Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2023 i Empire

THEY CLONED TYRONE: part sci-fi, part mystery, all madness THEY CLONED TYRONE poses the kind of questions that you don’t hear every day. Like, what happens when a drug-dealer, a pimp and a sex worker accidentally uncover a government conspiracy? Do we control our destinies or are shady forces controlling us? Oh, and also: “If The Truman Show drank a bottle of vodka, what would the outcome be?” laughs Juel Taylor, writer-director of what will surely be this summer’s most eclectic thriller. Also inspired by “They Live, Groundhog Day, It Follows and Napoleon Dynamite” (yes, you’re reading that right), its plot follows a character whose reality begins to crumble around him, much like the Jim Carrey classic. Except this Truman is a dope-pushing single father, played by John Boyega, who…

Scrapper writer-director Charlotte Regan on taking the kitchen-sink genre and filling it with talking spiders “I WANTED IT to feel like the kids were telling the story,” Charlotte Regan says of Scrapper, her council-estate-set story about a 12-year-old girl seemingly orphaned by the death of her mother. Think that premise is a recipe for bleakness? Think again. “The kids would tell it in a fun way! They’d have a packet of sweets and then the energy would be mad, and then they’d have a crash,” she laughs. Hence a British social-realism drama unlike any other: one full of laugh-out-loud comedy and the occasional speaking arachnid. “It’s the kids that gave us the excuse to have a wild style. If an adult was the centrepiece of our film and I did…

The writer-director of Medusa Deluxe on his hair-dressing murder mystery “I’VE BEEN MACED!” someone screams midway through Medusa Deluxe, only to be told, “It’s fucking TRESemmé, you crazy bitch!” It’s not an exchange you’ll hear in your average murder-mystery film. But then again, the debut feature from Thomas Hardiman isn’t like any other whodunnit. “My mum went to the hairdresser’s a weird amount when I was a kid,” says Hardiman, describing how his literally hair-raising comedy-mystery came to be. “I’d wait there for hours after being picked up from school, so it’s something that’s always been in my mind. The best hairdressers have this incredible creativity — they're like contemporary sculptors.” Medusa Deluxe sees the London filmmaker combine his respect for top-level coiffeurs with his two other great passions: absurdist…

EMPIRE BREAKS DOWN WHAT TO EXPECT FROM A MUSICAL STAGE-PLAY INSPIRED BY THE FILMMAKER’S ICONIC WORK TARANTINO’S BLESSING The show began as a concert of Tarantino soundtrack songs. Then the man himself came to check it out. Much shared tequila ensued. “That’s when we started developing a meta story where [we’re reviewing] the entire back catalogue of his work and doing the soundtracks and mashing it all together,” says director Anderson Davis. HYBRID HEROES Characters the Fox Force Five (a reference to Pulp Fiction) represent Tarantino’s starring women. Blonde Fox, for example, is an amalgamation of Mia Wallace and Beatrix Kiddo. “Beatrix fighting the Crazy 88 in Kill Bill becomes a metaphor for Mia surviving her overdose,” Davis says. “You get to see how these things overlap and the dialogue…

You fell in love with that incredible new TV show. And then it ended! Don’t despair — Boyd Hilton recommends the sibling shows to watch next IF YOU LOVED... GREAT EXPECTATIONS DICKENSIAN (UKTV PLAY/SKY GO) This magnificently madcap attempt to fuse myriad Charles Dickens novels and characters into one sprawling serial made up of 20 half-hour instalments was created by TV drama legend Tony Jordan (Life On Mars), and aired on BBC One in 2015. The writing team included Sarah Phelps, whose own 2011 BBC adaptation of Great Expectations is also well worth checking out, and the extraordinary cast featured Tuppence Middleton as Miss Havisham, Stranger Things’ Joseph Quinn as her brother Arthur and Stephen Rea as Inspector Bucket (from Bleak House). It was a suitably rollicking celebration of Dickens’…

