Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2018 i Empire

EVERYONE IS SCARED of giving away spoilers on the set of The Girl In The Spider’s Web — which seems odd, considering the novel it’s adapted from, by David Lagercrantz, was published three years ago. Instead of rebooting The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (again), or moving on to its follow-up, The Girl Who Played With Fire, Sony has opted to tackle the fourth instalment in the Millennium series (and the first not written by original author Stieg Larsson, who died in 2004), which sees Lisbeth Salander and journalist Mikael Blomkvist embroiled in a world of government spies and cyber criminals. Here, Claire Foy stars as Salander, taking over the role from Rooney Mara, who starred in David Fincher’s 2011 English-language adaptation. Having shot to fame in Netflix hit The…

WHETHER IT’S PENNYWISE or the Joker, clowns are often the scary evildoers when they show up on the big screen. But Animal World — a Chinese action film that blends sci-fi with martial arts — aims to flip that script in a big way. Adapted from the first part of the Japanese manga Gambling Apocalypse Kaiji, Li Yifeng stars as Zheng Kaisi who, after being deceived into entering a deadly game, has to battle hordes of monsters in order to survive. And, in a twist from writer-director Han Yan, he does so by turning into the world’s deadliest clown: “The clown is actually a cartoon figure that Kaisi knew from his childhood,” Han tells Empire. “When our hero gets excited, the clown jumps out from his body and helps him…

CABIN IN THE Woods announced Drew Goddard as a highly exciting new filmmaking talent. His directorial debut, it took the horror cliché of a group of young people being terrorised in a rural hideaway and turned it into something bizarre, scary and funny about secret government agencies and giant evil gods. Since then he’s written World War Z and The Martian, and created the TV show Daredevil. It’s only now, six years after his first, that he’s directing his second movie. Like Cabin In The Woods, it sounds like it’s going to be a genre-upending, bonkers ride. “I have to be very careful what I say about it,” says producer Jeremy Latcham (veteran of multiple MCU titles). “It’s full of so many twists and turns.” The film takes place in…

THERE’S ALWAYS BEEN something of the movie mogul about Matthew Vaughn. A producer-turned-director who works both inside and outside the studio system, self-funding blockbusters such as Kingsman: The Secret Service and its sequel, last year’s The Golden Circle. So, it’s perhaps no surprise to find that he’s going all in with the formation of Marv Studios. “I’d like to be the modern version of what a studio can be,” he tells Empire. “One where creativity really does win and is at the foremost of every decision. The older you get, the more responsible you start feeling. But we’re going to go for it.” To that end, Vaughn is lining up a slew of eye-catching films with which to launch his new venture over the next couple of years. To wit:…

“VENOM IS UNIQUE within the canon of Marvel,” asserts director Ruben Fleischer, speaking from the depths of post-production at Sony Pictures in LA. “You can’t say there are a lot of other heroes like him.” This is partly because Venom isn’t really a hero at all. As revealed in the 300th issue of The Amazing Spider-Man in 1988, this alien symbiote — fused with the bitter, vengeful Eddie Brock — is one of the friendly neighbourhood crimefighter’s deadliest foes. One who’s already faced off against Spidey on screen in Sam Raimi’s less-than-loved Spider-Man 3, with Topher Grace in the role. Not that this put off the director of Zombieland and Gangster Squad. “Always a fan” of the character, he was drawn to the idea of a movie that put the…

PAST TIMES AT RIVENDELL HIGH After his father fell foul of orcs, Aragorn was raised in Rivendell, left unaware of his kingly destiny until he was 20. Would Amazon dare a Middle-earth teen drama, as a callow Aragorn struggles with his identity, being an outsider at elf camp, and an inter-species romance with dazzling prom queen Arwen? Tellingly, Elrond attempted to hide Arwen from his human adoptee, sending her away to Lothlórien. There even exists unused Jackson footage of a beardless Viggo Mortensen and Liv Tyler frolicking between the trees of Lothlórien once due to be a flashback. EASY STRIDER By far the likeliest route is Aragorn’s time in the wild. Burdened by his royal blood and tangled romantic life, Aragorn turned ranger. As noted in the Appendices, “for nearly…

SPINNING OUT OF the museum of the supernatural, housed in the basement of paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, James Wan’s The Conjuring has quietly spawned a burgeoning shared cinematic horror universe. So far, it includes a numbered sequel, plus a couple of spin-offs for the killer doll Annabelle, collecting an impressive worldwide box office of $1.2 billion. The Crooked Man, as featured in The Conjuring 2 may also be the subject of a future project — but first, here comes The Nun. We first see the Nun 15 minutes into the original Conjuring — although you’d be forgiven for not noticing the unremarked picture on the wall near the door of the Warrens’ haunted archive. That picture is in the final shot too, reflected in the mirrored lid of…

