Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2017 i Empire Australasia

DISCOUNTING THAT FLYING saucer in Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, Ready Player One is Steven Spielberg’s first dip into his beloved sci-fi genre since 2005’s War Of The Worlds. An adaptation of Ernie Cline’s 2011 bestseller, it sets his formidable world-building powers to work in a dystopian 2044 where big cyber is all-powerful. There, Tye Sheridan’s gamer, Wade Watts, teams up with his crush, Olivia Cooke’s whip-smart blogger Samantha Evelyn Cook, to find a life-changing Easter egg within virtual reality simulator, the OASIS. For Watts, it’s love at first MacGuffin. Tantalisingly, Spielberg is presiding over a quest filled with ’80s Easter eggs referencing everything from Stephen King to WarGames. “It felt like pure adventure,” says Cooke of the eye-popping adaptation. “It was Willy Wonka, it was…

DIRECTOR RIAN JOHNSON and the cast of The Last Jedi braved armies of Cinderella cosplayers at Disney’s D23 Expo to unveil a new behind-the-scenes video. A treasure trove of clues and rumour confirmations, we break down the five big ones below. WARNING! SPOILERS! 1. REY WILL TAKE ON THE KNIGHTS OF REN Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver’s training clips raise a few tantalising possibilities. Rey is seen fending off three assailants with her lightsaber, feeding speculation her nascent Jedi will go head-to-head with the Knights Of Ren, glimpsed briefly during her vision sequence in The Force Awakens. What’s more, we see Driver battling two similar opponents. Will he, too, fall foul of his former crew? Could Ren and Rey team up? 2. FINN RETURNS TO THE FIRST ORDER John Boyega’s…

TALKING ABOUT HIS filmmaking process brings out Luca Guadagnino’s inner Swiss Toni. Like The Fast Show’s resident lothario, a man who likened everything to making love to a beautiful woman, the Call Me By Your Name director turns sensuous when discussing his critically acclaimed romance. “My casting director recently said to me, ‘Every movie you make, it’s a way of making love to your partners in the film, whether they are actors or crew members,’” he explains. Yes, even the sweaty key grip was inducted into the Italian director’s sexy filmmaking world. This metaphorical on-set orgy was in aid of an indie drama critics have been showering with praise since its Sundance debut in January. Suffused with a heat-haze eroticism and nostalgic hues, and featuring some show-stopping (and potentially non-consensual)…

★★★★★ OUT 14 SEPTEMBER RATED MA15+ / 104 MINS DIRECTOR Francis Lee CAST Josh O’Connor, Alec Secareanu, Gemma Jones, Ian Hart PLOT Johnny (O’Connor), the twentysomething son of an ailing sheep farmer (Hart), doesn’t expect much from his life in rural Yorkshire beyond several pints and an anonymous bunk-up. But his perfunctory existence is turned upside-down when Romanian farmhand Gheorghe (Secareanu) arrives for lambing season. IN HIS POEM Moors, Ted Hughes describes that particular part of the Yorkshire landscape as “a stage for the performance of heaven”. It is this Yorkshire, brutal and beautiful, that Francis Lee conjures for his debut, God’s Own Country. The film opens on the moors before dawn: an isolated house, silence, then the sound of retching and spitting as farmer’s son Johnny (O’Connor) vomits…

★★★★★ OUT 7 SEPTEMBER RATED M / 90 MINS DIRECTOR John R. Leonetti CAST Joey King, Ryan Phillippe, Ki Hong Lee PLOT Misfit teenager Claire (Joey King) is given a supernatural Chinese music box by her scavenger father (Ryan Phillipe). She discovers it has the power to grant seven wishes — though her good fortune must be paid for in someone else’s blood. AFTER A SET-UP establishing that high schooler Claire (Joey King) has had a blighted life since the suicide of her mother (Elisabeth Rohm), she clutches a magic object (a nicely-designed Chinese puzzle/music box) and wishes the mean girl at school would ‘just rot’. The next day, teen princess of Instagram Darcie (Josephine Langford) wakes up with her face and toes falling off due to necrotising fasciitis. Then…

