Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2016 i Empire

THE BIG SHORT IS many things. It’s the first movie to tell the inside story of the collapse of the housing market in the US in 2007/08, which very nearly drove the world economy to the brink of collapse. It’s very funny, as you might expect from Adam McKay, the director of both Anchorman movies. It’s very clever, using every cinematic trick in the book, from voiceover and diagrams to celebrity cameos, to make its info dump of tricky terms more palatable. (If you don’t know what a CDO is beforehand, you will afterwards.) But what you might not expect is how sobering and nightmarish it is — anger about the incompetence, deceit and fraud that led to the collapse emanates from almost every frame. “It’s an impossible story to…

WHEN IT COMES TO voting for the Jameson Empire Awards 2016, it’s easy to have your head turned by the blockbusters. Star Wars. Mad Max. Avengers. Jurassic World. Spectre. This year, though, with the Awards expanding in all kinds of exciting ways, the race has never been more open. So it’s time for a reminder of some of the smaller, quieter but undeniably brilliant films you may have overlooked. Take Best British Film, for example, where Andrew Haigh’s aching 45 Years or the gonzo treat that was Kingsman: The Secret Service could mount a challenge to 007. Or Best Comedy, where the gentle but hilarious SuperBob and pun-tastic Shakespeare origin tale Bill could duke it out with Melissa McCarthy’s Spy. It’s been a cracking year for Horror, with Guillermo del…

NO, WE MEAN THE TREE. THE PAST FEW years may have seen an endless stream of gruff-voiced action heroes in black leather jackets, but never let it be said that Liam Neeson doesn’t have range. This is a man who, after all, has played a Jedi Knight, a Greek god and a talking lion. But for his next role, he’s really branching out… by playing a tree. Not just any tree, mind. In Juan Antonio Bayona’s A Monster Calls, based on the heartrending book by Patrick Ness, 13 year-old Connor (newcomer Lewis MacDougall) is at the darkest time of his young life: shunned at school, faced with a sick mother (Felicity Jones) and a distant grandmother (Sigourney Weaver). At that moment, enter Neeson as a millennia-old giant tree who comes…

WAYNE’S WORLD (1992) After Wayne (Mike Myers, above) and Garth’s (Dana Carvey) basement cable show is picked up by a big network, exec Benjamin Oliver (Rob Lowe) insists they include product placement. Cue Wayne mugging wildly to camera showcasing a range of tasty comestibles. “Pepsi, it’s the taste of a new generation!*” (* Ask the old generation) BLAZING SADDLES (1974) Pondering his diabolical plans, Harvey Korman’s racist State Attorney Hedy Lamarr (“HEDLEY!”) becomes aware of the camera. “If I could find a sheriff who so offends the citizens of Rock Ridge that his very appearance would drive them out of town... But where would I find such a man? Why am I asking you?” FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF (1986) John Hughes’ teen classic gleefully smashes the fourth wall from the…

HE’S QUESTIONING THE chain of command,” says Chris Evans of his third outing as Captain America. “He’s always taken orders, but I think, especially after Captain America 2, he feels that while he’s not perfect, the safest hands are still his own.” Steve Rogers has come a long way from the frail kid who couldn’t wait to join up in 2011’s The First Avenger, and eagerly fought for the American way. In fact, the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s straightest arrow has, over the course of his five movie appearances, become its most interesting antihero. To Evans, it’s all to do with the changing nature of his foes, who keep moving closer to home. “This is one of the first times Steve doesn’t know what side he’s on or what the right…

A NEWBORN VANISHES FROM A Puritan farm. Has he been gobbled up by a witch? Or is something else feeding his family’s paranoia? Set in New England in the 1630s, the year’s most anticipated horror has been rattling festival audiences since its Sundance debut. It’s an exquisitely nasty experience that recasts the wart-nosed, pointy-hatted crone into a figure of supreme, ambiguous dread. “Before they were taken over by Disney, fairy tales tapped into something far more primal,” says writer/director Robert Eggers. “I wanted to reclaim the witch as something terrifying, exotic and unfamiliar. The weird shit in the movie wasn’t made up — it’s all based on research.” Some have dubbed his debut feature The Shining meets The Crucible. The film was inspired by Eggers’ own childhood nightmares and has…

“I WANTED TO BE A GHOSTBUSTER when I was a kid,” says Melissa McCarthy. “I guess I didn’t think about the fact that those four just happened to be men.” Well, since it was revealed that the quartet of ’busters in Paul ‘Bridesmaids’ Feig’s take on the 1986 hit would all be female comedians (McCarthy joined by Kristen Wiig, Leslie Jones and Kate McKinnon), that fact’s been given a lot of thought. Or maybe ‘thought’ isn’t quite the right word: “Ghostbusters is now a chick flick WTF” was the kind of response that typified the initial social-media backlash. While frustrating for Feig and his actors, the casting has given the long-dormant franchise an awakening that simply wouldn’t have been achieved by just updating with new-gen male leads. Not to mention…

