Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2026 i Empire

BACK IN 2013, they strode into pop culture like they owned the place. Rocking instantly iconic overcoats and baker-boy flat caps with razor blades stitched into the lining (the deadliest hats since Oddjob’s steel-rimmed bowler), the anti-heroes of Peaky Blinders brought edge and street-smarts to TV. The ever-ambitious Birmingham gangsters would go on to run rings around the law and rival outfits, and win hearts all over the world, including those of such unlikely aficionados as Margot Robbie and Snoop Dogg. Fronted by Cillian Murphy, orchestrated by Steven Knight, Peaky Blinders was, simply, peak TV. They could have stopped there. But as Murphy’s Tommy Shelby once said, “There’s no rest for me in this world. Perhaps in the next.” And so, following six seasons, the still-scrappy bunch are back with…

“IF IT SEEMS impossible to pull off,” says Phil Lord who, along with Christopher Miller, forms half of Lord and Miller, the directors of outer-space epic Project Hail Mary, “that makes us want to try.” He’s not kidding, either. These are the guys, after all, who have made a habit of making the impossible possible, whether it’s clicking all the pieces of The LEGO Movie into place, dusting off a decades-old TV show, 21 Jump Street, and transforming it into a wild live-action comedy, or shepherding the Spider-Verse movies into animation game-changers. Project Hail Mary is based on a bestselling novel by Andy Weir, author of The Martian. Like that story, it revolves around an enormously resourceful main character, Ryan Gosling’s genius-level teacher, who is stranded in space on a…

BLOODSPORT 2 “An incredible, fantastic movie,” is how Trump has described Jean-Claude Van Damme’s 1988 martial-arts fist-fest. And with The Muscles From Brussels still cranking out his signature action capers (and recently posting a seemingly AI-generated video of himself meeting Trump), a POTUS-endorsed sequel doesn’t seem like such a far stretch. THE EXPENDABLES 5 Earlier this year, Trump appointed Sylvester Stallone as a “special ambassador” tasked with making Hollywood great again, along with Mel Gibson and Jon Voight. Perhaps his end game is to assemble a new line-up of action stars for this lengthy merc franchise? With a cameo from the President himself as Pecs McPOTUS? HOME ALONE: WASHINGTON Speaking of cameos, the former entrepreneur popped up in the 1992 New York-set festive sequel, briefly giving directions to young Kevin…

ANIME: IT’S THE word that conjures up the vast, varied and vibrant world of Japanese animation. Those three short syllables are now on the lips of every box-office guru in Hollywood, after two recent releases, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu No Yaiba — Infinity Castle and Chainsaw Man — The Movie: Reze Arc, ruled the roost at the multiplex at the back end of summer. With a worldwide gross of over $700 million, Infinity Castle alone surpassed Superman and The Fantastic Four: First Steps in the global charts, leading to speculation that these spectacular Japanese cartoons might just be the saviour of blockbuster cinema. Both of these movies were unleashed on cinema screens by Crunchyroll, the Sony-owned streaming platform and film distributor that has become a one-stop-shop for ravenous fans around the…

IT’S A BRUTAL showdown. Uma Thurman’s betrayed Bride and the ball-and-chain-wielding schoolgirl Gogo Yubari (Chiaki Kuriyama) come to vicious blows in Kill Bill: Vol. 1, with the former of course emerging triumphant. But in Quentin Tarantino’s original screenplay there was more to the story: a twin sister to Gogo, Yuki, who escapes the Bride’s massacre because she’s at home with a cold. When the news reaches Yuki, she seeks vengeance. Tarantino mourned having to axe the chapter, saying, “It was too crazy, too violent, and just too much action.” That is, until this November, when the gonzo escapade surfaced as an eight-minute animated short entitled The Lost Chapter: Yuki’s Revenge in video-game platform Fortnite. To realise his dream, Tarantino — who was approached by Team Fortnite with a request for…

YOU WOULD BE forgiven for having had a bit of scepticism or weariness at the prospect of Predator: Badlands. It is the seventh film in the franchise — ninth if you include the risible Alien Vs. Predator films. How many series hit new heights on entry number seven? In fact, Badlands turned out to be one of the freshest and most original Predator instalments since the first one in 1987: a film in which the many-fanged extraterrestrial Yautja hunter is, for the first time, the good guy, a protagonist we can root for — and not only that, he’s making friends with robots, attempting (awkward) jokes, and befriending a cute alien. All the while, also making bloody trophies of his enemies. It’s a testament to the vision of director and…

“I KNEW I had to do something,” says B.D. Neagle. “I wanted to make a big deal about it — to show how much the fans want this movie. Then I thought: ‘I wonder how much a billboard costs…’” US schoolteacher Neagle is one of a growing number of Star Wars megafans throwing their time, energy and cash behind a campaign to save ‘The Hunt For Ben Solo’ — a proposed sequel about Adam Driver’s redeemed villain, set after 2019’s The Rise Of Skywalker. Ever since Driver revealed, back in October, that he and director Steven Soderbergh had brought the idea to Disney, only to have it knocked back, the Force’s global fandom has gone into overdrive both on- and offline, disseminating “MISSING” posters with Driver’s face on them, flying…

“IT’S QUITE SURREAL, to be honest.” Akinola Davies Jr is speaking with Empire days after the news that his semi-autobiographical feature debut — about a father and sons’ trip to Lagos set against the ’93 Nigerian presidential election — has been selected as the UK’s entry for Best International Feature Film at next year’s Academy Awards. The news may feel otherworldly to Davies Jr, but the response to the film has been very real. Following its world premiere at the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes in May, where it won the Special Mention for the Caméra d’Or, the film scooped a British Independent Film Award and two Gotham Awards in the States. This emotional indie drama seems to be winning over every audience it meets. The film’s concept came…

