Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2025 i Empire

I BELIEVE IT was Dorothy Parker who once wrote, “If you can put flying monkeys on your magazine cover, put flying monkeys on your magazine cover.” With the second and final part of Wicked en route, we’ve gone full Munchkinland, with an epic cover story by Helen O’Hara featuring the world’s first cast interviews (Cynthia Erivo! Ariana Grande! Jeff Goldblum! Michelle Yeoh! Sadly the talking goat proved unavailable) and unseen images from the witch-versus-witch spectacular. Last year the first film hit the world like a Kansas tornado, triumphing at the box office, unleashing tie-in products from body wash (notes of raspberry and bubbles, anyone?) to cupcakes (pink and green batter, naturally), and even giving Greenwich a temporary rebrand to GreenWitch. How on earth can they top that? Turn to page…

KATHRYN BIGELOW IS thinking about the end of the world. When Empire asks the Oscar-winner what compelled her to make A House Of Dynamite, her first movie in nearly a decade, she describes the urgency of the nuclear question bringing her back behind the camera. “There’s no guard rails on the potential for a catastrophic nuclear reaction,” she explains. “I wanted an opportunity to begin a dialogue about it. It’s almost been normalised.” She sighs in disbelief. “No! That’s the end of civilisation!” Working from an original script by Noah Oppenheim (the former president of NBC News), A House Of Dynamite imagines a nerve-shredding scenario in which an intercontinental nuclear missile is fired at the United States. It’s not clear who fired it, but the machinery of the state immediately…

THE HEIGHT How do you make Ethan Hawke look more than half a foot shorter than he actually is? That wasn’t just a practicality in Blue Moon (Linklater used “old-school stagecraft tricks” to present Hawke as 5’ 2”). It was also key to cracking the mindset of a man who, on one of the hardest nights of his life — watching former collaborator Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott) achieve game-changing success with his new writing partner as Broadway smash Oklahoma! debuts — simply can’t stop talking. “[Lorenz] Hart’s size is such a huge part of who he was, and what drove him, and why he thought the way he thought,” Hawke explains of the American lyricist. “If somebody is 6’ tall and they won’t stop talking, they’re trying to control the…

“I JUST DECIDED — ‘Fuck it. I’m gonna do this.’” For years, Kate Winslet had been asked by colleagues and journalists — “I’m sure even people who I’ve spoken with at Empire” — if she would ever make the move into filmmaking. “I had thought to myself, ‘How do I answer that question?’” she reflects. “I think that I’ve often said, ‘I’ve been raising a family. I’ve got other things going on.’ But actually, I realised that the reason that I hadn’t directed before now was because I was probably scared.” Although the actor feels like she’s been integrated into filmmaking over decades spent on set, she was aware that making a clean pivot was a big leap. “And I’m acutely aware of how much harder it is for actresses…

OUT NOW/ CERT 15 / 108 MINS DIRECTOR Francis Lawrence CAST Cooper Hoffman, David Jonsson, Mark Hamill, Garrett Wareing, Charlie Plummer, Judy Greer, Ben Wang PLOT In a totalitarian future, Garraty (Hoffman) is one of 50 teenagers taking part in a marathon trek. The winner will name his own prize; the other 49 will die. BASED ON A NOVEL that Stephen King wrote in his freshman year at college before publishing it 12 years later, in 1979, under the pseudonym of Richard Bachman, The Long Walk has endured an aptly arduous journey to cinemas. George A. Romero and Frank Darabont are among the filmmakers who held the rights before dropping out of the race, and only now, as King turns 78, is the page-to-screen marathon complete. But boy, does Francis…