★★★★★ OUT SEPTEMBER 14 RATED TBC / 112 MINS DIRECTOR Stephen Frears CAST Judi Dench, Ali Fazal, Olivia Williams, Michael Gambon, Eddie Izzard, Simon Callow PLOT An elderly Queen Victoria (Judi Dench) forms an unlikely platonic bond with a young Indian servant, Abdul (Ali Fazal), while those in her close quarters want nothing more than to break up the deepening union and see him returned to the subcontinent. IT’S TOUGH BEING Queen Victoria circa 1887. It’s her Jubilee year, a time where she’s forced to stomach arbitrary bits of diplomatic ritual that aim to honour her significance, but that in reality strive to keep her coddled — encircled by an invisible, royal force field that no man or woman would dare penetrate. Opulence and sycophancy are designed to satiate the…

YORKSHIRE HAS ALWAYS BEEN HOME TO ME. Its landscape formed me both emotionally and physically, and even though I ‘escaped’ to London when I was 20 to train as an actor, it’s a place I’ve never been able to get out from underneath my flesh. When I decided to quit acting and start making films about five years ago, it felt like the most rich and emotive territory to set my work — the most natural place on Earth to make my first feature film. I had wanted to leave London for some time. The ‘urban’ lifestyle had depleted my resources massively and God’s Own Country was an opportunity to move back to the Pennine Hills. My dad is still a sheep farmer there, his farm is not dissimilar to…

MOST DIRECTORS, WHEN they’re talking about sequels, tend to go for the obvious platitudes: bigger, better, faster, stronger, explodier. Not Matthew Vaughn. When he was making Kingsman: The Golden Circle, the follow-up to 2014’s audacious, hilarious and button-pushing spy caper Kingsman: The Secret Service, he had a mantra in mind. “If you didn’t like the first movie, you’ll fucking hate this one,” he laughs. “I’ve made this for people who liked the first film.” Which means they should love this one. And while Vaughn wasn’t physically present at Comic-Con this year, there was plenty of evidence in the footage that his all-star, mostly Oscar-winning cast brought with them to suggest The Golden Circle isn’t playing it safe, from a gloriously inventive, breakneck car chase-cum-fight scene to evil henchmen being turned…

THE LAST TIME director David Ayer came to Comic-Con, in 2015, it was straight from the set of Suicide Squad without grabbing even a single Z. “I was fucking shooting, I jumped on a plane, and they dragged me over,” he recalls, unhappy at the memory. This year, it’s different. “I’ve gotten some sleep lately. It’s novel and I recommend it.” It’s not just Ayer — the entire Bright crew is on ebullient form, not least Will Smith, who accuses Joel Edgerton of grabbing his ass during Empire’s shoot, later asking, “Anyone got a tissue? David made me laugh and cry and mess up my eyes.” They’re in town for a sneak preview of their gritty, LA-set fairy tale, described as Training Day meets The Lord Of The Rings. “Meets…

BEFORE COMIC-CON, Star Trek: Discovery — the first new Trek series in more than a decade — was shrouded in the kind of secrecy that would frustrate a Ferengi. We knew it takes place before the events of the original series — Kirk, Spock et al — and that it would embrace diversity and inclusivity even more openly than Trek, a show famous for both, had in the past. But we knew little about its characters, until its principal cast beamed up to the Empire studio… SONEQUA MARTIN-GREEN __ FIRST OFFICER MICHEAL BURNHAM “Michael’s a xenoanthropologist and she studies other things too — you’ll see! She’s an incredibly flawed but incredibly principled woman. There’s the Vulcan way of life, which she learns from her surrogate father, Sarek, but then…

THERE ARE 312 shots fired in anger (and panic, and fear, and rank incompetence) in Free Fire, Ben Wheatley’s riotous tale of an arms deal-turned-shoot-out. But not all those bullets have the same impact. Wheatley talks us through the bullets that matter the most. Warning: spoilers! SHOT #1 Harry shoots Stevo Things kick off when Harry (Jack Reynor) shoots Stevo (Sam Riley) in the upper chest as payback for Stevo’s unprovoked attack on Harry’s cousin in a Boston bar. “It was always going to be those two characters because they’re the least sensible. The hard bit of that was making sure that Jack Reynor’s performance was internal enough that you could buy that he would go that crazy. Originally, the insult Stevo lobs at him wasn’t enough. I’d had a…

