Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2019 i Empire

Allstar, Gregory Peters/AMC AARON PAUL THINKS Breaking Bad ended “perfectly”. When we last saw his character — meth-cooking, magnet-loving Jesse Pinkman — he was ragged, scarred and reeling from his enslavement by Uncle Jack’s neo-Nazi gang, speeding off into the night, high on freedom. Jesse’s story was done. Paul was satisfied. “My God, did he pay for his sins inside that buried cage,” he tells Empire. Yet, he says, during the subsequent years, “People kept asking me: ‘What happened to Jesse?’ Although I loved how it was left unclear, I’m glad that now…” He pauses and chuckles. “… it’s a little less so.” That clarity comes courtesy of the movie El Camino, written and directed by Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan. Remarkably, it was shot completely under the radar last…

“YEAH, I DON’T know a lot about fantasy!” It’s a brave thing for director Dan Scanlon to admit, given he’s about to complete animation on Onward, Pixar’s first high fantasy film. The setting, a fairy-tale world given a modern-day spin, originated with an idea about two sons looking to bring their late father back to life for one day with magic. “Luckily,” Scanlon says, “there’s a lot of fantasy fans here [at Pixar] to educate me.” Here, he introduces Onward’s fantastical multi-species world. UNICORNS Usually the most mysterious and majestic of fantasy creatures, unicorns in Onward are basically just common pests. “We thought, ‘If the world’s changed and magic’s gone away, maybe unicorns are everywhere? What if they’ve become a little bit like raccoons or squirrels?” Part of the subversive…

GARY OLDMAN/ GARY BUSEY To find actors as fearlessly demented as Cage and Travolta, turn to cinema’s greatest Garys. Guaranteed to dial it up to 11 — and then shout at the dial. MARTIN LAWRENCE/ WILL SMITH This shit just got real. Meet the only thing that can separate the Bad Boys for life — some highly experimental facial transplant surgery. ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER/ DANNY DEVITO The Twins reunion you never knew you needed. Potential highlights: DeVito’s face on Arnie’s huge body; Arnie delivering the line, “I can eat a peach for hours.” JOHN NUGENT…

WHERE? Ahuriri Valley, New Zealand WHEN? 29 September 2018 WHY? Disney is making an actual flesh-and-blood live-action version of its 1998 animated musical Mulan, and we’re here to check that it’s all for reals. WHO’S IN IT? Liu Yifei, Donnie Yen, Jason Scott Lee, Jet Li, Yoson An, Gong Li, Rosalind Chao and more horses than you’ve ever seen in your life. WHAT DID WE SEE? Mountains! Everywhere you look there are beautiful, imposing, snowcapped mountains — this scenery, we’re told, uncannily doubles for China, where much of the film has already been shot. Above us, on a ridge, are dozens of spear-wielding Huns on horses. The bad guys. And there’s not a green-screen in sight. HOW DOES THE WISEASS DRAGON FIT INTO IT? Sorry, Eddie Murphy fans: there is…

THEORY 1 Tom (Henry Golding) is a ghost; he died and then became a heart donor to Kate (Emilia Clarke). THE CASE FOR: It fits with a literal interpretation of the lyrics of the George Michael song ‘Last Christmas’, which the film was partially inspired by. And some internet sleuths have noted that Tom doesn’t seem to change his clothes in the trailer. THE CASE AGAINST: Other, more observant internet sleuths have noted that Tom does actually change his clothes, and seems to interact with physical things quite a lot for a ghost. LIKELIHOOD: 8/10 THEORY 2 Tom is actually a guardian angel, sent to ensure Kate follows her dreams. THE CASE FOR: The poster features the tagline “It’s a wonderful life”, with the word “wonderful” crossed out, which suggests…

★★ 11 OCTOBER / CERT 18 / 102 MINS DIRECTOR Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje CAST Damson Idris, Kate Beckinsale, John Dagleish Actor Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje turns his traumatic early life into a gut-wrenching directorial debut in Farming, which sees Enitan (Idris, superb) — a young Nigerian boy who is ‘farmed out’ by his parents to a white British family — fall in with a white skinhead gang. Eni’s complete rejection of his blackness makes for authentic but relentlessly bleak viewing, and there’s not enough character development to offset the bouts of physical and psychological torture. Beckinsale (Eni’s foster mother) and Mbatha-Raw (Eni’s kind teacher) can only do so much with characters desperately in need of more screen time, and while the film touches on the rotten system that forms its title, there’s precious…

★★★★ OUT 11 OCTOBER CERT 15 / 88 MINS DIRECTOR Chris Morris CAST Marchflnt Davis, Danielle Brooks, Anna Kendrick, Denis O’Hare, Kayvan Novak PLOT Preacher and wannabe revolutionary Moses (Davis) promises to lead a small band of men in a race war while at the same time struggling to support his wife and children. When cash for a manufactured terrorism plot comes his way, mild-mannered Moses finds himself caught in a tense homeland security sting. SATIRIST CHRIS MORRIS’ second film has been a decade in waiting, after the award-winning, incendiary Four Lions. And it’s a film that was made almost entirely in silence, with very little known until its premiere at SXSW earlier this year. Morris, as you’d expect, would like The Day Shall Come to speak for itself. And…

★★★ OUT NOW / CERT PG / 122 MINS DIRECTOR Michael Engler CAST Maggie Smith, Hugh Bonneville, Elizabeth McGovern, Jim Carter If you already love Julian Fellowes’ drama, its big-screen debut will delight. All your favourite characters return, and Maggie Smith’s Violet continues to shower us in delightfully acerbic snark as Downton’s inhabitants and staff prepare for a royal visit. But this is otherwise a nostalgia trip. Major plot points turn on how shiny the silver should be, and the big storytelling crescendo involves a minor breach of protocol. This is a stratified England as Americans see it, a Tory vision of the UK — though it would be unfair to blame the basically decent characters for that, or the talented cast. And this series of almost unrelated and often…

