Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2018 i Empire

NOT ALL SUPERHEROES wear capes. Or have powers. Some are just angry as hell. In Breaking In, Gabrielle Union plays a woman she describes as a superhero by necessity. Shaun Russell (Union) has to save her kids after heavies lock them in her father’s highly fortified house. “It’s like a reverse Panic Room,” says Union. “She has to find the superhero within when her kids’ [lives] are in the balance.” Should you need to protect your own home from intruders, monsters or local goodfornothin’ youths, Union recommends the following steps. GET BULLETPROOF WINDOWS The house in the film can be completely sealed off from the outside world. Much of that requires movie trickery, but not all of it. “The windows are insane,” says Union. “There were these electronic hurricane shutters…

DC Entertainment, Alamy BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH FIRST encountered the Patrick Melrose novels after a friend’s recommendation. “I was just absolutely captivated from the first book in,” admits Cumberbatch, who is now both starring in and producing a television adaptation. Edward St. Aubyn’s five semi-autobiographical books follow the sharp-tongued playboy Melrose across five decades, as he suffers horrific ill-treatment from his family, becomes consumed by substance abuse, and then later, settles into recovery. “They’re so funny, and coruscatingly witty,” Cumberbatch tells Empire of the five-part book series, with the TV adaptation covering a book an episode. “It’s a real masterpiece of English literature. It touches on universalities of what it is to be a son, a father, a human being, what it is to survive abuse and become somebody who can live…

Jake Michaels/New York Times/Redux/eyevine, Alamy BEST F(R)IENDS MARKS the first collaboration of Tommy Wiseau and Greg Sestero some 15 years after their cult classic The Room. An offbeat road trip taken by a drifter (Sestero, who also wrote the screenplay) and a mortician (Wiseau), it has the hallmarks of another cult classic but has its roots in an actual trip taken by Wiseau and Sestero in April 2003. Greg wrote Best F(r)iends based on a real road trip. Tommy, what’s your memory of that? Tommy Wiseau: Yeah, we had a groovy time, and I told Greg that I feel the negative vibes, and based on this he wrote the script. We had a groovy time overall. You know, like crazy guys go on a trip, have fun. Why were you…

JAMES CAMERON REVEALED recently he was only hours away from purchasing the rights to Jurassic Park before Steven Spielberg beat him to the punch. Promising a much “nastier” take, here is what his version might have looked like. We imagine... THE GREATEST SHOWMAN John Hammond (Arnold Schwarzenegger), the billionaire entrepreneur behind Jurassic Park, starts the movie naked, asking passers-by, “I need your white suit, hat and cane.” THE BADASS BOTANIST Ellie Sattler would have played a much more upfront role in the action, Laura Dern going through months of physical prep for the role. Her big moment sees her take down T-Rex with an almighty, “Get away, you bitch.” THE COMIC RELIEF Charismatic chaotician Ian Malcolm (Bill Paxton, obvs) would have had a nifty way with memorable one-liners, be it…

THERE ARE FIVE reasons why Christopher McQuarrie was slightly reluctant to return to the director’s chair on Mission: Impossible — Fallout, the sixth in the series. And he was one of them. The others were Brian De Palma, John Woo, J.J. Abrams, and Brad Bird. Together, not only would they make up a cracking side for a film quiz, but they’re also the five directors of the five Mission: Impossible films, from the 1996 original to McQuarrie’s own Rogue Nation in 2015. “The pedigree of M: I is that a new director comes on every time and brings their own spin to it,” explains McQuarrie. That idea wasn’t set in stone from the off; it’s something that happened as the franchise went from strength-to-strength. But it became important — that…

1 __ THE SUPERTEAMS ARE FINALLY ASSEMBLING After some complex legal wranglings and licensing negotiations, the superheroes are assembling like never before. Studio collaborations have allowed for character mash-ups comic-book fans have long been waiting for: Spider-Man has finally joined his pals in the Marvel Cinematic Universe; the X-Force are about to hobnob with the X-Men; and Wonder Woman is at last rubbing shoulders with Batman and Superman. Pro tip: stick around past the credits of Marvel’s Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2 to see a tease of the ultimate team-up in Avengers: Infinity War. EXAMPLES: Spider-Man: Homecoming, Marvel’s Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2 2 __ FEMALE SUPERHEROES ARE GETTING THEIR DUE On screen, as in the comics, superheroism has traditionally been something of a boys’ club. Not for…

