Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2024 i Empire

I WAS HAUNTED by The Terminator. Back in the early ’90s, I hadn’t yet seen James Cameron’s stressful 1984 original — it was an 18 and I was 11 — but I did pay attention when a new cardboard standee arrived at my local video-shop. It depicted a huge man, astride a motorcycle and casually hoisting a sleek shotgun. I had no idea who or what ‘T2’ was; I was looking for a rental copy of King Ralph. But something told me it was major. Finally, I caught Terminator 2: Judgment Day (I also got the Game Boy game, which wasn’t legally allowed to use Arnold Schwarzenegger’s face). And my mind was permanently blown. If you’re reading this issue, chances are your mind has also been expanded by Cameron’s murderous…

IN 1975, SATURDAY Night Live was… well, a show on ABC called Saturday Night Live With Howard Cosell. It starred the controversial sportscaster and comedy group The Prime Time Players, featuring unknowns Bill Murray and Christopher Guest. It lasted 18 episodes, but temporarily prevented a counterculture comedy show on NBC featuring the Not Ready For Prime Time Players (yes, a direct dig) from using the title it would make famous for the next 50 years. Jason Reitman’s new film, Saturday Night, as it was known then, chronicles the intense 90 minutes right before this ragtag show — that needed a miracle to succeed — went to air. Reitman talks Empire through the gestation of the project. 1990s WELCOME TO STUDIO 8H “In the States, there’s an age where you’re allowed…

BODY HORROR Chewed-off fingers and bloody chest cavities have featured in Guadagnino’s gnarlier offerings, which could — especially in James Gunn’s DC Universe — spell gore galore for his comic-book-movie debut. May viscera ensue. TILDA SWINTON IN DISGUISE The Guadagnino stalwart played an old man, a withered witch and a dance teacher in Suspiria. In the DCU, the possibilities can go even further. Hybrid-species nemesis? Elderly mentor? Detective chimp? If anyone can pull them off, possibly simultaneously, Swinton can. EROTIC FOOD When it comes to sex and cuisine, Guadagnino can’t help himself: think Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist wolfing down a shared churro in Challengers, an erotically charged prawn dish in I Am Love, or the receiving peach in Call Me By Your Name. Dare to imagine a version of…

RETURNING TO THE role of Moana, one thing immediately struck Auli‘i Cravalho. “I watched the first film and my voice was up here,” she squeaks. But other than her pitch dropping a little, she felt like no time had passed when she stepped into the booth again. “It’s really like coming home… I don’t have to do anything to get back into voicing her. She and I are still super-tight. I understand her.” Time has moved on, however, for both young women. It’s been eight years since Moana was released, when Cravalho and Moana were 16. Cravalho is now nearing 24, but Moana is lagging a little. “Three years have passed since our first film [in Moana’s world],” says Cravalho. “Moana is now a master voyager” and still testing the…

IT WAS UNDER the most chaotic of circumstances that Anna Kendrick made the leap into directing. The actor had been announced as the star of Woman Of The Hour — a ’70s-set true-crime drama about serial killer Rodney Alcala and his appearance on The Dating Game — in 2021, and was immersing herself in playing Cheryl Bradshaw, the bachelorette who would match with him. Then, the film’s original director, Chloe Okuno, departed the project. With a start date looming, Kendrick had a visceral, nerve-shredding epiphany. “There was this horrible thought bubbling up inside of me that I kept trying to shove back down which was, ‘I think I want to do it, and I think I’m gonna pitch myself,’” she tells Empire. “[It] was the most terrifying thing.” Yet Kendrick…

OUT NOW / CERT 15 / 117 MINS DIRECTOR Ellen Kuras CAST Kate Winslet, Andy Samberg, Alexander Skarsgård, Andrea Riseborough, Noémie Merlant, Marion Cotillard, Josh O’Connor PLOT Model-turned-Vogue-photographer Lee Miller (Winslet) battles sexism from the military to head to the frontlines of World War II. LEE BEGINS WITH the sound of a heart beating, fast. We see Kate Winslet’s Lee Miller, camera round her neck, finding cover among booms of explosions all around her. It’s clear what director Ellen Kuras is trying to tell us with this opening — that this is a woman who’ll go to any lengths to get the shot. It’s an exhilarating start, even if the rest of the film never quite matches it. This biopic of the legendary war photographer begins in 1938. Miller is…

