Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2018 i Empire

FIRST AIRING IN 1965, Lost In Space was a huge fixture among space race-era audiences, adorned with colourful costumes, a wise-cracking robot (named ‘The Robot’), and charmingly glued-together special effects. The original may not have dated well (and we can all now pretend the 1998 cinematic dud with Matt Le Blanc never happened), but ’60s sci-fi has a habit of sticking around. Back with a 21st-century Netflix reboot, Lost In Space has stripped out the kitsch, dialled up the danger, and set the course firmly on thrills, rather than doom and gloom. “So much current sci-fi is dystopian,” says the show’s executive producer and showrunner Zack Estrin. “The future’s terrible and it’s dominated by killer robots and it’s all very dark... Lost In Space, at its heart, is about hope.”…

WHEN DIRECTOR FRANCIS Lawrence first started developing Red Sparrow, a thriller about Russian espionage and sexual power dynamics, he was worried people would think it was a little old-fashioned. “When we first started talking to the studio, everyone said, ‘We really like the story, but it doesn’t feel relevant,’” he recalls. Today, with Russia and gender politics dominating headlines, it’s slightly less of a concern. A story about a young woman thrown into a brutal Russian intelligence boot camp, it was speculated by some that this was the Marvel Black Widow spin-off by any other name. But with challenging sexual machinations and family-based motivations, the director contends that it is more personal than that. “It’s about transactional value versus self value,” he says. “There are political spy stories and action…

Getty COUNT OLAF IS back. The hook-nosed antagonist of Lemony Snicket’s A Series Of Unfortunate Events is still attempting to steal the Baudelaire fortune via evil schemes, garish costumes and “terrible acting” — and still without much success. With Season 2 about to debut on Netflix, we enlisted Olaf himself, Neil Patrick Harris, to talk us through four of his most diabolical new disguises. 1 DETECTIVE DUPIN “Detective Dupin was written by Mr. Handler [author Daniel Handler, aka the real Lemony Snicket] as a guy who wears everything and anything flashy to justify his authority. He comes strutting in with an unparalleled and embarrassing confidence. He likes to scat and sing musical poetry, but he is no Lin Manuel Miranda, I can tell you. I think Dupin may be my…

START WITH A PROLOGUE The number of Indiana Jones adventures is finite. I would love the return of the ‘Previously Seen On Indiana Jones’ prologues that started Raiders, Doom and Last Crusade but was sorely missing from Crystal Skull. Indy’s escape from the booby-trapped temple that opens Raiders is so fantastic, you feel like you could leave after just that entirely satisfied. So, more of that, please. (A treacherous animal would be good, too.) IAN FREER, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR BRING BACK THE SCARES Melting Nazis in Raiders. Death by Grail in The Last Crusade. The whole of The Temple Of Doom. Each original Indy film has its nightmare-inducing horror moment, while Crystal Skull’s killer ant chase doesn’t come close. A practical, visceral scare in Indy V would give the series its…

A FEW MILES west of Weymouth, on the Dorset coast, you will find Chesil Beach: 18 miles of sandy pebbles, with a lagoon on one side and the English channel on the other. It’s a striking, isolated environment — something author Ian McEwan recognised when he wrote the novella On Chesil Beach, about two 1950s newlyweds grappling with sexual repression. “The space is a metaphor for their relationship, in a way,” explains Dominic Cooke, director of the film adaptation starring Saoirse Ronan and Billy Howle. “They’re kind of stuck there. It creates a tension.” That tension, Cooke says, is born of a specific time and place. Florence (Ronan) and Edward (Howle) are on their honeymoon in Dorset, and very much in love, but the social norms of stiff-upper-lip post-war Britain…

★★★★ OUT 9 MARCH CERT 15 / 113 MINS DIRECTOR Warwick Thornton CAST Sam Neill, Bryan Brown, Hamilton Morris, Natassia Gorey Furber, Ewen Leslie PLOT Australia P929. Aboriginal farmhand Sam Kelly (Morris) goes on the run with his wife Lizzie (Gorey Furber) after killing a cattle station master (Leslie) in self defence. Lawman Sergeant Fletcher (Brown) leads a posse to track the pair down. SPARSE, TEXTURED AND bleak, director-cinematographer Warwick Thornton’s Sweet Country is a soulful slice of Australian history mixed with the tropes of a classic Western. In some ways, it is a spiritual prequel to Thornton’s 2009 debut Samson & Delilah, a contemporary look at Australia’s marginalised Aboriginal community. Both films feature couples on the run. Both offer depictions of a fractured national identity. Both are told with…

