Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2016 i Empire Australasia

YUL BRYNNER. STEVE McQUEEN. Charles Bronson. James Coburn. Robert Vaughn. The Other Two. Beloved of pub-quiz movie rounds (liquid prizes if you remembered Brad Dexter and Horst Buchholz), “The Magnificent Seven” are one of the toughest gangs in movie history; courageous, inventive, no nonsense and completely Caucasian. In remaking John Sturges’s 1960 favourite, based on Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, based on John Lasseter’s A Bug’s Life, director Antoine Fuqua is looking to change things up. Not in the name of diversity quotas but as a response to the troubled times. “Terrorism is alive,” he says. “It takes a society to fight them now. It’s not like a group of white guys has to fight the bad guys. We’ve all got to fight together against one cause.” Set just after the…

IN A FIELD SURROUNDED BY battle tents, Empire is sloshing through thick mud of an ochre colour. It will soon turn vermilion as the setting of the centrepiece bloody battle to be featured in Season 2 of Marco Polo. We’re in Malaysia’s Johor, about an hour or so from the Singaporean border, where the Netflix historical epic has the run of the 100,000 square feet of film stages and surrounding backlots at Pinewood Iskandar Malaysia Studios. As the shoot hits the home stretch, the region’s monsoonal rains have called for hasty rewrites of some scenes. But this afternoon’s downfall provides just the battle-scape the production team had intended for tonight’s shoot. “We wrote that it was muddy and nasty and bloody and that they’re rolling around in [it] and now…

OUT JULY 14 / RATED TBC / 107 MINS. DIRECTOR Susanna White CAST Ewan McGregor, Naomie Harris, Damian Lewis, Stellan Skarsgård PLOT While on holiday in Antigua, poetics lecturer Perry (Ewan McGregor) and his lawyer girlfriend Gail (Naomie Harris) become embroiled with flamboyant Russian Mafia money launderer Dima (Stellan Skarsgård), who is desperately seeking sanctuary in the UK from his murderous boss. JOHN LE CARRÉ’S FINELY crafted espionage thrillers, many directors would tell you, provide weighty and pleasingly malleable material for the screen. In 2011, the grand-spy-daddy of all Le Carré’s novels, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, proved the ideal English-language debut for Tomas Alfredson, while just recently the Tom Hiddlestonled The Night Manager got the pulses of smaller-screen audiences racing, under the smart guidance of Susanne Bier. Now, Susanna White…

OUT NOW / RATED TBC / 115 MINS. DIRECTOR Steven Spielberg CAST Mark Rylance, Rebecca Hall, Bill Hader, Ruby Barnhill, Jermaine Clement, Penelope Wilton, Rafe Spall PLOT In London, young Sophie is taken from her orphanage by a giant, who takes her back to his land. Sophie learns that he is a Big Friendly Giant, but that even bigger giants are hungry for human “beans”. The pair try to protect the world from these giants, using the BFG’s talent for storing and delivering dreams. STEVEN SPIELBERG ADAPTING Roald Dahl: it’s enough to put a shiver of anticipation up the spine of anyone who remembers the ’80s — or, indeed, people who’ve grown up reading The BFG and watching vintage classic E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. Hopes have been high for the great…

OUT JULY 14 / RATED M / 95 MINS. DIRECTORS Daniel Scheinert, Daniel Kwan CAST Paul Dano, Daniel Radcliffe, Mary Elizabeth Winstead PLOT Stranded on a beach and about to hang himself, Hank (Dano) has second thoughts when a corpse with special abilities (Radcliffe) washes ashore. Together the pair attempt to return to civilisation and figure out the identity of a mystery girl (Winstead) whose picture they find on a phone… THERE’S A MOMENT WITHIN THE FIRST TEN minutes of Swiss Army Man where Paul Dano’s marooned, suicidal Hank rides Daniel Radcliffe’s corpse, Manny, through the ocean like a human cadaver jet-ski. It’s utterly absurd and, depending on how warped your sense of humour is, rather hilarious, but it serves as an early drawing-a-line-in-the-sand moment for audiences: either you’re on…