OUT OCTOBER 3 / CERT 15 / 120 MINS DIRECTOR Benny Safdie CAST Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Ryan Bader PLOT In the emerging UFC, Mark Kerr (Johnson) tries to overcome a devastating loss in the ring, with help from his girlfriend Dawn (Blunt) and friend Mark (Bader). “WE, AS HUMANS, sometimes, we lose. What would that feel like?” This is the question put to Mark Kerr (Dwayne Johnson) by a Japanese journalist at the beginning of The Smashing Machine. At the time of the interview, the mixed martial artist is undefeated, and the concept of losing seems alien to him. Flummoxed, he doesn’t have an answer. The rest of the movie provides that answer. Set between 1997 and 2000, during the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s wild pioneer years — when rules such…

OUT NOW / CERT 15 / 84 MINS DIRECTOR Rob Reiner CAST Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, Kerry Godliman, Chris Addison, Rob Reiner PLOT The estranged members of metal band Spinal Tap decide to reunite for one last gig, in the hope of securing their place in rock ’n’ roll infamy. “DIRECT FROM HELL… it’s Spinal Tap!” This is how legendary mock-metal band Spinal Tap are introduced on stage in Spinal Tap II: The End Continues. It’s a typically goth line from the band who have a song in their catalogue titled ‘Christmas With The Devil’ (“The elves are dressed in leather and the angels are in chains…”). But while it’s not quite true to say that you could read a double meaning in that proclamation, this is not…

OUT OCTOBER 3 / CERT 18 / 96 MINS DIRECTOR Justin Tipping CAST Marlon Wayans, Tyriq Withers, Julia Fox, Tim Heidecker, Jim Jefferies PLOT Budding pro football player Cameron Cade (Withers) suffers a potentially career-ending attack. A training camp with legendary player Isaiah White (Wayans) is his one chance to keep the dream alive. AS A DIRECTOR, Jordan Peele makes original, thematically complex horror (Get Out, Us, Nope). As a producer, on titles like Candyman and Monkey Man, he shepherds films that, while not always overtly horror, are unsettling, packed with big ideas and presented with visual dazzle. Him is about the loudest example yet, with a million thoughts, directed to within an inch of its life. It’s a whole lotta movie. Sometimes almost too much, but never less than riveting.…

OUT 17 OCTOBER / CERT TBC / 126 MINS DIRECTOR Derek Cianfrance CAST Channing Tatum, Kirsten Dunst, Peter Dinklage, LaKeith Stanfield, Juno Temple PLOT After robbing multiple branches of McDonald’s by breaking in through the roof, Jeffrey Manchester (Channing Tatum) escapes prison and hides in a Toys R Us store. STRANGER THAN FICTION. That’s the phrase that springs to mind when thinking of the true story behind Derek Cianfrance’s Roofman — that of army veteran Jeffrey Manchester (played by Channing Tatum), who committed a spree of robberies through the late ’90s and early ’00s by hacking into the roofs of over 40 McDonald’s restaurants, went to prison, escaped by stowing under a truck, and hid in a North Carolina Toys R Us store for months. An unbelievable crime caper with…

DANIEL DAY-LEWIS HAS BEEN AWAY. Empire is in Manhattan’s unfeasibly illustrious Hotel Chelsea with the 68-year-old and his 27-year-old artist son Ronan, and we remark on how nice it is to be doing this in the flesh. “Yeah, I missed that whole transition into not meeting anymore,” says Day-Lewis Sr, who requested this conversation be face-to-face. It’s been eight years since he announced that he would no longer be acting, and in his absence, the film industry has had its ups and downs, as has the world, taking in a pandemic which heralded, well, more video interviews than we were previously accustomed to. Yet here we are, and here he is too: nothing less than a living legend, having returned to the fold with a thoroughly family endeavour. Family is everything…

SCOTT COOPER DIDN’T WANT TO MAKE A BIOPIC. After he wrote and directed 2009’s Crazy Heart, a film starring Jeff Bridges as an alcoholic country singer, he was offered all kinds of biopics for musicians he loved: Elvis, Miles Davis, Chet Baker. But he turned them all down, making films about American mobsters (Black Mass), dark American history (Hostiles) and murder (The Pale Blue Eye) instead. Then, in 2023, someone came to him with a book by Warren Zanes, Deliver Me From Nowhere: The Making Of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, and asked if he was a fan. “Who isn’t?” Cooper replied. This time it was different. For Cooper, the idea hit on something that had been missing from every other musician’s story he was offered. This was not a biopic. This…