When were you last naked outdoors? About ten minutes ago. I’ve come away for a lovely weekend with friends in a cabin by a lake and when we arrived we jumped in. I was in the nip. It’s a bit like Caligula here. What one thing do you do better than anyone else you know? Do you know what I’ve got very good at recently? I’ve been cultivating many flowers and plants. It gives me a disproportionate level of joy, but also a disproportionate level of tragedy when raccoons burrow through my basil. When were you most starstruck? When I met Sam Rockwell recently, on Mute. I was having my wig put on, with headphones on, completely off in my own world. Then I opened my eyes and I see…

★★★★ OUT 29 JUNE CERT PG / 109 MINS DIRECTOR Debra Granik CAST Ben Foster, Thomasin McKenzie PLOT Ex-military man Will (Foster) and tween daughter Tom (McKenzie) enjoy a solitary existence living mostly off the land. When they are shopped to social services, they are forced to live a life with others. And one of them starts to like it. IT MIGHT SOUND like a CSI-style procedural on 5USA (“Previously on ‘Leave No Trace’”), but co-writer/director Debra Granik’s film ploughs a subtler, more rewarding trail. Her first fiction feature since 2010’s Winter’s Bone, which launched the career of Jennifer Lawrence, it ploughs a similar vein of rural American drama but lands on a tender portrait of a father and daughter in transition. It is small and, story-wise, slight, but quietly…

★★ OUT 6 JULY CERT 15 / 95 MINS DIRECTOR Vaughn Stein CAST Margot Robbie, Simon Pegg, Mike Myers, Dexter Fletcher PLOT Two killers (Fletcher, Irons), a teacher (Pegg) and a janitor (Myers) lurk on the streets of an ever-dark city, living in fear of crime lord Mr Franklin, but a greater threat might be posed by a mysterious waitress (Robbie) with a curious interest in their lives. HARDBOILED NOIR PASTICHE Terminal is largely set in and around a train station. Which is apt, given that it pretty much nails the feeling of what it’s like to spend 90 minutes in one. There are long stretches of listlessness, every now and again something interesting to look at, and the overall compulsion to keep checking your watch. While its strong cast…

★★★★ OUT NOW CERT 15 / 119 MINS DIRECTOR David Leitch CAST Ryan Reynolds, Josh Brolin, Morena Baccarin, T.J. Miller, Zazie Beetz PLOT Having reunited with fiancée Vanessa (Baccarin), Wade Wilson/Deadpool (Reynolds) continues with his own brand of superhero crime-fighting. But when fellow mutant Cable (Brolin) travels from the future to kill a super-powered child, Deadpool forms team X-Force to take him on. HOW DO YOU review a film with a lead character so self-aware he’s capable of reading said review, then cracking wise about it with numerous inventively offensive putdowns? Deadpool (Reynolds) is a superhero with his own set of rules, in which nobody is inoculated from his peculiar brand of hyperwit, including (and especially) himself. So it goes with this frantic sequel, which opens with a comment on…

★★★ OUT JUNE 18 CERT 12A / 110 MINS DIRECTOR Gary Ross CAST Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, Anne Hathaway, Sarah Paulson, Mindy Kaling, Awkwafina, Rihanna, Helena Bonham Carter PLOT Criminal Debbie Ocean (Bullock) looks to pull off the most audacious heist of her career: the diamonds worth $150 million from movie star Daphne (Hathaway). But first she needs to get together a crew. CATE BLANCHETT HAS joked that the reason Ocean’s 8 earned its title is because there are actually only eight women working in Hollywood. But where the gender-swapped sequel to Steven Soderbergh’s early noughties crime trilogy doesn’t break from familiar heist-movie beats or raise the stakes, it more than makes up for that in cast chemistry and star power. It’s a breezy, enjoyable 110 minutes that feels human-sized…

★★ OUT 29 JUNE CERT TBC / 90 MINS DIRECTOR Baltasar Kormflkur CAST Shailene Woodley, Sam Claflin PLOT After being caught in a hurricane, sailor Tami Oldham (Woodley) wakes to find her yacht damaged, her partner injured and little hope of rescue. Can she get them home? WHILE IT RARELY comes up in lists of cinema’s greatest villains, the ocean as an antagonist is something Hollywood keeps coming back to. And not even because of the things in it (the sharks, the barracuda, the sharktopuses). Bigger than a kaiju, more emotionless than a Terminator, it can’t be bargained with, it can’t be reasoned with and, when you scan the horizon and there’s no land in sight, it can seem as though it absolutely does not stop, ever. In recent years…

