Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2021 i Empire

IT’S A LITERAL CAR CRASH Five years after French filmmaker Julia Ducournau astounded us with her debut feature, the cannibalistic coming-of-age tale Raw, she has returned with Titane, an audacious sophomore effort that cements her place as one of the most talented horror auteurs working today. Electrifying newcomer Agathe Rousselle stars as Alexia, a car-show dancer with a scar on her head. The film’s title refers to the metal plate in her skull following a childhood car accident. Alexia holds a peculiar affinity for her Cadillac, and it doesn’t take long for her to have car sex… literally. French Extremity at its most extreme. IT INSPIRED WALKOUTS If Raw’s thumb scene had you feeling nauseous, best to prepare yourself now for the corporeal carnage Titane has in store. The film…

IT WAS ALWAYS going to be different. We knew that Scarlett Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff, the character who famously admitted having “red in her ledger” in the first Avengers film, had a dark past; her long-awaited solo film was sure to reflect that. Still, for the famously bright and sunny Marvel Cinematic Universe, this sharp, savage tone feels new. For Black Widow director Cate Shortland, it was the only way to do the character justice. “I think that’s what people would want to see in Natasha Romanoff,” Shortland says. “Because unfortunately, she can’t always be this happy, shiny person. That’s not how she was created [in the comics].” Shortland notes that the moral ambiguity was built into Natasha from the start: created as a Cold War-era Russian spy, she was originally…

TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS after the movie adaptation — and a full 45 since author Anne Rice first published the novel — Interview With The Vampire is finally getting a second bite at the screen. AMC, who snapped up the rights last year, have given the go-ahead for an eight-episode series, retelling the story of Louis and his turbulent 200-year escapade with vampire libertine Lestat, as dictated to an unwitting reporter. After 2002’s ill-fated Queen Of The Damned (a botched amalgamation of Interview’s first two sequels, rushed out ahead of lapsing rights), it might be hard to summon much excitement for the series, let alone another yarn about moody neck-biters whiling away eternity in an existential funk. But Rice’s books have endured for good reason. Interview With The Vampire was written in…

IF YOU LOVED... LOKI SEX EDUCATION (NETFLIX) Until Loki came along, its director Kate Herron was most famous for making four episodes of Netflix teen drama phenomenon Sex Education. Similarities between the two shows are legion: both have a disarmingly light, frothy tone while grappling with their characters’ complex emotions, and while you’d expect a huge Marvel show to have an epic visual sweep, so, more surprisingly, does Sex Education. The Netflix show also leads the way in its celebration of gender fluidity and freewheeling sexuality, as, it turns out, does Loki, with Herron making sure its main variant’s bisexuality is crystal clear. WALLANDER (AMAZON PRIME VIDEO) The British version of the Swedish detective drama gave Loki himself, Tom Hiddleston, his big TV break, when he was cast alongside Kenneth…

SHURI BEN TRAVIS, ONLINE DEPUTY EDITOR While Chadwick Boseman was the shining light at the heart of Black Panther, Letitia Wright shone nearly as brightly as T’Challa’s genius-minded little sister, Shuri — and if the Black Panther mantle does continue, she’d be a worthy successor. Not only would Shuri make sense as the next person in the family lineage, but she was clearly aligned with T’Challa’s new mission come the film’s end: to open up the resources of Wakanda to the rest of the world and spread the wealth of knowledge. All that, and she can make her own tech too. What better way to bring the incredible women of Black Panther to the forefront than to have Shuri take on her brother’s legacy, while continuing her own? M’BAKU AMON…

EMILIA CLARKE Do you have a nickname? Oh, how long have you got?! I’ve got a lot of nicknames. Emilia is a real fucker of a name. My dad calls me ‘Billy’. My brother calls me various iterations of ‘Stinky Bums’. My mates call me ‘Brillo’, as in ‘Brillo pad’ — we’re all confused as to how we got there. A friend of mine used to call me ‘Heels’, because I used to wear them all the time. My mum has many iterations on ‘Chicken’. Often my American reps will call me ‘E’, I think probably just because it’s a bit of a faff writing out ‘Emilia’? There’s a lot of random ones. Do you have a signature dish? I love cooking so I’m always trying something new. When a…