EMPIRE IS TALKING TO Gareth Edwards in a toilet. It’s certainly on-brand for a Jurassic movie, but we’re here not hiding from an angry T-Rex, but rather a gaggle of influencers and publicists on the final day of Edwards’ Jurassic World Rebirth publicity tour. It is, it should be said, a particularly nice toilet, one situated in a Thai hotel that recently stood in for the White Lotus, but there’s no getting away from the fact that we’re currently sitting next to a khazi and chatting about dinosaurs. A thoughtful and somewhat introverted filmmaker, Edwards — the British director of Jurassic World Rebirth (and Rogue One, and Godzilla, and The Creator, and his astonishing breakthrough, Monsters) — finds the relentless barrage of media attention challenging (“I feel like Guantanamo Bay…

WHEN EVIL LURKS IN 2023, I SERVED on the jury at the Sitges Festival in Spain, which is to fantasy and horror what Cannes is to regular movies. That involved two weeks of screenings, from early in the morning — I saw Poor Things at 7 am — to very late at night… and a downside to that regimen is fear fatigue. Even the most extreme and peculiar films have a hard time getting past the eyeballs and registering on the brain. We saw many excellent films which are only now percolating to UK distribution, but awarded the top prize to Argentine writer-director Demián Rugna’s Cuando Acecha La Maldad — aka When Evil Lurks. It’s now out on a special edition, bells-and-whistles Blu-ray that should be a cornerstone of your…

ALEX GODFREY MET DANIEL AND RONAN DAY-LEWIS “When Daniel Day-Lewis emerges from seclusion and asks you to meet him in New York, you get on a damn plane. Expecting a somewhat imposing presence, what I got was a gentle soul opening up alongside his extremely talented director son. Wish I’d worn heels, though.” JOANNA MORAN PRODUCED OUR JOSH BROLIN SHOOT “Had Josh Brolin not made it in Hollywood, he could always have been a cat-charmer: I watched on set as he skilfully wielded a hand-mirror to create a flare off the studio lights. Turn to page 80 to see our amazing shoot with Josh and photographer Arsenii Vaselenko.” TOM ELLEN VISITED THE SET OF PREDATOR: BADLANDS “I headed to New Zealand last summer to see what was cooking in the…

In Luca Guadagnino’s After The Hunt, Andrew Garfield and Ayo Edebiri are at serious odds. He plays Hank, a Yale philosophy professor and colleague of Julia Roberts’ Alma. When Edebiri’s younger PhD student Maggie accuses Hank of sexual assault, they become locked in a bruising psychological battle of accountability and ethics. Thankfully, when Empire meets the pair on a sunny terrace the day after the film’s premiere at the Venice Film Festival, they’re on friendly form. Edebiri even tries out her best English accent, to Garfield’s delight. (“It’s the ghost of Margaret Thatcher!” Edebiri claims.) They tell us about their unique collaboration. Did the two of you know each other before making this film? Andrew Garfield: Yeah! Not very well. We met at the Emmys. We were at the same…

LAST TIME EMPIRE spoke to writer-director Jalmari Helander, he was fresh out of ideas for how to kill Nazis. He had used them all up in 2022’s surprise hit Sisu, his film set in the last desperate days of World War II, when Nazis were in retreat from northern Finland, destroying everything and everyone in their path. Until they met Aatami (Jorma Tommila), a lone Finnish prospector who simply refused to die. With his imminent sequel Sisu: Road To Revenge, however, Helander has found a way to cook up more creative kills. “I changed the Nazis to different bad guys!” he grins. “So, I somehow found a lot of cool ways again. I don’t know why my brain is good at thinking of something like that, but that’s my superpower.”…

