Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2018 i Empire

Alamy, Rex Features NOBODY TRUSTS ANYONE anymore. Corporations control the world, conflict is commerce, and shady cabals pull the strings from the shadows. Deep State, a new eight-part, continent-straddling action thriller, tackles this head on, sticking us slap in the middle of a covert intelligence war. “Politics and business have become interwoven, and to find a script that deals with that was perfect,” says Mark Strong, who plays Max Easton, a British ex-spy thrown back into work. “It makes a difference if you can entertain people but at the same time get them asking themselves some difficult questions, because we’re living in strange times.” Last Summer, Empire braved the outskirts of Guildford, where a cabin in the woods was standing in for Virginia. A heavy siege was taking place. Inside,…

Illustration: Matt Herring When were you most starstruck? Oh, many times. The very last time I was really starstruck was at the SAG Awards when I finally shook hands with Robert De Niro. He was very friendly, and for a second I was thinking of giving him the avalanche of speeches that he’s heard his whole life — talking about how great Taxi Driver is etc — but I decided to give him a break and just shake his hand. I got a typical Robert De Niro nod in return. That made my day. Do you have a signature dish? That would be something Spanish, because I’m half Spanish. I make a good tortilla de patatas, which is like a thicker omelette — it’s done with potatoes and onions. It’s…

★★ OUT NOW CERT 12A / 118 MINS DIRECTOR Roar Uthaug CAST Alicia Vikander, Dominic West, Daniel Wu, Kristin Scott Thomas, Walton Goggins PLOT Lara Croft (Vikander) lives a quiet life as a bicycle courier in east London. But when she uncovers clues to her missing father’s (West) whereabouts, Croft embarks on her first adventure to unlock the mysterious tomb of Himiko — the “mother of death”. SINCE FIRST APPEARING as a jumble of jagged polygons in a 1996 PlayStation game, Lara Croft has embedded herself in the pop culture like an artifact in an ancient catacomb. The computer-generated archeologistturned-sex-symbol is laden with superlatives: more magazine covers than any supermodel; more actors taking the role than Bond or Batman; and, with the two turn-of-the-century Angelina Jolie films, more box-office takings…

★★★★ OUT NOW CERT 15 / 110 MINS DIRECTOR Nash Edgerton CAST David Oyelowo, Joel Edgerton, Charlize Theron, Sharlto Copley, Amanda Seyfried PLOT On a work trip to Mexico with his bosses (Edgerton, Theron), put-upon, strait-laced businessman Harold Soyinka (Oyelowo) makes a rash decision that triggers a series of unfortunate events. BACK WHEN PULP Fiction ‘homages’ were all the rage, a young Charlize Theron made her mark as a fearsome, sexually aggressive schemer in 2 Days In The Valley, one of the very best of all the sub-Tarantino flood of movies that thrust a group of seemingly unconnected characters into a circuitous crime plot. That flood has since slowed to a trickle, but every now and then along comes a movie forged in QT’s image. Gringo is just such a…

★★★★ OUT 23 MARCH CERT 15 / 98 MINS DIRECTOR Steven Soderbergh CAST Claire Foy, Amy Irving, Joshua Leonard, Jay Pharoah, Juno Temple PLOT Despite moving away from home and rebooting her life, Sawyer Valentini (Foy) still suffers the trauma of being stalked by an obsessive man. Then, after a therapy session, she is involuntarily committed to a mental institution where her worst fears are realised and her grip on reality loosens. FEATURING MEDICAL malpractice, reality-smudging prescription drugs and a female protagonist who may or may not be losing her sanity, Steven Soderbergh’s second post-‘retirement’ production lurks closest to his second-to-last pre-‘retirement’ movie, Side Effects. But where that was executed in the glossy style of a typical Hollywood thriller, Unsane is down, dirty, lo-fi and — no doubt made for…

★★★★ OUT 6 APRIL CERT 15 / 93 MINS DIRECTOR Cory Finley CAST Olivia Cooke, Anya Taylor-Joy, Anton Yelchin, Paul Sparks, Francie Swift PLOT Upper-crust schoolgirl Lily (Taylor-Joy) is hired to tutor her friend Amanda (Cooke) some years after a traumatic event. As their bond grows and anger deepens, they enlist a small-time drug dealer (Yelchin) to take care of a family problem. CONTROL IS EVERYTHING in this debut feature from playwright Cory Finley. From the precise editing to the not-a-word-out-of-place dialogue, or from the intricately tailored costumes to the alternately clattering and eerie score, this is one of the most carefully marshalled first films in donkey’s years. Control’s also everything for the characters, be it restraining your emotions, pretending to be a normal human being existing in the world,…

