Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2024 i Empire

Creative Director CHRIS LUPTON Photography Director JOANNA MORAN Deputy Art Director GRAHAM JONES Features Editor ALEX GODFREY Executive Editor CHRIS HEWITT Reviews Editor JOHN NUGENT News Editor BETH WEBB CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Hayley Campbell, Ian Freer, Boyd Hilton, Dan Jolin, Bill McConkey, Ian Nathan, Christina Newland, Kim Newman, Nev Pierce, Paul Shipper, Adam Smith, Amon Warmann CONTRIBUTORS Words: Nicola Austin, Anna Bogutskaya, Joe Dante, Kelechi Ehenulo, Tom Ellen, Michael Jones, Matt Kamen, Jordan King, Barry Levitt, Dorian Lynskey, Christina Newland, David Opie, Olly Richards, Lou Thomas, Laura Venning Photographers: Michael Buckner, Sam McGuire, Ryan Kernaghan, Marco Vittur Illustrations: Arn0, Matthew Brazier, Chris Christodoulou, Selman Hoşgör, Bill McConkey, Russell Moorcroft, The Red Dress, Benjamin Wachenje Design: Russell Moorcroft Subbing: Julie Emery, Lucy Williams PRODUCTION Print Production Controller Carl Lawrence 01733-468858 Ad…

Winona Ryder granted us a rare interview for this month’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice cover feature (see page 52). As it happens, Ryder was the original Empire cover star, appearing way back in July 1989 on the front of our very first issue alongside Dennis Quaid, to promote the Jerry Lee Lewis biopic Great Balls Of Fire. Then just 17 and on the cusp of global superstardom — she had already appeared in the original Beetlejuice the previous year — Ryder plays a smaller role than you might expect in our feature. In fact, the main focus is on Actual Jerry Lee Lewis, who we speak to while he drinks from “half a dozen” glasses of bourbon. “I took enough pills for the whole damn town,” he tells us, before referring to…

#OSCARSSOWHITE. La La Land’s Best Picture mishap. The infamous slap. It’s safe to say it’s been a tumultuous decade for the Oscars, and the organisation behind the show, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It’s been the biggest awards ceremony in Hollywood for nearly a century, voted for by an almost 11,000strong membership of movie-makers, but those controversies and a major drop in viewers have raised big questions. How can the Academy get people watching again? In an ever-changing film industry, can the awards stay relevant? On a rainy Wednesday morning in Cannes, Empire met the people trying to find the answers —Academy President Janet Yang and CEO Bill Kramer. Kramer isn’t new to the Academy — previously, he headed up the development of its Museum of Motion…

AT THE LATE-April Los Angeles premiere of The Fall Guy, David Leitch’s paean to the stunt community, Ryan Gosling and the film’s stunt doubles, Ben Jenkin and Logan Holladay, took to the red carpet in matching suits. Seconds later, Jenkin and Holladay were dramatically yanked through a wall, via wires, while cameras flashed and onlookers gasped. It was just another example —albeit a particularly dramatic one —of how the film has trained a focus on stunt performers’ deathdefying work. Beyond the plot of the film, which follows the adventures of stuntman Colt Seavers (Gosling), it boasts the first-ever stunt-designer credit (for Chris O’Hara), and has worked a string of impressive action antics into its press tour. It’s all helped keep the on-going campaign for a stunts category at the Oscars,…

ASK DENIS VILLENEUVE what aspect of Dune most captivated him when he read it as a teenager, and he’ll recite his answer without hesitation, as if commanded by the Reverend Mother herself: the Bene Gesserit. So entranced was he by the scheming sisterhood whose arch manipulations underpin the book’s entire plot, that he deliberately dialled up their presence in the second part of his epic adaptation. But if even that wasn’t enough to properly scratch your Bene Gesser-itch, upcoming prequel show Dune: Prophecy surely will. Originally going by more on-the-nose title ‘Dune: The Sisterhood’, Prophecy takes place a full 10,000 years before Timothée Chalamet ever set foot on Arrakis’ scalding sands. Based loosely on the 2012 novel Sisterhood Of Dune by Brian (son of Frank) Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson,…

WHAT DO YOU do when you’re tired of seeing the same trans characters in film and TV? You make a neon-hued horror about a cancelled ’90s TV show that grips the lives of two lonely teens, of course. That was the case for filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun, who, after feeling frustrated at not seeing their own trans experience mirrored in the “psychos, killers who want to make a skin suit out of a victim, or martyrs” on screen, embarked on a deeply personal filmmaking journey, which began with low-budget indie We’re All Going To The World’s Fair and continues with Sundance hit I Saw The TV Glow. “[I] had just had the experience of beginning to transition, which was also the experience of leaving home behind in many ways,” they tell…

MERE MONTHS AFTER the success of Poor Things, writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos is back. Kinds Of Kindness —which sees him re-teaming with Dogtooth and The Killing Of ASacred Deer co-writer Efthimis Filippou — tells three separate stories, each a meditation on power, coercion, consumption and more. “I’d just read [Albert Camus’] Caligula, and started thinking about the control one person can have over others,” Lanthimos explains. “We have this sense of leaders being in control of the masses, but I wanted to explore that on a personal level.” Gathering a stellar cast, including Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons and Willem Dafoe, the actors rotate into new roles in each section. “It’s a way of bringing some undefined continuity and consistency,” the director says. Fresh from its premiere in Cannes, Lanthimos introduces Empire…

HOUSE OF THE Dragon’s first season covered a lot of ground. Decades passed, children were born and killed, and the tempestuous Targaryen family unit splintered, divided by claims to the Iron Throne. Season 2 sees those two sides head towards all-out war. On Team Black is Emma D’Arcy’s Rhaenyra, controversially named as father Viserys’ successor as a child. On Team Green is Olivia Cooke’s Alicent, acting on what she thinks was Viserys’ final wish by crowning her son. Playing former childhood friends, now regal rivals, they tell us about the battle ahead. How would you describe the mindset of your characters going into Season 2? D’Arcy: Rhaenyra’s devastated. So much has been taken from her —her son, her father, her inheritance. She’s rigid with grief, and increasingly isolated. This series,…