I Rogue One sits outside of the action in Episodes VII to IX, offering a completely different flavour of Star Wars story. “It’s a slightly grittier story, very emotional,” suggests Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy. “Right away, you have a sense of a mission, and it’s exciting.” II Suggested by ILM visual effects legend John Knoll, that “mission” is the daring raid by a band of rebels to filch the Death Star plans — the action that sets up Episode IV. III The spin-off has an impressive international cast, including Felicity Jones, Diego Luna, Riz Ahmed, Forest Whitaker, Mads Mikkelsen and Ben Mendelsohn. IV It’s directed by Gareth Edwards (Monsters), who has admitted that, on being offered the job after he’d exerted so much energy on Godzilla, he was initially reluctant…

“HE THINKS IT’S SCORSESE following the Rolling Stones around, but it’s really, ‘Where are they now?’” Writer-director-star Ricky Gervais has brought back his most popular creation, David Brent, in a mock-rockumentary inspired by This Is Spinal Tap and Anvil. Twelve years after The Office, the former Wernham Hogg irritant is a lowly salesman at a toilet supplies company, but he’s still clinging to his rock dream. He’s cashed in his pension to fund a UK tour by his band Foregone Conclusion, with a documentary crew in tow. Gervais, who reconnected with his best-loved character during a 2013 Comic Relief appearance and road-tested Foregone Conclusion’s songs at sell-out live shows, says that Brent is a more sympathetic character this time: still desperate to be liked, still shooting himself in the foot,…

“WE’VE BEEN WORKING ON THIS film for such a long time,” says Duncan Jones from the Warcraft edit suite. “It’s coming up on three years now.” The Moon director’s first foray into bronto-budget filmmaking has pushed the limits of his endurance. It has compressed a vast fantasy world (“20 years of Warcraft lore”) into a franchise-launching script; turned a larger-than-life digital universe into a live-set environment; and half its cast play orcs, which ILM is rendering photo-real based on performance capture. Epic doesn’t cover it. Despite an extended schedule thanks to a release clash with The Force Awakens, Universal’s confidence is clear, with the date moving to the slot occupied by Jurassic World in 2015. As the name suggests, this is a film about war on the largest scale, with…

IT HAS BEEN REALLY FUN USING BATMAN AS THE answer to Superman,” posits director Zack Snyder, “because he’s not flying around and acting crazy. He’s just driving around in his Batmobile, doing his Batstuff.” Batman, thinks Snyder, is the key to his DC movie expansion quite because he doesn’t have powers. In many respects, the $200 million-plus superhero head-to-head, one of the biggest event movies of 2016, will step back from the broad sweeps of CG in Man Of Steel for a more grounded approach — all this despite the recent trailer revelation that monstrous villain Doomsday will also join the mix. “We were able to do a lot of this practically,” Snyder boasts. “Batman brings that back.” So the Batmobile was shot hurtling around Detroit (Gotham), the Batcave was…

PRODUCER FRANK MARSHALL CALLED IT “BOURNE 2016”, via hashtag in September. The IMDb calls it Untitled Matt Damon/Bourne Sequel. And, if it follows the pattern of the Robert Ludlum/Eric Van Lustbader novels, it’ll be The Bourne Betrayal. But, whatever the title, the point is: this summer, Jason Bourne is back — properly back (no spin-off nonsense here) — with Matt Damon beating up the bad guys and Paul Greengrass in the director’s chair. The duo behind the one-two punch of 2004’s Supremacy and 2007’s Ultimatum had consistently said they’d only do another Bourne if a great story presented itself. But Damon says there was more to it. They wanted to show a different Bourne. “We both felt we needed time to pass. You want it to feel different, you want…

WHEN I MADE THE original Independence Day I had these images in my head and I couldn’t do them,” says director Roland Emmerich. “Then I did 2012 and saw what we could technically do now.” It’s hard to believe it’s been two decades since the first movie, with its gargantuan, city-shadowing spaceships and its gleeful national monument-destruction, reinvented the alien-invasion picture for a generation; if ETs weren’t blowing shit up good, they simply weren’t doing it properly. But Emmerich is now finally poised to bring his unwelcome visitors roaring back into multiplexes. The extensive wait, it appears, was necessary. During the intervening years, the director honed and expanded his mass-destruction skills with the likes of The Day After Tomorrow and, yes, 2012. So if you thought the last ID4 aimed…

HE’S DONE SWORDS BEFORE (drawn from a cane and brandished by Sherlock Holmes). And he’s also done stones (86-carat, swallowed by a dog in Snatch). But with all that streetsmart style and swagger, Guy Ritchie was never a filmmaker we’d have expected to deal with the sword in the stone. Yet here he is at the helm of the latest attempt (after Jerry Bruckheimer’s failed in 2004) to turn our greatest mythical hero into a cinematic franchise — that “Knights Of The Round Table” preface is a clue. Ritchie’s gambit is to make the myth all his own. So, in the rough and ready form of Charlie Hunnam (Sons Of Anarchy), Arthur has his blue blood buried beneath the grime of Londinium’s streets: a dirty-fighting street kid with a big,…

