Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2025 i Empire

“THE SLOWER WE move, the faster we die,” intoned George Clooney’s Ryan Bingham in Up In The Air. Being an air-mile-loving corporate fixer, he wasn’t talking literal life and death. But in The Running Man, speed is your only protection against an actual, head-splatting, body-exploding fatality. Well, that and cunning. And, very possibly, looking like Glen Powell. Stephen King cooked up the wild sci-fi story, about a futuristic gameshow in which regular folk are hunted down by lethal bounty hunters, back in 1982. It got Arnie-ized five years later, in a movie in which Schwarzenegger yelled, “If you guys don’t shut up, I’m gonna uplink your ass!” Now, it’s getting revived again, in time to make Squid Game look like Challenge Anneka. Behind the camera: Edgar Wright, a filmmaker who…

MOST MUSIC BIOPICS proudly trumpet their accuracy. But on Ebony & Ivory — the third film from Jim Hosking, the absurdist director behind The Greasy Strangler — inaccuracy was the rule. It’s a wildly fictionalised retelling of the making of ‘Ebony And Ivory’, the 1982 ballad about racial harmony from Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder — played here by Hosking regulars Sky Elobar and Gil Gex, who by Hosking’s admission look “too old, too wonky, too wrong” for the roles. He tells Empire how he forged their duet his way. SMOKE A DOOBIE WOOBIE “Obviously, I did no research whatsoever,” says Hosking. But there are just enough crumbs of reality for the characters to feel recognisable — including a disgusting approximation of Linda McCartney’s vegetarian food, and Paul McCartney’s love…

IN ALL HONESTY, I did not expect that a highlight of a recent weekend would be witnessing Pamela Anderson use a samurai sword to slice off the head of a marauding voodoo snowman. Yet such was the case, thanks to one especially silly riff in the recent The Naked Gun reboot. It would have made me laugh wherever I saw it. But I doubt I would have laughed quite so much if I hadn’t been in a room full of equally tickled people, aka Screen 3 at the Muswell Hill Everyman. Special shout-out to the gentleman sitting in front of me, who erupted in a contagious chortle at the sight of Liam Neeson’s Frank Drebin Jr eating an adversary’s gun in the film’s opening minutes, and didn’t stop from there.…

THE LAST TIME Ben Wheatley made a movie, it involved Jason Statham titting about on a jet ski and a giant shark. But in case you were worried that directing The Meg 2 meant that Wheatley was saying “goodbye, chum” to the kind of low-budget, high-concept film that had made his reputation, here’s the good news: his new film, Bulk, is going to bake your brain. A film so demented that it makes A Field In England look like, well, a field in England, Bulk almost defies description, but we’ll give it a go. After an experiment goes horribly wrong, Sam Riley’s journalist is recruited to find a missing scientist (Noah Taylor), who is somewhere in a world of his creation. That, thankfully for the budget, just happens to look…

FORGET SLEEPING BEAUTY. Move over, Rapunzel. Take a hike, Snow White. With the graphic-novel adaptation 100 Nights Of Hero, a new kind of fairy tale is headed to the big screen. Written and directed by Julia Jackman (whose feature debut Bonus Track was released in 2023), 100 Nights Of Hero pays homage to One Thousand And One Nights, the centuries-old collection of Middle Eastern folktales in which female narrator Scheherazade tells stories to her husband each night to avoid execution. Here, within a fantastical universe that sees women forbidden from reading or writing, the storyteller is a quick-witted maid called Hero (Emma Corrin), servant to Cherry (Maika Monroe), with whom she’s a little bit in love. When Cherry’s spouse abandons her, leaving her with a handsome houseguest (Manfred, played by…

THE MINDSET Playing the title character in Tim Mielants’ drama Steve exhausted Cillian Murphy. Screenwriter Max Porter spun the story from his 1990s-set 2023 novella Shy, changing the perspective from the titular kid to a headteacher navigating a volatile 24 hours at an under-funded school for troubled teenage boys. “I wanted to be in a heightened, almost lucid, hyper-focused state of exhaustion,” says Murphy of the process. “I wasn’t in a great place during it. And we shot it all chronologically, in six weeks, in one location, so it felt like you were living the thing.” Mielants’ penchant for setting stuff up to surprise the cast on camera, on the fly, further intensified Murphy’s on-set mindset — and as if that weren’t enough, the actor was also producing the film.…