PARK CHAN-WOOK knows a thing or two about murder. The Korean auteur responsible for thrillers such as Old Boy, Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance and, more recently, Decision To Leave has made a career out of telling homicidal stories. But he’s never made a film quite like No Other Choice, a farcical satire that plays out a little like Parasite crossed with Kind Hearts And Coronets and a touch of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. It tells the story of a paper-factory worker named Man-su (played by Squid Game’s Lee Byung-hun), recently laid off after 25 years of faithful service. Driven to desperation by his new situation and a highly competitive employment market, he decides to start killing his rivals for the only job offer in town, clumsily eliminating them one by…

OUT JANUARY 9 / CERT 15 / 120 MINS DIRECTOR Rowan Athale CAST Amir El-Masry, Pierce Brosnan, Katherine Dow Blyton, Austin Haynes In his boxing prime, Prince Naseem Hamed was larger-than-life, known for his over-the-top entrances and unorthodox style. His flair and cocky arrogance is brought to life by the perfectly cast Amir El-Masry in writer-director Rowan Athale’s aptly titled Giant, which focuses on Hamed’s relationship with the Irish boxing trainer who discovered him, Brendan Ingle (Pierce Brosnan). Frustratingly, nuance is only given to Ingle as the bond between athlete and trainer deteriorates. Truncated boxing sequences, devoid of visual flash that would complement its subject, don’t help. With a brief mention of a tell-all book and a tribute relegated to the end credits, it’s hard to shake the sense that…

OUT NOW / CERT PG / 137 MINS DIRECTOR Jon M. Chu CAST Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande, Jonathan Bailey, Ethan Slater, Bowen Yang, Marissa Bode, Michelle Yeoh, Jeff Goldblum PLOT In Oz, the Wicked Witch Of The West, Elphaba (Erivo), attempts to get Glinda (Grande) on side. Meanwhile, a young girl from Kansas suddenly arrives on the scene… LAST YEAR’S WICKED had to defy a lot more than just gravity. Jon M. Chu’s first film — which adapted the 2003 musical by Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman, which in turn adapted the 1995 book by Gregory Maguire, which itself offered an alternate history to L. Frank Baum’s 1900 The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz mythology — had to take on critics, cynics, and flying-monkey sceptics. The received wisdom goes that musicals…

OUT NOW / CERT 15 / 118 MINS DIRECTORS Laura Poitras, Mark Obenhaus PARTICIPANTS Seymour Hersh Oscar-winning documentarian Laura Poitras returns from the high of 2022’s All The Beauty And The Bloodshed with another searing portrait of a maverick; like her last film (about artist Nan Goldin, and the opioid crisis), it serves both political and personal purposes. Seymour Hersh is a legendary American investigative journalist who was instrumental in exposing scandals from Vietnam to the Iraq War. He makes for an excellent subject, a dogged, old-school hack, full of righteous fury and grandfatherly grouchiness. Poitras and co-director Mark Obenhaus offer a rounded view, delving into his occasional journalistic shortcomings. But the message is clear: cover-ups are rife in US politics, across its history, and we need good journalists like…

OUT NOW (DISNEY+) / EPISODES VIEWED 9 OF 9 DIRECTOR Oliver Murray PARTICIPANTS Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr PLOT A remastered edition of the classic documentary series about the legendary rock band — with an additional episode included. “IT’S ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE to get the definitive story of The Beatles,” says Paul McCartney in The Beatles Anthology. That hasn’t stopped people trying. The craze for filmed fodder about the Fab Four has barely relented since the band split up in 1970; in the last five years alone, we’ve had films ranging from the excellent (Peter Jackson’s Get Back) to perfectly fine (Martin Scorsese-produced Beatles ’64) to niche (the Cirque du Soleil/Beatles collab All Together Now). Not to mention the four major biopics on each member, from Sam Mendes, arriving in 2027.…

SISU: ROAD TO REVENGE FILM “Gore-soaked and unbelievably bloody, this will make you wince, gasp and cheer for the little guy. Another authoritarian regime is in for a bad day, and that’s a lovely thing to watch. Finnish him!” HELEN O’HARA THE CARPENTER’S SON FILM “There was an opportunity for a truly original spin on the so-called Greatest Story Ever Told here, but this pulls its punches to make a rather rote horror that amounts to little. In fact, it all inadvertently goes a bit Life Of Brian.” JOHN NUGENT PRIMITIVE WAR FILM “An unashamed exploitation movie with teeth, this has all the dinosaur devilry and gung-ho soldiering you could want. There’s even a sweet Tyrannosaur love story in the mix.” KIM NEWMAN THE ICE TOWER FILM “Although the pace…

(FROM TOGETHER) The marriage of this 1996 ballad and a horrifying sequence in which partners Millie (Alison Brie) and Tim (Dave Franco) melt into each other’s bodies was strangely enchanting. ‘2 Become 1’ is a sultry love song that simultaneously promotes safe sex. In Together, where the flesh-binding body-horror serves as an allegory for codependency, it served as both a nostalgic romantic gesture and a tongue-in-cheek soundtrack to an all-consuming relationship. Come a little bit closer, baby……

THE BACKGROUND In a Bangkok hotel lobby, Rick (Walton Goggins) meets up with his old friend Frank (Sam Rockwell), expecting to party. But Frank has changed. He pushed hedonism to its limits, he explains, sleeping with multiple Asian women a night, before deciding to explore why he had such a voracious appetite for them. He ultimately realised that he needed to be one of them, wearing lingerie and hiring men to have their way with him. “Guess I was trying to fuck my way to the answer,” he reasons as a wide-eyed Rick nods in confused amazement. “It’s a brilliant monologue,” says Sam Rockwell, who took on the role four weeks before filming, after Woody Harrelson had to drop out. “It’s an extraordinary thing that Mike [White, creator/director/writer] does. He…

