Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2019 i Empire

IT’S THE REAL STORY For many people, Arthur Penn’s classic 1967 film Bonnie And Clyde, with Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway as the impossibly beautiful outlaws, is the definitive take on the story. But what about the people who caught them? The Highwaymen focuses on Frank Hamer, the Texas Ranger who tracked and ultimately killed the Barrow Gang; the film’s director, John Lee Hancock, considers it “a different lens” from the Penn movie, which depicted Hamer as something of a bumbling idiot. (Hamer’s widow would later sue the studio for defamation, settling out of court.) The Highwaymen, Hancock hopes, is something of a cinematic redemption. “This is Frank Hamer, front and centre,” he says. “I’m from Texas originally. The lore of the Texas Rangers is huge there. And he’s probably…

ROSAMUND PIKE WAS looking for something tough. While they were shooting A United Kingdom together, director Amma Asante told Pike that she should look for roles that reflected her own resilience. That led the actress directly to Marie Colvin, a war correspondent for The Sunday Times who lost an eye in an explosion in Sri Lanka and filed copy from her hospital bed — before heading straight back into the field with an eyepatch. Pike soon learned that a film about Colvin’s life was in development, with Cartel Land’s Matthew Heineman set to direct. “I thought, ‘That’s going to be very cool, because this is not going to be a biopic and it’s not going to be hagiography,” says Pike. “We agreed to have breakfast and I said [to Heineman],…

BEGINNING AS WORLD War II ends, The Aftermath is the tale of a country and people shattered. Centred on a British officer and his wife, who are placed in Hamburg as part of a mission to restore a defeated Germany, it sees them as two corners of a love triangle with a German citizen in whose house they live. The film’s director and cast talk us through the key characters. RACHAEL MORGAN KEIRA KNIGHTLEY Rachael has very little control over her own life. During World War II she lost her only son. Desperately longing for connection and feeling like a stranger to her own husband, Rachael falls into a potentially disastrous relationship with Stefan. “Rachael’s not some ingénue,” says director James Kent. “She has a wisdom from all she’s gone…

★★★★ OUT NOW CERT 12A / 114 MINS DIRECTOR Travis Knight CAST Hailee Steinfeld, John Cena, Justin Theroux, Angela Bassett, Jorge Lendeborg Jr, Dylan O’Brien PLOT Two decades prior to the events of Transformers , Bumblebee (voiced by O’Brien) crash-lands in P987 San Francisco. Hauled from a local junkyard by teenager Charlie (Steinfeld), the intrepid Autobot does his best to adapt to ’8Os Earth, while evading his Decepticon pursuers. EVERYTHING YOU NEED to know about this latest Transformers is contained in a multi-car pile-up. Near the film’s finale, a desperate pursuit sees a car hurtle towards a four-way junction. It skids to a stop inches from the bumper of an oncoming lorry, while cars from either side — displaying a keen observation of DMV-regulated stopping distances — screech to a…

★★★ OUT NOW CERT 12A / 128 MINS DIRECTOR Christian Rivers CAST Hera Hilmar, Robert Sheehan, Hugo Weaving, Jihae, Stephen Lang PLOT In a post-apocalyptic future, mobile cities on huge caterpillar tracks roam the landscape, gobbling up smaller towns for their resources. Londoner Tom (Sheehan) is proud of his home until he meets Hester Shaw (Hilmar) and learns that London’s hero Thaddeus Valentine (Weaving) may not be as upstanding as he thought. AS VISUAL METAPHORS for capitalism go, the sight of a towering, mobile London running down and swallowing a smaller town is pretty compelling. The stripped world of Mortal Engines is dying, and humanity on the verge of extinction caused by its own hubris. And yet hubris still dominates, with each city convinced of its own manifest destiny to…

★★★★ OUT 11 JANUARY CERT 15 / 113 MINS DIRECTOR Jason Reitman CAST Hugh Jackman, Vera Farmiga, J.K. Simmons, Mamoudou Athie, Sara Paxton PLOT US Senator Gary Hart (Jackman) enters the race for the Democratic Presidential nomination in P988 with an overwhelming lead. Then it’s discovered he’s having an extramarital affair and his campaign swiftly goes off the rails. AS HAROLD WILSON once said, a week is a long time in politics. It took slightly longer than that to transform Senator Gary Hart from the next US President to a scandal-ridden campaign drop-out, but the 180 in his fortunes was still remarkably hard, sharp and fast. And it was a turning point for American politics — certainly the way politicians were scrutinised by the media. There’s an irony in the…

