Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2018 i Empire Australasia

FORGET SNOWPIERCER. MEET the Conveyex, a rollercoasterstyle train barrelling through a barren landscape in Solo: A Star Wars Story. And hanging on for dear life are young Han (Alden Ehrenreich) and youngish Chewie (Joonas Suotamo) during a daring robbery. Co-writer Lawrence Kasdan and producer Kathleen Kennedy have long likened Ron Howard’s film to a Western: replace the goggles with neckerchiefs and the Conveyex with a locomotive and this could be Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, albeit with more hair and less Burt Bacharach. As well as being a “heist” movie, we now know where Solo: A Star Wars Story sits in the series’ scheme of things. A recently released time-line puts the film not only before Rogue One (obvs) but also before the Star Wars Rebels series. More specifically,…

IT WASN’T CLAIRE Foy’s universally acclaimed role as the Queen in The Crown that made director Steven Soderbergh choose her for the lead in paranoid thriller Unsane, as a woman seemingly having a breakdown. What convinced him was her acceptance speech at the SAG Awards, upon winning the first of her two prizes as Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Drama Series. “Someone told me that he watched my acceptance speech and was like, ‘She seems mental! She could play the part!’” Foy says. “That’s obviously how I come across. So that’s good.” Foy found the script fascinating — and as a long-time Soderbergh fan, was hardly going to reject such an offer. Not that she went to meet him expecting an offer. “You don’t meet a complete…

Breath is based on Tim Winton’s novel of the same name. Was there extra pressure considering the book has its own following? Yeah, for sure. The amount of times people have stopped me and said, “You’re making a film with that book? That’s my favourite book!” It does add onto complications of trying to make the film. At the same time, at least you know that it’s a subject and it’s a story that a lot of people have identified with and relate to in an emotional and a powerful, visceral way as well. There are positives. You can’t have both. You can’t have one without the other. What made you want to adapt the novel? Like a lot of other people that read the book, it had…

★★★★ OUT 12 APRIL RATED TBC / 101 MINS DIRECTOR Wes Anderson CAST Bryan Cranston, Bill Murray, Greta Gerwig, Edward Norton, Scarlett Johansson, Koyu Rankin PLOT Thanks to the cat-loving mayor of Megasaki City, the entire dog population of the Japanese metropolis has been transported to a grim island far from the coast. There, a band of scrappy creatures must embark on a mission to prevent further disaster. WES ANDERSON HAS history with dogs. And it’s the kind of history that might have landed him on some kind of PETA watchlist. In Moonrise Kingdom, a fox terrier named Snoopy took a fatal arrow in the neck. In Fantastic Mr. Fox, a beagle called Spitz got knocked out via drugged blueberries. Another mutt is killed in The Royal Tenenbaums, while the…

★★★★ OUT NOW RATED TBC / 95 MINS DIRECTOR John Krasinski CAST Emily Blunt, John Krasinski, Noah Jupe, Millicent Simmonds PLOT 2020. Civilisation collapses following the arrival of ravening monsters who track by sound and pounce on any creature who makes a noise. After a terrible loss, a family — father, mother, daughter, son — survive on an isolated farm, but the imminent arrival of a new baby imperils their fragile fortress. THOUGH ITS CATACLYSM is global, this high-concept monster movie works by narrowing the focus. Just as the human characters try to cut out noise, by going barefoot and sprinkling sand over every path, director John Krasinski (who also co-stars and writes) and writers Bryan Woods and Scott Beck eliminate almost all of the frills to concentrateon delivering one…

★★★ OUT NOW RATED PG / 109 MINS DIRECTOR Ava DuVernay CAST Storm Reid, Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Levi Miller, Deric McCabe, Chris Pine PLOT Pre-teen Meg (Reid) never got over the disappearance of her scientist father (Pine) four years ago. But when she and her little brother (McCabe) meet the strange Mrs Whatsit (Witherspoon) they learn that he has travelled through space — and there may be a way to get him back. MADELEINE L’ENGLE’S A Wrinkle In Time is a children’s classic, showered with awards on publication in 1962 and in print ever since. But with its spare prose and cosmos-spanning concepts, and in particular given its non-ending, the novel is a particularly tricky proposition for the screen. Director Ava DuVernay’s solution is…