“I JUST WANTED to tell the truth,” says Paris Lees, sitting in the elegant lobby of a West End hotel. Earlier this summer, the sensational TV adaptation of her fictionalised memoir, What It Feels Like For A Girl, aired on the BBC. Lees is now ready to take stock of its rapturous reception. “All I knew when I started this rollercoaster was that I could make people laugh and make people cry. Those three things became guiding principles with the show: make them laugh, make them cry, tell the truth.” The Paris Lees back story is one of the great modern parables of self-determined social mobility. Born in the Nottingham outpost of Hucknall, she weathered a delinquent adolescence, some of it in a young offenders’ institution, while forging a low-key…

IT’S THE MOST excruciating dinner party this side of your average episode of Come Dine With Me. And that show, generally speaking, almost never ends with the food being laced with a truth drug, or a light stabbing. It is, of course, the dinner party that kicks off Steven Soderbergh’s excellent, cold-as-ice spy thriller Black Bag. Michael Fassbender’s master interrogator, George, tasked with rooting out a traitor, invites the suspects (two couples, played by Regé Jean-Page and Naomie Harris, and Tom Burke and Marisa Abela; plus his own wife, played by Cate Blanchett) round to his lavish London gaff, serves them drugged grub, sits back, and watches the sparks fly. And, boy, do they fly, as guards are let down, truths are trotted out inadvertently and, before the dessert has…

IT’S A BRAVE show that waits until Season 2, Episode 7 to introduce you to one of its most important characters. Severance’s premise is that evil corporation Lumon is splitting its employees in two, which means almost every character we meet has an ‘innie’ persona and an ‘outie’ one. And while we’d spent a lot of time with both versions of main character Mark (Adam Scott), we didn’t properly meet his wife until the nightmarishly unsettling episode ‘Chikhai Bardo’. Here, we finally got to know outie Gemma (Dichen Lachman) — and learned she has also been split into multiple tortured innies. For most of the show, Mark believes Gemma died in a car crash. In fact, she is being kept prisoner in the bowels of the Lumon building, forced to…

IT IS, ARGUABLY, the most memorable opening to any film released this year. Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later — a story about survival and death in which hulking, naked, infected maniacs rip victims limb from limb — began with the following words: “Over the hills and far away, Teletubbies come to play.” The opening sequence saw a young kid watching the iconic kids’ TV show just as the outbreak began, his entire family being brutally devoured to the sound of ‘Tinky Winky, Dipsy, Laa-Laa, Po!’ As the horde attacks, the TV set — Teletubbies and all — is drenched in blood. Eh-oh. “I guess if you were going to ask yourself, ‘What is the antithesis of zombies?’, you might come to the conclusion that that would be Teletubbies,” laughs Nikky…

There was something exciting in the cinematic air in the late ’50s and early ’60s. New filmmakers with fresh voices were emerging globally, seemingly on a weekly basis. In the US, we had John Cassavetes, Shirley Clarke and Lionel Rogosin alongside avant-gardists like Jonas Mekas. The Free Cinema filmmakers in Britain led by Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson gave voice to the Angry Young Men in duffle coats. Miloš Forman, Věra Chytilová and Jiří Menzel pioneered a new brand of Czech filmmaking. Nagisa Ōshima, Yoshishige Yoshida and Shōhei Imamura were breaking down barriers in Japan. There were great indie-spirited film movements popping up everywhere, but the most significant, certainly in quantity, was the French New Wave. At the heart of it were a group of cine phile sturned-film…

1 WAKE UP DEAD MAN: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY OUT NOW/NETFLIX The third movie in what should be called ‘The Benoit Blanc Mysteries’ has been widely proclaimed the darkest outing yet for Rian Johnson and Daniel Craig’s master detective. There’s some truth in that, yes, as Johnson wrestles with weighty themes (faith, guilt, organised religion). But it’s also often incredibly funny, while Johnson’s ingenious riff on a classic locked-door mystery gives Craig the chance to let rip. His delivery of ‘Scooby-Dooby-Doo’ will live long in the memory. 2 DISNEY CLASSICS 62 MOVIE COLLECTION OUT NOW/BR Suck it, streaming. This incredible collection brings together pretty much every Disney animated movie you’ve heard of, and several you haven’t. It also marks the Blu-ray debut of The Black Cauldron, and boasts a 128-page coffee-table book…

Star Wars. Kylo Ren discovers the true meaning of Christmas after he’s visited by three Force Ghosts. @SIMONL.BSKY.SOCIAL Studio Ghibli Christmas Carol. I'm already crying over how good the food spread would look at the end. @SICPARVIS87.BSKY.SOCIAL Maybe if John Hammond had experienced a ‘Jurassic Park Christmas Carol’ he would have learned that just because his scientists could, doesn’t mean that they should. @LAURENDAMON.BSKY.SOCIAL Ghostbusters, hired by Scrooge to catch the three ghosts of Christmas. @STEVEFOAM.BSKY.SOCIAL WATCH OUT FOR THE NEXT QUESTION VIA OUR BLUESKY ACCOUNT: @EMPIREMAGAZINE.BSKY.SOCIAL…

THE DOCUMENTARY Jackman’s research began with the 2008 documentary of the same name about the real Mike Sardina and his wife/performing partner Claire (Kate Hudson), who together formed Neil Diamond tribute act Lightning & Thunder. On board for a year-and-a-half before the script was finalised, Jackman spent that time studying Mike. “I watched the doc and thought, ‘They don’t make movies like this anymore,’” Jackman tells Empire. “Movies used to remind us that there is no small, or ordinary. Everyone’s life is extraordinary. But this story was so incredible; I couldn’t stop telling people about it.” Once fully immersed, he had to “let go” of the real Mike and find his own interpretation of the character. THE WAR “My litmus test for every character I play is the same as…