‘DANCE YRSELF CLEAN’ LCD SOUNDSYSTEM BLINK TWICE (TRAILER) An inspired remastering for the trailer of Zoë Kravitz’s directorial debut, with echoey vocals adding to the sense of unease as a fun-looking vacation turns sour. ‘CLUBBED TO DEATH — KURAYAMINO VERSION’ ROBERT DOUGAN THE MATRIX (RE-RELEASE) A banger in The Matrix and in the real world, thanks to a perfect blend of techno elements, classical strings and piano. ‘DEMENTUS IS GAINING’ JUNKIE XL FURIOSA The string motif from Mad Max: Fury Road’s iconic ‘Brothers In Arms’ makes a welcome return, as does Junkie XL’s thunderous percussion. ‘THE CREATURES OF NATURE’ THE OCTOPUS PROJECT (FEAT. RILEY KEOUGH) SASQUATCH SUNSET Riley Keough’s soft vocals complement a simple acoustic guitar for this fantasy drama that captures the life of a Sasquatch colony. ‘RUNNING THE…

★★★★ OUT NOW / 7 JUNE (NETFLIX) / CERT 15 / 115 MINS DIRECTOR Richard Linklater CAST Glen Powell, Adria Arjona, Retta, Austin Amelio PLOT When a professor (Powell) starts acting as a fake hitman, he gets a little too invested in his role — and one of his clients (Arjona). IT’S TAKEN A while for Glen Powell to truly step into the spotlight. After popping up in the likes of Hidden Figures, Set It Up and Everybody Wants Some!! (the last his first collaboration with Richard Linklater), it was 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick that saw him really take flight, giving an unforgettably hissable-yet-heroic performance as Lt Jake ‘Hangman’ Seresin. Major turns have come since —box-officebusting romcom Anyone But You and another aviation adventure, Devotion —but it is with Hit…

★★ OUT NOW / CERT U / 101 MINS DIRECTOR Mark Dindal CAST Chris Pratt, Samuel L. Jackson, Hannah Waddingham, Nicholas Hoult, Ving Rhames, Brett Goldstein PLOT Tabby cat Garfield (Pratt) reunites with his estranged father Vic (Jackson) after he is cat-napped by wicked Persian cat Jinx (Waddingham). GARFIELD —THE LASAGNE-loving, Mondayhating, greedy, grumpy cat originating in Jim Davis’ long-running comic strip —is an awkward fit for a kids’ film. He’s a cynic forced to be a family-friendly goofball, a sarcastic hero being sold to an audience of under-tens with an undeveloped sense of sarcasm, a square pessimist peg in a round optimistic hole. It has been tried unsuccessfully before, in 2004’s Garfield: The Movie and its sequel —those films most notable for the fact that Bill Murray signed on…

★★ OUT NOW / CERT 15 / 92 MINS DIRECTORS Spenser Cohen, Anna Halberg CAST Harriet Slater, Adain Bradley, Avantika, Jacob Batalon A group of friends unleash an ancient evil bound to a deck of tarot cards that starts taking them out one by one in the same fashion as their readings. Based on the 1992 YA novel Horrorscope, directors Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg’s debut feature is horror-by-numbers, with characters that scarcely get (or deserve) a name. Instead, they are introduced through their horoscopeassigned personalities; almost immediately, a malevolent force starts picking them off. The inventiveness of the kills is what salvages Tarot from the depths of the digital bargain bin, and the film walks the line between goofy and gruesome. But almost everything about it is predictable, from…

★★★ OUT NOW / 12A / 145 MINS DIRECTOR Wes Ball CAST Owen Teague, Freya Allan, Kevin Durand, Peter Macon, William H. Macy PLOT After young ape Noa (Teague) encounters a human (Allan), hostile apes attack his village and bring his tribe into a wider world. IT MAY BE hard to get excited about a sequel trilogy to a prequel trilogy to five original films (not even counting the failed reboot). But the good news about this latest simian effort is that it drills into character and culture to ground its story, and has a bit where two apes on horses re-enact A Knight’s Tale. If it’s lower on action than its immediate predecessors, it at least has more character drama than a thousand monkeys trying to retype the works…

★★★★ OUT NOW (BBC ONE/iPLAYER) / EPISODES VIEWED 4 OF 8 SHOWRUNNER Russell T Davies CAST Ncuti Gatwa, Millie Gibson, Jinkx Monsoon, Susan Twist PLOT The Doctor (Gatwa) and Ruby Sunday (Gibson) encounter space babies, Beatles and more during their adventures in time and space. DOCTOR WHO’S REGENERATION continues apace. This is Russell T Davies’ first full season back at the helm of the world’s longest-running sci-fi series, following last year’s 60th anniversary specials and Christmas’ introduction proper to Ncuti Gatwa’s Fifteenth Doctor and Millie Gibson’s companion Ruby Sunday. And whether you’re calling it Series 1, Series 14, or Series 40 (diehard Whovians, we see you), this latest reboot sees Who back, better than it’s been in years. Much of the silliness is front-loaded in season opener ‘Space Babies’, a…

★★★★★ OUT NOW / CERT 15 / 148 MINS DIRECTOR George Miller CAST Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth, Alyla Browne, Tom Burke, Charlee Fraser, Lachy Hulme PLOT Years before she meets Max Rockatansky, Furiosa (Taylor-Joy) desperately searches for her way home after being kidnapped by the foot soldiers of warlord Dementus (Hemsworth). IN 1979, GEORGE Miller made his feature debut with Mad Max, a modest, near-future indie about a cop taking on a biker gang. Four decades later, amazingly, he’s still playing in that insane sandpit. Furiosa represents a lot of things: an epic slice of myth-making, a Homeric odyssey that broadens the ever-expanding dystopian world in which it is set; a prequel to 2015’s Fury Road, a historically exceptional action movie which may never be bettered; and perhaps the most…