★★★★★ NETFLIX OUT NOW DIRECTOR Alex Garland CAST Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tessa Thompson, Gina Rodriguez, Tuva Novotny, Oscar Isaac PLOT Cellular biology professor Lena (Portman) joins an expedition into an area of Florida swampland that was hit by a meteor and is now surrounded by a mysterious shimmer that blocks all contact with the outside world. ANNIHILATION IS A women-on-a-mission film — a five-strong team, each member with a different skill set (a biologist, a physicist, a geologist, a paramedic and a psychologist), are sent to investigate a meteor that’s causing a strange phenomenon in an area of Florida. But that’s far from all it is. Taking that throwaway premise, writer and director Alex Garland (loosely adapting a novel by Jeff VanderMeer) has crafted a film that tackles…

★★ NETFLIX OUT NOW RATED M / 126 MINS DIRECTOR Duncan Jones CAST Alexander Skarsgård, Paul Rudd, Justin Theroux, Seyneb Saleh, Noel Clarke, Robert Sheehan PLOT Berlin, 2052. A mute Amish barman (Skarsgård) is searching for his missing girlfriend (Saleh). Meanwhile, an AWOL US military medic (Rudd) tries to secure fake IDs so he can go home with his daughter. IT’S FAIR TO say Duncan Jones’ Mute arrives on Netflix burdened by a considerable weight of expectation. It’s a film he’s been nurturing for over a decade-and-a-half. One which should prove that Warcraft was a studio-over-coddled glitch and which, encouragingly, is the narrative successor to his fantastic 2009 debut Moon; not a sequel so much as fresh story in the same universe. In the latter sense, at least, it delivers…

“I could get into the black dog. Whatever you want. Or I could stay, spiking it in the end zone until I have to be carried off.” YOU ALL KNOW how he earns a living. A decade ago, Robert Downey Jr launched the MCU as Tony Stark in Iron Man, and has since then become the lynchpin of the franchise, with major appearances in seven of the 18 films. Now in his early fifties, and with his contract coming to an end with Avengers 4, it may soon be time for Downey Jr to explore life outside the steel suit. We caught up with him in-between takes on the Infinity War set. What can you tell us that’s not a spoiler? We can just sit in silence. Ruminating. How does…

_there is a severed leg sticking out of a mound of chopped-up logs in Jason Blum’s office. Sat at the other end of the room, on a sofa facing Empire, Blum slowly stirs some tea. In the wake of Catherine Keener’s hypnosis tactics in Get Out, it’s a little ominous. “Oh, I know,” he grins. “Be careful, buddy. I might be getting you ready for the Coagula.” The Coagula, Get Out’s procedure in which black people are body-snatched, becoming involuntary hosts for the minds of physically ailing white people, is — when you read it like that — not traditional awards-season material. But Blumhouse has been upending expectations and subverting norms from the start, and the last year has been a banner one for the company. Its two biggest successes yet…

AFTER THE AVENGERS failed in 1998, Jeremiah S. Chechik fled Hollywood. Not to a beachside retreat to drown his sorrows in margaritas and escape the deafening silence of box-office tills. Not even back across the border to his hometown of Montreal. The director, deemed responsible for a hot mess that scraped in only $48 million against a $60 million budget, felt so profoundly battered by the experience he disappeared into the literal wilderness. “I went across the Gobi desert to the edge of Western China,” he tells Empire. “I travelled through West Africa, through all these war-torn areas. The most dangerous places.” Now 62 years old, Chechik is reluctant to share details of his self-imposed exile, saying only that he had “plenty of dangerous experiences”. Though none so harrowing as…