OUT NOW / CERT 12A / 105 MINS DIRECTOR Tim Burton CAST Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Jenna Ortega, Catherine O'Hara, Justin Theroux, Monica Bellucci, Willem Dafoe PLOT Years after their first encounter, Lydia Deetz (Ryder) is once again forced to team up with the demon Betelgeuse (Keaton) in order to rescue her daughter Astrid (Ortega). MORE A CULT classic than a full-blown masterpiece, the original 1988 Beetlejuice is fondly remembered for a few key reasons: the extraordinary live-action cartoon-character performance of Michael Keaton in the title role; the crowning of a teenage goth queen in Winona Ryder’s Lydia; and the establishment — in only his second film — of the filmmaking force that is Timothy Walter Burton, a director so distinctive that his mere name announces a certain freaky style…

OUT 4 OCTOBER / CERT 15 / 112 MINS DIRECTOR Aaron Schimberg CAST Sebastian Stan, Renate Reinsve, Adam Pearson, C. Mason Wells, Owen Kline, Michael Shannon PLOT After undergoing a miracle procedure to cure his neurofibromatosis, Edward (Stan) meets a charming man with the same condition. IT’S NO BIG secret that the world holds a narrow view on what is beautiful. It’s there on screens, in photos, and in the judgemental gaze of every passerby. Otherness is seen as monstrousness. In Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man, the notion that beauty is in the eye of the beholder is excavated and complicated in a darkly hilarious satire about what it means to be attractive, inside and out. Edward (Sebastian Stan) is a struggling New York actor with neurofibromatosis, a condition that…

27 APRIL 1996 is a date in Terminator lore almost as significant as 29 August 1997. It was the day that T2 3-D: Battle Across Time opened at Universal Studios in Florida. A lavish, big-budget, multimedia attraction, front and centre was a 12-minute short film that starred Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Eddie Furlong and Robert Patrick, but also marked the last time James Cameron directed anything Terminator-related, in tandem with his visual-effectswizard pals, Stan Winston and John Bruno. “It was such an insane concept,” Bruno tells Empire. “A character would come out of the screen that you’re watching, come onto the stage, shoot a T-1000 that had come onto the stage, and then drive back into the movie. How do we visualise this thing?” That was Bruno’s early task. Until…

IF THE TERMINATOR hadn’t been a success, I truly believe there would have been no second movie for Jim Cameron and me. I don’t mean a second Terminator movie. I mean any movie. Jim had directed a film previously, and I’d produced one for Roger Corman, but those were both jobs for hire. So if The Terminator hadn’t worked, who knows what we’d be doing now? I doubt we would have had the same careers. Yet it was never obvious to us that it would become such a success. Even after we’d finished production on The Terminator, I remember the head of marketing at Orion Pictures telling me, “This is a down and dirty exploitation film. We’re embarrassed to release it. We don’t want to screen it for critics, and…

ROGER EBERT, ONE of the most famous film critics of them all, built his career on his opposable thumbs. “Two thumbs up” remains an indelible phrase. Yet it’s a dark irony that when he came to assess Robert Harmon’s 1986 thriller The Hitcher, a film built around the mayhem that happens after a psychopath (Rutger Hauer) uses his opposable thumb to ensnare a driver-cum-victim (C. Thomas Howell), Ebert pointed his pollex in only one direction: down. All the way down. On TV, he and his colleague Gene Siskel absolutely rinsed the movie. But it was in Ebert’s regular Chicago Sun-Times column that he really twisted the knife. “This movie is diseased and corrupt,” he wrote. Nearly 40 years on, Robert Harmon bristles when the review is brought up. “Roger Ebert,…