SHANE BLACK WAS 12 when he first met Parker. “I was at the dentist,” he tells Empire. “And I went downstairs, where there was a little spinner rack in a bookstore.” On it were a number of novels by Donald E. Westlake (under the pen name Richard Stark) about a professional thief called, simply, Parker. The writing was lean, mean, and laced with dark humour. If you’ve seen anything Black has written or directed, whether it’s The Long Kiss Goodnight or The Nice Guys, the Westlake influence has been writ large. “I used to say that if noir was a fine whiskey, Westlake’s the stuff you’d keep behind the bar,” he adds. “It’s the good stuff.” And now Black wants the world to meet Parker with his new movie, Play…

IMAGINE THE YELLOW brick road spanning the length of four football fields. Or Dorothy’s Kansas farmhouse spiralling up and over your head on a 160,000 square-foot LED screen while the sound of wind whips through 167,000 speakers. This is what’s being promised at the Sphere, where Las Vegas audiences can watch The Wizard Of Oz on its behemoth AV set-up. Yet while this may sound like an immersive experience akin to entering the Emerald City, the project has sparked mass criticism. Because in order to translate Victor Fleming’s Technicolor masterpiece into the space, artificial intelligence has been liberally deployed to “amplify” the original film. Google Cloud built a custom model for the film that has not only changed its texture to appear ultra-smooth, but used a method called outpainting to…

OUT NOW (SKY/NOW)/EPISODES VIEWED 5 OF 8 SHOWRUNNER James Gunn CAST John Cena, Danielle Brooks, Freddie Stroma, Jennifer Holland There was some understandable uncertainty when James Gunn decided to focus a series around Peacemaker — the most abrasive member of the Suicide Squad crew — but its first season was an irreverent delight. Now, Christopher Smith and his merry band of well-meaning misfits are back for more episodes that exceed our expectations, from the more ambitious opening credits to a central narrative that uses alternate dimensions to deepen its introspection on the titular anti-hero in surprising and heartfelt ways. It’s all anchored by a John Cena performance that finds the sweet spot between the silly and the vulnerable. For the moment, the Best Wrestler-Turned-Actor belt belongs to him.…

OUT NOW/CERT 12A/114 MINS DIRECTOR Matt Shakman CAST Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Julia Garner, Ralph Ineson PLOT The Fantastic Four are expecting a new family member — while taking on their greatest foe yet: Galactus, devourer of worlds. DESPITE THE INSISTENCE of this latest Fantastic Four film’s subtitle, it arrives carrying a distinct hint of déjà vu. Not least because 2007’s so-so sequel Rise Of The Silver Surfer covered the very same Earth-threatening ground, with the same (very, very) big bad. But, just as you might worry how yet another Fantastic Four could serve up anything close to fresh, you might also take heart in the relieving fact that fourth time (okay, fifth if you count the never-released Roger Corman-produced movie) is a charm. This is…

OUT NOW (APPLE TV+)/ EPISODES VIEWED 9 OF 9 SHOWRUNNER Thomas Pa'a Sibbett CAST Jason Momoa, Luciane Buchanan, Te Ao o Hinepehinga, Temuera Morrison It feels fitting that Jason Momoa’s best performance yet is based on a real-life figure who forever changed the history of his native Hawaii. Momoa — who co-created the series, co-writes, and co-directs — plays Ka‘iana, a warrior chief charged with uniting warring Hawaiian kingdoms in the face of European colonisation. Torn between worlds, this mountain of a figure commands every frame, whether conversing in the Ōlelo Hawai‘i native language or flinging himself into combat with only a loincloth. But while the detail is very sharp, the plotting meanders between set-pieces. Chief Of War cuts a brutal swathe through vital chapters of history—but you wish the…