OUT JULY 21 / RATED PG / 92 MINS. DIRECTOR Whit Stillman CAST Kate Beckinsale, Chloë Sevigny, Tom Bennett Jane Austen’s novella Lady Susan is crafted by writer-director Whit Stillman (The Last Days Of Disco) into an intricate plot — Lady Susan Vernon (Kate Beckinsale) schemes to marry her ill-favoured daughter to wealthy idiot Sir James Martin (Tom Bennett) — peppered with laugh-out-loud cynical throw aways. Such high society comedy-romance is only bearable if real viciousness is stirred into the mix of posh accents, lovely costumes and great British character acting. After a long sojourn in leather vampire catsuits, Beckinsale acts up an awards-worthy storm as the amusingly horrid anti-heroine. The funniest, most deliciously venomous Jane Austen movie ever, and conclusive proof that a) Beckinsale has been seriously undervalued by…

OUT NOW / RATED MA15+ / 134 MINS. DIRECTOR James Wan CAST Patrick Wilson, Vera Farmiga, Frances O’Connor After his billion-dollar diversion with Fast & Furious 7, it would have been easy for Australian director-done-bonza James Wan to stay away from horror. But the man who created the Saw, Insidious and Conjuring franchises swiftly returned to doing what he does best. Like the 2014 original, this follows real-life ghostbusters, Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga, terrific). This time, they’re in London, 1977, and the normality of the environment only accentuates the horror. Wan plays fast and loose with facts, creating an escalating series of superb shocks as he does. Few modern horror filmmakers can deliver a jump scare as effectively as Wan. Despite some clichés and hokey…

OUT NOW / RATED M / 123 MINS. DIRECTOR Duncan Jones CAST Travis Fimmel, Paula Patton, Toby Kebbell, Ben Foster PLOT With their own world dying, a race of Orcs pass through a magical portal into the land of Azeroth. Led by a despotic warlock, the Orcs try to conquer Azeroth, but one among their number wants to broker peace. WHERE DOES ONE EVEN START in turning the world of World Of Warcraft into a movie? Played by millions but a mystery to millions more, the game has countless characters of all sorts of fantastical races — dwarves, elves, werewolves, ghouls. It has no specific plot and no end point. That Duncan Jones, who penned complex narratives in Moon and Source Code, has managed to herd all its random elements…

Five years ago, David Yates might justifiably have taken a very long holiday. The director had just said goodbye to Harry Potter with the series’ final instalment, The Deathly Hallows — Part 2. After four films, half a decade and north of $4 billion at the box office, he’d certainly earned a break. But his thoughts instead turned immediately to his next project. Unsurprisingly, stacks of screenplays had come his way — “Lots of sci-fi, lots of things blowing up,” he says. The director who’d just brought one of cinema’s most successful series to a spectacular conclusion had his pick. But one in particular called out to him. A surprising one. “The Legend Of Tarzan felt the most enjoyable of everything I’d been reading,” Yates tells Empire. A film based…

WHEN SELF-PROCLAIMED “SUPERSTAR publicist” Howard Bloom started working with Prince in December 1980, the first thing he did was ask to spend some time with the rising pop star. Bloom specifically wanted to discover, as he puts it, “the things that had shaped Prince emotionally”. To that end, he flew to the Shea’s Theatre in Buffalo, New York, where the then 22-year-old was rehearsing for his Dirty Mind tour. The two talked through the night. He finally found what he was looking for around dawn. “He told me this story of his mother taking him, at the age of five, to a big theatre,” says Bloom. “All the seats were pointed at the stage and there was a spotlight on the centre of the stage, and who’s in the spotlight?…

ON THE MORNING OF SEPTEMBER 21, 1978, a thousand-strong crowd gathered before the 22-storey-high Kincaid Towers in Lexington, Kentucky, drawing as close as it could to a huge, billowing airbag tethered near the building’s base. The city had for several weeks been enjoying the novelty of Hollywood being in town. Lexington’s modern skyline, with its plentiful supply of half-built office blocks (including Kincaid Towers) had attracted the attention of the location scouts for Steel, a now largely forgotten vehicle for Lee Majors and George Kennedy, set against the construction industry. As the film had wrapped only days before, the gathering rubberneckers had thought the circus was over, the main event having already taken place. Six weeks earlier, stuntman A.J. Bakunas, doubling for Kennedy, had flung himself from the ninth…