THE FIRST SHOT of Mary Bronstein’s nerve-shredding account of motherhood is an extreme close-up of Rose Byrne’s face. As her character’s chronically ill young daughter talks to a doctor off-screen — “Mommy is stretchable” — Byrne’s Linda battles back tears while arguing about the best course of action for her child’s mysterious condition. All the while, the camera lingers inches from her eyes (Bronstein wanted to avoid long lenses). It’s traumatic stuff. “On the first day of the shoot, we shot the first scene,” recalls Byrne. “That was the hardest day for sure.” Not that Linda’s journey gets any easier in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, a modern drama which has earned career-best praise and festival awards for Byrne. Based in-part on Bronstein’s experiences of caring for a…

OZ ORIGINS Gregory Maguire, author of the 1995 novel that Wicked is based on, has written eight additional books in the series, meaning ample room for expansion. Among them are Elphie: A Wicked Childhood and next year’s Galinda: A Charmed Childhood, both prequels further charting the origins of the frenemy witches. While the two existing films gave glimpses into Elphaba and Glinda’s beginnings, Elphie is a fully formed coming-of-age story about the green rebel’s troubled family, her first run-in with the mistreated animals of Oz, and a failed attempt at friendship. Sister book A Charmed Childhood, meanwhile, will introduce Galinda (still with the “a”) as the youngest of four children in a high-born family down on their luck. A YA-skewing pair of movies, complete with new songs, could be just…

IT WAS A brisk New York night in late November when swarms of young people descended upon a pop-up space on Grand Street, Manhattan with phones and credit cards at the ready. The reason? A Marty Supreme merchandise event, announced by its star Timothée Chalamet earlier that day via Instagram. Ayra Peredo, an art director from London, was holidaying in the city when she saw the actor’s post and decided to head down and check it out. “Ever since he started the promo for Marty Supreme I’ve loved the jacket and was super-keen to get one,” she tells Empire of the collection’s ping-pong pièce de résistance, a limited-edition windbreaker designed by Doni Nahmias and sported by the likes of Tom Brady and Kid Cudi. The pop-up is indeed part of…

MARTY MAUSER CONTAINS multitudes. A singular creation from Josh Safdie, co-written with his regular comrade Ronald Bronstein (who worked on all the Safdie brothers collaborations), he is quite the cocktail: an unashamed hustler drawn from real table-tennis players, from Safdie and Bronstein’s imagination, and from Safdie’s own life. Tying it all together, though: dreams. “I think dreams are infectious,” says Safdie. “They drive humanity.” Safdie is a lifelong dreamer — and table-tennis die-hard. Growing up in New York in the 1980s, he was introduced to the sport by his father, Alberto, who used to play in tournaments in the ’50s. “He taught it to me as kind of a discipline,” says Safdie. “I have ADD, and it’s a great challenge for extreme focus, which I think you see in [Marty].”…

BEAVERS HAVE HAD their share of screentime in the past. Take 2024 silent comedy Hundreds Of Beavers, or Jodie Foster’s 2011 drama about a healing handpuppet shaped like the titular flat-tailed mammal. In Pixar’s latest caper Hoppers, however, these rotund rodents are stepping into the spotlight, as the mind of teen animal-lover Mabel is transplanted into a robotic beaver who must save a local habitat. Director and co-writer Daniel Chong breaks down why now is their time to shine. THEY’RE ECO MVPS After his original pitch for a penguin movie was rejected by Pixar — “The studio was just like, ‘We don’t need another penguin movie in this world.’ They were not wrong” — he went searching for a new animal star. He discovered how beavers had recently proven crucial…

OUT JANUARY 9 / CERT 12A / 126 MINS DIRECTOR Chloé Zhao CAST Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Emily Watson, Joe Alwyn, David Wilmot, Jacobi Jupe, Olivia Lynes, Justine Mitchell PLOT William Shakespeare (Mescal) and Agnes Hathaway (Buckley) fall in love and start a family. Their only son, Hamnet (Jupe), soon becomes the tragic inspiration for an important play. THERE IS VERY little we know about William Shakespeare. The few facts we do have about the playwright have been gleaned from patchy oral histories and written public records. One indisputable truth is that he had a son named Hamnet, who died aged 11, in 1596, most likely of plague. Three years later, Shakespeare wrote his most famous play, Hamlet. It’s this curious near-forgotten nugget of personal history which gave rise to…

OUT NOW / CERT 18 / 96 MINS DIRECTOR Mike P. Nelson CAST Rohan Campbell, Ruby Modine, David Lawrence Brown, David Tomlinson You’re on firmer ground remaking iffy originals than butchering classics. Writer-director Mike P. Nelson improves on the middling 1984 horror of the same title, while sticking to its basic slasher-Santa outline. Troubled Billy (Rohan Campbell) is compelled to don a Santa suit to slay folk who have made the naughty list; Campbell is affecting as the haunted murderer, matched by Ruby Modine as a non-stereotyped hero. It develops via tipped-in ideas from Unbreakable and Dexter that semi-possessed Billy could really be doing Santa’s work. A nicely seasonal horror cocktail — gruesome kills, proper suspense, sly wit, likeable leads and a dose of just deserts for very, very bad…

OUT NOW / CERT 15 / 114 MINS DIRECTOR David Freyne CAST Elizabeth Olsen, Miles Teller, Callum Turner, John Early, Olga Merediz, Da'Vine Joy Randolph PLOT In the afterlife, Joan (Olsen) must decide between spending eternity with her husband of decades (Teller) or her first love (Turner). PERHAPS THREE ISN’T a crowd, after all. From Challengers to Materialists, the love triangle has truly made its comeback, and David Freyne’s delightful romcom Eternity offers a refreshing twist. In its vivid fantasy world, the choice is more than just picking between two suitors; rather, two husbands, one with whom decades of marriage were shared, the other leaving behind tantalising questions of what could have been. Right before old Larry (Barry Primus) kicks the bucket, he’s squabbling with his wife Joan (Betty Buckley)…

