. “That scene broke me,” chuckles director Kay Cannon. “It was two in the morning, John was bent over with hundreds of extras in prom dresses around him, and I was laughing so hard I couldn’t speak. He was so game, but he was very excited when it was over.” Formerly titled Cherries, the script featured on the Black List back in 2012.…

Jason Reitman promises a ‘return to form’ comeback with TULLY (20 Apr), re-teaming with his Juno/ Young Adult partner-in-snark Diablo Cody for a “comedy about motherhood” starring Charlize Theron... Once a James Cameron movie, now a Robert Rodriguez joint (produced by James Cameron), sci-fi manga adaptation ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL (19 July) will feature cutting-edge cyborg antics… There’s no stopping Tom Cruise, it seems — not even a broken leg — as MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 6 (26 July) proves. Yep, Ethan Hunt is back for more rubber-mask, stunt-heavy antics, along with pretty much everyone else, plus series newbie Vanessa Kirby (aka Princess Margaret from The Crown)... Shane Black’s gone from being killed by a Predator (in the 1987 original) to directing one in THE PREDATOR (2 Aug) — his attempt, he says,…

00:01:21 MONSTER, INK __ The opening scene of S. Craig Zahler’s insanely violent Brawl In Cell Block 99 showcases its usually wisecracking star, Vince Vaughn, in a way that lets you know this is not going to be Dodgeball 2: shot from behind, with a massive cross tattoo on the back of his shaven head. “That’s a strong way for the character to enter,” says Zahler. “Coming at him back to front is a way in which you’re going character first.” 00:07:47 COMPLETE CAR-NAGE __ After Vaughn’s Bradley is a) laid off and b) finds his wife Lauren (Jennifer Carpenter) has been cheating on him, he takes out his anger on his car, systematically ripping it apart with his bare hands. “It was a real car,” recalls Vaughn. “Some things…

“IF WE MADE Singin’ In The Rain today,” the film’s co-director Stanley Donen suggested to The New York Times in 1996, “when Gene Kelly sings in the rain, I think he’d be looking around to make sure he wasn’t going to get mugged.” An incongruous notion indeed — the most iconic sequence in the Greatest Movie Musical Ever Made, Kelly’s hoofing through a rain-swept street is exuberance incarnate, exemplified by his much-copied joyous swing on a lamp post. Written in 1927, the song, with words by Arthur Freed and music by Nacio Herb Brown, was designed to be sung by Don (Kelly), Kathy (Debbie Reynolds) and Cosmo (Donald O’Connor), emerging from a restaurant following the flop preview of film-within a film The Duelling Cavalier, a celebration of changing the film-to-the-musical.…

1 SKARSGåRD’S CHARACTER HAS BEEN MUTE SINCE CHILDHOOD “Leo [Beiler] was in a boating accident, and his vocal cords were severed when he was nine. He could have had an operation to save his voice, but his Amish mom basically said, ‘God will heal Leo.’ For his entire adolescence, he was waiting for God to heal him. He didn’t learn sign language because, well, why would he? He was like, ‘God will heal me any day now.’ He has a sense of abandonment, trying to find his place in the world.” 2 LEO IS A FISH-OUT-OF-WATER “Leo left the Amish community when he was in his early twenties, bringing only one suitcase and one suit with him [to Berlin]. He doesn’t have any contact with his mom anymore. She kind…

IMAGINE IF DEATH was not the end of your life but merely a minor inconvenience. That’s the world that Netflix’s new sci-fi-noir series Altered Carbon imagines: set 500 years in the future, it depicts a society in which humans can live indefinitely, with memories saved to a digital ‘stack’ in your spinal column and constantly re-uploaded to a new body (a ‘sleeve’). Originating as a novel by British writer Richard K. Morgan, it was planned as a movie, but the vastness of Morgan’s 26th-century universe could not be contained in two hours. “Frankly, it was too dense,” says executive producer and showrunner Laeta Kalogridis, who approached Morgan directly for the rights. “The world he created is too deep and rich.” So it became a ten-hour Netflix show, with more than…