STAR WARS: TALES OF THE EMPIRE ★★★★ “This is short, powerful, punchy storytelling in the Star Wars galaxy, hooking onto under-explored characters, spanning several eras and facets of Star Wars lore — possibly baffling to the uninitiated, but likely to thrill devotees.” BEN TRAVIS ORDINARY ANGELS ★★★ “The phrase ‘faith-based drama’ is one to strike fear into the hearts of all but the most devout. But the sermonising is kept to a minimum, letting solid performances, a heartbreaking set-up, and the characters’ kindness shine.”  HELEN O’HARA BRIDGERTON: SEASON 3, PART 1 ★★ “A flash of Colin's (Luke Newton) newly chiselled abs in the first five minutes remind us that some things never change. But with repetition setting in, Bridgerton needs to surprise fans if it has any hope of remaining…

LIKE SUPERHERO MOVIES, music biopics are obliged to hit certain beats, from the childhood epiphany to the first flush of fame to the backstage meltdown. In the wake of Walk The Line and Ray, all of the genre’s cliches were ruthlessly parodied by 2007’s Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (“Goddamit, this is a dark fucking period!”) but survived unashamed. Since the $910 million coup of Bohemian Rhapsody in 2018, movies about pop and its perils have flooded out: Rocket Man, Elvis, Bob Marley: One Love, Back To Black. It might be time for a Walk Hard sequel. “Studios like existing IP,” says Rich Peppiatt, the director of the unorthodox new biopic Kneecap. “A band with a fanbase de-risks things. But I think audiences are getting a little bit tired…

You’re on the edge of your seat, but you daren’t move a muscle. The pitch-black of the cinema surrounds you. You’re watching a new horror movie directed by Jim from The Office, and your fists are clenched, goosebumps raised; your senses are on high alert. You bought a bucket of popcorn —but from the second the film starts, and for the entire opening sequence, the popcorn remains untouched. The room is silent, as the characters on screen tiptoe around an abandoned pharmacy, avoiding making a sound so as to avoid being torn to pieces. Tension thrums in the air, and you don’t want to be responsible for breaking it by munching away on your sweet and salty. John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place, a hushed, thrilling tale of the Abbott family…

ON A BALMY evening in Edward Yang’s Taipei-set family drama Yi Yi, a young couple on their first date sit reflectively in a fast-food restaurant. While talking about a sad film that they’ve just watched, a debate arises about the importance of movies versus the real world. “My uncle says, ‘We live three times as long since man invented movies,’” the boy, Fatty (Chang Yu Pang), argues. “It means movies give us twice what we get from daily life.” Yang’s body of work, which sits at the forefront of the New Taiwan Cinema movement that rose in the early ’80s, has extended many a lifespan if Fatty’s argument is anything to go by. Yi Yi is arguably his most recognised and internationally lauded film, a near three-hour study of urban…

Chris: Joel Silver, then. The producer who bestrode the ’80s and ’90s action movie, in particular, like a colossus. James: It was quite difficult for me to pick a favourite Joel Silver movie, because it’s a who’s who of my favourite films. Chris: And Speed Racer. James: The quality here is just extraordinary. One might say the bar has been raised so high, there is no bar. Chris: Which is something he said in an interview about The Matrix Reloaded. “There is no bar.” Nick: He doesn’t do many interviews, which is a real shame, as he’s a quote machine. I think Les Grossman from Tropic Thunder was inspired by Joel Silver, and maybe that big, blustery character in True Romance too. He once said, “I want this film so…

CONCEPTS LIKE THE multiverse, alternatetimeline doppelgängers and fracturing reality while trying to rewrite the past have become more familiar since that scene in Back To The Future: Part II where Doc gets out a blackboard and chalk and gives a five-minute lecture (with diagrams) on how time-travel screws you up. 1989 audiences still complained they hadn’t a clue what was going on. That Oscar-winners like Everything Everywhere All At Once and comicbook franchise features like Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse (and, er, The Flash) can play free and easy with multiple realities indicates general viewers have become more open to the kinds of time-tinkering which makes your head hurt. This selection of currently-streaming time-twisters is almost random — these things come along every month in genres from romcom to slasher movie.…

WHEN DOES SUMMER start? It is a question that has preoccupied mankind since the sun first rose. Astronomy dictates that it begins on 20 or 21 June. Meteorologists maintain that it is 1 June. In fact, neither is true. As all cinemagoers know, summer actually starts when the first fireball ignites in a movie that cost more to create than the Palace of Versailles. That or when Vin Diesel drives a truck into a boat —whichever comes first. WHEN DOES SUMMER start? It is a question that has preoccupied mankind since the sun first rose. Astronomy dictates that it begins on 20 or 21 June. Meteorologists maintain that it is 1 June. In fact, neither is true. As all cinemagoers know, summer Yes, blockbuster season is upon us. We bid…

LETTER OF THE MONTH WITH THUNDEROUS APPLAUSES I’ve been subscribed to Empire for a few years now —my collection doesn’t extend beyond the pandemic years —and what I’ve always appreciated is how you bring me back to things. Take this month’s magazine —I had given up on Star Wars TV shows, but having read your feature on The Acolyte [‘Let There Be Lightsabers’, Issue #427], I have been sufficiently hyped to watch it! Leslye Headland! Carrie-Anne Moss! Amandla Stenberg! I’ll be there, day one, because of the excellent writing by Ben Travis. KASIM MOHAMMED, LONDON Kind of you to say! Because of the excellent letter-writing by Kasim Mohammed, have a Picturehouse membership, on us. Empire’s star letter wins a Picturehouse Membership, valid for one year at all Picturehouse Cinemas across…

