Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2016 i Empire Australasia

WHAT A YEAR. What an absolute belter of a year it’s been. The terrifying lows, the dizzying highs, the creamy middles… 2016 has been a glorious shock-and-awe assault on our pleasure lobes from the moment we watched Leo wrassle a b’ar before we’d even sobered up from New Year’s Eve. Here’s some of our most memorable moments of 2016 in the Empire office — let us know yours, via empire@bauer-media.com.au, or on our Facebook page, /empireaust. Most unintentionally hilarious moment: Oscar Isaac in his vastly over-produced blue costume in X-Men: Apocalypse, placing his hand on the TV set and growling, “Leeeearning…” A super-powered rip-off of Leeloo learning history in The Fifth Element, but so much stupider — especially for a mutant who can read minds: why not have him “leeeeeearn”…

ROBERT DOWNEY JR TO DIRECT TV DRAMA SINGULARITY SAMUEL L JACKSON JOINS BRIE LARSON'S DIRECTORIAL DEBUT UNICORN STORES STEVE CARELL TO STAR IN MINECRAFT FILM FOREST WHITAKER JOINS JOHNNY DEPP IN TUPAC CRIME DRAMA LABYRINTH AARON ECKHART WON'T RETURN FOR ANGEL HAS FALLEN HBO'S WESTWORLD RENEWED FOR SEASON 2 CLINT MANSELL TO SCORE GHOST IN THE SHELL MATT DAMON AND LIAM NEESON TO STAR IN UNTITLED MOTORSPORTS RACING THRILLER THE CROODS 2 CANCELLED EDGAR RAMIREZ JOINS WILL SMITH IN DAVID AYER'S BRIGHT PENELOPE CRUZ BOARDING KENNETH BRANAGH'S MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS DEAN DEVLIN TO DIRECT COUNTDOWN THE ACCOUNTANT DIRECTOR GAVIN O'CONNOR MAKING A NEW GREEN HORNET MOVIE FEDE ALVAREZ CONFIRMED TO DIRECT THE GIRL IN THE SPIDER'S WEB WITH ROONEY MARA JURASSIC WORLDSTAR LAUREN LAPKUS TO JOIN CAST OF…

WINSTON CHURCHILL HAS been played by British thesps from Albert Finney to Michael Gambon and soon Brian Cox, but never with quite the dedication to physical verisimilitude of Darkest Hour’s Gary Oldman. Yes, this is Gary Oldman. Honest. Joe Wright’s (Atonement, Pride & Prejudice) latest dramatises the early days of Churchill’s Prime Ministership. With the Wehrmacht stomping across Europe and Hitler at his most bullish, the nation’s leader was left with a stark choice: negotiate a humiliating peace with Germany, or dig in and fight back. Churchill sat back, lit a cigar and said, “I’ll take option B.” Except, of course, the reality was much less straightforward. As Anthony McCarten’s script will chart, the strain was enormous and he lent heavily on the support of his stalwart wife Clementine (Kristin…

HAVE A STRONG CONCEPT “Don’t say it, don’t think it,” is the mantra behind her new film, The Bye Bye Man, about a supernatural entity who hunts and possesses its victims and makes them killers. “He’s telepathic and he knows when you’re thinking about him, and your fear makes him more powerful,” Title explains. CAST SMART Playing the supernatural stalker is Doug Jones, used to monstrous make-up jobs thanks to regular gigs with Guillermo del Toro in Pan’s Labyrinth and the Hellboys. “He can do more with his index finger than most people can do with their entire body,” says Title. “He couldn’t see well in the make-up, so he would step carefully around the set, then all of a sudden burst into life. There were crew who decided to…

Which character were you in your first school play? I played the middle Billy goat in The Three Billy Goats Gruff. I think I was a little disappointed; it was interesting enough, [but] I either wanted to be the big Billy goat or the little Billy goat. What is your signature dish? I make a grilled pimento cheese sandwich with cream of tomato soup. It’s pretty darned good, but it’s the only thing I can make. What is your earliest memory? When I was three, I remember playing a plastic guitar my parents got me and singing the first song I ever wrote, which was called ‘Cat Shit On A Rat Box’. Have you ever knowingly broken the law? In West Hollywood one time, I got a pretty high-priced parking…