★★★★ OUT 27 AUGUST CERT 12A / 107 MINS DIRECTOR Sean Durkin CAST Jude Law, Carrie Coon, Charlie Shotwell, Oona Roche PLOT The mid-1980s. Uprooting his family from America to Surrey, commodities broker Rory O’Hara (Law) moves his family — Allison (Coon), son Ben (Shotwell) and step-daughter Sam (Roche) — into a huge, dilapidated country manor. But if the house needs work, so does Rory and Allison’s marriage. NINE YEARS AFTER (literal) cult thriller Martha Marcy May Marlene, writer-director Sean Durkin returns with an equally challenging if completely different story. A neatly wrought chamber piece, The Nest is Marriage Story meets Escape To The Chateau, a piercing portrait of the breakdown of a relationship within the rooms and corridors of a huge manor house. Graced by perfectly modulated performances by…

★★★ OUT 13 AUGUST (IN CINEMAS/ APPLE TV) CERT TBC / 111 MINS DIRECTOR Siân Heder CAST Emilia Jones, Troy Kotsur, Marlee Matlin, Daniel Durant PLOT Massachusetts. 17-year-old Ruby Rossi (Jones) is the only hearing member of a deaf family, an invaluable interpreter for her parents (Kotsur, Matlin) and their struggling fishing business. Yet, when she joins a choir, her sublime singing voice could land her a prestigious scholarship — if she’s willing to leave her family. IF YOU WERE going to ask AI to come up with an identikit Sundance break-out hit, it might well be Coda. The winner of the festival’s 2021 US Grand Jury Prize: Drama (it subsequently sold to Apple TV for $25 million), writer-director Siân Heder’s film mixes up Sundance-favourite elements — family shenanigans, salty…

★★ OUT NOW (IN CINEMAS/ DISNEY+ PREMIUM ACCESS) CERT 12A / 127 MINS DIRECTOR Jaume Collet-Serra CAST Emily Blunt, Dwayne Johnson, Jack Whitehall, Edgar Ramirez, Jesse Plemons, Veronica Falcón PLOT Explorer Lily (Blunt) and her brother MacGregor (Whitehall) set off for the Amazon to find “the flower of the moon”, a cure for all ills, guided by riverboat captain Frank (Johnson). But others are also after it, including Germany’s Prince Joachim (Plemons). SOMETIMES, IT’S NOT the reboots and remakes that make you despair of Hollywood’s lack of originality. Sometimes it’s a theoretically original film like this, another attempt to turn a Disneyland ride into a big-screen franchise. As you watch Jaume Collet-Serra’s adventure, you’re haunted by the unpleasant feeling that this is a supposedly fun thing that’s already been done…

★★★★★ OUT AUGUST TBC (SKY ATLANTIC/NOW) EPISODES VIEWED 6 OF 6 SHOWRUNNER Mike White CAST Murray Bartlett, Connie Britton, Steve Zahn, Jennifer Coolidge, Alexandra Daddario, Jake Lacy, Brittany O’Grady, Sydney Sweeney, Fred Hechinger PLOT A week in the lives of a group of rich, privileged guests and the stressed-out staff at a luxury hotel resort in Hawaii. In-between spa treatments and scuba diving lessons for the holiday-makers, relationships falter and families fracture while the hotel manager (Murray Bartlett) plunges himself into a full-on crisis. WRITER/DIRECTOR MIKE White begins this series with the hoary old narrative device of establishing that Someone In This Story has died, before flashing back to a week earlier, when a group of hotel guests arrive at The White Lotus Hawaiian resort, greeted by the staff sporting…