1 THELMA (OUT 21 OCTOBER, DVD/BR) Josh Margolin’s comedy gives the great June Squibb the role of her long lifetime as an elderly lady who shakes off her shackles to hunt down the guys who conned her out of ten grand. An acutely observed character piece with occasional age-appropriate riffs on spy movies, it’s an absolute delight. 2 NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (OUT OCTOBER 7, BR) Given the Criterion treatment, George A. Romero’s black-and-white original is still one of the greatest horror movies of all time, with an ending that will live long in the memory. It’s coming to get you. 3 SEVEN SAMURAI (OUT 21 OCTOBER, 4K) If you haven’t seen Akira Kurosawa’s legendary three-hour epic, you have no excuses now with this remastered re-release. If you’re still on the fence,…

THE GIRL IN THE TRUNK (DIGITAL) Runaway bride Katharina Sporrer is abducted and trapped in a car boot with only a mobile phone and her wits to help her. Though it could have done without the toy scorpion, this very watchable Texas-set suspense drama has snappy patter and a couple of clever twists. JADE (2024) (DIGITAL) British martial artist Shaina West — so tough she’s her own stunt double — has the moves and attitude to be a breakout action star (and serious hair)… though Jade is a fairly minimal vehicle. Mickey Rourke and Mark Dacascos bicker over a missing hard drive. But West is great in fights. MALUM (DIGITAL) In 2014, writer-director Anthony DiBlasi’s Last Shift blended Assault On Precinct 13 with Hellraiser; Malum is the same script done…

CHRIS HEWITT HAD AN AUDIENCE WITH JAMES CAMERON “If James Cameron is talked-out about The Terminator after 40 years, it doesn’t show. My audience with the legendary director lasted for nearly two hours (including one ten-minute answer), and taught me much I didn’t know about the movie. Can’t wait for the 50th anniversary.” JOHN NUGENT WENT TO THE VENICE FILM FESTIVAL “I had a heck of a time at Venice this year. I dodged Lady Gaga fans at the Joker: Folie À Deux premiere, chatted to directors Kevin Macdonald and Asif Kapadia, endured several lengthy standing ovations, and never quite got used to taking a boat to work every day. Che figata!” JOANNA MORAN ORGANISED OUR STEVE McQUEEN PHOTOSHOOT “As soon as we heard we had a chance to shoot…

IT MAY BE beginning to look a lot like Christmas, but in upcoming action movie Red One, the festive season is getting a makeover. Case in point: an atypically ripped Santa, known simply as Nick, played by J.K. Simmons, who looks like he’s been busy bench-pressing reindeer. Saint Nick’s abduction kicks off the plot, in which his right-hand man (Dwayne Johnson) and a befuddled human rule-breaker (Chris Evans) team up on a rescue mission. Director Jake Kasdan tells Empire how he put a twist on Yuletide traditions. EVOLVE THE ELF Productive, pint-sized elves have typically made up Santa’s workforce. But in Red One, the crack team of operatives assigned to his North Pole HQ are anything but little. “They’re not actually elves. They’re the E.L.F., which stands for Enforcement, Logistics…

THE TIMING COULDN’T be better. Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice, about Donald Trump’s vicious rise to power, has been in the works since 2018, falling through on numerous occasions before finally finding traction. Now, it’s about to be released, just as the former President seeks re-election. Beginning in the 1970s, Gabriel Sherman’s screenplay follows ruthless New York attorney Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) as he takes the young, ambitious but malleable Trump (Sebastian Stan) under his wing, teaching him how to get what he wants, whatever the cost. The film features incendiary scenes on multiple levels, most notably a sequence involving Trump sexually assaulting his then wife, Ivana (Maria Bakalova). Legal action has twice been threatened against it, including by Trump’s Presidential campaign’s communications director, while Trump’s attorneys have attempted to block…

A CAUTIONARY TALE “I’ve done a series of biographies. But I wanted to challenge myself as a filmmaker. I started working on this during lockdown, when everything felt really dystopian — but honestly, in my head, I’ve been wanting to do something since Brexit, with the rise of populism. And that was happening everywhere.” A WARNING FROM EXPERTS “The starting point was research. I’m not an expert. So I talked to journalists, I talked to activists, I talked to climate experts, I talked to tech experts all over the world, and they all were saying the same things. I was like: ‘I think I’m on to something.’” A BOUNDARY-PUSHER “I just wanted to push docs into a new space. So I was like: ‘Okay, I’m going to take archive footage…