“A bird-brained movie to cheer the hearts of the far right wing,” sneered Vincent Canby in the 25 July 1974 edition of The New York Times. The movie he was reviewing was Death Wish, a new crime thriller directed by Michael Winner, in which Winner’s frequent cohort, Charles Bronson, embarked on a vigilante crusade in New York, incited by the murder of his wife and rape of his daughter. And Canby wasn’t alone in his disdain. Variety called it “a poisonous incitement to do-it-yourself law enforcement”. Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times thought its message was “scary”. But Death Wish was unstoppable. In the US, the $3 million movie grossed $22 million and was followed by four sequels, two now infamous for their extreme sexual violence. The final one, 1994’s…

DON’T BE FOOLED by the cheerful demeanours of Paul King and Simon Farnaby. Because as the architects [King co-wrote and directed; Farnaby co-wrote] of Paddington 2’s incredibly emotional ending, in which Paddington is reunited with his Aunt Lucy, they are responsible for, at a rough estimate, 75 per cent of the tears shed in the world over the past four months. We caught up with these cold, calculating colluders and asked them for their tips. START WITH THE END King: We knew we wanted to end with Aunt Lucy coming back very early on. What’s emotional about the ending is that Paddington discovers that his good deeds meant something to all his neighbours, and the world can be a good place. Farnaby: What makes people cry isn’t just Aunt Lucy…

NASH EDGERTON ISN’T the first stuntman to become a director. But, from Hal ‘Smokey And The Bandit’ Needham to David ‘Snakes On A Plane’ Ellis, his predecessors tend towards the higher-octane end of the action spectrum with their behind-camera projects. Edgerton’s different. Despite stunt-work on the likes of The Matrix Reloaded and Revenge Of The Sith, his 2008 feature debut, The Square, was a lo-fi Sydney-based thriller about adultery and arson which led many critics to draw comparisons with the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple. And his incoming follow-up, Gringo, promises similarly Coen-esque black comedy. “I think there’s a lot of humour in awkward, uncomfortable situations,” the Aussie director tells Empire. “Something that might be shocking to some people can be funny to someone else. You can go through a tragic…

START WITH A PROLOGUE The number of Indiana Jones adventures is finite. I would love the return of the ‘Previously Seen On Indiana Jones’ prologues that started Raiders, Doom and Last Crusade but was sorely missing from Crystal Skull. Indy’s escape from the booby-trapped temple that opens Raiders is so fantastic, you feel like you could leave after just that entirely satisfied. So, more of that, please. (A treacherous animal would be good, too.) IAN FREER, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR BRING BACK THE SCARES Melting Nazis in Raiders. Death by Grail in The Last Crusade. The whole of The Temple Of Doom. Each original Indy film has its nightmare-inducing horror moment, while Crystal Skull’s killer ant chase doesn’t come close. A practical, visceral scare in Indy V would give the series its…

“WHAT IF I told you that there aren’t any chance encounters?” Westworld’s pragmatic examiner Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) asked cyborg heroine Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) in 2016’s Season 1 opener. “That you and everyone you know were built to gratify the desires of the people who pay to visit your world?” Westworld, created by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, has messed with our and its characters’ heads from the start. A mind-bending remake of the 1973 film about robots running amok in a Wild West theme park, it threw up existential questions while planting puzzles — and Season 2 may melt our brains for good. “There is a lot of mayhem,” says Joy, smirking, when Empire asks what’s in store. “And a lot of madness.” Flipping sympathies from the original, Westworld…

★★★★ OUT 25 APRIL RATED M / 125 MINS DIRECTOR Richard Linklater CAST Bryan Cranston, Laurence Fishburne, Steve Carell, J. Quinton Johnson, Deanna Reed-Foster PLOT 2003. Thirty years after they served together, former medic Larry ‘Doc’ Shepherd (Carell) enlists ’Nam buddies Sal Nealon (Cranston) and Richard Mueller (Fishburne) to attend the military funeral of his son, killed in action in Iraq. A bittersweet road trip ensues. IT IS PEAK Richard Linklater to make an unofficial sequel to a 44-year-old film he had nothing to do with in the first place. Last Flag Flying is a quasi follow-up to Hal Ashby’s 1973 The Last Detail starring Jack Nicholson, Randy Quaid and Otis Young (both films are based on novels by Darryl Ponicsan). It changes the names of the characters, but keeps…