★★★★ OUT 2 MARCH CERT 15 / 104 MINS DIRECTOR Sebastián Lelio CAST Daniela Vega, Francisco Reyes, Luis Gnecco, Aline Küppenheim PLOT Marina (Vega) is a singer and waitress who’s just moved in with her older boyfriend Orlando (Reyes). But when he dies suddenly, she finds herself rejected by his family and under suspicion from the police, because she is a trans woman. THE DEATH OF a loved one is always a nightmarish prospect, but that fear is given a particularly horrifying edge in this humanist story, told with fantastical flourishes. It’s anchored by the riveting Daniela Vega, whose Marina is faced with suspicion and potential homelessness after her boyfriend’s sudden collapse. We’re introduced to Marina as a rather glamorous, very beautiful young woman, hurrying to her nightclub singing gig…

★★★★ OUT 2 MARCH / CERT 18 / 88 MINS DIRECTOR Andrea Luka Zimmerman CAST James ‘Bo’ Gritz, Ted Kotcheff THE EXPLOITS OF Vietnam veteran James ‘Bo’ Gritz have purportedly provided the inspiration for Colonel Kurtz, The A-Team’s Hannibal and John Rambo. His bid to rescue American POWs from South-East Asia were backed by Clint Eastwood and William Shatner. Yet, as this compelling, often alarming documentary suggests, Presidential candidate Gritz epitomises the right-leaning mindset that led to the rise of Donald Trump. Making shrewd use of interviews, re-enactments and archive footage, Andrea Luka Zimmerman creates a provocative patchwork that not only challenges the Gritz legend, but also offers unsettling insights into heroism, the nature of governance, the demise of truth and America’s relationship with violence.…

★★★ OUT 16 MARCH CERT PG / 95 MINS DIRECTOR Will Gluck CAST James Corden, Rose Byrne, Domhnall Gleeson, Daisy Ridley, Margot Robbie, Elizabeth Debicki PLOT When nasty neighbour Mr McGregor (Neill) dies, Peter Rabbit (Corden) thinks his worries are over. Then a new McGregor (Gleeson) inherits the house and Peter has a whole new enemy to contend with. YOU COULD WRITE a complicated thesis about the morality of Beatrix Potter’s most famous story. Peter Rabbit is a story without a hero. On the one side you have Peter, who believes he is entitled to steal whatever vegetables he likes from the garden nearest his warren. On the other you have Mr. McGregor, the owner of said garden, who believes that if a rabbit strays into his garden then it…

ON 4 FEBRUARY 2018, the game changed. During the 52nd Super Bowl, Netflix announced the immediate release of The Cloverfield Paradox, the third part in the Cloverfield anthology series. There had been no trailer. No release date. Not even the title was known. Suddenly there it was: an event movie, in your home, the second you knew it existed. Movies debuting on streaming services is nothing new, of course. In just the past few months we’ve seen both Bright (expensive Will Smith action-fantasy) and Mudbound (low-budget Oscar contender) debut on Netflix. The release of The Cloverfield Paradox represents a significant new step, though, because it blurred the line between cinema and streaming. Cloverfield is a cinematic series in good health (the last movie, 10 Cloverfield Lane, made $110 million on…

THE DELOREAN ERNEST CLINE “Ready Player One will be the first time you’ve seen the iconic Back To The Future time machine in a major Hollywood movie since 1991. It’s a huge part of my life. When I sold my book, I bought a DeLorean to drive around the country on my book tour. I wrote it off as a business expense. When I first went to meet Steven at Amblin, he signed my glove-box lid for me and has promised he will never sign another one. I have the only Steven Spielberg-autographed time machine.” CLASSIFIED SIMON PEGG “My favourite is something of a spoiler because it doesn’t appear in the book. Like Ready Player One, it is a film based on a beloved book which became a classic itself…

IT LASTS FOR JUST A SHADE UNDER 24 MINUTES, but the opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan has proved timeless. Before the deeply personal Schindler’s List in 1993, Spielberg had depicted Nazis in his movies with a cartoonish quality; over-the-top baddies who existed just to be bopped on the jaw by the hero. Schindler’s List saw Spielberg mature at a remarkable rate, and take World War II and its horrors seriously. Just five years later he’d take that new ethos to its remarkable conclusion with this sequence, that follows Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks) as he lands, with his fellow Rangers, on Omaha Beach, Normandy, on 6 June 1944: D-Day. D-Day had been depicted on the big screen before, of course, in the likes of The Longest Day, but Spielberg…

