Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2017 i Empire Australasia

THOR: RAGNAROK MAY have only just hulk-smashed into the world, but the next, the 18th film from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is just three months away, and though it may be the latest in a fairly long line, it promises to be anything but more of the same. Not only is Black Panther the first solo black superhero movie in the current MCU — having been the first black superhero in mainstream comics when it was created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the 1960s — but also the first big-budget comic-book tent-pole movie with a predominantly black cast and filmmaking crew. We first met Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa — the young ruler who must protect Wakanda, the Afro-futurist paradise and most advanced nation on Earth, from outside threats —…

IN LATE FEBRUARY this year, newbie screenwriter Liz Hannah received a life-changing phone call. Her first-ever movie screenplay The Post, written simply to secure an agent but snapped up by producer Amy Pascal, was now being circled by Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep. “I just went into a corner and hid for a while,” she laughs. “I then realised it wasn’t a big prank. They were actually considering it.” And they went for it, too. Directed by Spielberg, The Post charts the relationship between Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham (Streep) and executive editor Ben Bradlee (Hanks), filtered through the pair’s history-changing decision in 1971 to publish the Pentagon Papers, the leaked government documents that exposed the escalating deaths of US soldiers during the Vietnam War. However, Spielberg wanted…

AGE __ 15 PLAYS __ Schoolgirl Max in Stranger Things 2. “She’s a tomboy and she skateboards a lot,” says Sink. “She’s pretty closed-off and has a stepbrother who’s bad news.” BACKSTORY __ “I didn’t start acting professionally until I was 10. I’m originally from Texas, but the whole family moved to New Jersey when me and my brother got into Broadway shows.” THE BIG BREAK __ “Annie [on Broadway] because at the time that was my dream. Then I moved into the world of film, and now that’s what I want to do.” BEST DIRECTION __ “The director for one of the Broadway shows I did told me, ‘The best acting advice I could give you is to be a real kid. How are you ever going to play…

WITH THE NUCLEAR dust settling on Blade Runner’s resurrection, thoughts can now turn to the next one. “Ridley and Hampton Fancher, who co-wrote our screenplay, had ideas they have been kicking around for a couple of decades,” says producer Andrew Kosove. Enough material to form “a trilogy” of sequels. Here’s what Empire’s man in the know thinks that could entail. A Replicant Uprising What began with Roy Batty’s gang looks set to continue with the one-eyed Freysa (Hiam Abbass) and her revolutionary group taking on humanity with the replicant child as their figurehead. Return of the Blade Runner Deckard could be coming out of retirement. Fancher told the LA Times that Deckard originally died at the end. With that changed, his mind returned to 1986 when he came up with…

What’s the story? Hollywood’s making an all-female version of Lord Of The Flies, with What Maisie Knew screenwriter-directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel bringing it to the screen. But why is that a big deal? There are already women in Lord Of The Flies. Love Galadriel. No, that’s Lord Of The Rings. Ah, right. What’s this about? It’s William Golding’s 1954 Nobel-winning novel that sees a group of British schoolboys crash-land on an uninhabited island in the Pacific and slowly turn into savages. The one we had to read at school with Piggy in it? Exactly. Wait, isn’t the story about masculinity run amok? Will that even work with female characters? Golding certainly wouldn’t have thought so. He often stated that his novel featured boys for…

OUT 26 DECEMBER RATED M / 135 MINS DIRECTOR Alexander Payne CAST Matt Damon, Christoph Waltz, Hong Chau, Kristen Wiig, Rolf Lassgård, Ingjerd Egeberg, Udo Kier, Jason Sudeikis PLOT Scientists discover a way to scale people down to the size of action figures, which appears to be the solution to humanity’s burden on the environment. While the world wrestles with the ethics of smallness, Paul Safranek (Matt Damon) looks to ‘downsizing’ for a fresh start. DIRECTOR ALEXANDER PAYNE has one of the most impressive resumes in American independent cinema. Election, About Schmidt, Sideways, The Descendants and Nebraska are all superbly acted films featuring engaging yet often wholly unlikeable characters. Whether it’s rigging a high school election or attempting to claim a million dollar sweepstakes, each character fights desperately for a…