Twelve years after the last movie, Harry Potter is being adapted again. Hollywood’s reboot rules might just have changed WHEN DWAYNE JOHNSON announced last month that Moana was getting a live-action adaptation only seven years after the animated original, it raised eyebrows higher than Maui’s. Then, mere weeks later, Warner Bros. said, “Hold my butterbeer,” announcing a Harry Potter TV show, once again adapting the J.K. Rowling books. The studio had been expected to wave a wand and shout, “Leviosa!” at its most profitable franchise before too long — but most expected a new story set in the Wizarding World, akin to its Fantastic Beasts movies. Perhaps an adaptation of Harry Potter And The Cursed Child, the play set 19 years after the events of The Deathly Hallows, that has…

EXTRACTION 2’s director on pulling off one highly flammable one-shot prison sequence WHEN SAM HARGRAVE, director of Extraction 2, received the screenplay for the action sequel from its writer-producer, Joe Russo, one sentence stood out, above all others. It came at the beginning of an action sequence in which the film’s unstoppable man-bastard of a hero, Chris Hemsworth’s Tyler Rake, begins the extraction of the title by infiltrating a Georgian jail where a drug lord has imprisoned his own wife (Tinatin Dalakishvili), and it described the sequence thus: “The craziest oner in cinema history.” Hargrave distinctly remembers his reaction when he read that. “Well, the gauntlet’s laid down now!” So he decided to do the responsible thing. The decent thing. The only thing he could do when charged with that…

★★ OUT NOW / CERT 15 116 MINS DIRECTOR Dexter Fletcher CAST Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Adrien Brody, Tate Donovan, Amy Sedaris PLOT Cole (Evans), a farmer, meets supposed art curator Sadie (de Armas) and falls head over heels for her. But when she ignores his texts, he decides to make a big romantic gesture and follow her to London — only to discover she’s an international spy. JUDGING BY MID-tier Hollywood thrillers, if you meet an attractive person and hit it off, there is a 73 per cent chance they’ll turn out to be a super-spy in a desperate life-or-death battle to stop some kind of big bomb. As a result, there’s little that’s fresh about the premise of Dexter Fletcher’s latest film — so it rises or…

★★★ OUT NOW / CERT 15 103 MINS DIRECTOR Julius Avery CAST Russell Crowe, Franco Nero, Ralph Ineson, Daniel Zovatto, Laurel Marsden PLOT The year is 1987. The religion is Catholicism. Father Gabriele Amorth (Crowe) is gainfully employed as the Vatican’s chief exorcist. When a child in Spain is apparently possessed by a demon, Amorth must team up with a younger priest (Zovatto) to renounce Satan and all his works. IMAGINE A BUDDY-cop movie in which a grizzled maverick detective, whose quippy exterior masks a past trauma involving a shoot-out gone wrong, is paired with a rookie cop on a new case turning out to involve corruption going to the very heart of the establishment. Oh, and he’s also in trouble with those pencil pushers up at City Hall who…

★★★★ OUT 26 MAY / CERT TBC 107 MINS DIRECTOR Paul Schrader CAST Joel Edgerton, Sigourney Weaver, Quintessa Swindell, Esai Morales PLOT An unassuming horticulturalist (Edgerton) working in the gardens of a grand New Orleans mansion prepares for a yearly flower show to raise money for charity. That calm is threatened when the estate’s wealthy matriarch (Weaver) asks him to train her wayward grand-niece (Swindell), and his own dark secrets come to the fore. MASTER GARDENER MARKS the conclusion of Paul Schrader’s loose trilogy about broken men seeking redemption in modern America. After the deep questioning of faith suffered by both Ethan Hawke’s alcoholic minister in First Reformed and Oscar Isaac’s convicted Abu Ghraib-torturer-turned-gambler in The Card Counter, here we get Joel Edgerton as a haunted man willing to live…

★★★ OUT NOW (PRIME VIDEO) EPISODES VIEWED 3 OF 6 SHOWRUNNER David Weil CAST Richard Madden, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Stanley Tucci, Lesley Manville PLOT Eight years ago, spy agency Citadel was wiped out by a shadowy group called Manticore, the surviving agents’ memories erased. Now, with no recollection of his secret-agent past, Mason Kane (Madden) is dragged back in to work with Agent Nadia Sinh (Chopra Jonas) in a bid to thwart Manticore’s nefarious plans. THE RUSSO BROTHERS have been making Bond films in one form or another for the better part of a decade now. They brought old-school espionage to the MCU in The Winter Soldier, turned Chris Hemsworth into a (nearly) unstoppable force in Extraction, and played spy games with Ryan Gosling in The Gray Man. It’s little…

