Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2025 i Empire

AS WE REACH the end of the year, my thoughts turn — as they so often do — to the events of Highlander II: The Quickening. In that truly dire sequel, set in 2024, a hole in the ozone layer has resulted in the deaths of millions. An evil alien powermonger played by Michael Ironside, meanwhile, is saying things like, “The remains of your mortal wife. So frail. So earthy. So very dead.” In the real world, this year may have been riven by division and plagued by doomy headlines — but hey, at least it’s not as bad as that. Plus, it’s been an absolutely stonking 12 months for cinema and TV. In our 16-page Review Of The Year, starting on page 63, we rake over the detritus of…

This issue, we reflect on the last 12 months of movies in our 2024 Review Of The Year (see page 63). Which means we can also reflect on our first-ever Review Of The Year, from 35 years ago. Some things haven’t changed: the box office was dominated by superheroes (Tim Burton’s Batman) and sequels (Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade). But some things seem positively ancient: we reported on a “quiet revolution at the video shop” with VHS tapes being sold for “under a tenner”. We noted now-beloved classics (When Harry Met Sally) and since-forgotten curios (We Think The World Of You) and awarded Best Bon Mot to Patrick Swayze in Road House (“It’s my way or the highway!”). We also anointed 1989 as the year “that movie fans got…

IT STARTED WITH a cat. Gints Zilbalodis’ cat, to be precise, the inspiration for his 2012 film Aqua (about a water-phobic feline) and then the hero of his upcoming animated feature Flow. In the film — which is the Latvian entry for Best International Feature at the 2025 Academy Awards — a catastrophic flood has seized the human-less land of said cat, who must navigate the open waters on a boat with a haphazard ensemble of animals. “I wanted to focus more on the fear of others and of working together, because it was my first time making a film with the team,” admits Zilbalodis. Speaking with Empire, he delves into the origins of his creature creations. CAT The internet proved a treasure trove for Zilbalodis and his team, who…

FIVE YEARS AGO, writer-director Joe DeBoer read about the ‘dead letter office’, a branch of the US postal office that investigates undeliverable mail. Enchanted by the peculiarity of this real-life organisation, he mentioned it to Kyle McConaghy, his filmmaking partner and best pal since sixth grade. A fellow horror-head, McConaghy was instantly struck by a vision of a woman crawling from a house, clutching a blood-streaked letter. “We always fear being bland Midwest Americans, so we set out to take the riskier choice,” says Missouri-born McConaghy of Dead Mail, the suspense-packed movie that stemmed from that first image, and has gone on to receive rave reviews following its South By Southwest premiere. He’s not kidding; set in the mid-1980s, Dead Mail sees loner postal-worker Jasper (Tomas Boykin) tracking the aforementioned…

WRITER-DIRECTOR MIKE LEIGH first collaborated on film with actor Marianne Jean-Baptiste on the Oscar-nominated Secrets & Lies. Almost 30 years later, the pair are back with Hard Truths, a powerful character study of Pansy (Jean-Baptiste), a belligerent, difficult woman — she rants at shop-workers — who is clearly in some kind of deep-rooted pain. The pair tell Empire about their decades-long partnership, creating characters and — obviously — the next James Bond film. Your first time working together was on Mike’s play, It’s A Great Big Shame, at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, in London. How was that? Mike Leigh: When [Marianne] came and auditioned, it was obvious that this was a smart character actor with a sense of humour and a sense of life. We just clicked. She played…

IT’S BEEN ALMOST 30 years since Happy Gilmore turned Adam Sandler from SNL star into movie A-lister virtually overnight (and which, along with Billy Madison, inspired the name of his production company, Happy Madison). Yet a sequel felt inevitable; from the moment Sandler first raised his club in anger as the titular ice-hockey player (with rage issues) turned golf player (with rage issues), his petulant screen persona meshed perfectly with the film’s endlessly quotable dialogue (“I eat pieces of shit like you for breakfast”/“You eat pieces of shit for breakfast?”). It became an enduring pop-culture hit: pro golfers even took to recreating his iconic, unorthodox swing on the course for the film’s 25th anniversary. To measure the anticipation for Happy Gilmore 2 — helmed by Murder Mystery director Kyle Newacheck…

WITH THE FAR-RIGHT gaining more power globally day by day, Justin Kurzel’s The Order — an ’80s-set thriller which explores the murky world of white supremacists — has taken on a whole new dimension since the Australian filmmaker signed on in late 2020. “Since shooting it, the conversation around the film has sharpened with where we are now,” he says. “It no longer feels like a period film and feels like something that could be bubbling away today — unfortunately.” Inspired by true-life events, The Order follows FBI agent Terry Husk (Jude Law, playing a fictionalised lawman) on the hunt for cult leader Bob Mathews (Nicholas Hoult), who has formed a neo-Nazi group called The Order, dedicated to overthrowing the US government by any means necessary. Key to The Order’s…