FROM DAZED AND Confused to Everybody Wants Some!! to the epochal Boyhood, Texan director Richard Linklater has long specialised in telling stories about flawed, interesting men having lengthy conversations about everything and nothing. Last Flag Flying certainly falls into that category, but it’s less about misspent youth: based on the book by Darryl Ponicsan, this is a melancholy, nostalgic tale about three middle-aged Vietnam vets who reunite when one of them (Doc, played by Steve Carell) loses his Marine son to the Iraq war. “That’s what I loved about it,” says Bryan Cranston, who plays fast-talkin’, fast-drinkin’ Marine-turned-bar owner Sal. “It explores male bonding, but also how men deal with pain and tragedy: how aggressive they are with it, how they find ways to justify it, how they cope with…

IF RECENT BRITISH cinema is anything to go by, England’s fields are rich and fertile with stories. There was the folk horror of The Levelling, then the rural romance of God’s Own Country — and the latest in this loose trend is Dark River, the new film from British director Clio Barnard (The Selfish Giant), which depicts a down-at-heel Yorkshire tenant’s farm as the backdrop to a story of a sexually abusive father (played by Sean Bean) whose actions haunt estranged siblings Alice (The Affair’s Ruth Wilson) and Joe (Game Of Thrones’ Mark Stanley). “I really love the place,” says Barnard of her home county. “But I feel a frustration in the way the landscape can be romanticised and objectified.” In order to show the countryside unsentimentally, Barnard’s two lead…

TOMB RAIDER IS a big deal for Norwegian director Roar Uthaug. He’s made features before, but only in his native tongue — this Lara Croft reboot, starring Alicia Vikander, is his first big studio picture. And if that didn’t invite enough pressure, he also has to contend with the issue that there’s never been a good film based on a game. But he thinks he knows how to crack it. “It’s about making the character the focus,” he says. “It’s about what she experiences, and not just action for action’s sake. I love how they made Lara Croft vulnerable in the game, and that’s something we’re bringing to the movie. But there’s lots of great stuff in the game that’s inspired us — the authenticity and the grittiness. That’s something…

IN A NEAR 50-year career, Dame Helen Mirren has never made a horror movie. There’s the vaguely sinister teen thriller Teaching Mrs. Tingle, and she was a bit of a beast in Monsters University, but there’s nothing on her CV too spooky. Winchester is a first for the Oscar-winning actor, with all the trappings of a good, old-fashioned chiller: a haunted house, lavish gothic costumes, jump scares — and ghosts. Mirren, however, disagrees. “I wouldn’t call this a horror movie,” she tells Empire. “It’s a psychological drama.” A beat. “With ghosts,” she laughs. Whatever genre it falls into, Winchester is based on a mysterious real-life figure. Mirren plays Sarah Winchester, the widow and heir of gun tycoon William Wirt Winchester. She spent her fortune building a vast San Jose mansion,…

IT’S BEEN SIX years since we’ve seen a film from Lynne Ramsay, which is frankly cruel, given she’s one of Britain’s best directors. Finally, following 2011’s superb We Need To Talk About Kevin, Ramsay is back with perhaps her best work, a project that initially sounds very un-Ramsay-ish. You Were Never Really Here, an adaptation of a novella by Jonathan Ames, stars Joaquin Phoenix as Joe, an ‘enforcer’ who rescues children from paedophile rings, and does so as violently as necessary, but only as necessary. In other hands it could be a very conventional thriller with the attention on the fights and the glorification of the anti-hero. Ramsay’s view is different. She implies violence while rarely showing it and delves into the core of a man who saves others but…

