Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2017 i Empire Australasia

“APES TOGETHER STRONG” may have been the mantra last time, but the cataclysm that broke 2014’s Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes has forced Caesar (Andy Serkis) to rethink. War For The Planet Of The Apes sees him ditching most of his simian tribe and storming off on a mission both to avenge a wrong and solve a mystery. “[Toby Kebbell’s renegade ape] Koba had the bigger arc in the last movie,” producer Dylan Clark tells Empire, “but this time it’s all about Caesar. His anger has led him to the position where he’s killed another ape. Now what? The stakes keep getting raised. And he will kill again.” The trail of clues leads the dark ape detective inexorably towards the dangerous militia of Woody Harrelson’s Colonel, but the…

★★★ OUT MAY 25 RATED TBC / 133 MINS DIRECTOR Terry George CAST Oscar Isaac, Christian Bale, Charlotte Le Bon PLOT An Armenian student in Turkey, Mikael (Isaac), is engaged to a woman from his village, but falls in love with the glamorous Ana (Le Bon). His biggest problem seems to be US reporter Chris (Bale), Ana’s lover, but then World War I breaks out and Turkey’s Armenians are suddenly in danger. GENERALLY, A FILM like The Promise wouldn’t have generated so much pre-release notoriety. But after just three screenings at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, it somehow amassed more than 50,000 one-star ratings on IMDb. Unless Canadian cinemas are considerably bigger than those in the UK, that’s an unlikely tally. And the smart money is on it…

★★★★ OUT NOW RATED M / 133 MINS DIRECTOR Lone Scherfig CAST Gemma Arterton, Sam Claflin, Bill Nighy, Jack Huston PLOT 1940s London. Writer Catrin Cole (Arterton) gets a job at the Ministry Of Information. Her knack for writing believable women’s dialogue lands her a role in making a feature-length propaganda film. Cue a battle against sexism, bureaucracy and hammy British actor Ambrose Hilliard (Nighy). A BIT LIKE Hail, Caesar! set in 1940s Ealing rather than 1950s Hollywood, Their Finest is a slight, warm, funny delight, informed by a gently etched feminist agenda. Continuing director Lone Scherfig’s interest in young women coming into their own (see An Education, One Day), this follows Welsh scriptwriter Catrin, played with an impressive mixture of steel and warmth by Gemma Arterton, on a…

“It was like the shark in Jaws,” considers Ridley Scott of the monster he first unleashed back in 1979. “You don’t show it too often. Really make him exclusive. I was trying to keep the creatures pulled way back, show enough of them to make you squeamish. You’re gradually building the tension to the right moments. Then you let ’em have it.” He laughs, because there is a trace of sadism beneath the 79-year-old director’s distinguished exterior. On the set of this year’s Alien: Covenant, Scott merrily got someone to chase his cast when he needed them to flee in terror, and could sometimes be seen cackling over some detail of the gore-strewn scenery. If the chief criticism of his 2012 Prometheus is that it wasn’t scary enough, Alien: Covenant…

IT’S THE SCENE that Manchester By The Sea builds to for about two hours. It lasts about two-and-a-half minutes. And when it’s over, good luck hearing the next scene over the soundtrack of sobs. It’s the chance encounter between Casey Affleck’s Lee and his ex-wife Randi (Michelle Williams) towards the tail-end of Kenneth Lonergan’s Oscar-winning drama, a triumph of acting and dramaturgy as Randi tries desperately to get through to Lee, who is racked with guilt over the tragic deaths of the former couple’s three children. “To me it was always the scene that demonstrated that there was no way he could stick around in that town,” says Lonergan, talking to Empire just a couple of weeks after picking up the Best Original Screenplay Oscar. “Because what was between him…

1990 / RATED PG JOHNNY DEPP HAS made such a long career from oddball roles that it’s easy to overlook how unexpected his first weird role was. Edward Scissorhands was a weird movie to make, even for the guy behind Frankenweenie and a kung-fu version of Hansel And Gretel, but Tim Burton was riding high after the twin successes of Beetlejuice and Batman, and had the clout to demand $20 million and no studio interference for his next picture. Studio execs agreed, but insisted that Burton meet with Tom Cruise for the role of Edward; Cruise wanted a happier ending, and Burton had someone else in mind. In 1990, Depp was known as a teen heart-throb from four seasons of 21 Jump Street, and was looking to break out of…