★★★★ OUT 30 MARCH CERT 15 / 102 MINS DIRECTOR Kay Cannon CAST Leslie Mann, John Cena, Ike Barinholtz, Kathryn Newton, Geraldine Viswanathan, Gideon Adlon PLOT Best friends Julie (Newton), Kayla (Viswanathan) and Sam (Adlon) have decided that prom will be the night they all lose their virginity. But there’s just one thing out to stop them: their parents. MOVIES DEALING WITH teenage sexuality tend to be, unless they’re made by Larry Clark, pretty conservative. Mainstream comedies especially — from Pretty In Pink to American Pie to Superbad — for all their nudging and winking and supposed debauchery usually end with the message that losing one’s virginity, particularly for girls, is a sacred act only to be done in a loving relationship after much conversation and lighting of candles. It’s…

★★★★ OUT 4 MAY CERT 15 / 96 MINS DIRECTOR Jason Reitman CAST Charlize Theron, Mackenzie Davis, Ron Livingston, Mark Duplass PLOT Fortysomething mother of three Marlo (Theron) finds it so hard to cope with her newborn daughter she finally agrees to her “rich asshole” brother’s offer to pay for a night nanny. Enter Tully (Davis), a weirdly perfect 26-year-old Mary Poppins who not only gives Marlo a lifeline, but also makes her pine for her long-lost youth. WHEN MOVIES AREN’T perpetuating the saccharine myth of the ‘magic’ of childbirth, they often present everyday, mid-life domesticity as something to be escaped, usually via flight to some exotic location or through the sexual reawakening of an extramarital affair. Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman’s Tully locates us in a dramatically satisfying middle…

★★★ OUT 11 MAY CERT 12A / 92 MINS DIRECTOR Eric Styles CAST John Hurt, Charles Dance, Sofia Helin, Max Brown, Noah Jupe, Erin Richards PLOT Ralph Maitland (Hurt) is a successful novelist and screenwriter suffering from an incurable illness. Over a few days at his Portuguese villa, he attempts to rebuild relationships with his loved ones while becoming increasingly tempted by euthanasia. OLD MUSICIANS HAVE it easy when it comes to parting statements: in their later years the likes of Leonard Cohen and Johnny Cash built cottage industries recording albums where they addressed their impending meetings with their maker. Actors who don’t die young seldom get the opportunity to sign out with dignity — would Orson Welles, the man who gave the world Citizen Kane, really have chosen Transformers:…

★★★★ NETFLIX OUT NOW EPISODES VIEWED 1-4 DIRECTORS Jakob Verbruggen, James Hawes, Paco Cabexas, David Petrarca, Jamie Payne CAST Daniel Brühl, Luke Evans, Dakota Fanning, Brian Geraghty PLOT A series of grotesque murders of male prostitutes in P89Os New York prompts the police commissioner to sanction an investigation by criminal psychologist Dr Laszlo Kreizler (Brühl). But to avoid the wrath of the corrupt police force, he must conduct his enquiries in secret. NEW YORK IN the 1890s was a fine place to live. But only if you were fabulously wealthy. For the rest — the poor, or the droves of immigrants — it was a bleak existence. Dozens of people crowded together in the tiny rooms of unregulated tenement blocks; disease and death rampant. This is the world of the…

WHEN Roddy McDowall looked in the mirror, he didn’t recognise the face staring back at him. Heavy-browed, with a round wrinkled snout, it wasn’t even human. McDowall rose slowly from the barber’s chair in which he’d spent close to six hours having this new face applied, one May morning in 1967 at 20th Century Fox Studios. Then, seized by an odd compulsion, the London-born former child actor, star of How Green Is My Valley and Lassie Come Home, started jumping up and down. He let his arms hang loose and scratched manically at his armpits. He stuck out his tongue and jabbered madly. For a full 15 minutes, as Mort Abrahams, associate producer of Planet Of The Apes reported, “he went berserk.” The crew watched in stunned silence while McDowall…

Navy knitted top and knitted skirt: Joseph at Net-a-Porter. Leather shoes: Manolo Blahnik.Silver suit jacket and trousers: Isabel Marant. Purple suede shoes: Rupert Sanderson THE FIRST TIME I saw Ruth Wilson on screen, I was floored. It was 2008, in The Doctor Who Hears Voices, a Channel 4 documentary about a pioneering psychologist who had kept shtum about his schizophrenia diagnosis, and was now helping a junior doctor subjected to her own internal terrors. The psychologist played himself, and everything on screen was real bar his reconstructed scenes with the doctor, played by Wilson. It was a suffocating portrayal, far too authentic to be called a performance. She seemed genuinely on the edge; it all seemed real. I couldn’t fathom it. She has blurred lines since, forever getting between the…