★★★★ OUT NOW / NETFLIX 105 MINS DIRECTORS Yolanda Ramke, Ben Howling CAST Martin Freeman, Anthony Hayes, Caren Pistorius, Simone Landers PLOT Having fled a zombie apocalypse into the Australian Outback, Andy (Martin Freeman) is bitten, and finds himself desperately seeking a home for his infant daughter before he caves to the infection. MARTIN FREEMAN HAS battled the undead before, briefly, in Shaun Of The Dead, although we never saw what became of him. That’s not the case in Cargo, a fascinating Australian addition to the ever-growing zombie canon, which follows Freeman’s ex-pat Brit on a eerie, existential walkabout through the Outback. The problem here is that, very early on, Freeman becomes a dead man, when he’s on the wrong end of a bite. From that moment on, he’s embroiled…

When Constantin Stanislavski, the legendary acting theorist and teacher, said, “There are no small parts, only small actors,” he clearly didn’t have the Marvel Cinematic Universe in mind. There are few parts smaller — literally (and we don’t mean the new definition of literally; we mean the old definition, which literally means literally) — than Ant-Man and the Wasp, the half-size heroes who spend much of their time shrinking down to the size of… well, you can probably guess. So Stanislavski was wrong about small parts. And, sorry, Constantin, but you’re wrong about the “only small actors” part too. (Stanislavski’s having a shocker.) Paul Rudd and Evangeline Lilly played the roles in 2015’s energetic and entertaining Ant-Man. Well, sort of. That movie saw Rudd’s Scott Lang be chosen to wear…

IT STARTED ON JACK REACHER “On Jack Reacher Tom said, ‘I’m going to start flying [a helicopter]”. He got with Airbus and did some lessons. Then we put him in touch with a world-renowned stunt pilot.” IT GOT SERIOUS ON MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 5 “On Mission 5 Tom and I would helicopter to a lot of places together. He said, ‘One day I’m going to do the ultimate helicopter sequence.’” CRUISE HAD TO GET GOOD FAST “To do what we wanted to do in high altitude, in the mountains of New Zealand… you should be looking at 7,000 hours seat time. The big guys are 10,000-hours-plus. Tom had to learn all this in a couple of hundred hours.” THE SEQUENCE WOULD KILL MOST PEOPLE “Tom’s doing some serious torque turns [the…

00:03:19 CARMAGEDDON __ Greta Gerwig’s stunner gets into gear when Christine, aka Lady Bird (Saoirse Ronan), arguing with mom Marion (Laurie Metcalf) about college, chucks herself out of the car. “It felt heightened, as if it was emotionally true rather than literally true,” Gerwig says. She rejected greenscreen and stunt doubles in favour of a harnessed Ronan throwing herself onto a trailer. “It was still scary just watching it at my monitor.” 00:11:25 RELIGIOUS EDUCATION __ Attending Immaculate Heart (obv nicknamed Immaculate Fart) Catholic school, Lady Bird and bestie Julie (Beanie Feldstein) talk sex in a school corridor. “I’ve always been so interested in how mortal teenage girls fit into this structure which is all priests, bishops, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost,” Gerwig says. “Lying down eating…

JEAN-LUC GODARD ONCE said, “Cinema is truth 24 frames a second.” He might have to revise that opinion upon seeing I, Tonya. Craig Gillespie’s account of the rise and fall of Olympic ice skater Tonya Harding, who was implicated in and disgraced by an attack on her rival Nancy Kerrigan in 1994, has a deliberately slippery relationship with the idea of objective truth, as it presents different viewpoints: Harding’s (Margot Robbie), her ex-husband Jeff Gillooly’s (Sebastian Stan), and her venal mother, LaVona’s (an Oscar-winning Allison Janney). We spoke to Gillespie, and the movie’s writer, Steven Rogers, about the truth, the whole truth, and anything but the truth. How did you know where to begin in capturing the truth of Tonya Harding’s story? Rogers: I interviewed Tonya Harding to start with.…

ONE OF MY pet enthusiasms is that run of overcrowded, overdecorated ripping yarns that came out of a 1960s craze for Victorian-Edwardian nostalgia — The First Men In The Moon, Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines, The Wrong Box, The Charge Of The Light Brigade and The Private Life Of Sherlock Holmes. These lie between Sgt. Pepper and steampunk, with spirited gals in gorgeous costumes, comic character actors in false whiskers, insanely complicated plots, stalwart yet absurd heroes, and rivet-studded Jules Verne contraptions. However, there’s also a tinge of melancholy, as we are constantly reminded all this ingenuity will lead to 20th century horrors, making it appropriate that the end of the cycle comes in the unjolly Oh! What A Lovely War. Basil Dearden’s The Assassination Bureau Limited (1969),…