THE MANDALORIAN Recently, viewers have been musing on social media whether the title of The Mandalorian still refers to Din Djarin, or if it’s now Bo-Katan. How has it felt moving into the centre of the show? I don’t think I realised how much of Bo’s season it actually was, until I started seeing it cut together. Jon [Favreau] and I focused so much on Bo having this arc. She is the arc of the season. When we first saw her, she was questioning whether she was capable of ruling. Those aspirations have cost her everything — her home, her people, her sister. She’s literally lost everything. But in that loss, and that grief, and that complete humility, she has found herself in a place where she actually knows how…

MICHAEL J. FOX WAS IN COURT WHEN HE REALISED HE WAS DONE. He was on set of The Good Fight, a goofy spin-off of the legal drama The Good Wife, playing Louis Canning, a devious lawyer who exploits a medical condition to win juror sympathy. He loved the part, a juicy recurring guest role that had earned him five Emmy nominations. But this time would be the last. And he wasn’t just done here. In 2020, at the age of 58, 40 years after his first movie role, he was going to stop acting. Because something was different. Fox, who had always prided himself on his ability to instantly memorise a script, kept forgetting what he was supposed to say. “I thought of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood,” he…

INDISPENSABLE HOME ENTERTAINMENT SAM NEILL’S MEMOIR, Did I Ever Tell You This?, contains pretty much everything you might expect from the always modest Kiwi actor. There’s detailed discussion of the key films of his career (Jurassic Park, The Piano, Possession and, yes, even Event Horizon), of his fairly late-in-life career switch to becoming a vintner of some repute with his Two Paddocks brand, and of his recent brush with cancer (thankfully now in remission), all shot through with a dry wit and oodles of self-deprecation. But there’s also plenty you might not expect in there, including — but not limited to — the leftfield largesse of James Mason, who reached out to Neill after seeing him in My Brilliant Career, his second major film, and invited him to stay with…

All About Eve Chosen by REBECCA HALL REBECCA HALL: “The party scene in All About Eve. I always go back to this little sequence, where Bette Davis gets increasingly drunk at the piano. It charts the three acts of a party very brilliantly. I find it fascinating. It’s a simple thing, but I just think it’s exquisite, and I love it.” INT. MARGO CHANNING’S LOUNGE — NIGHT Deep into a party at her home, Margo Channing (Davis) is several drinks down and the worse for wear. She’s sitting at the piano, next to the piano-player (Claude Stroud), and nursing another drink. The pianist is working away on a rather maudlin tune. Birdie (Thelma Ritter) takes her a cup of tea, taps her on the shoulder. Margo looks at her, takes…

EVERY STEP YOU TAKE Could someone please give the poor stuntman who did the steps scene in John Wick 4 an Oscar? Or at the very least, a nice cup of tea? CHRIS WENHAM, VIA EMAIL We’re putting the kettle on now, Chris. For the record, the stuntman who doubled for Keanu rolling down hundreds of steps is named Vincent Bouillon, and he willingly tumbled down the Rue Foyatier staircase in Paris four times during filming. While we wait patiently for the Oscars to recognise Best Stair Falling as a category, your thoughtful sentiment deserves a Picturehouse membership, on us. Empire’s star letter wins a Picturehouse Membership, valid for one year at all Picturehouse Cinemas across the UK, including the flagship Picturehouse Central in London’s West End. The Membership comes…

How TV ’toon Gremlins: Secrets Of The Mogwai rewrites the franchise rulebook… THE MOGWAI You think you might know the Gremlins rules (no water, bright lights, midnight feasting). But there’s one you don’t: never compare Gizmo to Baby Yoda, a stricture recently broken by Joe Dante, director of the 1984 original, to his cost. “I got a lot of criticism,” he laughs about making the connection. “But if you put the two designs together, it’s pretty obvious where one came from and where the other came from.” Thirty-three years after his last outing, Gizmo is back in animated origin story Gremlins: Secrets Of The Mogwai, with Dante serving as consulting producer. Unlike the puppet version, ’toon Gizmo is highly mobile, the plot propelling him across 1920s China to return to…