IT’S FINALLY BACK FROM THE DEAD Some 22 years after 28 Days Later proved a monster horror hit (and 17 years since its sequel 28 Weeks Later), Danny Boyle and Alex Garland are reuniting to revive the franchise with a 28 Years Later trilogy. Rumours of a continuation of the story have been kicking around since 2007, but Garland was reluctant to commit until the right idea materialised. “I resisted it for a long time because there were things about 28 Weeks that bugged me,” he said in 2023. “I just thought, ‘Fuck that. I’d rather try to write a different story in a different world.’” Now, Boyle will direct the Garlandwritten first film in this broader trilogy, while The Marvels’ Nia DaCosta is in talks to shoot the second.…

SOPHIE BUTCHER IS THINKING ABOUT… CHALLENGERS SWAG Much from Luca Guadagnino’s sizzling tennis drama lingers in my brain – the score, the churro, the energy — but most of all, I covet the £225 grey ‘I TOLD YA’ T-shirt, worn by Zendaya and Josh O’Connor and designed by Loewe’s Jonathan Anderson. Best start saving now… NICK DE SEMLYEN IS THINKING ABOUT… BEANS MOROCCO I was living my life, totally unaware… and then I saw it. A post online about an actor named Beans Morocco. Bit-part star of Police Academy 5 and Used Cars. Does he like beans? Has he been to Morocco? The questions keep coming. My mind keeps spinning. BEANS. MOROCCO. BETH WEBB IS THINKING ABOUT… BRIAN COX’S BIBLE BEEF Joining the actor’s hit list, which…

PICTURE THE SCENE: a group of people get lost in the woods, with no phone signal. Some strange goings-on start, well, going on. It’s a set-up we’ve seen before —but never has that group consisted of prime ministers and Presidents. Rumours, directed by Guy Maddin and brothers Evan and Galen Johnson, is here to change that. Starring Cate Blanchett, Alicia Vikander, Nikki Amuka-Bird and Charles Dance, it depicts the annual G7 summit, with the septet of leaders meeting to write a joint statement about an unexplained ‘crisis’. That is, until everyone around them quietly vanishes, and they’re left to fend for themselves in a forest filled with surreal discoveries. “Once we said, ‘Okay, G7 summit. That’s the movie,’ almost anything we suggested was immediately funny,” Evan says of the film’s…

PAUL McCARTNEY, ELTON John, Garth Brooks and Questlove —as a hypothetical supergroup, that line-up would be none too shabby. But when the same list of names (plus more) was announced as due to appear in the long-awaited follow-up to cult 1984 mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap, some fans — myself included — were a tad concerned. In Hollywood, the cameo-stuffed comedy sequel has a track record that’s patchy at best. In fact, to co-opt the phraseology of the first Spinal Tap, these star-studded second acts tend to range from “lukewarm water” right down to “shit sandwich”. Patient Zero for the tradition was arguably Blues Brothers 2000 — the 1998 follow-up to another beloved ’80s comedy — which tripled down on its musician cameos, seemingly at the expense of a coherent…

TERRIFIED GASPS, SHRIEKS of laughter and applause echoed through the Cannes Film Festival auditorium at the first screening of The Substance, a hyper-stylised horror-comedy from writer-director Coralie Fargeat that examines the question —what if, with one injection, you could create a whole new version of yourself ? Ayounger, better, more relevant one? The Substance stars Demi Moore as Elisabeth Sparkle, a TV-fitness guru who creates a new variant of herself (Sue, played by Margaret Qualley) with an experimental drug after being fired. Fargeat’s follow-up to 2017’s hardcore rape-retribution thriller Revenge, it explores the pressure on women around ageing and appearance through a blend of wince-inducing body horror and dark humour. Here, the director reveals the influences at the heart of the film. GROWING OLDER The film’s core idea stemmed from…

★★★★ OUT 14 JUNE / CERT 15 / 88 MINS DIRECTORS David Zellner, Nathan Zellner CAST Jesse Eisenberg, Riley Keough, Christophe Zajac-Denek This is a bizarre and beautiful new take on the Bigfoot legend. Shot almost like a mock BBC nature documentary, it contrasts big skies and Californian redwoods with a small group of Sasquatches (Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough among them, gamely grunting through heavy prosthetics). From a wordless script, there are insanely crude moments — expect sex, piss, shit, sick, engorged penises, and fish guts being gurgled into mouths — and more tragicomic grace notes. The lonely Sasquatches seem on the cusp of greater understanding, but human progress is set to outpace them; the ‘sunset’ of the title is not just a twinkly skyline, but the end of…

★★★★ OUT 28 JUNE (APPLE TV+) / CERT TBC / 90 MINS DIRECTOR Erica Tremblay CAST Lily Gladstone, Isabel Deroy-Olson, Shea Whigham, Ryan Begay, Audrey Wasilewski PLOT When her sister disappears, Native American hustler Jax (Gladstone) defies the law to keep what’s left of her family together. NATIVE AMERICAN STORIES on screen are still few and far between. Martin Scorsese’s Killers Of The Flower Moon was a welcome addition to the canon last year, and now hot on its heels comes Fancy Dance, an assured narrative-feature debut from Native American writer-director Erica Tremblay. The common denominator between both movies is actor Lily Gladstone. But where Scorsese’s movie arguably moved the focus away from the Indigenous community as it progressed, this film puts both that community and the Oscar-nominated actor firmly…

★★★ OUT NOW / CERT U / 104 MINS DIRECTOR John Krasinski CAST Ryan Reynolds, John Krasinski, Cailey Fleming, Steve Carell On paper, John Krasinski’s IF has all the right ingredients for a family adventure in the Amblin mould. It’s a charming story about reconnecting with our inner child, and in its concept of making IFs (short for “imaginary friend”) real, it brings to life an array of colourful characters. IF’s childlike vastness is influenced by every Disney/Pixar movie ever made, yet it’s a classic example of having too much of a good thing. For all its sweetness and star-studded cameos, the plot never positions itself to settle on one coherent idea. The result leaves far too many questions to be satisfying, too many jokes falling flat, to reach its…