OUT 21 DECEMBER RATED G / 95 MINS DIRECTOR Paul King CAST Ben Whishaw, Sally Hawkins, Hugh Bonneville, Hugh Grant, Brendan Gleeson, Julie Walters PLOT Paddington (voiced by Whishaw) wants to buy his Aunt Lucy a unique pop-up book for her 100th birthday. But before he can save enough money, the book is stolen. Then, as he tries to retrieve the missing item, he’s framed for the theft and sent to prison — not exactly the marmalade-loving bear’s natural habitat. WHEN TANGLED UNIVERSES, complex mythologies and dystopian malaise are still the running trend in sequels, it’s a breath of fresh air that the plot of Paddington 2 is, in essence: Paddington tries to buy a nice birthday present and it goes wrong. It goes wrong rather drastically, but it’s still…

OUT NOW RATED PG / 104 MINS DIRECTOR Bharat Nalluri CAST Dan Stevens, Christopher Plummer, Jonathan Pryce, Morfydd Clark PLOT October 1843. After a trio of flops, celebrated Victorian novelist Charles Dickens (Stevens) is running out of money and in desperate need of a hit. Then he lands on an idea: a festive ghost story about a miserly old businessman. But can he fight writer’s block and finish it by Christmas? CINEMATICALLY CAPTURING THE creative process has always been a tricky business. From The Doors to Shakespeare In Love, more often than not it’s led us into that cheesy territory where everything all-too-neatly falls into place with an “I got it!” eureka moment. Which presents a pitfall you’d think director Bharat Nalluri (Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day) and writer…

OUT 21 DECEMBER RATED MA15+ / 111 MINS DIRECTOR Sean Baker CAST Bria Vinaite, Brooklynn Prince, Willem Dafoe, Mela Murder, Valeria Cotto, Christopher Rivera, Caleb Landry Jones PLOT In a Florida motel run by Bobby (Dafoe), Moonee (Prince) and her mother Halley (Vinaite) lead a precarious existence without secure accommodation. But while Halley struggles to make ends meet, Moonee is largely oblivious to her circumstances and runs wild with her friends. WALT DISNEY’S MAGIC Kingdom opened in Florida in 1971, centred around a fairytale castle that promised visitors a spell in the happiest place on Earth. In its shadow, motels popped up to cater to a steady influx of tourists until, recently, these increasingly run-down establishments found a new clientele: Florida’s struggling working-class and unemployed families. These were people locked…

Bright is almost done. It’s late September 2017 and there are only some musical cues left to drop in; otherwise we’re good to go and director David Ayer, sitting in his office in Silver Lake, LA, accompanied by barky dogs, is buoyant. Bright, a genre-bending, R-rated stew of LAPD grit and Tolkien-esque fantasy, seems to have ended up exactly as intended, and he sounds relieved. His positivity has context. In January this year, in response to a Twitter compliment about Suicide Squad, Ayer broke into unprompted candour. “Wish I had a time machine,” he wrote. “I’d make Joker the main villain and engineer a more grounded story.” As his tweets went on, it became clear how hurt he was by critical responses to the film, which made $745 million at…

ON 17 APRIL 2002, a 48-year-old financier arrived at Michael Ovitz’s office with some very bad news. Ovitz’s ambitious company, Artists Management Group, was bleeding cash and the super-agent was out of options. This meeting was to negotiate the sale of AMG to an aggressive rival called The Firm. Ovitz was hoping for $40 million. The man from The Firm offered $5 million. After a stunned pause, Ovitz said: “If I didn’t know you personally, I’d throw you out of the room.” Fourteen years later, the same man who humiliated Michael Ovitz was responsible for the undoing of Hillary Clinton. The man from The Firm was Stephen K. Bannon, a former Navy officer and Wall Street banker who became the canniest far-right propagandist in Hollywood and then the brains behind…

1981 / RATED R18+ THAT THING MEN do in Michael Mann films, that obsessive and nihilistic act where they burn down their lives and bail when they feel the heat around the corner — that all arrived fully formed in Thief, Mann’s first feature film as writer and director. Released in 1981 with a Tangerine Dream score, Thief is the emotional blueprint for every film he’s made since. James Caan stars as Frank, a thirtysomething, no-nonsense, safe-cracking jewel thief who’s been out of the joint for four years after 11 behind bars. “You gotta forget time,” he says, explaining how he made it through prison. “You gotta not give a fuck if you live or die. You gotta get to where nothin’ means nothin’.” But now time is all he…