FROM NOW / RATED M / DIRECTOR TODD HAYNES / CAST CATE BLANCHETT, ROONEY MARA, SARAH PAULSON WOMEN IN LOVE THE CHALLENGE FOR MOST movie romances is finding a reason to keep the two people on the poster apart for the majority of the running time, thereby creating tension to carry the audience to the triumphant (or tragic) finale. In hackneyed melodramas and weak rom-coms, this involves laboured set-ups, out-of-character tantrums and contrived obstacles. In Carol, as with director Todd Haynes’s earlier Far From Heaven, there are compelling reasons of social prejudice to ensure that the two female lovers keep their distance. Still, the need to be together is greater than any obstruction, and so Carol gets the sweep and power of the best love stories without any trace of…

FROM NOW / RATED MA15+ / DIRECTOR GAVIN O’CONNOR / CAST NATALIE PORTMAN, JOEL EDGERTON, EWAN MCGREGOR, NOAH EMMERICH CALAMITY? CONSIDERING JANE GOT A Gun’s turbulent back story, you might expect it to be a ruinous mess, each catastrophic frame drowned out by the chirrup of casting agents’ mobiles and the Xanax-popping of anxious studio bean counters. Its director, Lynne Ramsay, walked off its Santa Fe set before the first take, while its cast rotated like the cylinder on a gunslinger’s iron. This Western seemed, for want of a better phrase, to have gone west. Instead, the end product is a dusty revenger which, while by no means a disaster, is about as thrilling as a bowl of cold oats. Ramsay’s replacement, Gavin O’Connor, shows a keen eye for…

1998 / FROM NOW / RATED R18+ / DIRECTOR TERRY GILLIAM / CAST JOHNNY DEPP, BENICIO DEL TORO THE BOOZY NIGHT OF THE HUNTER BASED ON HUNTER S. Thompson’s legendary gonzo journalism opus, Fear And Loathing is perhaps the last great film Terry Gilliam directed before he went too deep into the weirdness, But it’s also the first fully fledged version of the acting persona that has defined Depp’s career ever since. The lip-curling, tongue-waggling, spider-fingered mannerisms of Jack Sparrow, Ichabod Crane, the Mad Hatter, Charlie Mortdecai — they’re all here in Depp’s brilliant Raoul Duke. But Duke is actually the straight man next to the deranged and depraved mania of Dr. Gonzo (Benicio del Toro), who raves and vomits his way through this neon-psychedelic romp across ’70s Vegas, presented…

“Historical adventure has rarely been this thrilling.” 1992 / OUT NOW / RATED M THE FINAL FRONTIER BY 1992, MICHAEL MANN HAD DIRECTED Manhunter and spent the best part of a decade showrunning Miami Vice. In the years since, crime thrillers have remained his principal passion. Romantic historical action-adventure The Last Of The Mohicans is still an anomaly on his CV. While historically reverent, it doesn’t have a lot of time for the James Fenimore Cooper novel upon which it’s nominally based. Instead, Mann channelled the svelte 1936 film version he’d been indelibly impressed by as a child, watching it on TV. Cooper’s 1826 “classic” — still widely studied on American literature courses — is, to modern eyes, barely readable: laughably written (a tracker picks up a trail under the…

TODD PHILLIPS IS GETTING OUT OF THE Hangover business, and into the arms race. Specifically, he’s co-written and directed War Dogs, an international gun-running “comedic drama” shot in six countries. “I love travelling for movies,” Phillips tells Empire, “and the whole idea of the movie circus. I find that energy and freneticism always finds its way into the film. There was a lot of running around, but we were trying to tell a pretty big story.” Based on an article Guy Lawson wrote for Rolling Stone in 2011, the premise involves two young Miami stoners, David Packouz and Efraim Diveroli. With little more than an internet connection and a mobile, they penetrated the “grey world” of international arms dealing in 2007 and ended up with The Pentagon for a…

FORTY-SEVEN FILMS into his glorious career, and Woody Allen may have finally found the new Woody Allen. Over the years, the Woodster has employed a number of hot young things, including John Cusack, Kenneth Branagh and, er, Jason Biggs, as thinly veiled stand-ins for the real thing. But most have simply plumped for Woody impressions, while none quite captured the blend of wit and existential panic of the real thing. With his latest movie, Café Society, which opened the Cannes Film Festival in May, Allen’s search for a surrogate may have hit the mother lode in the form of Jesse Eisenberg. As Bobby, a guy from the Bronx who seeks his fortune — and possible romance with his Adventureland co-star Kristen Stewart — in 1930s Hollywood, Eisenberg ploughs his own…