SIMU LIU WILL NEVER FORGET THE FIRST time he played a superhero. It was a few years ago, back in his struggling-actor days, when he would take pretty much any gig that came his way, as long as it paid the bills. (He was also a stock-photo model for a while, as it happens.) On this particular occasion, he was dressing up as Spider-Man for kids’ birthday parties. In some ways, it was fun — “I remember watching the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man movies when I was 12 or 13 and really loving them,” he says — but it also came with a constant sobering awareness that if kids clamoured for Spidey to reveal the Peter Parker beneath the mask, Liu couldn’t comply. “As an Asian man, I could never show…

THE DIRECTOR CLAIMS he has no filmmaking know-how, yet he wanted to make a musical, a famously difficult genre to master. The composers have been trying, unsuccessfully, to get into movies for 40 years. The male star’s performance was inspired by a gorilla. One of the leading ladies had to figure out how you’d sing while giving birth, while the other does not, technically, exist. It may not sound promising. Yet somehow director Leos Carax, pop group Sparks, stars Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard, and “the miracle” that is Annette herself have made a Cannes-opening, genre-defying rock-opera that might just be the best argument for big-screen, capital-C Cinema you’ll see all year. It divided the Cannes crowd, and will divide cinemagoers in turn. The Guardian called it “bizarre” and “magnificent”;…

“WARRIORS... COME OUT TO PLAAAAAY!” TODAY, THAT LINE is quoted on rap records (from Ice Cube to the Wu-Tang Clan), chanted in sports stadiums and used as an answerphone message by rock icons (more on which later). But back in 1978, it was merely an ad-libbed taunt tossed out during the final scene of an extremely turbulent movie shoot. The epic tale of one Coney Island gang scrapping their way across a dystopian New York, The Warriors was a riot of face paint and flick knives, shot at night in the city’s genuine nogo zones. Basing it loosely on Sol Yurick’s 1965 novel (itself inspired by an Ancient Greek saga about a band of mercenaries’ blood-spattered journey), director Walter Hill stripped away the book’s gritty realism, replacing it with an…

INDISPENSABLE HOME ENTERTAINMENT FOR AN INDIE film from a small town in Arkansas, Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari has done pretty well for itself. The movie landed six Oscar nominations, two for Chung personally, and won one for Best Supporting Actress Youn Yuh-jung. That wasn’t something the director had anticipated: after his previous, somewhat experimental films had been very much underseen, he had considered giving up on directing for good in favour of teaching. But then this script, an intensely personal and semi-autobiographical tale of a Korean-American family trying to get their start as farmers in Arkansas in the 1980s, got the green light, and changed everything. So began a whirlwind ride from Sundance to the Oscars to being hailed as one of the most exciting directors working today. We caught…

KAT STRATFORD, 10 THINGS I HATE ABOUT YOU (1999) By 1999, former child actor Julia Stiles had already appeared in a couple of movies, such as The Devil’s Own, but it was this — the lead role opposite Heath Ledger in Gil Junger’s seminal high school romcom twist on The Taming Of The Shrew — that saw her break out. Now seen as a classic, its emotional impact hinges on the connection between Stiles’ Kat and Ledger’s wild Patrick Verona, culminating in a scene where Kat reads the title poem, about Patrick, in class. Hearts swell and tears flow. “I was not expecting to cry like I did,” admits Stiles. “Which is probably why it felt so real. When you have this expectation of, ‘I’m supposed to cry in this…

WHEN CRAIG GILLESPIE signed on to direct Cruella, the live-action prequel that tells the tale of how a young fashionista called Estella became Cruella de Vil, the snarling, hissing villain of all iterations of 101 Dalmatians, he knew that turning her from two dimensions into three was going to be a huge challenge. One requiring the talents of Emma Stone, some of the finest hair and costume people in the business, and a whole lot of planning… THE CLOTHES If Cruella’s costume designer Jenny Beavan doesn’t at least bag an Oscar nomination for her dizzyingly inventive array of clothes, from the rigid haute couture of Emma Thompson’s Baroness to the wild and rambunctious designs worn by Cruella, then something will be amiss. “We were trying to entrench Cruella in the…