★★★ OUT 12 DECEMBER CERT 12A / 143 MINS DIRECTOR James Wan CAST Jason Momoa, Amber Heard, Patrick Wilson, Nicole Kidman, Dolph Lundgren, Willem Dafoe, Temuera Morrison PLOT Arthur Curry’s (Momoa) parents are a lighthouse keeper (Morrison) and Atlantean queen (Kidman). When a war between the subsurface world of Atlantis and its ruler Orm (Wilson) threatens the human world, Curry must confront his past to save the day. IMAGINE IF SOMEONE cut together all the biggest action sequences from the last few decades of Hollywood, resulting in a mash of Tron, Avatar, Clash Of The Titans, Superman, Jurassic Park, and Gladiator. Imagine a film where an octopus gets a drum solo, and it isn’t among the top ten weirdest moments. Welcome to Aquaman, where you won’t have a clue what’s…

★★★★ OUT 11 JANUARY CERT PG / 97 MINS DIRECTOR Jon S. Baird CAST John C. Reilly, Steve Coogan, Shirley Henderson, Nina Arianda, Danny Huston, Rufus Jones PLOT In P9TR, Laurel (Coogan) and Hardy (Reilly) are past their prime but embark on a tour of the UK, only to play to near-empty houses. Has the world forgotten them or can they regain their affection once more? JON S. BAIRD’S last movie, 2013’s Filth, was a wild fit of directorial excess, throwing rattling editing, disturbing fantasy sequences and cross-dressing animated pigs at a madly sleazy story that demanded more more MORE. One might think he’d gone soft in following up with a biopic of Laurel and Hardy, the most wholesome double-act in cinema history. Instead Baird shows he’s a director who…

★★★ OUT 4 JANUARY CERT 12A / 116 MINS DIRECTOR Robert Zemeckis CAST Steve Carell, Leslie Mann, Diane Kruger, Eiza González, Janelle Monáe PLOT After being brutally beaten and losing his memory, artist Mark Hogancamp (Carell) has retreated into a fantasy life involving a miniature World War II Belgian village, Marwen, that bizarrely reflects his own experiences. His world is further turned upside down by a new neighbour (Mann). THE INGREDIENTS FUELLING Robert Zemeckis’ Welcome To Marwen are bizarre. Adapted from Jeff Malmberg’s 2010 documentary Marwencol about Mark Hogancamp, who after being beaten for being a cross dresser created a 1/6th World War II-era Belgian town to work through his lack of memory, it throws together disparate elements — subtle performance capture, World War II movie parody, shoe fetishism —…

★★★ OUT NOW / NETFLIX EPS VIEWED 6 OF 6 DIRECTOR Clay Tweel CAST John Grisham, Barry Scheck PLOT A documentary about the intertwined stories of two pairs of men convicted of two separate murders in ’8Os Oklahoma. Inconsistencies in the evidence against the four emerge, though, but they — and their lawyers — struggle to convince the courts of their possible innocence. THE INNOCENT MAN arrives on a crowded dance floor — after Serial and Making A Murderer hit big, there’s been a glut of true-crime stories. It turns out the eons of runtime afforded by streamed TV are perfectly suited to the kind of deep-dive investigations real-crime stories have at their core, and it usually helps that audio and documentary can showcase unselfconscious, non-metropolitan Americans better than print.…

THERE ARE MANY words to describe the rise of Taika Waititi, the Kiwi writer/director/actor/fashion icon/ quadruple threat. Taikarific, while apt, is technically not a word, so we’ll plump instead for “stratospheric”. When Empire was born in 1989, Waititi was still at school. He didn’t make his first film until 2007, with the sensitive lo-fi rom-com Eagle Vs Shark, then followed that up in 2010 with the warm and winning Boy. But things have accelerated since then, with the one-two punch of 2014’s vampire comedy What We Do In The Shadows and 2016’s funny/daft/tragic/profound Hunt For The Wilderpeople (Empire’s film of the year back then, folks), showing that here was a rare and prodigious talent. They put him on Marvel’s radar, and he promptly made Thor: Ragnarok, a studio movie that…

• OUT • 2 AUGUST RIGGS AND MURTAUGH. Tango and Cash. Angel and Butterman. All are iconic action-movie duos, but could any of them survive a tussle with Hobbs and Shaw, the Fast & Furious characters played by Dwayne Johnson and Jason Staham who are now getting their own spin-off movie? We don’t like their chances, even if they’re in a tank. “Hobbs is brute force, Shaw is exceptional technique,” says director David Leitch (Atomic Blonde). “One’s style is to smash, while the other has finesse and speed. The distinction between the two is where the fun lies.” The idea of following this pair of ludicrously pumped-up pros — lest we forget, Hobbs flung a torpedo with his bare hands in Fast & Furious 8, while Shaw took out a…