#10 STUART HAZELDINE ON RIO BRAVO THE IDEA OF Empire’s First-Take Club is gloriously simple. Every month, we ask someone to watch a film they haven’t seen from our Greatest Movies Of All Time, and tell us what they thought. This month, Stuart Hazeldine — director of Exam and the upcoming The Shack — confronted Rio Bravo (1959). Bravo! 50… 100… 150… My smug-o-meter rose ever higher as I scanned down Empire’s Greatest Movies list and realised I’d seen that, that and that… until Rio Bravo flashed by. Wait, which one was that? Not Michael Caine and a bikini babe on a faded VHS cover (that would be Blame It On Rio, aka I blame it on teenage hormones). No, this was a Western, but which one? I mentally rewind…

ASK FILMMAKERS ABOUT the film that changed their life, and a fair percentage would say Star Wars. Not Martin Scorsese. His life changed when, aged 13, he first saw Georges Méliès’ Le Voyage Dans La Lune. It was his equivalent of the Star Destroyer sliding into shot. “I was fascinated by the sleight of hand concept,” he recalled. “Méliès saw the potential in these moving images, and these images that came up on the screen absolutely took me to another planet.” One of these images — a rocket striking the moon in the eye, causing custard-y tears and a comedy grimace — became emblematic of Méliès’ aesthetic: lo-fi, whimsical, utterly enchanting. But it’s also an image that’s rocketed around pop culture ever since, in music promos and stagecraft (Queen, The…

1 In Shaun Of The Dead, what is the name of the store Noel and Shaun work in? [Long pause] I’ve got no idea. It’s a shop which is like a Dixons-type shop. Oh shit, it says it on the badge. [Hears the answer] What? Why? I’m going to be bad at this. The correct answer is Foree Electric. It’s named after Dawn Of The Dead’s Ken Foree. 2 Complete your line from Hot Fuzz: “You wanna be a big cop in a small town...” “... fuck off up the model village.” That day is the only day in my entire career where a director [Edgar Wright] sent us home. We couldn’t complete the scene, we were laughing so much. Paddy Considine was one of the main culprits. He is…

THIS MONTH: VEEP WHAT HAPPENS WHEN you watch five seasons of Veep in one sitting? After mega-marathoning 48 episodes in 24 hours, sleep deprivation, golf-ball haemorrhoids and chronic sofa-lag would be the physical answer, but psychologically? I’m absolutely fizzing. Here’s a show so resplendently acidic I feel like my brain’s been plunged into a vinegar Jacuzzi. Created by Armando Iannucci, Veep is The Thick Of It’s American cousin, and shares the same comedy genes: hand-held style, improvised bustle, shitloads of swearing and omnishambles plotting. I’m a huge The Thick Of It geek, but this isn’t just faster and funnier — the entire show’s powered by the fearless Julia Louis-Dreyfus, whose venal Vice President is the poster girl for post-truth politics. When your ego’s the size of Iowa, there’s simply no…

★★★★ OUT NOW FORMATS PC, XBOX ONE, PS4 DIRECTOR Mac Walters CAST Fryda Wolff, Tom Taylorson PLOT In the 22nd century, mankind makes plans to populate the Andromeda Galaxy and sends ships into space. Your character wakes up 634 years later, but with the mission in crisis. LAST GENERATION’S Mass Effect trilogy proved a successful sci-fi saga that people cared about could exist sans Skywalkers, lightsabers and Death Stars. But much like the original three films from a galaxy far, far away, it lumbered developer BioWare with a problem similar to the one George Lucas faced when he came to start the prequels — with the action-RPG series setting the bar so high, it burdened future instalments with dangerously heightened expectations. Mass Effect: Andromeda — a fresh start for…

