Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2017 i Empire Australasia

IT’S 2017. We made it. We’re in the future. And look around you! Everything is strange and unfamiliar! 2017 is the year The Running Man is set, so expect to see President Trump introduce an even more exciting form of reality TV than The Apprentice! (Not that that’s a high bar to clear.) 2017 is the year that, uh, Adam Sandler fast-forwards to in Click when he finds out that he got fat. And, um, it’s the year of the Second American Civil War in Pamela Anderson’s Barb Wire. Well, maybe 2017 hasn’t been a watershed year in cinema history so far. Not much chance of Back To The Future-style viewing parties for those. But forget the past-present, and look to the near-future-present! 2017 promises to be an absolute humdinger…

EXCELLENT GOOD OKAY POOR AWFUL OUT 2 FEBRUARY RATED TBC / 137 MINS DIRECTOR Kenneth Lonergan CAST Casey Affleck, Kyle Chandler, Lucas Hedges, Michelle Williams PLOT Scratching out a living as a handyman in Boston, Lee Chandler (Affleck) is suddenly called back to his home town on the Massachusetts coast by the death of his brother (Chandler). This loss returns him to the scene of an even greater grief, threatening to tip him over the edge for good. “SOME FILMS YOU watch,” hailed Ordinary People’s poster back in 1980, “others you feel.” By that same tagline logic, Manchester By The Sea, another story of grief and loss, is a film you get socked hard in the chops by. It’s an emotional tour de force by a filmmaker and writer, Kenneth…

OUT JANUARY 12 / RATED PG / 105 MINS DIRECTOR Chris Wedge CAST Lucas Till, Jane Levy, Thomas Lennon, Rob Lowe A THROWBACK TO the 1980s family creature features, this achieves *batteries not included levels of charm, though it never approaches the heights of E.T. Till stars as Tripp, a put-upon teen who’s building his own truck when he encounters an intelligent squid-like creature. It’s up to Tripp and bright chemistry student Meredith (Levy) to protect his new friend from an oil company by, er, hiding him in the truck. The monster is sweetly puppy-ish and well-realised, but Tripp himself veers from childish silliness to action hero machismo too often to convince. Only Levy and Lennon’s squirrelly scientist inject the necessary humour to keep us going until an entertaining action…

OUT NOW / RATED TBC / 111 MINS DIRECTOR John Hamburg CAST Bryan Cranston, James Franco, Zoey Deutch, Megan Mullally THERE’S A SOLID premise to this holiday comedy, with an eccentric tech millionaire (Franco) going to extreme lengths to impress his girlfriend Stephanie’s (Deutch) family, often with disastrous results. Surprisingly, Franco is the standout as an amiably chaotic guru with a ludicrous lifestyle, a bit of a shock to the system of Stephanie’s conservative, financially struggling dad Ned (Cranston). But no two characters seem to be in the same film, and the overall tone veers from holiday heartwarmer to raunchy rom-com to indie-tinged family dramedy with no concern for consistency at all. It has some laughs, but it feels like there’s probably a better film left somewhere in the edit…

00:03:01 JESSE’S ‘DEAD’ __ When we first meet her, aspiring model Jesse (Elle Fanning) is lying on a chaise longue covered in blood, posing for a morbid shoot by amateur photographer Dean (Karl Glusman), soon to be her boyfriend. “That was the idea that started the whole journey,” says Nicolas Winding Refn, the film’s co-writer and director. “Before I even had a story, I came up with this idea: death and beauty in one shot.” 00:17:30 THE SCOUT __ Jesse visits a modelling scout (Christina Hendricks), who immediately sees her potential. “This scene sets up Jesse wanting to be a model,” says Refn. “It was important to make a point of that, because Christina’s character sees so many girls, but Jesse has ‘the thing’. She’s ‘the one’. So again it…

FROM NOW / RATED M AN INTERESTING CONCEPT for a suburban thriller that by all accounts hews closely to the book (other than transposing the action from London to New York; we confess to not having read it) in that the unreliable narrator (Emily Blunt, subtle and wonderful in many scenes but often doing a better impersonation of a meth addict than a drunk) suffers from alcoholic blackouts. But it’s fairly grim going, the story wandering from the merely tawdry to the crushingly depressing with no lightness in sight. And it’s not easy to care enough to stay such an unpleasant course, when every single character (with the exception of the always wonderful Allison Janney) is about as likeable as nailbed fungus. EXTRAS None.…