EVERY FILM COMES with its own mythology, its own history woven from sharp stories and warm memories — the years spent giving your brain over to funding battles and your soul over to creative differences. Of disputes and struggles and false starts and frustrations and epiphanies and triumphs. The mythology fractures further when you’re dealing with a first. Firsts are tough, firsts test, firsts take superhuman effort, are transformative. They should, right? They’re firsts. So, the most surprising part of the story director Ava DuVernay tells about making fantasy sci-fi epic A Wrinkle In Time is just how linear, simple and smooth it is. The legs kicking serenely beneath the water. It began with an approach by Tendo Nagenda, EVP of production at Disney live-action. “He approached me with the…

AT FIRST GLANCE, Armando Iannucci’s The Death Of Stalin, about the battle for political supremacy in 1950s Russia after Josef Stalin buys the farm, is based on a French graphic novel by Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin. But when it came to the film’s coruscating comedic set-pieces, Iannucci and his writers (David Schneider, Ian Martin and Peter Fellows) looked to history for inspiration. Here, they talk us through six of the film’s best, and blackest, moments. 1. THE MUSICAL EMERGENCY Joseph Stalin (Adrian McLoughlin) calls a concert organiser (Paddy Considine), demanding a copy of the evening’s performance, a Mozart piano concerto. The only problem: it hasn’t been recorded. Cue a mad scramble to do it all over again. Armando Iannucci: This actually happened. Except in reality it was even worse,…

TO WRITE A farce is really, really tough for a chapter of Inside No 9. For its creators that wasn’t enough They sought to do it entirely in rhyme. So, tackling iambic pentameter, the language of the bard, shaker of spears They formed a tribute to this world-beater, But at first it realised their deepest fears. They went on with the experiment grand And ‘Zanzibar’ was the episode’s name Lo, it was acclaimed throughout all the land A successful end to their tricky game. About their methods, with them we did talk Of rhymes invented while out for a walk… IF THE ABOVE attempt at a sonnet hadn’t already persuaded you, let Empire tell you from bitter personal experience: writing in iambic pentameter, the poetic technique favoured by William Shakespeare,…

Alamy, Rex Features IN 2004, AGED 62, veteran character actor Tobin Bell (then best known for menacing Tom Cruise in The Firm) suddenly became the face of a horror franchise, despite spending most of Saw lying face down on the floor. His character, John ‘Jigsaw’ Kramer, was a big-screen psycho like none other, meting out what he considered justice via a series of elaborately staged traps. Audiences liked what they saw, and Bell has since played Jigsaw seven more times, including in the brand new reboot/ sequel Jigsaw — which is especially impressive considering that Kramer was bumped off in Saw III. We asked Bell to talk us through the whole series to date. SAW (2004) Kramer is revealed to be the mastermind behind the central trap, lying in plain…

LIAM NEESON: “I saw this as a boy, and thought it was terrific. What springs into my mind is an actor from Glengormley, a Belfast boy, William Millar, who was known as Stephen Boyd. His death scene in Ben-Hur still gives me the chills. I can feel all the pain that Stephen portrayed, and love this agonised, croaky voice that he got after being churned up by his chariot. It’s one of the great death scenes.” INT. ROMAN MEDICAL ROOM — DAY Messala (Stephen Boyd), Judah Ben-Hur’s childhood friend-turned-arch rival, has been mortally wounded in a chariot race against Judah. A doctor (John Le Mesurier) tends to Messala’s wounds. But it looks hopeless. DOCTOR: We cannot wait, tribune. MESSALA: He will come. He coughs and convulses with pain. The doctor…

A FLAME-HAIRED GIRL escapes a burning building. She flies away on a broomstick. She dodges mono-eyed goons in orange jumpsuits, flying eel-monsters and a shapeshifting water demon, before tumbling to the ground in a brilliant blue explosion. This all happens in the blistering first five minutes of Mary And The Witch’s Flower, the debut film from anime upstarts Studio Ponoc, and it’s a real statement of intent, according to the film’s director, Hiromasa Yonebayashi. “I always wanted it to be action-packed,” he tells Empire. “My previous film [When Marnie Was There] was more introspective. Of course, it takes tremendous work to create action scenes in animation — lots of labour and time — but it was very important for us.” His team clearly recognise the importance. In the Japanimation world,…

WRITER-DIRECTOR JOHN Cameron Mitchell has a fervent hope for his new film How To Talk To Girls At Parties: he wants it to be a teen classic, rubbing shoulders with the likes of John Hughes in the pantheon of cult movies adored by adolescents. “I wanted to make a high-school romance that lasts,” he says. “I wanted this to be every 15-year-old girl’s favourite film.” The difference between this and most high-school movies, of course, is that they don’t feature a scene where an alien anally penetrates a teenage punk. “We’re trying to bring fisting back!” chuckles Mitchell mischievously. “We’re trying to bring it to the masses.” Adapted from the Neil Gaiman short story, Mitchell wanted to subvert the trope of alien probes by a having a matriarchal alien society…