MOMENT Easy. It would be the first time I ever did a film, shooting Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides in Hawaii. I remember being sat for the read-through with Johnny Depp on my right and Penelope Cruz on my left and thinking, "What is happening?!" I was, like, a year out of drama school. For My Cousin Rachel, I had to swim naked in the English Channel and have a boat full of people watching - mainly men. It was a cold day and a freezing cold ocean. I remember getting out of the water and asking, "Did you see everything?" Everyone was like: "Yep." That was horrific. AUDITION There was one I was really proud of that I didn't actually g.-t: the Green…

“HOW MANY YEARS is it now?” asks M. Emmet Walsh, who memorably portrayed Blood Simple’s private eye Loren Visser, first of many villainous windbags to crop up in the films of Joel and Ethan Coen. Thirty-three years have passed since this keenly plotted tale of vengeful husbands, cheating partners and corpse disposal proclaimed a singular cinematic voice with two brains. Indeed, the three-minute tighter Directors’ Cut could easily be their latest release. Not only does it contains most of their hallmarks, it also defined the attitude that has served the Coen brothers well since... PREPARATION WAS EVERYTHING… The Coens took a leaf out of the book of their friend and sometime colleague Sam Raimi, who had raised money for The Evil Dead, by going door-to-door among the dentists and wealthy…

HERE’S HOW INFLUENTIAL Ray Harryhausen is. He didn’t direct Mysterious Island — that was Cy Endfield. Nor Jason And The Argonauts, which was a Don Chaffey joint. And he didn’t call the shots on First Men In The Moon, either, for which the credit goes to Nathan Juran. Yet when those three films are released in a box set in the UK, they’ll be under the title The Wonderful Worlds Of Ray Harryhausen. Because the stop-motion animation effects that Harryhausen provided have become the films’ defining glory; and so completely in control of the process was he that he was, effectively, those movies’ director. Here are Harryhausen’s five greatest creations. MIGHTY JOE YOUNG Harryhausen got into the business after being inspired by Willis O’Brien’s pioneering work on the 1933 King…

HAVING CO-WRITTEN Frances Ha and Mistress America with Noah Baumbach, Greta Gerwig has now struck out alone as a writer-director with Lady Bird. Starring Saoirse Ronan, it’s a personal story that, Gerwig says, is not quite as it seems. Would you call this a coming-of-age film? I wanted to construct the movie as a Trojan horse. One person’s coming of age is another person’s letting go — I’m just as interested in the letting go. Ostensibly it seems like the lead character is Lady Bird, but it turns out to be her mother. It’s been really interesting to watch people respond to that. Particularly parents. Have you spoken to them? A lot of people have come up to me to say they just dropped their daughter or son at college…

IT TAKES EXTRAORDINARY confidence to begin production on four sequels without waiting to see if there’s appetite for one. Considering the first of them won’t arrive until a decade after the original, it’s easy to see the ongoing Avatar project as a monument to hubris. But James Cameron is no ordinary filmmaker and Avatar was far from an ordinary film. Perched atop a worldwide gross of nearly $2.8 billion, it is quite comfortably the most successful film in history, and if Star Wars’ return dominated cinema in the 2010s, then Avatar’s resurgence may well define the 2020s. Here’s what we hope Cameron has in store. 1 __ MORE PANDORA From the levitating peaks of the Hallelujah Mountains to the colossal, gnarled boughs of the Hometree, Cameron created a vast new…

THERE’S CERTAINLY NO shortage of short film competitions in the world, but few offer the prize spoils that come with Jameson First Shot. Since its inception in 1998, the competition has been open to aspiring filmmakers from several countries (Australia included), offering the chance to have their short script produced by Hollywood player Dana Brunetti (Captain Phillips, The Social Network) and cast with a bona fide star to fill lead role duties (previous years have seen the likes of Maggie Gyllenhaal, Adrien Brody and Uma Thurman take part). This year Dominic West (The Affair, The Wire) was in the hot seat, playing roles in the short films of the winners: Sydney’s Alice Cogin (The Finish Line), London’s Ollie Wolf (Five Star Faoud) and Ontario’s Jason Manella (A Funny Thing Happened…