★★ NETFLIX OUT NOW CERT 15 / 126 MINS DIRECTOR Duncan Jones CAST Alexander Skarsgård, Paul Rudd, Justin Theroux, Seyneb Saleh, Noel Clarke, Robert Sheehan PLOT Berlin, 2OT2. A mute Amish barman (Skarsgård) is searching for his missing girlfriend (Saleh). Meanwhile, an AWOL US military medic (Rudd) tries to secure fake IDs so he can go home with his daughter. IT’S FAIR TO say Duncan Jones’ Mute arrives on Netflix burdened by a considerable weight of expectation. It’s a film he’s been nurturing for over a decade-and-a-half. One which should prove that Warcraft was a studio-over-coddled glitch and which, encouragingly, is the narrative successor to his fantastic 2009 debut Moon; not a sequel so much as fresh story in the same universe. In the latter sense, at least, it delivers…

IT’S THE TRUCKS THEY SPOT FIRST. THEN THE SECURITY BARRIERS. THEN THE SECURITY GUARDS. THENTHECAMERAS. That’s when people realise a big movie has come to town. And that’s when the crowd starts to form on this boiling hot June day, trying to catch a glimpse of the Atlanta street that has been transformed, for the time being, into a little slice of New York City. More accurately, into MacDougal Street, complete with meticulously recreated frontage of the famous Minetta Tavern. And, even more accurately, into a MacDougal Street that has seen better days. Cars, including those famous yellow cabs, are strewn everywhere. Some are on fire. Some are upside down. Rubble litters the streets. Shopfronts are cracked. Windows are broken. Clearly, something bad has happened here. Then, the crowd glimpses…

_there is a severed leg sticking out of a mound of chopped-up logs in Jason Blum’s office. Sat at the other end of the room, on a sofa facing Empire, Blum slowly stirs some tea. In the wake of Catherine Keener’s hypnosis tactics in Get Out, it’s a little ominous. “Oh, I know,” he grins. “Be careful, buddy. I might be getting you ready for the Coagula.” The Coagula, Get Out’s procedure in which black people are body-snatched, becoming involuntary hosts for the minds of physically ailing white people, is — when you read it like that — not traditional awards-season material. But Blumhouse has been upending expectations and subverting norms from the start, and the last year has been a banner one for the company. Its two biggest successes…

I ARRIVE TO MEET MAXINE PEAKE IN A BIT OF A STATE. Me, not her — she’s the model of calm. The actor is cheerfully cooperating with the photographer and his crew, changing patiently into new outfits, asking for a lipstick retouch because she’s just given her nose “a right big blow”. I, meanwhile, have just seen Peake’s new film, Funny Cow, and feel like I’ve received a hammer blow to the solar plexus. Written by Peaky Blinders actor Tony Pitts, Funny Cow is the story of a physically abused child, then wife, whose sense of humour is not only her coping mechanism, but her vocation — one she pursues in the merciless working men’s clubs of 1970s Sheffield. Peake (who displays a remarkable flair for stand-up comedy) plays the…

AS A STUDENT, I spent two years working at Blockbuster. The money was crap, but I got ten free rentals per week. Sod your Bitcoin nonsense, this was the sexiest currency imaginable. It means I’ve seen 296 of Empire’s 301 Greatest Movies Of All Time (as seen in issue, well, 301, July 2014), plus thousands more. Yet Network had somehow escaped. Well, no longer. My eyes have devoured it, my brain has digested it, and my fingers are now frantically trying not to type: “HOLY SHIT, THIS 1976 FILM PREDICTED TRUMP!??!” I’m an historian, so I’m meant to be more sophisticated than that, but it’s grim how President Trump’s post-truth reign of media-baiting (t)error is the logical endpoint of this dazzling work of satirical prophecy. But, anyway. Network deservedly won…

Illustration: Olly Gibbs. Alamy MOST DIRECTORS, EVEN working at a fair old lick, will struggle to make 20 films in a career spanning three decades. Takashi Miike, the Japanese master of mayhem, has just polished off his 100th with the excellent Blade Of The Immortal, and he’s still in the mood for more. We asked him to select milestones from a career that has taken in everything from yakuza movies to musicals. RAINY DOG (1997) Movie #25. An ex-yakuza stranded in Taipei is working for a local crime boss when an old flame appears, bringing with her his mute son. “It’s a film that I made in Taiwan. All I had was money. Cash. It was just me and the cast, and I went off to Taiwan to make it.…