IT’S BERLIN, 1989. The Wall is about to be consigned to history, and the Cold War with it, but Charlize Theron’s MI6 agent Lorraine Broughton is just getting warmed up. “Charlize transformed what you think a female action character can do [in this film],” says director David Leitch of his Atomic Blonde lead. “She’s just fucking badass.” With a key intel document missing and KGB goons all around, she’ll have every chance to show it, as Sofia Boutella’s night crawler Delphine Lasalle will discover. James McAvoy’s edgy Berlin station chief — “a Tyler Durden spy” says Leitch — is also along for the ride. Boutella (pictured with Theron) is in the way. As the title implies, Atomic Blonde is not your average spy thriller. Leitch, who co-created John Wick and…

DEEP WITHIN THE bowels of a former London art college, Empire is doing its best to pretend that close proximity to a naked German activist is the most normal thing imaginable. “Are they planning any other operations?” barks Rory Kinnear’s sadistic Rhodesian detective as he stalks a police cell, menacingly trailing a cricket bat over actor Giorgio Spiegelfeld’s trembling flesh. We’re on the set of Guerrilla, a bold six-part look at the British Black Power movement of the early ’70s, and this interrogation scene is a crunching introduction to its textured world of high-stakes, revolutionary rhetoric and crooked cops. It’s the brainchild of Oscar-winning 12 Years A Slave screenwriter John Ridley. But in a way, Jimi Hendrix was key to its inception. “I was in the UK working on post-production…

★★★★ OUT MAY 25 RATED MA15+ / 108 MINS DIRECTOR Pablo Larraín CAST Gael García Bernal, Alfredo Castro, Luis Gnecco, Mercedes Morán PLOT Chile, 1948. Poet Pablo Neruda (Gnecco) is on the wrong side of the new pro-American regime. He goes on the run, but detective Peluchonneau (García Bernal) is on his trail. PABLO LARRAÍN’S LATEST comes to cinemas hot on the heels of Jackie (although he filmed it first). Neither a standard biopic nor a conventional chase movie, it fuses both into a grand narrative experiment that imagines the battle of wits between a poet, Chilean great Pablo Neruda (Gnecco), and policeman (García Bernal) — artist versus repressor — as a noirish travelogue where nothing is quite as it seems. Unlike Il Postino, the 1994 Oscar-winner set two years…

★★★★ OUT MAY 25 RATED M / 108 MINS DIRECTOR Ritesh Batra CAST Jim Broadbent, Charlotte Rampling PLOT Retired and divorced, Tony (Broadbent) potters around his camera shop while helping his daughter (Dockery) prepare for her first baby. Then a surprising legacy in the will of an old friend stirs up distant memories. BOOKER PRIZE WINNERS have long been a handy starting point for moviemakers. The Remains Of The Day, Life Of Pi and Schindler’s Ark accrued 31 Oscar nods between them in their big-screen incarnations. Julian Barnes’ 2011 novella The Sense Of An Ending hasn’t translated quite as powerfully to the screen, but is certainly no disgrace. Split across two timelines, it’s a thoughtful adaptation that’s never quite the conventional character study it appears. At the heart of Ritesh…

WHEN PETER CAPALDI first got the keys to the Tardis — way back before all those invading Zygons and cosmic Mummies, disembodied intergalactic kings and lavish guitar solos — he seriously considered investing in some gym equipment. And you can see the reasoning. Aged 58 now (and 55 when he took over from 31-year-old 11th Doctor Matt Smith), the former Malcolm Tucker was keen to show he could flee Daleks and fling himself around alien planets just as vigorously as the recent, younger incarnations of the Time Lord. “They had put me in a flat across the road [from the Doctor Who studios in Cardiff],” says Capaldi, taking up the tale. “And I thought, ‘I need to get a treadmill or something to sit in the flat, to make sure…

00:02:51 NO CRAWL BEFORE WALKING __ As the first standalone Star Wars film, Rogue One breaks new ground from the off. Not only is there no crawl, it’s the first to have a prologue, in which Jyn Erso’s father (Mads Mikkelsen) is recruited by the Empire to build the Death Star. “It felt like what the crawl does is tell you what the prologue would have been,” says director Gareth Edwards. “We had this opening from the very first draft.” 00:09:36 MAYS THE FORCE BE WITH YOU __ “[Our film] is saying that people aren’t simplistically good or evil,” says Edwards. Witness our first encounter with Diego Luna’s Rebel captain, Cassian Andor — who shoots Daniel Mays’ disabled character, Tivik, in the back. “We always wanted Cassian to have done…