JAKE GYLLENHAAL was terrified before his first meeting with Jeff Bauman. In order to play him in Stronger, Gyllenhaal knew he’d be spending a year learning to ‘become’ Bauman — an ordinary guy who was bestowed unwanted fame after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, which killed three people and left 256 injured. Among them Bauman, then a 29-year-old deli counter worker, who lost both his legs. His survival and determination to walk again made him the symbol of a city’s refusal to cower before terror. “I was really nervous,” says Gyllenhaal. “I felt this sense of fraudulence. I know what I’m doing is pretend. When you meet someone who’s been through what Jeff’s been through and survived the impossible, there’s just something that calls you out for what you do.”…

HE’S TAKEN ON Whitehall and tackled the White House, and now it’s the Kremlin’s turn. In The Loop’s Armando Iannucci, the creator of The Thick Of It and Veep, is returning to the big screen with The Death Of Stalin. A blackly comic satire, it sifts through the political machinations that unfolded immediately after the Soviet dictator popped his murderous clogs in 1953. Loosely based on fact, the story takes Fabien Nury’s French graphic novel of the same name as its starting point. But Iannucci’s script — and direction — ramps up the laughs even as the bodies amass. Potential successors to Stalin, Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi), Beria (Simon Russell Beale) and Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor), all jockey for position, each out-scheming the others. “We’ve been very careful not to trivialise history,”…

OUT NOW RATED M / 104 MINS DIRECTOR James Franco CAST James Franco, Dave Franco, Seth Rogen, Zac Efron, Jacki Weaver, Alison Brie, Josh Hutcherson PLOT California, the late ’90s. Struggling actor Greg Sestero (Franco) befriends amateur actor Tommy Wiseau (Franco). Together, they move to Hollywood to follow their dreams. When Hollywood rejects them, they endeavour to make The Room — a film that would later become notorious as being one of the worst ever made. THE ROOM IS a bad movie. No question. Whether or not it is officially The Worst Movie Of All Time is a matter of taste (countless films, from Sex Lives Of The Potato Men to Superman IV, could easily jostle for that crown of thorns), but cult status and midnight screenings have turned it…

DAISY RIDLEY SPENT six months on a train with the world’s greatest detective but never gave up The Last Jedi’s secrets. Who are Rey’s parents? How did she end up on Jakku? Is she related to Kylo Ren? Ridley has the lowdown on all of this and more, but even the combined interrogation of Hercule Poirot, Murder On The Orient Express co-star Josh Gad and Dame Judi Dench couldn’t shake the answers loose. Empire, it must be said, is faring little better. “I am… aware of things,” she concedes reluctantly, after several minutes of relentless badgering. “But being told something out of context on set because I’m saying, ‘Hey Rian, what’s the answer to this question?’ is never the same as when it’s properly revealed. I mean, you can be…

THE ORIGINAL 1990S INCARNATION OF TWIN PEAKS INFECTED THE TELEVISION LANDSCAPE AND POP CULTURE AT LARGE FOREVER. Its effects are still seismically rippling, the mere title an evergreen touchpoint for anything approaching small-town surrealism. So when word hit a few years back that co-creators David Lynch and Mark Frost were resurrecting the series, mouths foamed and minds boggled. What joy it would be to hang out with old friends, to luxuriate in a bit of nostalgia. Right? Wrong. The third season was a beast, actively defying such decadent notions. When we left Twin Peaks in 1991, FBI agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) had been trapped in the Black Lodge, swapped on the outside for a doppelgänger inhabited by evil spirit BOB, and for the revival Lynch and Frost ran with…

OF ALL THE grenades thrown at Dale Dye, only one has come close to causing lasting damage. The thrower? Tom Hanks. “The shitbird,” grumbles Dye, mock-outraged at the memory. “He just got up and fired it right into my groin from 35 metres. I doubled over.” The rogue projectile struck Dye — website motto: “You just don’t get it” — during the pre-shoot military boot camp his company, Warriors Inc., had organised for Saving Private Ryan. Unfortunately, when it came to hand-grenade training, Hanks had got it. Too well. “The standard dude can’t throw that hard,” rues Dye. “I underestimated Tom.” The 72-year-old Dye has survived 31 combat operations in Vietnam, helped make Platoon a Best Picture winner, spent 30 years working to reinvent the Hollywood war movie, and can…