The Little Drummer Girl (1984) As the policeman who appears when Diane Keaton’s Charlie goes to her flat in London. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) As a tweedy old service gent at the Circus Christmas party leading the jokey rendition of the Soviet anthem. A Most Wanted Man (2015) As a thoughtful patron at a seedy Hamburg bar, seated in the booth behind Philip Seymour Hoffman’s weary spy Günther Bachmann. The Night Manager (2016) As the patron of a Madrid restaurant whose dinner is interrupted when sozzled henchman Corcoran (Tom Hollander) intercepts a lobster meant for him. Our Kind Of Traitor (2016) As an attendant at the Einstein Museum in Bern, where a key scene takes place. He speaks perfect Swiss German.…

1995-2003 / FROM JANUARY 25 / CERT. 18 MIAMI TWICE IN FEBRUARY 2017, Bad Boys 3 will crash into cinemas, with or without Will Smith. Could be a Next Gen reboot. Could be a Bad Babies prequel. Could be set in space. Who knows, but this double bill indicates what the producers should be aiming for: recapture original, reverse over sequel. Shot 20 years ago, it’s easy to forget Bad Boys was a career bazooka for ’90s TV talent — Michael Bay was a pop-video director, Smith and Martin Lawrence sitcom stars. The film that launched them is like a final roar from the ’80s buddy-cop cycle — an unashamed cliché pile-up complete with nightclub shootouts, ball-busting captain (Joe Pantoliano) and a fruity Euro villain (Tchéky Karyo). What remains fresh…

“MY TIME ALLOWED?” SETTING THE SCENE While let down by a demon that looks like the Chewits monster, Jacques Tourneur’s 1957 horror classic remains a supremely creepy watch. Based loosely on M. R. James’ short story Casting The Runes, it pits questioning academic John Holden (Dana Andrews) against diabolical Satanist/part-time children’s entertainer Dr. Julian Karswell (Niall MacGinnis). After a visit to Karswell’s country abode descends into chaos after it’s hit by a freak storm, conjured by the host, it’s revealed to Holden that he’s been cursed — and hasn’t got long to live. INT. KARSWELL’S COUNTRY HOUSE — DAY Holden: Where are the others? Karswell: They probably went round by the back. Holden: I didn’t know you had cyclones in England. Karswell: We don’t. You probably could use a drink.…

PEOPLE HAVE TRIED to peg me my whole life,” says Michael Bay. “‘You can only direct commercials’, ‘You can only direct big movies.’ But it’s not about the money, it’s about the passion I had for this project.” He’s talking about 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers Of Benghazi. The story of a September 11, 2012 terrorist assault on an American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, and the resistance mounted by a small group of ex-special forces CIA contractors (led in the movie by John Krasinski’s Jack), it seems to have all the elements of a Bay movie: action, patriotism, manly men doing manly things. But it cost just $50 million — that usually doesn’t even cover Optimus Prime’s oil bill — and Bay says it’s very un-Baylike. “It’s not supposed…

READING WAR AND Peace is not for the faint of heart. Over 1,400 pages long and full of stodgy musings about agriculture, Leo Tolstoy’s 1869 novel about the Napoleonic Wars has acquired a daunting reputation. In Cheers, Sam stays awake for five days straight so he can read it to impress a girl, sighing, “They say the first 800 pages are slow, but it shoots off after that...” But if ploughing through it is tough, try turning it into a TV series. It’s a monstrous task, as director Tom Harper discovered when he took the reins on the BBC’s new miniseries. “Every day I have my moment of, ‘I can’t believe how lucky I am,’ followed by my moment of, ‘FUUUUCK! How are we going to get through today?’” he…

FEW THINGS ARE more thrilling in cinema than a brilliant ensemble cast all working at the top of their game. Which makes John Hillcoat’s cop thriller Triple 9 such an attractive prospect, with the likes of Casey Affleck, Kate Winslet, Aaron Paul, Norman Reedus, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Woody Harrelson and Anthony Mackie going toe-to-toe in a tense game of cops, robbers and cops-who-are-robbers. Today, on the north side of Atlanta, Empire is watching one member of that cast, Anthony Mackie as corrupt cop Marcus, move warily through the shadows of a derelict building, weapon drawn and at the ready. There’s tension in the air, and not for nothing. For it’s here, in this grim edifice, that Mackie will hope to contrive the shooting of a fellow Atlanta Police Department detective, an…