LUKE SKYWALKER IS dead. He is no more. He has ceased to be. He’s fucking snuffed it. At the end of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the Tatooine farmboy-turned-withdrawn Jedi Knight did his Force projection thing to ward off Kylo Ren and light the spark that fans the flame that saves the Resistance and might down burn the First Order. And then, exhausted by the effort, he fades into nothingness, never to be seen again. Maybe. Mark Hamill, the man who brought Skywalker to life, is not fading away. The Last Jedi brings to an end his 41-year, five-movie association with the character, but Hamill is as vocal and visible as ever. As we found to our delight when we sat down with him to discuss, in true Hamill stream-of-consciousness…

“IT WAS A very unusual opportunity to let your heroes get killed,” says Jake Kasdan, director of Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle, of the masterstroke that gives his box-office behemoth an edge. As, in the living video game that is Jumanji, each of Kasdan’s four leads — Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Karen Gillan and Jack Black — start with three lives, and gradually have them whittled down to just one. We asked Kasdan to talk us through the film’s inventive, often hilarious, and sometimes surprisingly moving death scenes. HUNGRY, HUNGRY HIPPO The victim: Professor Shelly Oberon (Jack Black) Method of dispatch: Munched by a giant hippopotamus, mid-sentence “This was in the very first draft I read,” says Kasdan of the moment when a perplexed Shelly (actually super-cool school girl Bethany)…

Alamy TO PARAPHRASE CLINT Eastwood’s Blondie from The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, there are two types of people in the world: those who love the film’s climactic triangular shoot-out and those who haven’t seen it. The last part of Sergio Leone’s ‘Dollars trilogy’ culminates in perhaps the greatest set-piece of his career: a three-way Mexican standoff between goodie Blondie, baddie Angel Eyes (Lee Van Cleef ) and ugly Tuco (Eli Wallach) at Sad Hill cemetery. It’s a masterpiece of sustained suspense orchestrated by a conductor at the top of his game. For Quentin Tarantino, who quotes it in practically every film he makes, it’s “one of the best action sequences of all time”. The military-cemetery set was built at Carazo near the Salas de los Infantes in the…

WALK INTO ANY pub looking for a Star Wars enthusiast and you’re onto a sure thing. Want a conversation on any Marvel franchise and you might as well just open the nearest window and shout into the street. Iconic blockbusters are a useful cultural and social leveller, sure, but when the conversational ice has been broken, you may find little in common with fellow fans beyond a taste for popcorn and mutual proximity to a multiplex. But happen across a person who loves a film that matters only to a few, one you love like a family pet, and you have the beginning of a beautiful friendship. The ‘matchmaker movie’ identifies a kindred spirit, suggests a broader set of common reference points, a hinterland of shared interests. Several films have…

WHEN THE ICONIC blaxploitation picture Super Fly hit cinemas in 1972, it screened against a backdrop of social unrest, telling a story of a disenfranchised youth. The Black Power movement was in full swing and the militant Black Panther group loomed large as a dissenting voice. Things have changed in the intervening decades — the civil rights torch has been picked up by groups like Black Lives Matter — but now producer Joel Silver and director Director X feel the time is right for a remake. The story follows the original in the telling of Youngblood Priest (played here by actor-cum-singer-songwriter Trevor Jackson), a drug dealer looking to make one final score before heading out along the straight and narrow. Yet, while the original unfolded in Harlem — then the…

INDIANA JONES 5 Spielberg announced at the Empire Awards in March that Indiana Jones 5 will go before the cameras in the UK in April/May 2019 with a release date of 10 July 2020. David Koepp is writing, Harrison Ford will return, anything else you read is what Indy might call folklore. WEST SIDE STORY Spielberg’s long-held desire to make a musical seems to be moving ever closer to fruition. Adapted by regular collaborator Tony Kushner (Munich, Lincoln, The Kidnapping Of Edgardo Mortara), his take on the Jets vs Sharks fest is mooted as a more realistic, ethnically sensitive take than Robert Wise’s 1961 Oscar winner. After a casting call went out, actors such as Glee’s Naya Rivera fell over themselves to audition. Yet, it might have a rival. A…