1 What’s the last line of The Howling? “Rare.” It came from John Sayles. You assumed at that point that the other werewolves had died, and this character [Elisabeth Brooks’ Marsha Quist] was going to go on to maybe do other things. What was interesting was that they didn’t use her when they made the sequel — this character that was so set up for a sequel. Correct. 2 What two movies are on the marquee at the Kingston Falls Movie Theater when we see it at the beginning of Gremlins? A Boy’s Life and Watch The Skies. Those were the working titles for E.T. and Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. It was something I put in, I thought it’d be fun. Nobody’s made them yet. Correct. 3 Who…

THE COLD NIGHT AIR is heavy with the sound of clinking champagne glasses and hushed chatter. Extras, resplendent in dinner jackets and ballgowns, are braving the inclement Melbourne weather at the Richmond Rowing Club on the banks of the Yarra River in the heart of the city. Faux signage has transformed the club into Vancliffe College and the revellers are here to celebrate 140 years of the fake educational establishment. To further enhance the idyllic soirée, long boats silently glide past. It’s the sight of veteran actor John Brumpton that shatters the serenity and reminds Empire why we are here. In a long coat and ill-fitting suit, his neck tattoos poke up above his starchy shirt collar; his closely shaved hair revealing more ink behind his ears. They may be…

Bushwick has some astonishing single takes of full-on action scenes. Can you explain the planning and processes involved in getting them done? Yes, sure. I lived in Bushwick for about five years. I got to get to know the neighbours pretty well and then started to work on the movie. Me and Jon [Millot, co-director] spent years speaking out the movie to each other. When we got the script, we started to plan out a lot of the scenes. It was written with a very specific city block in mind — pretty much the whole movie takes place in this five block radius and when we started production we actually got almost all locations that we wrote. We aren’t jumping from one neighbourhood to the other with these invisible cuts…

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ONE OF THE most colourful aspects of Pacific Rim, along with the fearsome creatures, was the spectacular monicker of Idris Elba’s apocalypse canceller: Stacker Pentecost. The sequel features John Boyega as his son, so what do we get this time? Boring old Jake. “I felt the same way,” laughs Boyega on set at Fox Studios in Australia. “Jake? I wonder if Stacker is a nickname that stuck.” Set a decade after the first film, in Pacific Rim: Uprising the alien monsters, known as Kaiju, have returned. And although he knows his way around a Jaeger — the giant mech suits used to fight them —Boyega’s Jake is no hero. “At the start of the film, he is an absolute crook,” says Boyega. “There are rogue Jaegers where people have collected…

POP QUIZ. WHAT links Brokeback Mountain, Blue Valentine, My Week With Marilyn and Manchester By The Sea? They all feature an Academy-acclaimed turn from Michelle Williams — now officially the most Oscar-nominated actor born during the ’80s. Renowned for inhabiting haunted, heartbreaking figures, the early buzz suggests Williams’ streak is set to continue as the lead in Ridley Scott’s kidnap drama, All The Money In The World. Crashing back down to Earth after Alien: Covenant, Scott’s film spins a tragic true story. In the summer of ’73, the Mafia snatched 16-year-old John Paul Getty III from the streets of Rome. Paul’s billionaire granddad, John Paul Getty (Christopher Plummer, replacing Kevin Spacey), refused to pay the $17 million ransom, leaving his mother, Gail Harris, to negotiate her son’s release. After a…

AARON SORKIN SAYS he’s “never thought of being a screenwriter as a stepping stone to being a director”. He had considered directing The Social Network, but happily handed it over to David Fincher. When it came to Molly’s Game, though, he felt differently. Adapted from the memoirs of Molly Bloom (played by Jessica Chastain), who went from being a Hollywood PA to running high-stakes poker games that got her mixed up with the Russian Mafia and the FBI, it made Sorkin feel protective in a way he hadn’t before. “There were emotional moments I wanted to preserve,” he tells Empire. “It would be very easy to make this a film about the shiny objects: decadence, glamour, money, gossip.” His directorial debut received a warm response on the festival circuit. In…

THE PORGS “They’re mischievous and inquisitive. Rian felt it was very important you were able to look at them and read their emotions, which is difficult in a character that is essentially a bird. We were able to do a lot practically by swapping a sad-looking porg to a happy-looking porg, an aggressive porg or a roaring porg. We have a whole porg menagerie that we use. Chewie befriends one, and that porg in particular shows some very Wookiee traits in the way he’s coloured; his patterning is very similar to Chewie’s.” THE CRYSTAL FOXES “We started with real dogs and made a little suit covered in drinking straws. Then we created a scale version which had over a thousand crystals in it. They’re really beautiful creatures; we had one…