KATNISS EVERDEEN may have fired her last arrow in anger, but Hollywood’s hunger for the new Hunger Games has not abated (as indicated by news that Lionsgate may now be in the Hunger Games prequels business). The latest contender for the Y.A. crown is The 5th Wave — and with Jennifer Lawrence moving on to more adult fare, there’s also room for a new heroine. Step forward, Chloë Grace Moretz. In a sense, it’s a surprise that Moretz hasn’t appeared in one of the many Y.A. sci-fi fantasies that sprang up in the immediate wake of The Hunger Games’ success. She’s the right age (18), she’s bankable and her time as Hit-Girl in the Kick-Ass movies showed she can handle herself in a dust-up. As it turns out, she had…

THE SCRAPPY COUPLE You can’t have any take on Pride And Prejudice without Mr. Darcy and Lizzie Bennet, played here by Sam Riley and Lily James. But, even beyond the addition of brain-craving undead, changes are afoot. As James explains, the Bennet sisters can now “do spinning round-kicks into slicing someone’s head off. We have daggers hidden in our knickers.” Riley, meanwhile, says he’s playing this Darcy as “a mix of Colin Firth, Alex from A Clockwork Orange and Sean Connery in Dr. No.” He’s still required to deliver Austen’s romantic dialogue, “but sometimes you’re saying that while killing things.” LENA AND MEANER Seth Grahame-Smith’s Austen remix is set against a zombie outbreak rather than the Napoleonic Wars, the rich reacting much as they did to the bubonic plague, retreating…

FROM THE BEHEADING OF Ned to the multiple stabbing of Jon by his Night’s Watch brothers at the conclusion of the last season, death is such an integral feature of Game Of Thrones it may as well be credited as a main character. And, with the single, notable exception of minor player Beric Dondarrion, it’s always been permanent. “Dead means dead,” showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss have insisted. Yet nobody could accept the Stark reality that we’d never see Kit Harington frowning in black leather again. Almost immediately after the credits rolled on Season 5 finale Mother’s Mercy on June 15, all eyes were on the actor, and especially his lustrous mop of hair, which he’d once promised he’d hack off once he was done Snowing. First he was…

FROM THE JOKER TO KILLER Croc, Suicide Squad will feature more bad eggs than a coop for evil chickens. But even though she’s not a colourful, crazed super-villain, power-suited schemer Amanda Waller will hold her own against them all. So when Viola Davis was offered the role she said, “Yes.” Then, “Who?” She talked about the character with her “comic-book-zealot friends... The three things that kept coming up were, ‘Hard. No humour. Sociopathic.’ And that’s when I started getting nervous!” In the MCU, Nick Fury is the Avengers’ ringleader. Waller is DC’s answer: equally tough, but far less noble, her sights set on wrangling incarcerated metahumans for her devious ends. And she’s unafraid to get her hands dirty. “I can’t reveal how I got this,” Davis grins, waving a freshly…

ON THE LES ANGELES set of Disney’s live-action take on The Jungle Book, ten year-old Neel Sethi is a lone analogue presence in an otherwise entirely digital world. “It’s overwhelming!” says Neel, but he could have fooled us. Playing jungle boy Mowgli may have kept him away from his parents’ Manhattan home for the past six months, but as he bounces enthusiastically along the length of a small runway of real jungle foliage (which will later be inserted into a 360-degree virtual wilderness), there’s little sign that he’s homesick. He’s taken to his feature debut like a bear takes to the woods. Remaking a 50 year-old beloved classic and reshaping it for a modern audience is no easy task, but director Jon Favreau was clear in his ambitions: to go…

NOT THAT WE WERE EVER THAT worried, but it was a relief when Better Call Saul proved far more than a Breaking Bad cash-in. It treated us to more time in Vince Gilligan’s tragi-comic alt-Albuquerque and gave us something fresh, too. With the second season, we can settle comfortably into Gilligan and Peter Gould’s all-new, long-form portrayal of character descent. Just as Walter hadn’t gone full Heisenberg by the end of Breaking Bad’s first season, so we last saw Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) as, well, Jimmy McGill, still. Albeit a Jimmy who’d resolved to ditch his cumbersome morality and hooked up with grizzled bagman Mike (Jonathan Banks). This season he’ll hopefully go full-sleaze, while Gilligan confirmed no-gooders Nacho Varga (Michael Mando) and Tuco (Raymond Cruz) will reappear. But we can…

A COMIC FEATURING A LIQUOR-swilling vampire (This Is England’s Joe Gilgun), a dead-eye markswoman (Ruth Negga) and a possessed Texan priest (Dominic Cooper) on a mission to hunt down God doesn’t seem an obvious candidate for one of the greatest ever written. But Garth Ennis’ gleefully blasphemous Preacher is just that and, after a few false starts, arrives this year via AMC — and, surprisingly, the pens of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. Those concerned about the Superbad guys tackling the material may need reminding that it is, at heart, a black comedy. And they’ve not been afraid to play around to ensure surprises. “We want to make a show that if you’re a fan of the comic, you don’t know what to expect,” Rogen said. As showrunner Sam Catlin…