FROM NOW / RATED M A PAIR OF douchebag teens attempt to trick their elderly neighbour (James Caan) into believing his house is haunted, but the experiment gets out of hand. This not-so-thrilling thriller is a clever concept, and not entirely without chills and charms while watching it, but ultimately it’s just not taut enough — it keeps cutting away from the action, takes way too long to come to its final resolution after the action peaks, and expends too much energy on pushing morals when it should just focus on being thrilling. Cutaways to the future trial of some of the participants constantly deflate the tension of the moment, while the ending itself is just too preachy and overlong. James Caan is pretty good, rocking a menacing scowl and…

FROM JANUARY 18 / RATED M / DIRECTOR Woody Allen / CAST Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, Steve Carell, Corey Stoll, Blake Lively, Anna Camp WOODY ALLEN JUST keeps dropping a movie a year like a cinematic metronome, but perhaps some of his projects would benefit from a longer gestation period. Cafe Society is a so-so story that only holds your attention because it looks so stunning. Like Allen’s 2015 offering Irrational Man, it features a young woman falling for an older man – a topic close to Woody Allen’s heart – but where Irrational Man was meandering and dark, Café Society is meandering and so light it’s barely there. A sort of “wouldn’t it be nice” daydream that bumbles along from one fanciful notion to the next, it’s a Woody…

FROM FEBRUARY 1 / RATED M / SHOWRUNNERS Johan Kindblom, Tomas Tivemark / CAST Mia Skäringer, Göran Ragnerstam, Joel Spira, Amanda Ooms VERA FORS (Mia Skäringer) is having a disastrous year: she’s lost her husband, her job and she’s about to lose her house; she’s teetering on the edge of despair when she abruptly applies for a job in the small town of Angelby in rural Sweden and moves there with her two young children. But driving through the forest outside Angelby, she has a shocking incident in her car, which seemingly kickstarts a rolling cascade of weirdness and suspicion throughout the town and its motley collection of locals. Is it all supernatural? Or is it just that Swedes are crazy? What’s with the giant triangle rock? Who’s that mysterious…

FROM NOW / RATED MA15+ Will Josh ever get lucky in love? That depends: from one angle, the aimless twenty-something has been pretty lucky to score a relationship with the very hot Arnold (Joyce), so when he’s physically pushed out of a threesome with Arnold and a cute stranger in the opening episode it’s something we all — even Josh — saw coming. Not so much a sitcom (it’s often not even trying to be funny) as a dark-tinged relationship hangout show, Please Like Me captures the aimless, chat-heavy lives of a group of drifting, insecure friends. While it’s been praised for its depiction of the mentally ill (especially Debra Lawrence as Josh’s mum), and there’s real warmth underlying the often awkward relationships, the show’s strength is Josh. Consistently unpleasant,…

FROM NOW / DIRECTOR Vikram Gandhi / CAST Devon Terrell, Anya Taylor-Joy, Jason Mitchell, Avi Nash, Ashley Judd, Jenna Elfman IT’S EASY TO call this a Barack Obama movie, which of course it literally is, but you don’t have to care about the president or US politics in general to enjoy it. In fact, for most of the movie, director Vikram Gandhi deliberately obscures the fact that this is a young Barack; he’s called Barry by almost everyone, and while there’s glimpses of the man he will eventually become, this is really the story of a young man, barely out of his teens, trying to figure out where he belongs in the world, and who he belongs with. Devon Terrell’s Barry is smart, handsome and charismatic, but there’s uncertainty and…

FROM NOW / RATED M / DIRECTORS Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner, Jane Kennedy, Rob Sitch / CAST Rob Sitch, Jane Kennedy, Tiriel Mora, Alison Whyte, Santo Cilauro, Bruno Lawrence, Steve Bisley SOMEWHAT depressingly, it’s been 23 years since Frontline first aired. In that time, the pace and tenor of the 24-hour news cycle, and what counts as current affairs, has mutated so rapidly that Frontline’s sharp satire no longer seems sufficiently cynical: one almost longs for the good old days when producers at least pretended to care about facts. Over the span of 39 episodes (three seasons of 13 episodes each, dating from 1994, 1995 and 1997), the team and the fictional show itself evolved, but always anchored (as it were) by Rob Sitch’s Mike Moore and his towering mane…