LOCATION I’ve just shot Welcome Home in this beautiful Italian town, in Umbria right next to Tuscany. I was out there for five weeks. That was cool. I’ve also shot out in South Africa a few times, Eye In The Sky most recently, and just really loved it, loved the people out there. It was beautiful. Not to shit on the place because I loved the people there, but The Canary Islands on Exodus: Gods And Kings . I’m a foodie and where we shot there was no food around so you could only put two pieces of bread together. It was also full of soft dirt that you’d walk through and create dust clouds. COSTUME I’ve got to…

JUST ACROSS FROM life-sized Sully and Mike statues and a studio shop brimming with collectibles, a slice of Mexico arrived in Pixar’s gleaming Emeryville atrium last November as its latest, Coco, took shape. In tribute to the movie’s storyline, a small ofrenda — an altar dedicated to deceased relatives — was set up on the Day Of The Dead holiday, Dia De Los Muertos. Staff could leave photos of their loved ones there, as well as tributes to former colleagues. Soon it spilled over with dedications and offerings. “We had to keep expanding it because so many participated,” says co-director Lee Unkrich. “It was lovely.” Death, the Coco way, is anything but sorrowful. “It’s not about wallowing in the negativity of death,” stresses Unkrich of his first directorial assignment since…

BEST KNOWN AS the birthplace of Woody Allen and Lena Dunham’s Girls, Brooklyn is now the setting for the year’s most unlikely foreign-language film, too. Shot almost entirely in Yiddish and filmed in a quiet enclave nestled within America’s busiest metropolis over the course of a year, Menashe was a bold place for director Joshua Z. Weinstein to kick off his feature filmmaking career — not least because he didn’t even speak the language. “I speak very, very little,” the New Yorker admits. “I grew up speaking Hebrew, but if Hebrew is like Arabic, then Yiddish is German.” Fortunately, it was his words the cast were speaking. Set in the Hasidic Jewish New York enclave of Borough Park, Menashe began life as 30 pages of loosely connected scenes in English.…

THE TITLE NARCOS was chosen for a reason. The Netflix series, which drops its third season next month, was always intended to be about the rise of cocaine in Colombia and the kingpins — or ‘narcos’ — who controlled it. It was never meant to be about one person. That was proven at the end of Season 2 when drug baron Pablo Escobar (Wagner Moura), the show’s central character, was killed off in a bloody execution. It shouldn’t have come as a huge surprise to anyone who knew anything about the real-life Escobar, but it leaves the show with a big, baddie-shaped hole. “When I conceived the show, years ago now,” says executive producer Eric Newman, “I modelled it slightly like The Wire. You’d have characters die or just recede…

★★★★★ OUT 14 SEPTEMBER  RATED TBC / 108 MINS DIRECTOR Geremy Jasper CAST Danielle Macdonald, Mamoudou Athie, Cathy Moriarty, Siddharth Dhananjay, Bridget Everett PLOT A white female rapper (Macdonald) dreams of escaping her smalltown existence and becoming a star. With the help of her misfit friends, she hits upon a unique sound and sets about getting their demo tape into the hands of anyone who matters.  IN THE LAST half decade, “cultural appropriation” has become an accusation commonly levelled at any white rapper who dares to so much as throw a gang sign. In 2013, we saw Lily Allen get it in the neck from the Twitterati for the twerking black and Asian back-up dancers in the video for Hard Out Here. At the end of last year, Honey G…

★★★★★ OUT 14 SEPTEMBER RATED M / 93 MINS DIRECTOR Raoul Peck CAST James Baldwin, Samuel L. Jackson PLOT Before his death in 1987, African-American writer James Baldwin was working on an opus. Here, that uncompleted book — a biography of civil rights activists Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. — is revived with archive footage and an ever-present narrator (Jackson). WHEN YOU THINK of searing examinations of race relations in the US, you possibly don’t picture the studio lights, pot plants and gentle audience laughter of a 1968 chat show. But that’s how I Am Not Your Negro begins, with James Baldwin — tie rakishly knotted, lit cigarette pluming smoke at his side — patiently answering a question from host Dick Cavett that essentially amounts to,…