AT THE PREMIERE for Revenge, paramedics had to be called. During a particularly gruesome scene, in which a character prises a three-inch shard of glass from a gaping wound in his foot, one audience member felt “unwell” and had to leave. “It was very surprising,” says first-time director Coralie Fargeat, with a smile. “When you make the movie, you don’t feel the violence anymore — it takes a kind of operatic, poetic form. When it’s that excessive, it becomes kind of unreal... Apparently some people respond to it in another way.” The incident seems mightily appropriate for Revenge, an intense experience both on screen and off. It’s a simple story: blonde airhead Jen (Matilda Lutz) spends a weekend in a luxury villa in the desert with her lover and his…

★★ OUT 11 MAY CERT TBC / 102 MINS DIRECTOR John Cameron Mitchell CAST Alex Sharp, Elle Fanning, Nicole Kidman, Ruth Wilson, Matt Lucas PLOT It’s P977. Young punk Enn (Sharp) attends a strange house party and falls head-over-heels for a bizarre American tourist (Fanning), who isn’t quite what she seems. Cue mayhem on the streets of Croydon. SOMETIMES, THROWING shit at the wall and seeing what sticks can be a valid artistic process, resulting in unexpected detours and rewarding leftfield turns. And sometimes you end up with How To Talk To Girls At Parties. Which, despite the very best intentions of John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig And The Angry Inch, Shortbus) and his talented and game cast, is a film that can never quite decide what it wants to be.…

★★ OUT 11 MAY CERT 12A / 107 MINS DIRECTOR José Padilha CAST Rosamund Pike, Daniel Brühl, Eddie Marsan, Lior Ashkenazi PLOT The true story of a P97U plane hijacking, which saw four anti-Israel terrorists take over an Air France flight and divert it to Uganda’s Entebbe Airport, where the crew and passengers were held hostage. ENTEBBE HAS A problem to solve. A familiar one, incidentally, to anyone who’s ever filmed the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Namely, how do you get around the issue that the action centrpiece to the film is over so quickly? Three minutes, in this case (while the O.K. Corral was done and dusted in just 30 seconds). John Sturges solved it by ignoring the truth and setting wagons on fire over his eight-minute shoot-out;…

★★★★ OUT 4 MAY CERT TBC / 103 MINS DIRECTOR Hiromasa Yonebayashi CAST (Voiced by) Ruby Barnhill, Louis Ashbourne Serkis, Kate Winslet, Jim Broadbent PLOT Schoolgirl Mary (Barnhill) is spending the summer at her great aunt’s, but the holidays become more interesting when she’s swept away on a flying broomstick to the magical Endor College. THE CENTRAL IMAGE of Mary And The Witch’s Flower has a ring of familiarity: a young pre-teen girl clutching a magical broomstick, accompanied by a sarcastic cat. The film’s surface similarities to Hayao Miyazaki’s 1989 coming-of-age story Kiki’s Delivery Service are no accident, but this goes beyond homage. Mary is the first feature from Studio Ponoc, created from the ashes of Studio Ghibli with a team boasting former Ghibli staff including lead producer Yoshiaki Nishimura.…

★★★★ OUT NOW CERT 15 / 90 MINS DIRECTOR John Krasinski CAST Emily Blunt, John Krasinski, Noah Jupe, Millicent Simmonds, Cade Woodward PLOT 2O2O. Civilisation has collapsed following the unexplained arrival of ravening monsters who track by sound and pounce on any creature who makes a noise. A young family survive on an isolated farm, but the imminent arrival of a new baby imperils their fragile fortress. THOUGH ITS CATACLYSM is global, this high-concept monster movie works by narrowing the focus. Just as the human characters try to cut out noise by going barefoot and sprinkling sound-absorbing sand over every path, screenwriters Bryan Woods and Scott Beck and director John Krasinski (who also plays the lead and did a rewrite of the script) eliminate almost all of the frills to…

3.720 TO ONE. These, as any Last Exit To Nowhere T-shirt-sporting geek could tell you, are the (approximate) odds of Han Solo successfully navigating an asteroid field, according to C-3PO in The Empire Strikes Back. For the cast and crew of Solo: A Star Wars Story, it also must have felt like the odds of meeting their summer 2018 release date. As the world knows, 22 Jump Street’s Phil Lord and Chris Miller were dismissed mid-way through production. It became a production frozen in carbonite. Just nine months later, on a late March morning, Ron Howard, who took over the controls, is on buoyant form. With just two days of scoring left (John Powell has composed the music but Star Wars veteran John Williams has written Solo his first theme),…