THIS IS HOW YOU ANNOUNCE A CAST FOR A TV show — not with any great fanfare or hoopla, but with a simple list of 217 names in alphabetical order. Or at least, that’s how you do it if the show in question is Twin Peaks, which will return to our screens next year. Here, we pick out the most intriguing names, old and new, on the list... KYLE MACLACHLAN The last time we saw MacLachlan’s Special Agent Dale Cooper, the ostensible hero of the show when it first ran from 1990-’91, he was banging his head against a mirror and laughing maniacally, having been possessed by the spirit of Killer Bob. So he pretty much had to come back to close the loop on an all-time great TV cliffhanger.…

OUT JULY 14 / RATED M / 106 MINS. DIRECTOR John Carney CAST Ferdia Walsh-Peelo, Lucy Boynton, Jack Reynor, Aidan Gillen PLOT When his family falls on hard times, Cosmo (Walsh-Peelo) is moved from his fee-paying school to the local state school. In a bid to make friends, work out who he is and impress a girl, Conor starts a band. THERE’S AN EXPRESSION USED by Sing Street’s dorky hero to describe the music of The Cure: “happy sad”. Something that makes you feel a little dolorous, but in quite a bouncy way. The same description could be used for the films of John Carney. This is his third sort-of-musical in a row, after Once and Begin Again, and it’s another full-hearted celebration of laying yourself out for love, even…

OUT NOW / RATED TBC / 100 MINS. DIRECTORS Mike Thurmeier, Galen T. Chu CAST Ray Romano, Simon Pegg, John Leguizamo, Denis Leary, Queen Latifah After trashing the laws of palaeontology and geology over four instalments, this franchise now takes aim at astrophysics. The hapless, unkillable Scrat chases his acorn into a UFO and launches an asteroid towards Earth while playing pinball with the solar system. The other animals are warned by weasel Buck (Simon Pegg) and set off to avert the catastrophe using volcanic steam and crystal like a new-age spa. Then there are boring squabbles, gender politics straight from a ’90s sitcom, and endless bum jokes. A few fun moments, such as Buck unexpectedly singing Figaro’s Aria, can’t disguise a franchise running on fart fumes and, apparently, alien…

OUT NOW / RATED PG / 112 MINS. DIRECTOR Dave Green CAST Megan Fox, Will Arnett, Laura Linney Surprisingly, this unneeded sequel is considerably better than that diabolical 2014 reboot. At least, for a third of its running time. The opening sequence cares more about its mutant quartet than the entirety of its predecessor, a wise move that fuels our compassion even into the overstuffed finale. Same can’t be said for the limp threat of Shredder; kudos, then, to Gary Anthony Williams and WWE’s Sheamus, who bust a gut to try to inject some fun as Bebop and Rocksteady. The slick first third may seem like a different franchise is emerging but Out Of The Shadows soon unravels, as yet another uninspired MacGuffin lobs in yet another bland final act…

OUT JULY 14 / RATED TBC / 101 MINS. DIRECTOR Jean-Marc Vallée CAST Jake Gyllenhaal, Naomi Watts, Chris Cooper, Heather Lind, Judah Lewis PLOT After his wife (Lind) is killed, banker Davis Mitchell (Gyllenhaal) demolishes his worldly goods and forms a mysterious bond with a complaints department secretary (Watts) and her son (Lewis). FOLLOWING THE TEX-MEX DRUG scams of Dallas Buyers Club and 1600km mountain ramble of Wild, death-fixated indie middleweight Jean-Marc Vallée has now completed a bizarre-responses-to-grief trilogy. In this case, financial hotshot Davis (Jake Gyllenhaal) reacts to his wife’s sudden death by taking up amateur demolition. Household appliances, a cubicle door, his office computer, even his palatial show-home (which he bulldozes) — nothing is safe as he dismantles the remnants of his once-perfect life. Spaced out and hard…