I SPENT A long time not telling people my last name. For the 45 years following my father’s death, I avoided that type of connection; I didn’t want to be known as the son of Humphrey Bogart. Then, in my forties, I said, “Okay, it’s about time that you dealt with it.” You get a little maturity, and you get comfortable. I wrote my memoir, Bogart: In Search Of My Father, and I’m really glad I did because it got a lot of crap out of my head. When Kathryn Ferguson approached me about making her documentary, I saw that she didn’t want to make it about his movies. That would have put me to sleep. I think the big difference is the way it’s told; through my father’s voice,…

THE FOOD COURT in Newport Market is buzzing on the seemingly ordinary November day that Empire is in town. Beneath ground level, however, is another story. Down a flight of steps lies a low-ceilinged, concrete-clad, formerly-a-slaughterhouse basement serving as a laboratory. Amid the operating tables, surgical tools and lots and lots of fake weed, we are informed that we’ve just missed a staged splenectomy, before being shown footage of an elderly zombie devouring a (fake) dog. It’s surreal. It’s violent. It’s the set of Ben Wheatley’s upcoming horror-comedy series Generation Z. The six-part Channel 4 scarefest sees a return to the smaller-budget, darkly comic roots of the writer-director. Set in the fictional small town of Dambury, the OAP outbreak is triggered by a chemical leak outside a care home, resulting…

‘THE BALLAD OF THE WITCHES’ ROAD’  AGATHA ALL ALONG CAST  AGATHA ALL ALONG This eerie song teases the mission that Kathryn Hahn’s Agatha Harkness will embark on to reclaim her power in her own MCU adventure. And just in time for Halloween too. ‘CORNCRAKE’ JAN MISERRE AND JOHN GÜRTLER THE OUTRUN A rousing, string-led composition is befitting of this Saoirse Ronan-fronted drama about addiction and rediscovery set on Scotland’s windswept Orkney Islands. ‘9 TO 5’ DOLLY PARTON THE PENGUIN: SEASON 1, EPISODE 1 Even Gotham gangsters have to put the hard hours in to be successful, and the lyrics to this country idol’s up-and-at-’em hit are an inspired choice for Colin Farrell’s aspirational Oz Cobb. ‘MAIN TITLE’ JOHN WILLIAMS SUPER/MAN: THE CHRISTOPHER REEVE STORY (TRAILER) Reeve was a superhero both…

FLOW BETH WEBB, NEWS EDITOR This wordless Latvian animation about a small cat’s fight for survival following a cataclysmic flood has already scooped a pawful of awards and been submitted for next year’s Oscars. Filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis deploys expansive, gorgeous vistas that envelope our hero and a crew of pals as they seek passage to safety. QUEER SOPHIE BUTCHER, CONTRIBUTOR No-one does sexual tension quite like Luca Guadagnino, and he’s re-teaming with screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes for this adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ lustful novel. Described by the director as his most personal work, it sees Daniel Craig’s wayward Lee become infatuated with younger man Allerton (Drew Starkey) in 1940s Mexico City. MARIA JOHN NUGENT, REVIEWS EDITOR Pablo Larraín is back on the biopic beat: after simmering, sumptuous portraits of major…

FILM JOKER: FOLIE À DEUX IS IT JUST ME, OR IS IT GETTING (EVEN) CRAZIER OUT THERE? OUT 4 OCTOBER/ CERT TBC / 138 MINS DIRECTOR Todd Phillips CAST Joaquin Phoenix, Lady Gaga, Brendan Gleeson, Catherine Keener, Steve Coogan, Harry Lawtey, Zazie Beetz PLOT Arthur Fleck (Phoenix) is now in Gotham’s Arkham State Hospital, awaiting trial for murder. There he meets Lee (Gaga), and together they forge a strange — and musical — bond. WHO IS THE Joker? Ever since being introduced in the comics as Batman’s first and foremost foe in 1940, this question has never truly been answered. Joker’s backstory is forever foggy, multiple stories from a cackling unreliable narrator, the truth left to fizz in a vat of acid. Todd Phillips’ darkly beautiful 2019 standalone spin-off movie…