★★★★ OUT 5 JANUARY CERT 15 / 133 MINS DIRECTOR Scott Cooper CAST Christian Bale, Rosamund Pike, Wes Studi, Jesse Plemons, Rory Cochrane PLOT New Mexico, P892. Army captain Joe Blocker (Bale) is tasked with escorting a dying Native American chief (Studi) and his family to their home in Montana. It is a journey fraught with danger — from outside threats, and also from within the party itself. IN THE FIRST few minutes of Scott Cooper’s Western, a man is gunned down and scalped, before his two screaming daughters and swaddled infant are shot dead. All in front of their mother, Rosalie Quaid — superbly played by Rosamund Pike with a strange kind of brittle strength (at least after the mind-scrambling trauma ebbs a little). Things don’t get much easier…

★★★★ OUT 19 JANUARY CERT 12A / 116 MINS DIRECTOR Steven Spielberg CAST Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Bob Odenkirk, Bradley Whitford, Bruce Greenwood, Sarah Paulson PLOT When a classified government study about the Vietnam war is leaked to the press, Washington Post owner Kay Graham (Streep) and editor Ben Bradlee (Hanks) are keen to publish exposés. Standing in their way? Only the US government. THE WASHINGTON POST and the US government have previous. Famously. It is, after all, the paper that brought down a presidency — its months-long investigation into a break-in at the Watergate Hotel forcing Nixon into a no-win ‘resign or be impeached’ quandary. (He resigned.) But that’s not the only run-in it’s had — before Watergate, there were the ‘Pentagon Papers’. First, the history lesson: commissioned by…

THERE’S A SENSE of discomfiture when watching The Last Jedi. It’s a subtle, nagging feeling; hard to pin down but impossible to ignore. It’s a sensation of unfamiliarity: that, having expected to see an old friend, you’ve just met someone new. Someone interesting and magnetic, who you’d like to know a whole lot better. And you’re going to get the chance, because that person is Rian Johnson and in November, Kathleen Kennedy, devourer of film directors, handed him the keys to the Star Wars universe. On the strength of The Last Jedi, he was granted carte blanche to forge a fresh trilogy of his own devising, one that will form the basis for Star Wars going forward. No writers’ room, no story groups, no world-building by committee. Rather, the singular…

★★★ OUT 20 DECEMBER CERT 12A / 119 MINS DIRECTOR Jake Kasdan CAST Dwayne Johnson, Jack Black, Karen Gillan, Kevin Hart, Madison Iseman, Alex Wolff PLOT Four teenagers serving detention are sucked into a video game called Jumanji. Finding themselves embodying avatars, they must find a way back to the real world before they run out of lives. SO, IT’S COME to this: Hollywood’s increasingly desperate search for IP — any IP — that can be mined for a few coppers has led to Jumanji. The 1995 Joe Johnston original, based on Chris Van Allsburg’s book, is perhaps best remembered for groundbreaking (at the time) CGI and a fun Robin Williams lead turn, but it was built on the fascinating idea of a mischievous board game that comes to life.…

★★★★★ OUT 19 JANUARY CERT U / 109 MINS DIRECTORS Lee Unkrich, Adrian Molina CAST Anthony Gonzalez, Gael García Bernal, Benjamin Bratt, Alanna Ubach PLOT Miguel (Gonzalez) is a P2-year-old boy whose family have banned music. He longs to play, but when he steals a guitar belonging to his deceased icon, Ernesto De La Cruz (Bratt), he’s transported to the Land Of The Dead and must escape before dawn. AFTER INSIDE OUT, Pixar dips again into the metaphysical with a trip into the afterlife. Of course, being Pixar, it doesn’t simply slip beyond a veil but stride across a gigantic arched bridge made of marigolds, because there’s no concept so difficult that Pixar can’t make it breathtaking. Powell and Pressburger would cheer. While this film packs in adventure and desperately…

★★★★ NETFLIX OUT NOW EPISODES VIEWED ALL CREATED BY Peter Morgan CAST Claire Foy, Matt Smith, Vanessa Kirby, Anton Lesser, Matthew Goode, Victoria Hamilton, Pip Torrens PLOT Picking up in 1956, a year after the conclusion of the first season, we follow Queen Elizabeth II (Foy) through the tumultuous early phase of her reign, from the Suez Crisis to the Profumo Affair in ’63. IF ABSOLUTE POWER corrupts, then what does constitutional (ie purely symbolic) power do to somebody? That’s the question at the centre of Peter Morgan’s grand plan to dramatise the entire reign of Queen Elizabeth in six Netflix Original seasons. So in this second ten-episode set — sadly, the last in which we’ll see the excellent Claire Foy don the royal cardies — we repeatedly find her…