The HYPNOTIC director breaks down his mindbending, 20-years-in-the-making thriller ONE NIGHT IN 2000, Robert Rodriguez was up late in his edit suite working on his family film Spy Kids, when Vertigo came on TV and a realisation struck him. “I wanted to come up with my own Hitchcock movie: lots of twists and suspense, crazy action, a big star like Cary Grant…” he tells Empire. “They always had great one-word titles and I thought, ‘What’s a name he hadn’t used?’” Hypnotic was the word he landed on, working backwards to devise a plot that would leave audiences in a trance. The story he came up with? A tale of “a guy you can’t catch,” he explains. “Somebody you meet who takes everything you own — then you never even know…

The makers of DIAL OF DESTINY on the art of crafting Indy action TUK-TUKS? WHY did it have to be tuk-tuks? Indiana Jones has commandeered some pretty unusual vehicles over the years. A mine cart. An elephant. A fridge. But it’s not until upcoming instalment Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny that we’ll finally get to see him behind the wheel of a motorised rickshaw, attempting to navigate chaotic streets and even steps while inside the kind of vehicle usually seen irritating people around Leicester Square. The high-velocity sequence, in which Harrison Ford’s Indy and Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Helena pursue Nazi villain Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen) through the Moroccan city of Tangier, recently brought the house down when shown at Star Wars Celebration, getting raves for its crunching physical stunts…

As Spider-Man’s foe lets rip in a solo outing, get to know the fur-clad madman WHY IS HE BUZZY? In late April, footage screened at CinemaCon got everyone talking about Kraven. Why? Because in the clip shown, things got pretty wild, not to mention bloody, with Aaron Taylor-Johnson biting a man and spitting out his skin. Did we mention it’s going to be R-rated? WHERE DOES HE COME FROM? Birthed by Marvel OGs Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, Kraven was introduced in 1964’s The Amazing Spider-Man #15 as a new villain taking on the webslinger. A professional game-hunter, he just loved killing animals. Mostly, he wanted to kill that friendly neighbourhood man-spider. WHAT’S HIS DEAL? Armed with spears, darts, whips and traps, he’s a deadly foe. Hailing from an abusive…

★★★★★ EXCELLENT ★★★★ GOOD ★★★ OKAY ★★ POOR ★ AWFUL ★★★★ OUT 19 MAY / CERT 15 / 178 MINS DIRECTOR Ari Aster CAST Joaquin Phoenix, Patti LuPone, Zoe Lister-Jones, Amy Ryan, Nathan Lane, Parker Posey, Stephen McKinley Henderson PLOT Beau Wasserman (Phoenix) is not having a great week. He lives in a crime-ridden neighbourhood. He is beset by anxiety. He is extremely sexually frustrated. While trying to visit his mother’s house, Beau inadvertently embarks on an odyssey of nightmarish proportions. ARI ASTER’S INCREASINGLY wild filmography seems to all hinge on one simple, unifying theme: fucked-up families. In his head-lopping horror Hereditary, Toni Collette bluntly informs her son that she “tried to have a miscarriage”. In the sunny folk horror Midsommar, Florence Pugh’s family is dead from a murder-suicide within…

★★★★ OUT 26 MAY / CERT 15 91 MINS DIRECTOR Jalmari Helander CAST Jorma Tommila, Aksel Hennie, Jack Doolan, Mimosa Willamo PLOT It’s 1944, and although the Nazis are on the retreat in Finland, they’re determined to burn the country to bits as they go. Meanwhile, in the Lapland wilderness, lone war veteran Aatami Korpi (Tommila), having literally struck gold, crosses paths with them. It’s an unfortunate situation. (For the Nazis, that is.) A BIT OF narration at the start of Sisu makes it clear: this is gonna be some mythic shit. World War II is on its last legs and the flailing Nazis, we’re told, have adopted a scorched-earth policy as they retreat from Finland, burning down everything in their path. But then: “Deep in the wilderness of Lapland,…