IN NOVEMBER 1942, ROALD DAHL ARRIVED IN Hollywood. A party had been thrown in his honour at The Beverly Hills Hotel, by Walt Disney himself. Here, for Dahl’s benefit, Spencer Tracy and Charlie Chaplin acted out portions of a story the 26-year-old, British Royal Air Force pilot had recently cooked up. The story was about gremlins, mischievous imaginary critters blamed by airmen whenever there were technical difficulties. The story had dazzled Disney after he’d received it from the RAF (which needed to approve anything Dahl wrote while in its service), and Disney was determined to adapt it into an animated feature. Dahl was far from becoming the celebrated children’s writer we know him as today, author of such wildly popular yarns as James And The Giant Peach, Charlie And The…

FROM NOW / RATED M / DIRECTOR JASON ZADA / CAST NATALIE DORMER, TAYLOR KINNEY IT’S IN THE TREES, IT’S COMING THIS IS THE SECOND FILM IN a year to centre on an American who ventures into the Aokigahara forest at the foot of Mount Fuji, a notorious suicide spot. As with Gus Van Sant’s Sea Of Trees, which screened at Cannes last year and then vanished, there’s something a little distasteful about using a real place of tragedy as the backdrop for some Westerner to have a personal revelation. And it’s even worse to use it as the setting for a rather average set of horror scares, which is unfortunately what we get here. Natalie Dormer is rather good as a twin who has her own demons to face…

FROM NOW / RATED MA15+ / DIRECTORS DUKE JOHNSON, CHARLIE KAUFMAN / CAST DAVID THEWLIS, JENNIFER JASON LEIGH, TOM NOONAN MAN IN STOP-MOTION THERE ARE 1,070 “SPECIAL thanks” credits at the end of Anomalisa. Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson’s mini-masterpiece started life as a one-act Kaufman entry in a Carter Burwell sound-play experiment (whatever that is) and it took Kickstarter to get it to the screen. Happily, Anomalisa has made all those other Kickstarter requests bearable. It is a minor miracle of a movie, the most beautiful, haunting, empathetic, tender, funny 90 minutes of the year so far. Whether each of those 1,070 people donated a lot or a little, thank you to them all. On paper, it doesn’t sound hopeful. This is a stop-motion character study of Michael Stone,…

FROM NOW / RATED MA15+ / DIRECTOR TOBY TOBIAS / CAST IGGY POP, KACEY BARNFIELD, BEN LAMB, ANTONIO MAGRO GETTIN’ IGGY WITH IT THE SCORCHING SPANISH sun glints on the surface of a pristine pool, as a man of a certain age basks in the peace and quiet of a well-earned retirement. So far, so Sexy Beast. But a snake is about to enter this hillside paradise and much blood will be spilled before tranquility returns. That snake is Lucas (Ben Lamb). He descends on the idyllic hideaway to challenge Isabelle (Kacey Barnfield), who is both his ex-stepmother and ex-lover. The source of his indignation? She married his ailing father just before he died, robbing him of his inheritance. Forever making furtive phone calls home, Lucas thinks he can drive…

WIN! Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice on Blu-ray THE CAPED CRUSADER FACING OFF AGAINST THE Man of Steel… for even longer! The “Ultimate Edition” contains much more superhero stoushery — and you can kapow yourself one of 10 copies on Blu-ray (also starring Batman v Superman’s original cut) by answering our super-question below. TO WIN, TELL US WHY SUPERMAN — OR BATMAN — RULES. WIN! Gods Of Egypt on DVD ANCIENT IMMORTALS GOING AT IT! ON-SET at Sydney’s Fox Studios! Gerard “This. Is. Not. Sparta.” Butler and Nikolaj “First my hand; now, my eye” Coster-Waldau lead the SFX fandango. To get some Gods, enter now to claim one of 10 copies. TO WIN, TELL US WHICH MYTHOLOGICAL FIGURE IS BEST, AND…

CAST MILA KUNIS, KRISTEN BELL, KATHRYN HAHN, CHRISTINA APPLEGATE, JADA PINKETT SMITH / DIRECTORS JON LUCAS, SCOTT MOORE CAPTION THE PICTURE ABOVE AND WIN STUFF! THE MOTHER OF ALL MOTHER COMEDIES might be Bad Moms. Looking to do what it says, this parental-advisory freak-out has Mila Kunis, Kristen Bell and Kathryn Hahn as mums who can’t hack trying to be “good”. So, they go “bad”, such as in the image above. We need you to amusingly caption their store shenanigans and the best effort will take home a signed poster for new Oz outback chiller, Red Billabong, in cinemas August 25. BAD MOMS IS IN CINEMAS AUGUST 11. HOW TO ENTER In 10 words or less, email your caption with the subject July 2016 Caption Comp to empiregiveaways@bauer-media.com.au.…