OUT 1 JANUARY / CERT 15 / 132 MINS DIRECTOR Robert Eggers CAST Bill Skarsgård, Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Willem Dafoe, Emma Corrin, Ralph Ineson PLOT The blood-sucking vampire Count Orlok (Skarsgård) moves from Transylvania to the German city of Wisborg. There, infatuation with Ellen (Depp) consumes him, as his deathly influence consumes others… “COME TO ME, hear my call,” murmurs Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp) in Robert Eggers’ full-blown Gothic melodrama Nosferatu. She’s speaking not to her husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), a young estate agent who’s journeying to the jagged, windswept Carpathians on business, but to his undead client Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), whose sulphurous powers have scrawled his signature upon her heart and soul as clearly as he scribbles his John Hancock on the property deeds for…

OUT NOW (NETFLIX) / CERT PG / 92 MINS DIRECTOR Jerry Ciccoritti CAST Lacey Chabert, Dustin Milligan, Craig Robinson, Joe Lo Truglio Netflix’s latest piece of hunky Christmas junk will only rise above your expectations if you keep them well below freezing. When kindly café owner Kathy (Lacey Chabert) donates a scarf to an ice sculpture, it comes to life as a hunky man (Dustin Milligan). Before you can say, “Is that a carrot in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?”, he’s encouraging her to open her heart, doing topless DIY and winning over the entire town in a story more predictable than the sunrise. This is cynically greenlit, built on a certainty that some people will watch any festive film with a silly enough premise…

OUT 1 JANUARY / CERT 15 / 108 MINS DIRECTOR John Crowley CAST Andrew Garfield, Florence Pugh, Adam James, Marama Corlett, Aoife Hinds, Nikhil Parmar, Heather Craney PLOT A chance encounter between chef Almut (Pugh) and recently divorced Tobias (Garfield) leads to romance — but a cancer diagnosis threatens their time together. TIME MAY BE a straight line, but memories hit you in random waves. Taken in that spirit, We Live In Time’s central gambit — to tell its love story out of chronological order — is more than just a stylistic flourish, the kind that would make Christopher Nolan proud. It’s an inspired choice that adds a layer of unpredictability to John Crowley’s weepy romcom. And thanks to a couple of powerhouse performances, its straightforward story packs a punch.…

OUT NOW / CERT PG / 160 MINS DIRECTOR John M. Chu CAST Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande, Jonathan Bailey, Ethan Slater, Bowen Yang, Peter Dinklage, Michelle Yeoh, Jeff Goldblum PLOT The early story of Oz’s future Wicked Witch Of The West, Elphaba (Erivo), and her perky college roommate, Glinda (Grande). IT’S NEVER EASY to adapt a deeply loved story. The musical of Wicked, based on Gregory Maguire’s prequel novel to The Wizard Of Oz, has bred the sort of fandom that has strong feelings about particular trills in the original cast recording, but a film version must reach new audiences and win over the musical-resistant. Full marks for bravery, then, to director Jon M. Chu and stars Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, who not only fill these big, ruby slippers…

Think of the number six. At first glance, it’s fairly humdrum and meaningless, just another number lost in the infinity gauntlet. But ask any maths nerd, and they’ll tell you that it’s actually the smallest perfect number. It is considered by numerous numerologists to be the ‘mother’ of numbers. Alan Hansen wore the number 6 shirt for Liverpool. Patrick McGoohan’s character in The Prisoner protested he was a man, not a number; but what a number it was. And when Anthony Mackie made his Marvel Cinematic Universe debut as Sam Wilson, aka The Falcon, all the way back in 2014’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier, he was assigned a number on the call sheet, the daily production breakdown that, among other things, lists cast members in order of story import.…

“There are so many parallels,” says Brady Corbet, “between making a film and building a building.” Films, like buildings, are big endeavours. They can often be miraculous undertakings, sometimes ruinously expensive, demanding a unique mix of an artist’s vision and a wealthy benefactor’s wallet. Their creation can require a leap of faith. But they also tell us much about ourselves, and the time in which they were made. Nearly a decade ago, Corbet began construction on his biggest project to date: The Brutalist. Set between 1947 and 1980, the 215-minute film — which includes a 15-minute intermission — tells the story of fictional architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian Jew who escapes war-ravaged Europe to seek a new life in the United States. Fleeing fascism, he instead encounters capitalist…

ONE OF THE interesting things about George Miller’s Furiosa is how it feels, for much of its running (and driving) time, so utterly unlike its much-lauded predecessor. But for the film’s third chapter, ‘The Stowaway’, Miller rides historic on the Fury Road once more, marshalling an astonishing sequence in which Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy), squirrelled away on the War Rig as it makes its maiden run, finds herself forced to help defend it and its driver, Tom Burke’s Praetorian Jack, from marauders. Filled with inventive beats that would make even the Octoboss gasp, it’s one of the finest action sequences of the year, and here Miller tells Empire how he and his team pulled it off. Fire up the Bommy-Knocker! THE STOWAWAY “This sequence is character-driven. Furiosa starts off as a…

IF THERE’S ONE CATEGORY THAT THE OSCARS screws up time after time, it’s Best Original Song. This is the category that completely overlooked ‘Staying Alive’ from Saturday Night Fever. If the Academy wishes to atone, they could do a lot worse than give the little gold guy to Osgood Perkins and Nicolas Cage for the song we’re calling ‘Longlegs’ Lament (Theme From Longlegs)’. Yes, it’s barely 20 seconds long. Yes, it consists of just a few lines. But if there’s a bigger earworm this year, we haven’t heard it. And for bonus points, it’s fucking terrifying. The song comes in a flashback, during which Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) recalls her first meeting with Cage’s Satanic serial killer, Longlegs, when she was just a young girl. As he starts his big…