★★★★ OUT NOW (NETFLIX) / EPISODES VIEWED 6 OF 6 SHOWRUNNER Abi Morgan CAST Benedict Cumberbatch, Ivan Morris Howe, Gaby Hoffmann, McKinley Belcher III Monsters real and imagined are confronted in this ambitious story of a Jim Hensonesque puppeteer searching for his missing son in ’80s New York. Mixing true crime and social realism with a giant blue creature isn’t an easy sell, but creator Abi Morgan deftly weaves in the delusions of Vincent (Benedict Cumberbatch) with everything from homelessness to homophobia. Although Cumberbatch is the star draw and Gaby Hoffmann impresses too, McKinley Belcher III is Eric’s MVP, playing queer policeman Michael Ledroit with admirably precise restraint. It’s an eccentric story about finding home, whether that be in the arms of family, or in a very literal sense; even…

★★ OUT NOW (NETFLIX) / CERT TBC / 90 MINS DIRECTOR Brad Peyton CAST Jennifer Lopez, Simu Liu, Mark Strong, Sterling K. Brown PLOT Three decades after a devastating attack by rogue AI Harlan (Liu), Atlas (Lopez) joins a crack team to track him down. THESE DAYS, ANY original sci-fi film is worth cheering for; one boasting genuine movie stars is even more exciting. Sadly, this Brad Peyton effort can’t deliver on its promise. The Rampage director benefits from some cool imagery and a great cast —in particular a committed lead performance from Jennifer Lopez —but wastes it on predictable character beats and a pat trauma narrative. It’s all very sci-fi-looking: lots of flying cars and blue glowy things. No surprise given this begs, borrows and steals from classic films…

★★★ PC, PS5, XBOX SERIES S/X “VERY FEW CARTOONS are broadcast live,” goes an old Simpsons joke. “It’s a terrible strain on the animators’ wrists.” But that is exactly the sensation you have when playing Harold Halibut, a remarkable if frustrating new game that gives the experience, perhaps for the first time, of rendering stop-motion puppets as they’re animated live before your eyes. On this point alone, it feels significant, just as games like Dragon’s Lair or Cuphead gave the sensation of playing a 2D cartoon. German game director Onat Hekimoglu has been working on the concept for well over a decade, creating physical puppets in the real world and then using technology called photogrammetry to scan them into the game software. The end result is immediately striking: this is…

★★★★ OUT NOW (SKY / NOW) / EPISODES VIEWED 7 OF 7 SHOWRUNNERS Don McKellar, Park Chan-wook CAST Hoa Xuande, Robert Downey Jr., Sandra Oh, Toan Le, Fred Nguyen Khan, Duy Nguyen, Vy Le PLOT Imprisoned in a North Vietnamese re-education camp, a man (Hoa Xuande) recalls his years as a Communist spy. AT REGULAR OPPORTUNITIES, The Sympathizer likes to remind you not to blindly trust what you’re told. At the tail end of the Vietnam War, its narrator (Hoa Xuande), known only as The Captain, is being held in a North Vietnamese re-education camp, where he’s forced into confessing his story. As he recounts his years as a Communist spy, first infiltrating the South Vietnamese special police, then operating as a mole in America after the fall of Saigon,…

STORM-CHASERS CALL it ‘skipping’ — the phenomenon where a tornado will seem to disappear, only to touch back down, often with renewed vigour. A ‘skip’ typically lasts minutes, even seconds. To hear of one lasting nearly three decades is — it’s safe to say — unprecedented. And yet, 28 years after Jan de Bont’s disaster movie Twister ran riot at the box office — and inspired a whole generation of death-defying meteorologists in the process — a sequel is landing. Sort of. “Ours is a standalone film,” clarifies Twisters director Lee Isaac Chung, from the LA edit suite where he’s putting finishing touches to his gale-force actioner. “There are no returning characters, but we’re also not a remake,” he grins. “This is a very different plot from the first one.…

1. SUBVERSION “LIFE HAS ALWAYS BEEN HARD, BUT I DON’T REMEMBER IT BEING QUITE THIS CRUDE.” ERIC KRIPKE WAS deep into pre-production of superhero satire’s The Boys’ third season when he announced to his team: “We need to have another penis-prosthetic meeting.” Planning was well underway for the season’s opening episode, ‘Payback’, which featured perhaps the most fearless —and phallic — set-piece yet staged: at a superhero sex party, the Ant-Man-alike ‘supe’ (superhero) Termite (Brett Geddes) shrinks down and enters the urethra of his lover —only to sneeze on some cocaine and accidentally return to human size, in the process exploding his unfortunate paramour from within his penis. It was after calling this meeting, in which the producers, writers and relevant craftspeople were discussing how best to erect a giant…

ACCORDING TO HIS mother-in-law, H.R. Giger was just “a normal guy”. He liked cake, he enjoyed The Wire, and he loved cats. He would drop what he was doing to blow kisses at his beloved Siamese cat, Müggi III, and ask him how his day was. Every day, Müggi III used a cat-flap Giger had made in the shape of a cat, with cat ears cut into the door panel. Pinned up around Giger’s home office were photos of every cat that came before Müggi III (I, II and Nönneli, whose black-and-white markings made her look like a nun). Giger was a cat guy; friends and agents said he was sweet, gentle, shy. Yet he is best known for designing an alien so terrifying that many audience-members in 1979 fainted…