COSTUME My costume from Submarine. I’d go and buy a coffee in that outfit, with my long leather coat, all in black, with that hair, and I was extremely confident and smooth. I enjoyed Graham. He’d go into a [bakery] and light the place up, man. I’m not particularly vain, I like to think. But maybe some of the stuff they put me in for In America — purple vests and that — now I’d go, “That’s coming nowhere near me.” Earlier in my career I submitted, and now I’m a little more picky. MOMENT Directing Journeyman . The fears I’d had about filmmaking and acting, I confronted them all. I’m not saying they’re totally erased, but they don’t have the potency they did. I took a…

THE EMPIRE MOVIE GUIDE UNMISSABLE EXCELLENT GOOD POOR TRAGIC OUT NOW / RATED M / 120 MINS. DIRECTOR Roland Emmerich CAST Liam Hemsworth, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman, Maika Munroe, Brent Spiner, Charlotte Gainsbourg PLOT Twenty years on from the global devastation wrought by the alien nasties of Independence Day, Earth has united to adapt and adopt all the leftover technology and prepare for the retaliation. On July 4, naturally, it comes. And it comes hard. AS DUBAI’S BURJ KHALIFA lances down from a fiery sky into the London Eye, tossed like a used iceblock stick amid the gravity-churning fury of a 5000km-wide, claw-shaped alien mother-of-all-battleships, Jeff Goldblum tiredly absorbs it all and deadpans: “They like to get the landmarks.” If his David Levinson — one-time computer guy, now Director of…

OUT NOW / RATED G / 97 MINS. DIRECTORS Andrew Stanton, Angus MacLane CAST Ellen DeGeneres, Albert Brooks, Hayden Rolence, Ed O’Neill, Diane Keaton, Eugene Levy, Idris Elba PLOT One year after she helped reunite Marlin (Brooks) and Nemo (Rolence), Dory (DeGeneres) is settled into her new life. But when some long-forgotten childhood memories resurface, she sets out to find her parents, with help from her new friends. SPARE A THOUGHT FOR THOSE wildly successful bazillionaires at Pixar. Yes, the Californian dream factory is one of the most respected studios in history — a virtual byword for a specific brand of boundless creativity — but, recently, they seem perennially to have something to prove. As if the envelope-pushing geniuses are locked in competition not just against the likes of DreamWorks…

OUT JULY 7 / RATED M / 98 MINS. DIRECTOR Rebecca Miller CAST Greta Gerwig, Ethan Hawke, Julianne Moore Smart people can do dumb stuff, as we see on increasing display in this Woody Allen-lite chamber piece about a farcical threesome of NYC intellectuals, who treat morality like jelly to be wrestled in. While they tussle further into absurdity, interest wanes. Aggravation rises. Hip-endearing Greta Gerwig stars as Maggie, whose plan to have a baby without a bloke soon involves unhappy author John (Ethan Hawke). How Maggie, John and his powerhouse wife Georgette (Julianne Moore) treat marriage might be a fair testimony to our relativist times. But that doesn’t equal writer-director Rebecca Miller giving us people and plot which warrant persistence or pondering. Seeing clever clogs flounder through life engenders…

OUT NOW / RATED M / 129 MINS. DIRECTOR Jon M. Chu CAST Jesse Eisenberg, Morgan Freeman, Mark Ruffalo The problem with magic tricks is once the big reveal occurs, there’s nowhere left to go. That proves to be an unassailable problem for this sequel to the charming, surprise 2013 sleeper hit. Having played its cards at the end of the original, the Now You See Me magic show can only muster a tepid return, set 18 months later. Three of the four Horsemen (Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Dave Franco) are back, hiding out… and bored. From here, this drab effort is so strangled by an incredibly convoluted plot that the original’s easy repartee is never recaptured. Same goes for its fun and flashy vibe, as interesting ideas are introduced,…