ONE OF THE most spectacular TV moments of the year saw an elderly Scottish Dwarf attempting to absolutely munter a Balrog. After spending Season 2 of The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power in thrall to a magical ring, getting too greedy and delving too deep into the Mines Of Moria, Peter Mullan’s King Durin III redeems himself with a glorious finish. He sets things right with his son (Owain Arthur) and makes a doomed final stand against one of Middle-earth’s baddest bads — said Balrog — to save his people. We asked Mullan to talk us through the year’s hottest melee… What excited you about playing Durin III in the first place? Originally when it was filming in New Zealand, my partner’s there in New Zealand, so…

You’d think that, over 100 years, cinema would have exhausted all its possibilities. That there is nothing new for filmmakers to show us. All roads have been well and truly travelled. Well, all roads except for one. The one that a family of Sasquatches — Jesse Eisenberg’s Male, Riley Keough’s Female, and Christophe Zajac-Denek’s Child, all in full-body make-up — stumble upon in Sasquatch Sunset. Freaked out and fucked up by the black strip of concrete that has cut a swathe through their Pacific Northwest paradise, they do what comes naturally. They defy the gods and mark their territory, grunting and howling and hollering as they cover the road in rivers of piss, piles of poo and — the coup de grâce — breast milk, shot out of Keough’s hairy…

SEPPUKU, POETRY, WEAPONISED etiquette, and sacrificing your life for the sake of a decomposing pheasant — such are the unlikely elements of this year’s breakout TV hit. A largely subtitled, 90 per cent Japanese-language series about subtle politicking for control of 17th-century Japan, Shōgun took the building blocks of James Clavell’s 1975 novel and, shaking off the memory of Richard Chamberlain’s 1980s miniseries, constructed an enthralling, labyrinthine and yet surprisingly accessible ten-part drama charting the dawn of the country’s Edo period. With its complex codes of conduct and delicate, knotty political manoeuvrings, Shōgun feels entirely alien to modern, Western audiences, dropping viewers into the cultural deep-end as surely as it does Cosmo Jarvis’ cocksure English sailor, John Blackthorne. But, like Blackthorne, we’re swiftly drawn in by the Byzantine machinations of…

WITH ITS SPEAKING SPERM AND BLABBERING BABIES, LOOK WHO’S TALKING CAME FROM NOWHERE TO BECOME ONE OF THE BIGGEST — AND WEIRDEST — ROMCOMS OF ALL TIME. THIRTY-FIVE YEARS ON, DIRECTOR AMY HECKERLING TELLS EMPIRE ABOUT THE CHAOTIC MAKING OF THE “MOST PROFITABLE PRIVATE JOKE EVER” Amy Heckerling’s first thought was: “Oh no.” It was the winter of 1985, and the Bronx-born filmmaker was eating breakfast at the kitchen table with her husband. Across from them, burbling away happily in a high-chair, sat their baby daughter, Mollie. “She was looking at us, we were looking at her,” Heckerling recalls, nearly four decades later. “Suddenly, me and my husband started ad-libbing things she might be thinking.” As the sleep-deprived new parents amused themselves by improvising their child’s inner monologue, something occurred…

EVERY CHRISTMAS, a jolly man commandeers our screens to bring gifts of festive joy and good cheer. His name? Chris Columbus (no relation to the explorer). He is the filmmaker behind some of the most beloved, endlessly rewatchable Christmas films of the past four decades. His Crimbo-filmography began in 1985 as the screenwriter behind Gremlins; later, he almost directed National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, before scoring his first major hit as director with 1990’s home-invasion classic Home Alone, and its inarguably superior 1992 sequel. Less festive films followed (including Mrs. Doubtfire and the first two Harry Potters), but Columbus always found a way to return to the Yuletide hearth, whether as writer (Christmas With The Kranks), producer (Jingle All The Way), or director (The Christmas Chronicles 2). He spoke to Empire…

HELEN O’HARA WENT BACK TO MIDDLE-EARTH “I rode, rode for ruin and the world’s ending, hosting an Empire VIP Club screening of anime epic The Lord Of The Rings: The War Of The Rohirrim, and talking to the filmmakers. Turns out horses are really hard to animate; luckily the Mûmakil were easy-going.” JOANNA MORAN OVERSAW OUR WILLEM DAFOE PHOTOSHOOT “Willem Dafoe joined us at the London studio of photographer Nadav Kander (pictured with the actor) for an amazing shoot. Dafoe told me his background was in movement and performance art — you can really see it in the finished product.” BETH WEBB VISITED JAPAN — VIA CATBUS “Imagine a small child being let loose in an empty toy store after hours, and this is roughly akin to what I felt…