THE ORIGINAL CONCEPT FOR THE GRIM, AXE-hurling Huntsman in 2012’s fairy-tale remix Snow White & The Huntsman was, reveals Chris Hemsworth, “referencing Indiana Jones and that kind of fun.” Then, he adds, “we went in a different direction.” Now the Huntsman returns, without Kristen Stewart’s Snow White, but with some added Indy mojo instead. “This time we wanted it to be more of an adventure story.” The prequel/sequel to the gorgeous but overly sombre 2012 hit is going to be a much cheerier affair. Cedric Nicolas-Troyan, who makes his directing debut here, backs Hemsworth up. “Visually we’re in the same realm, but tonally it’s a lot lighter. Chris always had that thing with the Huntsman being a bit more open and light, and that’s something we’re really going for.” Indiana…

WHAT INSPIRED THE WALKING Dead creator Robert Kirkman to create his zombie comic-book hit was the idea of what would happen after the apocalypse — he picked up where most zombie movies left off, and it’s turned into a TV epic. Now another of his properties has been adapted for TV, and promises to do the same for exorcism as TWD did for the undead. Set in smalltown West Virginia, all the usual tropes — levitating child, oozing bile, icy breath — are present, but there’s a twist. Kyle Barnes (Patrick Fugit) has already had his life destroyed by demons, so now he’s looking for answers. Along for the ride is boozehound Reverend Anderson (Life On Mars’ Philip Glenister), who’s been trying to exorcise spirits all his life but doesn’t…

IT SOUNDS LIKE A SUPERHERO MOVIE, BUT IT’S A tongue-in-cheek title,” explains Viggo Mortensen about Captain Fantastic — 2016’s biggest contender for The Little Film That Could. It is the second feature directed by actor Matt Ross (American Horror Story) following 2012’s 28 Hotel Rooms, and has landed him on Variety’s 10 Directors To Watch list. Then there is the cast; alongside Mortensen, keep ’em peeled for Steve Zahn, Missi Pyle, Kathryn Hahn and Frank Langella. And, most importantly, from what we’ve seen the film delivers laughs and warmth without being overly kooky. Ten years on, we may have a natural successor to Little Miss Sunshine. The story centres on Mortensen’s Ben, an idealistic father raising six kids off the grid in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. He wants…

DESPITE, TO THEIR CREDIT, always keeping the heart of their drama on an intimate, interpersonal level, the X-Men movies haven’t exactly stinted on spectacle — whether mounting battles on the Statue Of Liberty, levitating the Golden Gate Bridge, or throwing a football stadium around. Now, emboldened by the success of 2014’s X-Men: Days Of Future Past, which saw original director Bryan Singer’s triumphant return and grossed a series high of $747 million, the sixth entry in the mutant saga is going to take things up another notch. “This one does some things that the franchise hasn’t really done on film,” says writer/producer Simon Kinberg. “You have a character called Apocalypse, who wants to do a different kind of damage than an X-Men movie ever has.” He’s not kidding. Buildings will…

“FROM BOTH THE ‘PRO’ AND ‘ANTI’ REACTIONS, WE KNEW WE’D TOUCHED A NERVE.” DAMIAN JONES, PRODUCER IT WAS SATURDAY evening in Damian Jones’ living room and the telly was on. Surfing the channels for something, anything, that didn’t involve the caterwauling hopefuls of The X Factor, the History Boys producer, half paying attention, landed on a repeat of Dad’s Army, the ’70s sitcom about a group of elderly and hapless Local Defence Volunteers set during the early days of World War II. Rather than being musty and tired, Jones was surprised to discover its laughs remained evergreen. Well, everkhaki. “Yes, it was still funny,” he remembers, “and the characters were timeless, but to be on at prime time? It was mad for a 40 year-old TV show.” The madness was…

DVD BLU-RAY iTUNES SKY STORE SKY MOVIES NETFLIX AMAZON Straight Outta Compton — Director’s Cut FROM NOW / CERT. 18 L. A. STORY BEING FORMULAIC isn’t always a bad thing. Straight Outta Compton doesn’t so much tear up the music-biopic sheet as hug it close… before scrawling its own “street knowledge” in the margins. In a sense, F. Gary Gray’s soup-to-nuts N.W.A story is a virtual remake of Oliver Stone’s The Doors. The era’s changed and it’s a very different musical genre, but both are epic accounts of ultimately tragic groups who rose up through the fissure of American political division, challenged the prevailing cultural agenda, embraced controversy over their lyrics, and apparently had a moment when one of them noodled on a keyboard for a while before triumphantly coming…