EVERY THANKSGIVING, WHILE family members whipped up a turkey dinner in the kitchen, Jodie Foster would sit in front of the TV and watch The Twilight Zone. “Every single year,” she recalls. “It was like a 48-hour marathon. Non-stop Twilight Zone. It was my favourite thing.” Today, when Empire meets her on an appropriately bleak January morning in an appropriately bleak part of west London, she’s finishing post-production work on Black Mirror — the Netflix show routinely described as The Twilight Zone’s spiritual successor — for which she’s directed a new episode. Foster’s ‘Arkangel’ is one of the entries in the latest anthology and, following a shoot in Hamilton, Ontario, she’s now in Twickenham, where Empire’s been invited to see some raw footage. Together we watch Rosemarie DeWitt fretting over…

THE WALLS OF Ye Cracke, one of the oldest drinking joints in Liverpool, are festooned with fly-blown prints and nicotine-tinged photos of the Fab Four. Its labyrinth of tiny rooms is stuffed with moviemaking apparatus and Empire is witnessing a scene unfolding in the back bar. Here, sitting side by side behind two pints of mild, father and son — Kenneth Cranham and Jamie Bell — are sharing memories of silver screen star Gloria Grahame. She may have been a Hollywood siren, they recall, but she wasn’t half fond of a bacon butty with “tommy sauce”. Bell plays Peter Turner in director Paul McGuigan’s Film Stars Don’t Die In Liverpool, the real-life character whose memoir recalls his unlikely romantic liaison with Grahame. Turner met Grahame (Annette Bening) in the late…

OUT 11 JANUARY RATED PG / 125 MINS DIRECTOR Joe Wright CAST Gary Oldman, Lily James, Kristen Scott Thomas, Ben Mendelsohn PLOT Great Britain is in turmoil. Hitler is on the verge of taking Europe and his troops are advancing on the beaches of Dunkirk. The nation is under threat of invasion and Winston Churchill must choose between peaceful negotiation and standing his ground. IT’S LIKE WAITING for a London bus: you stand about for ages for a definitive on-screen Winston Churchill, and then three turn up in a row. It’s a testament to the brilliance of Gary Oldman’s astonishing performance as Britain’s most famous Prime Minister in Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour that, even though John Lithgow had given us a stellar Winnie in The Crown and Brian Cox toked…

OUT 26 DECEMBER RATED M / 132 MINS DIRECTOR Luca Guadagnino CAST Armie Hammer, Timothée Chalamet, Michael Stuhlbarg, Amira Casar PLOT It’s the early 1980s. Elio (Chalamet) is living an idyllic existence in Italy with his parents. One summer, his charmed life is disturbed by Oliver (Hammer), who comes to spend six weeks with the family, helping Elio’s father. They are six weeks that will change Elio’s life forever. IN HIS LAST film, A Bigger Splash, Luca Guadagnino stuck four attractive people in a remote holiday home and set off a sort of lustful Hunger Games, where sex was a weapon in a battle for dominance. Call Me By Your Name is similar in its set-up, but the opposite in how it plays out. It puts two strangers in another…

THERE ARE SINS so dark, no amount of penitence can erase them. Torture; treason; Red Hot Chili Peppers concerts — things so heinous they all but guarantee an eternity in The Bad Place. For Kylo Ren, that fateful moment came when he abruptly plunged a lightsaber into Star Wars’ best-loved scoundrel. To forgive is divine, but all the Hail Mothmas and Our Fistos in the galaxy surely can’t buy salvation for the man who killed Han Solo. “I know,” says Adam Driver, wincing apologetically. “That was Han Solo! It was so moving being a fan of those movies and taking in what all that meant.” Kylo Ren — Ben Solo — had murdered his father, twisting a ’saber in Han’s gut and casting his body into the abyss. “I really…

Besides that time Rick Astley showed up to sing on stage with Foo Fighters, few surprises in recent years have been as pleasant as Paul King’s Paddington. A wonderfully whimsical adaptation of the Michael Bond books about a talking bear from darkest Peru who rocks up in London in search of a home and happiness, it was well-received critically (five stars, said Empire) and went great guns at the box office, raking in over $260 million worldwide, enough to keep its ursine underdog (underbear?) in marmalade for life. Bright, inventive, charming, quaint and imbued with a lovely message about tolerance and acceptance, it’s already something of a family classic. So then, to the sequel. And that usually means one thing: bigger. Rightly or wrongly, sequels are associated with the idea…