OUT NOW / PS4, XB1 DIRECTOR Hajime Tabata CAST Ray Chase, Amy Shiels, Adam Croasdell, Chris Parson, Robbie Daymond AFTER A DECADE in development, Final Fantasy XV surprises simply by being good. Its story — exiled prince Noctis and buddies Gladiolus, Ignis, and Prompto go road-tripping to reclaim his lost kingdom — won’t win awards, but its slick real-time combat and vast, visually striking open world might. It’s a stark departure from previous instalments though, with stats and character management buried in submenus. Having four heroes initially feels redundant, too, as only Noctis is active, but their combo skills in battles prove a delight. The changes are ultimately positive, successfully breaking the game out of its genre ghetto. This is a Final Fantasy for the modern audience, and all the…

A FAMILY TRADITION Just wanted to say, love your mag, you are my favourite mag of all. But I’m particularly loving all the Star Wars stuff, which I think you have topped with The Compendium Falcon — Star Wars: The Complete History Of The Saga In Under 12 Parsecs! My son was born just after the first Star Wars: A New Hope was released. My friends and I rushed to see it on release, May 1977, then I bought the video (no DVDs in those days) as soon as it came out in early 1978 I think. I remember playing it over and over at home, with my baby boy propped up on the couch so he could watch it! He really seemed to enjoy it, but 38 years later…

Art Ache, 1993: “The winning film of the very first Tropfest was called Art Ache, about this very well-known artist around the Tropicana Café where it all started, called Michael Saker who was a real character. He used to hang out at the Tropicana café all day and talk to everybody. So there was this documentary made by a guy called Stephen Fenley who’s a journalist. So a documentary won the very first Tropfest and it was just brought the house down, it really captured his spirit.” The Lighter, 2001: “There was a film by a guy called Patrick Hughes, called The Lighter, which is pretty brilliant. It was from when the Olympics were on, and if I remember rightly, a guy is driving along in his car in Sydney,…

OUT JANUARY 26 / RATED TBC / 127 MINS DIRECTOR Warren Beatty CAST Alden Ehrenreich, Lily Collins, Warren Beatty, Matthew Broderick WARREN BEATTY has been trying to make a Howard Hughes movie for decades, but it wasn’t really worth the effort. The movie just doesn’t know what it wants to be: for the first forty minutes it’s a “forbidden love” story between Ehrenreich’s studio driver and Lily Collins’ actress — it’s all longing gazes and no real heat, but it’s fine in a vintage sort of way. Then it pivots to become about the decline of Howard Hughes (played by Beatty), and the two plotlines just get further and further apart. The editing is so abrupt and choppy you can’t help but think this must have been a six-hour epic…

OUT FEBRUARY 2 / RATED TBC / 121 MINS DIRECTOR Stephen Gaghan CAST Matthew McConaughey, Edgar Ramírez, Bryce Dallas Howard A 1980s CAPER movie, with shades of American Hustle, about eccentric gold prospector Kenny Wells and a massive gold strike in Indonesia that turned the world on its head… several times over. McConaughey is having a ball as Wells: he physically transformed for the role (pot belly, balding hairline) but he also reaches Nic Cage-like levels of physical acting (and not in a bad way). It’s a wildly entertaining performance and brings the reckless “bet everything” ethos of Wells to life. It also overshadows everyone else — Edgar Ramírez is solid as Wells’ geologist but McConaughey just devours every scene he’s in, while Bryce Dallas Howard is underused as Wells’…

1993 _ Trainspotting (BOOK) Welsh’s groundbreaking novel began an odyssey that’s showing no signs of slowing. 1994 _ Trainspotting (PLAY) The play, in which Ewen Bremner played Renton, was adapted by Harry Gibson not long after the book had been published, and did well in Edinburgh before storming the London stage. 1996 _ Trainspotting (FILM) Boyle’s film adaptation startled the film industry. “Hollywood come in,” wrote Empire, in a quote used on the film’s official poster, “your time is up.” 2001_ Glue (BOOK) Welsh’s novel had structural similarities to Trainspotting, and featured cameos from Begbie, Renton, Spud and Sick Boy. 2002 _ Porno (BOOK) Welsh’s sequel catches up with the boys a decade after the original story. Sick Boy dreams of directing porn, and teams up with Renton to make…