THREADS OUT 9 APRIL / CERT 15 / 175 MINS You might best know Mick Jackson’s made-for-TV tale of nuclear warfare breaking out in P98Os Britain for the astonishing credit given to one unfortunate extra (Anne Sellors will never be able to escape the shadow of Woman Who Urinates On Herself). But there’s so much more to unpack here. An unremittingly bleak, sobering look at what would happen when the bombs drop (in this case, over Sheffield), there are no heroes or villains here; just a group of bedraggled, bewildered survivors trying to eke out an existence in the middle of a nuclear winter. Made at the height of the P98Os obsession with nuclear armageddon, I first saw it a decade or so ago, when its images and preoccupations had…

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED EMPIRE ISSUE 27R, MARCH 2OP2 Who has the toughest job in Hollywood? Not the poor schmo who has to stop Tom Cruise from climbing up things at every opportunity, nor the unfortunate bastard who has to keep a well-known producer furnished with cans of Diet Coke, no matter the hour. The guy with the toughest job in Hollywood is Kevin Feige. As head cheese of Marvel Studios, he may, at first glance, appear to have everything going for him — the geek who inherited the Earth, entrusted with bringing the comic giant’s back catalogue of iconic characters to the big screen. But therein lies the problem. For, last summer, Feige’s day job as producer of one of this summer’s biggest movies meant he had to cram all those…

CHRISTOPHER McQUARRIE REMEMBERS the moment distinctly. Tom Cruise had just completed his final pass on the big stunt that became the basis of Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation (you know the one; bloke strapped to the side of a plane as it takes off ), and a relieved McQuarrie turned to his cinematographer, Robert Elswit, with a simple observation. “I said, ‘I feel sorry for the poor son of a bitch who directs Mission: Impossible 6,’” laughs McQuarrie, who shortly thereafter became his own punchline by agreeing to return for Mission: Impossible — Fallout. And the second he signed on the line that is dotted, thoughts turned to the spectacular as he and Cruise attempted to outdo themselves. “On this one, there was the constant search for The Stunt,” admits…

NAKIA TURNS ON T’CHALLA Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o) was firmly on Team T’Challa in Black Panther. But in the comics, she’s a frequent foe to the Wakandan King, as Malice. Could Nakia turn her back on her on-again-off-again love in the MCU? In the Christopher Priest run of comics, she teams up with M’Baku (played by Winston Duke in the film) and vengefully assassinates prominent Wakandans. WAKANDA DESCENDS INTO CIVIL WAR A soldier from Niganda (the fictional African country bordering Wakanda), Zenzi has the power to bring anyone’s truly ugliest thoughts to the surface. She uses that ability to incite a rebellion against Black Panther. There are plenty of Wakandans with mixed feelings about their newly exposed position in the world — could Zenzi take advantage here? The fact that she…

“THERE WAS PLENTY of hesitation,” admits director Nora Twomey with a laugh, speaking about her Oscar-nominated animation The Breadwinner, “but at a stage where we were too committed to turn around.” The story of a young girl in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan who must pretend to be a boy to save her family from starvation, it is perhaps an unlikely subject for feature animation. But while it took considerable intestinal fortitude to make, “the wonderful thing about animation is that it takes so long, you get opportunities to fix your mistakes.” The film is a new direction for Cartoon Saloon, the Kilkenny-based animation house behind acclaimed family-friendly fables The Secret Of Kells and Song Of The Sea. The Breadwinner, based on Deborah Ellis’ novel, is its first film set outside Ireland, and…

WHAT MIGHT A BATGIRL MOVIE LOOK LIKE? After working on it for over a year, Joss Whedon has quit Batgirl — the long-mooted DC movie focused on Barbara Gordon, the daughter of Commissioner Gordon who dons her own Batsuit — saying he “didn’t have a story”. But there are plenty to choose from, if the project continues. Gail Simone’s psychologically dark run of the comics saw a PTSD-suffering Batgirl recovering her mojo after being shot through the spine by the Joker (in Alan Moore’s infamous The Killing Joke). Scott Beatty and Chuck Dixon’s Batgirl: Year One is a lighter affair and gives us a fresh origin story. And Hope Larson’s recent series in the DC Rebirth line presents a Batgirl still in college, should the DCEU be looking for some…

THE RED CARPET has been rolled up; the drinks cleared away; and the hangovers nursed. By the time you read this, the Rakuten TV Empire Awards are all done and dusted, revealed in a glitzy ceremony at London’s iconic Roundhouse. But who took home the most gongs? At the time of going to press, the full list of winners remains a mystery. There’ll be a full celebration of the evening in the next issue — but to see the winners right now, head to Empire Online for full coverage, including the complete list of winners, as-it-happened live blog, and video interviews with the star-studded guests. With a galaxy-beating nine nominations, Star Wars: The Last Jedi was the film to beat, scooping up nods for Best Director for Rian Johnson and…