“I FEEL LIKE I’m going to Comic-Con every day,” laughs Alison Brie. “Season 1, it was mostly no make-up and simple clothes, and Season 2, it’s, like...” She gestures at the ‘look’ she’s currently rocking here on the Netflix lot in Los Angeles. It combines a beetroot-red leotard, jet-black lipstick and a gravity-spurning hairstyle that can only be described as ‘a Jedward’. Suffice to say, things have changed for the Gorgeous Ladies Of Wrestling. Based on the real-life ’80s grappling show of the same name, Netflix’s GLOW spent its first season tracking a disparate bunch of struggling female actors — Brie’s eager-yet-clutzy ‘Zoya The Destroyer’ Ruth, plus Debbie ‘Liberty Belle’ Eagan (Betty Gilpin), Cherry ‘Junkchain’ Bang (Sydelle Noel) and Carmen ‘Machu Picchu’ Wade (Britney Young) — as they attempted to…

NICOLAS CAGE SPENDS a full five minutes screaming in a bathroom, alternating between guttural weeping and glugs of vodka, all while wearing tighty-whities; later, he smelts his own axe, and fights a man with a chainsaw. They’re all scenes that could have featured in the YouTube classic “Nicolas Cage Losing His Shit”, a montage of the actor’s most demented, dialled-up-to-11 moments; in truth, they’re all from his latest film, the hallucinogenic revenge horror Mandy. According to the film’s director, Panos Cosmatos, this could be the ultimate example of Cage Rage. “I’m not trying to praise myself,” Cosmatos says, “but I feel like this is one of my favourite Nicolas Cage performances of all time. He has a lot of intensity.” This is not an exaggeration. “He starts off as a…

“THERE’S NOTHING SIMPLE about this movie, my friend,” laughs Graham King. The producer has been working on the Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody for a decade. Now, though, the film is done — and King sounds very relieved. “Ten years of obstacles and different kinds of hurdles,” he says, not least of which was the removal of director Bryan Singer last December. “Bryan Singer is the credited director of the film,” confirms King. Singer had shot the majority of it. “Basically, Bryan had some personal issues going on. He wanted to hiatus the movie to deal with them, and the movie had to get finished. That was what it came down to.” King replaced him with Dexter Fletcher, who was originally slated to direct the film in 2013, and Fletcher shot…

1 __ BLADE RUNNER 2049 (2017) YEARS AWAY: 35 Ryan Gosling stars as Officer K, a blade runner tasked with ‘retiring’ rogue replicants. However, K is a replicant himself and, after one particular job, unearths a secret that not only shakes the foundations of his beliefs but leads him to the door of another blade runner, one who has been missing for decades. Why so long? A complete story in itself (and one with modest box office returns), Blade Runner didn’t cry out for a sequel in the ’80s. The film’s enduring cult appeal and the advancement of special effects, though, led Warner Bros. to acquire sequel rights in 2011. 2 __ IT (2017) YEARS AWAY: 27 Like the monster at its heart, It slumbered for nearly three decades after…

★★★★ OUT 6 JULY CERT 15 / 120 MINS DIRECTOR Kevin Macdonald CAST Ellen White, Mary Jones, Clive Davis, Pat Houston, Cissy Houston, L.A. Reid, Michael Houston, Gary Garland-Houston PLOT Since Whitney Houston’s death from an overdose six years ago, many attempts have been made to tell the singer’s story. But this documentary is the first to feature interviews with those closest to Houston, resulting in never-before-heard revelations. WITH THOUSANDS OF tabloid stories during her life and a reality show, several memoirs and Nick Broomfield’s documentary Whitney: Can I Be Me since the singer’s death in 2012, you’d be forgiven for presuming that there was little else to discover, or be discovered, about Whitney Houston. But you’d be wrong. New documentary Whitney weaves a complex new tapestry thanks to the…

THERE’S BEEN A lot of talk, over the last few years, about the rights and wrongs of gender-swapping film remakes and film characters, and the general efforts to make sure that not all the leading characters in all films are white, straight men. Lots of people (white men, mostly) have complained about the practice as it relates to Ghostbusters, or Star Wars, or most recently the Ocean’s films. But Ocean’s 8 demonstrates neatly that, with a thoughtful translation and a great cast, gender swapping can go a long way to redress one long-standing imbalance in cinema. Namely, the fact that women so rarely get to play cool. Let’s get the inevitable objection to any female-dominated take on an existing property out of the way first: why not develop your own…