GOLDENEYE — (1995) Height: 720 feet Object jumped from: Contra Dam Pierce Brosnan’s 007 debut featured this epic drop, performed by Wayne Michaels. Tourists braver than us can replicate his daring, as the Swiss site has been leased to a bungee-jumping business. HOOPER — (1978) Height: 230 feet Object jumped from: helicopter The great A.J. Bakunas set a world record falling from a chopper for this stunt-themed comedy. He died on another jump just months later, making this stunt his legacy. ASSASSIN’S CREED — (2016) Height: 125 feet Object jumped from: Seville Cathedral The video-game series’ signature action beat was replicated for real by stunt double Damien Walters, although his jump was from a platform, not a bona fida holy building. THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING — (1975) Height:…

KINGSMAN: THE GOLDEN CIRCLE (28 SEP) will see the sharp-suited secret agents battling Julianne Moore’s American not-so-sweetheart... David Ayer’s BRIGHT (TBC) pairs Will Smith’s human cop with Joel Edgerton’s orc cop for a fantasy-tinged crime case… Netflix will boldly go where no streaming service has gone before, with new series STAR TREK: DISCOVERY (TBC)… Dan Stevens goes furry for Disney’s lavish live-action BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (23 MAR)... And then goes mutant for X-Men TV spin-off LEGION (9 FEB), as Professor X’s son… JUSTICE LEAGUE (16 NOV) teams all the major DC heroes, plus Cyborg… PADDINGTON 2 (26 DEC) pits the marmalade-mainlining bear against a dapper thief, played by Hugh Grant… STRANGER THINGS (TBC) is about to become Strangerer Things, as the small-screen smash adds Sean Astin and Paul Reiser……

FROM JANUARY 18 / RATED R18+ / DIRECTOR Nicolas Winding Refn / CAST Elle Fanning, Jena Malone, Bella Heathcote, Abbey Lee IT BARELY SEEMED possible, but Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon is an even more extreme exercise in high style, ponderous pacing and stomach-churning grue than Only God Forgives. It became the most divisive film of Cannes 2016, prompting boos/walk-outs and standing ovations in roughly equal measures. Imagine America’s Next Top Model written by Sofia Coppola and directed by Dario Argento — it’s cool, baffling, darkly funny, super-slow, vapid, stunning to look at, at times tedious and in its last third utterly bat-shit crazy. A cult-y Showgirls afterlife beckons. The story is a simple and familiar tale — an ingenue comes to town, ruffles feathers and incites payback —…

FROM JANUARY 11 / RATED PG / DIRECTOR BOB NELSON / CAST CLIVE OWEN, JAEDEN LIEBERHER, MARIA BELLO, PATTON OSWALT, MATTHEW MODINE WHEN UNDEREMPLOYED carpenter Walt (Clive Owen) tells his son Anthony (Jaeden Lieberher) that God is in the details, you sense he could be talking about Bob Nelson’s whole approach to filmmaking. Writer-director Nelson wrote Alexander Payne’s Nebraska, and just as in that movie, this is a small story – small in a good way, small in that it exists in the details and nuances of the characters and the tiny orbits of their lives; but also small geographically: you could make a drinking game from how many times you see the same storefronts sliding past the windows of Walt’s truck. The plot is so trifling as to be…

FROM JANUARY 24 / RATED TBC / SHOWRUNNERS MISHA GREEN, JOE POKASKI / CAST ALDIS HODGE, JURNEE SMOLLETT-BELL, ALANO MILLER, CHRISTOPHER MELONI, JESSICA DE GOUW, ADINA PORTER, MYKELTI WILLIAMSON, MARC BLUKAS SET ON A plantation in Georgia just a few years before the US Civil War, this 10-part first season follows a group of slaves as they plan their escape from their brutal and dehumanising existence in the South and try to make the dangerous flight to freedom. The title obviously refers to the Underground Railroad, the secret network of safe houses that escaping slaves and abolitionists used to smuggle people to freedom in the north. Underground doesn’t shy away from depicting the awful reality of the South’s antebellum slave system but it isn’t as grimly painful to watch as,…

FROM NOW / RATED TBC ADAPTED FROM THE 1990s cult comic series, this is a mixture of supernatural hijinks, dark comedy, weird theological philosophy and Tarantino-esque violence. Preacher follows a West Texas preacher named Jesse Custer (Dominic Cooper), who is merged with a mysterious entity that causes him to develop supernatural powers. Jesse, his badass ex-girlfriend Tulip (Ruth Negga) and Irish vampire Cassidy (Joseph Gilgun) are thrust into an unpredictable world populated by outcasts from Heaven and Hell. It’s rare for a TV show to be even more opaque and coy than its source material, but Preacher is just that: you’ll have to stick with it for half a dozen episodes before some complexities reveal themselves; but it’s never boring.…

