Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2016 i Empire Australasia

SET PHASERS TO PARTY. STAR TREK IS turning 50, and it’s doing so in style with Star Trek Beyond. It’s the third Trek film to explore strange new worlds with the rebooted cast, and it might once again change the status quo. “It was important to really deconstruct the idea of Star Trek, the idea of the Federation, and why it’s special,” says new director Justin Lin. “We’ll be poking at a lot of different things.” Following their brush with Khan in Star Trek Into Darkness, James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) and the crew of the Enterprise have spent two years nosing around the final frontier, and have come to rest at a Federation outpost. There they encounter Idris Elba’s alien nutjob, Krall, who rains fire and scorn on the…

IT’S A BIG JOB,” SAYS STEVEN Spielberg, appropriately enough, about The BFG. “There are thousands of effects shots. I think it’s the most ambitious motion capture of a character that any film has ever done.” Just one look at Mark Rylance, working with Spielberg again so soon after bagging the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Bridge Of Spies, confirms that. As the towering beanpole at the heart of Roald Dahl’s classic 1982 children’s book, this is Rylance as you’ve never seen him before. This is a Rylance big enough to give Frank Stallone, who famously railed against the British actor pipping his big brother Sly to that Oscar, pause for thought. This is a Rylance almost entirely composed of pixels. The BFG — Big Friendly Giant if we’re being formal…

THERE ARE FEW SEQUENCES in cinema history as spectacular as the chariot race from 1959’s Ben-Hur. Remaking it seems like an act of folly, but Timur Bekmambetov, the brave soul who’s giving it a go with the new Ben-Hur, has an ace up his sleeve. And, surprisingly, it’s not just a CG ace. “Our technology is now far away from what they had previously,” the Russian-Kazakh director tells Empire, “and the rigs we have are unbelievable. The goal for me is to shoot these action scenes so realistically that the audience feels that they’re in the chariot, driving.” Empire bears witness to the filmmaker’s ambition, from the stands of a newly constructed Circus Maximus built at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios. The story’s two great rivals, Judah Ben-Hur (Jack Huston) and Messala…

HE MAY HAVE BEEN KNOWN to millions of fans as the workaholic tunesmith who played guitar like Jimi Hendrix, grooved like James Brown and sung like a purple angel, but it was the movies that gave Prince Nelson Rogers his big break. In 1978 Warner Bros signed an unprecedented three album record deal with the 17-year-old wunderkind. The kid went on to play 27 instruments on his debut album For You. It took, however, five more albums for Prince to achieve the blockbuster success he craved. Purple Rain would go on to sell 13 million copies in the US alone, spend 24 weeks on top of the Billboard charts and win the pint-sized popster an Oscar for Best Original Song Score. Hailed by Quentin Tarantino as the greatest rock ‘n’…

OUT JUNE 16 / RATED M / 100 MINS. DIRECTOR Don Cheadle CAST Don Cheadle, Ewan McGregor, Emayatzy Corinealdi, Michael Stuhlbarg, PLOT After reclusive jazz-trumpet legend Miles Davis (Don Cheadle) is doorstepped by dodgy music journalist Dave Braden (Ewan McGregor), the pair form an unlikely alliance to retrieve a stolen music tape.. EYES HIDDEN BEHIND HUGE sunglasses, his hair wild and long, voice modulated into a rich, husky whisper, Don Cheadle announces in Miles Ahead that “when you’re creating your own shit, man… the sky is the limit.” And, with this passion project — Cheadle directs for the first time, co-writes (with Steven Baigelman), produces and stars as Miles Davis — he’s certainly aimed to push the limits of the biopic. The hub of the plot is a fictional crime…