Standout sequences from the great movies Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) and Harry Lime (Orson Welles) are on a Ferris wheel in Vienna. At the top, Lime opens the door and looks down below. LIME: Look down there. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you £20,000 for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax. It’s the only way to save money nowadays. MARTINS: A lot of good your money will do you in jail. LIME: That jail’s in another zone. There’s no proof against me. Besides you. He stares at…

SHEEP HORROR! Supernatural Icelandic drama Lamb sees Noomi Rapace as a farmer looking to start an unconventional family with her husband; cue agricultural body horror and gory creature effects. NUN NUDITY! Veteran provocateur Paul Verhoeven unsettled prudish viewers with his erotic nun thriller Benedetta, which included a scene where nuns use a religious idol as a sex toy. MOODY MURDERERS! Caleb Landry Jones puts in a deeply disturbing performance as Australian serial killer Martin Bryant. Justin Kurzel’s quietly brutal new drama is somehow more shocking for not showing violence. VERY ORAL SEX! Adam Driver stunned the Palais Des Festivals audience by singing between Marion Cotillard’s legs during a sex scene in director Leos Carax’s bonkers musical.…

WHEN SEAN PENN first asked his daughter, Dylan, to star in Flag Day, she had one answer for her dad: “No.” Penn’s adaptation of Joanna Vogel’s memoir, about Vogel’s charismatic, criminal, compulsive liar of a father, just premiered in competition at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival. “I was 15, and it was right after I read the book,” Dylan Penn tells Empire at the festival. “He had optioned it, and I was very not interested.” Despite being the daughter of two famous actors — her mother is Robin Wright — and time spent on their respective film sets as a child, Dylan, now 30, was slow to warm to the family business; until Flag Day, her career was defined by modelling and the occasional bit part. She agreed to play…

GET READY TO start hearing the name Renate Reinsve a lot more. The 33-year-old Norwegian actor had never played a lead role until she starred in The Worst Person In The World, a romantic drama (romdram?) showing the messiness of love and life from a Millennial perspective. Directed by Joachim Trier (Louder Than Bombs), the film earned instant raves, with Reinsve singled out for particular praise (“A star is born,” cooed one critic). Now, having returned home to Norway after winning Best Actress, Reinsve reflects on a whirlwind first festival. So… how was Cannes for you? Have you had a chance to take stock yet? Well, I have and I haven’t! Being there was so absurd and overwhelming. I was so happy and excited and honoured. We had such good…

Artwork: Aliyah Allen IT’S A WESTERN SET IN WEST WALES For his first feature, director Ryan Andrew Hooper was keen to emulate his Hollywood heroes. “I love the Spaghetti Westerns and John Ford movies,” he says. Filmed on the remote Pembrokeshire coast, Hooper found curious parallels. “Because it’s so out of the way, there is a level of lawlessness there,” he explains. “People just deal with things themselves. Which is maybe a bit Wild West-y.” IT’S BASED ON A REAL TOLL BOOTH “It’s a big thing for people from South Wales, that toll booth,” says Hooper, referring to the Severn Bridge that connects England and Wales. “It’s hard to explain the psychology of it — this thing that we have to pay to come back home.” Hooper and writer Matt…

A SUMPTUOUS, SLOW-burn queer romance set in 18th-century France, Portrait Of A Lady On Fire was one of last year’s best. With a host of glowing reviews under its belt plus a prize from Cannes for Best Screenplay, all eyes were on what filmmaker Céline Sciamma would conjure up next. It may be surprising to most, then, that her follow-up is Petite Maman: a pared-down, coming-of-age fantasy about an eight-year-old girl, Nelly (Joséphine Sanz), who has recently lost her grandmother. For Sciamma, however, the leap between the two films isn’t as big as it seems. “I feel like the films are holding hands,” she says. Sciamma dreamed up the idea for Petite Maman before she started work on Portrait Of A Lady On Fire. Yet the experience of making her…