Illustration: Matt Herring Do you have a nickname? Yes. My favourite one is Baby Dazzle. I’m called Daz, and Dazma, and on the first Star Wars, it became Baby Dazzle, because I was the baby. What character did you play in your first school play? I played Demetrius in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Gender-swapping as my first role! Pushing boundaries. I was literally ten, and it was mainly girls, and I actually remember part of the song. I think we did some of Shakespeare’s words. Where is the strangest place you’ve ever thrown up? On top of Skellig Michael, when we were filming Star Wars: The Force Awakens. I felt really funny all morning but I kept saying, “No no, I’m fine.” And then I wasn’t fine. We had these…

★★★★ OUT NOW CERT 12A / 134 MINS DIRECTOR Ryan Coogler CAST Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong’o, Danai Gurira, Martin Freeman, Andy Serkis PLOT Following his father’s death, T’Challa (Boseman) is crowned as Wakanda’s king and super-powered protector. Soon, the new Black Panther is defending his technologically advanced kingdom from a notorious arms dealer (Serkis) and a former soldier with a dark past (Jordan). TO SAY THAT Ryan Coogler’s films are expanding in scope and scale — more ambitious, audacious and pyrotechnically dazzling each time — would be to deal in wild understatement. After the wrenching, real-time intimacy of his debut, Fruitvale Station, and the franchise-jolting, bruised adrenalin hit of Creed, we now have Black Panther: a giddily enjoyable, convention-bucking, 134-minute epic that somehow manages to simultaneously be…

★★★ OUT 9 MARCH CERT TBC / 90 MINS DIRECTOR Alexandra Dean CAST Hedy Lamarr, Nino Amareno, Peter Bogdanovich, Mel Brooks, Diane Kruger PLOT A documentary on the life of Hollywood Golden Age star Hedy Lamarr. Born in Vienna, she emigrated to the US after the failure of her first marriage, where she married five more times and invented a mainstay of modern communication. Never a dull moment. HEDY LAMARR LIVED enough life for ten biopics, which is a problem when you’re trying to fit her story into a single instalment. But director Alexandra Dean and her team manage a brisk but coherent overview of the star and inventor, thanks to a well-choreographed combination of archive footage, a lengthy audio recording of an interview Lamarr gave to Forbes magazine in…

★★★★ OUT 9 MARCH CERT 15 / 90 MINS DIRECTOR Lynne Ramsay CAST Joaquin Phoenix, Alex Manette PLOT Gulf War vet and ex-FBI Agent Joe (Phoenix) is a killer specialising in hits within the child-sex trade. He is hired by Senator Votto (Manette) to extract the latter’s daughter Nina (Ekaterina Samsonov) from a brothel but the rescue goes badly wrong, embroiling Joe in a conspiracy. IN TERMS OF work rate, it seems Lynne Ramsay is shaping up to be a kind of Glaswegian Terrence Malick. There was a nine-year gap between her second feature, Morvern Callar (2002), and her third, We Need To Talk About Kevin (2011). Now You Were Never Really Here, based on Jonathan Ames’ novel, arrives seven years after Kevin. Happily, it’s well worth the wait. The…

★★ OUT 9 FEBRUARY CERT 15 / 94 MINS DIRECTOR Clint Eastwood CAST Alek Skarlatos, Anthony Sadler, Spencer Stone, Jenna Fischer, Judy Greer PLOT Childhood friends — Sadler, Skarlatos and Stone — board a train from Amsterdam to Paris at the end of a European inter-railing jaunt. Hungover, they are stirred by the appearance of a bare-chested terrorist wielding an AK-S7. GIVEN IT IS based on a brief moment of true-life heroism — three American tourists, two with a military background, take down a terrorist on a train speeding towards Paris — it was always hard to imagine what the other 90 minutes of Clint Eastwood’s The 15:17 To Paris were going to pan out like. Hampered by Eastwood’s decision to cast the actual participants in the fictionalised account, the…

★★★ OUT 23 FEBRUARY CERT 15 / 90 MINS DIRECTOR Clio Barnard CAST Ruth Wilson, Mark Stanley, Sean Bean PLOT Alice (Wilson) returns home to her family farm after her father’s death. As she confronts her memories of abuse at the hands of her father, she tentatively rebuilds her relationship with her brother Joe (Stanley), although the two clash over what to do with the farm. FANS OF GRITTY dramas about alienated people staring over the Yorkshire moors are being spoiled at the moment. And while there’s much to commend it, arthouse doyenne Clio Barnard’s Dark River is sadly the Deep Impact to God’s Own Country’s Armageddon. This is a film made with great thought and care, and it’s not its fault that it comes out after its superior counterpart,…