DUNCAN JONES WAS ALWAYS A WARRIOR. He’d wear the heaviest armour, strap on a shield and, as he fondly recalls, “just stand out front and whack things”. His business partner and producer, Stuart Fenegan, preferred to be a paladin, smiting his foes with holy power. Bill Westenhofer, appropriately enough for an Oscar-winning visual-effects supervisor, was a fireball-hurling mage. And British actor Robert Kazinsky, the most dedicated Warcrafter of all the cast and crew of Warcraft, favoured the runesword-wielding death knight. “I was in the top 10 DPS for my class for three years straight during Wrath Of The Lich King,” he tells Empire proudly. If that last sentence made complete sense to you, then you are likely as excited about the imminent arrival of Jones’s adaptation of Blizzard’s 22-year-old computer-gaming…

Louis Black has known Richard (or Rick, to his friends) Linklater for nigh-on 30 years, even appearing in 1991’s Slacker, and is set to release Dream Is Destiny, an exhaustive documentary portrait of Linklater, his career and working methods. “I first interviewed him for public access TV in Austin when he was making Slacker, and even then he was confident in himself as a director,” he says. “Not in an arrogant way, but he just has it in his blood. If you look at those early films running up to Dazed And Confused, the learning curve is amazing — he found his feet in no time.” Linklater has always been an outlier of the ’90s indie generation: he’s a bit older than most of his peers, and not for him…

FROM NOW / RATED M / DIRECTOR PAUL MCGUIGAN / CAST DANIEL RADCLIFFE, JAMES MCAVOY, JESSICA BROWN FINDLAY LET’S BE FRANK CLASSIC LITERARY WORKS like Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein will be subject to all kinds of interpretation. James Whale’s 1931 masterpiece went wildly off-book and defined cinema’s long relationship with the text, and the past few years alone have seen adaptations both faithful (Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 version, Bernard Rose’s 2015 take) and loose (I, Frankenstein, Penny Dreadful’s heady stew). And now here’s Max ‘Chronicle’ Landis and Paul ‘Sherlock’ McGuigan, aiming to do for Victor Frankenstein what Guy Ritchie did for Sherlock Holmes, set in the past but with a playful, postmodern sensibility that zaps new life into Shelley’s 200-year-old Gothic masterpiece. Although the film takes its name from the student…

FROM NOW / RATED M / DIRECTOR TOM MCCARTHY / CAST MARK RUFFALO, MICHAEL KEATON, RACHEL MCADAMS, LIEV SCHREIBER, JOHN SLATTERY AND THE WINNER IS… THE REVENANT HAD SEEMED the surer bet, with its raw, suffering-star turn and its extreme-wilderness cinematography, filling every frame with roaring, pounding, storming drama. But after the Best Picture envelope was torn open at this year’s Oscars, another, very different film’s title was read out. One in which there was no dominant performance, and which let its drama unfurl steadily in boxy, beige-and-grey interiors, to the sound of file pages being flipped and pens scratching on notebooks. Spotlight bagging the big award may have been a surprise but, for all The Revenant’s visual genius, there were some — including industry mag Variety — who saw…

FROM JUNE 8 / RATED R18+ / CREATORS JONATHAN E. STEINBERG, ROBERT LEVINE / CAST TOBY STEPHENS, HANNAH NEW, LUKE ARNOLD, RAY STEVENSON, ZACH MCGOWAN PIRATE TV SEASON TWO OF BLACK SAILS ended with two big developments: Fort Nassau was destroyed, and Silver (Luke Arnold) lost his leg. Silver’s leg isn’t coming back, but Fort Nassau has to be rebuilt if the pirates are going to survive the inevitable return of the British. Unfortunately, Flint (Toby Stephens), all but driven mad by Miranda’s death, is too blinded by rage to be the leader the pirates need — especially now that Blackbeard (Ray Stevenson) is on the scene. Even when almost all the pirates are on the same side there’s still plenty of scheming going on, and thankfully this season kills…

WIN! The X-Files Season 10 on Blu-ray plus poster! MULDER AND SCULLY ARE BACK IN THIS YEAR’S six-episode X-Files revival, 14 years after the series closed its ninth season. If you think the truth is still out there, try and win a copy of the reboot season, plus a “I want to believe” poster to, erm... boot. TO WIN, TELL US YOUR FAVOURITE SUPERNATURAL CREATURE, AND WHY. WIN! Steve Jobs on DVD GET TO KNOW THE BESPECTACLED TECH GENIUS known almost as well for his turtle-neck collection as for his hundred-billion-dollar company. Chances are you own something invented by the guy, so win one of 10 DVDs to learn the story behind your iPhone. TO WIN, TELL US WHAT’S YOUR FAVOURITE BIOPIC,…