OUT NOW / CERT. 15 UN-MAGNIFICENT THE NATIVE American people have suffered any number of indignities over the years. But they haven’t, until now, suffered Adam Sandler. The comedy titan’s latest movie, released exclusively by Netflix in the first of a four-picture deal, blunders into a sensitive subject with all the gentle caution of stampeding bison. Female characters are called Smoking Fox, Never Wears Bra and, um, Beaver Breath. The pun “Poca-hot-tits” is deployed. There are wince-inducing jokes about peace pipes and wigwams. But other ethnicities won’t feel left out — Rob Schneider plays a stupid Mexican with a diarrhoea-spraying donkey. We have the feeling Donald Trump has added The Ridiculous 6 to his ‘To Watch’ list. The Western spoof features six leads. Sandler is White Knife, doing a Man…

OUT NOW / PC, PS4, XBOX ONE WORLDS AT WAR WE ALL KNOW WHAT this Christmas was really about: events that took place a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Thanks to Star Wars Battlefront, we can once again bury ourselves in the Star Wars universe, only without ever needing to leave the comfort of our living rooms. Total immersion is what Battlefront is all about. Its iconic environments, taking in key locations like Tatooine and Endor, are among the finest-looking ever seen in a game, and you can play (albeit temporarily) as the likes of Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Darth Vader and even Emperor Palpatine. Meanwhile, for those still dazzled by J. J. Abrams’ take on the Star Wars universe, the Battle of Jakku exists here…

1 William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet 1996 There were elements of the songs, like Radiohead’s Talk Show Host, that bled into the score. You went from out-and-out pop music to the end, where Romeo is walking through the church, that is very classical. It’s almost nuts. 2 Moulin Rouge! 2001 The sets were just incredible. And you’d be working in a wee room then you’d breeze down to the studio and meet Kylie Minogue as the Green Fairy. They don’t make films like that now, do they? 3 The Quiet American 2002 This was almost like a ’70s film: lots of long scenes without cuts. The whole movie was just based on a few notes. 4 Love Actually 2003 Everyone was freaking out that there were far too many stories.…

IT’S BEEN SEVEN years since Tom Hanks last filled the Hush Puppies of Dan Brown’s symbologist Robert Langdon, but he’ll return to the role this October in Inferno, using his archaic knowledge to solve teasers that make Only Connect look like a doddle. We travelled to Florence to get director Ron Howard and his cast to decipher Inferno’s secrets in nine rings of info. 1 Inferno is the third Langdon movie, following The Da Vinci Code (2006) and Angels & Demons (2009). There are four novels in Dan Brown’s series, but the filmmakers have skipped the third, 2009’s The Lost Symbol, which was set in the US. “I love the international nature of this,” says Howard of the decision. “As an American, part of the excitement for me creatively is…

ROUND 1 March, 1977. Sylvester Stallone is on top of the world. Rocky, the boxing film that he wrote, starred in and made happen through sheer, bloody belligerence, has won Best Picture at the Oscars, beating Taxi Driver, All The President’s Men and Network. Stallone himself loses out on Best Screenplay and Best Actor, but it’s alright. There’s a confidence about him, a sense that life is about to imitate art. Just like Rocky, the big time is finally beckoning to Stallone. As the night ends, a jubilant Sly is pictured throwing a right-hand jab at a giant statue of Oscar. The message is clear: “We’ve got unfinished business, big guy. I’m coming for you.” ROUND 2 In Richmond, California, during the mid-’90s, a young African-American boy named Ryan Coogler…

RYAN REYNOLDS WAS TAKING a break from filming in Vancouver, Canada, when to his surprise a studio executive handed him a pile of comic books. Reynolds was in the middle of shooting a bloody, action-packed Marvel Comics adaptation in which he played a cocky, profane, sword-wielding hero. The comic series through which he was now flicking was also a Marvel product. Its protagonist? A cocky, profane sword-wielding hero. “Seeing as you’re essentially playing this guy anyway,” said the exec, who had spotted the similarities, “maybe you should play him for real.” It was 2004, the movie was the Wesley Snipes-fronted Blade: Trinity, Reynolds’ character vampire-hunter Hannibal King, and the series in his hands was titled Deadpool. The actor took in the character’s striking red-and-black suit and mask, his aptitude for…

MY CAREER DIDN’T exactly pan out the way I’d imagined,” says Ryan Reynolds. Normally you’d expect an admission like this to preface a tale of disappointment and recrimination. Yet with Reynolds it’s quite the opposite. He’s more surprised than anybody at a 25-year career trajectory that’s led to him taking the position of star (and producer) of what promises to be one of the boldest, craziest blockbusters of 2016. “When I moved to LA when I was 18 years old,” he says, “I genuinely just wanted to play the wacky next-door neighbour on a sitcom.” It has, in his own words, been a “weird road”. Born into a crowded household in Vancouver on October 23, 1976, Reynolds was the youngest of four brothers. His father was a food wholesaler and…