FROM NOW / RATED M CONSIDERING IT ONLY ran for two seasons almost a quarter century ago, The Late Show is still legendary. A real case of catching lightning in a bottle, The Late Show had Tony Martin, Mick Molloy, Rob Sitch, Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner, Jane Kennedy and Judith Lucy; this three-disc set (actually the Champagne Edition) is fattened like a Christmas goose with bits like Bargearse, The Olden Days, Shitscared, Understanding Wogs, Shirty the Slightly Aggressive Bear, Santo the Magnificent, Graham and the Colonel, Pissweak World, and the legendary musical finales (Pete Smith singing Dude Looks Like A Lady, Mike Whitney singing I Will Always Love You.) EXTRAS Commentary tracks with most of the team discussing the show along with Bud Tingwell, Joan “I Love Rock’N’Roll” Kirner and…

Best movies of 2016 1. The Revenant 2. Deadpool. 3. Goosebumps 4. Captain America: Civil War 5. The Hateful Eight 6. The Legend of Tarzan 7. My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2. 8. Batman ’66: Return of the Caped Crusaders 9. Sing Street 10. Dr Strange Joke of the Year: The “Elephant” Joke in Grimsby. Surprise of the Year: Goosebumps Gutting disappointment of the Year: Batman vs Superman Franchise Burnout of the Year: X-men: Apocalypse The ‘I thought you sucked, now I’m finding you semi–interesting’ Award: Shia Lebouf Out-of-form Award: Steven Spielberg and runner-up Robert Zemeckis. MITCHELL HALL, ASQUITH, NSW Readers, take note: Mitchell actually had more awards than this, and a whole section for TV, but for the sake of brevity we edited it to this.…

Do you have a nickname? My family call me Gill. If anybody else called me Gill, I might slap them, because it’s a bit familiar. There’s one person in my life who calls me Gigi – that’s probably the only nickname I have. I had names at school that people would bully me with that I am not going to repeat. Although why the fuck not? So at one point I was… no, I’m not going to say that. Never mind. Let’s just stick with Gigi or it’ll all go wrong. Which movie have you seen the most? I think it’s between The Godfather and [The Godfather] Part II and The Deer Hunter. What is the one thing that really scares you? Public speaking. It really, really does. Even accepting…

OUT JANUARY 26 / RATED TBC / 111 MINS DIRECTOR Barry Jenkins CAST Mahershala Ali, Alex R. Hibbert, Ashton Sanders THE MOMENT WRITER-DIRECTOR Barry Jenkins’ adaptation of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue fades in on Mahershala Ali, rolling up in a pimped out Caddy, sporting a do-rag and tooth grill, it seems we’re on familiar ground — different boys in a different hood, another Hollywoodised trawl through another gangsters’ paradise. That it’s Boris Gardner’s soulful 1973 ode to empowerment Every Nigger Is A Star gracing the soundtrack, rather than the pulverizing rap groove we’ve come to expect, suggests that things are not what they seem. Jenkins’ fervent coming-of-age drama may well have a familiar backdrop — the scourge of poverty and crack cocaine, fractured communities…

FROM NOW / RATED M WHEN HIS PLANE suffers catastrophic damage over New York, Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger (Tom Hanks) has to make a split-second choice about how to safely bring his craft down. His choice saves everyone on board, but his superiors question whether it was the right one. Give this role to an actor without Hanks’ great reserves of charisma and you’ve got a pedestrian true-life procedural drama. Add Hanks and you’ve got an extra layer of human frailty, a flash of steel, and a touch of Mr Smith Goes To Washington-esque facing down the establishment. The sequences of what actually happened on the plane — especially in the cockpit — are white-knuckle tense, but rather than keeping his powder dry for the big finale, Clint Eastwood shows you…

FROM NOW / RATED M / DIRECTOR Richard Tanne / CAST Tika Sumpter, Parker Sawyers, Jerod Haynes, Tom McElroy IMAGINE BEFORE SUNRISE when you knew that the couple would end up in the White House. This Barack Obama movie — see our review of Barry on page 108 for the other one —is in fact more a Michelle Obama movie (played by Tika Sumpter, with a pair of eyebrows that could cut paper, who also produces). The movie starts and ends with Michelle, and it’s more illuminating of her character, which is no bad thing: there’s endless coverage of President Obama, but less about his brilliant and intriguing wife. And Sumpter’s Michelle is no sidekick to show off Parker Sawyer’s Barack: when the cocky future president tries to show off…