OUT NOW RATED M / 133 MINS DIRECTOR David Yates CAST Eddie Redmayne, Katherine Waterston, Colin Farrell, Samantha Morton, Dan Fogler, Alison Sudol, Ezra Miller, Carmen Ejogo PLOT Newt Scamander (Redmayne) arrives in New York to pursue his work promoting the care of magical creatures, but finds himself drawn into a conflict between the wizarding world and witch-hunters led by Mary Lou Barebone (Morton). YOU HAVE TO credit J.K. Rowling. Rather than spin off new big-screen adventures for the generation-defining boy wizard, she and the Warner Bros. team have opened a completely different wizarding saga: a new era, new country and entirely new characters (at least so far). That’s a lot of world-building to do, so this film has a bit of the same dense exposition of the first two…

How easy was it to find your new dog? We recruited Luke, our dog trainer, again to start the search. It’s an elimination process. It’s really about Luke spending time with the dog. For six months he had four dogs come and live with him. It would take him a month to figure out if a dog was capable of doing what we needed him to do. As is usually the case with this kind of thing, it’s quite protracted. Coco had such a classic iconic face. Phoenix had these beautiful eyes and the proportions of his face were right. We had to screen test the dogs. Put a camera on them on every angle. You have to be rigorous, almost forensic, about casting and that takes time. It’s like…

OUT NOW / RATED PG / 99 MINS DIRECTOR Klaus Härö CAST Lembit Ulfsak, Märt Avandi, Kirill Käro, Tõnu Oja, Ursula Ratasepp IT’S A SUGARFREE Dead Poets, an adult School Of Rock. It’s Sister Act II without nuns or medleys or a young Lauryn Hill. It’s a teacher-inspiring-students tale where the cohort’s success isn’t the highest stake. We’re in 1940. There’s no John Keating, Dewey Finn, or Sister Mary Clarence to unleash the fun and freedom in all of us. This is as much fun as can be had sitting in class during WWII, which is surprisingly quite a lot, albeit subtler. Protagonist Endel Nelis (Märt Avandi) boasted a life with world-class fencing on the horizon, until forced to flee his hometown of Leningrad due to the Secret Police and…

Splinter Of The Mind’s Eye (1978) Alan Dean Foster’s novel follow-up to Star Wars, in which Luke and Leia battle Vader for a powerful crystal on a swampy planet named Mimban. He lightsaber-duels both heroes, but it’s Luke who beats the looming villain, cutting off his arm and sending him tumbling down a pit. Planet Of Kadril (1980) This Los Angeles Times comic-strip sees Lord Vader developing a poisonous gas named “pacifog”; by putting “kunda crystals” in his stormtroopers’ breathing filters, he makes them immune. His chemical warfare plan goes awry, though, when Luke, Han and co find a “vibrocrystal” which shatters the kundas. Curse those pesky Rebels. Shadows Of The Empire (1996) Though it was Lucasfilm’s own multimedia expansion, set before Return Of The Jedi, Shadows Of The Empire…

40 UNDER CAPRICORN (1949) Here’s the answer to the pub trivia question, “Which Hitchcock film is set in Australia?” More curio than classic, this suspense-free melodrama returns us to Sydney 1831, where Michael Wilding’s colonial newbie woos Ingrid Bergman’s boozy and nutty Lady Henrietta, much to the consternation of her gruff hubby Joseph Cotten. The Technicolor’s lovely but there’s too much emotional horizon-gazing from Bergman and Cotten, while Hitch’s post-Rope 10-minute takes are technical wizardry in the service of too little. 39 THE PLEASURE GARDEN (1925) Hitch’s directorial debut is a stagey silent melodrama about the trials and tragedies of two showgirls. What makes it worthwhile these days is as a cinematic crystal ball that’d anticipate much of what was to come in his career, from the obsession with blondes…

THIS SUMMER SHOULD have been glorious for Leslie Jones. After a decade of popping up in films as characters such as ‘Trucker Woman’ (National Security) and ‘Angry Subway Patron’ (Trainwreck), the 49-year-old Saturday Night Live cast member finally got her big break, as one of the lead quartet in Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters reboot. She headed to Boston and spent a major chunk of 2015 battling phantoms. But online, trouble was brewing. Countless male ‘fans’, furious at the casting of female leads, targeted a torrent of abuse at everyone involved. Jones received the worst of it, with many horrific, often racist messages aimed at her Twitter account. When Empire caught up with her just before the movie’s release, she was thoroughly bummed out. “It makes me very sad,” she said. “If…