★★ FROM MAY 29 / DIRECTOR F. Javier Gutiérrez / CAST Matilda Lutz, Alex Roe, Johnny Galecki IT’S OVER A DECADE since the J-horror remake craze died with The Ring Two, though Sadako (the original Ring spectre) has remained active in Japan. Despite imaginative direction from F. Javier Gutierrez, whose Spanish end-of-the-world movie Tres Dias /Before the Fall is excellent, this mess isn’t likely to reboot or revive the American franchise. Julia (Matilda Lutz) learns that her boyfriend Holt (Alex Roe) has watched the famous cursed video — and exposes herself to it to shift the curse to herself, only to find that the curse-originating spook Samara has special plans for her. The plot stutters as if radically different scripts were commissioned and then shuffled together to justify creepy set-pieces…

THE VAMPIRE WAS dead. He hadn’t been killed, as bloodsuckers usually are, by sunlight. Or a wooden stake pounded through his heart. Or even — and this is an old-school method — chopping off his head and stuffing the mouth with garlic. No, the vampire had been killed by a much more unlikely method. George Hamilton. “Love At First Bite had come out,” says Tom Holland (the film director, not the new Spider-Man), citing Stan Dragoti’s spoof, which saw perma-tanned Hamilton cock his eyebrow as Dracula. “That tells you the genre was exhausted. Vampires were exhausted. You couldn’t get a vampire film made to save your life.” But Holland had a plan to prove there was still life in the hoariest of screen monsters yet. And, helped by the heat…

AN INNOCENT WARRIOR This Polynesian song plays as toddler Moana first meets the character of the ocean. Musker: We tried different songs and one was by Te Vaka, the band fronted by Opetaia Foa’i [one of the film’s songwriters]. Even without knowing what those words mean it set the mood. Clements: He rewrote the lyrics to fit. The question Moana keeps asking is, “Why did the ocean choose me?” WHERE YOU ARE Moana’s father Chief Tui (Temuera Morrison/ Christopher Jackson) leads this song about their island home’s laws and culture. Musker: We thought of this [as] like Tradition in Fiddler On The Roof: it sets up the world. Lin [Manuel Miranda, the film’s other songwriter] riffed on a melody by Opetaia. [Broadway star] Christopher Jackson did the demo. Tem’s register…

★★★★ FROM MARCH 29 / SHOWRUNNERS Rob Thomas, Diane Ruggiero-Wright / CAST Rose McIver, Malcolm Goodwin, Rahul Kohli, Robert Buckley, David Anders iZOMBIE HAS EITHER the best or the worst premise for a television show ever (spoiler alert: it’s the best). When med student Liv Moore (McIver) was attacked by zombies at a party she became a zombie (obviously). But not the mindless kind: now she works as a morgue assistant so she can eat brains which a): stop her turning mindless, and b): give her the memories and personality of the dead, an ability she uses to solve crimes with the Seattle PD. But while it’s an ideal set-up for a murder-of-the-week procedural, it also comes with a whole mess of ongoing plots and season-long story arcs. Season…

★★★★ FROM MAY 24 / SHOWRUNNERS Jon Steinberg, Robert Levine / CAST Toby Stephens, Hannah New, Luke Arnold, Ray Stevenson, Zach McGowan, Jessica Parker Kennedy FOR A SERIES that’s a prequel to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Black Sails has increasingly felt a lot closer to something like Game of Thrones. And not just because it piles on the big battle sequences, though it does love a really big fight: the Cape Town production crew often go above and beyond with the large-scale carnage and this season’s big opening battle is a sign that they’re going out with a bang. Increasingly this has been a series about various pirate factions — including Blackbeard (Stevenson), who gets to be part of one of the nastiest scenes in recent television history here…

MOMENT Watching Daniel Day-Lewis walk across a stubbly field towards set on Lincoln . I wasn’t watching Daniel Day-Lewis, I was watching Abraham Lincoln. You go, “Fucking hell, that’s Abraham Lincoln coming towards me.” That was pretty magnificent. Going to the Lost In Space premiere and realising they’d decided to dub half my performance with someone else was pretty crazy. I sat there watching it going, “I didn’t say that line.” Did I get an explanation? Nobody ever explains anything to you. FAN ENCOUNTER People have always been very polite with me. One of the funniest was at the premiere for The Crown [in which Harris played King George VI] last year. I signed something for someone and when the exchange ended, they…