OUT AUGUST 29 / CERT 15 / 107 MINS DIRECTOR Darren Aronofsky CAST Austin Butler, Zoë Kravitz, Matt Smith, Regina King, Liev Schreiber, Vincent D’Onofrio PLOT 1998, New York. Bartender Hank (Butler) agrees to look after punk neighbour Russ’ (Smith) cat for a few days — when a case of mistaken identity spirals his entire life out of control. DARREN ARONOFSKY ISN’T a director who tends to cut loose. His comfort zone is exploring the darkest depths of misery (Requiem For A Dream), Biblical apocalypses (Noah, mother!), and characters chasing oblivion (The Wrestler). But while there are typically Aronofskian themes at play in Caught Stealing, it is, ostensibly, the filmmaker having fun — a gritty, pacy, propulsive crime thriller, adapted from Charlie Huston’s novel, that grabs Austin Butler by the…

IT WAS A COLD AND WET WEDNESDAY on November 9, 2022, when Bristolian director Kirk Jones, who over the years has worked with Robert De Niro, Tom Hanks and Jennifer Lopez, turned up at John Davidson’s door in Galashiels, an unassuming town in the Scottish borders. Jones had been in touch with Davidson, who has Tourette syndrome, for a few weeks, having first contacted him on Facebook, interested in making a film about him, and kept him posted as he travelled up to meet him for the first time. The then 50-year-old Davidson, he imagined, might be anxious — he is at the best of times — and now Jones was on his way, the big filmmaker coming to Davidson’s small town. So, to put him at ease, Jones called…

THE SPECIAL-THANKS section of the credits for Guillermo del Toro’s 2021 noir thriller Nightmare Alley is business as usual, until it isn’t. The first two names we see are Alfonso Cuarón and Alejandro G. Iñárritu, the Mexican directors who, along with del Toro, are the self-styled Three Amigos of cinema. No surprises there, then. But things soon get interesting, with the inclusion of Derren Brown, the British illusionist, and Teller. Yes, that Teller, one half of Penn & Teller, the greatest magic duo since Paul Daniels and Debbie McGee. What gives, Guillermo? “They helped me with the mentalism,” he says. Nightmare Alley is, of course, about a con man named Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper) whose mentalism act propels him all the way to the top. “There are basically three or…

CHRIS HEWITT WENT ON THE SET OF THE RUNNING MAN “I ran all the way to Bulgaria to sit down with our cover star, Glen Powell, while he was making Edgar Wright’s The Running Man. He’s a very engaging fellow, that Powell. He’ll go far. Shortly after this picture was taken, one of us jumped off a bridge. To find out who, turn to page 48.” BETH WEBB SPOKE TO HARRIS DICKINSON “It was a real pleasure to speak with an imminent Beatle about goats in his native East London. And it was very on-brand for him to bring a Criterion Collection tote along for the day. (For the record, his Criterion Closet picks are well worth seeking out!)” HARRY STAINER COVERED EMPIRE VIP’S NAKED GUN SCREENING “Long live the…

“PEOPLE’S KNIVES WERE out, ready to cut us if we destroyed something they love,” director Jon M. Chu says of 2024’s Wicked: Part One. But the film, based on the first act of Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman’s hit stage show, instead became the highest-grossing musical adaptation of all time (making over $756 million worldwide) and won two of its ten Oscar nominations, for costume and production design. The knives, it seems, were retracted. “I don’t think any of us could have imagined the groundswell of love and support for the movie, the performances; for every department, really,” Chu says. This November, he’ll wrap up the story of Cynthia Erivo’s Elphaba and her best frenemy, Ariana Grande’s Glinda, in For Good. The reception to Part One both gives Chu confidence…

IT WAS IN Slow Horses’ third season that showrunner Will Smith — Emmy-winning writer, not Oscar-ruining actor — realised the spy series had become a smash. With a plot centred on a hostage rescue, it dialled everything up: more explosive action, twistier plotting, funnier gags (Smith is ex-Veep and The Thick Of It). The cult hit had reached a tipping point. “It just felt like a bigger show,” says Smith. “That’s when I no longer had to explain it to people… I remember renewing my car insurance and [telling the person] my job was, ‘Writer, Slow Horses.’ ‘OH MY GOD, DO YOU KNOW GARY OLDMAN?!’” Slow Horses is now heading into its fifth season, making it Apple TV+’s longest-running show, and it’s more popular than ever. Based on a novel…