Niko Tavernise, Alamy meryl streep (20 oscar nominations, three wins) and tom hanks (5 nominations, two wins) can’t remember the first time they met. It might have been at a Shakespeare In The Park production of Macbeth. Or at one of the countless awards bashes where they probably gave ridiculously witty acceptance speeches. Streep thinks she met Hanks’ wife Rita first, but isn’t sure. The only cast-iron fact is they have never shared the big screen together. Until now. Fittingly, it took a filmmaker of Steven Spielberg’s stature to bring the titans together. Set in 1971, The Post centres on The Washington Post’s race against The New York Times to publish the previously suppressed ‘Pentagon Papers’, revealing the level of US involvement in Vietnam. Streep is the Post’s publisher Katharine…

“WE’RE LOOKING AT what we did the first time around and going, ‘Okay, come on, let’s push things forward,’” Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them director David Yates told Empire in February 2017. “How do we take people by surprise? We need to do that on the next one.” Flash forward almost a year, and the sequel’s surprises are still being concealed more cunningly than Rowena Ravenclaw’s diadem. What we do know is that while characters from the original film are back, Newt (Eddie Redmayne) and Tina (Katherine Waterston) will be encountering a host of new friends and foes. Here’s our wand-by-wand update. 1. GELLERT GRINDELWALD (JOHNNY DEPP) The darkest of dark wizards, Grindelwald caused mischief in the first film disguised via magic as Percival Graves (Colin Farrell). This…

MEET HAKUJA, RAIJIN and Shrikethorn, on the rampage through 2035 MegaTokyo. According to the classification system set up in Guillermo del Toro’s 2013 original, Hakuja (left) and Shrikethorn (right) are Category 4 Kaiju, while, Raijin, the big brute in the middle, is a Category 5 badass. “Raijin is bi-pedal, more T-Rex-like,” explains visual-effects supervisor Peter Chiang. “He’s almost got a Venus-flytrap head that enables him to close up in defence mode. He has the ability to absorb energy from any attack and then use it to power his body to use it as a weapon.” Hakuja, meanwhile, is a “praying-mantis/mole/alligator-type thing that burrows”, and Shrikethorn “has plasma spears he can fire”. To make things worse for human stars John Boyega and Scott Eastwood, the Kaiju are also sharper. “They are…

PRODUCED BY STEVEN Soderbergh and George Clooney in the wake of their breezy heist trilogy, Ocean’s Eight rejigs the formula again — this time featuring the mother of all-girl gangs. Directed by Gary Ross, the spin-off stars Sandra Bullock as Danny Ocean’s sister Debbie, determined to score a huge heist at New York’s glitzy Met Gala. Targeting her ex-lover (Damian Lewis), Debbie puts together a formidable crew, featuring, among others, Cate Blanchett as Lou, Sarah Paulson as Tammy and Rihanna as Nine Ball (all pictured above). “It was like being in a really good band,” Ross tells Empire of the star-packed shoot. “There were days I’d just sit back and watch the alchemy happen.” Sounds like the winning streak continues.…

1. DUKE (JEFF GOLDBLUM) “A bohemian mountain-dog. Slender face, sleek ears, and a ballet-dancer’s overly nimble gait. He has seven missing teeth and a consumptive dry-cough. He is Duke.” 2. CHIEF (BRYAN CRANSTON) “A coal-black hound with long legs, black nose, a boxer’s jaw, and floppy, black ears with white spots all over them. He has the sturdy frame of a middle-weight, but the starved mass of a long-distance runner. He is Chief.” 3. REX (EDWARD NORTON) “A wiry, wire-haired mutt with spiky, mottled coat and the eyes of an Arctic sled-dog. His ribs stick out like a cast-iron radiator. He is Rex.” 4. BOSS (BILL MURRAY) “A stout, liver-spotted mutt with black paws and a tail like a stubbed-out cigar. He wears a soiled, grimy, unravelling, striped, woollen dog-sweater…