OUT 27 SEPTEMBER / CERT 15/99 MINS DIRECTOR Brian Taylor CAST Jack Kesy, Adeline Rudolph, Jefferson White, Martin Bassindale, Effie Kolb PLOT In 1959, Hellboy (Kesy) and rookie BPRD agent Bobbie Jo Song (Rudolph) come face-to-face with a soul-eating revenant named the Crooked Man (Bassindale). HERE WE ARE, then: Hellboy take three. After Guillermo del Toro’s superb 2004-to-’08 double bill and Neil Marshall’s bloated 2019 attempt to take things into harsher action-horror territory, we now get the purist’s approach. Directed by Brian ‘Crank’ Taylor, who also co-wrote the script with Hellboy creator Mike Mignola (drawing heavily on his limited-edition series), Hellboy: The Crooked Man strips away the fantastical spectacle and brings its diabolic hero down to ground level, as it were, in a gritty low-fi chiller. Similarly to Matt Reeves’…

OUT 11 OCTOBER (APPLE TV+) / EPISODES VIEWED 7 OF 7 SHOWRUNNER Alfonso Cuarón CAST Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline, Sacha Baron Cohen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Lesley Manville, Louis Partridge, Leila George, Indira Varma PLOT The life of respected journalist Catherine Ravenscroft (Blanchett) is upended when a novel exposes a shameful incident from her past. DISCLAIMER IS ONE of those shows that wears its theme brazenly on its well-tailored sleeve from the get-go. Presenting a lifetime-achievement award to journalist Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett), CNN’s Christiane Amanpour (playing herself) announces: “Beware of narrative and form. Their power can bring us close to the truth, but they can also be a weapon with a great power to manipulate.” Adapting Renée Knight’s 2015 bestseller, Alfonso Cuarón’s seven-parter, his first directorial outing since Roma, is a…

OUT 27 SEPTEMBER / CERT TBC / 138 MINS DIRECTOR Francis Ford Coppola CAST Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Dustin Hoffman PLOT In an alternate future America, architects, artists and politicians battle for the soul of ‘New Rome’, a New York-esque city. TIME HAS ALWAYS been kind to Francis Ford Coppola. The legendary filmmaker is no stranger to epic, unwieldy, ruinously expensive films, underappreciated upon release before later achieving classic status. Will his monumental, decades-in-the-making, self-funded passion-project Megalopolis follow a similar path to The Godfather and Apocalypse Now — or will it be more like One From The Heart? Only time will tell. It is certainly a film that requires some time digesting. Coppola has compared the film to James Joyce’s…

HIS THREE DAUGHTERS FILM “It’s a feat in casting. Carrie Coon is forthright, Natasha Lyonne is subdued and complex, Elizabeth Olsen brings lightness and comic relief. By its final chapter, the actors are firing on all cylinders, moving as an emotionally charged force.” BETH WEBB CLOSE TO YOU FILM “This largely improvised film hinges almost entirely on Elliot Page’s soulful performance. He shines bright in an otherwise formulaic story — but this is still a thoughtful, sensitive portrait of a young man coming to terms with his sense of self.” ELLA KEMP THE PERFECT COUPLE TV “What this show does well is get you invested enough in these people to keep on watching. It knows what it is (shiny, easy, bingeable) and what it is not (pretentious, groundbreaking, particularly memorable).”…

JUST FIVE DAYS after Josh Friedman sold his pitch to write The Sarah Connor Chronicles, life happened. Suddenly, he didn’t feel like writing it at all. “I was 36, and I got diagnosed with kidney cancer,” he recalls. In recovery, meeting a therapist who specialised in cancer patients, the TV work now felt insignificant. “I was like, ‘I don’t know that I can go and write this scary robot show. After going through what I’ve just gone through, I don’t know if it’s what I can do right now in my life.’” His therapist told him that he should at least try. After all, there is no fate but what we make for ourselves. It was 2006. Friedman (who had co-written Steven Spielberg’s War Of The Worlds) had been approached…