OUT JULY 7 / RATED M / 110 MINS. DIRECTOR Ivan Sen CAST Aaron Pedersen, Jacki Weaver, Alex Russell, David Wenham, Michael Dorman, Michelle Lim Davidson PLOT With a missing person on his mind and a bottle in his hand, detective Jay Swan (Aaron Pedersen) arrives in the small outback town of Goldstone. Helped and hindered by local cop Josh (Alex Russell), all roads lead to the brothel and the closed gates of the nearby mining company. A PSEUDO-SEQUEL TO HIS 2013 outback noir Mystery Road, Ivan Sen’s Goldstone again stars Aaron Pederson as Indigenous detective Jay Swan, but this time we find the law enforcer in a very different set of circumstances. In the first film, Swan was an eager do-gooder dealing with family issues, as well as a…

OUT NOW / RATED M / 114 MINS. DIRECTOR Rawson Marshall Thurber CAST Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Aaron Paul, Danielle Nicolet A buddy comedy with an inkling of a good idea: 20 years ago, Bob (Johnson) was an overweight high school student, but now he works for the CIA. Naturally, he enlists Calvin (Hart) — once the coolest guy in his school; now a depressed accountant — for a case involving a spy satellite. Despite such a tasty set-up, this is an action comedy where neither the action nor the comedy are up to much. Dodgeball’s Rawson Marshall Thurber directs and The Mindy Project’s Ike Barinholtz is a co-writer, but scenes plod on with the slack editing of an Apatovian improv-fest. Only, without the jokes. Both stars seem aware of…

OUT JULY 7 / RATED M / 109 MINS. DIRECTOR David Yates CAST Alexander Skarsgård, Margot Robbie, Samuel L. Jackson Edgar Rice Burrough’s most famous son has had a chequered past on the big screen. For every Johnny Weissmuller success, there was a Bo Derek dud to endure. In fact the last film of note was Greystoke: The Legend Of Tarzan, Lord Of The Apes in 1984. Now The Legend Of Tarzan brings the king of the swingers, erm… swinging into blockbuster land with a buffed up Alexander Skarsgård squeezing into the trademark loincloth. Starting in London where the ape-man now resides, there is a plot of sorts about Christoph Waltz’s dastardly moustache-twirling bad guy, but it’s transparently designed to get Tarzan and Jane (Margot Robbie, a spunky delight) back…

ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO. AUGUST 2015 In a vast, bluescreen-bedecked hangar on a blazing hot morning, Dr. Brakish Okun (Brent Spiner) is giving an impassioned speech. The chief scientific advisor to Earth Space Defense (ESD) — and apparent survivor of his mauling-by-extraterrestrial in the original Independence Day movie — closes the presentation on his strategy for dealing with the latest interstellar invasion of our home world. “... And then we’ll ram it right up her royal wazoo!” he yells, his greying hippie locks flying about impressively. This, it has to be said, is a suspiciously familiar plan — the ramming of it wazoowards being a tactic instantly recognisable to anyone who has seen Independence Day. But then, it all adds to what is becoming, for Empire, an undeniably pleasing sense of…

BIG-HEARTED, PACKED with visual effects, a family blockbuster… In theory, The BFG should place Steven Spielberg right slap bang in his comfort zone. And when Empire meets the director in New York, he does prove to be in a very relaxed, confident mood. He shows us videos of The BFG’s recording session on his iPhone, looks forward to Indiana Jones V (“We have a MacGuffin, that’s all I can say”), and muses on his inability to make comedies: “I developed Meet The Parents for myself to direct,” he says, “but I realised, ‘If I direct this I’m going to screw it up.’” Yet his affable demeanour belies just how tough the past three years have been for him. Making The BFG has turned out to be a journey full of…

01.02 King Arthur The movie begins with Arthur C. Clarke championing the potential of a fridge-freezer-sized computer. The archival footage is to remind digital natives that machines weren’t always pocket-sized. “It had a secondary impact,” says Danny Boyle. “It told you that Steve was not the sole guy responsible for imagining the future.” Later in the film, there’s a poster of Alan Turing, which a journalist fails to recognise: “’Cause he doesn’t look like Benedict Cumberbatch.” 04.31 All About Steve “We decided we would chase an actor rather than have a look-alike,” says Boyle. Michael Fassbender may not look like Jobs, but he ended up being him. “Michael is a purist. He is extraordinarily uncompromising about going for the truth of it. What the essence of…