★★★★ OUT 2 JUNE / CERT TBC 83 MINS DIRECTOR Tina Satter CAST Sydney Sweeney, Marchánt Davis, Josh Hamilton, Benny Elledge, John Way PLOT Translator and whistle-blower Reality Winner (Sweeney) arrives at her Georgia home to find a team of FBI officers at her door. As her house is searched, she is interrogated about her involvement in the leaking of documents exposing Russia’s interference in the 2016 US election. “I WASN’T TRYING to be a Snowden or anything,” says Reality Winner (yes, that’s her actual name) in Reality. The real-life Winner, a translator working for a National Security Agency contractor, is by all accounts an ordinary all-American woman: she likes yoga, has two pets, and owns a pink AR-15. She was also given the longest prison sentence — five years…

★★ OUT NOW (PARAMOUNT+) EPISODES VIEWED 8 OF 8 SHOWRUNNER Alexandra Cunningham CAST Joshua Jackson, Lizzy Caplan, Amanda Peet, Alyssa Jirrels, Toby Huss PLOT District attorney Dan Gallagher (Jackson) is seemingly happily married to Beth (Peet). When he embarks on an affair with colleague Alex Forrest (Caplan), he soon discovers his mistress is deeply unstable — and possibly a danger to his family. WE ALL KNOW this story, don’t we? A high-powered single career woman, Alex Forrest (Glenn Close), has a weekend affair with a married lawyer (Michael Douglas) and grows increasingly unhinged after she discerns his disinterest in continuing their relationship, preferring to remain with his wife and young daughter. Fatal Attraction, a cornerstone of erotic thrillers, directed by expert of the genre Adrian Lyne (see also: Indecent Proposal…

WHEN SISU BEGINS, WE ARE TOLD there is a word in the Finnish language that cannot be neatly translated into one in English: we need a whole bunch of them. “Sisu” describes a white-knuckled form of courage and determination; an internal resistance that rises when all hope is lost. But even that doesn’t fully cover it. “Sisu” is as intrinsic to Finnish culture as sauna and salt liquorice, and we need something more, maybe like a 90-minute film, to serve as a dictionary definition. Conveniently, this is what writer and director Jelmari Helander has made us, in the form of a non-stop wild and crazy action ride about a gnarly old guy who simply refuses to die. Sisu is set in 1944, when the Nazis were in retreat from northern…

MARK JENKIN IS practically his own genre. Nobody makes films quite like the Cornish filmmaker, who won an Outstanding British Debut BAFTA in 2020 for his black-and-white drama Bait, and followed it up with last year’s haunting horror Enys Men, about a volunteer (played by Mary Woodvine) who sees supernatural visions on a remote island where time seems to stop. Like all his work, the film was largely handmade, Jenkin taking a DIY approach and wearing many hats — including writer, director, cinematographer, editor, sound editor and score composer. He would probably do you a decent cup of tea on set too, if you asked. With Enys Men arriving on Blu-ray and streaming, Jenkin lifts the lid on the unique way he makes movies. THE IDEA Every film starts with…

Tetris DESPITE THE TITLE, Tetris isn’t about Taron Egerton dodging giant falling blocks. Instead, Jon S. Baird’s movie (the fifth in the ongoing collaboration between Egerton and producer Matthew Vaughn) details the cutthroat free-for-all that ensued when several different entrepreneurs found themselves fighting for their rights. Not to party, but to own a slice of the Russian videogame that took the world by storm. READY, PLAYERS 1-5 Baird admits that condensing the ridiculously complex battle for Tetris into a coherent but entertaining package was a challenge, to put it mildly. “There’s a lot of exposition that could have dragged you down,” he says. “We had 101 different ways of trying to do this.” In the end, the one he settled on was a fast-paced intro in which the audience meets…

M. Night Shyamalan movies Helen: What was your first encounter with M. Night Shyamalan? Dan: I went to the first UK press screening of The Sixth Sense. I was expecting it to be Mercury Rising with ghosts. And I came out afterwards and went, “Bloody hell.” We just knew it was going to be A Thing. Ben: My first cinematic one was The Village. But I wish I could have had Dan’s experience because I never got to see The Sixth Sense not knowing the twist. But I think it’s a great film because it works even when you do know the twist. Helen: We should talk about twists. He did become known as the master of the twist, and was almost treated like a one-trick pony. Ben: I think…