★★★★ OUT 18 OCTOBER / CERT 15 / 102 MINS DIRECTOR Richard Lowenstein CAST Michael Hutchence, Kylie Minogue, Helena Christensen Richard Lowenstein’s absorbing documentary on INXS frontman Michael Hutchence was ten years in the making, and what a labour of love it is. Not just Lowenstein’s for his subject — he made close to 2O promo videos with the band — but also the singer’s precarious love for life, and his friends’, family’s and lovers’ abiding fierce affection for him. Piecing together his life via home-video footage and candid reminiscences from ex-girlfriends (Kylie Minogue, Helena Christensen), bandmates and relatives, it’s a bittersweet, melancholy, often dreamlike eulogy — punctuated by the revelation of a catastrophic incident that forever changed his outlook. While not solving the complex riddle of the man, it…

★★★★ OUT 18 OCTOBER / CERT 15 / 107 MINS DIRECTOR Olivier Assayas CAST Guillaume Canet, Juliette Binoche, Vincent Macaigne Following Clouds Of Sils Maria and Personal Shopper, Olivier Assayas continues his stellar run with a brisk, funny, tender look at complicated lives. The loose plot follows novelist Léonard Spiegel (Macaigne), who writes an incendiary novel blurring the lines of fact and fiction, and the subsequent aftershocks for editor Alain (Canet), girlfriend Valérie (Nora Hamzawi) and lover Selena (Binoche), who also happens to be Alain’s wife. But really Assayas uses the farcical shenanigans as a framework to examine everything from debates around analogue vs digital publishing models to whether is it more acceptable to have a blowjob watching The Force Awakens or Haneke’s The White Ribbon. All modern life is…

★★★ OUT 4 OCTOBER / CERT 12A / 112 MINS DIRECTORS Gabe Turner, Ben Turner CAST Berry Gordy, Smokey Robinson, Stevie Wonder Sponsored by Motown, Hitsville… is a soft but enjoyable overview of the birth of America’s hit factory mostly relayed by its founder, Berry Gordy. Just as the company took its cue from the production line of Detroit’s car factories, so the film follows each stage of the process (finding artists, production, image crafting) through talking heads and great archival footage. If you are after a warts-and-all documentary —stand-offs with Diana Ross (who doesn’t appear) are glossed over — this isn’t it. But it’s good on the nuts-and-bolts of crafting the songs, provides a touching portrait of Gordy and Smokey Robinson’s friendship, and of course the music itself —…

★★★ OUT 18 OCTOBER / CERT 15 / 112 MINS DIRECTOR Gavin Hood CAST Keira Knightley, Matt Smith, Matthew Goode, Ralph Fiennes Official Secrets is the kind of film where the most suspenseful scene is built around an office printer. Keira Knightley excels as whistle-blower Katharine Gun, the GCHQ worker who leaked a secret memo revealing a US spying campaign designed to help ratify the 2OOR invasion of Iraq. Eye In The Sky director Gavin Hood’s film is a timely, ambitious but broad take on a complex subject — there is too much recapping to make sure we are always up to speed — but remains engaging as Gun’s case is taken up by The Observer’s Martin Bright (Smith) — there’s a huge drama involving spellcheck — then Liberty lawyer…

★★★★ OUT NOW / NETFLIX EPISODES SEEN ALL SHOWRUNNER Ryan Murphy CAST Ben Platt, Zoey Deutch, Lucy Boynton, Gwyneth Paltrow, Bob Balaban, David Corenswet PLOT Payton Hobart’s (Platt) destiny is becoming President of the United States. The first stage in his ascent is to be elected president of his senior class and go to Harvard. But first he must find a running mate — perhaps sympathetic cancer victim Infinity (Deutch) — and defeat determined opponent Astrid (Boynton). RYAN MURPHY’S LATEST hyper-mannered, hyper-articulate look at the lives of the rich and disgraceful isn’t always as biting as it should be, but when it works it’s glorious. This is a show about the strange emptiness of politics, and the ways that we have all become politicians in an age of social media…

1 THE PEEPER BEETLE Dan Jolin: Much like the original P982 movie, Age Of Resistance admirably refuses to treat its family audience like delicate little flowers, serving up a squirming platter of creep-out moments, brutal violence and torture — like all the best classic fairy tales. The most memorable and distressing comes at the end of the second episode, when the Scientist (Mark Hamill) is punished for letting Rian (Taron Egerton) escape with the Essence. First, a skeletal cage is placed over his beaky head, in a disturbing echo of the Room POP rat cage from Orwell’s 1984. Then a skittering bug is released onto the shrieking Scientist’s face. Director Louis Leterrier pushes the PG rating as far as he can, even showing the nasty little Peeper Beetle gleefully prising…

Shuttersteodcikt IT’S BEEN NEARLY 20 years between my first film as director and the second, Motherless Brooklyn. So I guess the question is: why the rush? Truth is, I didn’t intend for it to be that long. But I knew when I got the rights to Jonathan Lethem’s novel that I wasn’t going to work on it right away. We did Fight Club. I directed Keeping The Faith. For four years I just wasn’t working on it. Then I wrote about half of it but got blocked. Finally, the guy running New Line, Toby Emmerich — we’d become friends doing American History X — told me, “I want the rest. Write it!” He pushed me and pushed me and I finally finished it. And then Toby was the one who…

CHAD STAHELSKI IS a man of action. Literally. This is a guy who started off as a stuntman, became one of the best in the business, and is the sort of person who can nonchalantly drop a sentence like, ‘“I’ve been in a lot of environments where you see actual violence, and it’s brutal,” into casual conversation. He’s walked the walk, talked the talk, jumped the jump, exploded the explosion. And now he’s channelling all those years of experience into becoming one of the best action directors around. He’s directed just three movies so far, but those movies just happen to be the John Wick trilogy, in which Stahelski and his creative partner, one Keanu Reeves, seek to elevate the modern American action movie into a hybrid of influences and…