• OUT • 31 MAY WHEN YOUR MOVIE’S main character is already tall enough to use Nelson’s Column as a back-scratcher, the idea of making the sequel ‘bigger’ must present a neck-crickingly unique challenge. But director Michael Dougherty, the man behind comedic Christmas-demon horror Krampus, thinks he’s found the answer. In Godzilla: King Of The Monsters, Dougherty’s follow-up to Gareth Edwards’ tense, sober 2014 take on the beloved Toho Studios Tokyo-stomper, the mountainous reptilian anti-hero and his colossal co-stars are not being portrayed merely as giant, rampaging animals, but as gods. “These are the Titans,” Dougherty explains. “These are the source of all our legends about dragons and giants; Leviathan, Behemoth, all the creatures from the Bible, from Ancient Greek mythology. The premise we’re going off here is they’re not…

• OUT • 15 FEBRUARY STANLEY KUBRICK WASN’T exactly what you would call prolific. Five years separated Barry Lyndon and The Shining. It took him a further seven years to make Full Metal Jacket. And then another 12 years to get around to his final film, Eyes Wide Shut. So legendary was his penchant for putting things off that it’s become de rigueur to describe a long gap on any director’s CV as ‘Kubrickian’. But perhaps it’s time for a new adjective. Ladies and gents, we give you… Cornishian. “What a terrible word,” sighs Joe Cornish. “I guess it’s equally my fault.” He’s referring to his surname, the root of and inspiration for this brand-new term which we can tell is going to enter the filmmaking lexicon quick smart. But…

It started on the toilet. In January 1977, nursing a hangover one Sunday morning, Donner sat there as the phone rang, listening to the Hungarian voice down the line. Producer Alexander Salkind, whom he’d never met, told Donner he had the rights to Superman and was making an origin story and sequel back to back. Donner was only half-interested; hot off the success of his breakthrough, The Omen, he was gearing up to make Omen II. Salkind told him he’d secured Marlon Brando as Superman’s father, Jor-El, and Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor, had a script by The Godfather’s Mario Puzo, and would pay Donner $1 million. Donner’s interest increased. Someone else could deal with Damien. “It’s so hard to talk about it,” says Donner, now 88, after lunch in…

EVERYBODY INVOLVED IN making Who Framed Roger Rabbit should have given up long before cameras rolled or brush met paint. All the effort could not possibly be worth it. As a filmmaking challenge, Roger Rabbit is up there with some of the most lunatic in history, as mad as Cleopatra, Waterworld or Avatar. As Robert Watts, one of Roger Rabbit’s producers, once said, “Who Framed Roger Rabbit is an epic movie. Not because we’re going to have an army of 15,000 people and blow up an entire village in one shot, but because we’re trying to have an animated rabbit pick up a crumb.” Getting that crumb between those yellow-gloved fingers took the work of many hundreds of people (there were 300 animators alone), and required such a complex shoot…

I’VE NEVER SEEN a National Lampoon movie. I’d like to chalk that up to my age, being born almost exactly a year after this movie’s 1989 release, but by that logic I would never have seen cutesy family favourite National Velvet, so I’m just going to blame my parents here like every other millennial. For those like me who were living under rocks, growing up in East Sussex, or too busy watching Very Serious Plays™, National Lampoon is a series of family caper comedies starring Chevy Chase, the world’s second-most favourite voicemail scandal victim after Andrew Sachs. “Ah, the guy from Community, who hates Dan Harmon!” I thought, as I settled down into my parents’ sofa, munching on chocolates, warmed by the roaring fire. Surely this would be jolly! Surely…

JOE RUSSO: “There’s one scene that always brings tears to my eyes. I don’t know if I cry in appreciation or because I know I’ll never be able to do anything that good. It’s the showdown at the end of Once Upon A Time In The West. I love that scene. It’s so existential, this conflict that’s been brewing between these two characters. Even though they’re at odds with each other, they’re part of the same breed, this dying breed. This is like the last gunfight on the edge of civilisation.” EXT. RAILROAD — DAY Frank (Henry Fonda) rides on horseback through the town of Sweetwater. Harmonica (Charles Bronson), sitting by a tree stump, looks up. He stops whittling a piece of wood, closes his knife, and puts it away.…