★★ OUT 22 JUNE CERT TBC / 112 MINS DIRECTOR Rob Greenberg CAST Anna Faris, Eugenio Derbez, Eva Longoria, Hannah Nordberg PLOT Lazy, rich Leonardo (Derbez) spends his days on his yacht partying, at least until he falls overboard, washing up with amnesia in a small Portland town. There, Kate (Faris), a carpet cleaner he fired, gets revenge by convincing him they’re married. 1980s COMEDY OVERBOARD, despite the considerable comic talents of Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn, isn’t exactly a classic. And, watching it 30 years on, it’s hard to avoid the distinct feeling of unease as a man takes advantage of a woman with amnesia. And so to the 2018 version: can a gender-flipped remake fix that, while also being funny and romantic? Not completely, it turns out. And…

★★★ PRIME VIDEO OUT NOW EPISODES VIEWED 1-4 CREATED BY David E. Kelley, Jonathan Shapiro CAST Billy Bob Thornton, Ana de la Reguera, Mark Duplass, Morris Chestnut, Tania Raymonde PLOT Alcoholic lawyer Billy McBride (Thornton) is reluctantly pulled into defending the innocent son of a local barman in a murder trial. As the case develops, it begins to encompass an unconventional real estate developer (Duplass) and the insurgent mayoral candidate he backs (de la Reguera). SECOND SEASONS ARE when good TV shows start to show their cards: The Wire made clear its mind was on more things than cops ’n’ gangs, and Sex And The City ditched its fourth wall-breaking gimmick. What does Goliath’s second season tell us about what it wants to be? Not much, sadly. The first season…

laughs Simon Pegg, leaning forward on a ridiculously oversized sofa in a Los Angeles photo studio. It’s important to note, or possibly even emphasise, the ‘laughs’ part of that equation. For today, our chat — just the latest of a long string of interviews we’ve done together since I first met Pegg back in 2004 — has taken an unexpected detour, into a soul-baring revelation about an ongoing battle with depression, and drinking, that had, until now, been known to only a handful of the actor’s closest family and friends. But he’s come through that now, and today he’s ebullient and effervescent; bouncing around with a brolly and a bowler hat for our photographer, cracking wise with the crew. You wouldn’t know, if you didn’t already know, that he’s off…

Neil Marshall (Director of The Descent , Game Of Thrones episodes and the upcoming Hellboy ): In 1981 a fantasy adventure movie came out that was unlike anything we’d seen before — certainly unlike any Disney movie before it. Produced by Disney in conjunction with Paramount Pictures, Dragonslayer was written by Matthew Robbins and his long-term collaborator Hal Barwood, and brilliantly directed by Robbins. And this movie did for dragons what Jurassic Park would do for dinosaurs 12 years later: it made them seem entirely real. Nothing else has come close to depicting a world in which dragons feel like an integral part of the ecosystem, and sorcery part of the furniture. The movie pushed boundaries on many levels. It…

WHEN THE SCRIPT for World War II movie Hurricane landed on director David Blair’s desk, he had never heard of the 303 Polish Fighter Squadron, a unit of Polish-born pilots who fought valiantly alongside Britain and its allies in the Battle Of Britain, and beyond. “It’s something I knew nothing about,” the Scottish filmmaker admits. “I was quite surprised.” As it turns out, very few British people have heard of the squadron — and that’s partly by design. As the closing titles for Hurricane notes, the extraordinary efforts of the squadron weren’t officially recognised until 1992. “To me, it’s unaccountable,” says BAFTA-winner Blair, who felt compelled to bring the story of the daring squadron of flyboys to the screen. “When you hear the history, it’s usually just a British victory…

RAW PLOT HAS, in recent years, become the mortal enemy of pop cinema. Like Japanese knotweed it coils under its foundations, growing uncontrolled and at a ferocious rate, choking off all life. Great fibrous clods of indigestible narrative have sunk the Pirates Of The Caribbean. Indiscriminate backstory and drive-by lore have fatally constipated Ridley Scott’s once narratively svelte Alien and left James Cameron’s formerly single-minded Terminator bewildered and terminally on the fritz. It’s pleasingly ironic, then, that the era that birthed this tsunami of story gave us at its very beginning a film that can be taken as an enthusiastic jeremiad against the centrality of, or even need for, conventional, coherent, yarn-spinning. David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, his finest film and still, 17 years later, a contender for the greatest of…