THIS MONTH SCREENWRITER JOE BARTON SAYS HELLO TO HIS LITTLE FRIEND — AL PACINO/BRIAN DE PALMA’S SCARFACE—FOR THE FIRST TIME IT’S TAKEN ME 34 years to see Scarface, surprisingly, given that it centres around two of my favourite things — doing cocaine and shouting at people. I actually thought that I had seen this film but it turned out I’d just fallen asleep in front of the telly and woken up halfway through Carlito’s Way. But even without having technically watched Scarface, it was easy to feel like I had. The poster and “Say hello to my little friend” have entered the cultural lexicon and the whole thing induced an almost Proustian memory of playing GTA: Vice City as a teenager, to the extent that whenever Pacino walked past a…

Rocketman THE TAGLINE FOR Dexter Fletcher’s Rocketman was “Based on a true fantasy”. Which just about sums up the life of its subject, one Elton John, but also gave Fletcher all kinds of artistic licence to play around with the details — chronological or otherwise — of John’s life and career. The result is one of the freshest musicals and biopics in years, with a number of standout sequences. MEET ELTON “I wanted to make something as impactful and arresting as possible,” says Fletcher of the film’s opening shot, in which Elton (Taron Egerton) storms through a set of doors in full-on, gloriously over-the-top feathered regalia. What we don’t know at this point is that Elton is on his way to rehab. “I was trying to create an illusion that…

WHEN HARRY MET SALLY (1989) DIE HARD (1989) Terri: “Simply the greatest romcom of all time.” Ian: “John McTiernan’s thriller does everything right. Every action set-piece, small moment and supporting character registers meaning.” INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE (1989) Chris: “Indy’s relationship with his dad is witty, complex and moving.” DO THE RIGHT THING (1989) Ian: “Spike Lee’s best film is a Molotov cocktail of a movie. But it is still smart, funny and deeply human.” BATMAN (1989) Terri: “The significance of this film for franchises and comic book movies can’t be overstated.” BACK TO THE FUTURE PART II (1989) Terri: “A prescient look at our modern-day hellscape.” DEAD POETS SOCIETY (1989) Helen: “Peter Weir’s BAFTA winner sees Robin Williams perfectly balance comedy and tragedy.” SEX, LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE…

Good Fellas Chosen by MICHAEL PALIN MICHAEL PALIN: “It would be that scene around the table in GoodFellas , where Joe Pesci shoots the waiter [Spider, played by Michael Imperioli]. That’s such an explosive scene. It’s so awful. It’s like an explosion, a human explosion. You see how anger works, and how devastatingly dangerous it can be.” INT. BAR — NIGHT Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) is laughing up a storm at a poker game with his pals, including Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro) and Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci). He’s just won a hand. HENRY: Goodbye, Jimmy! We see a bandaged foot limp across the floor. It belongs to Spider, his first time back at work since Tommy put a bullet in his foot at the last poker game. JIMMY: Spider,…

THE WIZARD OF OZ Sincere congrats on 30 years of epic goodness. Over three decades, living on four continents, working various jobs, Empire was invariably on my couch or bedside table, in my backpack or work satchel. I’ll never forget the thrill of discovering Empire (Hellboy cover, Issue 225, March ’08) on a newsstand in Saigon. I celebrated my 50th recently in a backyard festooned with dozens of posters from Empire. To quote arguably the best 007 song, nobody does it better, Empire. You’re the best. DAVID HOLMES, BRISBANE Wow, thanks David. Please accept these Picturehouse memberships for 11 years of loyalty. Worth coming back here just to use, we reckon. Picture house  Empire’s star letter wins a Picturehouse Membership, plus one for a friend! Valid for one year at…

THE HERO OF Alan Moore’s landmark 1986 graphic novel Watchmen was Rorschach, an uncompromising vigilante who’d stop at nothing in his hunt for justice. In Damon Lindelof’s HBO continuation of the superhero satire, set 30 years after the original, the character represents pure villainy. “We thought it’d be interesting to show bad guys appropriating Rorschach, twisting and subverting the idea of him to their whims,” says the Lost co-creator, whose new show sees violent criminals donning Rorschach masks to terrorise “race traitors” and people of colour. Welcome to the new Watchmen: a white supremacy-battling update of a comic book classic, tailor-made for our time of alt-right rallies and sky-rocketing hate crime figures. “We talked a lot about racism,” says Lindelof, who grew up reading Moore’s edgy tales. “Watchmen really tapped…

SHE’S FACED DOWN terrorists in Black Panther and the Tethered in Us. Now Lupita Nyong’o is taking on zombies. The new zomcom Little Monsters sees the actor as an elementary school teacher fighting the undead, while remaining chipper and cheerful for the nippers. Only her second lead role proper since winning an Oscar for 2013’s 12 Years A Slave, it’s hopefully a sign that Nyong’o is finally enjoying the movie star status she richly deserves (and destroying a few brains while she’s at it). JOHN NUGENT LITTLE MONSTERS IS IN CINEMAS FROM 15 NOVEMBER…

Do you have a signature dish? Yes. It is my vegetarian lasagne. People say when they eat it that it is the best thing that they’ve ever eaten. Not the best thing, actually, that would be a bit much! But the best vegetarian lasagne. My secret ingredient is my jerk seasoning. You put that little Jamaican twist in it. And then three different cheeses. When were you most starstruck? Meeting Obama. I went to the White House for a screening of Mandela, where I played Winnie Mandela. He is incredible. I mean, the magnetism that man has is unlike anything else. I was just so starstruck. I was trying to hide in the background, and he saw me getting some food at this buffet thing, before we went into the…