1 COLUMBO: THE 1970’S COMPLETE COLLECTION (OUT 10 JUNE, BR) Peter Falk’s shambling, dogged, indefatigable detective is my choice for greatest TV character of all time, and in this collection you’ll see why. Standouts include the Spielberg-directed first episode, ‘Murder By The Book’, and the desperately sad episode in which Janet Leigh’s fading movie star commits a murder she can barely remember. 2 PETER STRICKLAND: A CURZON COLLECTION (OUT 24 JUNE, BR) Another pricey package, but one worth the outlay, is this limited-edition set of one of Britain’s weirdest and most wonderful directors. Always challenging, always complex, always a hoot, my favourite Strickland remains Berberian Sound Studio. 3 LET IT BE (OUT NOW, DISNEY+) Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s unfairly maligned documentary is now on Disney+. Focusing almost entirely on The Beatles as…

IN AWORLD crowded with cradle-to-grave musical biopics, Reinaldo Marcus Green’s Bob Marley: One Love takes a slightly different approach, focusing instead on two pivotal years — 1976 to 1978 —in the life and career of reggae king, and folk hero, Bob Marley (Kingsley Ben-Adir). Here, Green talks us through some of the big moments from the movie that became something of a sleeper hit at the global box office. FACE TO FACE One Love begins with a shock, as Bob, while preparing to play at a peace concert in conflicttorn Jamaica, is shot by an unnamed assassin who has snuck into Marley’s recording studio/ compound. His wife, Rita (Lashana Lynch), and manager, Don Taylor (Anthony Welsh), are also injured in the attack, which comes soon after we see Marley and…

THE ORIGIN Given that Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two ends with its nominal hero dashing off to commit galactic genocide, it’s clear that this is a universe that isn’t black and white. Until, of course, it is. In a film filled with striking images, the depiction of Giedi Prime, the planet where we first meet super-psycho Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler) hacking and slashing his way through a selection of crysknife fodder in a gladiatorial arena, is perhaps the most striking. It is a planet entirely devoid of colour, a monochrome home to the Harkonnens that is nothing but black and white. “Denis had come to me wanting to do a scene where the sun had no colour,” cinematographer Greig Fraser tells Empire. “And I showed him a technique I’d been playing…

ALEX GODFREY VISITED THE BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE SET “Being on set of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice — to be in that afterlife waiting room, to peer over the miniature model of Winter River, to be face-to-face with Michael Keaton’s grisly ghoul in all his glory – what a dream it’s been. I hope I never wake up.” SOPHIE BUTCHER WENT TO THE CANNES FILM FESTIVAL “I was pinching myself this month as I got to spend a week on the Croisette, seeing some of the year’s biggest (and most interesting) movies, talking to some incredible filmmakers (which you can read in this issue) — and eating about a million pain au chocolats.” CHRIS HEWITT MET THE STARS OF FURIOSA “George Miller, Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth couldn’t be at our Furiosa: Mad…

EDITED BY BETH WEBB ALL THE ESSENTIAL INTEL, FROM HOLLYWOOD AND BEYOND WHICH IS THE better film, James Cameron’s Aliens or Ridley Scott’s original? It’s an impossible debate to resolve and, according to Alien: Romulus writer/director Fede Álvarez, one that should never be had in the first place. “To ask an Alien fan to choose between them is a perverse question,” he insists. “So I thought, ‘How do I do both?’” The answer is a film that takes place in the 57-year expanse between those first iconic movies, and one Álvarez has deliberately constructed to be a hybrid of the two —not just by blending the monster-in-the-house scares of the original with the frenetic action of its sequel, but by combining the settings and distinct aesthetics of both. Renaissance Station,…

THE CULTURE In the sprawling 19th-century epic Horizon: An American Saga —Chapter 1, Sienna Miller’s Frances Kittredge is, she tells us, a pioneer taken to the town of Horizon by her husband James (Tim Guinee) “against her wishes, to some degree. She is put in a really volatile situation. Everybody’s journey west was in search of a better life, but with really no knowledge of what they were heading into, so they had to adapt or die, basically.” To tune into the Western mindset, Miller watched the work of John Ford and Sergio Leone (“Once Upon A Time In The West was one of my favourite films growing up”), and in Moab, Utah, where they shot, found a bookshop that proved instructive. “I read factual books about travelling west, about settlers,…

THE ENTIRE WORLD may feel like it’s on fire right now, but it’s still important to examine its hotter corners. One is the plight of women in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, the subject of new documentary Bread &Roses from director Sahra Mani, producer Jennifer Lawrence and executive producer Malala Yousafzai, the activist who a decade ago won the Nobel Peace Prize aged just 17. The trio have teamed up to highlight three Afghan women who spoke out against the regime, and Empire met them to discuss the story behind their challenging film. Sahra, how did you find these Afghan women to tell their story? Sahra Mani: When Kabul fell to the Taliban, I started working with a charity to support women that had lost their jobs. I met some of these women…

YOU’LL STRUGGLE TO find another film quite like Sasquatch Sunset. Shot entirely on location in the forests of Humboldt County, Northern California, the film follows a group of furry, human-sized mythical creatures (played by actors in full costume) over the course of an absurd, challenging year of their lives. Riley Keough, who plays the sole female in the family, and Jesse Eisenberg, embodying a timid male, talk Empire through all things Sasquatch. SASQUATCH SURVIVAL “When you watch animal documentaries, you can see them going through these really harsh conditions and things that are typical in nature like birth and death,” Keough explains. “That exists within the Sasquatch family as well.” David and Nathan Zellner’s film mimics the documentary form, with four seasonal chapters, during which the makeshift family —an alpha…

“THE ROMAN ENTERTAINMENTS make Vegas look like nothing,” states Robert Rodat, creator of epic new show Those About To Die. “There has never been anything in history in which the size, scale, scope and allocation of resources has come even close. So it’s a marriage made in heaven: the grand entertainments and Roland Emmerich.” Over the course of his career, Emmerich has rebuilt the pyramids (twice), blown up the White House (twice), and ended the world (three times). He doesn’t just bust blocks. He obliterates them. So it should come as no surprise that his first directorial venture into prestige TV should focus on how one of history’s most powerful civilisations entertained the masses —with thrilling chariot races at the Circus Maximus, and brutal combat at the Colosseum. “I had…