THAT THANOS HAS a serious set of stones on him. Or he will, if the sinister purple-hued alien facing off against Earth’s Mightiest Heroes in Avengers: Infinity War has his way and unites the Infinity Stones, the multi-coloured MacGuffins that have been fuelling the Marvel Cinematic Universe almost since it began in 2008. But what are they? Where are they? What will happen if they all come together? Read on for our helpful gem-guide. THE SOUL STONE AKA: TBC The only Infinity Stone we haven’t yet seen (or have we? etc etc), speculation is rife about the Soul Stone, which has the power (in the comics, anyway) to encase souls inside other dimensions. A betting man would say the smart money is on it being in Black Panther’s African kingdom…

BASES ON THEIR SILHOUETTES alone, Guillermo del Toro and Doug Jones are a match made in heaven. One is tall and almost cartoonishly thin; the other is shorter and, by his own admission, squatter. It’s a classic combination. Little and Large. Del Boy and Rodders. The Pixar lamp and ball come to life. Silhouettes, though, only matter if you’re a comedy duo with music halls to pack out. Instead, del Toro and Jones are judged by a different metric — their unforgettable work together on six of del Toro’s meticulously crafted fantasies. Here’s how it works: del Toro, the Mexican maestro, comes up with characters that seemingly nobody on Earth could play: ethereal, eerie, elegant. Then Jones, a 57-year-old American who doesn’t look remotely like he’s 57, somehow plays them,…

Alamy THE IRON GIANT WAS AN outdated relic before construction was even complete. Post-Toy Story, many studios were starting to wind down their ‘traditional animation’ divisions and throwing their weight behind computer-generated techniques. With its thick lines, block colours and small-town scale, The Iron Giant looked like a cartoon from decades ago. Audiences want shiny spectacle, was the general industry line. And when Brad Bird’s film underperformed at the box office, that line seemed justified. Yet the late-flowering and lasting popularity of The Iron Giant is proof that spectacle is secondary. What audiences really want is a great story. Very loosely adapted from Ted Hughes’ 1968 novel — unlike Hughes’ book, Brad Bird’s film features zero space-dragons — The Iron Giant is about living up to your own expectations and…

MOST DIRECTORS TAKE a couple of years between their movies being released. Doug Liman’s taking three weeks. This month sees the Liman double bill of American Made, his globe-trotting ’80s crime biopic, and The Wall, a stripped-down Iraqi War thriller. We asked Liman to compare and contrast… THE PREMISE American Made, shot in 2015, follows the fortunes of Barry Seal, a maverick pilot-smuggler who was recruited by the CIA to run guns into Colombia. “I’ve done other spy movies, but the idea of somebody working as a spy for the CIA and profiting outrageously from it was amazing,” says Liman. The Wall, which he shot last year, is much simpler, following a US soldier as he gets pinned down by an Iraqi sniper. That appealed to Liman — not as…

1__ LEAVE IT FOR A FEW YEARS Andy Nyman: “One of the things that made the play work as well as it did was the clichés of horror films on stage — we hadn’t seen that before. What felt complicated to us was taking things that had come from horror films and putting them back into a film without feeling like, ‘Oh, I’ve seen that before.’” Jeremy Dyson: “We wanted some distance from it. We deliberately said: ‘Let’s park it for a bit.” 2__ KEEP THE PRODUCTION AS BRITISH AS THE FILMS THAT INSPIRED IT Dyson: “We came of age at the dawn of VHS and Friday night horror double bills on BBC Two: old ’40s films, Hammer and Amicus, all the great early ’70s British horror films. That wonderful…