WHEN FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA began mounting his brash, brazen, bonkers $120 million opus Megalopolis, fellow filmmaker Mike Figgis’ ears pricked up. “Almost as a joke, I wrote to [Coppola],” Figgis recalls, “and said, ‘If you want a fly on the wall, I’m your guy.’ Thinking: ‘That’ll never happen.’ Then he suddenly emailed me and said, ‘Could you be here in two weeks?’” Figgis, the director of Leaving Las Vegas, an episode of The Sopranos (‘Cold Cuts’) and a couple of documentaries, quickly became the film’s official fly-on-the-wall documenter. The result is Megadoc, a candid, feature-length portrait of either an epic artistic achievement or a financially ruinous folly, depending on who you listen to — one he hopes will enrich the film’s infamous lore. “I had no idea what was gonna…

SOMETIMES ALL YOU need to hook audiences is a great logline. Case in point: “a horror movie from the perspective of a dog”, the killer sell that has helped make Ben Leonberg’s Good Boy one of the most talked-about indie films of the year. Then came its trailer, which caused a 2,000 per cent spike in Google searches asking if the starring canine dies. “Dogs are such an easy character to click into because people instantly love them,” Leonberg explains. “You don’t have to spend time convincing your audience that this is a hero they want to root for. They’re like, ‘Well, I’ll die for him if I have to.’” The hound in question is Leonberg’s adorable eight-year-old retriever, Indy. When the director first had the idea of having his…

OUT NOW (NETFLIX) / CERT TBC / 93 MINS DIRECTOR Tim Mielants CAST Cillian Murphy, Little Simz, Tracey Ullman, Emily Watson This is a gut-punch-packing adaptation of a novel by Max Porter, set in 1990s Britain. Cillian Murphy plays the frazzled headteacher of the title; over the course of a day, everything at the short-staffed reform school is at risk of falling apart. Arguments erupt, fights break out. Making an already frenzied day worse, a news crew arrive and Steve finds out the school’s funding is under review. Thanks to Robrecht Heyvaert’s disorienting cinematography, Steve evokes a visceral sense of things spiralling out of control. Some experimental shots go overboard, while Porter’s elegant screenplay sacrifices some characters’ interiority. But its sheer force of emotion — rage, defiance, unalloyed joy —…

OUT NOW / CERT TBC / 139 MINS DIRECTOR Luca Guadagnino CAST Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri, Andrew Garfield, Michael Stuhlbarg, Chloë Sevigny PLOT After her colleague Hank (Garfield) is accused of sexual assault, philosophy professor Alma (Roberts) reckons with her complicity. IS ANYONE BANGING out films with the speed and tenacity of Luca Guadagnino? The director seems to have given up sleeping, somehow squeezing in a trio of toxic, tempestuous love stories — Bones And All, Challengers and Queer — in about as many years. His latest certainly has some of the hallmarks of a Guadagnino joint (illicit passion, slippery morality, Michael Stuhlbarg stealing scenes). But at the same time, campus thriller After The Hunt, which seems to condemn both abuses of power and the excesses of efforts to expose…

OUT NOW / CERT 15 / 89 MINS DIRECTOR Ethan Coen CAST Margaret Qualley, Aubrey Plaza, Chris Evans, Charlie Day Did you hear the one about the red herrings in the desert? If not, director Ethan Coen and his co-writer Tricia Cooke would like to tell you all about it over 89 baffling minutes. The best reason this film has to exist is Margaret Qualley’s Honey, a cool private-eye character in search of a compelling case. Instead, here she’s called out to an apparent car crash in the desert by cop Marty (Charlie Day). From the stylish opening credits to the final shot, it looks and sounds great, but it’s never quite funny or clever enough to get away with being so loosey-goosey in its approach. There are colourful characters…