★★★★★ OUT 21 SEPTEMBER RATED G / 89 MINS DIRECTOR David Soren CAST Kevin Hart, Thomas Middleditch, Ed Helms, Jordan Peele, Nick Kroll, Kristen Schaal PLOT Perpetual pranksters and pals George (Kevin Hart) and Harold (Thomas Middleditch) are threatened with separation in their school classes by the mean, fun-loathing Principal Krupp (Ed Helms). But when they accidentally convince him he’s Captain Underpants, a superhero they dreamt up, the result is chaos and the arrival of a threatening villain… A GROWN MAN running around in tighty whitey underwear with a cape flapping behind him. A villain named Professor Poopypants. Fart gags. Toilet jokes. If you’re already chuckling, then chances are you might just be the target audience for Captain Underpants. Or six. Which is essentially the same thing. The latest attempt to…

RAGNAROK, IN CASE you don’t know your Norse coda, means The End Of All Things. And Things certainly don’t appear to be going well for Thor Odinson right now. When Empire arrives on the set of Thor: Ragnarok at Village Roadshow Studios in Oxenford, Australia, on 20 August 2016, we find the thunder-bending Avenger doing battle with his latest, deadliest foe: Hela, Goddess Of Death. It is fair to say he’s getting his Asgardian arse kicked. They are fighting, it turns out, amid the swirling, interdimensional turmoil of the Bifrost — that handy, hyper-spacey bridge between worlds. Which is why actors Chris Hemsworth (in leather battle armour, his mighty hammer Mjolnir noticeably missing) and Cate Blanchett (in fractal-decorated mo-cap gear, which allows for an all-CGI Hela outfit that’ll twist, morph…

What brings you here? Gillan: We’re here to talk about the release of Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2 on Blu-ray in August. Rooker: That’s right. And the digital release too. Gillan: Which is on 8 August. Can’t remember when the Blu-ray is… Rooker: 23 August. Gillan: That’s why he gets paid the big bucks. Rooker: Especially on the Blu-ray, you get 80 minutes of brand-new footage that’s never been seen, including a music video. Gillan: It’s us dancing around in ’70s-inspired costumes, which you need to see. Have you been to Comic-Con before? Klementieff: Last year, for the first time. Gillan: I’ve been here loads of times. Rooker: Yeah, I’ve been many times. Gillan: I think this is maybe my fifth. Sixth, maybe. I was here for Doctor Who…

PETER CAPALDI’S DOCTOR still has one journey to make: the Christmas special airing this December. But with Jodie Whittaker confirmed as the next occupant of the TARDIS, it’s the end of an era for both Capaldi and showrunner Steven Moffat, who got to navigate through time and space together for just over three years. As they prepared to bid farewell to thousands of fans at Comic-Con, we sat them down together, plus guest writer and Christmas special co-star Mark Gatiss, to hear their memories of some key Capaldi episodes. DEEP BREATH (SERIES 8, EPISODE 1) In which the freshly formed 12th Doctor is startled by his new, craggier face. Specifically the “attack eyebrows”. Capaldi: Steven is a hugely gifted writer, obviously, but one of his quirks is that he loves…

THE EMPIRE VERDICT FRISKY ★★★★ RATED M This fearless, fun comedy offers a welcome female take on twentysomethings finding themselves amid aimless drifting, partying and hook-ups, its simple story bolstered by a sharp script and charismatic comedic turn from writer/ director Claudia Pickering. THE CONCEPT OF a person being a ‘triple threat’ may have (understandably) become a bit of a punchline over the years, but, much like Bigfoot, just because they’re not sighted in public all that often doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Enter Claudia Pickering: a writer, director and actor (and producer — so technically a quadruple threat, which doesn’t quite have the same alliterative ring to it) from Sydney who has proven her immense talent at all these roles with Frisky, her DIY feature film directorial debut. Shot…