“He calls it ‘fuck-dust’. He liberally sprinkled fuck-dust on the film.” CHARLIE HUNNAM ON GUY RITCHIE’S PROCESS “I imagined a child drawing a mouse’s head. I’m talking triangular member and balls to either side in place of the mouse’s ears.” THE GREASY STRANGLER DIRECTOR JIM HOSKING’S PENIS-DESIGN SECRETS “One or two people smile at me now when I go through an airport, rather than muttering, ‘Wanker,’ as I pass, which is a change.” SAM NEILL IS FEELING THE HUNT FOR THE WILDERPEOPLE EFFECT “That night I ate some mushrooms and I did self-inflict some burns.” JAI COURTNEY REVEALS HIS SUICIDE SQUAD PREP “Superman can go fuck himself.” JENNIFER LAWRENCE, NOT A FAN OF KAL-EL…

00.04.13 966 DAYS __ When we meet up with the crew of the Starship Enterprise, they’re three years into their five-year mission. Or 966 days, to be precise. “We realised that would be fun, because 966 was relevant to the 50th anniversary,” says Simon Pegg, the film’s co-writer. (The original series of Star Trek aired in September of 1966.) “We never saw what happened to Kirk & co beyond this point, because the show got cancelled. So we filled the gap.” 00.11.25 THE OTHER MR SULU __ When the Enterprise docks at Yorktown, John Cho’s Lt Sulu is met by his daughter and husband. In case you missed the hubbub upon release, Sulu is gay. But even if not, you might not have realised husband Ben is played by co-writer…

FROM NOW / RATED PG PERHAPS THERE’S A more penetrating film to be made once sprinter extraordinaire Usain Bolt is out of the clutches of his multi-million dollar sponsors, but this documentary is a more than solid place-holder until then. Following him as he trains for this year’s Olympics, intercutting the story of his career up to this year, there’s not much beyond a hagiography — he can’t be this straightforward, can he? — but the footage of him training is fascinating, and seeing his multiple Olympic triumphs is genuinely spectacular. Right now the people want their smiling goofball genius, and this delivers exactly that — a hefty dose of Bolt’s billion-dollar charm, and then some. Sometimes hero worship is okay if you’re worshipping someone who is deserving of it.…

FROM DECEMBER 7 / RATED MA15+ WITH ITS JAUNTY music and chin-stroke-while-raising-eyebrow tone, Kiwi doco Tickled starts out like it’s going to be a bit of a lark. While researching one of his ‘And Finally…’ stories for 3 News, co-director David Farrier came across a website asking for volunteers to take part in “Competitive Endurance Tickling”, and thought it would make a funny “light entertainment” piece. So he contacted the company behind this odd sport… And, in response, received homophobic slurs and cease-and-desist threats from lawyers. Gradually, insidiously, as Farrier digs deeper, the lark turns dark. It’s a crazy, rolling-snowball narrative that is unexpected, and genuinely disturbing. Though Farrier drops the pace and overplays his reveal, it feels like Louis Theroux shooting a conspiracy thriller. Tickling, it seems, is no…

1981 / FROM DECEMBER 7 / RATED R18+ / DIRECTOR Michael Mann / CAST James Caan, Tuesday Weld, Willie Nelson, Jim Belushi, Dennis Farina AS A YOUNG screenwriter, working on a failed draft of Dustin Hoffman’s Straight Time, Michael Mann took a trip to Folsom Prison in California. “The colour comes out of the research,” he explains, the scholarly expert to James Caan’s wiseguy on this Blu-ray’s odd-couple commentary. Off the back of that trip, Mann wrote two screenplays at the same time: Heat and Thief. These detailed, measured, almost philosophical studies of the lives of two crack burglars and ex-cons, set in different cities, in vastly different decades, remain clear companion pieces and the calling cards of Mann’s feature-film depictions of the clockwork of crime. If Heat was to…

FROM DECEMBER 7 / RATED M THE CRIME RE-ENACTMENT genre relies heavily on story: find a gripping tale and the rest of the show will take care of itself. Real Detective takes a different approach. Each stand-alone episode features a compelling case, but the focus is on the investigators as much as the crime, creating something closer to a drama than the usual true-crime re-enactment. Presumably that’s why name actors (well, actors you might recognise) play the lead each week in recreated scenes while the real detectives narrate their investigations. Cops get angry, cops make mistakes, cops get PTSD and have to resign from the force; the highlight is episode two, where Portland Detective CW Jensen (Tahmoh Penikett), still rattled after killing in the line of duty, takes on a…