OUT NOW / CERT PG / 108 MINS DIRECTORS Jared Bush, Byron Howard CAST Ginnifer Goodwin, Jason Bateman, Ke Huy Quan, Idris Elba It’s a little surprising that it’s taken nine years to come up with a sequel to a billion-dollar breakout success about an animal city and its overstretched police department. The heart and humour are still there, but the plot here smacks less of fox-like cunning and more of rabbit-in-the-headlights. Novice police officers Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin), a type-A energised bunny, and her ex-con-fox partner, Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman), suspect that an exiled reptile has returned to Zootropolis and set out to find him, only to discover that Gary De’Snake (Ke Huy Quan) has allegations that may rock the city. While the visual world-building is richly detailed and…

OUT DECEMBER 26 / CERT 15 / 133 MINS DIRECTOR Joachim Trier CAST Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Elle Fanning PLOT Two sisters navigate the challenge that comes with their estranged father (Skarsgård) wanting to make a film about their private family life. NORWEGIAN FILMMAKER JOACHIM Trier returns with another Scandinavian gem. While Trier’s renowned Oslo Trilogy — Reprise, Oslo August 31st, and The Worst Person In The World — followed young adults undergoing self-discovery, Sentimental Value sees the director broaden his focus, with a tender, insightful portrait of sisterhood, reconciliation, trauma and transformation. It’s about a fractured family unit attempting to heal through the power of cinema, unfolding with thorny dynamics and aching emotional resonance. We first meet close-knit sisters Nora (Worst Person star Renate Reinsve), an…

OUT 26 DECEMBER / CERT 15 / 131 MINS DIRECTOR Paul Feig CAST Sydney Sweeney, Amanda Seyfried, Brandon Sklenar, Michele Morrone, Elizabeth Perkins PLOT Ex-con Millie (Sweeney) takes a job as a housemaid with the picture-perfect Winchesters. Then things begin to go very, very wrong. IN 2018, PAUL Feig had a sizeable sleeper hit with A Simple Favour, adapting a successful book into a tart thriller about the secret, sordid lives of beautiful rich people. A sequel followed earlier this year. The Housemaid lives in a similar world, but everything’s less slick and smart. This is kind of the bargain-bin, airport-novel cousin of A Simple Favour: tacky and ridiculous, but just about entertaining enough to pass the time before you forget it forever. Based on a 2022 bestseller by publishing…

OUTSIDE the pub, the world is ending. Inside, though, the party is in full swing. The Garrison is heaving. Ashtrays are overflowing with cigarette butts. Countless card games have been played and abandoned. There are beer bottles, both broken and intact, and half-swigged glasses of whisky everywhere. Drinkers reel and stagger around; couples embrace with loose abandon. The light is low and it smells like smoke. This is a scene of pure debauchery. Nobody is getting away from here without a terrible, bone-rattling hangover. The year is 1940 and the Birmingham Blitz has just begun. The city is feeling the full force of Luftwaffe bombs, and the streets are wrecked and broken (a job for the blue-screens to fill in later). A small van pulls up and a gang of…

THE REVOLUTION WASN’T just televised in 2025. It was emblazoned across IMAX screens in the form of Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, and beamed in from a galaxy far, far away via Andor Season 2. Both told stories about rebellion that coincided with real-life uprisings outside our front doors, leading to commentators discussing a feeling of life imitating art. Images from Anderson’s epic, especially those in the spectacular sequence involving a night-time standoff with police, could be mistaken for recent news footage. Andor’s Ghorman Massacre, meanwhile, in which the Empire’s increased military presence in an otherwise peaceful community leads to violent clashes, hit screens as Trump began deploying the National Guard in US cities — a show of force that also led to skirmishes (none, thankfully, as bloody…

AUNT GLADYS HAS escaped containment. When an entire classroom full of young children vanishes into the night, Amy Madigan’s Pied-Piper enchantress turns out to be responsible, slowly draining their youth to restore her own life-force. Madigan, here a cross between your favourite grandma and your worst nightmare, stole the entire movie, in a whirlwind of smeared lipstick, plastic jewellery and sing-song delivery. But for a while, even after the film’s release, writer-director Zach Cregger kept the peculiar old biddy safely hidden from view. Now, Madigan is finally free to talk about her, at a time when Gladys has become truly inescapable: Weapons vaulted her to icon status, and Cregger is mulling a possible prequel about the character. Meanwhile, intense Oscar buzz has engulfed Madigan. Must be the season of the…

THERE’S SOMETHING INHERENTLY delicious about seeing a British TV-comedy legend like Mark Gatiss suddenly pop up in a Hollywood blockbuster. And in 2025, Gatiss did it twice. The Fantastic Four was originally set to open with Gatiss’ character, an Ed Sullivan-style TV host called Ted Gilbert, welcoming the super-quartet to his show with a dash of razzle-dazzle, complete with a gaggle of dancers. But the dance portion was cut. “It was great fun, so I really regret it’s gone,” Gatiss says. As for the rest of his day’s filming, it was a tad unglamorous. “It was just me on my own,” he explains. “Which was the weirdest thing. So for all the blockbuster talk, it was just me in Pinewood. I did improvise a bit and made Ted’s ‘thing’ that…

THE ENTRANCE The Final Reckoning is a sombre, often bleak entry in the Mission franchise. The sequence in which Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt infiltrates a dormant Russian submarine, the Sevastopol, takes it into the realms of horror. Ethan — mind whirling after making a swift descent through the depths to reach and breach the submarine — imagines the corpses of dead seamen coming to life. Claustrophobia is the order of the day. And that’s even before… THE ROTATION Ethan making his way through a static, albeit spooky, sub wouldn’t be very Mission. Now, having the whole thing start rolling towards an undersea cliff because of Ethan’s presence is very Mission. And was just one of the reasons writer-director Christopher McQuarrie held his breath (metaphorically) as Cruise did take after take…