IT’S A TOUGH time to be a Nic Cage fan. After splurging his fortune on dinosaur skulls, shrunken pygmy heads and America’s most haunted house, Cage’s financial woes have resulted in a manic pile-up of DTV releases to pay off the debts — this year alone, Cage will blurt out seven movies. Question is, do the films match the talent? If the following marathon proves anything, Cage switches genres more times than most people change socks, swinging from horror to thriller, action to comedy, biopic to disaster flick. Let’s start with a disaster. And boy, is it a disaster. USS Indianapolis: Men Of Courage (2016) subjects Cage to shipwrecks, sharks and Microsoft Paint-level CGI in a dramatisation of the World War II naval tragedy. Remember Quint’s Jaws monologue? There’s more…

WHAT DO THE following flicks have in common? Foreign Correspondent, The Godfather, The Untouchables, Revenge Of The Sith and The Naked Gun 33 1/3. The answer is they all worship at the altar of Battleship Potemkin’s Odessa Steps sequence. One of the most revered, imitated set-pieces in cinema history, it sees tsarist soldiers open fire on a crowd of mutinous civilians in the port of Odessa. The sequence remains a dazzling showcase of director Sergei Eisenstein’s ability to elevate indelible images, including the iconic baby rolling down the steps in a pram, through stunning editing (montage) techniques. But despite its totemic status, it wasn’t even in Eisenstein’s original screenplay. “It’s a very improvised sequence,” says Ian Christie, author of Eisenstein Rediscovered. “Once he decided to do it, he threw himself…

1 In World War II drama Their Finest, Sam Claflin tells Gemma Arterton, “Films are like life with the boring bits cut out.” Who originated that quote? Alfred Hitchcock. It’s an anachronism. Hitchcock is a big influence on me. I’ve taught some of his work. The Hitchcock/Truffaut book is still the best film book I own. Correct. 2 “Pancreas”, “woman’s handball team”, “sorbet”. These IMDb plot keywords describe which film? I don’t know. [Hears answer] Ah yes, it is the mother who has pancreatitis but it is also a disease that turns up in Wilbur Wants To Kill Himself.  The correct answer is Italian For Beginners . 3 In The Riot Club, how does Alistair (Sam Claflin) correct the mugger who wants to take his bank details?…

HEY EMPIRE. Just when I thought I was done after 20 years of collecting Terminator merchandise, I thought it was all over and I had it all and then BAM!, you guys throw me the awesome Terminator 2: Judgement Day 3D poster. The instant I unfolded the beast I headed out and had it framed and added it to the shrine. A big thank you for providing a fresh new entrant into the shrine to my obsession. I’ll be back. NEIL, VIA EMAIL Neil, we are LOVING your memorabilia collection! Empire readers — anyone else got a cool collection of movie memorabilia at home? Take some pics and send ‘em on in! Printed letter writers score a DVD copy of TV mini-series Guerilla, a drama set against the backdrop of…

THERE WAS MORE to George A. Romero than zombies. A Romero triple-bill could avoid flesh-eating fiends and still take in the likes of psychological vampire thriller Martin, or modern Arthurian fable Knightriders, or the barminess of his Stephen King collaboration, Creepshow. But zombies and Romero, who died in July after a short battle with cancer, will remain forever linked. When Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg pitched Shaun Of The Dead to Working Title, they called it “Richard Curtis shot through the head by George Romero”. The Walking Dead and Resident Evil wouldn’t exist if it hadn’t been for the man who basically created the modern zombie with Night Of The Living Dead (1968), and refined it with gallons of gore in the pulpy Dawn Of The Dead (2004) and 1985’s…

THE INTERGALACTIC COLONY of Primo 241 can be found just off London’s A4. The location for Impossible Planet, one of the short films in Stan’s 10-part Philip K. Dick anthology series Electric Dreams, has a shabby retro-futurist vibe. It may be set 500 years in the future but the inside of the Dreamweaver spaceship resembles an Atomic Age cocktail bar, all Formica surfaces and moulded furniture. In Impossible Planet, written and directed by The Night Manager’s David Farr, a rich, old, deaf woman (Geraldine Chaplin) hires two cosmic tour guides (Jack Reynor and Benedict Wong) to take her to Earth, presumed long dead. They plan to rip her off but discover, says Reynor, “that there’s something happening on a different plane of existence” — a recurring theme for Dick, who…