★★★★★ EXCELLENT ★★★★ GOOD ★★★ OKAY ★★ POOR ★ AWFUL ★★★★ OUT NOW CERT 15 / 132 MINS DIRECTOR James Gunn CAST Margot Robbie, Idris Elba, John Cena, Joel Kinnaman, Sylvester Stallone (voice), Viola Davis PLOT A.R.G.U.S. director Amanda Waller (Davis) is persisting with her suicide squad, a band of super-powered convicts chosen to fulfil secret government missions, or die trying. She assembles a ragtag bunch to find an evil scientist (Peter Capaldi) and prevent the release of a giant, alien starfish that could destroy the world. THE SUICIDE SQUAD is a fundamentally absurd idea. It has second tier (or below) DC supervillains, with frequently dumb powers, teaming up to do secret government missions. Even in a world of people flying around in their underpants, that is ridiculous. David Ayers’…

★★★ OUT 23 JULY CERT 15 / 108 MINS DIRECTOR M. Night Shyamalan CAST Gael García Bernal, Vicky Krieps, Rufus Sewell PLOT An escape to a tropical paradise turns horrifying when a group of beachgoers, including on-the-rocks couple Guy (García Bernal) and Prisca (Krieps), realise that their private oasis is ageing them rapidly. With the years and infirmities accruing by the hour, the race is on to solve the mystery. NOBODY EXPECTS ANOTHER The Sixth Sense from M. Night Shyamalan — that kind of poise generally comes only once a career — but there’s a cracked conviction to some of his silliest misfires that can be enjoyable in itself. (Killer shrubs?) Old, the writer-director’s latest, is probably the most boring movie he could make at this point: a perfectly fine,…

★★★★ OUT NOW (APPLE TV+) EPISODES VIEWED 6 OF 12 SHOWRUNNER Bill Lawrence CAST Jason Sudeikis, Hannah Waddingham, Juno Temple, Nick Mohammed, Brett Goldstein PLOT Newly relegated AFC Richmond struggle as they begin the new season, with star player Dani Rojas (Fernández) having an existential crisis, new captain Isaac (Bokinni) feeling the pressure, and the team in turmoil. But is coach Ted Lasso (Sudeikis) dispirited? Heck, no! WHETHER IT’S SWEATING along to Joe Wicks, cultivating a raccoon-themed paradise in Animal Crossing, or Taylor Swift’s swerve to alternative rock, there are certain things that will be forever synonymous with helping us struggle through pandemic life. Apple’s Ted Lasso is one of them. Arriving in August 2020, Bill Lawrence’s comedy — spun out of a spoof promo for NBC Sports’ Premier League…

“One of my favourite experiences is watching the moment when an actor clicks in with the character they’re playing,” says Destin Daniel Cretton. And when it came to Tony Leung, the director didn’t have to wait long. “It was the first time we started rolling on him. He’d had a few months in order to lock himself up and get into the mindset of this character. After his first scene, I yelled, ‘Cut!’ and looked to [producer] Jonathan Schwartz and said, ‘I don’t even know what to direct him to!’” A giant of Asian cinema, Leung has worked with Wong Kar-wai, John Woo, Ang Lee, and Infernal Affairs duo Alan Mak and Andrew Lau. But he’s always studiously avoided Hollywood’s advances — until now. “I still can’t believe it as…

THE HORROR MOVIE THE OMEN (1976) Released a few years after The Exorcist, The Omen was another massive horror hit which popularised the Book Of Revelation and the number 666, while forever associating the name Damien with absolute evil. But at the time, Richard Donner was just a veteran TV director with a couple of failed features under his belt. He approached The Omen not as a horror film but as a mystery-suspense thriller, and exorcised anything explicitly supernatural from the story, about US Ambassador to London Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck) who comes to realise the young boy he’s secretly adopted as his own is, in fact, Satan’s son. “What Dick brought was a sense of reality,” says screenwriter David Seltzer. “There was another director before him, and another star,…