OUT NOW / FORMATS PS4, XBOX ONE, PC DIRECTORS Raphaël Colantonio, Harvey Smith A WORTHY SEQUEL to the 2012 original, Dishonored 2 builds on the steampunk aesthetic and ramps up the “choice and consequence” factor. You can take a stealth or a more blunt-force approach to the storyline, and you have a choice of two main characters, which means despite about a 12-hour play-through, this game rewards multiple replays. As in the first game, you have access to a variety of powers, including time-bending and “blinking” (a form of teleportation) — with practise, you can combine powers to brilliant and sometimes hilarious effect. The gameplay mechanics evolve through the game, forcing you to adapt with them. Challenging, intelligent, visually glorious.…

WIN! CAPTAIN FANTASTIC ON DVD WATCH VIGGO Mortensen take home-schooling to the next level. When we say schooling we actually mean knife-throwing, intense number-crunching and extreme sports. Win on DVD to see what happens when Viggo’s kids take their HSC. TO ENTER, TELL US WHAT YOUR FAVOURITE VIGGO MORTENSEN ROLE IS, AND WHY. WIN! DAVID BRENT: LIFE ON THE ROAD ON BLU-RAY RICKY GERVAIS’S MOST famous creation has left the confines of the office to head on down the free love highway in search of rock ‘n’ roll stardom. In Slough. Win one of 10 BDs we have up for grabs to witness David Brent’s on-stage antics. It’s an embarrassment of riches. TO ENTER, TELL US WHAT YOUR FAVOURITE DAVID BRENT MOMENT IS, AND WHY. WIN! BRIDGET JONES’S BABY ON…

D’YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN? I really enjoyed your feature last month (Empire #188) on the Oasis documentary Supersonic. I was lucky enough to be in the front row at Knebworth in 1996 and I had forgotten what a great time it was in England when Oasis where at their height. It was a time of optimism and a belief that anything was possible. Everything Oasis did made the news, from bust-ups to Liam’s beard! I’ll never forget being in a pub while the DJ played Wonderwall, and mid-song he turned off the track and everyone in the pub sang the rest. It was a goosebumps moment. I’m looking forward to seeing the movie and reliving the excitement. The music industry has changed so much that I don’t think another…

OUT DECEMBER 26 / RATED M / 95 MINS DIRECTOR Julien Rappeneau CAST Noémie Lvovsky, Kyan Khojandi, Alice Isaaz ROSALIE BLUM IS the kind of film that deserves adjectives like ‘delightful’ and ‘splendid’. This French-language hodge-podge of genres maintains one foot in rom-com territory (and actually nails the ‘com’ part) while avoiding almost every ‘rom’ trope, partly due to the fact that a mystery lies at the centre of the plot. A mystery that came at exactly the right time to disrupt the stale existence of our protagonist, Vincent (Kyan Khojandi) — a nice enough bloke who runs a barbershop and lives with a mum that makes overbearing seem sweet by comparison. Vince could live out his daily routine with both eyes closed, so thank the universe that his mother…

OUT DECEMBER 26 / RATED M / 108 MINS DIRECTOR Jim Jarmusch CAST Iggy Pop, Mike Watt, Ron Asheton, James Williamson, Scott Asheton INARGUABLY THE MOST influential American rock band of all time, The Stooges have long deserved a definitive biopic. And really, there could not have been anyone better qualified to make it than Jim Jarmusch (who cast Iggy Pop to brilliant effect in both Coffee And Cigarettes and Dead Man). But the problem with biopics about bands who were overlooked at the time — particularly a time when video cameras were far less omnipresent than they are today — is, inevitably, a scantness of footage. Or at least footage that anyone with even the slightest interest in The Stooges will not have seen plenty of times before. So…

THE PLOT Seven years after her brother’s weird death, Donnie’s younger sister, Samantha (Daveigh Chase), goes on a road trip with her best pal. After their car breaks down, Samantha starts sleepwalking and appearing in visions to a Gulf War veteran (James Lafferty), who narrowly misses being killed by a meteorite. THE CREATORS The 2009 film was directed by Chris Fisher and written by Nathan Atkins, the man behind Deadly Descent: The Abominable Snowman. Production company Silver Nitrate owned the rights, having put out Donnie Darko on DVD in the US. Richard Kelly had no involvement and says he was told, “You have no legal recourse to stop us.” THE CONNECTIONS Fisher and Atkins brought back Chase to play the older Samantha, and clearly paid closer attention to Kelly’s visual…