OUT NOW (SKY/NOW) / EPISODES WATCHED 10 OF 10 SHOWRUNNERS Greg Daniels, Michael Koman CAST Domhnall Gleeson, Sabrina Impacciatore, Tim Key, Chelsea Frei, Oscar Nuñez PLOT The documentary crew behind The Office begin to follow the employees of a new workplace: the ramshackle team running local Ohio newspaper The Toledo Truth Teller. THE AMERICAN REMAKE of The Office was something of a miracle. Stateside reboots of UK shows rarely make it past the first season (see The IT Crowd, The Inbetweeners, Skins). The Office 2.0 not only ran for nine seasons but gained enough slow-burning popularity to now launch its own spin-off, sharing just a few threads of connective tissue and that same shaky, side-glance-to-the-camera mockumentary format. It’s a tough act to follow a show that had such a unique…

THE CONJURING: LAST RITES FILM “Perhaps because this film was conceived as a victory lap, director Michael Chaves lavishes time and attention on everything but the plot. This film is comfortably over two hours, and it’s a full 75 minutes before the Warrens even enter the haunted house.” HELEN O’HARA EENIE MEANIE FILM “There’s a ton of vigour to this piece. It’s an action-comedy with more than a whiff of Shane Black to it, some action reminiscent of Edgar Wright, and the morbid, chatterbox humour of Quentin Tarantino.” JOHN NUGENT HOSTAGE TV “Silly and rather slight, this is the rare Netflix show that doesn’t outstay its welcome. A solid binge for viewers who like their thrillers lean, entertaining, and somewhat vacuous.” DAVID OPIE GOOD BOY FILM “Teased out over a…

“GAMBLING IS THE ONE ADDICTION THAT NEVER REALLY GOT ME.” Colin Farrell shoots Empire a wry grin and continues: “In my younger years, I’d go to Vegas and spend three hours at a blackjack table, but that was more to do with the booze being free for as long as you were sitting there. So, I never got the gambling thing. But with any addiction — gambling, drinking, shopping, fucking — the roots are the same. It’s a spiritual malady.” Lord Doyle — Farrell’s character in Ballad Of A Small Player — represents spiritual malady in human form. An embezzler on the run from the UK, Doyle is hiding out in the mega-casinos of Macau, across the harbour from Hong Kong, posing as an aristocrat while frittering away his stolen…

BENEATH A SKY DOTTED WITH BRUISE-PURPLE CLOUDS, RUSHING WATER FREEFALLS DOWN 100 FEET OF VOLCANIC ROCK. As it pummels the river below, the roar is so loud, you can barely hear yourself think. All around is lush, green forest, interspersed with moss-covered cliffs and dappled sunlight. It’s an idyllic sight — one that, ordinarily, would be a breathtaking reminder of the raw power and beauty of planet Earth. Today, though, it has a dreadlocked alien stomping about in front of it. It’s August 2024, and Empire is at Hūnua Falls, an aggressively picturesque plunge waterfall an hour outside Auckland, New Zealand. It’s the 39th day of shooting on Predator: Badlands, and this location is currently posing for Genna, a “death planet” housing some of the universe’s most fearsome creatures, on…

HE HAS ALWAYS LIVED AT FULL PELT. That’s the Josh Brolin way. For evidence, pick up his extraordinary 2024 memoir From Under The Truck, which packs in an incredible amount of incident: growing up with wild beasts in the house, a bad acid trip, his years running with a California gang called the Cito Rats, the time he got stabbed in Costa Rica, an occasion on which he got drunk and told Robert De Niro, “You got a fucking face.” On screen, too, there’s no shortage of wild stuff happening; Thanos (whom Brolin zestfully describes as “big, purple, ball-sack-chinned”) hurling a moon at Robert Downey Jr is just the beginning. He’s plundered pirate treasure, played a President, clambered up Everest, survived Juárez and Arrakis. In the recent surprise summer smash…