WITH AVATAR: The Way Of Water, James Cameron presented to audiences a world full of whale-bonding and subaqueous spectacle. He also introduced two compelling human characters to his sci-fi saga: Brendan Cowell’s hissable, harpoon-happy seadog Mick Scoresby, and Jemaine Clement’s more empathic marine biologist Dr Ian Garvin, both of whom work for the nefarious Resources Development Administration (RDA). Speaking with Empire, the pair discuss the dysfunctional duo’s return in the third Avatar instalment: Fire And Ash. The last time we saw you both on screen, Scoresby had just lost his tulkun-hunting vessel and Dr Garvin had narrowly escaped with his life. How has the final showdown in Way Of Water impacted these guys’ workplace dynamic? Jemaine Clement: You know, in a different situation I think Scoresby and Garvin could have…

THE ELECTION OF Trump as President was — Trey Parker said — like a monkey running into a wall: “You’re like: ‘That’s funny,’ but how am I going to make fun of the monkey?” he pondered. “I can discuss the monkey… I can copy the monkey… But nothing’s funnier than the monkey just running into the wall.” The point was a fair one: satire is about using comedy to expose the stupidity and brutality beneath the surface. With Trump, many would argue that the stupidity and brutality are already on the surface — how do you satirise that? Eight years later, Parker and his creative partner Matt Stone have very much found a way. For South Park’s 27th season, the pair have come out all guns blazing against the second…

OUT NOW (DISNEY+)/EPISODES VIEWED 6 OF 8 SHOWRUNNER Noah Hawley CAST Sydney Chandler, Timothy Olyphant, Babou Ceesay, Alex Lawther, Samuel Blenkin, Essie Davis PLOT Two years before the Nostromo responds to that ill-fated distress call, another Weyland-Yutani vessel — with a lab full of extraterrestrial specimens — crash-lands on Earth. ALIEN: EARTH LULLS you with familiarity. Opening on the clinical, white-padded walls of a Weyland-Yutani vessel, we find daisy-petal cryo tubes surrounded by glowing monitors that spit text with a furious chatter. A ramshackle crew, complete with creepy science officer and grousing mechanics, eat and smoke around the breakfast table. It’s an almost uncanny facsimile of Ridley Scott’s Alien, lifted straight from 1979. But while the USCSS Maginot (history nerds may knowingly smirk) is not the Nostromo, its mission ends…

OUT NOW/CERT 15/102 MINS DIRECTOR Michael Shanks CAST Dave Franco, Alison Brie, Damon Herriman, Mia Morrissey Love is icky. Love is gross. Love is feeling so completed by someone that you want to live in their skin. At least, according to Michael Shanks’ bone-melding body horror Together. After a tumble into an H.R. Giger-esque cavern, newly engaged couple Tim and Millie (real-life married couple Dave Franco and Alison Brie) become physically drawn to each other in a manner that goes way further than anything sexual. A lot here may feel a bit like Body Horror For Beginners™, but when the film aims to make you squirm, it nails it. A fucked-up little love fable, its willingness to dig under the skin of its central relationship and actually interrogate it might…

OUT AUGUST 29/ CERT 18/ 102 MINS DIRECTOR Macon Blair CAST Peter Dinklage, Jacob Tremblay, Taylour Paige, Julia Davis, Jonny Coyne, Elijah Wood, Kevin Bacon PLOT Down-on-his-luck janitor Winston Gooze (Dinklage) mutates into an unexpected hero after being submerged in toxic waste. AFTER OVER A DECADE of development diversions and distribution troubles, the reboot of much-loved 1980s midnight movie The Toxic Avenger is finally splattering onto screens — and while it’s had a contemporary update in its core themes and special effects, it still retains the gory, spoofy silliness that made the original a cult hit. Game Of Thrones’ Peter Dinklage steps into the starring role as Winston Gooze, janitor at behemoth pharmaceutical factory BTH and widower stepdad to young Wade (Room’s Jacob Tremblay). When Winston is diagnosed with a…