“IT’S NOT JUST a longer Zodiac,” says David Fincher of MINDHUNTER, his new Netflix series about the birth of serial-killer profiling. “I mean, the first season’s probably only an hour longer…” He’s joking, or course, but there’s something in it. He may have won a BAFTA for The Social Network and an Emmy for House Of Cards, but Fincher knows that Zodiac and Seven will forever link him with this blood-soaked subject. He’s exploring the dark side again in a 10-part run inspired by the memoir of FBI veteran John Douglas. Hamilton star Jonathan Groff plays an upstart agent based on Douglas, who believes killers can be learned from; Holt McCallany is his careworn partner. Together they interview incarcerated killers in order to catch others. “The most comprehensive look at…

JASON ISAACS CO-STAR, GOOD “Jodie’s going to own The Doctor for a generation. I already feel sorry for the next one. She’s funny as fuck, kind in a way that’s unfakeable and can simultaneously be utterly innocent and choke-on-your-tongue filthy. I can’t wait for my two majorly Whovian daughters to see her — not as a feminist role model, but because she’s going to blow them away.” ALICE LOWE CO-STAR, ADULT LIFE SKILLS “She’s someone you feel like you know when you see her on screen, yet she inhabits the character entirely. She’s got this uncanny ability to switch from heavy drama to comedy, which not many can do. It’s a bit greedy of her, really, to be so good at stuff. She’s going to be…

★★★★★ OUT NOW RATED MA15+ / 115 MINS DIRECTOR Doug Liman CAST Tom Cruise, Domhnall Gleeson, Sarah Wright, Caleb Landry Jones, Jesse Plemons, Jayma Mays, Kevin L. Johnson, Connor Trinneer PLOT Commercial aircraft pilot Barry Seal (Cruise) is enlisted by the CIA to gather intel on suspected communist threats in Central America during the 1980s, and ends up being both a key figure in the establishment of the powerful Medellin drug cartel and an unexpected friend to Reagan’s White House. ON PAPER, THE true story of devious pilot Barry Seal screams cinematic potential, so much so that one wonders why it’s taken this long for a screenwriter to snap it up. From 1978 until the mid-’80s, the man collected covert data for the CIA, brought cocaine into the states for Pablo Escobar,…

★★★★★ OUT NOW CERT MA15+ / 118 MINS DIRECTOR Patrick Hughes CAST Ryan Reynolds, Samuel L. Jackson, Salma Hayek, Gary Oldman PLOT Disgraced “protection agent” Michael Bryce (Reynolds) is coerced into transporting assassin Darius Kincaid (Jackson) to The Hague to testify against an evil dictator (Oldman). TYPIFIED BY THE work of Shane Black, the buddy action comedy was a Hollywood staple in the ’80s and ’90s, partly because on each occasion the audience knew exactly what they were going to get: a mismatched couple (often one conventional, one rule-breaker; sometimes one black, one white), pitched together to take down a Big Bad, crack wise and teach each other some life lessons along the way. This was all seasoned with car crashes, punishing punch-ups and the obligatory jump off a tall…

★★★★★ OUT NOW RATED MA15+ / 122 MINS DIRECTOR Malcolm D. Lee CAST Regina Hall, Queen Latifah, Jada Pinkett Smith, Tiffany Haddish, Larenz Tate PLOT The ‘Flossy Posse’ are four college friends who reunite after a long separation for a wild weekend in New Orleans. As they reforge their bond, old tensions and new bubble up. THERE’S A HUGE comedy sub-genre centering on the wild weekend, friends’ reunion or both, so on paper Girls Trip is yet another iteration of something we’ve seen a million times already. But this works better than its fellows, its blindingly charismatic cast elevating it to more the level of a Bridesmaids or a Hangover than a Grown Ups or a Wild Hogs. The key is that these women absolutely seem like friends. At their…