LORDS OF CHAOS tells the insane true story of Mayhem, a Norwegian black metal band who increasingly, and shockingly, lived up to that name. Formed in 1984, the band’s line-up included ‘Euronymous’ (played in the film by Rory Culkin), ‘Faust’ (Valter Skarsgård) and ‘Necrobutcher’ (Jonathan Barnwell). They recruited their singer, ‘Dead’ (Jack Kilmer), after he posted a demo tape with a dead rat enclosed. At gigs, they would throw pig heads into the crowd. The film’s director, Jonas Åkerlund, had been fascinated by the band since he himself briefly played in a metal band in the ’80s. “I kinda like that they had such a strong image,” he says. “Pre-internet, Euronymous managed to make his band world famous.” Åkerlund would later become fascinated by the band when they became more…

“IT WAS A DYNAMIC I’d not seen before,” says The Informer’s director, Andrea Di Stefano. “Enemies are coming from all sides.” Adapted from the Scandi-noir novel Three Seconds, The Informer is the story of Pete Koslow (Joel Kinnaman), an ex-military ex-con-turned-FBI informant. When he witnesses the death of a cop during a sting operation, he finds himself in the worst kind of three-way: federal agents, the police, and the criminal underworld. Here, Di Stefano talks us through the institutions. THE FBI It’s the Feds who set the whole mess in motion, forcing Koslow into an undercover mission that goes horribly wrong. As Di Stefano notes, we’re shown two sides of power: the more idealistic side, found in Rosamund Pike’s newbie, and a dodgier route from Clive Owen’s hard-bitten agent. “Clive’s…

“I WROTE A part for this girl who’s ginger and angry and chaotic but she pulls herself together when she sings,” says BAFTA-winning TV writer Nicole Taylor (Three Girls) of her debut film script, Wild Rose. “I really thought it might be quite difficult to find somebody who can do that. Then I heard Jessie’s voice. From that moment on I was like, away you go. She’s just pure.” That’s Jessie Buckley, the rising star lately acclaimed for her role in Beast and — happily for Taylor — someone who Wild Rose director Tom Harper immediately thought of, having worked with her on TV’s War & Peace. Buckley had the pipes — she came second in the BBC musical competition I’d Do Anything before starting her acting career proper —…

BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI 1941 — 2018 BERTOLUCCI HAD ALL three kinds of movie success: critical cred, earned with lasting mastery by The Conformist in 1970; profitable notoriety, earned by Last Tango In Paris in 1973; and a Best Picture Academy award, earned in 1987 by The Last Emperor. The production of the epic biography of Pu Yi, the emperor dethroned by the Chinese communist revolution, was at least as great a feat of diplomacy as cinema — with Bertolucci, left-leaning but hardly a doctrinaire communist, persuading the then-movie-shy Chinese government to allow The Last Emperor to be the first production filmed in the aptly named Forbidden City. This image epitomises Bertolucci’s approach, demonstrating the kind of madness and control only true dictators and bigshot moviemakers can even dream of: the grave-faced…

★★★★ OUT 9 JANUARY CERT 15 / 112 MINS DIRECTOR Wash Westmoreland CAST Keira Knightley, Dominic West, Eleanor Tomlinson, Fiona Shaw, Aiysha Hart PLOT France,P89R. Colette (Knightley) marries novelist Willy (West), an intellectual. But as their respective affairs become more involved and Colette’s work becomes the toast of Paris, their unconventional relationship is tested. YOU MIGHT THINK you know what you’re in for in this film’s opening scenes, when Keira Knightley stands demurely in a French garden to wave goodbye to Dominic West. But then, still barely five minutes in, she sneaks out for a quick shag with him in a barn across the field. It’s refreshing to see a period drama that involves this strong a commitment to joyous bonking but, as befits the life and works of the…

★★★★ OUT 18 JANUARY CERT 15 / 120 MINS DIRECTOR Felix van Groeningen CAST Steve Carell, Timothée Chalamet, Maura Tierney, Amy Ryan PLOT When journalist David Sheff (Carell) discovers his teenage son Nic (Chalamet) has been experimenting with drugs, he has to face the grim reality of being the parent of an addict as his son transforms into someone he barely recognises. SOME FILMS ARE hard to recommend. Not because they’re no good, but because they’re so good at presenting something so harsh and so upsetting, you almost feel bad for recommending that people should put themselves through watching them. Beautiful Boy is one of those movies. Based on the memoirs of David and Nic Sheff, it’s not only a bitingly raw portrayal of drug addiction, it also depicts a…