EXCLUSIVE INVITES TO EVENTS CURATED BY THE EMPIRE TEAM THE ULTIMATE EMPIRE EXPERIENCE Reading the magazine is only the beginning. To get closer to Hollywood than ever before, join the Empire VIP Club. Screenings with A-listers in the house, our deep-dive Spoiler Special podcast, the magazine direct to your door with bespoke covers, plus free cinema tickets. All for the incredible value of £8.99 a month. Join us today! SIGN UP NOW: GREATMAGAZINES.CO.UK/EMPIREVIP OR SCAN THIS QR CODE SCAN HERE VIP MEMBERSHIP ONLY £8.99 PER MONTH* Worth over £130! INCLUDES: ✔ Exclusive live events, including preview screenings and Q&As ✔ 13 print issues of Empire a year ✔ Choice of an annual Picturehouse Membership or a Cineworld regular Combo deal, with two cinema tickets** ✔ Access to the Empire Spoiler Special podcast ✔ Exclusive…

THE PREMISE OF Paddington In Peru is that Aunt Lucy is gone. “Gone, what do you mean, gone?” is not a question you’re asking right now, because everyone knows what “gone” means. Nonetheless, Hugh Bonneville’s Henry Brown does ask this of Olivia Colman’s cheery singing nun in the movie, because apparently no-one — from Carmela Soprano to Doctor Who to that breakdancing lion in Madagascar — understands that simple, four-letter word. Which makes me, quite frankly, want to use a four-letter word myself. Apple TV+’s ’60-set series Palm Royale also included the questionable question this year — “The gun, it’s gone!”, “What do you mean, gone?” — as did Netflix space show The Signal, adding a touch of originality with, “Gone? What does that mean?” As far as I can…

THE BATMOBILE PRICE: £2.3 MILLION Ten Tumblers, as featured in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, are now being sold by Warner Bros. Discovery’s Global Consumer Products division. Each features Kevlar armour and smokescreen deployment, though sadly no flamey jet-engine. THE BATARANG PRICE: £43,000 The Caped Crusader’s DIY boomerangs occasionally come up for auction at prop houses. This one, which Robert Pattinson used to sever an electrical cable in The Batman, sold for north of £40k, presumably to someone with an urgent electrical-cable problem. THE BATSUIT PRICE: £160,000 Yes, you too can don Bats’ iconic cape, cowl and gadget-laden belt, as designed by costume supremo Lindy Hemming. At least, you can if you’re the person who successfully bid for this in a Prop Store auction. Let’s hope they never meet the…

“THERE HAS TO be an aspect of it that scares me. There’s got to be something that’s keeping me up at night.” Steven Soderbergh is telling Empire about his motivations as a filmmaker. For his upcoming movie Presence, that fear can be attributed to a few things. Firstly, it’s about a mysterious, invisible entity floating around the confines of an old family home, a premise inspired by a series of occurrences involving a deceased woman witnessed in Soderbergh’s own abode by his housesitter. “There were incidents in the early years of, ‘Did I leave that light on? Was that door really closed?’” he remembers. “But I have to say, that all stopped, like, four or five years ago. I think either she moved on or [was] bored.” Secondly, the film…

A FULL-SCALE facsimile of a 14th-century Swiss village is not where Empire expected to end up an hour on from landing at Rome’s Fiumicino Airport. Yet here we are, amid gatehouses, battlements and market stalls groaning with fabricated victuals, on the set of action-heavy saga William Tell. The film stars Claes Bang as the Swiss folk hero, who, according to legend, shot an apple off his son’s head with a crossbow, a stunt that will be the focus of today’s shoot. Bang and director Nick Hamm tell us about pulling off the legacy-defining act. APPROACH THE MARK “It’s a massive choice Tell has to make,” Bang says of the legendary marksman. “How do you go about making sense of something like that?” The actor had heard of Friedrich Schiller’s play…

OUT 26 DECEMBER / CERT 15 / 134 MINS DIRECTOR Michael Gracey CAST Jonno Davies, Robbie Williams, Steve Pemberton, Alison Steadman, Damon Herriman, Raechelle Banno PLOT Coming from humble beginnings, Robbie Williams (Davies) — in CG chimp form — finds fame as a pop star and wrestles with his demons. WE’RE JUST A few minutes into Better Man when the eight-year-old Robert Williams — very much played by a CG chimp — is abandoned by his father. Williams steps out onto the streets of Stoke-on-Trent singing ‘Feel’, a song by the pop star he will later become. And despite none of that making sense on paper, your heart shatters. His shoulders slump and his green, glassy, watery eyes plead for protection as the strings swell. “I just wanna feel real…

OUT NOW / CERT 12A / 134 MINS DIRECTOR Kenji Kamiyama CAST Brian Cox, Gaia Wise, Luke Pasqualino, Miranda Otto, Lorraine Ashbourne, Yazdan Qafouri, Benjamin Wainwright PLOT In Rohan, mighty king Helm Hammerhand (Cox) wars with bitter rival Wulf (Pasqualino). Helm’s headstrong daughter Hèra (Wise) must save their people. “ALL MIDDLE-EARTH knows the tale of the War Of The Ring,” moodily intones Miranda Otto’s Cate Blanchett-esque voiceover at the beginning of The War Of The Rohirrim. But the story of Helm Hammerhand and his daughter Hèra, we are told, is “not a song you will have heard sung”. That’s partly because it’s a tale plucked from the depths of J.R.R. Tolkien’s appendices, set two centuries before Frodo was even a twinkle in Sauron’s Great Eye. It is almost literally a footnote,…