ESTHER WILLIAMS WAS SINKING. It was 1947, and while filming one of her signature swimming sequences for her movie This Time For Keeps, the MGM star found herself plummeting to the bottom of a 20-foot-deep pool. As it turned out, her glamorous new swimming costume, made of thick, plaid flannel and embroidered with heavy sequins, had absorbed so much water that it was dragging her under. The outdoor tank was crowded by excited bystanders assembled to watch Williams work; she very nearly drowned under the unwitting noses of hundreds of fans. Instead, she acted fast, unzipping the suit, swimming to the surface in the nude, and courageously emerging, hidden by a quickly-handed-over towel. From that point on, she would always approve of her costume designs. In her line of work,…

Alamy, Allstar, Getty Images, Shutterstock SHANE MEADOWS HAD been burnt. His 2002 film Once Upon A Time In The Midlands had opened to what he later described as a “lacklustre” response. This wasn’t business as usual for Meadows: a filmmaker who those who love, do so passionately. The very few who don’t, do so with an equal strength of feeling. “Lacklustre” is simply not a word that you ever associate with Meadows, or his films. Both known for their singularity of voice. That film had a punchy budget (for a writerdirector used to working with relatively little); big names (Robert Carlyle, Kathy Burke) and execs weighing in. So, Meadows did the only thing he knew how to: he got rid of it all. He got rid of the stars, the…

Illustration: Jacey THE RANKING Four Empire writers. Ten movies. Ordered definitively. Chris: The late, great Richard Donner, along with Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis, Joe Dante and John Carpenter, directed my childhood. The Goonies, Superman, The Omen are the films I grew up with. Was it the same for you guys? Helen: Replace The Omen with Ladyhawke for me. And I don’t remember a time before seeing Superman. That was always there somewhere. Dan: The Omen was always there, even though I hadn’t seen it. It kind of became myth, much like the film itself. There’s still that poem, which people think is in ‘The Book Of Revelation’, that they just made up for that film. I didn’t get to see it ’til a lot later because I was the kind of…

FRENCH DIRECTOR JACQUES Audiard, who won the 2015 Palme d’Or for crime drama Dheepan, was back in the Cannes competition this year with a tender and sexy story of romance between four Parisians. Work on Les Olympiades, Paris 13e — the film’s original title — began with Audiard and Céline Sciamma adapting American graphic novel Killing And Dying, by Adrian Tomine, into a screenplay. “We made it a French story by localising it into the 13 th district of Paris,” Audiard tells Empire. “And why the 13th? Because I lived there for a long time and it’s a very exotic neighbourhood. It’s in Paris, but you feel very far away from Paris.” Lea Mysius took over as Audiard’s screenwriting partner after a hiatus (in which Audiard made eccentric Western The…

EVERY FILMMAKER STANDS on the shoulders of generations before them — and that’s no different with Ferdinando Cito Filomarino. In Beckett, the Italian director’s second film, John David Washington plays an innocent American tourist in Greece embroiled in a conspiracy and hunted by police; as Filomarino explains, it is a “Frankenstein’s monster” of genres and influences. “I wanted to create a new monster that would borrow all the elements that I found interesting,” he says. Five directors in particular had a part to play. 1. ALAN J. PAKULA Filomarino cites the ‘Paranoia Trilogy’ from director Alan J. Pakula (Klute, The Parallax View, All The President’s Men) as a key influence: “Those films emerged from the Watergate scandal, and the very obvious discrepancy between what is being told to the public…

CHRISTOPHER WALKEN IS 78. He won an Oscar for his performance in The Deer Hunter. He’s worked with Spielberg, Cronenberg, Tarantino, et al. And he’ll soon be seen on BBC One as a dodgy guy called Frank doing community service in Bristol. The deal for this fabulously unlikely starring role — in Offenders, created and directed by Stephen Merchant — was sealed in 2019 over an omelette. “Stephen came to my house in Connecticut,” explains Walken. “And we spent a few hours just talking and I liked him very much. Then I cooked him an omelette and he ate it and then he asked if I had any more, and I thought, ‘Well, I have to work with this guy.’” Walken knew of and admired Merchant’s work as co-creator of…