OUT NOW (PRIME VIDEO)/ CERT TBC/ 90 MINS DIRECTOR Rich Lee CAST Ice Cube, Eva Longoria, Clark Gregg, Iman Benson It’s a copper-bottomed Hollywood pitch: what if the fate of America was riding on Ice Cube’s ability to cut and paste really fast? There’s tons of typing in this Amazon re-do of H.G. Wells’ The War Of The Worlds, the alien invasion seen from the POV of the desktop of Cube’s domestic-terror analyst. Depicting the attack via security cameras, phones, Facebook and CNN reports, the result is a Roland Emmerich-esque epic shot on 13 per cent battery. There are interesting updates — the red weed and killer virus get a fun modern makeover — but mostly it’s an ill-conceived effort with cheapo special effects, dumbass plotting, terrible dialogue, bad performances…

OUT SEPTEMBER 5/ CERT TBC/ 133 MINS DIRECTOR Spike Lee CAST Denzel Washington, Jeffrey Wright, A$AP Rocky, Ilfenesh Hadera, Aubrey Joseph PLOT Music mogul David King (Washington) is crafting a deal to cement his legacy when a ransom demand for his son abruptly derails his plans. SPIKE LEE’S LATEST joint is, above all, a celebration. He fêtes New York in his first hometown film in a decade, and his longtime collaborator, Denzel Washington. He pays off his longterm admiration for Akira Kurosawa, in a loose remake of the Japanese director’s 1963 noir High And Low. Lee even decks out his hero’s base in the blue and orange of his beloved New York Knicks. For all the high stakes and desperate moments of this thrilling crime drama, its filmmaker is having…

I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER FILM “‘Nostalgia’s overrated,’ warns this vacuous slasher with a wink. Trouble is, other than obnoxious characters meeting immemorable ends, that’s all it has to offer. Perhaps a full reboot might have been better.” MATT GLASBY HAPPY GILMORE 2 FILM “Like any Adam Sandler comedy film made this century, it never ascends higher than ‘hit-and-miss’, and there are some long stretches spent in the rough. But what it lacks in precision or panache, it makes up for in sheer goofy, golf-y geniality.” JOHN NUGENT THE ASSASSIN TV “It’s in the verbal sparring matches where the show has the most fun. There are killer set‑pieces here — yet it’s how the series plays with gender and genre that marks it out as something worth making…

WHAT DOES IT FEEL LIKE TO LOSE? BENNY Safdie wants to show you. “There’s this book I read a while ago called Losers — it’s a collection of essays on different people in different sports and how they’ve dealt with loss,” he says over Zoom, adjusting the angle of his screen so it doesn’t look like the entire sun is emanating from one eyeball. The essay that really got to him was Gay Talese’s 1964 Esquire profile of world heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson, written right after Patterson had lost his title to Sonny Liston. Safdie can’t remember it exactly, but he paraphrases: “Patterson says, ‘When I got knocked out, I felt like the whole stadium was giving me a kiss. But then right after that, I was hoping there was…

As wildfires started raging through her Californian community in the Pacific Palisades, Jamie Lee Curtis was on a plane to New York. It was January 7, 2025, and as she was en route to promote The Last Showgirl on The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon, she received a text from her husband (Christopher Guest) informing her he had been told to evacuate. “At the time that I did the Fallon show, I did not know if our neighbourhood had survived it,” she remembers. “The Pacific Palisades is where I shop. It’s the community I got sober in. That’s where I spend a lot of time. It had literally been incinerated by this fire.” Fortunately, Curtis’ home remained untouched, yet the tragedy reverberated around the actor-producer’s professional life: for years, she…

“I AM AWARE,” says Jake Schreier, “that my career makes zero sense on paper. There’s no through-line to any of it. And you know what? I don’t care anymore about that so much.” The 43-year-old director isn’t kidding, by the way. He burst onto the scene as an indie darling-in-waiting in 2012, with the excellent Robot & Frank, and quickly added the quirky and heartfelt teen dramedy Paper Towns in 2015. Both movies got him in the room with Marvel Studios, for meetings on Guardians Of The Galaxy and Spider-Man: Homecoming (which went, in the end, to Schreier’s film-school roommate Jon Watts). But after that, while he kept plenty busy directing music videos, commercials and TV with the likes of Lodge 49, Kidding and Lee Sung Jin’s Beef, that was…