ROBERT EGGERS is a stickler for period detail. His 17th century-set supernatural horror The Witch was eerily authentic, borne of going neck deep into New England Puritans and their supernatural fears. For his follow-up The Lighthouse, an absurdist 1890-set drama starring Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe, he doubled-down. Surrounded by piles of books about lighthouses and their keepers in his personal study, Eggers tells Empire where he went to find what he was looking for. THE LIGHTHOUSES “It was much easier to find evidence of the material world for this than The Witch, ” says Eggers, revelling in the relative modernity of 1890. “Craig Lathrop, the production designer, found many archives of blueprints of lighthouses.” For the film, Eggers wanted to feature a Fresnel lens — which delivers the lamp’s…

THE LAST TIME Olivia Colman played a queen, she won an Oscar. Of course, that was less an exercise in serene majesty and more one of screaming, stuffing her face with cake and getting giddy over the sight of Rachel Weisz in leather breeches (quite understandable). So were there any similarities between playing Queen Anne in The Favourite and stepping into the sensible heels of Queen Elizabeth II in The Crown? “They were both called Queen?!” Colman hoots. “I couldn’t think of two more different people.” With a £50 million budget per season, a trophy cabinet stuffed with awards and a vast (although undisclosed) audience, The Crown is the epic jewel in Netflix’s original programming. The first two series, which spanned 1947 to 1964, were triumphs of detail, period set-pieces…

THE REVOLVING DOOR of Hollywood can move fast. A string of dud roles, a couple of reckless incidents, a redemptive new period — this could refer to a lot of high-profile actors who found fame and then became blinded by it. But the remarkable rise and fall and rise again of Shia LaBeouf shows a singular trajectory of creative catharsis and emotional maturation. It hasn’t been an easy road. Following a few golden years as a Disney Channel poster boy, LaBeouf became the face of a multi-billion-dollar franchise in the Transformers films. Off screen, he started to make a name for himself for other reasons: a car crash in 2008, an arrest in 2014 for disorderly conduct and criminal trespass, and another in 2017 for public drunkenness, disorderly conduct and…

IT’S THAT TIME of year again. Halloween looms, and with it evil walks abroad. Well, let it walk abroad. You can stay safe and sound inside, watching one of the many great horror films on Sky Cinema’s Halloween Collection. But which is the greatest? It’s time to tackle the most terrifying question of them all… Chris: So, Helen... Halloween’s just around the corner, and so my thoughts are turning towards scary fillums, as we say back in Northern Ireland. And in particular, the scariest film or fillum of all time. And as Halloween’s nearly upon us, I can’t ignore the claims of John Carpenter’s movie that takes place on that day. So, is the original Halloween the scariest film of all time? Helen: Well, I should preface by saying that…

★★★ OUT NOW (CINEMAS); 18 OCTOBER (NETFLIX) CERT TBC / 96 MINS DIRECTOR Steven Soderbergh CAST Gary Oldman, Antonio Banderas, Meryl Streep For a former retiree, Steven Soderbergh hasn’t mellowed: with this, his unravelling of 2OPU’s Panama Papers leak, he’s mad as hell. That leak pulled back the curtain on corruption affecting all of us, and Soderbergh does the same here, ripping down artifice as Oldman and Banderas, as real-life law firm assholes Jürgen Mossack and Ramón Fonesca, unpick their methods direct to camera, ram-raiding the fourth wall. The film flips between such self-indulgence and episodic narrative, and there are great turns — notably Nonso Anozie’s billionaire bedswerver — but the disconnect doesn’t make for such rewarding drama. Still, it’s a righteous call to arms with charm to spare. AG…

★★★ OUT 4 OCTOBER CERT 12A / 118 MINS DIRECTOR Rupert Goold CAST Renée Zellweger, Jessie Buckley, Rufus Sewell PLOT P9U8. With her ex-husband Sid Luft (Sewell) demanding custody of her children and struggling to pay a CS million tax bill, fragile Hollywood legend Judy Garland (Zellweger) takes up a sold-out residency at London’s Talk Of The Town nightclub. Can she keep it together so the show can go on? THERE IS AN image halfway through Judy that captures Judy Garland (Zellweger) slumped in her dressing room, head bowed, cigarette burning in hand, surrounded by wall-to-wall flowers, a depleted Garland before literal garlands. It’s a moment that gets to the heart of the last days of Garland’s life, the difference between the private and the public, despair and sadness crystallised…

★★★★ OUT 25 OCTOBER CERT TBC / 121 MINS DIRECTOR Joe Talbot CAST Jimmie Fails, Jonathan Majors, Rob Morgan PLOT Jimmie (Fails) fantasises about reclaiming the home his grandfather built in the heart of San Francisco, lost by his estranged father over a decade ago. He and his best friend Mont (Majors) try and figure out a way to get the house back while navigating a rapidly changing city. THE DEBUT FILM from director Joe Talbot, The Last Black Man In San Francisco is both the story of a city and one of two friends, caught between wanting to escape the town and wanting to reclaim it. Starring and co-written by — as well as based on the life of — his childhood friend Jimmie Fails, it’s an extremely personal…

★★ OUT 25 OCTOBER / CERT 15 / 93 MINS DIRECTOR Abigail Blackmore CAST Laura Fraser, Mackenzie Crook, Johnny Vegas, Kelly Wenham It is a brave soul who reunites the stars of 2OOS’s Sex Lives Of The Potato Men, still justifiably derided as one of the worst films ever made. But writer/director Abigail Blackmore brings Mackenzie Crook and Johnny Vegas back together for her kinda-portmanteau horror comedy, in which the pair join a group of life-battered Gen Xers who gather at a remote country cottage to spread the ashes of a dead pal and share spooky stories. Despite a cute gimmick whereby each of the character’s stories is directed by the actor narrating it, it just doesn’t snap together, suffering tonal lurches, flat (and, in one case, flatulent) jokes and…