THIS MONTH’S ESSENTIAL FILM AND TV NEWS Writer-director Christopher McQuarrie on the action and emotion of MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE — DEAD RECKONING PART ONE “ALL THE DAYS on the train are exhausting,” laughs Christopher McQuarrie. “The train just sucks you dry. But in a good way.” It’s April 2021, and Empire is chatting to McQuarrie as he attempts the latest leg of his impossible mission to exhaust the seemingly inexhaustible Tom Cruise. He’s near York, to shoot a section of a train chase for the seventh Mission: Impossible movie, and the Cruise/McQuarrie team’s third together. Actually, it’s more of a fight staged on a moving train, involving Cruise (returning as Ethan Hunt), Hayley Atwell and Esai Morales as the film’s principal villain. And, because this is McQuarrie and Cruise, they’re not…

Team Empire highlight some of the buzziest movies storming the Croisette THE ZONE OF INTEREST ALEX GODFREY, FEATURES EDITOR It’s been ten years since Jonathan Glazer’s incredible Under The Skin. Now, finally, The Zone Of Interest is upon us, based on Martin Amis’ book about a Nazi love story in Auschwitz. Every Glazer film is unforgettable; the prospect of him tackling the Holocaust is fascinating. Can’t wait. MAY DECEMBER JOHN NUGENT, REVIEWS EDITOR Todd Haynes’ films include music doc The Velvet Underground and thriller Dark Waters, with his latest being a drama similar to Carol. Natalie Portman stars as an actor researching the woman (Julianne Moore) she will play. Expect emotional intensity and awards-beckoning performances. CLUB ZERO BETH WEBB, NEWS EDITOR Jessica Hausner returns to Cannes after 2019’s Little…

How New World Order will shake up the shield IT’S A NEW dawn for Captain America. The fourth instalment in the super-soldier series isn’t just welcoming Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson as Steve Rogers’ official successor, but refreshing the saga with a near-reboot. Empire breaks down the characters and curveballs that make this a sequel worth getting excited about. A NEW CAP After Rogers took a permanent holiday to 1945 in Avengers: Endgame, Cap’s shield found itself on the unworthy arm of Wyatt Russell’s US Agent, before Mackie’s Falcon grudgingly took up the mantle and earned himself some natty new Stars-and-Stripes-emblazoned wings in the process. New World Order picks up after Falcon And The Winter Soldier explored Sam’s relationship to Black superherodom and the systemic injustice that went with it. This…

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem’s Jeff Rowe on how he’s revamping the green guys for their new adventure DIRECTOR JEFF ROWE can promise you a few things about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. Number one: “It delivers on the mutants. And the mayhem,” he laughs. And number two: you’ve never seen a Turtles tale like this before. Here are all the ways the animated movie — co-produced by Seth Rogen — mixes things up for our heroes in a half-shell… THEY ACT THEIR AGE “We wanted it to be like Stand By Me and Ladybird. But, you know, with Ninja Turtles,” says Rowe, describing his ambition to make “the ultimate teen coming-of-age film”. So he and his animators leaned into the teenage aspect of not just their design,…

★★★★★ OUT 19 MAY / CERT PG 106 MINS DIRECTOR Kelly Fremon Craig CAST Abby Ryder Fortson, Rachel McAdams, Benny Safdie, Kathy Bates PLOT In 1970s New Jersey, sixth-grader Margaret (Ryder Fortson) moves to a new home from New York City with her parents Barbara (McAdams) and Herb (Safdie). Faced with new social challenges and a quarrelling family, Margaret turns to God to voice her hang-ups and ask for help. JUDY BLUME’S PRE-TEEN bible about an 11-year-old girl praying to hit puberty has proven a beacon of solace for girls (and often boys) across generations. Its enduring power lies in its confused protagonist, caught in the slipstream of her childhood, entangled in family politics and in a turbulent relationship with God. It’s a tough task to adapt such beloved —…