MOST ACTORS TREAD the boards for the first time in a school play. For Millie Bobby Brown, it was at the 2016 Emmy Awards, performing Uptown Funk with her Stranger Things co-stars to an audience of 7,000, plus 11.3 million more at home. As stage debuts go, it’s pretty extreme. But Brown shrugs it off. “I’d done a Comic-Con before,” she says. “I’ve never been shy of big crowds.” Big crowds are starting to become standard for the 12-year-old best known as Eleven, the smash Netflix show’s psychokinetic, Eggo waffle-loving heroine. There have been talk shows. There have been magazine covers. There’s been an audience at the White House. And there’s been the whirlwind of that Emmys show, during which John Travolta, Melissa McCarthy and David Schwimmer all declared themselves…

“IT DOES GET weird,” says Julian Dennison of the fame he’s experienced since Taika Waititi’s Hunt For The Wilderpeople became New Zealand’s biggest-ever homegrown hit. “Like, if you’re rushing to the loo and someone asks for a photo, I’m like, ‘You won’t get a very nice photo!’ I think it raised $12 million in New Zealand and our population is only four million, so everyone saw it three times. It’s sort of like Pokémon Go.” The 14-year-old’s “bad egg” Ricky Baker is a comedy creation for the ages, dispensing great lines as he wanders the wilds with grumpy foster carer Uncle Hec (Sam Neill). “We didn’t learn much about the outdoors because we had catering, we had warm clothes, we pretty much had the army,” Dennison says. “I learned something…

THE WORLD HAD plenty of reasons to be thankful for Tom Hanks this year. If he wasn’t landing a plane on the Hudson in Sully, he was saving the whole shebang in Inferno. But his crowning glory came in a form nobody could have predicted: a seemingly throwaway Saturday Night Live sketch involving a haunted elevator, dancing skeletons, an electro earworm and a gurning enigma named David S. Pumpkins (catchphrase: “Any queeeestions?”). It aired on 22 October — by the next day, Pumpkins was everywhere, with tribute videos, Hallowe’en costumes and the surest sign you’ve made it: parody Twitter accounts. Hanks has been tight-lipped about it, saying only, “I’m going to be David S. Pumpkins for the rest of my life,” but with any luck there’s a movie in the…

VICTIM __ 1961 Dirk Bogarde’s closeted barrister is the victim of blackmail in the first English-language film to use the word “homosexual”. Its sympathetic portrayal is often credited with helping to liberalise British laws and soften prejudice. THE ADVENTURES OF PRISCILLA, QUEEN OF THE DESERT __ 1994 Stephan Elliott’s gorgeous and tender culture-clash road-trip film won a swag of Best Costume Design awards, including an Oscar, but the actors under the frocks were the heart of the film, especially Terence Stamp in an affecting turn as transgender woman Bernadette. BOYS DON’T CRY __ 1999 Kimberly Peirce’s Oscar-winning film is based on the real-life story of murdered trans man Brandon Teena. Peirce keeps the focus tight on the story of Brandon and his girlfriend Lana, rather than sensationalising his tragic death,…

FROM NOW / RATED M / DIRECTOR Justin Lin / CAST Chris Pine, Simon Pegg, Zachary Quinto, John Cho, Zoe Saldana, Karl Urban AFTER SUCCESSFULLY kick-starting the Star Trek franchise, JJ Abrams hands over the keys of the USS Enterprise to Fast and Furious 6’s Justin Lin. While unsurprisingly the action and spectacular effects quotient is raised, hardly anything else resonates. This feels like a stale, reheated, extended edition of Gene Roddenberry’s TV show; tired and by the numbers; its young cast already uninspired. Spock (Quinto) and Uhura’s (Saldana) lover’s spat is high school level dull. Even the late Anton Yelchin’s final performance fails to generate a poignant kick to the heart. Simon Pegg pulls double duty, reprising his role as Montgomery “Scotty” Scott and co-writing the lazy script. Five…

FROM 7 DECEMBER / RATED MA15+ IN 2006 FIVE bodies of local prostitutes from the London Road area of Ipswich were discovered. Traumatised, the community sought to deal with the aftermath and the hunt for the killer. Now this macabre true story may seem an unlikely inspiration for this musical, which was a hit on the London stage. A fascinating examination of a curtain-twitching community floored by the killings and resulting media circus, the script and songs use real dialogue recorded at the time. Olivia Colman is excellent as a concerned/appalled neighbour of the murderer, while Tom Hardy is a taxi driver with a troubling obsession with serial killers. All cast and crew do an impressive job in making this unlikely proposition such an engaging, thought-provoking and darkly funny watch.…