★★★ OUT NOW CERT 15 / 130 MINS DIRECTOR Nicolai Fuglsig CAST Chris Hemsworth, Michael Shannon, Michael Peña, Navid Negahban PLOT Post-9/PP, army captain Mitch Nelson (Hemsworth) is sent to Afghanistan to lead a secret P2-man mission deep in Taliban territory. Working alongside a local warlord, he tries to land a retaliatory blow in the War On Terror. And make it out alive. “FIVE WEEKS AGO, 19 men attacked our country,” rasps William Fichtner’s chrome-domed army colonel, early on in this Jerry Bruckheimer-produced war drama. “The 12 of you will be the first ones to fight back.” It’s a line that acts as a neat summary of not just 12 Strong’s plot, but the raw desire for vengeance that propels much of its pulsating action. But it’s also a moment…

★★ OUT 14 MARCH CERT 12A / 86 MINS DIRECTOR David Batty CAST Michael Caine, David Bailey, Paul McCartney, Marianne Faithfull, Roger Daltrey PLOT Michael Caine compères a brisk collage of recollections and news footage which presents the cultural revolution brought about by British working-class youth — actors, photographers, fashion designers and musicians — during the ’UOs. “WHAT WAS IT all about?” Michael Caine asks, all Alfie-like, at the start of this Dick Clement and Ian La Frenaisscripted documentary on the 1960s, which relies heavily on the actor’s close-to-anachronistic charm and pub-chat manner. He doesn’t wait for an answer, because: “I’m gonna show you.” Well, cheers, Sir Michael, but we don’t really need you to. Especially when all you’re really doing is telling some familiar stories about your own life…

★★ OUT NOW CERT 15 / 99 MINS DIRECTORS The Spierig Brothers CAST Helen Mirren, Jason Clarke, Sarah Snook PLOT California, P9OU: Grieving, opiate-addled doctor Eric Price (Clarke) is sent to assess the mental state of Sarah Winchester (Mirren), the widow of gun magnate William Winchester, who claims to be haunted by victims of the famous rifle brand. But Price discovers that the ghostly apparitions might not all be in her head. THE HORROR GENRE has long been fascinated by instruments of death, from Saw’s increasingly outlandish Rube Goldberg machines to the tactile terror of Jack Torrance’s axe in The Shining. But has any weapon wrought more mass murder than the gun? It’s an interesting notion that Australian-American haunted-house horror Winchester lines up in its sights, before failing to deliver…

★★★ CHANNEL T OUT NOW EPISODES VIEWED 5 CREATED BY Chris Carter CAST Gillian Anderson, David Duchovny, Mitch Pileggi, William B. Davis PLOT Last season’s climax saw Mulder (Duchovny) in the death grip of an alien virus and Scully (Anderson) staring down a hovering UFO. Now the duo must unravel the world-threatening conspiracy while solving a few open X-Files along the way. TWENTY-FIVE YEARS after it first aired, The X-Files is synonymous with alien abductions, government cover-ups and shadowy, nicotine-fuelled cabals. Between contributions to the labyrinthine conspiracy, the show’s heart lay with a string of taut, tightly written case-files, each one a paranormal horror story that tapped perfectly into ’90s paranoia. As a serialised conspiracy thriller The X-Files was good, but as a supernatural procedural, it was entirely without peer.…

Spielberg logo: Luke Lucas. Grooming: Helen Robertson/Celestine using M.A.C cosmetics. Set build: Anthony Altomare. US production: Elaine Browne LIKE A CHILD IN ONE OF HIS MOVIES, STEVEN SPIELBERG IS AWESTRUCK He is standing before every poster in his 32-strong filmography, from Duel, a made-for-TV movie that demanded a place on a big screen, to Ready Player One, his latest science-fiction extravaganza. On Universal Studios Stage 20 for Empire’s photoshoot, even he seems taken aback by the width, depth and breadth of his career. “Did I make these movies?” he asks, perusing Empire’s poster gallery. “Just print it — don’t put me in the shot.” Spielberg’s body of work is without parallel in modern cinema. Scrub that, without parallel in cinema. On his journey from 8mm-obsessed teen to wunderkind TV director…