Zombieland “BILL MURRAY, YOU’RE A ZOMBIE?” SETTING THE SCENE Screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, who most recently brought us Deadpool , knew they wanted a big cameo in their zombie horror-comedy. More specifically, they wanted a movie star who would happily play a funhouse version of themself, as one of the last survivors of the undead apocalypse. They tried to land Kevin Bacon, Joe Pesci, Sylvester Stallone and many more, before landing the biggest fish of all: Bill Murray. The resulting sequences are giddy fun, as Murray apologises for Garfield , acts out Ghostbusters with a vacuum cleaner and scares our heroes by pretending to be a walking corpse. Good news for zom-com fans and Twinkie addicts:…

IT’S A VERY DIFFERENT FEEL, different hero and different set of circumstances to what we’ve seen before,” says Benedict Cumberbatch, star of Marvel’s forthcoming magical mystery tour Doctor Strange. “It’s another moment during Marvel’s evolution.” Back in the ’60s, Doctor Strange was the hippies’ favourite. Dr Stephen Strange, an arrogant Manhattan neurosurgeon who travels to the Himalayas to recover from a career-ending accident and ends up as the Sorcerer Supreme, opened the door to Marvel’s most psychedelic adventures. Under the tutelage of Tilda Swinton’s Ancient One, Cumberbatch’s tormented hero learns magic and discovers hidden parallel dimensions. This multiverse was teased at the end of Ant-Man, but Doctor Strange goes the whole nine yards, with major ramifications for all of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The Ancient One will teach Strange and,…

1 BORN TO BE BLUE Ethan Hawke puts on the shades and picks up the brass in his highly praised performance to play iconic musician/heroin addict Chet Baker, the “James Dean of jazz”. Writer-director Robert Budreau follows up his short The Many Deaths Of Chet Baker with this biopic, which covers the period of Baker’s life in the late-’60s when he attempts a comeback after years of drug abuse, financial loss and public disgrace. 2 CAPTAIN FANTASTIC Actor turned director Matt Ross (The Aviator) nabs himself a fine cast (Viggo Mortensen, Frank Langella, Aussie Nicholas Hamilton) to tell a tale based on his upbringing as a rural family — a hippie dad (Mortensen) and his six kids — go on a road trip which sees the clan unravel as the…

BLACK-CLAD stormtroopers staring impassively as something burns in the background. AT-ATs clomping around on a beach. And not a lightsaber in sight. Gareth Edwards’s Rogue One is Star Wars, alright, but viewed from a whole new angle. We’ve known for some time that the first in the Star Wars Story anthology, which will fill in the blanks around the Skywalker-focused Episodes, would centre on the Rebel mission to steal the plans to the first Death Star, and that it would be more of a war movie than any Star Wars yet. When the movie’s stunning first trailer hit in early April, it was a surprising and pleasing mix of classic references (not one, but two Gonk droids) and things we haven’t seen in Star Wars before. Although we know, broadly…

TRAGIC POOR GOO EXCELLENT UNMISSABLE THE EMPIRE MOVIE GUIDE OUT NOW / RATED MA15+ / 116 MINS. DIRECTOR Shane Black CAST Russell Crowe, Ryan Gosling, Margaret Qualley, Kim Basinger PLOT Los Angeles, the 1970s. Washed-up private eye Holland March (Gosling) and hired enforcer Jackson Healy (Crowe) must team up to investigate the case of a missing girl (Qualley) and the connected death of a porn star. HAVING SQUATTED ON SHANE Black’s To Do list for years, it’s only now, after he once more hit blistering form with Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and proved able to work within the strictures of the Marvel Cinematic Universe — and make more than a billion for the studio in the process — on Iron Man 3, that The Nice Guys is out of a…