★★★★ OUT NOW RATED M / 140 MINS DIRECTOR Steven Spielberg CAST Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Letitia Wright, Ben Mendelsohn, Mark Rylance PLOT To save a Virtual Reality realm known as the OASIS from the threat of a corporate villain and his army, underprivileged teenager Wade Watts (Sheridan) must discover three keys hidden somewhere in the computer-generated world. THERE’S A MOMENT, not long into Ready Player One, where hundreds of cars, including a DeLorean, the A-Team van and the Plymouth Fury from Christine (which happens to be driven by Lara Croft) are all racing each other through New York when, having already outmaneuvered the Jurassic Park T-Rex, King Kong swings into view. And as the giant ape appears, all lingering doubts are dispelled — it’s clear the film is going…

★★★ OUT NOW RATED M / 140 MINS DIRECTOR Francis Lawrence CAST Jennifer Lawrence, Joel Edgerton, Jeremy Irons, Charlotte Rampling, Matthias Schoenaerts PLOT When Dominika Egorova (Lawrence) has her promising ballet career cut short, she’s blackmailed by her uncle into becoming a sexually manipulative ‘Sparrow’ for Russia’s intelligence agency. A RUSSIAN SECRET agent. A dehumanising training regime. A background in ballet. It’s no wonder that when Red Sparrow was announced, Marvel fans thought they were getting their much-wished-for Black Widow movie in everything but name. But Francis Lawrence’s steely thriller, based on the first of Jason Matthews’ trilogy of novels, shares more DNA with John le Carré’s densely plotted espionage page-turners than the MCU. For his first film since directing the final three Hunger Games films, Lawrence has once again…

★★★★ OUT 25 APRIL RATED TBC / 98 MINS DIRECTOR Steven Soderbergh CAST Claire Foy, Amy Irving, Joshua Leonard, Jay Pharoah, Juno Temple PLOT Despite moving away from home and rebooting her life, Sawyer Valentini (Foy) still suffers the trauma of being stalked by an obsessive man. Then, after a therapy session, she is involuntarily committed to a mental institution where her worst fears are realised and her grip on reality loosens. FEATURING MEDICAL malpractice, reality-smudging prescription drugs and a female protagonist who may or may not be losing her sanity, Steven Soderbergh’s second post-‘retirement’ production l urks closest to his second-to-last pre-‘retirement’ movie, Side Effects. But where that was executed in the glossy style of a typical Hollywood thriller, Unsane is down, dirty, lo-fi and — no doubt made…

★★ OUT NOW RATED M / 118 MINS DIRECTOR Roar Uthaug CAST Alicia Vikander, Dominic West, Daniel Wu, Kristin Scott Thomas, Walton Goggins PLOT Lara Croft (Vikander) lives a quiet life as a bicycle courier in east London. But when she uncovers clues to her missing father’s (West) whereabouts, Croft embarks on her first adventure to unlock the mysterious tomb of Himiko — the “mother of death”. SINCE FIRST APPEARING as a jumble of jagged polygons in a 1996 PlayStation game, Lara Croft has embedded herself in the pop culture like an artifact in an ancient catacomb. The computer-generated archeologist-turned-sex-symbol is laden with superlatives: more magazine covers than any supermodel; more actors taking the role than Bond or Batman; and, with the two turn-of-the-century Angelina Jolie films, more box-office takings…

★★★★ OUT 26 APRIL RATED PG / 97 MINS DIRECTOR Paul Damien Williams CAST Gurrumul, Mark Grose, Michael Hohnen, Sting PLOT A documentary exploring the life of indigenous singer Gurrumul and his journey to fame while still holding dear the customs of his upbringing; as told by the musicians who helped him become one of the most distinctive voices in Australia. SOME STORIES DON’T need sensationalising. Indigenous artist Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu’s extraordinary life is one such tale. Born blind but gifted with one of the most beautiful and individual voices to ever be heard in Australia, the story of his success and the way he handled fame is an uplifting, emotional and deeply moving journey. The multi-instrumentalist from the Gumatj clan of the Yolngu people first saw success playing with…