★★★★ OUT 30 MARCH CERT TBC / POP MINS DIRECTOR Wes Anderson CAST Bryan Cranston, Bill Murray, Greta Gerwig, Edward Norton, Scarlett Johansson, Koyu Rankin PLOT Thanks to the cat-loving mayor of Megasaki City, the entire dog population of the Japanese metropolis has been transported to a grim island far from the coast. There, a band of scrappy creatures must embark on a mission to prevent further disaster. WES ANDERSON HAS history with dogs. And it’s the kind of history that might have landed him on some kind of PETA watchlist. In Moonrise Kingdom, a fox terrier named Snoopy took a fatal arrow in the neck. In Fantastic Mr. Fox, a beagle called Spitz got knocked out via drugged blueberries. Another mutt is killed in The Royal Tenenbaums, while the…

★★★ OUT 6 APRIL CERT PG / 116 MINS DIRECTOR Todd Haynes CAST Oakes Fegley, Millicent Simmonds, Julianne Moore, Michelle Williams PLOT Two stories, TO years apart: in P977, orphaned Ben (Fegley) is struck by lightning and loses his hearing. Then he runs away to New York to investigate his mother’s past. In P927, another deaf child, Rose (Simmonds), also slips away to the city that never sleeps in search of a silent-movie star. THE LAST ADAPTATION of a Brian Selznick novel was Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, a love-letter to the silent-movie pioneers who invented an art form from paper, wood and silver nitrate. Selznick’s beautiful follow-up book, Wonderstruck, was another puzzle-box story set in the early 20th century. But the two intrepid children at the heart of its tale live…

Where was the goddamn Uber? ★★★★ OUT 6 APRIL CERT 15 / 98 MINS DIRECTORS Jeremy Dyson, Andy Nyman CAST Alex Lawther, Martin Freeman, Andy Nyman, Paul Whitehouse, Jill Halfpenny PLOT Professor Philip Goodman (Nyman) investigates three unsolved cases of men falling victim to supernatural shenanigans. Dispatched around England, the pragmatic Goodman attempts to unravel their stories — but something scarier starts to take hold. GHOST STORIES SETS out its stall early, and what a bizarre stall it is. At its start, a supposed psychic is on stage acting as a vessel for a dead, leukaemia-stricken child to speak through him: “My blood hurts, Mummy,” the conman wails as the grieving mother breaks down. A couple of minutes later, a few decades earlier, a possessed old woman spits some bile.…

IF YOU KNOW one thing about Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane, it is that it was shot entirely on an iPhone. A big-name American auteur making a movie on a mobile could be conceived as little more than a publicity gimmick, a ruse to build noise around a film where the biggest name is the Queen off Netflix and the subject matter is an uncommercial cocktail of mental health and paranoia. Yet the way Soderbergh has utilised his ‘cell’ is fascinating, potentially paving a new way for filmmakers to work. If they remember to charge the damn thing. Of course, iPhone-shot cinema is nothing new. As far back as 2011, South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook made Paranmanjang, a 30-minute short about a fisherman who finds a dead body in the water shot…

★★★ OUT NOW CERT 15 / 140 MINS DIRECTOR Francis Lawrence CAST Jennifer Lawrence, Joel Edgerton, Jeremy Irons, Charlotte Rampling, Matthias Schoenaerts PLOT When Dominika Egorova (Lawrence) has her promising ballet career cut short, she’s blackmailed by her uncle into becoming a sexually manipulative ‘Sparrow’ for Russia’s intelligence agency. A RUSSIAN SECRET agent. A dehumanising training regime. A background in ballet. It’s no wonder that when Red Sparrow was announced, Marvel fans thought they were getting their much-wished-for Black Widow movie in everything but name. But Francis Lawrence’s steely thriller, based on the first of Jason Matthews’ trilogy of novels, shares more DNA with John le Carré’s densely plotted espionage page-turners than the MCU. For his first film since directing the final three Hunger Games instalments, Lawrence has once again…

★★★ NETFLIX OUT 8 MARCH EPISODES VIEWED 1-5 CREATOR Melissa Rosenberg CAST Krysten Ritter, Rachael Taylor, Eka Darville, Carrie-Anne Moss, Janet McTeer PLOT Even though she’s seen off mind-screwer Kilgrave, surly, hard-drinking PI Jessica Jones (Ritter) hasn’t achieved closure, so she sets out to crack the case of her own mysterious and tragic origin. “WITH GREAT POWER comes great mental illness,” says a short-lived character at the beginning of the second season of Jessica Jones, which sets its stall out early, and firmly. That not-too-subtle riff on Spider-Man’s catchphrase is a hardly necessary reminder the Marvel Universe’s Netflix-tethered heroes are, typically, hardly ecstatic recipients of their super-abilities. So where the first 13 episodes of the show boldly focused on Jessica’s struggle to vanquish a nemesis who was basically an amplified…