IT’S FUNNY,” SAYS JOEL COEN, WHO FINDS MANY things funny, “on the last day of shooting on [Burn After Reading] Ethan said, ‘That’s a wrap!’ And George said, ‘Okay, I’ve played my last idiot!’” Following O Brother, Where Art Thou? (idiot con on the lam) and Intolerable Cruelty (idiot divorce-belt lawyer falls for client), Burn After Reading (idiot security specialist proves to be a pervert) was supposed to conclude what George Clooney classifies as his “American Idiot trilogy”. More fool you, Mr. Clooney. It turns out those clever-clogs Coens had another idiot on the back-burner, and he couldn’t resist. Baird Whitlock must surely be the apotheosis of witless dreamboats Clooney has played on behalf of his sniggering employers. For this idiot is an actor. In glorious-looking, ’50s-set ensemble Hollywood caper…

SINCE BOB HOSKINS FIRST brandished a sink plunger in 1993’s Super Mario Bros., video-game adaptations have been an unsightly blemish on the face of modern cinema. In two decades, not one game, irrespective of quality or following, has turned out a truly great movie (though 2001’s Lara Croft: Tomb Raider was a hit), but we’d bet all the gold coins in Bowser’s castle that 2016 is the year that will finally change. Following Duncan Jones’ Warcraft (see page 93), Assassin’s Creed is the second member of gaming’s royal family going from monitor to big screen over the coming months. Reuniting Justin Kurzel with Macbeth leads Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, it’s an adaptation of Ubisoft’s roof-hopping murder franchise, known for its cinematic storytelling and striking recreation of classical periods. Kurzel’s…

“RELENTLESS. HEARTBREAKING.” Asked to sum up the second half of Season 6 in six words, The Walking Dead director and FX supremo Greg Nicotero does it in just two. But we can do it in one: Negan. Having been introduced to an unimpressed Daryl (Norman Reedus) by members of his crew, The Saviors, in the mid-season finale post-credits sequence, Negan, played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan, will be dishing out a large portion of that heartbreak with his bespoke barbed-wire-wrapped baseball bat, Lucille, at some point during the season. Not since The Governor has the arrival of a villain been this keenly anticipated, the sense of dread only intensified by the comic-book character’s ‘fondness’ for Carl (Chandler Riggs), and his brutal murder of a core character. Nicotero is tight-lipped about specifics,…

THE YEAR 1982 WAS A LANDMARK ONE FOR classic children’s entertainment. Roald Dahl’s book The BFG and Steven Spielberg’s E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial both arrived and defined unforgettable storytelling for an entire generation. Now Spielberg has adapted the former in a meeting of minds that feels just… Right. “I think one of the things Steven and Roald Dahl have both done is deliver dreams to the world,” says producer Frank Marshall. “Steven just seemed the perfect fit for the story of this bond between a little girl and a giant.” The BFG spins the story of young orphan Sophie (newbie Ruby Barnhill, cast after a trawl through more than 1,000 kids), who befriends a Big Friendly Giant (Bridge Of Spies’ Mark Rylance) and sets out to round up the evil man-eating…

WHEN HELEN FIELDING PUBLISHED MAD ABOUT The Boy in 2013, another big-screen Bridget seemed inevitable. But with (spoiler alert) the devastating demise of Mark Darcy in its pages, and considering the somewhat lukewarm reception to sequel The Edge Of Reason back in 2004, it wasn’t nailed on to receive a rapturous reception. Until, that is, it was announced that the third film would not be an adaptation of the book (phew) — but a brand-new story written by Fielding and David Nicholls set, timeline-wise, somewhere between the final two novels. Bridget is now 43 but still, before becoming pregnant at least, living the same old life, just now armed with an iPad. When Empire vists the set in Windsor, we witness a classicly slapstick Bridget scene as she ends up…

How did this new series come together? David Duchovny: There were many moving parts to it, but I think the pivotal thing that happened was the changing landscape of television. When it became obvious to all of us that we wouldn’t have to do a 24-episode season, suddenly it became very feasible. Gillian Anderson: It wasn’t something that was remotely interesting to me when it first came into earshot. It took a while to convince me. It wasn’t until it became this small, six-episode format that it became a possibility. What can you tell us about the new series that won’t set off the FBI chip in your brain swearing you to secrecy? Anderson: As we find Mulder and Scully, they are not a couple. They are living separately. Mulder…

JUSTIN LIN DID NOT NEED somebody else’s franchise. He already had his own. Having directed four movies in the Fast And Furious series, turning it from a solid property into a box-office monster, Lin had no strong desire to go back to being a director for hire. So when J. J. Abrams, who was leaving the Star Trek universe to go play with different planets on Star Wars , called Lin to offer him the captain’s chair, he was reluctant. “I said, ‘If you’re telling me there’s a script [already] that I should go shoot, then I have plenty of other things to do.’ J. J. said, ‘No, that’s not what I want. The only catch is you’re going to start shooting in about five-and-a half months.’” So Lin created…