Jason Reitman and DiaBro Cody could not be more different. Canadian-born director Reitman, son of Ghostbusters director Ivan, grew up in a minted film family — his baby pictures were taken on the set of National Lampoon’s Animal House. Writer Cody (born Brook Busey — she took the name ‘Diablo’, Spanish for ‘devil’, after repeatedly listening to El Diablo by Duran Duran side project Arcadia) had a modest but not impoverished upbringing in Chicago, Illinois, before her adventures as a blogger, feminist stripper and Entertainment Weekly columnist led her to Hollywood. But together, they have formed an indie dream team, pregnancy comedy Juno (2007) and mid-life-crisis tale Young Adult (2011) offering pointed, funny, candid takes on the pains and pangs of entering different life stages. Their third collaboration, Tully, continues…

Photofest WHAT’S FUNNIER THAN an idiotic right-wing Presidential candidate working with the Russians to help bring down his own country? Not much, thought Richard Condon. Published in 1959, Condon’s second novel, The Manchurian Candidate, was inspired by a brace of lunatic Cold War screeds: The Politician, by anti-Communist John Birch Society founder Robert Welch, which posited that President Eisenhower was a Red agent, and Brain-Washing In Red China, in which CIA propagandist Edward Hunter argued that US Korean War POWs had been “brainwashed” in Manchuria as Communist sympathisers. Centred around an American war hero programmed by the Communists to kill a US Presidential candidate, Condon’s satire was Hollywood catnip. Director-screenwriter team John Frankenheimer and George Axelrod snatched up the film rights. Frankenheimer, who came from New York TV, was schooled…

“IT’S NOT A date movie, is it?” chuckles Mick Jackson, director of the film that is, quite possibly, the most depressing of all time. And he’s right. For Threads is a dead-eyed depiction of the devastation a full-blown nuclear war would wreak upon society. From the first bloom of mushroom clouds on the outskirts of Sheffield to the fallout and then the long, slow descent into radioactive ruin, it’s likely to get the object of your affections running far and fast in the direction of the nearest nuclear bunker. It’s also, 34 years on from its debut on BBC One, incredibly, and scarily, timely, with the spectre of nuclear warfare being taken seriously for the first time since the Cold War thawed. “It’s almost as if we are back in…

Alamy, REX/Shutterstock FOR WRITER-DIRECTOR Whit Stillman, Metropolitan is a “Cinderella story of failing upwards”. Made on no budget with no names, Stillman’s 1990 debut feature was rejected by every small distributor before garnering Cannes Film Festival acclaim, fantastic reviews, and an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. Set in the rarefied high society of New York debutantes, it follows the lives and loves of a group of friends dubbed The Sally Fowler Rat Pack as they size up letting a new member, Tom Townsend (Edward Clements), join their clique. Twenty-eight years on, it remains as funny, smart and irresistible as ever. To mark its Criterion Collection UK debut, Stillman reflects on some of the elements that make it sing. THE AUTHENTICITY The moneyed world of the UHB’s (Urban Haute Bourgeoisie),…

“I HOPE YOU are not following me? I don’t know where I’m going!” Michael Palin said this as the camera cut to various pieces of signage hanging above a subterranean network of corridors creating a very busy intersection. There appeared to be thousands of people rushing around and moving in a blur on polished floors like a mesmerising flock of birds. My favourite Python was lost and confused. During Palin’s flagship series Around The World In 80 Days he tackled deadly snakes, blind razor-wielding barbers and burly sailors and now, in this scene, he was finally meeting his match: the rail network of Tokyo, Japan. I was 11 years old when my family and I were sitting down in front of the television, enjoying Palin’s travels and after watching this…

FRANCIS LAWRENCE: “I watch The Untouchables about once a year — it always holds up. I saw it at a time in high school when movies started to become an art form for me, they weren’t just entertainment. Most of this sequence is waiting. Kevin Costner watching the clock, seeing people walk by, thinking that it might be the accountant, waiting, waiting, waiting. It’s just so tense and so well done, and so well choreographed, and also a bit of an homage to the step sequence in Battleship Potemkin.” INT. UNION STATION — NIGHT Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner), shotgun out, is at the top of the station’s steps, waiting for Al Capone’s accountant to arrive. The clock reads four to midnight. Ness sees cleaners working on the floor. Then he…