PC, PS4/PS5, XBOX SERIES X|S Half chilled vibes, half Twin Peaks creepy, this direct sequel to 2015 franchise-starter Life Is Strange sees time-twisting teen Max now able to open portals to an alternate timeline, using her new powers to try to stop the murder of her best pal. With witty dialogue, complex characters and gorgeous graphics (though it’s a shame Max’s notebook scribbles no longer look hand-drawn), it’s a spooky treat right up to the X-Men-ish ending.…

OUT 10 JANUARY / CERT TBC / 114 MINS DIRECTOR Halina Reijn CAST Nicole Kidman, Harris Dickinson, Sophie Wilde, Antonio Banderas, Gaite Jansen PLOT Romy (Kidman) risks her marriage to Jacob (Banderas) and her position as a tech CEO when her secret desires are met by Samuel (Dickinson), a new intern at her firm. NICOLE KIDMAN HAS never been a risk-averse actor. For every commercial notch in her body of work, be it Bewitched or Moulin Rouge!, there’s a Birth or Dogville: films that mine the darker depths of humanity, often to the extreme. Babygirl may not linger in those shadowy corners for quite as long, but is nonetheless a reminder of Kidman’s gutsy choices and no-holds-barred approach to performing. In this film, directed by actor-turned-filmmaker Halina Reijn (who made…

THE HOWLING COMMANDOS An elite World War II fighting squad led by a man named Dum Dum (Neal McDonough), the Howling Commandos fought alongside Captain America in 2011’s The First Avenger, and haven’t been seen since. It’s unlikely they were all frozen in ice, but there’s franchise potential here. ‘Dum Dum And Dumber’, anyone? THE SCORPION This villain was the sting in the tail at the end of Spider-Man: Homecoming, with Michael Mando recruited to play Mac Gargan (a jailmate of Michael Keaton’s the Vulture), who is better known as the Scorpion. Perhaps he’s stuck in solitary confinement, which is a better fate than the Vulture’s, who showed up briefly in Morbius, looking completely baffled. EROS No larger ball has been dropped than Eros, introduced at the end of Eternals.…

GET CARTER (1971) Gateshead’s Trinity Square was officially the UK’s best-loved Brutalist car park, thanks to its role in Mike Hodges’ Michael Caine gangland classic. Sadly, this bleakly beautiful icon was demolished in 2010, despite protests from Sylvester Stallone (star of 2000’s remake), who pleaded: “Please don’t tear that thing down.” A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1972) The angular concrete shapes of east London’s Thamesmead estate were a perfect match for Stanley Kubrick’s dark satire. The grim, grey location, spotted by Kubrick in an architectural magazine, was designed as a utopian paradise, but soon gained a reputation for crime and violence — ideal for a near-future dystopia. HIGH-RISE (2015) The brutalism is practically built into the DNA of Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s thriller. Both book and film depict a tower…

FOR ALL THE headlines about freaking-out audiences fleeing screenings (yawnnn), The Substance will be remembered, celebrated, for Demi Moore’s bold (bonkers) performance, and director Coralie Fargeat’s blazing cinematic — and feminist — vision of the male gaze. One, she tells Empire, women “internalise, that becomes our jail”. And one that demanded creation of a “surreal, symbolic world”, in which Moore’s 50-year-old ditched fitness-star Elisabeth, and younger, perter version Sue (Margaret Qualley) — expelled from her back after she shoots up youth serum — become monsters. For Fargeat, that made practical effects a necessity. “She wanted that flesh-like quality,” says the man making it real, make-up and prosthetics designer Pierre-Olivier Persin. “It wasn’t just a movie for Coralie, just a story, a character. It was coming from her guts.” And speaking…

DUNE: PART TWO’S climactic showdown sees Paul Atreides, Timothée Chalamet’s messianic hero, cross blades with Austin Butler’s pallid Harkonnen, Feyd-Rautha, as the sun rises over the desert. Director Denis Villeneuve breaks down the vicious confrontation. “There’s something about knife-fights in particular that’s very frightening. And real knife-fights are very short. The shorter, the more dangerous. Battles in cinema often become fight porn — they’re too long and it doesn’t mean anything so they lose your attention. I try to create fights that are short, strong bursts of violence so you never lose the intensity. You want to be as economical as possible and just feel the brutality. “I wanted this battle to happen at the end of the night so you’d have the birth of a new world with a…

AH, REDNEX. WHAT A BAND. OR WERE THEY? It’s hard to say. ‘Cotton-Eyed Joe’ is a traditional American folk song, meaning: nobody knows who the hell wrote it, so the doors are open for any cover-version, cost-free. Enter Rednex, a Swedish pop outfit who, in 1994, retitled it ‘Cotton Eye Joe’ and Eurodanced it all to hell, taking the fiddles to 132 BPM. As infectious as it was irritating, it hit the number-one spot in many countries that didn’t know better, and lodged itself in everyone’s brains like a banjo-playing earworm. But its cultural impact waned. UNTIL NOW. The Lord (of Europop) works in mysterious ways. Not one, but two excellent films this year, James Watkins’ Speak No Evil and Andrea Arnold’s Bird, enthusiastically catapulted Rednex’s song firmly into 2024.…