★★ OUT NOW / CERT 18 / 89 MINS DIRECTOR Adrian Grunberg CAST Sylvester Stallone, Paz Vega, Óscar Jaenada, Yvette Monreal An end credits montage of old Rambo movies is a sad reminder of how far Sylvester Stallone’s secondary franchise (after Rocky) has devolved. After a slow Logan-y start with Rambo in a rocking chair, Last Blood sees the aged Vietnam vet head to Mexico to rescue his niece (Monreal) from sex traffickers, only to fall on the wrong side of nefarious brothers named Victor and Hugo (one for the Les Misérables fans). What follows is risible speechifying, wild plot conveniences, xenophobia, Stallone sleepwalking and an unpleasant second act as Rambo goes full Travis Bickle in a brothel. There’s throwback fun to be had as Rambo lures the goons back…

★★★★ OUT 18 OCTOBER / CERT TBC / 97 MINS DIRECTORS Tyler Nilson, Michael Schwartz CAST Shia LaBeouf, Dakota Johnson, Zack Gottsagen Early moments from The Peanut Butter Falcon could be grafted straight from one of Taika Waititi’s pre-Ragnarok comedies. We join aspiring wrestler Zak (Gottsagen) — a 22-year-old with Down syndrome — in a sleepy coastal home, where the urge to become a champion drives him to escape his heavily regulated lifestyle and stow away on the boat of LaBeouf’s feral fisherman Tyler. This is LaBeouf at his best, stripped down to his bare elements, aided by two luminous performances from Zack Gottsagen and Dakota Johnson, here playing Zak’s wary if slightly underwritten careworker. The script may lack the Huckleberry Finn epicness that it sets out to achieve, but…

★★★★ OUT 18 OCTOBER / CERT U / 87 MINS DIRECTORS Will Becher, Richard Phelan CAST (voices) Justin Fletcher, John Sparkes, Kate Harbour This second venture into big-screen sheepnanigans for Shaun The Sheep is no less charming or lovely than his first attempt. Like before, it skews very young — the characters still only speak in gobbledegook, and the comedy is mostly goofy slapstick. But this remains the best of all-ages-appropriate entertainment, with insane levels of craft on show. Here, Shaun encounters aliens and Men In Black-esque spooks, and leaves the safe confines of his farm for distant galaxies — an ambitious task for any stop-motion animator. And it’s packed to the barn rafters with visual gags, sci-fi nods and witty puns. (The literal bull in a literal china shop…

OUT NOW AD ASTRA ★★★★ DOWNTON ABBEY ★★★ HUSTLERS ★★★★★ THE GOLDFINCH ★★ THE LAUNDROMAT ★★★ THE POLITICIAN ★★★★ RAMBO: LAST BLOOD ★★ 4 OCTOBER HITSVILLE: THE MAKING OF MOTOWN ★★★ JOKER (ABOVE) ★★★★★ JUDY ★★★ 11 OCTOBER ABOMINABLE ★★★ AMERICAN WOMAN ★★★★ FARMING ★★ THE DAY SHALL COME ★★★★ 18 OCTOBER A SHAUN THE SHEEP MOVIE: FARMAGEDDON ★★★★ MYSTIFY: MICHAEL HUTCHENCE ★★★★ NON-FICTION ★★★★ OFFICIAL SECRETS ★★★ THE PEANUT BUTTER FALCON ★★★★ 25 OCTOBER BY THE GRACE OF GOD ★★★★ THE LAST BLACK MAN IN SAN FRANCISCO ★★★★ MONOS ★★★★ TALES FROM THE LODGE ★★ FOR MORE REVIEWS, VISIT EMPIREONLINE.COM…

IT ALL STARTED with a Jane Campion retrospective. The Lincoln Center in New York was entering night two of an in-depth celebration of the Kiwi filmmaker’s work when, during a sold-out screening of The Piano, one member of the audience received a text message. He then received another. And another. Hunched down in his seat towards the middle of the auditorium, screenwriter Chris Terrio glanced furtively at his mobile as yet another text pinged to life on his screen. It was from J.J. Abrams. Just like the last. And the dozen or so before that. It was 10 September 2017, and several hours earlier Terrio had received the first in what would become a torrent of communication: “I’ve just signed on to Episode IX,” it read. “We’re gonna write a…

THERE ARE CERTAIN things you need when making a murder mystery. A murder, ideally. A mystery, preferably. But that’s not all. As Rian Johnson found when he was writing and directing his latest movie, Knives Out, there are staples of a genre that stretches all the way back to the 1800s that must be incorporated; that help set a whodunnit apart from any other type of detective fiction. “When people say what’s a good whodunnit and start listing stuff, I’m like, ‘That’s more of a procedural, that’s more of a detective noir,’” says Johnson. “Whodunnit to me is much more specific than that. It’s a tricky genre to do, cinematically, because it has that basic weakness Hitchcock always talked about, where the whole thing hinges on one big surprise at…

JOANNA HOGG ARCHIPELAGO, THE SOUVENIR IN 1979 I was a photographer, thinking of becoming a filmmaker, when I saw my first Martin Scorsese film, New York, New York. One of the key things at that time was my love of musicals. There was something about how Martin takes the classic Hollywood musical but turns it into something contemporary, alive and obviously personal to him at that time. I just found the character De Niro played and his sparring with Liza Minnelli captivating — very funny at times but also very tragic. I love how the ‘Happy Endings’ musical number becomes its own entity but also acts as the film in microcosm — so much that it has inspired something I’ve done in The Souvenir: Part II. Later I loved The…