IT IS THE fate of all Final Destination movies that, no matter how inventive their Rube Goldbergian kills are, they are defined by their opening accident, the sequence in which a major character has a visceral vision of imminent, looming, bloody disaster. Be it a plane crash, a rollercoaster malfunction, or a bridge collapse, Final Destination movies start with a bang. So, when Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein bagged the gig to direct Final Destination Bloodlines, the first movie in the franchise for over a decade, they knew that they had to go big, or go home. “We were very focused on making the opening premonition as epic and gloriously gory and spectacular as we could,” Stein tells Empire. And they delivered a deadly doozy. Bloodlines became the biggest…

1 THE BALLAD OF WALLIS ISLAND OUT NOW/DIGITAL My film of the year thus far (and we’re running out of pretenders to the throne) sees Tim Key’s eccentric recluse try to reunite a long-split folk duo (Tom Basden and Carey Mulligan) on an island so remote that there’s nothing to do but play music, argue and reflect on the wreckage of the past. Basden and Key’s screenplay, beautifully directed by James Griffiths, is pitch-perfect in its blend of character-driven humour, pathos and quirk. Warm, witty, wonderful. 2 HAPPY GILMORE 2 OUT NOW/NETFLIX Adam Sandler’s rage-fuelled golfer returns after three decades away, older but absolutely not wiser, in a cameo-crammed sequel that takes some absolutely wild storytelling swings. Thankfully, though, it delivers on the laughs, particularly when it gives in to…

LETTER OF THE MONTH THIS TIME, IT’S WEDDING Hi, guys. Avid Empire reader (21 years and counting) and massive Alien fan. I attended the London premiere of the Aliens Expanded documentary last year and would like to share a picture of a very happy me and Bill Hope. In my infinite wisdom and adoration, I did indeed call him an “asshole, Gorman” and he giggled. Top bloke. Anyway, I am getting married in November and would be mostly ecstatic to be included in the mag as an early wedding gift please. Mostly. PENNY GLEN, VIA EMAIL Congrats, Penny! For both your impending nuptials and meeting Lieutenant Gorman in the flesh. Please accept a Picturehouse membership as our wedding gift. Hope you have a glorious day in the Corps. Empire’s star…

PETER PARKER WEB-SLINGS back into his Brooklyn apartment after battling Doctor Doom in Avengers: Doomsday. Looking to relax, he sits down to read a copy of Empire. “You’d be looking at as much as half a million dollars for that, for just a few seconds’ screentime,” suggests Matt Bonin, managing partner at US ad agency Alto, and an expert in all things product placement. At the other end of the financial scale, “If you were integrated into the storyline, or wanted multiple verbal mentions… something like that could easily pass $5 million.” Welcome to the booming business of “brand integrations”. This summer saw Amazon products flood the Ice Cube-fronted War Of The Worlds, while Capri-Suns were sipped in Lilo & Stitch. It has ignited new debate about whether the practice…

YOUR CINEMATIC PRAYERS are answered: Benoit Blanc is back! After solving a familial murder in Knives Out and exposing a super-rich dummy in Glass Onion, Daniel Craig’s Southern-drawling detective returns to unspool another whodunnit in Wake Up Dead Man — a twisted, deadlier, church-themed mystery. With the film opening the BFI London Film Festival this October, writer-director Rian Johnson takes Empire inside his latest crime scene. A DARK TURN Following the sun-drenched, Greek island-set Glass Onion, Wake Up Dead Man returns to the shadows. “It’s Gothic in its tone,” Johnson says. “It’s going back to the real origins of the [mystery] genre, which are Edgar Allan Poe, Murders In The Rue Morgue.” As well as the detective stories of G. K. Chesterton and John Dickson Carr, Johnson cites tonal inspiration…