★★★ OUT NOW (DISNEY+) CERT TBC / 106 MINS DIRECTOR David Lowery CAST Ever Anderson, Alexander Molony, Jude Law, Yara Shahidi, Jim Gaffigan PLOT The night before she leaves home for boarding school, Wendy Darling (Anderson) and her younger brothers are visited by Peter Pan (Molony) and whisked off to Neverland — where they meet Lost Boys, encounter fairy magic, and face off against pirate Captain Hook (Law). OF THE MANY things director David Lowery gets right about Peter Pan, the most important is this: it’s never really been about Peter himself. While the boy who never grows up was afforded sole headline billing in Disney’s 1953 adaptation, the 1911 novel version of J.M. Barrie’s tale was titled Peter And Wendy — and in Lowery’s Disney live-action reimagining, Wendy Darling…

★★ OUT NOW / CERT PG 92 MINS DIRECTORS Aaron Horvath, Michael Jelenic CAST Chris Pratt, Anya Taylor-Joy, Charlie Day, Jack Black, Keegan-Michael Key, Seth Rogen, Fred Armisen PLOT Siblings Mario (Pratt) and Luigi (Day) are plumbers in New York. After falling through a green-piped portal, they get lost in the Mushroom Kingdom, where Princess Peach (Taylor-Joy) is defying the evil Bowser (Black). Can Mario find his brother, save the Kingdom, and get home? THE LAST TIME Mario — the lovably high-voiced, moustachioed Italian plumber, and the most iconic name in videogames — starred in a film, it bombed so badly that Nintendo waited 30 years before giving their mascot another crack at the big screen. Now something of an oddball cult classic, the 1993 Bob Hoskins-starring live-action version was…

SKELETON CREW IT HAS BIG AMBLIN ENERGY The Goonies, Back To The Future, Young Sherlock Holmes: ’80s Amblin classics in which young people face fantastical threats. They’re all inspirations for Skeleton Crew, which sees intergalactic kids get lost in space. It’s a first for Star Wars, which has not previously featured a band of heroes waist-high to a Mynock. “There’s something really smart about what [co-creators] Chris [Ford] and Jon [Watts] did by bringing the focus onto children,” says star Jude Law. “Seeing this galaxy, this world that we’ve all grown up loving, and the jeopardy, the divides, the heroes, the villains, through the eyes of children, is brilliant.” Ford and Watts spent months finding the perfect young protagonists, including Ravi Cabot-Conyers, Kyriana Kratter and Robert Timothy Smith. Like the…

YOU CAN SHOUT about the significance of Grand Admiral Thrawn until you’re blue in the face, but with all due deference to Lars Mikkelsen’s heir to the Empire, the biggest announcement to emerge from this year’s Celebration was the existence of not one, not two, but three brand-new Star Wars movies which will end the franchise’s long absence from the cinema; The Rise Of Skywalker opened in December 2019. One, directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, is set 15 years after that film and sees Daisy Ridley return as Rey. The big-screen directorial debut of Dave Filoni, grand admiral of Star Wars animation, will bring together characters from The Mandalorian, Ahsoka and more in an Avengers-style crossover. And then there’s a James Mangold joint, following the story of the very first Jedi…

Withnail And I “EVERYTHING LOOKS ILL,” describes Bruce Robinson in his Withnail And I screenplay, of the Camden house based on his own squalid existence in the late 1960s. “The walls and furniture look ill. Daylight looks ill.” The screenplay is a brilliant read, because Robinson is a brilliant writer. You can smell the grime; you can taste the whiskey. And most impressively, Robinson heightened that even further for the film — his debut as director — in which the lives of its two struggling actors, one (‘I’) based on him, the other on his ex-drama-school friend Vivian MacKerrell (Withnail), are portrayed so vividly, so hilariously, and ultimately so profoundly, it feels as alive today as the reality of its story was to Robinson decades ago. It makes you want…

PICK OF THE MONTH KNOCK AT THE CABIN OUT 15 MAY / CERT 15 / 136 MINS There’s a compelling contradiction at the heart of M. Night Shyamalan’s latest thriller: never before has the filmmaker operated on a scale this small, with stakes so large. The fate of the world is on the line in his atmospheric adaptation of Paul Tremblay’s novel, which takes place almost entirely in a single location. That its runtime never sags or feels static is testament to both its pacy script and the raw power of its performances: Dave Bautista, in particular, is mesmerising as the weapon-wielding leader of a band of strangers brought together by visions of an apocalypse that can only be averted by one family’s ultimate sacrifice. Knock, knock; who’s there? One…