NUMBER OF FILMS: 4 (MATERIALISTS, EDDINGTON, THE FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS, FREAKY TALES) NUMBER OF TV SHOWS: 2 (THE LAST OF US: SEASON 2, SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE) TOTAL WORLDWIDE BOX OFFICE: $640M NAMES OF CHARACTERS: Reed Richards (THE FANTASTIC FOUR) Ted Garcia (EDDINGTON) Harry Castillo (MATERIALISTS) Joel Miller (THE LAST OF US) Clint (FREAKY TALES) Renaldo (SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE) NUMBER OF FILMS IN WHICH HIS CHARACTERS' LEGS STRETCH: 2 (MATERIALISTS, THE FANTASTIC FOUR) HIS ANSWER TO WHETHER ALL OF MR FANTASTIC’S BODY PARTS STRETCH: "Everything has to stretch." SLOGANS OF T-SHIRTS HE WORE IN 2025: 'Protect The Dolls', 'Adult Content', 'Materialists Girl', 'The Strokes', 'The Cure - Boys Don't Cry' HIS 2025 STARBUCKS ORDER: Iced quad espresso in a Venti cup, extra ice, six shots CAPTION ON ONE OF HIS…

(FROM URCHIN) In Harris Dickinson’s directorial debut, lead character Mike (Frank Dillane) is a recovering addict trying to find stability and acceptance after prison. His wins, then, are worth relishing. A night at a karaoke bar with new colleagues is accompanied by Atomic Kitten’s sweet, slow pop-ballad — and as Mike croons the lyrics with his companions, decked out in clothes that he’s managed to pay for himself, the words take on more depth. The sequence is an island of contentment in Urchin’s chaotic and often heartbreaking world.…

IT SOUNDS LIKE a dog’s dream: the Bone Temple. Towering structures of femurs, fibulae, skulls and sternums. To some, a spine-tingling monument to the dead; to the four-legged, a sprawling banquet. Blessed relief, then, that Nia DaCosta’s dog, Maude, is not the bone-chewing type. “She’s not interested,” the filmmaker laughs. “She’s very tiny; her mouth is too small.” Summer, 2024. Stood among the columns of the dead, arranged in rural North Yorkshire, DaCosta was preparing to tick a monumental item off her bucket-list; one so colossal, she wouldn’t have even considered it a bucket-list item. “I was like, ‘This is so crazy,’” she recalls of standing with Maude (half-Yorkie, half-Maltese) amid the white towers. “‘This is such a great fucking set.’” Rehearsal had begun on 28 Years Later: The Bone…

CAN A MOVIE about racing cars display great legs at the box office? Or would ‘great wheels’ be more accurate? Either way, after an average start that left it somewhere in the middle of the pack, Joseph Kosinski’s F1, in which Brad Pitt’s veteran driver Sonny Hayes revives the fortunes of a struggling Formula One team, revved its way to becoming one of the year’s biggest films, vindicating the 51-year-old director’s faith in the project. “I was told by everyone that racing movies don’t work, that the genre is just too narrow, that it doesn’t play broadly,” he tells Empire. “That was something I was determined to prove wrong.” It’s also a perfectly calibrated crowd-pleaser that has much in common with Top Gun: Maverick, the previous movie on which Kosinski…

IF THERE WERE fears that Akiva Schaffer’s reboot of The Naked Gun wouldn’t be able to match the astonishing gag rate of its Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker predecessors, those were pretty swiftly allayed when the film arrived. Liam Neeson gave it great deadpan as Frank Drebin Jr, and Schaffer — one-third of The Lonely Island, comedy historian, and director of Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping — adeptly marshalled an astonishing array of gags of all kinds: one-liners, puns, sight, parody and, most crucial of all, funny. Empire jumped onto Zoom with Schaffer recently to break down our favourites. THE LONG WAIT To say The Naked Gun is a laugh-a-minute would be something of an error, since the first joke doesn’t arrive until 90 seconds have elapsed, as Kevin Durand’s henchman reveals the movie’s…

We’ve been doing a Review Of The Year almost as long as there have been years for us to review. Exactly three decades ago, just as we do this year, we reflected on an excellent year in da movies. The Empire team rightly voted The Shawshank Redemption as our film of the year (it would later go on to top our Greatest Movies Ever poll) and we gave out joke “alternative” awards, too (The Bill Pullman Award For Playing The Most Terminally Nice Characters On Film went to, er, Bill Pullman). Perhaps most instructive, however, was our celebration of future British stars. Some predictions weren’t quite on the mark, but we found room to herald Danny Boyle (having just made his blistering debut, Shallow Grave) and a “19-year-old from Reading”…

2019’S READY OR NOT proved a head-turning, blood-smeared showcase for star Samara Weaving and directing duo Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin. The film saw Weaving’s newly-wed Grace survive a brutal round of hide-and-seek and ritual sacrifice, all part of a long-running pact between her über-wealthy in-laws (the Le Domas) and evil forces. It came with a world ripe for expansion, and so six years, two Scream movies and an Abigail later, Gillett and Bettinelli-Olpin return with more thrills and bold characters. They run Empire through the new participants in their savage sequel. FAITH Grace must now battle several elite families in order to save her newly revealed sister Faith, played by Kathryn Newton. Gillett and Bettinelli-Olpin had the epiphany that the pair should work together while sitting behind the monitors…