THE MAKERS OF Deep Blue Sea may have thought they had turned in the perfect shark-schlock movie — but this summer, there’s a new fish in the sea. The Meg, from National Treasure helmer Jon Turteltaub, is set to make a play for the crown, and the ace up its sleeve is the megalodon of the title: a prehistoric supershark that didn’t get the memo when all its mates went extinct. Luckily, humanity has a pretty solid backer in its corner in the shape of Jason Statham, whose presence adds to the feeling that gritty realism may not be the goal here. So, what’s the recipe for 2018’s most anticipated B movie? SUPERSIZE IT “I mean, who doesn’t want to watch a film about the biggest shark that’s ever existed?”…

What one thing do you do better than anyone else you know? Make my little boy laugh. Actually, I don’t know. I might be a close second to my wife [Laura Haddock]. But doing funny voices. I’m pretty good at animal noises. Sort of bird noises, and weird little whistles. What’s the worst thing you’ve ever put in your mouth? Once, when I was drunk, my little brother went into my fridge and chose a collection of dips and sauces and liquids and poured them all into a pint, and said, “Dare you to drink this.” I drank it. He had to call me the next morning to check I was still alive. Who was your first movie crush? It was actually more from a TV show, and it was…

★★★ OUT 1 JANUARY CERT 15 / 140 MINS DIRECTOR Aaron Sorkin CAST Jessica Chastain, Idris Elba, Kevin Costner, Michael Cera, Chris O’Dowd PLOT Former competitive skier Molly Bloom (Chastain) moves to Los Angeles in search of a fresh start, and finds a career running a high-stakes celebrity poker game. Initially she has wild success, but as she gets deeper, the temptation to cross a line into illegality grows. POKER IS A game of skill rather than chance, but despite the fact that livelihoods and lives can hang on the turn of a card, it has given us no end of heavy-handed and uninvolving films, without even the visual panache of sliding into home base to lift the storytelling. Aaron Sorkin’s based-in-fact directorial debut cleverly sidesteps this by focusing on…

★★ OUT 19 DECEMBER CERT 12A / 93 MINS DIRECTOR Trish Sie CAST Anna Kendrick, Rebel Wilson, Anna Camp, Hailee Steinfeld, Ruby Rose, Elizabeth Banks, Brittany Snow PLOT Post-college life is no picnic for the former Barden Bellas acapella group, so they leap at the chance to reunite for a USO tour of Europe. But up against bands with actual instruments, how will they cope? IT’S WORTH REMEMBERING how charming and fresh Pitch Perfect felt in 2012. It gave Anna Kendrick a role that played to her sceptical strengths, offered a female-led ensemble that didn’t have a weak link and showcased Kay Cannon’s sharp-witted script. The follow-up was still funny, but this third outing sadly follows a law of diminishing returns. Perhaps the problems are baked in to the premise.…

AFTER RYAN COOGLER signed on to direct the biggest movie of his career, his wife Zinzi insisted they go back, together, to the place where it all began, where Black Panther first came into his life. In many respects, it actually began before that first encounter, when Coogler, still a kid, would follow around his comic-book-mad cousin seven years his senior. “He was reading everything, man,” Coogler remembers. “Stuff from Superman, stuff from DC, from Marvel.” With a lifelong appetite seeded in his belly and further cultivated by the X-Men comics that he bought in the shop across the street from his elementary school, Coogler wanted more. And specifically, more of something he hadn’t yet seen. “I was going in there and wanting to find a superhero comic book where…

Steven Spielberg is a happy man. It’s Wednesday 29 November, the morning after the National Board Of Review Awards, and The Post has won Best Film, Best Actress for Meryl Streep and Best Actor for Tom Hanks. “We are so thrilled, it feels like we never won anything before,” he says. Here, the director gives us the lowdown on Streep, making her on-screen debut for the filmmaker, and Hanks, now on his fifth Spielberg film. SPIELBERG ON HANKS: “My favourite performance of Tom’s is always the last performance he gives. Fortunately, in this case, it’s once again for me! “Without any broad strokes, just by making subtle adjustments, Tom can be completely swept into an entirely different characterisation. He’s not only one of our great leading men; he is one…