★★★★★ NETFLIX OUT NOW DIRECTOR Alex Garland CAST Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tessa Thompson, Gina Rodriguez, Tuva Novotny, Oscar Isaac PLOT Cellular biology professor Lena (Portman) joins an expedition into an area of Florida swampland that was hit by a meteor and is now surrounded by a mysterious shimmer that blocks all contact with the outside world. ANNIHILATION IS A women-on-a-mission film — a five-strong team, each member with a different skill set (a biologist, a physicist, a geologist, a paramedic and a psychologist), are sent to investigate a meteor that’s causing a strange phenomenon in an area of Florida. But that’s far from all it is. Taking that throwaway premise, writer and director Alex Garland (loosely adapting a novel by Jeff VanderMeer) has crafted a film that tackles…

SO THERE’S THIS billionaire genius playboy philanthropist, Tony, and he builds a metal suit to keep himself alive and he likes wearing it so fights crime and becomes a MAN OF IRON . Meanwhile, this bloke Nick notices that superheroes are popping up all over the place — a HUNK WITH A HAMMER , a GREEN DUDE with anger issues, and a super-soldier who’s the best example of humanity and so, naturally, is called STEVE — and decides to bring them all together into a supergroup called the Avengers. Like THE TRAVELLING WILBURYS , but with better hair. So then they get attacked by aliens from outer space, but they prevail just in the nick of time. Then, a couple of years later, they get attacked by a BAD ROBOT…

eople ask me if I always wanted to be a director. And the truth is, no. When I first started out, I felt so lucky to be able to make a living as an actor it didn’t even cross my mind... and I didn’t want to jinx it. I was never one of those actors that said, “Well, when this acting thing is over… I’ll just direct.” I had way too much respect for the directors I had worked with to view the transition as some kind of foregone conclusion. My first directing gig actually came about by total happenstance. Before I got The Office I had adapted this book by David Foster Wallace that had meant a great deal to me called Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. I remember…

UPGRADE Leigh Whannell, writer of Saw, director of Insidious: Chapter 3 and star, as Specs, of all the Insidious films, directs this film about a technophobe under siege from a computer chip he has implanted to cure his paralysis. MA Tate Taylor, director of The Help and The Girl On The Train, reteams with The Help’s Octavia Spencer for this psychological horror shooting in Mississippi and also starring Juliette Lewis. Taylor says it will make us think while we shriek. SPAWN With 1997’s well-intentioned but unsuccessful Spawn film a distant memory, Blum has enlisted the demonic black superhero’s creator, Todd McFarlane, to write and direct a new outing. Tonally it will be very different from traditional superhero fare, says Blum. FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDY’S Based on the 2014 video game…

AFTER THE AVENGERS failed in 1998, Jeremiah S. Chechik fled Hollywood. Not to a beachside retreat to drown his sorrows in margaritas and escape the deafening silence of box-office tills. Not even back across the border to his hometown of Montreal. The director, deemed responsible for a hot mess that scraped in only $48 million against a $60 million budget, felt so profoundly battered by the experience he disappeared into the literal wilderness. “I went across the Gobi desert to the edge of Western China,” he tells Empire. “I travelled through West Africa, through all these war-torn areas. The most dangerous places.” Now 62 years old, Chechik is reluctant to share details of his self-imposed exile, saying only that he had “plenty of dangerous experiences”. Though none so harrowing as…

00:03:11 ELIO ELIO, WHO’S THIS? Luca Guadagnino’s gorgeous, affecting love story starts very simply, with Elio (Timothée Chalamet) spying on Oliver’s (Armie Hammer) arrival from his bedroom. “Sometimes you see films in which the point of view is not rigorous,” says Guadagnino. “But we are seeing the arrival of this usurper, as Elio calls him, from the perspective of Oliver. It’s a reflection on the dynamic of the scene.” 00:14:33 SHOULDERING RESPONSIBILITY At first, Elio and Oliver seem to dislike each other. However, early on, Oliver touches Elio, fleetingly, on his bare shoulder. “You don’t want to overplay your hand,” says Guadagnino. “That scene’s a testament to the greatness of Armie Hammer as a performer, and his casualness in doing something that is a trespass, but in a way that…