SINCE STARTING OUT as a child actor, then ascending to superstardom with the Twilight franchise, Kristen Stewart has crafted a fascinating filmography. From charming indies to blockbuster fare, she’s just about done it all. But with The Chronology Of Water — based on Lidia Yuknavitch’s (played in the film by Imogen Poots) memoir chronicling her experiences of childhood abuse, addiction and finding salvation through swimming — Stewart is moving into feature directing for the first time. She tells Empire how directing the film felt like wading into the unknown. TAPPING THE SOURCE Despite its title, Yuknavitch’s book hops around in time, delivering memories through short, evocative snippets more like a stream of consciousness than a traditional narrative. That unique structure is part of what appealed to Stewart. “Reading [it] feels…

OUT NOW (NETFLIX) / EPISODES VIEWED 4 OF 4 SHOWRUNNERS Matt Duffer, Ross Duffer CAST Millie Bobby Brown, Finn Wolfhard, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, Noah Schnapp, Sadie Sink, Winona Ryder, David Harbour, Natalia Dyer, Charlie Heaton, Joe Keery, Maya Hawke, Jamie Campbell Bower PLOT Hawkins is quarantined, Eleven (Brown) is a fugitive and Vecna (Bower) has vanished — pushing the grieving gang to regroup in order to stop the impending apocalypse. 2022 FEELS LIKE a different universe: the pandemic was drawing to a tentative conclusion, and Liz Truss was Prime Minister for less than a lettuce’s lifetime. It’s also when we last visited Hawkins: where Indiana’s pluckiest teens and most chaotic adults fought to stop the world from being enveloped by a Lovecraftian nightmare. Three-and-a-half years on, one of the…

OUT NOW / CERT 18 / 275 MINS DIRECTOR Quentin Tarantino CAST Uma Thurman, David Carradine, Lucy Liu, Daryl Hannah, Vivica A. Fox, Michael Madsen, Gordon Liu PLOT The Bride (Thurman) hunts down the fellow assassins who left her for dead, cutting a vengeful warpath to her former boss and lover. EVERY MOVIE BY Quentin Tarantino doubles as a tribute to his taste in other movies. But that’s doubly true of Kill Bill, a hyper-violent B-cinema epic too pregnant with video-clerk obsessions — samurai showdowns, kung-fu fighting, spaghetti-Western vistas, anime splatter — to make it to cinemas in one piece. Audiences originally experienced the East-meets-West revenge odyssey of the Bride (Uma Thurman) in two feature-length instalments released six months apart. Tarantino, however, has always maintained that Kill Bill is one…

OUT DECEMBER 26 / CERT TBC / 149 MINS DIRECTOR Josh Safdie CAST Timothée Chalamet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Odessa A’zion, Kevin O’Leary, Tyler Okonma PLOT In 1952, working-class New Yorker Marty Mauser (Chalamet) dreams of becoming the world table-tennis champion, and spies business opportunities in his greatness. “MARTY SUPREME: MADE in America” is the legend inscribed on the orange spheres that wannabe sporting hero Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet) plans to take to market as a snazzy alternative to plain old white ping-pong balls. Well, director and co-writer (with Ronald Bronstein) Josh Safdie has here made a great American picture. Set in the early ’50s and loosely inspired by real-life table-tennis player Marty Reisman, Marty Supreme takes themes of big business, national pride and identity, the American Dream, ethnicity, class, privilege and…

OUT JANUARY 1 / CERT TBC / 132 MINS DIRECTOR Craig Brewer CAST Hugh Jackman, Kate Hudson, Michael Imperioli, Ella Anderson, Fisher Stevens, Jim Belushi PLOT Mike (Jackman) and Claire’s (Hudson) success as a Neil Diamond tribute band is threatened by a horrific accident. IF YOU’VE FOUND most recent music biopics to be snoozefests severely lacking in good old-fashioned melodrama, we bring good news. That is, unless you’re allergic to sequins, luxuriant wigs and the musical stylings of Neil Diamond. No Hollywood screenwriter would dare write anything as bonkers as Song Sung Blue unless there was a true story behind it. Adapted from the little-seen 2008 documentary of the same title, this is not a straightforward Neil Diamond biopic. Instead, it’s the unlikely true story of Mike and Claire Sardina,…

OUT JANUARY 23 / CERT TBC / 139 MINS DIRECTOR Park Chan-wook CAST Lee Byung-hun, Son Ye-jin, Park Hee-soon, Lee Sung-min PLOT When a paper-factory worker (Lee) searches for a new job, he discovers the only way to get a position to die for is to start killing. LOOKING FOR WORK is tough, but there’s a difference between stalking people on LinkedIn and then just stalking them. Man-su (Squid Game’s Lee Byung-hun) opts for the latter when pursuing a new position. Made redundant after 25 years of service at the Solar Paper company, after a series of embarrassing interviews and temp jobs, Man-su hunts down the competition for the next big gig and begins eliminating them in ludicrous, often hilarious, fashion. The superb latest effort from Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, The…

STEVEN SPIELBERG “I think Peaky Blinders is wonderful,” the legendary director said in 2018, singling out Tom Hardy, who played Jewish gang leader Alfie Solomons. “Incredible. Peaky Blinders is my favourite Tom Hardy performance.” DAVID BOWIE After discovering that Bowie was a big Peaky fan, Murphy decided to give him the Tommy Shelby cap he’d had framed on his study wall. “I took it down, I smashed it, and I took the cap out, and I sent it over to him for Christmas. And he sent me back a picture of him in the cap,” Murphy tells Empire. They stayed in touch, and Bowie said the show could use any track they wanted from his final album, Blackstar. “I’ll be telling my grandkids that story.” JULIA ROBERTS In 2018, Roberts…