OUT JUNE 23 / RATED MA15+ / 117 MINS. DIRECTOR Richard Linklater CAST Blake Jenner, Glen Powell, Tyler Hoechlin, Zoey Deutch, Temple Baker PLOT August, 1980. Baseball pitcher Jake (Blake Jenner) arrives at his Texan college and spends the few days before classes begin bonding with his new teammates. THERE ARE ONLY TWO RULES for the college baseball players in Richard Linklater’s “spiritual sequel” to Dazed And Confused. One: no alcohol in their houses. Two: no girls in the upstairs bedrooms. It doesn’t take long for both to be broken. And broken in style. Starting three days and 15 hours before class starts (as a handy onscreen subtitle tells us) at the fictional Southeast Texas State college, Everybody Wants Some!! (named after a Van Halen song, including the double exclamation…

OUT NOW / RATED TBC / 108 MINS. DIRECTOR James Bobin CAST Mia Wasikowska, Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Sacha Baron Cohen, Anne Hathaway PLOT Alice (Wasikowska) returns to Underland to find a gravely ill Mad Hatter (Depp) and sets off to solve the mystery of his past after stealing a time–hopping device from Time (Baron Cohen). DESPITE MAKING A STAGGERING $1 billion-plus at the international box office, it’s safe to say that, six years on from release, Tim Burton’s take on Alice In Wonderland isn’t a particularly beloved take on Lewis Carroll’s classic children’s book. But with that kind of cash haul, a sequel was coming whether it was a good idea or not. Alice Through The Looking Glass — which bears little resemblance to the source material —…

OUT NOW / RATED PG / 101 MINS. DIRECTOR Taika Waititi CAST Sam Neill, Julian Dennison, Rachel House, Rima Te Wiata, Rhys Darby PLOT In the wild New Zealand bush, foster kid/gangsta-wannabe Ricky Baker (Dennison) escapes child services and a stint in juvie by hiding from authorities with his foster “uncle”, Hector (Neill). IN CASE YOU HAVEN’T HEARD, Taika Waititi is directing Thor 3. For those familiar with the Kiwi’s CV, which boasts a series of charming and critically successful indie comedies, a superhero blockbuster is a hard left turn. With Eagle vs Shark, Boy and vampire mock-doc What We Do In The Shadows, Waititi has made a name for himself with a whimsical, sweet-natured humour, his films always striking the right balance of humour and heart. Wilderpeople follows suit…

“I’m so lucky on X-Men because I don’t have to dress up. I’m just mortal.” SHE MAY DEPICT ONE OF the X-Men universe’s few non-mutant characters but, in real life, Rose Byrne is adept at shape-shifting. She’s had three very different movies hit cinemas in the past month: keg-rolling debauchery in Bad Neighbours 2; X-Men: Apocalypse, her return to the mutant world as CIA agent Moira MacTaggert; and sweet mother-daughter dramedy The Meddler. The 36-year-old recently gave birth to her first child, a boy called Rocco, and she is still adjusting to her new normal. “He’s two months old so the sleep’s not great,” says Byrne brightly. “It’s still early days so there’s a lot of coffee but I haven’t quite hit the Red Bull yet,” she laughs. Your role…

FROM NOW / RATED MA15+ / DIRECTOR TIM MILLER / CAST RYAN REYNOLDS, MORENA BACCARIN, T.J. MILLER, ED SKREIN, BRIANNA HILDEBRAND COCKPUNCHER TRIUMPHANT IF THE THOUGHT OF ultraviolent superhero films crammed with crude humour fill you with unbridled glee, you’re in luck: the astonishing success of the mid-budget Deadpool — it’s clocked a worldwide gross of $US761 million and is the highest grossing 20th Century Fox film ever not directed by George Lucas or James Cameron — all but guarantees a slew of them will be headed our way (expect the filmic Wolverine to finally get as stabby as his comic book counterpart in next year’s Wolverine 3). In a perverse twist, all it took to create a game changer that now stands as one of the biggest comic book…