★★★★ OUT 21 DECEMBER CERT U / 130 MINS DIRECTOR Rob Marshall CAST Emily Blunt, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Ben Whishaw, Emily Mortimer, Julie Walters, Dick Van Dyke, Angela Lansbury, Colin Firth, Meryl Streep PLOT Twenty years after Mary Poppins left the Banks family, Michael Banks (Whishaw) is now a widowed father of three who is in debt and risks losing the family home. So Mary (Blunt) comes back to save the family one more time… IT’S A WONDER nobody forced Mary Poppins to return earlier. P.L. Travers wrote eight collections of Mary Poppins stories and we’ve only ever seen one film, the 1964 musical, the very definition of a classic. That it’s taken almost 55 years might be cause for concern that this is a mere cash-grab, a cynical rummage around…

★★★ NETFLIX OUT NOW EPS VIEWED 1-3 SHOWRUNNERS Greg Berlanti, Sera Gamble CAST Penn Badgley, Elizabeth Lail, Luca Padovan, Shay Mitchell PLOT Bookstore manager Joe Goldberg (Badgley) becomes obsessed with poetry student Guinevere Beck (Lail) after she buys Desperate Characters from him. He builds an online mosaic of her life, then decides to make himself The One... by any means necessary. You is Notting Hill directed by David Fincher. A nice guy bookstore manager (Badgley) meets a smart, beautiful girl (Lail) in his store, yet rather than lead her to Rhys Ifans in his underpants, decides to stalk her online, inveigle his way into her life and knock off anyone that might threaten their togetherness. Adapted from Caroline Kepnes’ 2014 book by Greg Berlanti (Riverdale, Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina) and…

• OUT • 15 MARCH JORDAN PEELE’S DEBUT film, Get Out, shook everyone — and everything — up. Both a sleeper hit (making $255 million from a $4.5 million budget) and a critical triumph, it was a wake-up call for anyone sniffy about horror, especially after Peele won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. And his follow-up, Us, looks set to further cement his rep as a new master of horror. As with Get Out, the project is shrouded in more secrecy than an Avengers movie. All that is known is the basic concept: a mother named Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) and her husband (Winston Duke) head to a remote beach house with their kids, with the aim of unplugging from the stresses of modern life. But once there, some unexpected…

• OUT • 5 APRIL WARNER BROS. WASTED no time in getting their headline heroes to share the screen in the DC Extended Universe — just two films in, Batman bashed Superman, Wonder Woman waded in, and Aquaman and Cyborg showed face. Finally, though, in 2019, a fresh new voice is set to, well, extend the extended universe. Waiting in the wings is Shazam! (exclamation mark compulsory), aka good-hearted teen Billy Batson (Asher Angel), who becomes a primary-coloured adult übermensch (Zachary Levi) at command. His outing will illuminate a whole new corner of the DCEU — and not just in the introduction of all-out magic, with Batson’s powers bestowed by an ageing wizard. No, it’s goodbye to Gotham, Metropolis, and Themiscyra, and hello to, er, Philadelphia. “It feels sort of…

• OUT • 17 MAY THE LAST TIME we saw Keanu Reeves as the world’s greatest hitman at the end of John Wick: Chapter 2, he was wounded and hightailing it through Central Park with his dog by his side, a $14 million bounty on his head, and therefore pretty much every assassin in the world on his tail. “He just wants his life back,” confirms Reeves. Which, you would imagine, is bad news for pretty much every assassin in the world. One of the things that has set the John Wick franchise apart from other superficially similar action movies is the complex mythology constructed by writer Derek Kolstad and director Chad Stahelski. It’s a dark and dense world, filled with arcane rules, hotels-for-hitmen and mysterious organisations with sinister names…

The LEGO Movie 2 (8 FEBRUARY) sees Emmett and pals go to space and face alien queen Watevra Wa’Nabi (Tiffany Haddish)… Will Detective Pikachu (10 MAY) be the year’s weirdest blockbuster? With Ryan Reynolds voicing a sardonic Pokémon trying to solve crimes, almost certainly… Guy Ritchie creates a whole new world for Disney’s Aladdin (24 MAY) with his live-action remake… Stuber (12 JULY) sees Dave Bautista as a detective who drags his Uber-driver (Kumail Nanjiani) along on a case in a comedy hoping for a five-star rating… Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson are the new recruits for the mysterious Men In Black: International (14 JUNE)… James Mangold follows up Logan with Ford v. Ferrari (28 JUNE), a based-on-real-events drama about two men (Matt Damon, Christian Bale) bent on creating a…