“Put me back in!”MIKEY, THE MOMENT HE’S BORN “This has got to be the weirdest thing that has ever happened to me… well, so far…”MIKEY, A FEW SECONDS LATER “Boy, I hope they don’t get stuck together like that.”MIKEY WATCHING MOLLIE AND JAMES KISS “I hate it. I look like a boy. No offence.”MIKEY’S FRIEND MAGGIE, ON HER NEW HAIRCUT “Hey, I got more teeth than him!”MIKEY MEETING HIS GRANDFATHER “Don’t you just hate it when you get your head stuck in your placenta?”MIKEY’S LITTLE SISTER JULIE, IN THE WOMB “I’m your big brother Mikey. I’m gonna be in charge of your life for the next two or three years — smacking you around, getting you in shape.”MIKEY MEETS JULIE “Who’s this asshole?”JULIE MEETS MIKEY “I’m not pooping in that…

1 JOKER: FOLIE À DEUX (OUT NOW, VARIOUS) I was not on board at all with Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix’s first crack at carving a twisted version of Batman’s arch-nemesis, but adore their sequel, which eases back on the scuzziness, dials up the Lady Gaga, and is full of invention, technical excellence and, surprisingly given how cruel the first movie was, no little heart. Naturally, everyone else hated it. They’re wrong, I’m right. Trust me, this is no laughing matter. 2 HAWKEYE (OUT 13 JANUARY, 4K STEELBOOK) Just in time for, erm, next Christmas comes this physical release of Marvel’s most festive offering: a joyous, Shane Black-esque romp which pairs Jeremy Renner’s world-weary Avenger with Hailee Steinfeld’s pugnacious young archer, Kate Bishop, to glorious effect. One of the best MCU Disney+…

OFTEN IT’S NEAR-IMPOSSIBLE to guess the scenario when it comes to figuring out the connections referenced in endcredit acknowledgements. Yet this might be the least surprising Special Thanks in the history of Specially Thanking. Given that he starred in Jeremy Saulnier’s first three movies (Murder Party, Blue Ruin and Green Room), and wrote his fourth (Hold The Dark), it would have been more of a shock if Macon Blair hadn’t been mentioned in the credits of Rebel Ridge, Saulnier’s latest thriller. “We’re creative partners,” says Saulnier. “Our first film was, I think, when he was 12 and I was 11 years old. He’s my first script-read, he’s my last script-read. He helps get me through the process. We’re both kids from Virginia navigating Hollywood. I trust his taste.” That extends…

THE FORCE IS UNUSUALLY STRONG My midi-chlorians must have been doing their thing, because once I got out of bed this morning and grabbed the next T-shirt in the drawer, what did I find waiting for me downstairs? The Star Wars: Andor subscriber issue. STEPHEN COWIE, ALLOA, SCOTLAND Even Master Yoda doesn’t have a midi-chlorian count that high! For your well-coordinated T-shirt game, Stephen, have 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 pre-loaded with five free tickets, and gets you access to exclusive discounts on food, snacks and drinks. When you write to us, please include your full contact details so we…

NICK DE SEMLYEN IS BETTING ON… CONCLAVE What looked from afar like a ponderous Church drama (think: Doubt) in fact hit upon the Holy Trinity of Oscar buzz: it’s packed with heavyweight actors, is about a serious topic, but yet is entertaining as hell. (In fact, it’s been described by one social-media wag as “Gossip Girl in the Vatican”.) Plus, this tale of scurrying cardinals and dramatic chimney smoke, shot like a ’70s conspiracy thriller, is more likely to sway older Oscar voters than the edgier contenders. I’d tell you to put money on it, but that would contravene Hebrews 13:5. BETH WEBB IS BETTING ON… WICKED Something has changed within the Best Picture race. Something is not the same. Come the 2025 Academy Awards, it will have been 22…

THE BODY Stephen Graham’s first step when getting into character for Steven Knight’s Victorian-era drama was transforming his body into that of a seasoned, fearsome bare-knuckle fighter. “My objective was to get big,” he tells Empire. “I thought, ‘I’m going to eat — literally — sleep, dream this character,’ in terms of the physicality.” The actor seriously bulked up, thanks to an intense workout routine. “It was five solid days a week of training, five meals a day, loads of protein, ice baths,” he remembers. “I became like a proper athlete.” At points, Graham didn’t even recognise himself. “I’ve never been that big,” he says. “It changed the way I sat, the way I conducted myself. The first day of filming, the director went, ‘Do you want to look at…