Paddington films are a lot like marmalade. Balanced perfectly between sweet and tart, they give a sunny little fillip to an otherwise grey British day. And like marmalade, you must take care not to burn yourself while cooking up a fresh batch. First-time feature director Dougal Wilson felt the pressure as he embarked on Paddington In Peru, taking over from Paul King after two universally acclaimed instalments. Can this new guy complete a threequel for the ages? Or will he be getting a hard stare from, well, the entire nation? Here, Wilson and two of his stars lay out what’s changing — and what’s not… The Leader When Wilson was first invited in to chat about Paddington, he was flattered for an instant, followed immediately by, he says, “terror and…

IN A CAVE, AT THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH, RICHARD E. GRANT IS SMASHING HIS OWN HEAD IN. On this particular day in May 2024, the centre of the Earth can be found just off the A41 in Hertfordshire; a soundstage at Leavesden Studios is doubling for the core of the planet. But it is also doubling for a fictional superhero universe: one created by ‘Maximum Studios’, a faux film company bearing remarkable resemblance to its real-life counterparts Marvel Studios and DC Studios. The rather mediocrelooking movie being made is called ‘Tecto: Eye Of The Storm’. And the classically trained actor (played by the classically trained Grant) who plays the titular Eye is having a hissy fit. “I’m a trained fucking actor from the R-S-fucking-C!” he bellows, before slamming the…

“WE HAD A tough needle to thread on this one,” says Wes Ball, the king of Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes. “Soft-reboot the franchise, essentially, with new characters and a new storyline and remind people why they like these movies so much. I think we accomplished all those things.” You can see why he would say that. The tenth Planet Of The Apes movie, and the first since 2017’s War For The Planet Of The Apes, posted a solid worldwide gross of just south of $400 million and, while a sequel hasn’t officially been announced yet, introduced a central relationship between Owen Teague’s gentle chimp Noa and Freya Allan’s embittered human Mae that could play out in interesting ways. It certainly does here. HAIL, CAESAR Kingdom takes place…

LETTER OF THE MONTH HALF A CINEWORLD AWAY We dream of an urban utopia where Romford has a Cineworld, as mentioned on page 70 in the Megalopolis article [‘Building The Future’, issue #432]. If Francis Ford Coppola can self-finance this, we would greatly appreciate it. We once had a brand-new Ster Century cinema that opened in 2001 and that was a magical utopia for a Romford teenager. (Now it’s a crumbling and sticky Vue.) KIERON & LAURA THOMSON-TURNAGE, VIA EMAIL Ian Freer — who wrote that ‘Romford Cineworld’ gag in our Megalopolis feature — says: “One cinema? It’s no surprise Tarantino never made Once Upon A Time… In Romford.” For your evident love of cinema-utopias, Kieron and Laura, have a Picturehouse membership on us. Empire’s star letter wins a Picturehouse…

THERE’S A CHAOTIC start to Empire’s interview with Marielle Heller, but it’s very on point. She’s driving, calling us on the phone, and the reception is crumbling. “I’ve been schlepping kids from cello lessons to tutoring and back, and so the only way to make the timing work was to be in the car,” she explains. Seeing as we’re discussing a film that explores how hard it is to balance motherhood with a career, it’s a perfect example. The struggle continues. “You know…” she laughs. “This is all part of my plan, so you can pin me down as a harried mother who can’t keep it together.” Nightbitch is Heller’s adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s 2021 novel about a woman who puts her career on hold to raise her kid and,…

THOMASIN McKENZIE RAN into a significant problem when researching Jean Purdy. Although she was a real person — a nurse central to the scientific team that brought about the birth of the first IVF child — the film is in part about Purdy’s erasure from history. Only the men she worked with, scientist Robert Edwards (played in the dramatisation by James Norton) and surgeon Patrick Steptoe (Bill Nighy), were recognised, until very recently. “There wasn’t a lot of information available,” says McKenzie. “There were no books that I could find, but there were video clips. There was an interview she’d done with a couple of other nurses that helped with the birth of the first IVF baby.” Those gave some hints as to Purdy’s mannerisms, but also showed how underestimated…