THE RINGS OF Power are well-named, it seems. “You want to pick them up, you want to try them on,” says Lindsey Weber, executive producer on the show those very trinkets are named after. “We’ve all had our moment with the rings…” She’s talking about the real deals, whipped up by the epic production’s prop-conjuring craftsfolk to represent the three digitdecorations forged by distinguished elven blacksmith Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards) —with the help of a certain Mr Sauron (Charlie Vickers) —at the conclusion of the Lord Of The Rings prequel’s first season. But of course, it’s not the Rings Of Power crew’s fascination with handling these bejewelled shinies that should most concern us... “It’s a very special moment when Galadriel [Morfydd Clark] finally gets to put on her ring, Nenya,” says…

WHAT: EDNA MODE’S HOUSE WHERE: LOS ANGELES  With its stunning glass exteriors and full super-suit-creating facilities inside, Edna’s place is an ideal vacation spot for fans of comics and couture alike. Several of her classic incredible (and Incredibles) designs are displayed inside — just don’t steal a pair of her signature glasses; the fees are extortionate. WHAT: SHREK’S SWAMP  WHERE: THE SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS Looking for a rustic getaway with a fairy-tale twist? Shrek’s Swamp is an ideal all-star escape — step beyond the ‘BEWARE’ signs, and inside you can enjoy an evening meal by earwax candlelight, or take your very own trip to that iconic outhouse. And be sure to pay attention to the boulder — that is a nice boulder. WHAT: THE X-MANSION  WHERE: WESTCHESTER, NY  Usually,…

WHILE WORKING AS a writer on Saturday Night Live, Julio Torres received an invaluable piece of advice from host Emma Stone. When acting in a comedy, she told him, “you have to take it seriously”. Characters, she insisted, “aren’t vessels for jokes”. Torres bore this in mind when writing his most celebrated SNL sketch, 2017’s ‘Papyrus’, in which Ryan Gosling plays a lonely man who has a life-ruining obsession with the Avatar title font. It proved such a hit that it gained a sequel, which aired in April. For it to work, Gosling had to play the character with “empathy and honesty”, Torres explains. “I think the humour comes not from making fun of him, but from seeing qualities in him that we can relate to.” Torres has now brought…

Which movie have you seen more than any other? The Circus, by Charlie Chaplin. I love his films and I love animals. The film is about a circus, obviously, and having all these animals interact with Chaplin is very comical. I read in his biography that he didn’t have good memories of making the film. The set burned down; he was going through a divorce —it had all sorts of problems. I love it. What’s your signature dish? Ordering catering. I live in a little village and there’s a woman called Stacy who works in a very beautiful shop. It’s a decorating shop but it used to be a food shop and they have a licence to cook. The entire village eats what Stacy offers. So my answer to your…

★★★ OUT 14 JUNE / CERT TBC / 112 MINS DIRECTOR Julia von Heinz CAST Lena Dunham, Stephen Fry, Zbigniew Zamachowski This is a curious mix: a lightly comedic road-trip exploring generational trauma. Based on Lily Brett’s autobiographical novel Too Many Men, it has idealistic, somewhat self-absorbed writer Ruth (Lena Dunham) locking horns with her garrulous, somewhat insensitive father Edek (Stephen Fry), a Holocaust survivor. In 1991, as they retrace Edek’s traumatic years in Poland, von Heinz grapples with the generational divide as the pair come to terms with what he went through while, yes, learning about each other. It’s painted in broader strokes than the material deserves, but sweetness carries it through. Most effective is the vivid recreation of post-Iron Curtain Poland —a grim, ghostly relic that can’t disguise…

★★★ OUT 7 JUNE / CERT 15 / 129 MINS DIRECTOR Viggo Mortensen CAST Vicky Krieps, Viggo Mortensen, Solly McLeod, Danny Huston, Garret Dillahunt PLOT Vivienne (Krieps) and Holger (Mortensen) have their quiet life on the American frontier shattered when the Civil War breaks out. IT’S NOT UNUSUAL for a Western to open with a figure on horseback. However, in Viggo Mortensen’s second feature as director (and writer, and composer), that figure does not wear a Stetson but rather a metal visored helmet, and is clad in plate-mail armour. It’s a surprising and striking image: a chivalric knight of medieval legend, trotting through a primeval forest. And it is our first clue that Mortensen’s take on a later but no less mythologised historical period — the Wild West — will…

★★★★ OUT 28 JUNE / CERT TBC / 165 MINS DIRECTOR Yorgos Lanthimos CAST Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn PLOT In three separate but loosely connected stories, bizarre misfortunes and onerous tasks are thrust upon different couples. WITH KINDS OF Kindness, his ninth feature film, Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos reinforces his formidable reputation as one of the great directors of contemporary world cinema. This triptych piece —studded with the characteristically oddball humour, violent shocks and sexual preoccupation of Lanthimos’ best work —is his version of going back to basics. His third consecutive collaboration with Emma Stone is perhaps the most stripped-down of the trio, unadorned by the ornate period trappings of The Favourite and the intricate, Victorian-steampunk production design of Alasdair Gray adaptation…

★★★ OUT 31 MAY / CERT 15 / 92 MINS DIRECTOR Kiah Roache-Turner CAST Ryan Corr, Alyla Browne, Penelope Mitchell, Jermaine Fowler While its depiction of a small spider that grows increasingly larger and more violent is hugely compelling, the family dynamics at the core of Sting are considerably less so. Other than 12-year-old Charlotte (Alyla Browne), most of the characters are one-dimensional; that’s easily forgiven if they’re just there to outlive a giant spider, but it’s a problem when they take up so much of the film’s 92-minute runtime. There’s little in the interplay between Charlotte and her parents that we haven’t seen before, and apart from some brief gruesome flashes, the spider-y goodness really only shows up for the beginning and end. That leaves the vast majority of…