A HAND ON FIRE. Rupert Friend, stabbed in the neck. Gallons of blood. These are just some of the brutal delights in Companion, a twist-laden thriller from writer-director Drew Hancock, and produced by Zach Cregger, whose last film Barbarian was a tense word-of-mouth hit. It stars The Boys’ Jack Quaid and Heretic’s Sophie Thatcher as Josh and Iris, a couple whose relationship takes a dark turn during a trip away with friends. The pair discuss forging their unique connection. ACCLIMATISING TO THE SCRIPT Sophie Thatcher: I was shocked, I was intimidated. I couldn’t ever imagine playing this role, and I’ve never really had that before. Jack Quaid: I got an email, and I remember seeing the words: “From the team that did (all caps) BARBARIAN.” As an actor, when you…

OUT 8 JANUARY / CERT 15 / 89 MINS DIRECTOR Jesse Eisenberg CAST Jesse Eisenberg, Kieran Culkin, Will Sharpe, Jennifer Grey A Real Pain is a sublime version of that often mishandled genre: the mismatched-buddy comedy. Jesse Eisenberg’s second film as a writer-director pitches two American Jewish cousins, nervy David (Eisenberg) and extrovert Benji (Kieran Culkin) on a tour of Poland to pay respects to their recently passed beloved grandmother, a Holocaust survivor. It’s by turns funny and emotional as the trip invokes some deep-seated familial tensions against the backdrop of the biggest trauma in European history, the film offering a tender treatise on different conceptions of pain. It’s small in scale but Eisenberg walks the tonal tightrope expertly, gets great performances from his cast, and forms a double act with…

OUT 10 JANUARY / CERT TBC / 124 MINS DIRECTOR Pablo Larraín CAST Angelina Jolie, Pierfrancesco Favino, Alba Rohrwacher, Haluk Bilginer, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Stephen Ashfield PLOT 1977. Famed opera singer Maria Callas (Jolie) lives quietly in her Paris apartment, mulling over a comeback. But her poor health — and her past — haunts her. THERE ARE EFFECTIVELY three stories being told in Maria. The first is the surface-level plot, the life of Maria Callas, told through that life’s final few days: the legendarily charismatic American-born Greek singer who beguiled the opera world with her exceptional voice and her dramatic private life, a foundational myth of the definitional diva. It is also the story of Pablo Larraín, the Chilean filmmaker who has become obsessed with making sumptuous, psychologically rich period biopics…

OUT NOW (DISNEY+) / EPISODES VIEWED 3 OF 8 SHOWRUNNERS Jon Watts, Christopher Ford CAST Jude Law, Ravi Cabot-Conyers, Ryan Kiera Armstrong, Kyriana Kratter, Robert Timothy Smith, Nick Frost PLOT On their sleepy home planet, four children discover a spaceship, which accidentally blasts them into hyperspace. Jod Na Nawood (Law) may be their only salvation. IT’S A FUNNY old time for the galaxy far, far away. With the next Star Wars film not due for another year-and-a-half, and plans for others in continual flux, the focus — and pressure — falls on the small screen. And with the exception of The Mandalorian and Andor, the live-action TV shows have found mixed success. Enter Skeleton Crew, from Spider-Man director Jon Watts and his longtime collaborator Christopher Ford — which places all…

OUT 3 JANUARY / CERT 12A / 140 MINS DIRECTOR RaMell Ross CAST Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger, Daveed Diggs, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor PLOT In segregated 1960s Florida, young Elwood (Herisse) is wrongfully sent to the Nickel Academy reform school, an effective jail for African-Americans. THERE MIGHT NOT be anything else like RaMell Ross’ Nickel Boys. Adapting the 2019 novel by Colson Whitehead (best known to most for The Underground Railroad, adapted for TV by Barry Jenkins in 2021), Ross finds an unorthodox approach here: extrapolating the book’s third-person narrative into a first-person point-of-view, the camera almost entirely presenting the action as through the eyes of its protagonists. Think Peep Show, but as a serious and urgent drama. It follows Elwood (Ethan Herisse), a young idealist living in…

BLACK DOVES TV “Doesn’t try to avoid spy-thriller genre clichés, but instead finds its very individual personality by mashing and twisting them into something surprising, thrilling and much more fun than 90 per cent of current offerings.”OLLY RICHARDS BOGART: LIFE COMES IN FLASHES FILM “Bogiephiles who know their Sahara from their Sirocco may not find much new in Kathryn Ferguson’s documentary, but anyone interested in early-to-mid-20th-century Hollywood history will discover plenty to spark further investigation.”NEIL ALCOCK ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT FILM “Writer/director Payal Kapadia’s vision immerses us in the rhythms of Mumbai, guided by moments of unexpected happenstance and beauty. She delivers a memorable and compassionate slice-of-life drama.”GAVIA BAKER-WHITELAW OUR LITTLE SECRET FILM “Lindsay Lohan’s latest attempt to colonise the Christmas-romantic-comedy market is a typically formulaic seasonal sugar-rush that’s…

IN 2014, CAMERON DIAZ RETIRED FROM ACTING. After finishing work on a remake of Annie, in which she played foster-home matriarch Miss Hannigan, Diaz called an end to her Hollywood career, which had generated over $3 billion in the US alone and seen her work with the likes of Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone and Tom Cruise. That retirement, however, is now over. Diaz returns next month in Back In Action, a family action-comedy, and in a sense she’s picking up where she left off. It reunites her with Jamie Foxx, her co-star in Annie (he played entrepreneur Will Stacks), as well as Oliver Stone’s 1999 sports drama Any Given Sunday. Here they play Emily and Matt, a pair of spies who fall in love while working undercover and leave their…