IN 1993, A GUTSY PALEOBOTANIST, A GROUCHY paleontologist and a cackling chaotician with rock-star specs made a trip to a far-off island. Cinema was never the same again. Fusing old-school practical effects with state-of-the-art CGI, Jurassic Park transformed blockbuster moviemaking, paving the way for the likes of The Lord Of The Rings and Avatar. But beyond the venom-spitting, lawyer-chomping, car-crushing spectacle, it is equally beloved for its human characters, none more so than Laura Dern’s Ellie Sattler, Sam Neill’s Alan Grant and Jeff Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm. Exchanging talon-sharp banter (“You’re married?” “Occasionally”) and locked in a quasi-love triangle, the three stars make the film riveting and hilarious even before the park’s attractions are let out of their pens. With a quarter of a century having passed since the original film’s…

“ A bird-brained movie to cheer the hearts of the far right wing, ” sneered Vincent Canby in the 25 July 1974 edition of The New York Times. The movie he was reviewing was Death Wish, a new crime thriller directed by Michael Winner, in which Winner’s frequent cohort, Charles Bronson, embarked on a vigilante crusade in New York, incited by the murder of his wife and rape of his daughter. And Canby wasn’t alone in his disdain. Variety called it “a poisonous incitement to do-it-yourself law enforcement”. Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times thought its message was “scary”. But Death Wish was unstoppable. In the US, the $3 million movie grossed $22 million and was followed by four sequels, two now infamous for their extreme sexual violence. The final…

Alamy, Photofest FROM THE OPENING titles of Body Heat, we know exactly where we are and when we are. As John Barry’s afternoon porn score slithers to life with the tinkling of piano keys and, yep, you’ve guessed it, a saxophone solo, we can already taste the sweaty warmth of Florida in that transition from ’70s to ’80s, a time good taste forgot. Yet conversely, first-time director Lawrence Kasdan was keen to make Body Heat as a throwback to 1940s noir, not relying on anything too contemporary for the story to work. The biggest nod we get towards emerging tech in this movie is a payphone, which for a present-day audience is about as common a sight as cigarettes in a bar (something else that Body Heat fogs up the…

I DON’T CALL Dirty Dancing a guilty pleasure because it’s bad — it really isn’t. Jennifer Grey, Patrick Swayze and a solid supporting cast do their jobs well. The cinematography is pretty, the choreography truly great, the soundtrack a perfect mix of ’60s soul and ’80s power ballads that sold over 32 million copies. The premise (affluent Jewish girl-swot has forbidden holiday romance with streetwise Irish boy-dancer, each unlocking something in the other) is well-worn but sweet, and even with Eleanor Bergstein’s cliché-heavy, semi-autobiographical script, Dirty Dancing is a competent, low-budget indie from which everyone walks away with heads held high. I feel guilty not for its quality, but for my mortifying predictability. At almost 13, I believed myself way too good for a film so shamelessly moulded to the…

Alamy THERE WERE ONLY a few lines in Alex Garland’s script. As his visceral reimagining of the zombie formula begins, former bike courier Jim (Cillian Murphy) awakens from a coma to find London abandoned and drifts through the deserted streets in his hospital scrubs, dazed and confused, forlornly calling out. Danny Boyle knew it was a “tip of the hat” to dystopian visionaries such as J.G. Ballard, and Boris Sagal’s last-man-standing thriller The Omega Man. Foremost, the vacated capital was a nod to John Wyndham’s The Day Of The Triffids (specifically, the seminal 1981 TV adaptation). “We were not stealing,” laughs the director, “but nothing can stand on its own anymore.” Plus, there was method in their mimicry: it set a striking, reality-inflected mood. When it came to officially clearing…

MARTIN SHEEN IS PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP Sure, Alec Baldwin’s Saturday Night Live impression is better known. But what could be more shocking and eye-catching than the former President Bartlet dispatching angry tweets about Crooked Hillary between mouthfuls of cheeseburgers? ZACH GALIFIANAKIS IS STEVE BANNON It takes a very specific actor to embody the former Chief Strategist’s “American carnage”. Only Galifianakis can convincingly provide the dishevelled look, the unpredictability, and the slight air of derangement that the role requires. CATE BLANCHETT IS KELLYANNE CONWAY The Counselor To The President requires a skilled operator at the wheel. Enter Oscar-winner Blanchett, an actor bold and brave enough to conjure up fictional massacres with merry abandon, or invent the ingenious concept of “alternative facts”.…