AFTER MUCH SPECULATION, Kevin Feige is now on the record stating that Marvel is looking to recast characters like Tony Stark and Steve Rogers in the great reset that will follow 2027’s Avengers: Secret War. That’s when (we think, and Feige suggests) Marvel’s existing, somewhat confusing multiverse will collapse into a new timeline. “Reboot is a scary word,” he said of the decision. “Reboot can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. Reset, singular timeline — we’re thinking along those lines.” That means that characters we know and love may never have existed in this reality, clearing the path for new incarnations of those heroes to appear without entirely negating or rewriting the originals. It means that, in this reality, Tony Stark may not yet have made…

THERE ARE SOME bongos behind Billy Zane. This seems appropriate on a couple of levels: firstly, they just seem very Billy Zane, who has always travelled through the world with an impish playfulness, but also because such percussion prominently features in Waltzing With Brando, in which he plays the late icon during the 1970s as he lives his best life in Tahiti. “I bought them for the movie,” Zane explains, Zooming in from his home. “They’re from the ’50s. I found them at a great pawn shop here in LA and they were perfect.” Alas, it was ultimately decided to not use them in the film, and here they live. He plays them a bit. “But takeaway chopsticks on a dashboard is really my best instrument.” Director Bill Fishman’s film…

OUT NOW/CERT PG/111 MINS DIRECTOR Nisha Ganatra CAST Jamie Lee Curtis, Lindsay Lohan, Julia Butters, Sophia Hammons, Chad Michael Murray PLOT Days before Anna’s (Lohan) wedding, a psychic event forces her to switch minds with her daughter (Butters), while her mom (Curtis) swaps with Anna’s future stepdaughter (Hammons). AS A SWEET and silly teen comedy with a big heart and outrageously good original songs, Freaky Friday has endured over decades. Its special sauce came courtesy of a then-teenage Lindsay Lohan and parental Jamie Lee Curtis, whose combined chemistry and knack for physical comedy worked wonders for the film’s body-swapping premise. It was a sparky partnership that called for a reunion, albeit under just the right circumstances. Set in the modern day, Freakier Friday has the advantage of taking place some…

OUT NOW (NETFLIX)/CERT 12A/118 MINS DIRECTOR Chris Columbus CAST Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley, Celia Imrie, David Tennant, Jonathan Pryce, Naomi Ackie PLOT A quartet of elderly amateur sleuths living in a luxury retirement home investigate the murder of a dodgy local businessman. CHRIS COLUMBUS IS probably eclipsed only by Steven Spielberg (on producing duty here) as the unassuming master of the Millennial childhood classic. Having written Gremlins and The Goonies, he went on to direct Adventures In Babysitting, Home Alone and its sequel, Mrs. Doubtfire and, of course, the first two Harry Potter films. Though he recently traded in family fare for producing Robert Eggers’ films, he’s back in the director’s chair with Netflix’s glossy adaptation of The Thursday Murder Club. If it’s been a while since you…

OUT NOW (DISNEY+)/EPISODES VIEWED 4 OF 4 SHOWRUNNER Todd Harris CAST Winnie Harlow, Cress Williams, Larry Herron, Adam Michael Gold, Jacques Colimon, Jona Xiao, Zeke Alton, Steve Toussaint PLOT A group of Wakandan warriors known as the Hatut Zaraze leave their homeland behind to retrieve vibranium artefacts lost to history. WAKANDA, FAMOUSLY, IS forever. So it makes sense that Wakandans’ adventures can go backwards in time as well as forward. In Eyes Of Wakanda — a four-part animated anthology series which expands the mythology first put properly on screen in Black Panther — the scope is not limited to the present day, or even Wakanda itself. Developed and executive-produced by Ryan Coogler, the series thrusts us into an Afrofuturist world of the past, from ancient Crete to 19th century Ethiopia…

OUT NOW (NETFLIX)/ EPISODES VIEWED 4 OF 4 SHOWRUNNERS Alfred Gough, Miles Millar CAST Jenna Ortega, Emma Myers, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Luis Guzmán, Steve Buscemi PLOT Wednesday (Ortega) faces up to an ominous premonition regarding roommate Enid (Myers), and investigates murders committed by a crow. IT FEELS BIZARRE that Wednesday returns at a time when Halloween is still months away. The show that became a runaway Netflix hit — while creatively reinvigorating director Tim Burton and turning Jenna Ortega into a generational star — radiates creepy, kooky and altogether ooky vibes, spinning the Addams Family character into her own Harry Potter-for-goth-kids YA detective series with hugely fun results. But Wednesday’s return at the height of summer speaks to Netflix’s blockbuster approach for the show’s second season — much bigger and starrier,…