FROM NOW / RATED PG / DIRECTOR ROB LETTERMAN / CAST JACK BLACK, DYLAN MINNETTE, ODEYA RUSH, AMY RYAN, RYAN LEE, JILLIAN BELL YOU COULD BE STINE IT’S SCARY HOW EASILY supernatural comedy can go wrong. For every Ghostbusters there seems to be a dozen films like R.I.P.D.. Happily, Goosebumps gets it just right. It’s consistently arch and knowing from the off, and while the scares won’t wake you up at three in the morning drenched in sweat, there are enough smartly manufactured jumps to keep things interesting. It helps to have solid source material, in this case R.L. Stine’s collection of spooky tales for teens and tweens. Rather than adapting a single book, director Rob Letterman and screenwriter Darren Lemke bet everything on Jack Black, placing his incarnation of…

FROM NOW / RATED MA15+ / DIRECTOR TRAVIS ZARIWNY / CAST GAGE GOLIGHTLY, MATTHEW DADDARIO, THE GRAPES OF ROTH HORROR FANS CAN BE A baffling bunch sometimes, often screaming bloody murder when a genre classic gets remade, forgetting that some of their favourite modern horror films (The Thing, The Fly, The Ring) are remakes. In the case of the outcry over the Cabin Fever update, however, it’s unclear whether the principal objection is that Eli Roth’s 2002 film was an untouchable classic, or that 14 years simply isn’t a sufficient gap to warrant a redo. Unless it’s a foreign-language film, in which case it’s okay. In Hollywood terms, the Cabin Fever remake actually makes sense, given that a) the teenagers it’s aimed at were toddlers when the original came out,…

FROM NOW / RATED M / DIRECTOR ALEX ROSS PERRY / CAST ELISABETH MOSS, KATHERINE WATERSTON, PATRICK FUGIT, KENTUCKER AUDLEY WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE… “I DON’T WANT YOU TO SEE me like this,” says Catherine (Elisabeth Moss) — swollen from crying, eyes panda’d with ruined make-up, nose scarlet — which only heightens the sense of callous voyeurism as her face fills the screen, the camera intruding obnoxiously on her grief. It places you from the very first scene in the uncomfortable role of rubbernecker to an emotional pile-up. And it just builds from there — there are so many close-ups, so many unhappy faces right in your face, that it feels like one of those worst-party-ever situations where you’re stuck on a sofa with a couple who are breaking up.…

1982 / FROM NOW / RATED R18+ / DIRECTOR MARK L. LESTER / CAST PERRY KING, TIMOTHY VAN PATTEN, RODDY MCDOWALL, MICHAEL J. FOX WE DON’T NEED NO EDUCATION CONTROVERSIAL WHEN first released and still packing a brutal punch in this beautifully collated Blu-ray release, director Mark L. Lester’s sleazy gore-fest proves alarmingly prophetic, despite a tendency to wallow in its unpleasantly exploitative roots. Lester, who went on to film Firestarter and Commando, along with fellow writers Tom Holland (Fright Night, Child’s Play) and John C.W. Saxton (Happy Birthday To Me), obviously didn’t think that their school days were the best days of their lives: the school depicted in Class Of 1984 is a war zone where teachers have all but given up the fight to educate the psychotic school…

You must be pumped that Goldstone’s world premiere is opening the Sydney Film Festival? Definitely. And for the second time in four years after Mystery Road. It’s doubly exciting. The State Theatre holds 2000 people, its a huge room! You’re right, I’m pumped but it’s not just an honour this time, it’s an extreme honour! Is it a daunting prospect showing your film to an audience for the first time? You’re writer, director, cinematographer and composer — this is pretty much you on the screen… Because I am doing all that, I don’t stop the film until I feel it is finished and ready for an audience. So I guess I’m not too worried because I pushed myself to my limit more than any of my…