★★★ OUT 21 JUNE / CERT 15 / 116 MINS DIRECTOR Jeff Nichols CAST Austin Butler, Jodie Comer, Tom Hardy, Mike Faist, Michael Shannon, Norman Reedus PLOT In 1960s Chicago, a photojournalist (Faist) documents the lives of a motorcycle gang as tensions drive their dynamic to boiling point. AUSTIN BUTLER IS not a man to rush his words. Every line of dialogue feels like it’s preceded by a pregnant pause or a considered stare while the star rolls the words around in his mouth. This abandonment of immediacy feels well-suited for The Bikeriders, a glacial study of oil-stained Americana, sumptuously crafted by writer-director Jeff Nichols. It’s a bold choice to stretch a tale about a gang of road-ripping reprobates over the best part of two hours. Inspired by Danny Lyon’s…

"HELL, YEAH" Betelgeuse is pacing. Guttural grunts tumble out of his mouth. He’s alone, in the zone, stalking back and forth, oblivious to the surrounding studio activity, the cameras, the crew, the lights. Betelgeuse. It’s him. The black-and-white striped suit, in dire need of a dry-clean. The lecherous eyes, glaring out from blackened pits. The matted green hair, unwashed. The broken, yellowed teeth, unbrushed. It could be 1988, when Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice (the title a more accessible take on the name) was gifted to unsuspecting cinemagoers like a freakish jack-in-the-box, but somehow it’s 2023, and Betelgeuse, a demon inhabited by Michael Keaton —or is it the other way round? —looks,extra wrinkles aside, the same. Betelgeuse was always somewhat ageless, stuck in time, because he’s dead. Kind of. “Hell, yeah.” We’re…

THE FISH Ranging between five and ten centimetres in length, the Bellapiscis medius (commonly known as the ‘Twister’) is a triplefin marine fish found off the coast of New Zealand. Its hobbies include hanging out in rock pools and eluding predators by remaining motionless, and as such it is of absolutely no danger to anyone, unless you happen to be a barnacle or small mollusc. DANGER RATING: Category 1 THE ICE CREAM At first sight, this lime-pineapple-strawberryflavoured lolly would appear to be the least hazardous of all existing Twisters. But living off nothing but these frozen treats for an extended period of time would cause untold havoc to one’s digestive system and dental health. DANGER RATING: Category 2 THE SINGER ’60s crooner Chubby Checker caused plenty of screaming and shouting…

NOBODY COULD EVER ACCUSE KEVIN COSTNER OF PLAYING IT SAFE. It’s been over 20 years since he last called “Action!”, on 2003’s excellent Western Open Range, and you could be forgiven for thinking that he had hung up the megaphone for good. Not the case. Far from the case, in fact. The case, to Kevin Costner, is a dot in the distance. Because this summer he returns to the director’s saddle with not one, but two, Westerns. And there’s more where they came from. Horizon: An American Saga —Chapters 1 and 2 are the opening salvos of Costner’s magnum opus: when all’s said and done, there will be four movies examining, with unparalleled scope and scale, the impact of the American Civil War on a growing town. Costner stars as…

A FRESH LOOK AT HOME ENTERTAINMENT EDITED BY CHRIS HEWITT SPOILER WARNING MATTHEW VAUGHN IS lost for words. This is something of a rare occurrence —the 53-yearold director is normally the talk-the-hind-legsoff-a-donkey type, but Empire has flummoxed him with a simple observation: it’s been 20 years since he made the leap from producing movies with his old mucker Guy Ritchie, and took the director’s chair for the first time on the excellent 2004 gangster movie, Layer Cake. “Wow,” he says. “Wow.” Then there’s an uncharacteristic long pause. “The 20 years thing has shut me up for a second,” he admits. “Fuck me, it has been 20 years.” Twenty years in which Vaughn has ploughed his own furrow to great effect. There have been studio movies (Stardust, X-Men: First Class), and…

AS A POOR film student in ’60s Munich, Wim Wenders loved music but couldn’t afford expensive LPs, so came up with an innovative, if highly illegal, way to feed his habit. “I invented a coat to steal vinyl,” he says, still a bit nervy admitting it. “I sewed myself a huge pocket in a Columbo mac into which an album would perfectly fit,” he tells Empire. “I did steal quite a lot of vinyl until one day I was ashamed and gave it all up.” It’s no surprise, then, that, when he became a film director, Wenders peppered his flicks with his favourite tunes, this time paying for the rights. To mark the home-ent release of the sublime Perfect Days —one of a number of his films titled after songs…

WHEN PETER JACKSON’S epic Beatles documentary The Beatles: Get Back appeared in 2021, it was manna from heaven for fans of the Fab Four: eight hours of extraordinary, remastered footage of The Beatles rehearsing and writing songs for the albums that would become Abbey Road and Let It Be. But it also seemed to signal the death-knell for Let It Be, Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s 1970 documentary for which all that footage, including that iconic rooftop performance that marked the last time The Beatles ever played together in public, had been shot. Released just after the band broke up, it had languished in various vaults thereafter. Its last official release came in the 1980s. With Get Back doing what it did, only longer and more comprehensively, surely there was no prospect of…

ALAN SILVESTRI: “When I worked on Forrest Gump, my son [Joey] was very young and he had recently been diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, which is a very profound event to happen to a child. I could not get the sense of what he was living with, and what the potential future was for him. And this image of Forrest being someone with a malady, who begins to cast off these apparatuses only to discover that he is, in effect, cured, was just a magical metaphor for me and for my family. That’s really where the music came from, in that sequence.” EXT. PARK BENCH — DAY They grab their bikes and set off after Forrest. Forrest Gump (Tom Hanks), sitting on a park bench, is telling his life story…