CURRENTLY FILMING IN Greece, Knives Out 2 has a key stipulation baked into the contract of its writer-director, Rian Johnson: no notes. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the filmmaker has been granted complete creative control by Netflix for the starry sequel — and it’s clear that for many established filmmakers like Johnson, script notes are seen as the bane of creativity. Yet to others, they are a vital part of the development process. Do notes make or break a project? We speak with three key film-industry figures to find out. ROSE GARNETT DIRECTOR OF BBC FILMS; EXECUTIVE PRODUCER OF THE FAVOURITE AND ROOM “Our job is to collaborate, facilitate and interrogate. Sometimes script notes are helpful because they help to determine what’s important to a writer. They might get a…

★★★ OUT 6 AUGUST CERT 12A / 140 MINS DIRECTOR Tom McCarthy CAST Matt Damon, Camille Cottin, Abigail Breslin, Lilou Siauvaud PLOT US oil-rig worker Bill Baker (Damon) arrives in Marseille to visit his daughter Allison (Breslin), in prison for killing her student lover Lina. But when Baker fails to get Allison’s case re-opened, he starts his own investigation, aided by local actor Virginie (Cottin). PERHAPS SURPRISINGLY, STILLWATER is not a straight-to-streaming film about a killer shark terrorising a sleepy fishing village or a faux rockumentary about Billy Crudup’s band in Almost Famous. Instead, Tom McCarthy’s first foray into adult filmmaking since the Oscar- winning Spotlight delivers two films for the price of one. It starts as a tough-ish dad-on-a-mission movie, before morphing into a relationship drama and then back…

★★★ OUT 6 AUGUST CERT TBC / 90 MINS DIRECTOR Janicza Bravo CAST Taylour Paige, Riley Keough, Colman Domingo, Nicholas Braun PLOT When Detroit waitress and stripper Zola (Taylour Paige) finds a kindred spirit in Stefani (Riley Keough), a firm friendship blossoms. However, the bubble bursts on a weekend in Florida involving an unscrupulous pimp (Colman Domingo) and Stefani’s dimwitted boyfriend (Nicholas Braun). IN 2015, A’ZIAH ‘Zola’ King fired out a 148-tweet thread about her messy weekend in Florida and Hollywood was clamouring for it. “Y’all wanna hear a story about how me and this bitch fell out?” King’s opening tweet declared. “It’s kind of long, but it’s full of suspense.” At 90 minutes, the film adaptation is a reasonable length, but co-writer and director Janicza Bravo uses much style…

★★★★ OUT NOW (CHANNEL 4) EPISODES VIEWED 3 OF 3 SHOWRUNNER Dominic Savage CAST Suranne Jones, Lesley Manville, Letitia Wright PLOT Three women are spotlighted at a pivotal time in their lives. Victoria (Jones), a mum who works in property, is suffering from an unnamed mental illness. Danielle (Wright) reluctantly lets her guard down with a new man. Maria (Manville) feels suffocated at home and craves a new life. DOMINIC SAVAGE’S FIRST I Am anthology in 2019 was a raw and textured interrogation of what it means to be a contemporary woman. The three episodes were made collaboratively with their stars Vicky McClure, Samantha Morton and Gemma Chan, and while their characters’ scenarios couldn’t be more different, each had a guttural, personal performance at its core. Savage returns now with…

THE MULTIVERSE WHEN KEVIN FEIGE told Empire, just before Loki started its run, that it “will have more impact on the MCU than any of the [Disney+] shows thus far”, he wasn’t telling porkies. By the end of its six episodes, two major (and one Majors) things had happened: the introduction of He Who Remains, the power behind the TVA whose timely demise will herald the arrival of Phase Four big bad Kang; and the creation of the Multiverse, the very thing the TVA was apparently designed to prevent. Move over, Phil Tippett: Owen Wilson’s Mobius is now the king of ‘you had one job’ memes. That Loki would end with the creation of the Multiverse, in which infinite possibilities and infinite versions of infinite characters theoretically exist, was always…