FROM DECEMBER 14 / RATED MA15+ NOVELTY IS BECOMING a rare commodity in the zom-com sub-genre, but Austrian Dominik Hartl comes up with some innovative ways to slay the walking dead in this tale of snowboarders and a batch of toxic fake snow. Essentially this is Green Room with flesh eaters instead of white supremacists. The set-up is perfunctory and predictable, while the performances are more bullish than accomplished. But the make-up effects and animatronics belie the modest budget, as gore and innards are splattered about with the aid of some snowboards, ski poles and a snowblower. Still, it’s not all knowing horror, a romantic dance routine involving some music-soothed zombies providing welcome and touching moments of calm amid the madness. Just ignore the fact that Hartl’s schlocker doesn’t contain…

1975 / FROM NOW / RATED MA15+ THEY DON’T MAKE them like this anymore. Made when film was cheap and stunt men were cheaper, Brian Trenchard-Smith’s adrenaline charged Ozploitation classic, in a stunning 4K transfer, is a brilliantly entertaining actioner that uses iconic Aussie locations like never before. Or since. Jimmy Yu stars as Inspector Fang Sing Leng, a Chinese cop who heads Down Under to extradite a drug dealer and gets on the bad side of George Lazenby’s “ruthless czar of international evil”. Cue bonkers set pieces and crazy stunts as our hero fights atop Uluru, hang-glides over Sydney Harbour and defies death climbing skyscrapers. It’s amazing they didn’t kill someone. EXTRAS Commentary, interviews, newsreel footage, making-of plus five bonus movies: Deathcheaters, Stunt Rock, Kung Fu Killers, Danger Freaks…

MAX JOLIN — 6 SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN Did you enjoy Singin’ In The Rain ? I very much liked it. I liked all the tricks that Don [Gene Kelly] did. I think he’s very elegant. It’s elegant when he’s skipping along with the umbrella behind his back. What would you say the film is about? Well, it starts in a big place with lots and lots and lots of people and there are cars with very famous people, and it’s set in Hollywood and some very famous people come out. So there’s Don, who is the main character, and he’s with someone... He hasn’t got married to her, but Lina [Jean Hagen] is her name and I don’t really like her. She’s quite annoying and irritating.…

FROM DECEMBER 7 / RATED MA15+ A POP-HISTORY exploration of the American frontier after the Civil War, this docudrama mixes bloody re-enactments with historian narrators (and some actors who once played cowboys! History lessons from Burt Reynolds and Kiefer Sutherland!) to tell the interwoven stories of Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, General Custer and Wyatt Earp from 1865 to 1890. It’s a bit like those “true crime” TV shows but with gunslingers. Fun, and informative in a non-Ken Burns way. EXTRAS None.…

THANKS SO MUCH for the awesome tribute to Gene Wilder in the October issue. He was my all-time favourite comic actor and I don’t think he ever made a bad movie — I even loved Haunted Honeymoon! It was great to relive all his best moments and I am going to re-watch Young Frankenstein tonight to celebrate. Cheers and RIP Gene Wilder. TRENT EDWARDS, VIA EMAIL Gene was certainly a hero around these parts, Trent.We even got to meet him in 2005. He gave us a scrumdiddlyumptious bar and everything! EVERY letter printed this month scores a DVD of Western The Duel, starring Woody Harrelson and Aussie Liam Hemsworth.…

“FILMS ARE REALLY the heartbeat of Tropfest,” says the short film festival’s founder and director John Polson. “What makes a great film for us is originality. It’s the ability to just tell a great story.” February 11 marks the 25th Tropfest, which is now the world’s largest short film festival. “We’ve had some fantastic short films. I saw a film one year, it had the title The Film, so this title fades up and it looks like it’s going to be the greatest movie ever, fade to black and then a minute of credits. And that’s it. It gave us all a good laugh.” An original idea, even if it’s harebrained, beats something derivative — so don’t just copy previous years’ films. “We’ve had all kinds. We had a film…