SO, HERE HE is once more. Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool — DP to his friends, Mr Pool to you — back for another round of merry mutant mayhem. No quip too big, no inside joke too small. Fourth walls will never be the same again. Deadpool 2 will follow in the footsteps of its postmodern predecessor by casting a sideways glance — or, if you will, cocking a snook — at the conventions and clichés of comic- book movies. As evidenced by our exclusive pic, in which Reynolds’ Wade Wilson appears to have finally joined the X-Men, alongside would-be team-mates Colossus (Stefan Kapicic) and Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand). But look more closely, and you’ll see he’s just wearing an X-Men T-shirt over his regular costume. Which sums up the character,…

WHEN PIXAR’S SUPERHERO adventure The Incredibles was first released in 2004, the genre landscape was very different. Iron Man was four years away; the Avengers were yet to assemble; Batman Begins hadn’t even begun. “Since then, there’s been roughly 600,000 superhero films,” chuckles Brad Bird, director of The Incredibles and its forthcoming sequel. “You can’t throw a rock without hitting a superhero. The turf has been trodden endlessly.” Which makes Incredibles 2, following-up after a gap of 14 years, something of a challenge in a crowded marketplace. But Bird, who dipped his toes into live action with Tomorrowland and Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol in the interim, seems up for it. “How do you do something fresh? Our answer is pretty simple: I was never particularly enamoured with the superpowers.…

Alamy/Photofest THE SECOND THE screen blacked out at the end of the last episode of The Sopranos, a sequel was out of the question. While some modern TV classics could conceivably be extended (Matthew Weiner sadly hasn’t responded to my pitch for ‘Sally In The ’70s’, in which Sally Draper encounters Watergate and second-wave feminism), there was simply no way, even before James Gandolfini’s premature death, that the story of the Soprano family could move forwards without destroying that perfect ambiguity. But it seems there’s a way it could move backwards. Creator David Chase has just announced a movie prequel, The Many Saints Of Newark, that will depict the tensions between Italian- and African-American gangsters around the time of the Newark riots in July 1967. That time period suggests it…

Alamy, Getty, REX/Shutterstock DIRECTOR ARI ASTER calls his debut feature “a family film”. But — and we cannot stress this enough — do not take kids to see this. Or anyone without a cast-iron constitution. Because this “family film” is going to be the most talked-about horror movie of the year. Aster uses the term because Hereditary is about family and the connections they share, emotionally and genetically, whether they like it or not. It centres on the Grahams. Annie Graham’s (Toni Collette) mother has recently died, which she and her family — husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne), son Peter (Alex Wolff ) and daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro) — are taking oddly. As bizarre and terrifying things begin to happen, they discover more about their family line and realise being a…

IT’S TAKEN NOEL Clarke (actor, writer, frequent Ashley Walters collaborator) and Ashley Walters (actor, rapper, frequent Noel Clarke collaborator) eight years to get new cop show Bulletproof off the ground — because it looks unlike anything else on British TV. Or rather they look unlike anyone else on British TV. “I was sitting at home watching Bad Boys, one of my favourite franchises,” says Walters, “and I thought, ‘Why isn’t there anything like this in the UK, with two black leads?” I called Noel and we thought we should make a film about two black UK cops.” They shopped the idea around, but couldn’t get backing for a film. Eventually they took it to production company Vertigo, who brought in director Nick Love (The Football Factory, The Business) and the…

Illustration: Matt Herring What character were you in your first school play? I was a potato. It was a play about nutrition. I don’t know how good I was in it. I didn’t work again for a long time after that. When were you most starstruck? By Ani DiFranco, who is my favourite singer, a folk singer. Also Anjelica Huston. My sister and I ran into her at an event once and we could not form an interesting sentence. We basically just said, “We love you!” and stared at her. Do you have a signature dish? No. I can cook maybe ten things, but I don’t. I married a chef, though, so I can continue to not cook those ten things. What is the worst smell in the world? Rotting…

★★★★ OUT 20 APRIL CERT 15 / 103 MINS DIRECTOR Adrian Shergold CAST Maxine Peake, Paddy Considine, Alun Armstrong, Tony Pitts, Lindsey Coulson PLOT Funny Cow (Peake) is a woman who defies every expectation of the men in her world, whether they’re her abusive father, loutish husband, needy boyfriend, or all the blokes in the working men’s clubs she frequents who don’t believe for a second she could ever make ’em laugh. DESPITE THE TITLE, Funny Cow is not a comedy. There are a lot of jokes, but — trust us — you’re not supposed to laugh at them. Even when the title character (whose real name we’re never told) gets her big, on-stage moment, her finally unveiled material is neither groundbreaking nor elevating. She’s really no better than any…