IN THE DARKEST reaches of the internet you can find all manner of fan-fiction spawned from the Predator and Alien franchises, much of which — the Alien/Predator slash fiction in particular — should be very much avoided. Yet, even among the most passionate of these crossover tales, you’ll rarely find a moment quite as giddy as Predator: Badlands’ protagonist Dek going full-auto with a pilfered Weyland-Yutani Pulse Rifle. Up to his reptilian arse in hostile organisms on the death planet of Genna (one star on TripAdvisor), Dek finally faces off against his ultimate prey: the unkillable Kalisk. Having little joy with either sword or fists, Dek reaches for the nearest weapon available, which happens to be the far-future descendant of Aliens’ original M41A Pulse Rifle — complete with the same…

(FROM WARFARE) Warfare was a gruelling, painstakingly authentic account of a real Navy SEAL operation in Iraq in 2006, which begins… with the video for Eric Prydz’s 2004 club-banger ‘Call On Me’. Production logos done and dusted, the screen suddenly explodes in Lycra, a sea of attractive, pneumatic gym-rats gyrating to Eurodance. One assumes that the real platoon really did watch the video together, as they do in the film. In any case, it’s a terrifying way to kick things off.…

IT WAS THE show everyone was talking about, and everyone had an opinion about. Starring Stephen Graham as the father of a 13-year-old boy arrested on suspicion of murdering a girl from his school, the four-part one-shot phenomenon ignited discussions about smartphones, masculinity, and young boys: what exactly were they being exposed to on the internet, and how much real-world damage was it doing? Its co-creator and co-writer, Jack Thorne, talks us through the aftermath. What surprised you most about the response to Adolescence? Being number one in Saudi Arabia for two weeks. Adolescence was never made to travel. It was made in exactly the same way as Help (Thorne’s 2021 Covid drama set in a Liverpool care home), but when we were trying to sell Help abroad, they wouldn’t…

THE BACKGROUND Following the merciless Ghorman Massacre, in which the Empire quashes much of the population of a planet, Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) prepares to address the Galactic Senate. “Tear the shit out of this place,” instructs an encouraging Bail Organa (Benjamin Bratt). And she does, for three gob-smacking minutes. “When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away — when it is ripped from our hands — we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest,” she says, her speech broadcast on screens across the galaxy as the Empire tries to shut it down and prevent her escape. It is chilling, thrilling, incredibly stirring — and fuelled by its writer’s own impassioned politics. “The Galactic Senate had had a long history of democratic principles,” explains…

WALKING A VERY fine line between vulnerability and vitriol, Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s naturalistic yet complex performance in Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths — as rage-filled, middle-aged South London housewife Pansy — is easily one of the best of the year. Reuniting with Leigh after 1996’s Secrets & Lies, Jean-Baptiste knew she would partake in extensive rehearsals and improv in order to find her character. “Mike said, ‘Just gently go into character. Observe her as she goes shopping and she goes out in the world.’ And what I observed was that the type of thing that makes me chuckle — like a bald-headed baby with a big pink bow on it to let everybody know it’s a girl — I start going, ‘But what does Pansy think about it? She kicks off.’ That’s…

RYAN COOGLER DOESN’T just make movies. He creates moments. Whether it be the franchise-rejuvenating Creed, or the game-changing superhero blockbuster Black Panther, his films have become cultural touchstones that have permeated the zeitgeist worldwide. Where most movies exit the collective discourse mere weeks after release, Coogler’s work has a habit of taking up residence in people’s hearts and minds for extended bouts of time. All of that holds true for Sinners, Team Empire’s favourite film of the year. “That’s so cool, that’s crazy,” says Coogler when we tell him. “It’s been a fun year at the movies. I couldn’t have imagined ours being number one.” Focusing on twin brothers Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan in two career-best performances) as they prepare to open a juke joint in the Jim…

MATT & BEN. BEN & MATT. However you think of Damon & Affleck (or Affleck & Damon), the chances are that when you think of them, you think of them together. Despite all the great things they’ve achieved in their own right, whether it’s Bourne or a Best Picture Oscar, they come, in the public consciousness at least, as a package deal. They were the two childhood friends who manifested a dream of movie stardom by writing and starring in 1997’s Good Will Hunting. Our boys were wicked smart. Overnight, in their twenties, they became Oscar-winners (for Best Original Screenplay; their giddy acceptance speech remains a delight), film stars, and (particularly in Affleck’s case) tabloid fodder, but while they remained close off-screen, they ploughed separate furrows on it. Only Kevin…

BONE LAKE DIGITAL A double-booking at an isolated Airbnb — near a lake where a killer once scattered bones — sounds alarm bells for viewers, but would-be writer Marco Pigossi and girlfriend Maddie Hasson welcome newcomers Alex Roe and Andra Nechita until sexy games turn scary. Twisty, well-acted psycho horror. DERELICT DVD/BLU-RAY/DIGITAL Jonathan Zaurin’s contemporary revenge tragedy focuses on Abi (Suzanne Fulton), set on getting rough justice for her murdered fringe-criminal father (Dean Kilbey), and Matt (Michael Coombes), an impressionable lump manipulated by his rotten brother (Pete Bird). A scruffy slice of British grim reality. THE HOME DIGITAL Horror in a retirement home from Purge creator James DeMonaco. Graffiti artist Pete Davidson is completing his community service at the facility, where he befriends the inhabitants but is spooked by experiments…

AT THE END of Alex Woo’s charming animated fantasy In Your Dreams, they come. One name after another, all specially thanked: Guillermo del Toro, Oscar-winner for Pinocchio (among other things), Mike Rianda, director of The Mitchells Vs The Machines, Michael Arndt, writer of Toy Story 3; Dean DeBlois, director of How To Train Your Dragon; and there’s more where that little lot came from. It’s almost like the Avengers of animation. “That’s a good way to describe them,” laughs Woo. “They’re like superheroes in their own right.” Woo has known and worked with most of them over the years, particularly in his past life as a story artist at Pixar. Only del Toro was a newbie, setting up a meeting with Woo to encourage him after catching an early version…