EXCELLENT GOOD OKAY POOR AWFUL OUT 26 DECEMBER RATED TBC / 128 MINS DIRECTOR Damien Chazelle CAST Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, John Legend, JK Simmons PLOT An aspiring actress and a struggling musician meet, flirt, fall in love and then struggle to balance the demands of their blossoming careers with their evolving relationship… and the story is largely delivered via song and dance. AFTER THE CRITICAL and commercial breakthrough of Damien Chazelle’s debut feature Whiplash, we can only imagine the nervous collar-tugging when he announced to his reps that his next movie would be… a Fifties-style jazz musical. The good news for all involved is that it is another triumph. A word up front: if the word “musical” makes your eyes glaze over and attention span snap shut, you’re not…

 “I FEEL LIKE I’M OUT OF PRISON” begins Aaron Eckhart when Empire suggests he is having a ‘moment’. “Careers go in different ways. Sometimes you’re up and sometimes you’re down. Having this happen in my life now, when I’m 48, is special. This will probably never happen again.” The star is referring to his roles in two very different movies. In Clint Eastwood’s Sully, he plays co-pilot Jeff Skiles, who helped land a passenger plane on the Hudson River after birds took out the engine. But, more impressively, in Ben Younger’s upcoimng Bleed For This, he plays Kevin Rooney, a washed-up boxing trainer who finds redemption helping Vinny Pazienza (Miles Teller) get back in the ring after a potentially paralysing car accident. With a paunch, a stoop and a balding…

MARK HAMILL Hamill grew up watching the Batman show, and years later, before it was available to buy, had Fox send him tapes of every episode. “Adam is so underrated as an actor,” he said recently. “He walked the line between sincerity and parody and set the tone.” NICOLAS CAGE “Adam West was my favourite Batman,” Cage once said. “I always wanted to be him.” He achieved that by channelling the star in Kick-Ass. Later, when Jay Leno got them together on his talk-show, Cage said to West, “Thank you for saving my childhood.” JERRY SEINFELD When asked in 2011 which TV series the comedian would take with him to a desert island, he chose Batman. “It’s funny, it’s got adventure, it’s got some romance, it’s very colourful and it’s…

How did you celebrate your film’s success of your movie? I had the cast of Sesame Street fired. What’s the most extravagant thing you’ve bought with all that cash? It’s a Fox film. I was paid in cocaine. Who’s your unlikeliest celebrity fan? Deathstroke. What was your favourite movie of 2016? (Not your own.) Hunt For The Wilderpeople. (Serious answer.) Which film of 2016 would have been improved by you being in it? The Amanda Knox documentary. What’s the strangest fan encounter you’ve had this year? I got my wife pregnant. You filmed a video intro for our Deadpool issue. How was that? Inexplicable hell. Don’t ever ask me to do that again or I’ll buy your shitty little magazine company and burn it to shapeless…

THE BIG SHORT had Margot Robbie explaining financial jargon in a bath. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping dared us to forget Judd Apatow’s penis. And Justin Bieber was, somehow, the best thing about Zoolander No. 2. Yet it’s Sigourney Weaver who wears this year’s cameo crown. Partly for her fun turn as Kate McKinnon’s daffy mentor in Ghostbusters (“I wanted to play her with a German accent — Paul Feig said no!”), but mainly for her surprise appearance in Finding Dory. Or rather, non-appearance. For Weaver plays herself as a voice booming over the speakers to welcome visitors to the aquarium where most of the film takes place. Her opening gambit — “I’m Sigourney Weaver” — gets the film’s biggest laugh. “I’d worked with [director] Andrew Stanton on WALL•E,” says…

BLAIR WITCH “This reminded me of [Turner Prize-winning contemporary artists] Gilbert and George — probably that strong colour, the red and black. It’s a very powerful composition. The symbolism works well. It’s unsettling. I felt that was a really good one. And actually using the conventions of 20th- and 21st-century art.” ELVIS & NIXON “This is really sophisticated. It’s witty. It’s ironic. The use of the flag like a little mouth. The fact that the folded glasses make eyes within the lenses. It’s obviously referencing surrealism. Things like Salvador Dalí. And it’s not trying too hard. It’s just saying, ‘Look, this is interesting enough already, Elvis and Nixon!’” THE ACCOUNTANT “This is really intriguing because it looks like a very politicised artist called John Heartfield, who was working in Germany…