★★★★ OUT 27 APRIL CERT TBC / 107 MINS DIRECTOR Michael Pearce CAST Jessie Buckley, Johnny Flynn, Geraldine James, Trystan Gravelle PLOT Moll (Buckley) is 27 years old and still lives with her parents, including her steely mother (James), on Channel Island Jersey. Then she meets misfit Pascal (Flynn) and the pair fall in love — a love that’s tested when Pascal becomes a murder suspect. WITH ITS OPPRESSIVE small-town setting, intense central relationship and serial-killer trimmings, you could be forgiven for expecting Beast to be yet another cinematic remix of the Charles Starkweather/Caril Ann Fugate spree: a Jersey Kalifornia, or Badlands in the Channel Islands. Yet, while that connection’s undeniable (tonally and visually, it’s closest to Terrence Malick’s bucolic debut), writer-director Michael Pearce’s first feature has a distinct heart…

★★★ OUT 4 MAY CERT TBC / TBC MINS DIRECTOR Andrew Niccol CAST Clive Owen, Amanda Seyfried, Colm Feore PLOT In a world where people’s memories are stored in the cloud, a killer is editing themselves out of existence. Detective Sal Frieland (Owen) sets out to track the killer down, encountering mysterious hacker Anon (Seyfried) along the way. IN THE PANTHEON of Andrew Niccol’s dystopian futures, Anon (future without privacy) rests somewhere between The Truman Show (voyeurism future) and S1m0ne (false-reality future) in its depiction of society gone awry. Anon’s vision of digital dependency taken to its logical end goes beyond sulky teens staring mindlessly at Snapchat, and sees the entire population plugged in to an augmented reality where everything from strangers’ bios to live ads are beamed directly into…

★★★ OUT 11 MAY CERT 15 / 108 MINS DIRECTOR Michel Hazanavicius CAST Louis Garrel, Stacy Martin, Bérénice Bejo PLOT France, P9U8: filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard (Garrel) is fêted the world over and newly married to the far younger actress Anne Wiazemsky (Martin). His marriage and career fade in importance to him as he becomes more interested in revolution. JAMES JOYCE GAVE us Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man; The Artist director Michel Hazanavicius here looks at arthouse hero Jean-Luc Godard and gives us ‘Portrait Of The Artist As An Insufferable Nightmare’. The source material is a book by Godard’s former wife, a sad story of a young woman learning narcissists are incapable of love. There’s a certain iconoclastic glee in how Redoubtable presents one of the monstres sacrés…

POP QUIZ HOTSHOT. Name the first two films directed by John Krasinski prior to A Quiet Place. No? Don’t worry, we had to IMDb it too. There might be a number of reasons why the David Foster Wallace adaptation Brief Interviews With Hideous Men and ensemble comedy The Hollars didn’t catch fire whereas Krasinki’s third feature has found favour (eg: they were rubbish). One reason might be genre. A Quiet Place is yet another example of the horror film’s ability to shine (a sickly green) light on directorial talent and chutzpah. After all, it’s not just Krasinski who is getting heat from fear-fests. Recently Jennifer Kent (The Babadook), Robert Eggers (The Witch), Anna Biller (The Love Witch), Corin Hardy (The Hallow), and the Oscar-winning Jordan Peele (Get Out) all proved…

★★★★ OUT NOW CERT 12A / 140 MINS DIRECTOR Steven Spielberg CAST Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Simon Pegg, Ben Mendelsohn, Mark Rylance PLOT To save a VR realm from the threat of a corporate villain, underprivileged teenager Wade Watts (Sheridan) must discover three keys hidden somewhere in the computer-generated world. THERE’S A MOMENT, not long into Ready Player One, where hundreds of cars, including a DeLorean, the A-Team van and the Plymouth Fury from Christine, are all racing through New York when, having already outwitted the Jurassic Park T-Rex, King Kong swings into view. At this moment it’s clear: the film is going to deliver on its thrill-ride promise, and then some. Set 27 years from now, the world is overpopulated and, if not quite yet a dystopia, certainly thinking…