Alamy TWENTY-ONE YEARS after GoodFellas came roaring into our lives, Martin Scorsese reflected that he’d always seen the film as “being a kind of attack”. Speaking with film historian Richard Schickel, he elaborated: “I wanted to seduce everybody into the movie and into the style. And then just take them apart with it. I guess I wanted to make a kind of angry gesture.” There is no moment in the film that feels more like “an attack” than the violent demise of poor young Mob bar boy Spider (Michael Imperioli). One which, like much of Scorsese and Nicholas Pileggi’s adaptation of former Lucchese family associate Henry Hill’s memoir, was based on a real event. Having been shot in the foot a week earlier by pint-sized loose cannon Tommy DeVito (Joe…

WHEN IT BECOMES apparent that an evil alien can possess any passenger on the train, an unhelpful foreigner dares suggest one of the scientists played by Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing might be the monster in disguise. With a cold, twinkling gaze, Dr Wells (Cushing) pooh-poohs the suggestion. “Monster?” he snorts. “We’re British, you know.” Made in Spain, Horror Express (1972) came about because producer Bernard Gordon and director Eugenio Martin had a period train model and interior sets left over from Pancho Villa. Rather than shoot another Western, they put together a preposterous blend of high adventure, science-fiction, spy melodrama, gruesome horror, disaster movie, and stiff-upper-lip comedy. In China in 1906, Professor Saxton (Lee) digs a prehistoric ape man out of a glacier and packs the fossil off on…

ALTHOUGH RED DWARF, the seminal sci-fi sitcom about the last human alive and his motley crew, has been going for 30 years, only 73 episodes have been produced. There have been low points of course, but equally within those 73 episodes are shows that redefined what sci-fi (even on a budget) and the sitcom could do. We spoke to Doug Naylor about some of the best. THE END SEASON 1, EPISODE 1 In which we meet Dave Lister (Craig Charles), sole surviving member of the Red Dwarf crew, three million years after an explosion wipes everybody else out. We also meet his nemesis, the hologram Arnold Rimmer (Chris Barrie), and his highly evolved cat, Cat (Danny John-Jules) “There’s so much exposition in it. I remember a reviewer saying, ‘It’s just…

STEPHEN MERCHANT KNOWS what Empire is going to ask before we ask it. Namely, how did he — a 6’ 7” comedian from Bristol, best known for The Office and Extras — wind up directing Fighting With My Family, a movie about the multi-billion-dollar WWE wrestling franchise? “It started with Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, as all good things do,” explains Merchant. So, something good came out of 2010’s Tooth Fairy, then: as well as pictures of The Rock in a tutu, a friendship between the megastar and Merchant. When a 2012 Channel 4 documentary aired called The Wrestlers: Fighting With My Family, Johnson saw it and decided to shepherd it to the screen. He picked Merchant as his director, and enlisted him to watch the documentary, too. “I sat down…

WITH GAME OF Thrones finishing in the spring, there will be a George R.R. Martin-shaped hole in our television schedules. That hole could well be filled by Nightflyers, a new TV adaptation of the writer’s sci-fi horror novella, about a space mission to find alien life — a mission which soon goes horrifically, violently wrong. Here, executive producer and showrunner Jeff Buhler explains its appeal. IT’S A GHOST STORY IN SPACE “It goes to the heart of how ghost stories work. The problem with traditional ghost stories is, you’re always thinking, ‘Why don’t you just leave the haunted house?’ When you’re on a spaceship on the edge of the solar system, you really have no choice. You are literally trapped, isolated. That’s a great recipe for horror.” IT’S AN ALLEGORICAL…

Illustration: Matt Herring What one thing do you do better than anyone else you know? Washing up. I’m really good at it. I’ve never met anyone who can do it as good as me. I’m usually driven mad by people’s shortcomings in that department. Not high standards — just ordinary decency. Ordinary human decency. What is your favourite animal? I like looking at quails. I think quails are the funniest. You just have to watch them. They’re very busy and clumsy, and the way they rush around is really funny. Some animals are just bloody funny. Have you ever knowingly broken the law? Oh yeah, all the time! But I think that might incriminate me. While certain laws exist, they’re there to be broken. Hopefully they won’t exist much longer.…

★★★★ OUT 1 JANUARY CERT 15 / 119 MINS DIRECTOR Yorgos Lanthimos CAST Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz, Emma Stone, Nicholas Hoult PLOT It’s 18th Century England. War rages with France. But there is a bigger battle royale unravelling in the court of the declining Queen Anne (Colman): a fight between her loyal counsel Sarah Churchill (Weisz) and new arrival Abigail (Stone), Sarah’s down-on-her-luck cousin. IF YOU CAN decipher the artsy, spaced-out font, a quick gander at the end credits of The Favourite reveals character names including ‘Wanking Man’ (Paul Swaine), ‘Nude Pomegranate Tory’ (Callum Lewin) and ‘Fastest Duck In The City’ (Horatio). This pretty much tells you all you need to know about Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos’ down-and-dirty period misadventure. As uncouth and unleashed as Merchant Ivory is buttoned up,…