10 CLOVERFIELD LANE A woman wakes up in a locked fallout shelter, with a man who might be her saviour or her abductor — is the world really ending out there or not? Defining moment: John Goodman dancing to the jukebox. DOCTOR STRANGE Hippie, trippy origin story for Marvel’s psychedelic sorcerer is like Cumberbatch in the sky with diamonds. Defining moment: When the Ancient One blasts Strange into alternate dimensions with hands-on-hands… HACKSAW RIDGE Mel Gibson’s brutal retelling of the true story of Desmond Doss, the only conscientious objector to be give the Congressional Medal Of Honour. Defining moment: The US troops try to take the ridge. Bullets fly. LA LA LAND Single-handedly delivers CPR to the classic musical, and will warm your heart like a vest made of puppies.…

THE STAND-OUT OF David Brent: Life On The Road, Ricky Gervais’s long-awaited follow-up to The Office, was undoubtedly the many songs ‘written’ by Brent. And our favourite track was the heartfelt Slough, Brent’s love letter to his hometown. So we asked Gervais to talk us through the lyrics. 01 “Brent would be very proud of that lyric. The first compliment about Slough is that it’s in a good place. A place doesn’t choose where it is.” 02 “This is an accidental diss. There’s always a reason why the property in one area is a lot less than the property in another. I know people who pretend that their address is Windsor because it’s just on the border.” 03 “It’s a little throwback to The Office, the line about a…

COSTUME I’m working with a pretty cool costume right now on the TV series Outcast . I’m a mysterious character who wears a black suit and a black hat. I look much more threatening and interesting than I ever have before. Certainly more interesting than I did when I was wearing gold make-up! The first-season costumes on Star Trek: The Next Generation were horrendous. They were spandex one-pieces and strapped under the boots, so they pulled your shoulders down all day long for 16 hours. It was so uncomfortable! But they got better after that, and became two-piece. FAN ENCOUNTER There have been so many, but if I have to narrow it down to one, I’ll go with Dr Oliver Sacks. He was,…

THIS MONTH: IAN RANKIN WATCHES: AMÉLIE THE IDEA OF THE First-Take Club is simple. Every month, we ask someone to select a film they haven’t seen from Empire’s 500 Greatest Movies Of All Time list (published in 2013). Then they watch it and tell us what they thought. This month’s inductee is Ian Rankin, one of Britain’s finest novelists and best known as the creator of the hugely successful John Rebus series. Read a Rebus novel and you’ll know Rankin is a man with his finger on the pop-culture pulse, so we worried he might have seen the whole list. Turns out one had escaped his gaze: a French movie renowned for its whimsy, achingly cool lead character and ace score. It is, of course, Amélie. So, Ian, what did…

1988 / FROM NOW / RATED M THE PINKEST FILM this side of The Greasy Strangler, Chuck Russell’s remake of the Steve McQueen-starring ’50s monster movie is a gloriously squelchy affair. An alien invasion flick back when extra-terrestrials didn’t want to shake our hand unless they were going to rip it off, The Blob’s physical FX, courtesy of Tony Gardner (Army Of Darkness, Zombieland) are eye-poppingly gloopy as the titular blob of amorphous space matter melts and absorbs anyone it comes into contact with. Luckily there is a kid from the wrong side of the tracks to save the day, a role made famous in the original by a young McQueen and now played by Kevin Dillon. An adoring remake, co-written by the director and Frank Darabont, this Blob is…

FROM NOW / RATED R18+ With Jon Snow dead, Daenerys in the clutches of the Dothraki, would-be assassin Arya Stark blind and her sister Sansa on the run, this season starts off about as grim as things can get. With the end of the series in sight though, this is where things finally start to turn. There’s still plenty of twists — more than one seemingly dead character returns, while a renewed focus on Bran Stark’s magic visions means more backstory — but this time not all the gory deaths are bad news. The ever-expanding cast is a drag (though pre-teen ruler Lyanna Mormont is brilliant) and some plotlines run in place, but The Battle of the Bastards is epic television and the simple phrase “Hold the door” is heart-breaking.…

In Dishonored 2 , Corvo can bend time: possible or not? Where we are in the scientific world, it’s like those questions are given a life in this game. One thing that struck me about Dishonored 2 is, I thought it did the time warping very well. It wasn’t a switch to dial back time for the entire universe. To me, it’s more realistic to imagine that you could illuminate how something looked in a previous time. That felt more realistic, as to how quantum physics may lead to technology that allows us to peer into a previous time and extract information. What about teleportation? Quantum teleportation is totally real. It’s a little different to the teleportation you see in Star Trek. Quantum teleportation is transporting the…