OUT JUNE 2 / RATED TBC / 98 MINS. DIRECTOR Jodie Foster CAST George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Jack O’Connell, Caitriona Balfe, Dominic West PLOT Money Monster, a popular cable finance show, is hijacked during a live broadcast by Kyle Budwell (O’Connell), a man angry at taking a bath on a recommendation by the show’s host Lee Gates (Clooney). As a tense hostage situation unfolds, Gates and Budwell begin to dig a little deeper into the truth… JODIE FOSTER WAS TYPICALLY excellent in Spike Lee’s Inside Man, but it’s clear now she was also taking notes from Lee: watching and learning, for her fourth film as director in a similarly sweaty, tense, entertaining siege thriller. And if it’s not quite as accomplished as Lee’s movie, or its other key touchstones,…

OUT NOW / RATED MA15+ / 144 MINS. DIRECTOR Bryan Singer CAST James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Oscar Isaac, Nicholas Hoult, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Sophie Turner, Olivia Munn PLOT When ancient uber-mutant Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac) is woken after sleeping for millennia, he examines 1983 civilisation and finds it wanting, so he decides to bring down the world. Professor Xavier (James McAvoy) and his students must find a way to stop him. BEFORE APOCALYPSE GETS GOING bringing about, well, the apocalypse, students from Xavier’s School For The Gifted sneak out to see Return Of The Jedi. “Well, at least we can all agree, the third one is always the worst,” says Sophie Turner’s Jean Grey afterwards, with startling prescience. But whether it’s a dig at Brett Ratner’s unlamented The Last Stand…

OUT NOW / RATED MA15+ / 94 MINS. DIRECTOR Atom Egoyan CAST Christopher Plummer, Martin Landau, Dean Norris, Jürgen Prochnow, Henry Czerny PLOT Two Holocaust survivors living in the same nursing home plan to find and take revenge on a surviving Nazi officer before it’s too late. FIRST OF ALL, THE BEST WAY YOU could watch this movie is without knowing anything about it. If you’re willing to take our recommendation, stop reading this now and just take our word: this is a brilliant slow-burn drama that is not nearly as depressing as it looks from the first glance. Still reading? Don’t worry, we’ll try not to drop spoilers on you. Christopher Plummer (looking all of his 86 years, plus a couple more for good luck) is Zev Guttman, a…

THE GHOSTBUSTERS ARE BACK IN business. Empire can testify to this, since we’re standing outside the supernatural exterminators’ iconic Hook & Ladder 8 firehouse HQ, next to not one but two parked Ectomobiles. Walking in, we clock gleaming white surfaces, a Terror Dog head mounted on the wall like a hunting trophy, and a receptionist behind a vast desk. Although she doesn’t yell, “We got one!”, it’s enough to make us wonder if we’ve accidentally stepped through some sort of portal to the seventh dimension. This, though, is not on a New York street but the Sony lot in Culver City, Los Angeles. There’s no sign of Ray sliding down the firepole or Egon inspecting spores, moulds and fungi. Instead, we’re greeted by Ivan Reitman, director of the first two…

Ghostbusters was something I grew up with. Besides being a dentist, my great-grandfather Sam was a spiritualist and a researcher. He would visit all the psychic acts that came to Kingston, Ontario, and decide whether something was for real or a hoax. He had a live-in medium, named Walter Ashurst, to channel spirits in the old farmhouse where I still live in Canada. One time Ashurst crawled up on the chair, hunched over, gnarled his hands and began to speak in a German accent about physics and fission and atomic energy. A little research was done afterwards, and it was discovered that Dr. Charles Steinmetz, the famous inventor, used to crawl up on his chair like that when he worked. It became a family business. My grandfather, a Bell telephone…

05.14 “Who The Hell Are You?” James Parks has the distinction of playing the same character in two Tarantino movies, appearing as Sheriff Edgar McGraw in Kill Bill: Vol. 1 and Death Proof (he also reprises the character in Machete ). For The Hateful Eight he learned to drive a six-horse stagecoach. “I had to train for three months,” Parks says. “The horses pull hard, so pretty quickly it can get out of hand. They used to tell me that you can go from hero to zero in one second.” 14.33 Daisy Takes A Hit A controversial scene sees bounty hunter John Ruth (Kurt Russell) elbow criminal Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) in the face.…