THE EMPIRE VERDICT WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES ★★★★ RATED M What we said: “Thanks to an evocative story and the most realistic anthropoids you’ll find outside a zoo, this third Apes is the strongest yet.” Notable extras: A Reeves commentary, a bunch of deleted scenes, featurettes and scene comparisons on the digital release. 00.05.41 THE GOD’S-EYE VIEW __ We’re thrust straight into the titular war with a vicious hillside battle between ape and man, at one point viewed from a striking top-down perspective. “I wanted to do an angle that showed the violence, almost from an indifferent, God’s-eye point of view,” says Reeves. “I watch a lot of war movies and The Thin Red Line really affected me, because of the smallness of its figures against the…

★★★★ OUT 13 DECEMBER RATED R18+ / 124 MINS DIRECTOR Jung Byung-gil CAST Kim Ok-bin, Kim Seo-hyeong, Sung Jun, Shin Ha-kyun PLOT Sook-hee (Kim Ok-bin) slaughters her way through a drug den and emerges bloodied, to be given facial reconstructive surgery and trained as an assassin by shadowy yet powerful forces. Slowly, her violent past and violent future unfold as she grapples with her role. IT’S ALWAYS A treat to see the film that a hundred Hollywood action directors are about to rip off (okay, lawyers, pay homage to) before they reach it. The Villainess opens with one of those sequences that will leave you wondering how they did it, and marvelling at the sheer kinetic impact. It finishes with another equally laws-of-physics-defying flourish of a fight scene. And in-between…

PRO HALLOWE’EN COSTUME tip. Don’t go as Peter Venkman, Harley Quinn or Archbishop Of Canterbury Justin Welby. Instead, go as Michael Myers Dressed As Bob In Halloween. It will not only bestow you with instant film buff kudos but also earn the seal of approval from the Horror Master himself, John Carpenter. “It’s the cheapest of the cheap,” he suggests. “You want to go to a Hallowe’en party and you don’t have a costume, just put a sheet over you and off you go.” And glasses, too. Otherwise people will think you’re cosplaying as Casey Affleck from A Ghost Story. You’ll remember the scene from Carpenter’s 1978 slasher classic. Party girl Lynda (P.J. Soles) sends her boyfriend Bob (John Michael Graham) to the kitchen for a beer after some obligatory…

THERE’S AN ART TO crafting a good setlist. To start with a quiet one, or hit ’em loud and hit ’em hard from the off? That is the question. Do you deluge an audience with the hits, or throw in a few deep cuts for the real fans? Those decisions have been on Hans Zimmer’s mind for the last couple of years as he’s been travelling the world, with an orchestra, playing tracks from his extensive back catalogue of movie scores. We asked the German composer to give us an insight into his setlist choices... DRIVING/DISCOMBOBULATE/ ZOOSTERS BREAKOUT For a man capable of LOUD NOISES, the show starts with Zimmer, alone, playing the theme from Driving Miss Daisy on a piano. “I used to have stage fright, and thought, ‘If…

AS JOHN JARRATT’S Mick Taylor eyes up a coach load of fresh victims — sorry, tourists — licking his lips at the prospect of further destroying Australia’s international relations, the opening of the second season of Greg McLean’s Wolf Creek proves, if it was ever needed, that there’s life in the irascible old dog yet. The sophomore streaming season of Wolf Creek promises to deliver the franchise’s customary mix of gallows humour and rough-as-guts larrikin butchery, but with an added twist, as the aforementioned holiday makers find themselves at the pointy end of Aussie hospitality. Empire caught up with director and Wolf Creek showrunner Greg McLean for the bloody low-down… Where did the idea for the second season originate from? Essentially when I was developing the first screenplay for the…

Ethan Hawke says: "Mine would be the "Goddammit, at least I tried" scene from One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. Jack Nicholson bets them all that he can rip the sink out, but he can't. And then he says to them, "At least I tried!" That scene has been a huge inspiration to me my whole life. I remember being 14 and being ripped up about him showing them the importance of trying - that you don't need to do it, but if something is worth doing, then it's worth all of us trying. And it relates to me in regards to the arts because I think a lot of people struggle with insecurity - why should I make a movie when there are so many great movies that people…