I And adults DON’T BE FOOLED by the cheerful demeanours of Paul King and Simon Farnaby. Because as the architects [King co-wrote and directed; Farnaby co-wrote] of Paddington 2’s incredibly emotional ending, in which Paddington is reunited with his Aunt Lucy, they are responsible for, at a rough estimate, 75 per cent of the tears shed in Britain over the past four months. We caught up with these cold, calculating colluders and asked them for their tips. START WITH THE END King: We knew we wanted to end with Aunt Lucy coming back very early on. What’s emotional about the ending is that Paddington discovers that his good deeds meant something to all his neighbours, and the world can be a good place. Farnaby: What makes people cry isn’t just…

LEE UNKRICH: “Anybody who follows me on Twitter knows that I love The Shining. It’s my favourite movie. The scene where Jack Nicholson is slowly backing Shelley Duvall through the big Colorado lounge and she’s just swinging her bat at him is just a great example of a slow-burn. You don’t know where that scene is going, but you feel such immense dread the whole time.” INT. OVERLOOK HOTEL LOBBY — DAY Corrupted by the ghosts of the Overlook Hotel in the Colorado mountains, novelist-turned-caretaker Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) has gone dangerously insane, and is now stalking his terrified wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) through the hotel’s lobby. Holding him at bay with a baseball bat, she begins to back up the grand staircase… WENDY: I’m very confused. I just need…

YOU KNOW THAT old saying, something about acorns and mighty oaks? If you don’t, you can Google it. But when it comes to Marvel Studios, it’s apposite and then some. Back in the mid-2000s, Marvel’s film arm had their HQ in a small, rundown office near Santa Monica. You would have been forgiven for assuming it was a law firm. This was the acorn phase. It was there that I was attacked by bees one time, when a hive full of them fell onto the roof of the cab I had just climbed out of. That was a fun afternoon. It was also here that I was chatting once with former Marvel head honcho Avi Arad, when he was told his next appointment had arrived “It’s the guy who’s going…

50 SHAWARMA AVENGERS ASSEMBLE The Big Apple has been devastated. Iron Man has been almost turned into Dead Man. And the world’s faith in the Avengers has been shaken. The aftermath of the Battle Of New York is one of the most solemn moments in MCU lore. So it was genius to puncture the gloom by having the heroes all go off for a bite to eat — work colleagues letting off steam after a tough week. 49 LUIS TELLS TALES ANT-MAN Making an impact as a supporting character in a MCU film is not an easy thing to do, what with, you know, all those super-powered folk flying around and punching people really hard. But Michael Peña’s Luis is Ant-Man’s MVP. And his finest moments are his often off-topic…

“WHAT IF I told you that there aren’t any chance encounters?” Westworld’s pragmatic examiner Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) asked cyborg heroine Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) in 2016’s Season 1 opener. “That you and everyone you know were built to gratify the desires of the people who pay to visit your world?” Westworld, created by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, has messed with our and its characters’ heads from the start. A mind-bending remake of the 1973 film about robots running amok in a Wild West theme park, it threw up existential questions while planting puzzles — and Season 2 may melt our brains for good. “There is a lot of mayhem,” says Joy, smirking, when Empire asks what’s in store. “And a lot of madness.” Flipping sympathies from the original, Westworld…

© Marvel Studios 2018/Stephen Erik Schirle AS THE TITLE may suggest, Paul Rudd’s Scott Lang isn’t going to have it all his own way in Ant-Man And The Wasp. As the exclusive concept art above proves, Marvel’s miniature hero will have an equally pixel-sized partner this time around, in the diminutive shape of Evangeline Lilly’s Hope van Dyne, last seen at the very tail end of 2015’s Ant-Man getting her wings, courtesy of her inventor dad, Hank Pym (Michael Douglas). And one thing’s for sure: The Wasp is not going to be anybody’s sidekick. “It was important to me, in this movie called Ant-Man And The Wasp, that she’s not a supporting character,” director Peyton Reed tells Empire. “She’s a lead character. She’s become a fully-formed hero.” When Hope uttered…

Rex Features, Dan Mora/DC Comics FILMMAKER ANDREW HAIGH was never what you’d call a horsey person. Before making Lean On Pete, his intensely emotional coming-of-age story about a troubled 15-year-old Portland boy and a knackered racehorse, the Croydon-raised writer-director hadn’t had any experience with the beasts. So he was understandably anxious about directing one — in a double act with a teenager (Charlie Plummer), no less. “It sounds like it’s gonna be horrific,” says Haigh. But, it turns out, having a horse around makes for a surprisingly chilled film set. “They’re amazing animals when you spend time with them,” he says. “They really do sense your mood changes. Our horse, who was named Starsky, would sense the tone of the set. So it means everybody has to be calm.” Having…