Grosse Pointe Blank NOSTALGIA WAS RIFE at the movies in 1997. Thanks to a vague fear of the oncoming train that was Y2K, Generation X embraced the past like never before. The original Star Wars trilogy made a hugely trumpeted return to the big screen, Austin Powers fondly fondled the Bond films of old, and Romy And Michele’s High School Reunion was one of two films that summer whose protagonists would confront the past in the faces of their former schoolmates against a backdrop of ’80s bangers. The other would do so with an equally killer soundtrack but more actual killers. Want to feel old? It’s 22 years since Grosse Pointe Blank was released! The story of a professional hitman, forced to reassess his life when his One Last Job…

Illustration: Neil Edwards. Black Fawn Canada’s Black Fawn might not be well known, but it’s turned out a wide variety of low-budget horror films with a distinctively off-kilter, wintery, imaginative tone for nearly PT years. Chad Archibald, Black Fawn’s supremo, has written and directed The Drownsman, Ejecta, The Heretics and this month’s outstanding I’ll Take Your Dead. He’s also scripted the two minimalist apocalypse Antisocial films and produced slightly more straight-ahead genre pieces like Sweet Karma, The Sublet and Bed Of The Dead, plus the indescribably bizarre Septic Man. Black Fawn specialises in flesh-creeping transmutations — like the doppelgänger clawing out of the heroine’s body in Let Her Out or the bachelorette turned into a giant insect in Bite. Its distinctive mumblecore indie tone is unusual amid so many flip…

BFI Psycho PSYCHO’S SHOWER SCENE is Ground Zero for cinematic terror. “It was the first time in the history of the movies where it wasn’t safe to be in the movie theatre,” remembered critic-turned-filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich. “There is enough blood on screen to satisfy the most bloodthirsty movie fan,” offered The Hollywood Reporter. Nearly 60 years on, Marion Crane’s (Janet Leigh) shower slaughter is the most intense 45 seconds you can imagine and perhaps the most famous single scene in film history. It spawned untold parodies (Scream Queens’ version featured Janet Leigh’s daughter Jamie Lee Curtis), an entire documentary about its creation (78/52, the number of set-ups and shots), and gifted the world the international hand gesture for scary/crazy behaviour: a stabbing motion, accompanied by Bernard Herrmann’s violin shrieks, As…

After a disappointing movie, what is the BBC/HBO TV adaptation doing differently? BY ALL ACCOUNTS, Ruth Wilson is perfect casting as His Dark Materials’ Mrs Coulter. Empire tells her so. “I’m slightly offended by that,” she says. “Considering she’s described as the mother of all evils — ‘a cesspit of moral filth’.” That’s not what we took from it. “Well, that’s what I take from it!” she says, mock-horrified. “No, it’s great. She’s a brilliant character.” She is — and now, thanks to a lavish BBC/ HBO series adapting Philip Pullman’s epic literary saga, she’ll get her due. Finally. 2007’s The Golden Compass, starring Nicole Kidman as Mrs Coulter, was the first and last in a planned cinematic trilogy taking on the books, a limp disappointment, but the new series…

MARRIAGE STORY BEST PICTURE NICK DE SEMLYEN (at Toronto International Film Festival) Movies about divorce aren’t meant to be this entertaining. 1979 Best Picture Oscar-winner Kramer Vs Kramer, for example, is an intelligent and moving piece of work, but there’s less fun in its entire run-time than in the joke at its expense in The Return Of Spinal Tap, where schlocky filmmaker Marty DiBergi reveals he made a sequel called Kramer Vs Kramer Vs Godzilla. This year’s Marriage Story, on the other hand, is a triumphant blend of comedy and drama, finding the absurdity as well as the melancholy in what occurs when partners consciously uncouple. It even has Adam Driver singing Stephen Sondheim, something very few films this year can claim. Noah Baumbach has tackled relationships before, and specifically…

IN 1983, HE was Delirious. In 1987, he was Raw. Now, in 2019, Eddie Murphy is reborn. The comedy mega-star has been AWOL for many years, ensconced in his cliffside Beverly Hills mansion and only emerging occasionally to make such humdrum films as A Thousand Words or Mr Church. It felt like the man who once inspired the nickname ‘Money’ had lost his appetite. Actually, no. He was just taking a break. Right now, Murphy is in Atlanta, shooting a sequel to Coming To America, the 1988 comedy classic that introduced the world to the line, “The royal penis is clean, your Highness.” And imminent is the release of Dolemite Is My Name, in which Murphy plays hustler Rudy Ray Moore, one of the star’s real-life heroes, as he tries…

SIMON BLACKWELL HAS Charles Dickens to thank for his writing career. Years ago, as a prospective mature student, he went for an interview at university. “The guy who interviewed me was a Dickens nut,” he recalls. “I’d read some Dickens, including David Copperfield.” Which led to a friendly interview, which led to admission to uni, which led to a career as a writer. “David Copperfield has an emotional resonance for me,” adds Blackwell. It then became the natural choice for Blackwell and his fellow Dickens buff, director Armando Iannucci, to adapt as The Personal History Of David Copperfield, their next project, following The Thick Of It, In The Loop, and Veep. But, given that Dickens is considered the greatest novelist of all time, where do you even start? KILL DICKENS’…

THE CHRISTMAS CLASSIC Home Alone has been designated ripe for reinvention, getting a reboot on Disney+. But how will the Wet Bandits fare when Kevin McCallister has a state-of-the-art smart home? After consulting with experts Will Hopkins and Sam Breen of YourSmartHome.co.uk, we drew up some ideas. Alexa! Order a cheese pizza and play ‘Angels With Filthy Souls’! LIVING ROOM ENABLE ALEXA From his bedroom hideout, Kevin instructs Alexa or Google Assistant to launch the living room TV to a deafening music channel, just as the bandits enter. TURN IT UP The McCallisters, of course, have multi-room audio installed, so the cacophony from the ear-splitting rock channel can be broadcast throughout the house. The bandits race around in a panic. UNLEASH THE BOTS As the bandits flap about, Kevin drives…