★★★★ NETFLIX OUT NOW EPISODES VIEWED ALL CREATED BY Barry Sonnenfeld, Mark Hudis CAST Neil Patrick Harris, Patrick Warburton, Malina Weissman, Louis Hynes, Nathan Fillion, Roger Bart PLOT They’ve survived snakes, leeches and whirring buzz-saws. But the beleaguered Baudelaire orphans are in for a whole heap of further trouble, as they continue to be pursued by the fortune-hungry Count Olaf (Harris) and meet an equally sly new foe. LAST YEAR WE got the sordid start of the tale of the Baudelaire orphans. And now along comes the menacing middle: ten episodes, two apiece dedicated to the book created by verbose wordsmith Daniel Handler. This will be the longest of the three seasons and though we’re now into territory uncharted on screen, this is the one most likely to test a…

OUT OF THE PAST (1947) Emilia Clarke’s Qi’ra is a quasi classic film noir femme fatale. “My favourite is probably Jane Greer from Out Of The Past ,” says Lawrence Kasdan. “She sees things more clearly than Robert Mitchum does. And we wanted that quality for Qi’ra.” ADAM’S RIB (1949) One of Lawrence Kasdan’s instructions to his son was to imbue the Han-Chewie dynamic with some zingy Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn repartee. “When he said that, I thought, ‘That’s cool,’” says Jonathan Kasdan. “And then I thought, ‘How are we gonna do that if you can’t understand what the hell one of them says?’ But that became one of the great, fun challenges. One of the things I’m proud of is that for everything Chewie says, we wrote a line.” THE…

On the same day in 1968 — 3 April — two timeless cinematic masterpieces were released. Both were science-fiction. Both featured apes. And both would go on to change cinema forever. Empirechronicles the turbulent, rival productions of2001: A Space Odyssey and Planet Of The Apes THEY had arranged to meet among the ersatz palms and DayGlo punch of a Polynesian-themed cocktail bar. It was never entirely clear why Stanley Kubrick favoured Trader Vic’s, the tacky franchise in the bowels of the Savoy Hilton, but that was where Arthur C. Clarke was bidden on 22 April 1964. By which time the director had read everything that could be considered science-fiction and most science fact. Kubrick had been informed Clarke was the best. There was little doubt the British author’s scientific leanings…

In the summer of 1997, reeling from the box-office failure of his horror-comedy The Frighteners, Peter Jackson was desperate to get his mooted adaptation of The Lord Of The Rings off the ground. Fortunately, a powerful Hollywood force seemed eager to make it as two films. Unfortunately, that person was Harvey Weinstein, the tempestuous and often terrifying head of Miramax — who has since been disgraced over multiple accusations of sexual assault — to whom Jackson was bound by a first-look deal. “Fran remembers this stuff much better than I do,” says Peter Jackson stoically. “It’s like a car crash, I tend to sort of wipe out all the bad memories. Fran hangs on to every detail.” With their initial treatment completed, Jackson and [producer/co-screenwriter] Fran Walsh flew to New…

00:08:13 BOMBS AWAY __ Rian Johnson’s addition to the Star Wars pantheon kicks off with a sequence in which Resistance bombers attack a First Order Dreadnought, only for one to blow up and set off a chain reaction. “That’s an unavoidable flaw of having bombers,” says Johnson, who was inspired to introduce them after watching World War II flick Twelve O’Clock High. “Bombers were big, pregnant cows. Their flaw is also a B-52’s flaw.” 00:14:25 THROWAWAY GAG __ J.J. Abrams’ The Force Awakens ended on a cliffhanger, with Rey (Daisy Ridley) handing a lightsaber to Mark Hamill’s Luke Skywalker. There was much speculation about what Luke would do. Turns out it was ‘toss it over his shoulder’. “Once I figured out where Luke’s head is at, I knew he would…

IN THE MID-1960S, Alfred Hitchcock abandoned a project called Frenzy — very different from his 1972 film of that title — which would have been his attempt to stay in the ‘mod cinema’ game, fracturing narrative in the manner of Euro auteurs like Michelangelo Antonioni or Jean-Luc Godard. One of the reasons Hitch was so self-conscious of his position was that Henri-Georges Clouzot had encroached on Hitch’s master of suspense turf with his back-to-back hits The Wages Of Fear and Les Diaboliques — which prompted the Englishman to get gritty and ruthless with Psycho. Clouzot one-upped his rival for a final time with La Prisonnière (Woman In Chains), which fulfils Hitchcock’s vision by blending psycho-thriller and experimental drama. It catches its groovy, chilly moment perfectly (and Paris 1968 was nothing…