GUILLERMO DEL TORO was attached to the 2017 Disney Beauty And The Beast, eventually directed by Bill Condon. Given the Mexican auteur once called Jean Cocteau’s La Belle Et La Bête (1946) the “most perfect cinematic fable ever told”, he might have just been plain old intimidated. Intoxicating, poetic and immensely moving, the film was made as an escape for a war-ravaged France and has survived to become the definitive version of Beauty And The Beast. Del Toro didn’t abandon the idea completely: The Shape Of Water is nothing if not La Belle Et La Bête with gills. This film’s magical charm is encapsulated in the stunning moment Beast (Jean Marais) carries Belle (Josette Day), who has fainted at the sight of the creature, through his enchanted castle. The scene…

LAST MONTH, SOMETHING happened that sounds exactly like a thing a columnist would make up to introduce a column. No one is more surprised than I am that it’s completely true. My 13-year-old son (an average kid, not generally a weeper) came home from the cinema and went straight up to bed, slamming the door behind him. I followed him up and found him slumped in his bunk, crestfallen and tearful. “Ready Player One is my favourite book, I’ve been waiting all year to see the film, and it’s all wrong”. I explained that the film was a director’s personal interpretation of a book and maybe Spielberg simply had an entirely different reading to his. “No. He just completely changed the plot. He ruined it”. In fairness, I didn’t even…

FILMWORKER OUT 2 JULY / CERT 15 / 94 MINS As someone who’d happily watch a 9O-minute insight into Stanley Kubrick’s toilet habits if somebody made it, I devoured this documentary about one member of The Kube’s inner circle: actor, assistant and eventual doormat Leon Vitali. After starring in Barry Lyndon, Vitali became obsessed with Kubrick’s filmmaking process and ditched acting to become one of his closest allies, working in various capacities on every successive project. But Vitali’s was no path of glory: Kubrick repaid his devotion with a callous disregard for his mental wellbeing, and his story blends an insider’s view behind the scenes of some indisputable cinematic masterpieces with uncomfortable revelations about the behaviour of an uncompromising genius. Filmworker’s structure occasionally frustrated me, threatening to unbalance a compelling…

THE PREDATORS’ HUNTING grounds have ranged from the Central American jungle to (the then) future LA. But few things can have prepared them for the most challenging terrain of all: the suburbs. Having been on an extended hiatus since Robert Rodriguez’ Predators, one of the mandibled monsters returns in The Predator to stalk the commuter belt: home of ten-year-old Rory McKenna (Jacob Tremblay), who inadvertently draws the creatures’ ire after stumbling across an alien artefact. If the Predator’s latest quarry seems a little leftfield, it’s exactly what we’ve come to expect from director Shane Black. Working from a script co-written with Fred Dekker, Black saw the film as an opportunity to take a welcome trip down memory lane. “I wanted to make a movie me and Fred might have stood…

YOU KNOW WHERE you are with monster movies. Usually, dread beasts attack the blue-collar inhabitants of major world cities or small US towns. But what about the upper classes? Don’t the blue bloods also deserve to be scared by terrifying creatures out of nightmares? Slaughterhouse Rulez, the new film from A Fantastic Fear Of Everything director Crispian Mills, sets up just that sort of class warfare, unleashing hell on a posh public school. Simon Pegg produced the film, with Nick Frost, under their new Stolen Picture company, and Pegg also plays Meredith Houseman, the closest thing to a sympathetic teacher that the imperilled pupils have. We asked him to talk us through the key influences. ATTACK THE BLOCK “Crispian and I had been working on a script,” explains Pegg, “and…

CASTING COUCHED A memo from talent agency CAA reveals a number of different names for the iconic characters in the frame. Ray Liotta, Kurt Russell, Alec Baldwin, Kevin Kline and Woody Harrelson were all in the running for Dr Alan Grant (at this point named Richard). For Ellie Sattler, Helen Hunt, Penelope Ann Miller, Julie Warner, Robin Wright, Sherilyn Fenn and Kelly Lynch were considered. Dan Aykroyd, a Spielberg vet from 1941, was in the frame for Ian Malcolm. Even more surprising are the names for shifty lawyer Gennaro: Kevin Bacon and Tom Berenger. RAP ATTACK ATTACKED Attenborough also offers opinions on the work-in-progress fourth draft screenplay. In terms of the opening raptor attack, he suggests it “is too much of a give-away to have the worker torn to shreds”…