NOT ALL FILMMAKERS use the Special Thanks section to credit their mates, or their mentors, or their mums. Take Chris Columbus. He tends to tip his hat to organisations and institutions. The Residents Of Lincoln Ave on Home Alone. The National Portrait Gallery on Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone. On his latest, The Thursday Murder Club, A.L.E. Photocopiers get a nod. Photocopiers! It hasn’t always been thus. In the credits of Columbus’ directorial debut, Adventures In Babysitting, there can be found the names of actual human beings: as well as his NYU film professor Haig Manoogian, he thanks Stacey Sher, the producer of Get Shorty and Out Of Sight, and Raja Gosnell, the director of Never Been Kissed and Scooby-Doo. Although that wasn’t who they were back in 1987.…

LETTER OF THE MONTH THAT’S GOLD, JERRY! Your ‘top ten films of 1995 feature’ [‘The Ranking’, issue #443] and Jerry from Die Hard With A Vengeance got me thinking about how movies are such a great way of learning facts. Indeed, it was Jerry who taught me who the 21st US President was. I also know it was John Lennon who said, “If I’d lived in Roman times, I’d have lived in Rome,” thanks to Nicolas Cage in The Family Man. What is the most interesting thing you’ve learned from a movie? MATT TUCK, SOUTHAMPTON We learned from Ghostbusters never to cross the streams. Intel that comes in especially useful in a men’s urinal. To facilitate your incurable cinematic curiosity, Matt, have a Picturehouse membership. And if any other readers…

OF ALL THE problems that Clark Kent faces in Superman, the state of print media isn’t one of them. While the world at large burns, Daily Planet HQ remains a vibrant sanctuary fuelled by the bashing of keyboards, phones ringing off the hook, and inky-fresh newspapers strewn everywhere. There’s even a jovial dig thrown in about the use of adverbs, for goodness’ sake! Outside of the DCU, however, the shaky realities of old-school journalism are making their way into storytelling. In The Devil Wears Prada 2, Meryl Streep’s Anna Wintour-esque editor-in-chief must reportedly now navigate the decline of traditional magazine publishing. In order to save her beloved ‘Runway’, she will face her former assistant Emily (Emily Blunt) in a bid to score vital advertising money from the luxury group that…

IT’S BEEN A LONG TIME COMING Concerned with tales of immortal warriors battling across the ages, Highlander is a fantasy saga that spans oceans of time. Somewhat aptly, then, the journey towards rebooting the 1986 classic for the big screen feels just as long. Over the past 17 years, the directorial dragon-head katana has passed from Justin Lin to Juan Carlos Fresnadillo to Cedric Nicolas-Troyan, while rumoured heroic Connor MacLeods (Ryan Reynolds, James McAvoy) and villainous Kurgans (Vinnie Jones, Ray Stevenson) have all come and gone. CHAD STAHELSKI IS CALLING THE SHOTS The stuntman-turned-filmmaker has been attached to helm the swords-and-sorcery franchise’s revamp since 2016, with the project officially announced in 2023. What’s more, the John Wick director — a self-professed fan of Russell Mulcahy’s OG film since childhood —…

OSGOOD PERKINS IS not a director who shies away from influences. Longlegs was his tribute to The Silence Of The Lambs. The Monkey was his love letter to legendary animators Chuck Jones and Tex Avery. Now, his latest, Keeper, takes its cue from an unlikely source as it dares to ask the biggest question of them all: what is the deal with relationships? “It’s almost like a Seinfeld episode in terms of its set-up,” laughs Perkins. “You can see George Costanza and Jerry Seinfeld talking about it, because there are certain hinges in any relationship. It’s our first time meeting the parents, it’s our first time [out] in the country. It just focuses on one of those, and it gets pretty ragged.” Not that any Seinfeld episode was ever as…