IT WASN’T YOUR USUAL casting call. When a request went out for background artists to appear in new HBO series Westworld , it stipulated they may have to perform “genital-to-genital touching”, or “contort to form a table-like shape while being fully nude”. Though the channel has since distanced itself, pointing out that the controversial call was written by a third-party company, it’s clear this take on the Michael Crichton sci-fi classic, which is overseen by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy (with input from J. J. Abrams), will be very different from the Westworld your dad saw in 1973… The show was announced to the world as “a dark odyssey about the dawn of artificial consciousness and the future of sin”. Nolan’s take is more succinct: “It’s fucked up.” But the…

HAVING BROUGHT THE Prohibition era to vivid life in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, showrunner Terence Winter and director/ producer Martin Scorsese have now channelled their mojo into ’70s rock ’n’ roll. This time they’ve got Mick Jagger on board as producer, too. In fact, it was his all idea, first pitched eight years ago. “He wanted to do a movie sort of like Casino in the world of rock ’n’ roll,” says Winter. “Over the years it morphed into a TV series.” Starring Bobby Cannavale as a record label boss trying to revive his company, with Olivia Wilde, Ray Romano and Juno Temple joining him on the cast list, it has all the signs of the kind of prestige saga we’ve come to expect from HBO, with Jagger’s involvement promising a…

“WHY SHOULDN’T OLDER women behave badly?” asks Mandie Fletcher, the director of Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie, which brings chaotic PR Eddie (Jennifer Saunders) and her buddy Patsy (Joanna Lumley) to the big screen 24 years after their TV debut. “When you’re a woman over 45, nobody notices you,” she says. “And these two make themselves so noticeable. That’s what people love about them.” On the day Empire visited the set in Canary Wharf, Saunders was smashing up an office and Lumley doing coke off a photocopier — both in character, we should add. You would have to be extremely heavily sedated not to notice them. The movie follows Eddie’s attempts to claw her way back to relevance by taking on a high-profile client, then fleeing to France when she causes…

There was one, known as ‘Harry’, who had joined the Communist Party to spy from the inside. Harry was astonishing; all his energies were focused on his mission. Harry could react at all times like one of the faithful. Despite being paid a pittance, Harry knew no other life. “He had bent his mind until he scarcely knew its old shape anymore,” his runner reflected. In some senses, the author of the greatest spy stories ever written has always been telling Harry’s story. It’s a story producer Simon Cornwell is determined to spread as far as possible. In a members’ club close to Trafalgar Square, he meets with Empire to set out his manifesto. “I guess we saw the chance with le Carré to establish a company with a reputation…

TIME TO RYE Surely the classiest product based on a 1982 sci-fi film, these whiskey glasses are an exact replica of the ones seen in Blade Runner. Good luck trying to make an origami unicorn after using them. firebox.com, £94.99 per pair AND COW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT The most Pythony box set ever, this Holy Grail 40th anniversary bundle comes with a castle, a catapult and assorted farm animals to fling over the former using the latter. amazon.co.uk, £17.99 DOCTOR HUH? We don’t know why cult US artist Brandon Bird has made a poster depicting Shia LaBeouf as every Doctor Who. But we’re very glad that he has. Wait for the inevitable live video stream of LaBeouf staring at it for 72 hours. brandonbird.com, £6.65 EMPIRE RECORDS With John…

1971 / OUT NOW / CERT. 15 “An achingly human, true and irresistibly sad tale.” LONE STAR OF ALL THE DIRECTORS DEEMED harbingers of New Hollywood in the 1970s, Peter Bogdanovich’s career is perhaps the most frustrating. A prickly, perfectionist ex-film critic boasting an encyclopedic knowledge of cinema — he claimed to have seen well over 5,000 films by the time he was 30 — he quit his job as programmer for New York’s Museum Of Modern Art in the early ’60s and headed West. There, his reverence for Hollywood’s aristocracy quickly opened doors. Orson Welles became a mentor; there were breakfasts with Fritz Lang. Inevitably he ran across Roger Corman, and made his debut with curio Targets (1968), which stitched leftovers from 1963’s The Terror into new footage featuring…

LUCAS AID The moment that I made my peace with the Star Wars prequels: watching the films chronologically with my then seven year-old son, and seeing how differently he viewed Darth Vader because of them. We finally arrived at Return Of The Jedi, and at the climax, as Palpatine blasts Luke with Force lightning, Jake (normally a pretty relaxed film viewer) leapt to his feet, tears running down his face, and started yelling in anguish at the TV: “Help him, Anakin! ANAKIN! SAVE HIM! HE’S YOUR SON, ANNIE! HELP HIM!” I may have got something in my own eye at that point. Seems like George Lucas did know what he was doing, after all... TONE HITCHCOCK, BATH Nice to see a spirited defence of the original blaster-master. Picture house Empire’s…