ON 8 AUGUST 2018, the Academy Of Motion Pictures Arts And Sciences announced plans for an Academy Award for Best Popular Film. Ironically, it was the most unpopular thing the Academy had done since Seth MacFarlane opened the show with ‘We Saw Your Boobs’ and was quickly back-burnered. Yet, without a helping hand, the idea of celebrating popular film is happening organically. For alongside the usual indie stalwarts, a crop of films that might be described as blockbusters are having an equal say in the Oscar conversation. Black Panther (box office: $1.3 billion worldwide), A Star Is Born (box office: $370.5 million worldwide), A Quiet Place ($340.7 million worldwide), Crazy Rich Asians (box office: $237.9 million worldwide) and Mary Poppins Returns (box office: supercalifragilisticexpialidocious worldwide) are all making their mark…

★★★★★ OUT NOW CERT PG / 117 MINS DIRECTORS Peter Ramsey, Bob Persichetti, Rodney Rothman CAST Shameik Moore, Jake Johnson, Nicolas Cage, Liev Schreiber, Hailee Steinfeld, John Mulaney, Lily Tomlin PLOT In an alternate reality, teenager Miles Morales (Moore) is bitten by a radioactive spider and becomes the new Spider-Man. But when a portal opens to other realities, Miles learns there are multiple webslingers. YOU’D BE FORGIVEN for feeling like Spider-Man’s recent big-screen adventures have simply been a repetitive, endlessly recurring multiverse. So kudos, then, to this, for boldly ignoring potential audience fatigue by doubling down — or rather, quintupling down — by telling not one Spider-Man origin story, but five. Right from the off, this is a Spider-Man wholly distinct from the live-action vintage, in every sense. While the…

★★★★ OUT 18 JANUARY CERT 15 / 124 MINS DIRECTOR Josie Rourke CAST Saoirse Ronan, Margot Robbie, James McArdle, David Tennant PLOT The widowed Mary, Queen Of Scots (Ronan) returns home to take her throne. Her brother (McArdle) and his lords are wary of a female ruler, while in England her cousin Elizabeth (Robbie) is threatened by this Catholic monarch on the same island. THE STORY OF Mary, Queen Of Scots has everything a filmmaker could want. Three marriages, rumoured affairs and a tragic death on the orders of her cousin, Elizabeth I of England, is almost too much drama. Director Josie Rourke finds a way through by focusing on a relatable story about women struggling to survive a man’s world, though sometimes sacrifices historical believability. We meet Mary (Ronan)…

Illustration: Holly Jose • OUT • 26 APRIL THE PROBLEM WITH cliffhangers is that, sooner or later, you have to resolve them. And with the film that we now know officially as Avengers: Endgame coming just a year after directors Joe and Anthony Russo ended Avengers: Infinity War on the biggest bummer in blockbusters, it’s very much a case of sooner. So, to recap (and reCap): Thanos, that purple prick, has succeeded in his quest to wipe out half of all life in the universe with a click of his Infinity Stones-wielding fingers. The half that dissolved into dust includes a ton of Avengers, and all but one of the Guardians Of The Galaxy. The half that survived are in no state to fight back against an omnipotent being. Tony…

Ungano E Agriodimas/Contour By Getty Images • OUT • 18 JANUARY “WHEN ARE WE MAKING THAT sequel, motherfucker?” Samuel L. Jackson is not backwards about coming forwards. No shrinking violet, he. So, if he’s keen to make a sequel to a movie — let’s call it Unbreakable — and there’s no sign of that sequel after many years, and then he happens to drive past the director of that movie — let’s call him M. Night Shyamalan — on a studio lot, he’s going to wind down his car window and bring up the subject. In the way only Samuel L. Jackson can. “That happened twice,” laughs Shyamalan. “Literally at a light in Los Angeles, same thing again. He rolls down the window. ‘When we making that film, motherFUCKER?’” It…

• OUT • 12 APRIL “HEEEY, WHATSSSUPP!” David Harbour barrels into the room, bellowing and giggling. “Sorry I’m late,” he booms, ruffling his hair, fresh from having today’s paint and prosthetics removed. “I wasn’t supposed to take that long but, you know, you can’t rush genius.” A little red remains. “I leave this on to wander around Bulgaria. They de-rig me of all the stuff and are like, ‘Do you wanna take this off?’ and I’m like, ‘No, I’m in Bulgaria, I’m just gonna sleep anyway, eat shopska salad, so fuck it. HA HA HA!’” It’s the end of the day in Sofia, where, in a studio aptly surrounded by forests and mountains, Harbour has been stomping around, tail swinging, as everybody’s favourite half-horned half-demon of the Apocalypse, although the…