JORDAN KING IS THINKING ABOUT… BENEDICT WONG’S HOT DOGS Zach Cregger’s Weapons offers plenty of food for thought — both figuratively and literally, the latter being Benedict Wong’s seven-hot-dog platter. Now, I love a hot dog, truly I do. But seven? With carrot as a side and zero crispy onions? That’s the movie’s real tragedy, right there… BETH WEBB IS THINKING ABOUT… BIG MOVIE MOTORS PURCHASES I’ve spent too much time scrolling through the Klairmont Kollections Automotive Museum closing-down auction lately. Expect to see me in the Rubble Racer from the ’94 Flintstones movie or a wonderful replica of the Mutt Cutts van from Dumb & Dumber on an A-road near you soon. JOHN NUGENT IS THINKING ABOUT…  ALIEN: EARTH’S ICE AGE OBSESSION I really wasn’t expecting the brooding new…

OUT NOW / CERT 15 / 105 MINS DIRECTOR Jay Roach CAST Benedict Cumberbatch, Olivia Colman, Kate McKinnon, Andy Samberg The original The War Of The Roses was a shock to the system; Jay Roach’s remake comes with a different set of pressures. He has his work cut out to update its story and characters and make us feel any narrative tension as the marital tension ratchets skyward. Luckily, it’s still funny. Couple Ivy (Olivia Colman) and Theo (Benedict Cumberbatch) have two romcom-friendly professions — chef and architect — but after a professional disaster, the marriage cannot quite recover. Perhaps because of Colman’s innate warmth and Cumberbatch’s ability to be self-deprecating, it’s never as venomous as the original; not the toothless remake we feared, but there’s an imbalance between the…

OUT NOW (APPLE TV+) / CERT TBC / 130 MINS DIRECTOR Paul Greengrass CAST Matthew McConaughey, America Ferrera, Yul Vazquez, Ashlie Atkinson PLOT School-bus driver Kevin McKay (McConaughey) must deliver a bus full of elementary school kids to safety during California’s deadly 2018 Camp Fire. AFTER FIVE YEARS of stymied projects, Paul Greengrass has returned with something that should be right in his comfort zone: a fact-based drama set during a notorious disaster. It’s character-based and non-sensationalised, and politically tinged in its approach to the world. But this isn’t quite as sure-handed as usual, lingering on details that don’t add to the story and underselling some that do. The film initially feels almost retro in its slow build, with ominous establishing shots of the arid brush and the tense hum…

OUT NOW / CERT 15 / 119 MINS DIRECTOR Daniel Minahan CAST Daisy Edgar-Jones, Jacob Elordi, Will Poulter, Diego Calva Based on Shannon Pufahl’s 2019 novel of the same name, On Swift Horses has a lot going for it: the starry cast of über-popular young actors (Daisy Edgar-Jones, Jacob Elordi, Will Poulter), lush visuals, sweeping romance, a rich period setting. While it doesn’t quite soar to the heights that combination might promise, it does deliver a textured, thoughtful drama examining queer love and repression in mid-century America. Edgar-Jones’ Muriel is doing her best to avoid marrying her partner Lee (Poulter). When Lee’s charming but unreliable brother (Elordi) visits, sparks fly between him and Muriel, setting off a journey of self-discovery. The filmmaking is a tad formulaic, but beautifully shot.…

OUT OCTOBER 3 / CERT TBC / 99 MINS DIRECTOR Harris Dickinson CAST Frank Dillane, Megan Northam, Amr Waked, Harris Dickinson PLOT After living on the streets of London for five years, Mike (Dillane) tries to turn his life around. ACTORS MAKING THE transition to directing are a dime a dozen, but there’s something special about Urchin, Harris Dickinson’s feature debut. Sure, he’s navigated his career so far with impeccable taste, working with the likes of Joanna Hogg and Steve McQueen, but as a filmmaker he’s more than just a sponge for his collaborators — he’s a fresh and original artist in his own right. In the impersonal expanse of London, Dickinson finds a personal story. Mike (Frank Dillane) has been sleeping rough in any dark corner he can find…