FROM JANUARY 11 / RATED MA15+ “IT TAKES A WILLING hand to punish evil men.” That’s the motto of this gritty modern western. Nobody said that hand belonged to the good. When a Mexican arms deal goes tits up in an Arizonan border town, a cartel hatchet man (Leguizamo) comes to collect many pounds of flesh. New sheriff with a questionable past Wallace (Wilson) is on the case, as is his culpable predecessor Leland (McShane) in an attempt to protect the town. What could have been a ho-hum scenario isn’t because of a perfectly pitched cast. Wilson seethes retribution, Leguizamo makes a chilling bad guy, and Belushi has a ball as a shady car salesman. McShane is a craggy highlight, an onesie-wearing, slightly more congenial Al Swearingen, in a brutal…

ELLA BERRY — 10 IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE What did you think of the film? It touches your heart, and makes people think if you put other people before you that’s good, and if you think everything you do doesn’t matter, you’re wrong. Was that the first black-and-white movie you’ve seen? Yeah, I didn’t think I was going to like it. I thought it would be people rolling off cliffs and tied to train tracks but then it turned out to be really good. What was your favourite bit? I liked the bit at the beginning when the stars were talking to each other and the bit when the dance floor opened and there was a swimming pool underneath. I wish we had that at our school. How did you…

How did an Australian from Perth end up playing an American president? I came off another project and my agent called me and said “There’s this story called Barry.” I was like “… Barry?” and he said, “It’s Barack Obama.” I had a moment going “Oh my god.” What kind of research did you do for the role? I watched as much as I possibly could on him, and I started really drilling down to his younger days and that awkward confidence that he had — he wasn’t so sure of himself as he is now, and when he walked into a room he was still a bit shy, but could turn it on when he needed to. I read everything I could, so Dreams From My Father I’ve read…

FROM JANUARY 11 / RATED M LIKE A COP-CENTRIC version of Northern Exposure, Picket Fences is set in a quirky small town (here it’s Rome, Wisconsin) with a heavy dose of magic realism: UFOs, circus dwarfs, spontaneous combustion, religious miracles and an aborted X-Files crossover episode. But it’s not as sweet as Northern Exposure, and is far more in love with its own cleverness. This complete set includes all four seasons — that’s 88 episodes — so you can really soak your brain in the weirdness from the mind of creator David E Kelley (yes, the guy behind Ally McBeal) and try to recapture the mania of the early 1990s that saw Aussie actor Costas Mandylor named as one of People’s 50 Most Beautiful. Ah, the ’90s, you were so…

OUT NOW / PC, XB1 DIRECTOR Joe Nickolls CAST Victor Nosslo, Karen David, Stjepan Back CAPCOM’S FOURTH ENTRY in the Dead Rising series is quite the celebration. It’s not only set at Christmas, it also adds some much-needed sparkle to the familiar gameplay. Taking you through events occurring some 16 years after the original game, zombie apocalypse 2.0 brings you the walking dead in their thousands. The storyline is solidly entertaining throughout, but it’s the chaotic playground of zombie slaying that will keep a grin plastered to your face. Weapon crafting is cranked up a notch to maximum bonkers, with some welcome festive fun incorporated, too. Plus the variety of different zombies keeps things feeling fresh. Hilarious, creative and satisfyingly bloody.…

WIN! MISS PEREGRINE’S HOME FOR PECULIAR CHILDREN TIM BURTON’S latest adventure into weirdness and whimsy features Eva Green as a supernatural headmistress and a selection of freaky and, yes, well, peculiar children — think of the X-Men as envisioned by the mind behind Edward Scissorhands. “Dark, twisted and funny, Ransom Riggs’ Peregrine books are right up Burton’s Beetlejuicy boulevard,” cackled Empire reviewer Chris Hewitt. We have 10 copies to give away on either DVD or Blu-Ray — you choose because hey, we’re flexible like that. TO ENTER, TELL US WHAT PECULIAR POWER YOU WISH YOU HAD, AND WHY. WIN! IN A VALLEY OF VIOLENCE LIKE A sort of Wild West John Wick, Ethan Hawke plays a drifter out for revenge when some nogoodniks mess with him and his dog. John…