★ ★ ★ ★ OUT NOW CERT 12A / 135 MINS DIRECTOR Ron Howard CAST Alden Ehrenreich, Woody Harrelson, Emilia Clarke, Joonas Suotamo, Donald Glover, Thandie Newton, Paul Bettany PLOT After young “scrumrat” Han (Ehrenreich) escapes the slums of Corellia, he vows to one day return for love Qi’ra (Clarke). But not before he’s managed to get himself a ship and make heap of money. Along the way, he makes a big, furry friend. IT’S FAIR TO say Solo flies into port rather less burdened by expectation than recent Star Wars movies. Anyone who pays even the faintest bit of attention to the behind-the-scenes goings-on in Hollywood must be aware that its original directors, Phil Lord and Chris Miller — the guys behind The Lego Movie and 21 Jump Street…

His preconceptions were challenged “When I was first approached, I wasn’t interested. Nicole David, who was Whitney’s film agent, said she never understood why her life went the way it did. That was intriguing. And then she sent me a New Yorker article about Whitney that took her seriously as a musical genius whose social impact was enormous. I was fascinated and thought maybe I had underestimated her.” the family got on board The family were incredibly brave and it’s been difficult for them. But they were as good as their word. Right at the start I said to them I’d only do this if they’d give me final cut. There are things they didn’t want in there, but they accepted it when I said they had to stay. Because…

★★★ OUT 22 JUNE CERT 12A / 91 MINS DIRECTOR Trudie Styler CAST Alex Lawther, Ian Nelson, AnnaSophia Robb, Bette Midler, Larry Pine PLOT Billy Bloom (Lawther) has been raised fabulous by his large-living mother (Midler). But when she sends him to live with his father (Pine) in Virginia, he runs into trouble when he wears his usual fashions to school and his fellow students turn against him. ALEX LAWTHER HAS carved out quite a career in quite a short time playing disenfranchised or unhappy young men, whether as the young Alan Turing in The Imitation Game, the older Christopher Robin in Goodbye Christopher Robin or the homicidal James in The End Of The F***ing World. That trend continues in this slightly more upbeat story from Trudie Styler about a…

★★★★ OUT 22 JUNE CERT 18 / 106 MINS DIRECTOR Fatih Akin CAST Diane Kruger, Denis Moschitto, Numan Acar PLOT Living in Hamburg’s Turkish quarter, free-spirited Katja’s (Kruger) world collapses when her husband (Acar) and son are killed by a nail bomb. She then has to deal with the trial of the two suspects — husband and wife neo-Nazis. FATIH AKIN’S IN The Fade is three films in one. It starts as a coruscating study of grief under unimaginable circumstances, segues into a gripping courtroom drama, then takes a last-act swerve into a vigilante thriller, all marinated in the context of the rise of the far right in Germany. If the last third doesn’t really live up to the unbridled power of the first and the genre-pleasing qualities of the…

★★★★ OUT 29 JUNE CERT 15 / 100 MINS DIRECTORS Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead CAST Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead, Callie Hernandez, Tate Ellington PLOT Brothers Justin (Benson) and Aaron (Moorhead) receive a video in the mail from members of a UFO cult they had been members of as children. In a bid for closure, the pair return to the cult compound, only to discover that not all is as they remember. WITH THEIR 2012 debut, Resolution, filmmaking duo Benson and Moorhead created a lean cabin-in-the-woods horror that poked fun at genre tropes while conjuring its own supernatural scares. Though not strictly speaking a sequel, The Endless overlays the pair’s earlier film, expanding and evolving the mythology with a focus on two minor characters from the original, played by the directors…

★★★★ OUT NOW / NETFLIX EPISODES VIEWED ALL CREATED BY Cheo Hodari Coker CAST Mike Colter, Simone Missick, Rosario Dawson, Alfre Woodard, Theo Rossi, Mustafa Shakir, Gabrille Dennis PLOT After the deaths of Diamondback and Cottonmouth, Luke Cage (Colter) is now Harlem’s most famous man, expected to stop every crime. With Mariah Dillard (Woodard) even more powerful and a new enemy in town, can he be the hero required? “IS IT EVER okay to do the wrong thing for the right reason?” That line, spoken by Misty Knight (Missick) in episode six, is the key to the excellent second season of Luke Cage. Every one of its major characters is playing a game without rules, a game to save the district of Harlem, and there’s no way to win by…

“Holy shit, whose car is this? Is this your car, McQuarrie? Come out here!” Those were the first words Christopher McQuarrie ever heard Tom Cruise say. In real life, that is. He’d heard him utter plenty before, on the big screen. But as far as in the flesh was concerned, this was it. It was 2007 and McQuarrie had made a breakthrough with his World War II script, Valkyrie: Tom Cruise was interested in producing it. So, McQuarrie found himself summoned to Cruise’s house to meet the man himself. Only there was a dilemma. “My car broke down,” recalls McQuarrie. “I had a choice of either driving the family mini-van, with a dent in the side and baby seats in the back, or this old ’64 Cadillac I’ve hung onto…