OUT NOW / CERT 18 / 128 MINS DIRECTOR Zach Cregger CAST Josh Brolin, Julia Garner, Cary Christopher, Alden Ehrenreich, Austin Abrams, Benedict Wong, Amy Madigan PLOT When 17 children from one class at Maybrook Elementary School inexplicably disappear overnight, the community reels. What really happened? WEAPONS FIRES ITS starting shot almost immediately. An opening prologue, told by an unseen child narrator, explains what it claims is a “true story” in which “a lot of people die in a lot of really weird ways”. Then we witness the inciting incident: one night, at 2.17am, 17 school kids from the fictional town of Maybrook wake up, walk out of their homes and run off into the night, arms eerily outstretched, destination unknown — soundtracked, ominously and strangely sweetly, to George Harrison’s…

OUT NOW/ CERT 15/ 85 MINS DIRECTOR Akiva Schaffer CAST Liam Neeson, Pamela Anderson, Paul Walter Hauser, Kevin Durand, Danny Huston, CCH Pounder PLOT Detective Frank Drebin Jr (Neeson) and new acquaintance Beth Davenport (Anderson) take on evil billionaire Richard Cane (Huston) — and his mysterious P.L.O.T. device. 1988’S THE NAKED GUN — and to a lesser extent its confusingly numbered sequels, 2½ and 33⅓ — from the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team, are rightly revered as parody classics. They are also, it has to be said, relics of a bygone era: when comedy films still ruled the roost, when spoof was a genre in rude health, when it hadn’t been weakened by years of cheap knock-offs and straight-to-streaming slop. Comedy, the received wisdom goes, does not belong in a cinema anymore. Perhaps…

You’ve heard of Elf On The Shelf. You’ve heard of (but hopefully not participated in) Boar On The Floor. And you may have tried, but failed, to forget about The Cat In The Hat. But they all pale in comparison next to Powell In A Towel. It’s 19th December 2024. Six days ’til Christmas, not that you’d necessarily be able to tell by stepping onto the set of Edgar Wright’s new movie, The Running Man. There isn’t a tree in sight, and the only lights of note can be found on the mammoth multi-storey set that takes up most of a Leavesden soundstage. That set represents the YVA, a YMCA-style hostel where the film’s hero, Glen Powell’s Ben Richards, has taken temporary refuge. It’s a hugely impressive build, courtesy of…

Spelunking: not a hobby for everyone, and one with even less appeal for those who have seen Neil Marshall’s 2005 subterranean scare-fest The Descent. It was only the writer-director’s second feature film (following 2002’s gritty werewolf horror-thriller Dog Soldiers) and an unexpected box-office hit, making over $57 million worldwide on a budget of just £3.5 million. The film starts as horrifyingly as it means to go on, with a brutal car crash that kills the husband and young daughter of outdoorsports-loving protagonist Sarah (Shauna Macdonald). A year later, she heads to the Appalachian mountains for a caving trip with friends. Still drowning in grief but putting on a brave face, she joins a gang of five other women — best friend Beth (Alex Reid), half-sisters Rebecca (Saskia Mulder) and Sam…

THIS MONTH THE ACT OF SEEING I’M A VETERAN of challenging evenings in cinemas. The most extreme was a bill of two major experimental films I saw at the University Of Sussex Film Society in 1978. I haven’t seen either since — read on, and you’ll understand why — but recall them in detail. I believe they’re both essential viewing and cautiously recommend them to anyone with a serious interest in film. Your mileage may vary. User reviews on the IMDb offer a range of incredulous, appalled and just-plain-ticked-off alternate responses. Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967) and Stan Brakhage’s The Act Of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes (1971) run 45 and 31 minutes respectively. Yet they can both completely change your understanding of cinema — and even life and death. After…