The ultimate Empire experience. See page 8 for details. Every issue delivered to your door, before it arrives in shops, with exclusive collectible covers SUBSCRIBE BY VISITING EITHER GREATMAGAZINES.CO.UK/EMPIRE, CALLING 01858 438 884 OR SCANNING THE QR CODE Terms and conditions: *Saving applies to initial trial term of 6 issues for £19.99. The minimum term is 12 months. Offer closes on 30/12/24, for subscription offers after this date, please check our website. Subscriptions will start with the next available issue. Offers cannot be used in conjunction with any other offer. Trial offers are only available on recurring payment and will auto-renew to a price of £30 every 6 months after the initial trial period, based on the print+ subscription option. If you wish to cancel before the end of your…

KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES It’s the franchise that keeps on giving. Fifty-six years and God knows how many films on, the chatty apes returned, with Owen Teague’s eager young Noa going up against Kevin Durand’s absolute bastard Proximus Caesar. Apes… Together… (Box-office) strong. GLADIATOR II Let us discuss — applaud, in fact — whoever decided to not just give Fred Hechinger’s Emperor Caracalla a fabulous pet monkey called Dondus, but have Caracalla name him consul. Dondus ruled — not, ultimately, the Roman Empire, but definitely our hearts and minds. BETTER MAN The wildest swing this year, though, was having a CG chimp play Robbie Williams. Yes, the ones in Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes were fluent, but could they dazzle 125,000 people while singing ‘Let…

AFTER RELEASING HIS London crime drama Blue Story in 2019, writer/director Rapman knew what he wanted to do next: a TV show about a group of Black people who develop superpowers. But unlike cinema’s super-worlds, this would be different. There would be no heroes here, as such: this would be a grounded show, about regular people who wouldn’t quite know how to handle their burgeoning powers, using them just to get through the day. And these powers would all be connected to sickle cell, the genetic blood disorder that predominantly affects Black people. Rapman was confident that he was onto a good thing, but had no idea how the show would be embraced once it hit Netflix on 27 June. He takes us through his wild few months. THE RECEPTION…

THE FIRST OMEN This prequel to 1976’s The Omen tells us how the Antichrist came to be. Nell Tiger Free stars as Sister Margaret, an American who has moved to Rome to become a nun, finding work at an orphanage. She then gets caught up in Satanic rituals, as you do, and her faith is tested. Don’t forget your rosary. IMMACULATE In 2024’s other nun-becomes-pregnant-amid-religious-conspiracy horror, Sydney Sweeney’s novice nun Sister Cecilia is hailed as the next Virgin Mary. For promo, the actor watched the film with some actual female pastors: “Never seen a nun break another nun’s leg before,” commented one. PADDINGTON IN PERU In the fluffy little bear’s third outing, Olivia Colman plays the Reverend Mother, a singing, dancing, smiling, quietly scheming sister who (spoiler alert) may not…

1 ALL OF US STRANGERS Andrew Haigh’s beautifully melancholic drama tells the story of lonely writer Adam (Andrew Scott), who revisits his childhood home and begins a new relationship with the ghosts of his parents (Jamie Bell and Claire Foy). Alongside that, he strikes up another relationship, with the equally lonely Harry (Paul Mescal). Even though it was released back in January, we’re still smitten, and still crying: Team Empire, taking in our editorial staff and regular contributors, have overwhelmingly voted it as the best film of the year. We spoke to Haigh about All Of Us Strangers’ ever-growing impact. “This is so cool. I’ve read Empire literally since it first came out. The idea that I could ever be even involved in film, let alone be a director, was so…

THE SHOW MAY have been called Agatha All Along, but Jac Schaeffer’s follow-up to WandaVision turned out to be much more than just a vehicle for Kathryn Hahn to show off what she could do (the answer: pretty much all of it). Around Agatha Harkness, Schaeffer constructed a witches’ coven of compelling characters, and put them through a series of terrifying trials on The Witches’ Road. Here, Schaeffer dissects them (and their ultimate fates, so beware of spoilers) exclusively for Empire… AGATHA HARKNESS Mind you, the final episode does very much lean into the show’s title, revealing that ‘The Ballad Of The Witches’ Road’, the song that runs through the entire season (it’s the first thing we hear, as Agatha hums it in her car), was actually created by Agatha…

THIS MONTH CHRISTMAS MOVIES 1 What is the title of the film-within-a-film that plays throughout Home Alone? 2 In each instalment in the National Lampoon’s Vacation series, the Griswold children, Russ and Audrey, have been played by two different actors. Who takes the roles in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation? 3 Can you remember the final line of It’s A Wonderful Life? 4 Judy Garland’s Christmas classic song, ‘Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas’, was written for which film? 5 When he arrives in New York, Buddy The Elf in Elf finds employment at which real-life department store, which sadly closed down in 1987? 6 What is the name of the Christmas song that kicks off Joe Dante’s Gremlins? 7 Which character links the following actors: Carol Kane, Jim Carrey, Will…