VERY FEW MOVIES have a way of keeping me on the edge of my seat or keeping me invested right to the end. The Dark Knight Rises did that, as did Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Now, you can add Logan to that as well. I was hooked from the first reel to the last. Seeing Jackman as well as Patrick Stewart playing characters past their used-by-dates, was something that had to be done. These guys can’t keep on playing the same characters with the same verve and eagerness they had when they first started portraying them 17 years ago. It was brave and terrific to see all who were involved, go in that direction. I’m sure we won’t be seeing something like that in the next Avengers movie? Who…

★★★★ OUT 18 MAY RATED TBC / 122 MINS DIRECTOR Chad Stahelski CAST Keanu Reeves, Ian McShane, Common, Ruby Rose, Lance Reddick, Riccardo Scamarcio, Laurence Fishburne, Bridget Moynahan PLOT Legendary hitman John Wick (Reeves) travels to Europe to take on a contract against his will, triggering a chain of events that puts him in the sights of the world’s greatest assassins. OF ALL THE characters Keanu Reeves has played since hanging up Neo’s sunglasses a decade and change ago, it’s probably fair to say he didn’t expect John Wick to be the one to stick around. When the hirsute hitman first showed up in the self-titled 2014 film, it seemed to be just another entry in the recent cycle of geriaction movies (although Reeves, then just about to hit 50,…

★★ OUT NOW RATED M / 96 MINS DIRECTOR Zach Braff CAST Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Alan Arkin PLOT Unable to make mortgage repayments, senior citizen Joe (Caine) visits his bank and gets embroiled in a hold-up. When he loses his pension, it gives him the idea to pull off a heist, recruiting two of his old buddies as accomplices. AT ONE POINT during Going In Style, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman and Alan Arkin watch Dog Day Afternoon, another film about a dysfunctional bank heist. While it’s never a good idea to quote a film that is much better than the one the audience is watching, the contrast is instructive. Where Dog Day is genuine and off-beat, Going In Style couldn’t be more on-beat, a slick, no-surprises studio comedy that…

★★★ OUT NOW RATED M / 136 MINS DIRECTOR F. Gary Gray CAST Vin Diesel, Dwayne Johnson, Jason Statham, Charlize Theron, Michelle Rodriguez, Kurt Russell, Chris ‘Ludacris’ Bridges PLOT When a dark figure blackmails Dom Toretto (Diesel) into turning against his crew, it’s up to Luke Hobbs (Johnson) to stop his old friend, and perhaps save the world into the bargain, with the help of a deadly foe (Statham). MAYBE THEY THOUGHT just calling it Furious 8 would be too similar to The Hateful Eight, and maybe The F8 Of The Furious was too… 2 Fast 2 Furious; but calling it F8: The Fate Of The Furious is appropriately daffy, in much the same manner that transformed the franchise from an also-ran into one of the world’s biggest box office…

There’s a scene in Taken 3 where Liam Neeson climbs over a fence. As crack CIA operative Bryan Mills, the actor jogs over to a parked car, scrabbles onto the roof and heaves himself over the eight-foot, chain-link fence before landing on someone’s lawn. The sequence lasts just six seconds, but is cut together from 15 separate shots of Neeson (and a swarthy stunt double) vanquishing the obstacle. Quick cuts and clever angles, as much as bullets and bombs, have become the weapons of choice for modern action movies. Whether employed by Greengrass, Nolan or Taken 3’s Olivier Megaton, vertiginous camerawork can create powerful illusions: be it Jason Bourne taking out a dozen assailants in the blink of an eye, or an ageing spy clambering over a railing. Rapid-fire editing…