MARVEL STUDIOS DIDN’T bring the entire cast of Avengers: Infinity War to Comic-Con. Probably because the convention centre isn’t big enough. But Marvel chief Kevin Feige did bring footage from the next few MCU films, and dropped a few info-bombs into the bargain… THE ORIGINAL WASP At the end of Ant-Man, we see a picture of Janet van Dyne, the original Wasp and wife of Michael Douglas’ Hank Pym, long thought lost to the mysterious Quantum Realm. Well, almost — her face was obscured, so Marvel could cast the role down the line. Which they have in style, with Michelle Pfeiffer joining the cast of the currently filming Ant-Man And The Wasp. “We used to say, ‘It would be great if they go to rescue someone like Michelle Pfeiffer,’” Feige tells…

What brings you here?  Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. We’re in the middle of the new season and resume shooting on Monday. There are a lot of Douglas Adams devotees around so we had a built-in audience, in that regard, but I think people really fell in love with the show in its own right, which is great. It’s a crazy show — funny but gritty and intense — and it gets even weirder in the second season. Which of your characters is biggest at Comic-Con? I mean, it would be Frodo Baggins. I haven’t actually been out amongst anything so far, so I’ve not seen any cosplay at all, but I’ve seen my fair share of Hobbit costumes. What I’m starting to see over the last few years are…

WITH THE RECORD-BREAKING commercial (not to mention critical) success of Wonder Woman giving both Warner Bros. and DC a boost, the companies brought their big guns to Comic-Con, putting Ben Affleck (Batman), Ezra Miller (The Flash), Gal Gadot (Wonder Woman) and Jason Momoa (Aquaman) on stage to talk Justice League, Aquaman and more, including indications that the DC Extended Universe is about to get pretty darn big. COMING ATTRACTIONS  Following this year’s Justice League and next year’s Aquaman, Warner Bros. has another eight DCEU movies in the works. Shazam is due for April 2019, while Wonder Woman 2 will follow that in December 2019. Also coming, but currently undated, are Joss Whedon’s Batgirl, Matt Reeves’ The Batman, Suicide Squad 2, Green Lantern Corps and Justice League Dark. Previously announced, but…

Saturday 22 July, 11:18am __ Hall H, right at the end of the San Diego Convention Centre, is the place where Hollywood shows off its wares to the Comic-Con massive. And massive is about right — it’s a cornucopia of cinema, a glut of geekery, that can host 6,500 people, many of whom have camped out all night to try to get in for the Con’s biggest day. 11:30am __ Warner Bros. are first up with their signature move: giant screens that wrap around the hall. 11:39am __ Ready for Ready Player One? Here comes former Empire editor Sir Steven of Spielberg. It’s only his second visit to the Con, but he knows the drill: don’t come empty-handed. He's brought the teaser for his pop culture-tastic film, a visual treat…

IN 1995, THE name “Michael Bay” meant something quite different to what it means today. The man who now makes “movies for teenage boys” (his words) was just a glint on his camera lens. Then a 30-year-old director with music video and advertising experience, he had just one film to his name — action comedy Bad Boys. It may have received (at best) mixed reviews, but he was an exciting young talent, with an obvious flair for visuals. And it didn’t hurt that Bad Boys made over seven times its budget at the US box office. So naturally producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson immediately hired him again. This time to direct The Rock. The Rock holds a rarefied position in Bay’s filmography. Of all the films he’s directed —…

James McAvoy: “This is one of my favourite scenes of all time. It’s the ‘up there it’s their time, down here it’s our time’ speech, where Mikey makes his plea for why the Goonies should carry on with their adventures and find One-Eyed Willy, and not just go back up the well and find safety and go back to their houses to have chocolate marshmallows and watch TV. Because this is their last moment to be children. ‘Up there is their time.’ That symbolises, if you go up there you become an adult and have to deal with adult issues. You stay here and you get to be children. I think that’s fucking beautiful.” INT. CAVERNS — NIGHT Having been trapped in a network of underground caves on a search…