FROM NOW / RATED MA15+ / DIRECTOR ALEJANDRO GONZáLEZ IñáRRITU / CAST LEONARDO DICAPRIO, TOM HARDY, WILL POULTER, DOMHNALL GLEESON THE BEAR NECESSITIES IT WAS FORETOLD AND so it came to pass: Leonardo DiCaprio finally won an Oscar. And all he had to do was spend The Revenant’s 10-month shoot bedding down in animal carcasses, risking hypothermia in icy rivers and eating (and then vomiting back up) bison liver. He’s a vegetarian. Do these hardships make it a great performance? The best of the last year? Not on their own, but DiCaprio’s work here is astounding and often wordless. His pain, both emotional (dead son) and physical (angry bear), is often conveyed through just an expression or ragged breathing pattern. Or a massive gash on his neck. They may not…

FROM NOW / RATED PG / DIRECTOR PETER SOHN / CAST JEFFREY WRIGHT, FRANCES MCDORMAND, MALEAH NIPAY-PADILLA, JACK MCGRAW, ANNA PAQUIN, SAM ELLIOTT T-REXTASY THE GOOD DINOSAUR HAS an enthralling story to tell, one packed with tension, heartache and intriguing twists. The bad news? That story is not on screen — it’s behind the scenes. But let’s focus first on what is there. In a parallel universe where dinosaurs weren’t wiped out, Arlo (Raymond Ochoa) is the runt of a family of farming Apatosauruses, his natural nervousness meaning he struggles to make his mark. Literally — when the members of the family prove themselves worthy, they’re permitted to leave a footprint on the side of their corn silo. Disaster strikes when his father Henry (Jeffrey Wright) dies hunting a feral…

FROM NOW / RATED M / DIRECTOR MICHAEL DOUGHERTY / CAST ADAM SCOTT, TONI COLLETTE, DAVID KOECHNER, ALLISON TOLMAN, KRISTA STADLER JINGLE HELL ALL THE WAY BACK TO Dickens, the best Christmas stories — It’s A Wonderful Life, Gremlins, Die Hard, Bad Santa — combine cynicism and sentiment. Krampus delivers this mix perfectly from its stunning opening, slo-mo consumerist mall riots accompanied by Bing Crosby’s It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas, before turning into a siege-type horror that effectively melds the set-ups of Christmas Vacation and The Mist. After deft thumbnail sketches of the young hero’s fairly awful folks — played just on the right side of caricature by Adam Scott (overworked Dad), Toni Collette (wound too-tight Mom), David Koechner (overbearing uncle), Allison Tolman (crass aunt) and Conchata…

1943 / OUT NOW / RATED G MAN O’ WAR WINSTON CHURCHILL’S SECRET MEMO was handwritten. And he was livid: “Pray propose to me the measures necessary to stop this foolish production.” To be fair, with World War II in the balance, he had a lot on his mind in August 1942. The last thing he needed was a pair of upstart filmmakers proposing some satire detrimental to the morale of his British army. To his mind, The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp was a matter of life and death. Democracy being democracy, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (hence forward P&P) carried on, using borrowed military uniforms and vehicles. Created by cartoonist David Low, Blimp was a slap-headed blowhard with a moustache the size of a coat hanger and…

The Founder CAST MICHAEL KEATON LINDA CARDELLINI, NICK OFFERMAN, PATRICK WILSON, LAURA DERN / DIRECTOR JOHN LEE HANCOCK CAPTION THE PICTURE ABOVE AND WIN STUFF! TWO ALL BEEF PATTIES, SPECIAL SAUCE, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a another fabulous performance from Michael Keaton. That’s what we’re hoping for in the McBiopic of the man who gave us the golden arches. We’re also hoping for an awesomely hilarious caption, from you the reader, for the image from The Founder above. If we do, the best will take home a copy of the R. L. Stine spookfest Goosebumps on Blu-ray and a promo T-shirt! THE FOUNDER WILL BE SERVED UP IN CINEMAS FROM AUGUST 25. HOW TO ENTER In 10 words or less email your caption with the subject June…