OUT 10 OCTOBER / CERT TBC / 120 MINS DIRECTOR Kirk Jones CAST Robert Aramayo, Maxine Peake, Shirley Henderson, Peter Mullan, Scott Ellis Watson PLOT John Davidson (Aramayo) lives with Tourette syndrome, for which he is ostracised — until he meets kindly Dottie (Peake). AS FAR AS cosy, feel-good British films go, I Swear begins in irreverent form. As John Davidson (Robert Aramayo) lines up to receive his MBE from Queen Elizabeth II, his nerves get the better of him. “Fuck the Queen!” he blurts out. It’s a deliciously iconoclastic moment, and one that serves both sides of this delightful film’s two wolves: the warm-and-fuzzy teatime template that it appears to follow, and the involuntarily foul-mouthed subject that it tracks. Directed by Kirk Jones (whose cosy feel-good credentials include 1998’s…

“Oh. My. God,” Wicked director Jon M. Chu shakes his head. “I have so many pictures of yellow bricks. Different hues. How warm or cool or textured; how the bricks are lined up. Are they staggered? How big are the bricks? Are the bricks indented? What’s the grout? Is the grout yellow? Is it a different yellow? How much dirt can you get on the yellow brick road? If it was a real road, there would be dirt, but you don’t want the yellow brick road to have dirt on it. Does it have an edge? Does it have a curve? We debated every single question for many, many weeks. It was a daunting task.” Everything about his adaptation of the musical Wicked has been similarly involved. The prequel to…

PETERBOROUGH IS a nice-enough city. It’s got a cathedral, a population of around 200,000 people, and a football team hovering around the lower reaches of League One. But, with all due respect to the good folk who live there, it doesn’t feel like the sort of place where a lifelong dream comes true for an Oscar-winning filmmaker. Yet, on a sunny September day last year, Empire popped along to Burghley House, a 16th-century country estate (with grounds designed by Capability Brown, no less), found just ten miles northwest of the city centre, to see just that. For, inside, around a large dining table, Oscar Isaac, Mia Goth, Christoph Waltz and Felix Kammerer are having a spirited exchange about the limits, ethical and otherwise, of science. And, just a few feet away,…

1__MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE — THE FINAL RECKONING OUT OCTOBER 13 / DVD, BLU-RAY, DIGITAL If this is to be the last Mission (at least for now), then it’s a fine, if unexpected, note on which to end. Although slower, more serious and sombre than any previous instalment in the franchise, it’s hard to deny the power of that last hour, as Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie go underwater and high in the sky to ensure Ethan Hunt goes out with a bang. Choose to accept. 2__M3GAN 2.0 OUT SEPTEMBER 29 / DVD, BLU-RAY, DIGITAL Shamefully shunned at the box office this summer, Gerard Johnstone’s killer robot doll (pictured below) returned with an upgrade, and a complete change of genre to action-comedy. That may have turned off diehard horror fans, but they…

IF YOU’RE A filmmaker trying to get a feature off the ground, it’s not unusual for a short film to be made as a proof of concept. Wes Anderson expanded Bottle Rocket into a feature. Damien Chazelle almost got whiplash from turning Whiplash into a film mere months after his short. Neill Blomkamp turned Alive In Joburg into District 9, Sam Raimi essentially remade Within The Woods as The Evil Dead, and so on and so forth. In that regard, then, The Ballad Of Wallis Island isn’t unusual at all, in that it’s an adaptation of a short film called The One And Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island. It has the same basic story — an eccentric millionaire called Charles Heath (Tim Key) hires a conceited folk-music star called…

Chris: Recently, it was reported that Scarlett Johansson has usurped Samuel L. Jackson as the highest-grossing movie star of all time. So now seems like a good time to Rank her very interesting career. Beth: I love her. It’s a real rarity, I think, to have a career as a woman over this many decades, just because of the way that the movie business is. Helen: I think because she has a deeper voice, she read older than her years. Maybe it meant she had a lot more choice than some actors coming out of their teens, and she was able to move up to adult roles a little bit sooner. And good for her, using her looks in an almost Marilyn Monroe kind of way, to push in all…