IT BEGAN WITH a playlist. The songs, by and large, were mellow: sunny slices of West Coast rock and meandering, guitar-driven folk tunes. But the playlist’s title hinted at something darker: “BAD GUY HOSPITAL”. And sure enough, as he listened to the music over and over again, the man who had put the playlist together was dreaming of riots, exit wounds and a haunted, desperate nurse. “This is going to make me sound like Ben Affleck’s character in The Accountant,” says that man, writer-turned-director Drew Pearce, “but whenever an idea starts to congeal, if I think it’s got legs, I start a little notebook, a playlist and a Dropbox folder for photos. Those three things are my starting points.” By 2012, when “BAD GUY HOSPITAL” first began to develop in…

“ There was no moment on Sicario where I wanted to do this again,” says Josh Brolin, on the set of the sequel to Sicario. It’s December 2016 and, for now, this film is called Soldado, Spanish for “soldier”, referring to Brolin’s CIA agent Matt. Later it will be retitled Sicario 2: Soldado, and later still, in the US at any rate, Sicario: Day Of The Soldado, but today it is simply, confidently Soldado. The crew have been shooting in New Mexico, making the most of the region’s Native American reservations, including Laguna Pueblo, where we are today — a gorgeous vista and home to, at least this evening, a mountain sunset Instagrammers would die for. It is also freezing. Way below zero. Empire has been warned to bring “your warmest…

MAKING $1.3 BILLION at the worldwide box office and receiving the kind of raves most blockbusters don’t come within a mile of receiving, Marvel Studios’ Black Panther was a true phenomenon. More than that, though, it was a groundbreaking film in many ways, with director Ryan Coogler shaping the kind of tentpole we had constantly been told Hollywood couldn’t, or wouldn’t, make — the received wisdom being that films aimed at diverse audiences just wouldn’t connect. Last year alone, the likes of Get Out, Girls Trip and The Big Sick proved that little theory wrong, but Black Panther eclipsed them all and, in doing so, rewrote the rule book. Here three BAME film experts, Ellen E Jones, Jimi Famurewa and Amon Warmann, get together to talk about the movie’s impact…

GIVEN IT’S ABOUT one of the world’s top fashion designers (albeit one who’s slightly on the wane, at least creatively speaking), you’d have expected Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread to deliver handsomely on the snazzy suits and divine dresses. And you’d have been right. Mark Bridges snagged an Oscar (and a Jet Ski, for making the ceremony’s shortest speech) for his work on PTA’s dark love story. Here, he tells us how he came up with just some of the looks for the film’s three lead characters: Vicky Krieps’ Alma Elson (1-3), Lesley Manville’s Cyril Woodcock (4) and Daniel Day-Lewis’ Reynolds Woodcock (5). 1 LONDON DATE DRESS “This is the dress that Reynolds is draping on Alma at the country house. The plum colour was Daniel’s idea. It’s Reynolds’ love…

THERE ARE SOME things in life I just haven’t got to yet. I’m a busy man who sleeps a lot, so my time is precious. I haven’t gone bungee jumping, I haven’t backpacked across India, I have never done ketamine — you know, the things most people do in their lives. Oh, and I’ve never seen The Godfather. I do consider myself a movie nerd. I love every aspect of cinema, but the one question I’ve always hated is, “Do you think GoodFellas or The Godfather is the better gangster movie?” Because as soon as I answer the question, I get the same response I always get. “You’ve NEVER seen The Godfather?! How are you alive? Do you have eyes?!” I don’t know why I’ve never watched it. Maybe I…

JULIAN DENNISON: “When Thor first meets Korg, I love that scene. It’s really funny. Taika [Waititi] plays Korg, and and it’s got a bit of Kiwi humour in there because of Taika. I love the way Korg talks. Our local library, our sister works at, and she knows people who talk like Korg.” INT. SAKAAR PRISONERS’ QUARTERS — DAY Thor (Chris Hemsworth) has been taken prisoner and is thrown onto the ground of a circular corridor. Guards shut the door behind him. He picks himself up and bangs on the door. A large blue being, Korg (Taika Waititi), sitting against a wall, speaks to him. KORG: Hey hey hey! Hey, take it easy, man! Thor turns round. He sees the blue being sitting next to a smaller creature wielding blades.…