Alamy, Photofest NO RABBITS WERE harmed during the filming of Peter Rabbit. Probably because there are no rabbits in Peter Rabbit: the filmmakers just couldn’t get the damn things to talk, act, and follow direction. Thank heavens for CGI. Adapted from Beatrix Potter’s quintessentially English children’s books, with James Corden voicing the titular bunny, and Domhnall Gleeson and Rose Byrne as humans McGregor (no longer ‘Mister’) and animal-loving neighbour Bea (in tribute to the author), it’s not stuck in 1902. “It’s timeless,” says director Will Gluck. “We’ve taken what Beatrix Potter wrote and expanded from that.” “I thought it would be great if the rabbits looked ludicrous, but Will completely disagreed,” says costume designer Lizzy Gardiner of the clothing challenges. “He wanted them to wear what teenage kids wear. And…

NASH EDGERTON ISN’T the first stuntman to become a director. But, from Hal ‘Smokey And The Bandit’ Needham to David ‘Snakes On A Plane’ Ellis, his predecessors tend towards the higher-octane end of the action spectrum with their behind-camera projects. Edgerton’s different. Despite stunt-work on the likes of The Matrix Reloaded and Revenge Of The Sith, his 2008 feature debut, The Square, was a lo-fi Sydney-based thriller about adultery and arson which led many critics to draw comparisons with the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple. And his incoming follow-up, Gringo, promises similarly Coen-esque black comedy. “I think there’s a lot of humour in awkward, uncomfortable situations,” the Aussie director tells Empire. “Something that might be shocking to some people can be funny to someone else. You can go through a tragic…

IT WASN’T CLAIRE Foy’s universally acclaimed role as the Queen in The Crown that made director Steven Soderbergh choose her for the lead in paranoid thriller Unsane, as a woman seemingly having a breakdown. What convinced him was her acceptance speech at the SAG Awards, upon winning the first of her two prizes as Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Drama Series. “Someone told me that he watched my acceptance speech and was like, ‘She seems mental! She could play the part!’” Foy says. “That’s obviously how I come across. So that’s good.” Foy found the script fascinating — and as a long-time Soderbergh fan, was hardly going to reject such an offer. Not that she went to meet him expecting an offer. “You don’t meet a complete…

LONG-TIME FRIENDS but first-time writers, producers and directors, Bradford-born Scott Elliott and Sid Sadowskyj, have made their movie debut with an autobiographical coming-of-age story, Scott And Sid. Richard Mason and Tom Blyth play the pair on screen. But will the real Scott and Sid please stand up? Why did you decide to tell your own story? Scott: Neither one of us is an egomaniac or anything. It was never going to be based on us, but we gradually realised that all the stories we had were our own. Sid: Making a film is so hard. I think I might have lost interest if I wasn’t totally emotionally invested. How “true” is your true story? Scott: The deputy head teacher advising me to work in the DVD section of a supermarket…

Tell us about your character, Shuri. She’s the princess of Wakanda and a pretty big deal! She is the person who creates all of the technology. She’s a scientist, but also a doctor — she can heal people! She’s everything I wish I was, and pretty much protects the throne, her nation and her brother, the King. Even at 18, she has to do her bit. She has such a lovely spirit. I loved playing her. It was fulfilling for me. It was refreshing. You have appeared in Holby City and Top Boy. How does it feel to do a film of this scale? All the TV, all the films…it’s all just trained me for this moment — it wasn’t a big shock for me. I was just so at…

★★ OUT 23 FEBRUARY CERT TBC / 95 MINS DIRECTOR George Nolfi CAST Philip Ng, Xia Yu, Billy Magnussen PLOT In P9UT, Bruce Lee (Ng) faces off against martial arts grandmaster Wong Jack Man (Xia Yu). Meanwhile, Steve McKee (Magnussen), a student of Lee’s, finds himself involved in a complicated love affair. THE DETAILS CHANGE, depending on who’s recounting them, but the broad strokes seem pretty set in stone: in 1965 Bruce Lee, on the verge of becoming a big splash in Hollywood, fought Wong Jack Man in a no-holds-barred, down-and-dirty private brawl. At its heart was a fairly stark philosophical disagreement about the future of kung fu, with Man the traditionalist, and Lee the innovator, determined to bring it to a new, Western audience. The ingredients are there for…

★★ NETFLIX OUT NOW DIRECTOR Julius Onah CAST Gugu Mbatha-Raw, David Oyelowo, Daniel Brühl, Chris O’Dowd, Ziyi Zhang PLOT Earth’s energy resources are kaput. In five years we’ll have none at all, and as such, civilisation is crumbling. To solve this problem and save the world, a small crew is sent to a space station entirely designed to undertake an experimental mission. ONE THING’S FOR certain with Cloverfield films — you know you’re getting some monsters. Or a monster. At some point. Probably. But now, as we hit the third instalment, that’s about all we know, because in terms of tone, worldview and quality control… it’s a crapshoot. What are these films? There is no linear throughline, not conventionally at least. At best it’s an anthology; at worst, marketing. 2008’s…