“IT’S PURE TERROR.” Unbridled fear is not an emotion you expect to hear from powerhouse producer Jerry Bruckheimer. After all, he spends his nine-to-five working with pirate skeletons. But the thing that reduces him to a quiver is not studio chiefs, egotistical actors or a particularly hairy stunt. No, what transforms Bruckheimer to a blubbering mess is the time-honoured Hollywood process of showing a new film to a “test audience”, aka members of the public yanked from a Boise, Idaho mall who can yay or slay a film with the stroke of a stubby pencil. “You’re anxious and nervous,” says Bruckheimer about testing. “You never know how the audience will respond. Fortunately, we just had a great test reaction. It was in a pretty rough form — there weren’t…

★★★★ FROM NOW / DIRECTOR André Øvredal / CAST Brian Cox, Emile Hirsch, Ophelia Lovibond, Olwen Kelly AUSTIN (HIRSCH) HAS to assist his coroner father (Cox) on a rush overnight job — determining the cause of death of unidentified ‘Jane Doe’ (Kelly). As they work, they’re plagued by perhaps-supernatural manifestations. An essay in gothic forensics, The Autopsy Of Jane Doe is Norwegian director André Øvredal’s follow-up to Troll Hunter. This swaps the snowy wastes for the claustrophobic interiors of a retro-look morgue, yet, like Troll Hunter, it mixes suspense with black comedy, a high level of gore and spooky mystery. Despite the American setting, it begins as a Scandistyle small-town noir, then shades into ghost story chills. The hook is that an unnamed female corpse (Kelly) is found half-buried in…

MAYES C RUBEO is one of Hollywood’s most in-demand costume designers, having worked on Avatar, World War Z, Warcraft, and the upcoming Thor: Ragnarok. But her work on The Great Wall was one of the most demanding projects she’s ever taken on, thanks to the sheer size of the production. While CGI was of course used, her team had to produce full costumes for a staggering number of actors and extras: “I think between 2500 and 3000,” Rubeo tells Empire. “There were civilians and the Emperor, which was a big thing, but there were six important regiments with a meaning to every symbol. I really had to make the director happy with his vision, Zhang Yimou was there every step of the way. But I had the best time of…

★★ FROM NOW / DIRECTOR Roger Spottiswoode / CAST Luke Treadaway, Bob The Cat JAMES BOWEN (Luke Treadaway), a homeless, recovering drug addict, ekes out a meagre dangerous existence busking on the streets of London. When his kindly support worker Val (Joanne Froggatt) finds him some accommodation, it brings him into contact with an injured ginger cat and animal lover Bettie (Ruta Gedmintas). Both will change his life. It is easy to see why A Street Cat Named Bob, James Bowen’s real life account of how a ginger moggy turned his life away from drugs and desperation, has made it to the screen. Based on a best-selling book, it offers a huge, potentially emotional character arc and a social-media-friendly cat story, all wrapped up in an upbeat tale of hope,…

CAPTION COMP Write a caption to the image above from Steve Carell’s upcoming Despicable Me 3 that makes us giggle like giddy schoolgirls, and you could win the entire Cosmos! To enter, email empiregiveaways@bauer-media.com.au DESPICABLE ME 3 IS IN CINEMAS FROM JUNE 15. GIVEAWAYS WIN! JACKIE ON BLU-RAY SET AFTER the assassination of JFK, Jackie sees Natalie Portman’s stunning portrayal of a woman coping with a very public grief. It’s also one of John Hurt’s last films. We have 8 copies on Blu-ray to win. TO ENTER, TELL US WHAT IS YOUR FAVE PORTRAYAL OF A REAL PERSON AND WHY. WIN! GOLD ON DVD MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY piles on the pounds and loses his hair in Stephen Gaghan’s latest flick. It’s an amazing transformation, on par with his work…

Garth Jennings (director of Sing ) says: “When I first saw Rushmore it seemed so perfect to me that there was almost no reason to make any more films. Though every scene is gold, Bill Murray’s speech to the school still resonates deeply with me. Wes Anderson told me the speech was written by [co-writer] Owen Wilson’s father, Robert. He was briefed to write a speech he might have given himself.” INT. SCHOOL CHAPEL — DAY Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman) is nudged out of a daydream by his chapel partner Dirk Calloway (Mason Gamble). A man is at the lectern. This is Herman Blume (Bill Murray). HERMAN: Thank you. You guys have it real easy. I never had it like this where I…