FORGET SNOWPIERCER. MEET the Conveyex, a rollercoaster- style train barrelling through a barren landscape in Solo: A Star Wars Story. And hanging on for dear life are young Han (Alden Ehrenreich) and youngish Chewie (Joonas Suotamo) during a daring robbery. Co-writer Lawrence Kasdan and producer Kathleen Kennedy have long likened Ron Howard’s film to a Western: replace the goggles with neckerchiefs and the Conveyex with a locomotive and this could be Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, albeit with more hair and less Burt Bacharach. As well as being a “heist” movie, we now know where Solo: A Star Wars Story sits in the series’ scheme of things. A recently released time-line puts the film not only before Rogue One (obvs) but also before the Star Wars Rebels series. More…

IT WILL SEE THE CAST RETURN The story of Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and Oliver (Armie Hammer) is not yet over. Speaking to the Empire Podcast, Chalamet and Hammer confirmed they would gladly return for any sequel. (Chalamet jokingly suggested it could be set “in space or underwater”, while Hammer pondered the terrifying prospect of the peach having a baby: “There are a bunch of half-human peaches running around. A bunch of pumans...”) IT WILL BE SET YEARS LATER On the Oscars red carpet, director Luca Guadagnino confirmed that he’s working on a Call Me By Your Name sequel, set five or six years after the original film. The director is writing with the original book’s author André Aciman. In the novel — spoiler alert — a 40-page epilogue sees a…

PAUL SCHRADER MAY have just made his final film. He hasn’t decided yet. “I’m close to writing something now,” the 71-year-old filmmaker says, “but I’m also of the mind that if this was my last film, it would be a very good last film.” If it is indeed a swansong, First Reformed seems appropriate. A brooding, philosophical drama about a rural church encountering radical environmental activism, it features at its centre a most Schraderian anti-hero: the softly-spoken Reverend Toller (Ethan Hawke). Like Schrader’s most famous creation, Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle, Toller is a decent man experiencing a moral crisis — and responding to society’s ills with extreme measures. “It brings together a lot of things that I’ve been attempting my whole life,” says Schrader, who has been “working towards” the…

★★★★ OUT 30 MARCH CERT 15 / 92 MINS DIRECTOR Paddy Considine CAST Paddy Considine, Jodie Whittaker, Anthony Welsh, Paul Popplewell PLOT World middleweight boxing champion Matty Burton (Considine) is defending his title against cocky, trash-talking challenger Andre ‘The Future’ Bryte (Welsh). But when Matty suffers a traumatic head injury, he has a new fight on his hands. IN BOXING, A journeyman refers to a fighter with moderate skill who doesn’t quite reach the level of a prize fighter: a lost soul drifting from fight to fight. Matty Burton (Considine, who also writes and directs) is no journeyman in this sense: he’s a veteran of the sport, a middleweight boxing champion with a glittering career under his belt and retirement in his sights. The title of Considine’s second directorial effort,…

★★★★★ OUT 6 APRIL CERT 15 / 143 MINS DIRECTOR Robin Campillo CAST Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, Arnaud Valois, Adèle Haenel, Antoine Reinartz PLOT It’s the early ’9Os, and AIDS is killing in droves. In Paris, activist group ACT UP take on the government and pharmaceutical business, conflicted on how to get results, but doing all they can to affect change. IN 2000, DISCUSSING Boogie Nights, pornography and drama, Paul Thomas Anderson lamented the lack of proper, honest sex scenes in traditional narrative film. “How does Forrest Gump have sex?” he asked, by way of example. “What could be more of a revelation about a character than watching them have sex? That says a lot about them, how they touch another person in bed.” 120 BPM (Beats Per Minute) isn’t primarily…

★★★ OUT 23 MARCH CERT PG / 109 MINS DIRECTOR Ava DuVernay CAST Storm Reid, Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Levi Miller, Deric McCabe, Chris Pine PLOT Pre-teen Meg (Reid) never got over the disappearance of her scientist father (Pine) four years ago. But when she and her little brother (McCabe) meet the strange Mrs Whatsit (Witherspoon) they learn that he has travelled through space — and there may be a way to get him back. MADELEINE L’ENGLE’S A Wrinkle In Time is a children’s classic, showered with awards on publication in 1962 and in print ever since. But with its spare prose and cosmos-spanning concepts, and in particular given its non-ending, the novel is a particularly tricky proposition for the screen. Director Ava DuVernay’s solution is…