• OUT • 24 MAY “HOPEFULLY IT’LL BE as good as the advert,” laughs Dexter Fletcher, director of Elton John biopic Rocketman. “The advert”, of course, being John Lewis’ much-ballyhooed Christmas ad, which pipped Fletcher to the post by telling the story of Elton’s life in just two minutes; roughly 100 minutes fewer than Fletcher has. “It is what it is,” says Fletcher. “It’s a Christmas ad. And if it makes people more keen to see a film about his life, it’s all good.” Most biopics are straight down the middle. Take Bohemian Rhapsody, for instance (upon which Fletcher worked briefly, taking over after Bryan Singer was fired by Fox). Fun but conventional. No fussing, no fancy business. Rocketman plans to buck that trend. Taking a leaf out of the…

• OUT • 29 MARCH THE STORY This version of Dumbo , directed by Tim Burton, is effectively remake and sequel in one. “The original movie is only 63 minutes long. You can’t just retell that,” says Frey. “Our screenwriter Ehren Krueger’s idea was that you tell the story of the original film up until the moment Dumbo flies. When people know there’s a flying elephant exists in the world, now what?” After becoming the star of a small-time circus, Dumbo is sold to the owner of a big-city theme park called Dreamland, becoming the star attraction. “I associate it loosely with the King Kong story,” says Frey. “This amazing animal is discovered and brought into the developed world.” THE PEOPLE Unlike the 1941 film, this Dumbo has people. Colin…

It’s 10am and he spares no detail, describing the “late ’40s, early ’50s sedan” he stole in a small town, and now he’s hiding in a house from the cops, and he wishes he’d covered the car in branches, and now the car has turned into a horse, and he wishes he’d brought the horse inside the house. “Do you know dreams?” he asks me. “What does that mean?” I don’t know what the hell it means. This sets the tone. Mortensen enthusiastically spins stories, jumping about; Ali carefully considers each thought before uttering it. They met two years ago on the awards circuit, culminating with the 2017 Oscars, where Mortensen was nominated for Best Actor, for Captain Fantastic, and Ali for Best Supporting Actor, for Moonlight (he won). They’re…

00:01:57 SHITE SUPREMACIST __ The film’s second prologue has Alec Baldwin as white supremacist Kennebrew Beauregard, spitting racist bile. “We wanted the feel of a black-and-white archival PSA from a redneck government cracker official,” says Lee, “explaining why things aren’t the way they used to be in the good old days.” Kennebrew’s vocal exercises were Baldwin’s own. “I asked if I could use that stuff,” says Lee. “He said, ‘Go ahead.’” 00:15:45 STRAIGHT TALKING __ After becoming Colorado Springs’ first black cop, Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) goes undercover to a speech by civil rights organiser Kwame Ture (Corey Hawkins). Lee and co-writer Kevin Willmott radically rewrote the script they were given. “We couldn’t just have a stereotypical black leader saying, ‘Whitey is bad, kill whitey.’ That would be disrespectful…

1 __ AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR SKY CINEMA, AVAILABLE NOW Eighteen Marvel movies built to this one, and boy, did it turn out to be a biggie. 2018’s most successful film at the box office, only the fourth film to take more than $2 billion and Empire’s film of the year — Infinity War was without a doubt worth the wait, rewarding multiple viewings. Huge in ambition and scale, it pulls off the nigh-on impossible task of cramming more than 20 superheroes into a film and leaving none of them underserved. A triumph of filmmaking. 2 __ SOLO: A STAR WARS STORY SKY CINEMA, COMING JANUARY After a rocky start — with original directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller leaving mid-shoot, to be replaced by Ron Howard — Solo is a…

CRAZY RICH ASIANS OUT JANUARY 21 / CERT 12 / 120 MINS You already know that this blockbuster hit was A Big Deal for representation, proving that even major films don’t need a token Caucasian to do well at the box office. So let’s focus for a minute on the fact that it marks the return of a genre that’s been largely absent of late, the glossy studio romcom. Rachel (Constance Wu) goes to Singapore to attend a wedding with her boyfriend Nick (Henry Golding), and discovers that he’s, well, crazy rich. It starts as a Cinderella story, with the complication of his disapproving and snobbish mother (Michelle Yeoh), but there’s something smarter underneath. Amid family feuds and romantic crossed wires, the film’s stroke of genius is Rachel herself, wary…