LEIGH WHANNELL IS no stranger to reboots of classic horror films. In 2020 the actor-turned-director put his stamp on The Invisible Man, a modernisation of a 127-year-old story that delivered visceral scares and proved a robust box-office hit, making $144.5 million off a $7 million budget. Now, he’s about to give the same treatment to another legendary Universal monster: the Wolf Man. “I think of it as a companion piece to The Invisible Man,” Whannell tells Empire of his latest horror update. “I didn’t want this film to be a nostalgic or a retro Wolf Man film in any way.” Indeed, Whannell set out to make his take on the Wolf Man as distinct from previous iterations as possible. “[I was] actually writing down in my notepad everything that’s been…

“IT WAS AN empowering and joyful experience,” says Jakub Duszyński, creative director of Polish film company Gutek. “It almost felt like a ritual — the crowd wanting to create a special moment, not just for the filmmakers, but for themselves, too.” Duszyński is describing what it was like to be part of the audience that gave Pedro Almodóvar’s latest film, The Room Next Door, a palm-punishing 18-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival in September — the longest in the event’s history. “It didn’t even feel like a big physical effort,” he laughs. “You shout and clap at a pop concert — that’s what it felt like. The same energy you’d imagine at a Beatles show.” Lengthy applause has been a staple at film festivals for decades — E.T.…

IT’S BASED ON THE BOOK, NOT THE MOVIE Opinion has long been divided on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1987 dystopian thriller The Running Man. For some, it’s an entertainingly batshit sci-fi. For others: a schlocky misfire, full of subpar puns. One thing everyone agrees on, though, is that the film played fast and loose with its source material. Based on Stephen King’s 1982 novel (published under King’s pseudonym, Richard Bachman), the movie retained the book’s concept of a murderous futuristic game show, but changed pretty much everything else. Now, though, a new adaptation is coming, which looks to adhere more closely to King’s story. EDGAR WRIGHT IS RUNNING IT Production begins in November, with Wright directing, Glen Powell starring and a script by Scott Pilgrim Vs The World writer Michael Bacall. Wright…

WHAT CAN YOU say about the world’s biggest band that hasn’t already been said? “That’s obviously the number-one challenge making a film about the Beatles,” admits director Kevin Macdonald. The filmmaker eventually found his focus: a brief period in 1972 when John Lennon and Yoko Ono lived together in a tiny, two-room apartment in New York’s Greenwich Village. He uncovers some morsels that might surprise even the most seasoned Beatles fan. A RARE JOHN LENNON PERFORMANCE The film builds up to One To One, a benefit concert for disabled children, and the only full-length gig Lennon performed outside of his time with The Beatles. “Basically, after the rooftop concert you see in Peter Jackson’s Get Back, this is the only concert that he gave,” explains Macdonald. “And you sort of…

OUT NOW (PRIME VIDEO) / EPISODES VIEWED 8 OF 8 SHOWRUNNERS J. D. Payne, Patrick McKay CAST Morfydd Clark, Sara Zwangobani, Markella Kavenagh, Robert Aramayo, Benjamin Walker, Ismael Cruz Córdova, Charles Edwards, Daniel Weyman, Owain Arthur, Charlie Vickers PLOT Galadriel (Clark) has secured three Rings Of Power. But will she earn back the trust of the Elves after accidentally collaborating with Sauron (Vickers)? RUMOUR HAS IT that Prime Video’s The Rings Of Power is the highest-budgeted TV show ever made — though the maths depends on including the vast amount paid for the rights to J.R.R. Tolkien’s magnum opus, The Lord Of The Rings. It certainly looks expensive, from its extensive locations to the huge sets. More importantly, however, the plot lives up to the packaging. It may be cobbled…