THE KID WHO Would Be King has been rattling around Joe Cornish’s head for years. Thirty-five years, to be precise, since he had the simple thought as a 13-year-old: “What if a normal kid discovered Excalibur?” Now that idea has become the director’s second movie, a long-awaited follow-up to Attack The Block, in which, once again, a group of youngsters come together to save the world from unspeakable evil in the shape of Rebecca Ferguson’s sorceress, Morgana. Time to meet Alex, Lance, Kaye and Bedders, the new kinda Knights Of The Round Table… 1. RHIANNA DORRIS IS KAYE In Arthurian lore, Sir Kay was one of the first knights to join the king. Here, Kaye is a girl (played by Rhianna Dorris, star of CBBC series Secret Life Of Boys)…

WHEN SOPHIE TURNER learned her Game Of Thrones cast-mate, on-screen Stark sister and real-life pal Maisie Williams, had joined the X-Men universe as Wolfsbane in New Mutants, she was overjoyed. “We compared notes, and we hoped we’d be able to do a crossover at some point, because I can’t not work with her,” Turner laughs. If they’d argued at all about whose mutant hero is the most powerful, it wouldn’t have taken long. Turner’s psychic Jean Grey is, as we saw in the OTT conclusion of 2016’s X-Men: Apocalypse, off the chart. “Yeah, Jean is the most powerful mutant,” says Turner. “But it’s not necessarily a good thing. And you will see that in this movie.” This movie being Dark Phoenix, in which long-time X-Men writer-turned-first-time director Simon Kinberg returns…

BY THE TIME Incredibles 2 comes out, 14 years will have passed since we saw the super-powered Parr family (superstrong Bob, stretchy Helen, speedy Dash, invisible Violet) strut their funky stuff. But despite the time jump IRL, Brad Bird’s movie picks up seconds after the end of the first. “As long as people’s voices didn’t change too much, we were in good shape,” laughs Bird, who returns as writer and director. The reason for the mere blink in time? The Parrs’ baby son, Jack-Jack, who displayed all kinds of abilities at the end of the first film. “People don’t remember that Bob and Helen never see that he has powers, even though it happens in front of them,” says Bird. “In this film, they know it fairly early and the…

PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON films feel almost alien in their otherness; they are grounded in reality but surreally askew. From Magnolia’s raining frogs to There Will Be Blood’s operatic oil psychosis, it’s life, but not as we know it. As such, Phantom Thread is much anticipated, but with added ammunition: firstly, the re-teaming of director and actor, and secondly, it is officially Day-Lewis’ swansong. The movie introduces us to a reliably singular Anderson/Day-Lewis creation, 1950s English fashion designer Reynolds Woodcock. Committed to his work, he wields enormous power both in his magnificent London home and in his industry. After wooing a waitress (Vicky Krieps), though, his control is challenged. “A vague thought of making a relationship movie,” was the first seed, says Anderson. “I have also always wanted to work in…

TYE SHERIDAN’S WADE Watts, hero of Steven Spielberg’s upcoming sci-fi epic Ready Player One, has it tough in the real world of 2045. He lives in the Stacks, a tottering landscape of mobile homes piled high, with uncaring relatives and a perpetual struggle for food. But when he dons a VR rig and escapes into the digital world of the OASIS, he is somebody. Wade’s alter-ego is Parzival, who’s “everything Wade wants to be” and who was performance-captured by the X-Men: Apocalypse actor inside a space known as the Volume, where Sheridan spent two weeks rehearsing and learning about the process before filming. “Steven showed up on the last day of our rehearsal, and he was like, ‘Why don’t we shoot something?’” says the actor, remembering the surprise. But instead…