Illustrations: David Mahoney ★★ AMAZON PRIME VIDEO OUT NOW EPISODES VIEWED 7-10 CREATED BY Ben Edlund CAST Peter Serafinowicz, Griifin Newman, Valorie Curry, Brendan Hines, Yara Martinez, Scott Speiser, Jackie Earle Haley PLOT Having rescued citizens from a bus crash, The Tick (Serafinowicz) and Arthur (Newman) are finally a fully-fledged superhero duo. But there’s no time to bask in their new-found fame. They need to save The City from a marauding giant, a killer robot and the revived megalomaniac known as The Terror (Haley). IT’S AN INTERESTING time to welcome a new batch of episodes of The Tick. While Amazon recently cancelled a trio of comedies — Jill Soloway’s I Love Dick, Tig Notaro’s One Mississippi and high-concept muscles-from-Brussels vehicle Jean-Claude Van Johnson — this live-action iteration of the 32-year-old,…

AUTHOR-GEEK EXTRAORDINAIRE ERNEST CLINE will never forget meeting Steven Spielberg for the first time. It was at Amblin HQ on the Universal lot, 100 yards from the Back To The Future clock tower. He’d had a haircut and completely over-thought his wardrobe. It was the biggest day of his life. “When you walk into Amblin, you walk past the wishing well Marty McFly and his siblings are leaning on in the photo that literally disappears throughout the movie,” he marvels. “When I got into Steven’s office he had Rosebud from Citizen Kane. It made me feel like Charlie Bucket in Willy Wonka’s factory for the first time, seeing how he makes the candy.” Aptly enough, Ready Player One, Cline’s 2011 debut novel, has its roots in Roald Dahl — the…

DAKOTA FANNING, WAR OF THE WORLDS (2005) “I turned 11 on the set of War Of The Worlds. Steven gave me a video camera for my birthday. I made a lot of great memories on that. I’d first met him for [TV series] Taken. It was ‘Executive Produced By Steven Spielberg’. To be in something that he had touched was so exciting. “War Of The Worlds was huge. We filmed on the East Coast for half of it and on the West Coast for half of it. On the Universal lot, they had smashed up a real airplane and built a set like it had crashed into homes. The magnitude of that set alone was insane and we only filmed on there for two-and-a-half days. I was young and couldn’t…

00:02:02 CHAIN REACTION __ The first two Thor films opened with our hero triumphant. This time, he’s in chains in the lair of the evil Surtur. “We felt it would be interesting to open with the hero in a predicament, like the ’80s films when you’d open with Indiana Jones in a spot and you’d be like, ‘How did he get here?’” says director Taika Waititi, who took the image from a comic in which Thor battled Gorr, The God Butcher. Yes, Gorr. 00:23:17 HAMMER! IT’S STOP TIME __ The trailer showed Thor’s hammer, Mjolnir, meeting its end in New York following the death of Odin, but that always felt like “a massive bummer” to the director, who finally relocated the scene to a Norwegian cliff. “We needed to go…

FOR A FEW weeks — days, maybe — in 1965 or ’66, a company intent on doing for the The Spencer Davis Group what A Hard Day’s Night did for The Beatles assembled a bunch of reigning or aspirant acts in the grounds of Puttenden Manor in Surrey and surrounded them with wildly dancing mid-teens. Fifty years on, those mayfly moments are preserved in Hugh Gladwish’s The Ghost Goes Gear. Everyone I’ve shown the movie to — it’s my go-to party film — has been astonished and charmed by the awkward, yet perfect results. A minimal plot is carried by Nicholas Parsons as posh-twit pop manager Algy. His mad mother (Joan Ingram) airily decides to dismiss maid Polly (face-pulling jiver Sheila White) because the servant has run out of shillings…

I’M NOT SURE it’s legal to be a filmmaker and not have watched Bicycle Thieves. It’s a guilty secret like the dust-gathering Lovefilm DVD of Le Mépris I used to keep on top of my TV. Probably one of the most expensive films I’ve never watched. ‘Homework films’, I used to call them. It’s like a diet: you know it’s good for you, but the crisps were too tempting. It’s high time for a detox. One reason I haven’t watched Vittorio De Sica’s drama is a fear of ‘Whimsy’. Small winsome boys, lost innocence, striving for nobility with dirty knees. I’ve always felt ‘Sentiment’ is a luxury I can ill afford as a female filmmaker. (Don’t ask why, I’m working on it.) So it was with trepidation that I signed…