OUT 18 OCTOBER / CERT TBC / 120 MINS DIRECTOR Ali Abbasi CAST Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, Maria Bakalova, Martin Donovan, Ben Sullivan PLOT A young Donald Trump (Stan) is mentored by ruthless lawyer Roy Cohn (Strong) in order to achieve his dream of absolute power. WHAT MORE IS there to know about Donald Trump, one of the most publicised men of the last century? In Ali Abbasi’s biopic, so intentionally grubby you may well feel in need of a shower afterwards, the answer is perhaps: not a lot. But if this film is hardly revelatory, it finds an absorbing narrative in the opposing fortunes of Trump and his mentor, Roy Cohn, anchored by two of the best performances of the year. In the opening scenes, in seedy, shabby 1970s…

OUT 11 OCTOBER / CERT TBC / 89 MINS DIRECTOR Alice Lowe CAST Alice Lowe, Nick Frost, Aneurin Barnard, Tanya Reynolds, Jacob Anderson, Kate Dickie PLOT Lonely, lovestruck Agnes (Lowe) pursues the elusive object of her infatuation across hundreds of years of history. A PASSION PROJECT in the works for eight years, Alice Lowe’s follow-up to Prevenge borrows from the likes of Terry Gilliam and Stanley Kubrick to tell a story about the obsessive pursuit of love, with a healthy side of schlocky gore. Lowe has long been something of a savant of the strange and macabre, from her breakout role in Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace onwards. But her imagination really runs wild here, leaping between centuries with aplomb, even if the jokes are disappointingly weak. Bedecked in everything from an…

WHEN JAMES CAMERON wrote, “The future is not set,” he wasn’t kidding. The year was 1982 and Cameron — then a Roger Corman-schooled production designer, art director, effects guru and general Jim of all trades — was in Rome, directing a few ill-fated days on Piranha II before getting the boot, when a vision came to him in a fever dream. It was a hellish image, of a chrome skeleton, an unstoppable robot that Cameron decided was from the future. He called it, and the movie it inspired, ‘The Terminator’. When he got back to Los Angeles, licking his wounds from the Piranha II fallout, he started writing the screenplay for a movie in which that unstoppable robot travelled back in time to try to kill the mother of the…

“THERE WAS NO plan,” remembers Richard Easter. “Stupidly, I had no plan.” He’s remembering the mad Monday back in 1991 when he got a call asking him to perform on Top Of The Pops, in just two days’ time. The song: a ramshackle thing he’d concocted for a laugh called ‘I’ll Be Back’. A sidekick to radio DJ Steve Wright, Easter had been inspired by Total Recall to start doing impressions of Schwarzenegger on air. “Arnold failing to heat up a chicken and mushroom pie, so it needed a Total Re-Heat. Or getting the wrong fuse in the plug, so Total Rewire. We flogged that dead horse for some time.” The bit proved so popular with listeners that when it came time for the Radio 1 Roadshow, he decided to…

BEFORE ANYONE HAD EVEN SET FOOT IN front of a camera, Jacques Audiard knew he was risking disaster. And this is not a director afraid of big swings. Audiard has danced through multiple genres in his career, from the BAFTA-winning prison drama A Prophet; to Rust And Bone, a romance about a woman who loses her legs in her work as an orca-trainer; to the eccentric Western The Sisters Brothers. But with Emilia Pérez he’s swinging like never before. This is the audacious story of a low-grade lawyer in Mexico City employed to help a cartel leader lead a new life as a woman. That is just the first act. Also, it’s a musical. And almost entirely in Spanish, which Audiard doesn’t speak. “There were many, many, many things that…

SPURTING ONTO THE scene in 1998, Todd Solondz’s Happiness was as acclaimed as it was divisive, a comedy of (bad) manners about people in various states of unfulfillment. It was a shock to the system, its ensemble including Dylan Baker’s paedophile Bill Maplewood, portrayed as a loving father as well as a predator, and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s socially inept phone-sex-pest Allen. Solondz has made just five movies since, and for years has been teaching film at NYU. As Happiness arrives on Criterion, he looks back on its singular legacy. Happiness is sad and troubling and funny, often at the same time. Was that just you completely settled into your own voice? I think it’s reflective of the way I, as a filmmaker, feel about what I’m doing. On the one…