A SWEET, INTIMATE, deeply personal drama, The Last Black Man In San Francisco was a huge hit at this year’s Sundance. First-time filmmaker Joe Talbot co-conceived it with his best friend Jimmie Fails, who stars as himself in a story partly based on his own life, and refusal to let go of his old childhood home. It’s a poetic paean to roots — and, as Talbot explains, friendship infused the entire production and beyond. HARNESSING THE EMOTION Talbot and Fails met as teenagers, beginning a friendship that soon turned into filmmaking. “We could be more vulnerable with each other than with other friends. The first time we ever hung out, he came over to my house and we just talked late into the night. He had to call his group…

★★★★★ OUT 4 OCTOBER CERT TBC / 122 MINS DIRECTOR Todd Phillips CAST Joaquin Phoenix, Zazie Beetz, Robert De Niro, Frances Conroy, Marc Maron, Brett Cullen PLOT Arthur Fleck (Phoenix) is an unsuccessful clown and an even more unsuccessful stand-up comedian. As he attempts to simply exist in a broken-down and beaten-up Gotham City, a sequence of violent events will lead to a revolt across the town and the birth of the Joker. 1981 IN GOTHAM City. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. There’s a garbage strike, rats rampaging in the piled-up trash, parts of the city are no better than slums and Arthur Fleck, troubled professional clown and wannabe stand-up comedian, sits in front of a mirror, slowly painting his face. He attempts to…

★★★★★ OUT NOW CERT 15 / 110 MINS DIRECTOR Lorene Scafaria CAST Constance Wu, Jennifer Lopez, Julia Stiles, Keke Palmer, Lily Reinhart, Lizzo, Cardi B PLOT Struggling to make ends meet, inexperienced New York stripper Destiny (Wu) strikes up a friendship and profitable partnership with star dancer Ramona (Lopez). When the recession hits, however, the pair concoct a decidedly more dangerous way to earn their money back at the expense of their clients. WHETHER YOU’RE A fan of her films or not, it’s undeniable that no-one commands a room quite like Jennifer Lopez. That self-made magnetism that has been finessed over years of performing still has the ability to seemingly slow down time, and writer-director Lorene Scafaria appreciates this more than anyone, rewarding such enigmatic energy with the role of…

★★★★ OUT 25 OCTOBER / CERT 15 / 138 MINS DIRECTOR François Ozon CAST Melvil Poupard, Denis Ménochet, Swann Arlaud Perhaps best known for Hitchcockian thrillers, François Ozon’s gripping dramatisation of a real-life case of child sex abuse in the French Catholic Church is the filmmaker in a more sober register. By The Grace Of God follows three men —Alexandre (Poupard), François (Ménochet, terrific) Emmanuel (Arlaud) — who expose the priest (Bernard Verley) who assaulted them as boys. The film’s relay-race structure sees each character pass the baton to the next, the stories highlighting but not judging a different response. It has tasteful flashbacks to camping trips but Ozon’s film lives in the present, a fast-paced, beautifully played film that matches Spotlight as a searing portrait of modern heroes who…

★★ OUT NOW / CERT 15 / 149 MINS DIRECTOR John Crowley CAST Ansel Elgort, Oakes Fegley, Nicole Kidman, Finn Wolfhard, Sarah Paulson, Jeffrey Wright Donna Tartt’s emu-sized, hyper-acclaimed book drills deep into the inner life of Theo, a young man who loses his mother and illicitly gains a famous painting in an art-gallery bombing. This adaptation struggles mightily to translate that to the screen. Both as teenager (Fegley) and twentysomething (Elgort), Theo is a blank canvas and a deathly bore. The other characters aren’t much livelier, constantly monologuing at the poor guy and speaking in such ponderous tones, it’s as if they know they’re uttering Pulitzer-winning words. Dreary and over-reverential, the endeavour is hardly saved when it slips, ludicrously, into thriller mode at the end, with Theo going up…

★★★ OUT 11 OCTOBER / CERT U / 97 MINS DIRECTORS Jill Culton, Todd Wilderman CAST (voices) Chloe Bennet, Albert Tsai, Eddie Izzard, Sarah Paulson, Tenzing Norgay Trainor Some mythical creatures have better agents than others — the bunyip, the Australian legend said to resemble a cross between a bear and a duck, has yet to inspire a single movie, while the yeti gets two animated features in the space of a year. Following Smallfoot, this less starrily voice-casted endeavour from DreamWorks sees one of the big furry guys on a trek to get home to the Himalayas, aided by three children. It’s fairly standard stronger-together, be-kind-to-nature stuff, but charming all the same. The monster is adorable (he has the look of a Wampa, the roar of Chewbacca and the…

★★★★ OUT 11 OCTOBER CERT 15 / 109 MINS DIRECTOR Jake Scott CAST Sienna Miller, Christina Hendricks, Aaron Paul, Sky Ferreira PLOT Living in a blue-collar town in Philadelphia, single grandmother Deb Callahan (Miller) sees her life collapse when her teenage daughter Bridget (Ferreira) goes missing. Raising her grandson, she negotiates bad men, limited job opportunities and tensions with sister Kath (Hendricks) while she waits for news of her AWOL daughter. APT FOR A film about a woman coming into her own, American Woman feels a bit like a graduation party for Sienna Miller. After owning big roles in little films (Factory Girl, The Edge Of Love) and shining in supporting parts in big movies (American Sniper, Foxcatcher), Jake Scott’s drama-cum-character study gives her the chance to show both her…