FROM NOW / RATED M / DIRECTOR JOHN CROWLEY / CAST SAOIRSE RONAN, EMORY COHEN, DOMHNALL GLEESON, JULIE WALTERS FAIRY TALE OF NEW YORK A SORT OF ANTI-THE Godfather, Brooklyn sees a young immigrant arrive in America and, rather than form a deadly crime syndicate, go on to be thoroughly pleasant to everybody she encounters. On paper, it sounds like a yawn: a drama populated by well-mannered people, with little in the way of incident. On screen, though, it’s delightful, so much so that this $10 million Little Film That Could ended up a contender for the Best Picture Oscar. Director John Crowley, who also shot the finale of True Detective Season 2, does nifty work with his limited budget: a sea storm is simulated with only close shots…

FROM NOW / RATED M / DIRECTOR ALEX PROYAS / CAST NIKOLAJ COSTER-WALDAU, GERARD BUTLER, BRENTON THWAITES, BRYAN BROWN WALK LIKE AN EGYPTIAN IN THE PAST, ALEX PROYAS created seductive, gothic worlds, notably in The Crow and Dark City. But he stumbles into the garish sun for this catastrophe, shining unkind light on a story both misconceived and poorly executed. Situated in a fantasy Egypt where gods rule and most Egyptians are white with English accents, evil god Set (Gerard Butler) kills his brother Osiris (Bryan Brown), blinds Osiris’s son Horus (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and steals his throne. With the help of a thief (Brenton Thwaites), Horus attempts to reclaim the crown and set his people free. The plot is lurid and camp, but Proyas tries to give it a weight…

FROM NOW / RATED M / DIRECTOR RICKY GERVAIS / CAST RICKY GERVAIS, ERIC BANA, VERA FARMIGA, KELLY MACDONALD, KEVIN POLLAK CHUBBY LITTLE LOSER CHARACTERS DON’T HAVE to be likeable to make great comedy. Some of the greatest comic creations are bastards, nincompoops or weirdos. But even the worst have to have some redeeming feature, and it’s that spark of grace that’s missing from Ricky Gervais’s latest movie as writer, director and star. A remake of 2009 French film Envoyés Très Spéciaux about two journalists faking broadcasts from a war zone. Gervais plays Ian, the hapless tech responsible for the precarious predicament he is put in with too-cool anchorman Frank (Eric Bana). Their shaky alliance is particularly fragile because Frank slept with his comrade’s wife shortly before. But it’s hard…

1985 / FROM NOW / RATED PG / DIRECTOR WOLFGANG PETERSEN / CAST DENNIS QUAID, LOUIS GOSSETT JR., BRION JAMES, RICHARD MARCUS INTERDEPENDENCE DAY IT’S HARD TO IMAGINE anyone’s list of great ’80s sci-fi movies, however long, including 1985’s Enemy Mine. It didn’t exactly enjoy auspicious beginnings. After Terry Gilliam turned it down, it went into production at 20th Century Fox with Richard Loncraine at the helm. It was then shut down a week into shooting because of creative differences, before being relaunched from scratch with Wolfgang Petersen directing. It ran massively overbudget, received shruggy reviews and died at the US box office. It’s since enjoyed no cult resurgence, no second life in home entertainment. And yet, with this bare-bones Blu-ray debut (one extended scene, that’s yer lot), it is…

Beverly Hills Cop “IT’S SHOWTIME, OKAY?” SETTING THE SCENE When it came to casting the small but juicy role of Inspector Douglas Todd, the superior of Detroit lawman Axel Foley (Eddie Murphy), director Martin Brest went with Gil Hill, an actual ex-detective and veteran of the Detroit homicide division. It was a smart move. Every scene between Hill and Murphy crackles with hilarious energy, especially this first encounter following a disastrous attempt at a bust by Foley. Hill sadly died this year, but his legacy as cinema’s greatest angry police chief lives on. INT. LOCKER ROOM — DETROIT POLICE HEADQUARTERS — DAY Axel is being warned by fellow cop Jeffrey (Paul Reiser) that his boss is on the warpath. Suddenly, the last voice Foley wants to hear rings out. Inspector…