★★★ OUT NOW CERT 12A / 120 MINS DIRECTOR Garth Davis CAST Rooney Mara, Joaquin Phoenix, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Tahar Rahim PLOT After a miracle-performing Rabbi named Jesus (Phoenix) visits her village on the coast of Galilee, Mary of Magdala (Mara) leaves her home and family to join him as his newest disciple, and witnesses the key events during the final months of his life. MARY MAGDALENE HAS always been a vague, mutable figure in Christian teaching who tends to tell us more about the prejudices of the time than who she really was. Sadly, it’s Pope Gregory I’s take on her which has dominated most of history. In the late sixth century, the patriarchal git recast her as “the sinful woman” — a whore who Christ oh so mercifully redeemed.…

★★ OUT 23 MARCH CERT 12A / 102 MINS DIRECTOR Peter Landesman CAST Liam Neeson, Marton Csokas PLOT Following the death of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, FBI Associate Director Mark Felt (Neeson) is beaten to the post by Patrick Gray (Csokas), an outsider in Nixon’s pocket. As Watergate unfolds, Felt leaks information to the press, earning himself the nickname Deep Throat. SOME 32 YEARS after its release, Alan J. Pakula’s All The President’s Men suddenly feels like a touchstone for 2018’s cinematic releases. Firstly, Steven Spielberg’s The Post acted as a quasi-prequel outlining an investigation at The Washington Post pre-Watergate. Now Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down The White House (a title longer than the film will run in cinemas) does a deeper dive into Deep Throat, revealed…

Martin Freeman is standing stock still in an empty nursery being steadily unnerved by a series of unexplainable occurrences. Strange things are happening with the nappies; the Sudocrem is misbehaving. Off to one side, at a monitor, Ghost Stories co-directors Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson are stifling giggles. They are joy incarnate. The clapper board has Pac-Man ghosts drawn on it. It’s November 2016 and Empire is inside a vast luxury house half an hour outside of Leeds, two-and-a-half weeks into the five-week shoot for a horror movie that’s unashamedly, gloriously retro. Outside snow is coating the countryside, but inside the building there is under-floor heating and everyone is quietly padding around in socks of various embarrassing designs to protect the plush carpet. That sense of cosiness extends to the…

Wes Anderson’s new film is a load of old rubbish. This being Wes Anderson, of course, it’s actually a pile of neatly stacked, meticulously crafted, perfectly symmetrical rubbish. Welcome to Trash Island. Population: dogs. Having dipped into shark-infested waters ( The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou ), Indian long-distance trains ( The Darjeeling Limited ) and the post-War European service industry ( The Grand Budapest Hotel ), near-future Japan provides the latest quasi-fantasy setting for Isle Of Dogs , the ninth film from the Texan filmmaker. In the fictional city of Megasaki, 20 years from now, dogs have become effectively outlawed, reduced to second-class pet-izens by a fearsome, cat-loving mayor and his cackling cronies. In the midst of anti-dog hysteria, all…

WHEN KENNETH BRANAGH signed on to direct a new adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Murder On The Orient Express, he had already found his ideal Hercule Poirot: Kenneth Branagh. But how to put his own stamp on a character already played so memorably by the likes of Albert Finney, Peter Ustinov and John Suchet’s brother, David? We spoke to Branagh about how he pulled off playing “a human being and not merely a supercilious collection of quirks and eccentricities”. THE HAIR Like most everything else with Poirot, the hairstyle is controlled to within an inch of itself. “His delight in precision makes him breathe easier,” explains Branagh. But, as the murder mystery unfolds and Poirot gets deeper into the murky happenings aboard the famous train, the hair gets a little mussed…

Allstar, Capital Pictures, Ronald Grant Archive HAYAO MIYAZAKI, THE animation genius behind some of Studio Ghibli’s greatest hits, doesn’t write scripts. By his own account he starts production before he’s even finished storyboarding, with the plot unfolding as he gets his animators rolling, which somewhat explains the dream logic that informs Spirited Away. Of course our hero’s parents would be turned into pigs; of course she would share a lift with a giant radish spirit; of course a boy would also be a dragon who is in fact a river. The whole magical adventure is conducted with such a sure hand, and such a detailed sense of place and character, that you never question its weirder aspects. And the story turns weird, and wyrd, fast, and only gets more bizarre…

Rex Features IT ALL BEGAN with a falling scalpel. As a kid, Christopher Nolan had watched and loved the 1966 sci-fi adventure Fantastic Voyage, in which a crew of experts and their hi-tech submarine are shrunk to the size of a microbe and enter the body of a dying scientist. While they travel along his ear canal, a normal-sized surgeon in the operating room drops his knife, its clatter having catastrophic consequences for the teensy crew within. “That is a great moment,” Nolan says. “I always loved the idea of something in a larger-scaled world having a cataclysmic effect on this smaller world beneath.” Which is why, in the summer of 2009, Joseph Gordon-Levitt spent the best part of a week in a near-derelict former airship hangar in Bedfordshire performing…