Previous page and overleaf: Pink Soraya Maxi dress by Hanifa. Jennifer Hudson is uncharacteristically still. It’s late morning in Chicago and she’s at home in a frankly splendid room, a gleaming bright, big space, understated and classy. She’s seated by a piano, because of course. But the real significance is that she’s seated at all. “This is literally the first time I’ve been able to sit still, the first time I’ve been at home in my adulthood, ever,” she says. “Normally everything is going, going, going. So you never really get a chance to take in much. But since the pandemic... I’ve now been having moments like, ‘Wait — I did that? And I did this? And I’m here?’ To still be around this long, and to have an opportunity…

ONE OF THE Beatles’ greatest superpowers was their ability to bend time. It’s rock’s equivalent of dog years, it taking them a year to achieve what would take any other band seven. In the first three months of 1964, they’d played 18 dates in Paris, had their first number one in the States, made their era-defining debut on The Ed Sullivan Show, been immortalised in wax at Madame Tussaud’s, and begun filming their first feature film. The title, A Hard Day’s Night, was announced to the press on 17 April, having been decided four days prior, inspired by one of Ringo Starr’s frequent and unintentional manglings of the English language. Lennon wrote the title song that same evening, and with lyrics scrawled inside a birthday card for his one year-old…

Werewolves Within DIRECTOR JOSH RUBEN unpacks his hairy horror-comedy whodunnit. A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD Josh Ruben’s Werewolves Within is a deliciously dark comedy that could essentially be labelled ‘An American Werewolf In Knives Out’. Its subversive tone is established right from the off, with a title card that takes an innocent quote from Mister Rogers, that oh-so-American paragon of virtue, and darkens it with ominous strings. “That was a late add,” says Ruben. “We had lines in the movie regarding Mister Rogers, but once the film was in the can we thought, ‘We have so much here about community and about being a good person. So let’s open it with the spokesperson or politeness and then just have a Sam Raimi-esque sound slam.’” MEET THE SUSPECTS “That sequence…

ACROSS 1 Nihilistic Mike Hammer movie from Robert Aldrich (4,2,6) 8 Could be Cattrall or Novak (3) 9 See 21 Down 10 Requiem For A Dream’s Jennifer (8) 11 Winston, special effects maestro behind The Terminator (4) 13 — Out (Pixar) (6) 15 Get Shorty sequel that reunited Travolta and Thurman (2,4) 18 Barrymore, friend of E.T. and frequent Adam Sandler co-star (4) 19 Say his name five times to see a Nia DaCosta movie (8) 22 Jack, who’s been Jack, Jake and Joker (9) 23 Animation about a bird named Blu (3) 24 Scientist portrayed by Peter Cushing, Kenneth Branagh and Sting (12) DOWN 1 Rinko, who went from Babel to the Pacific Rim (7) 2 He says what Bruce and Zeus have to do (5) 3 Pilot who leads the…

This month it’s all about your ears in Crossword Corner, with a pair of Ausounds AU-Stream Hybrid earbuds for one winner. The AU-Stream Hybrid is a premium wireless headphone with an AU-Titanium Driver — basically meaning you get a clear, rich sound despite the buds’ dinky size. You’ll also get up to 8.6 hours from a single charge, making them perfect for on-the-move viewing even for long distances. Their IXP5 rating means they can withstand the elements, and they look very snazzy too. To be in with a chance of winning, crack the crossword, solve the anagram and text your answer and ‘EMPIRE’ to the number below. AUSOUNDS AU-STREAM HYBRID EARBUDS ARE AVAILABLE NOW FROM CURRYS.CO.UK, IAMAUDIO.CO.UK AND RICHERSOUNDS.COM…