★★★ NETFLIX OUT NOW EPISODES VIEWED 1-5 CREATOR Melissa Rosenberg CAST Krysten Ritter, Rachael Taylor, Eka Darville, Carrie-Anne Moss, Janet McTeer PLOT Even though she’s seen off mind-screwer Kilgrave, surly, hard-drinking PI Jessica Jones (Ritter) hasn’t achieved closure, so she sets out to crack the case of her own mysterious and tragic origin. “WITH GREAT POWER comes great mental illness,” says a character at the beginning of Jessica Jones season two, which sets its stall out early, and firmly. That not-too-subtle riff on Spider-Man’s catchphrase is a hardly necessary reminder the Marvel Universe’s Netflixtethered heroes are, typically, hardly ecstatic recipients of their super-abilities. So where the first 13 episodes of the show boldly focused on Jessica’s struggle to vanquish a nemesis who was basically an amplified abusive boyfriend, we now…

IT’S THE TRUCKS THEY SPOT FIRST. THEN THE SECURITY BARRIERS. THEN THE SECURITY GUARDS. THEN THE CAMERAS. That’s when people realise a big movie has come to town. And that’s when the crowd starts to form on this boiling hot June day, trying to catch a glimpse of the Atlanta street that has been transformed, for the time being, into a little slice of New York City. More accurately, into MacDougal Street, complete with meticulously recreated frontage of the famous Minetta Tavern. And, even more accurately, into a MacDougal Street that has seen better days. Cars, including those famous yellow cabs, are strewn everywhere. Some are on fire. Some are upside down. Rubble litters the streets. Shopfronts are cracked. Windows are broken. Clearly, something bad has happened here. Then, the…

Leigh Whannell, writer of Saw , director of Insidious: Chapter 3 and star, as Specs, of all the Insidious films, directs this film about a technophobe under siege from a computer chip he has implanted to cure his paralysis. Tate Taylor, director of The Help and The Girl On The Train , reteams with The Help’s Octavia Spencer for this psychological horror shooting in Mississippi and also starring Juliette Lewis. Taylor says it will make us think while we shriek. SPAWN With 1997’s well-intentioned but unsuccessful Spawn film a distant memory, Blum has enlisted the demonic black superhero’s creator, Todd McFarlane, to write and…

MY INTRODUCTION TO STEVE BUSCEMI IS EVERYTHING you’d fear, which, perversely, is everything you’d want. Due to some miscommunication, I’m in the adjoining room to the Brooklyn photo studio, gormlessly unaware that the shoot wrapped 10 minutes ago. “He was about to leave!” the photographer says when he finds me, leading me into the studio, where Buscemi looks agitated. “You were hiding in plain sight!” says Buscemi, looking like Mr Pink, sounding like Mr Pink, in a space not unlike a warehouse. It’s not good for your nerves. Of course, he’s absolutely fine, and gentlemanly too. There’s just all that baggage. From Reservoir Dogs to Fargo to this month’s The Death Of Stalin, Buscemi is all too convincing as cerebral hotheads, unleashing machine-gun diatribes and not letting go, a dog…

FROM THE OPENING titles of Body Heat, we know exactly where we are and when we are. As John Barry’s afternoon porn score slithers to life with the tinkling of piano keys and, yep, you’ve guessed it, a saxophone solo, we can already taste the sweaty warmth of Florida in that transition from ’70s to ’80s, a time good taste forgot. Yet conversely, first-time director Lawrence Kasdan was keen to make Body Heat as a throwback to 1940s noir, not relying on anything too contemporary for the story to work. The biggest nod we get towards emerging tech in this movie is a payphone, which for a present-day audience is about as common a sight as cigarettes in a bar (something else that Body Heat fogs up the screen with…