★★★★ OUT 25 OCTOBER CERT 15 / 102 MINS DIRECTOR Alejandro Landes CAST Julianne Nicholson, Moises Arias, Sofia Buenaventura PLOT High in the mountains of an unnamed South American country, a squad of child soldiers perform paramilitary exercises, look after a conscripted cow and hold an American doctor (Nicholson) hostage. But when the stronghold comes under attack, the kids and their captive scatter into the jungle where cracks in the unit begin to form. ALEJANDRO LANDES’ MONOS has the plot of 2010s YA drama but with the feel of 1970s Werner Herzog. The title means ‘monkeys’ in Spanish and refers to a bunch of feral kids playing at soldiers, trying to keep their hostage and their hormones under control. Uniquely, Landes’ film is at once almost entirely plotless but also…

★★★★ OUT NOW CERT 12A / 123 MINS DIRECTOR James Gray CAST Brad Pitt, Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland, Ruth Negga, Liv Tyler PLOT The near future. Astronaut Roy McBride (Pitt) has lived in the shadow of his heroic father (Jones), who disappeared on a mission to find artificial intelligence in the universe. When electrical surges from space begin to hit Earth, Roy must travel across the solar system to find his father, the origin of the surge — and maybe more. IT FEELS LIKE we’ve been spoiled by space. Ever since Gravity seemingly changed the game, science-fiction has had to work harder than ever to impress us. It’s almost like the genre’s peaked. Picking up the space-gauntlet, director James Gray quixotically heralded Ad Astra as being “the most realistic…

1 THE ATTACK John Nugent: Chapter Two’s shocking opening sequence sees a gay couple (played by Taylor Frey and LGBT actor/filmmaker Xavier Dolan) subjected to a devastating homophobic attack — only for one of the victims to then suffer a demonic clown one, too. Reactions to this sequence have been mixed, but whether it oversteps the line for you or not, it’s a pretty faithful recreation of the scene from the book, closely based on the real-life hate crime that killed Charlie Howard, a gay man from Bangor, Maine — Stephen King’s hometown, and the loose inspiration for Derry — in 1984. The event weighed heavily on King, and his commentary on small-town intolerance feels more depressingly relevant than ever. Whether you felt the violence was exploitative or necessary, it’s…

EPISODE IV: A NEW HOPE (1977) LOCATION: TUNISIA • DOUBLING FOR: TATOOINE Star Wars’ very first location provided a baptism of twin suns fire. On 2R March P97U, the second day of filming was hit by rain, the first Tunisian winter storm in TO years. After falling behind in the first week of schedule, George Lucas and co were hit by a freak sandstorm tearing the Sandcrawler set apart. The Tunisian sands also caused havoc, disturbing the signals directing the RD-D2 models and sending them out of control. EPISODE IV: A NEW HOPE (1977) LOCATION: TIKAL, GUATEMALA • DOUBLING FOR: YAVIN IV A small crew from ILM ventured to Tikal, Guatemala, in March P977 to capture Rebel base exteriors. After 2P hours of travelling, the crew landed on a runway…

Kubrick had been interested in adapting Traumnovelle [‘Dream Story’], Arthur Schnitzler’s novella about the romantic complexities of marriage, since 1969, and when he finally began developing it in earnest in the early ’90s, he knew the book’s sinister masked ball would be the centrepiece. Stanley Kubrick’s final film, 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut, had been a long time coming. Reeling from the fantasy confessions of his wife Alice (Nicole Kidman), Dr Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) treks into the New York night, eventually blagging his way into an elite evening involving dubious masked men, beautiful women, a whole lot of nudity and a shedload of threat. The dramatic highlight of the film, it’s a beautiful, foreboding sequence, dripping with atmosphere. But enough set-up — say “Fidelio” and head on in… Kubrick was…

JIM CUMMINGS IS a writer. A director. An actor. A producer. An editor. And a composer. Yet before his debut film, Thunder Road, a slow-burn, pitch-black, funnier-than-it-sounds dramedy about a small-town cop having a breakdown in the wake of his mother’s death, he was none of those things. Now, he’s keen to inspire others to follow in his footsteps. So here, exclusively for Empire, is Jim Cummings’ guide to how you — yes, you — can become the next Jim Cummings. 1 PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT “The first hurdle to get over is inadequacy. That’s natural in every industry. It comes about from inexperience and naivety. People shouldn’t hold themselves back with thoughts of, ‘I can’t do this,’ or, ‘This will never happen.’ Think, I have a story to tell. I…

Illustration: Jacey FILMS OF 1989 Chris: 1989, then. The year that saw the launch of a movie magazine called Empire. What were we doing in 1989? Terri: I was ten. Everything I wanted to see was a 12. At that age, you’re just obsessed with how do I get into a 12? The answer in my case was an MC Hammer pantsuit from Tammy Girl and a perm with loads of hairspray. So 1989, I started going to the pictures. Chris: The pictures. This is 1989, not 1959. Terri: I’m from the North. I’m working class. Ian: In 1989, I was in my second year of doing a degree in film at the Polytechnic of Central London, whose most famous alumnus is Asif Kapadia. I was making really terrible short…

DEADWOOD: THE MOVIE OUT NOW (DOWNLOAD), 7 OCTOBER (DVD) / CERT 18 / 110 MINS Unceremoniously gunned down in 2OOU after just three seasons on TV, Deadwood returns via this feature-length finale that is less concerned about wrapping up the narrative comprehensively than it is reminding us how much fun it is to spend time with Ian McShane’s Al Swearengen, Timothy Olyphant’s Seth Bullock, Paula Malcomson’s Trixie and the other residents of the scrappy South Dakota mining community. A decade has passed in camp time, and while some have moved on or prospered, the years haven’t been kind to all. And the future is riding towards them, in the form of an old nemesis, businessman (now senator) George Hurst, played by Gerald McRaney, who has modern designs on the town…