Snakeskin mac: Zeynep Arçay. Black wool cut-calf trousers: Dorothee Schumacher. Black patent umps: Louboutin. White three-piece suit: Jake Mueser. Black patent pumps: Louboutin SOME ACTORS ARE HARD TO CATEGORISE When Rachel Weisz took the female lead in 1999’s The Mummy, her big Hollywood breakthrough, she boldly played it more as comic relief than romantic interest. Yet she’s hardly done comedy (or big action films) since. And now, after years of avoiding the ‘Doting Mum’ or ‘Supportive Wife’, we find her in James Marsh’s true-life drama The Mercy playing Clare Crowhurst, a devoted mother of four known for being the tragically supportive spouse of Donald (played by Colin Firth), the amateur yachtsman who disastrously attempted a round-the-world sailing race in 1968 and has never been seen since. When I admit to…

Illustration: David Mahoney WASTE. I DON’T hold with it. Maybe it stems from having been penniless in my youth, or perhaps from being at one and the same time both a guilty liberal and gluttonous pig. I always believed that every penny spent should be enjoyed to the full. And this tenet of my personality remained unshakeable, until 2000 and the day my naive and then-uncritical love of John Travolta led me to the cinema to see his latest vehicle, Battlefield Earth, and 40 minutes in, to storm right back out again. Sure, we can all identify the warning signs with the benefit of hindsight. There’s Travolta’s joke-shop goatee straight out of regional panto, the script adapted from a book by the founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard, set in…

Stanley Tucci: Fabrizio Maltese/Contour by Getty Images, Alamy. Will Poulter: Alamy, Landmark STANLEY TUCCI: character actor, writer, director and all-round great guy. Come on, you know what we mean. Maybe it’s those roles: rad dad, flamboyant confidant, loving brother. Even when playing a killer, he adds a dusting of humanity to the most inhumane of men. He’s spent years pivoting around the camera and has been working on his latest film, fifth directorial outing Final Portrait, for over a decade. But we want to take him back, way back (well, to the 1990s) to talk about *drum roll* the life and times of Tucci. BIG NIGHT (1996) Sumptuous comedy-drama about an Italian restaurant, in which Tucci starred (and co-directed) I wrote the script with my cousin Joe Tropiano. We wanted…

STEPPING INTO THE old Connecticut farmhouse which is to be her new home, fragile Jessica (Zohra Lampert) is startled by a shadow figure… and hesitates to tell her husband (Barton Heyman), only for him to reassure her with, “It’s alright — I saw her too!” It’s a twist that Jessica is more relieved she isn’t seeing things than worried about the intruder — red-headed hippie-chick squatter Emily (Mariclare Costello). As it turns out, the odd girl might well be a malign spirit, the vampire/ghost of a bride drowned in the lake on the property. Jessica’s mental state doesn’t mean the horrors are all in her mind, just that she’s especially susceptible to the supernatural, with real and imagined voices whispering constantly in her head. John Hancock’s quiet, deceptive, chilly Let’s…

IT WAS HARD to find a film on the First-Take Club list that I hadn’t seen. I live for movies, especially sci-fi — the weirder the better. Yet somehow District 9 was a cult classic that had gotten away. With great buzz behind it and a Peter Jackson-produced seal of approval, this was an easy choice. From the get-go, I was all-in. The set-up was great. An alien mothership has been stalled, floating over Johannesburg, for a couple of decades. The bug-like beings from inside have been relocated to the surface into crude, refugee settlements. They’re now the new immigrant class, one that everyone else in South Africa is sick of, and a private firm has been contracted to evict all of them to a more out-of-the-way internment camp. This…

Alamy. Illustration: Olly Gibbs AS THE DIRECTOR of Ocean’s Eleven, Ocean’s Twelve and Ocean’s Thirteen, what Steven Soderbergh doesn’t know about pulling off a movie heist probably isn’t worth knowing. And when he came out of retirement this year after four years away, it was for Logan Lucky, another heist flick, albeit one a world away from the slickness of the Ocean’s movies. We asked him to share his tricks of the trade… START WITH A PLAN Every movie needs a plan — and that should ideally take the form of a tight script with a strong premise. In Logan Lucky’s case, it came from unknown screenwriter Rebecca Blunt. (So unknown, in fact, that a rumour sprung up that she did not exist; Soderbergh has since dismissed this.) “You need…