FIRST AIRING IN 1965, Lost In Space was a huge fixture among space race-era audiences, adorned with colourful costumes, a wise-cracking robot (named ‘The Robot’), and charmingly glued-together special effects. The original may not have dated well (and we can all now pretend the 1998 cinematic dud with Matt Le Blanc never happened), but ’60s sci-fi has a habit of sticking around. Back with a 21st-century Netflix reboot, Lost In Space has stripped out the kitsch, dialled up the danger, and set the course firmly on thrills, rather than doom and gloom. “So much current sci-fi is dystopian,” says the show’s executive producer and showrunner Zack Estrin. “The future’s terrible and it’s dominated by killer robots and it’s all very dark... Lost In Space, at its heart, is about hope.”…

THERE IS A strange thing that happens during the Oscar race. As we become impassioned about our favourites, cheerleading them on in the race to Best Picture, we can become soured towards films that we thought were just fine, great even, before awards season started. Anything that’s not our number one becomes ‘undeserving’. So it is with The Shape Of Water, a highly unlikely Best Picture winner that has been branded a safe, even boring choice. However, in years to come, with the passage of both distance and time, I believe it will come to be judged on its own significant merits, not simply by the films it beat. Its major crime is, of course, that it’s not Get Out. A huge number of people — though not enough in…

NAKIA TURNS ON T’CHALLA Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o) was firmly on Team T’Challa in Black Panther. But in the comics, she’s a frequent foe to the Wakandan King, as Malice. Could Nakia turn her back on her on-again-off-again love in the MCU? In the Christopher Priest run of comics, she teams up with M’Baku (played by Winston Duke in the film) and vengefully assassinates prominent Wakandans. WAKANDA DESCENDS INTO CIVIL WAR A soldier from Niganda (the fictional African country bordering Wakanda), Zenzi has the power to bring anyone’s truly ugliest thoughts to the surface. She uses that ability to incite a rebellion against Black Panther. There are plenty of Wakandans with mixed feelings about their newly exposed position in the world — could Zenzi take advantage here? The fact that she…

IF YOU KNOW one thing about Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane, it is that it was shot entirely on an iPhone. A big- name American auteur making a movie on a mobile could be conceived as little more than a publicity gimmick, a ruse to build noise around a film where the biggest name is the Queen off Netflix and the subject matter is an uncommercial cocktail of mental health and paranoia. Yet the way Soderbergh has utilised his ‘cell’ is fascinating, potentially paving a new way for filmmakers to work. If they remember to charge the damn thing. Of course, iPhone-shot cinema is nothing new. As far back as 2011, South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook made Paranmanjang, a 30-minute short about a fisherman who finds a dead body in the water…

SO THERE’S THIS billionaire genius playboy philanthropist, Tony, and he builds a metal suit to keep himself alive and he likes wearing it so fights crime and becomes a MAN OF IRON. Meanwhile, this bloke Nick notices that superheroes are popping up all over the place — a HUNK WITH A HAMMER, a GREEN DUDE with anger issues, and a super-soldier who’s the best example of humanity and so, naturally, is called STEVE — and decides to bring them all together into a supergroup called the Avengers. Like THE TRAVELLING WILBURYS, but with better hair. So then they get attacked by aliens from outer space, but they prevail just in the nick of time. Then, a couple of years later, they get attacked by a BAD ROBOT that wants to…

People ask me if I always wanted to be a director. And the truth is, no. When I first started out, I felt so lucky to be able to make a living as an actor it didn’t even cross my mind... and I didn’t want to jinx it. I was never one of those actors that said, “Well, when this acting thing is over… I’ll just direct.” I had way too much respect for the directors I had worked with to view the transition as some kind of foregone conclusion. My first directing gig actually came about by total happenstance. Before I got The Office I had adapted this book by David Foster Wallace that had meant a great deal to me called Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. I remember…

This being Wes Anderson, of course, it’s actually a pile of neatly stacked, meticulously crafted, perfectly symmetrical rubbish. Welcome to Trash Island. Population: dogs. Having dipped into shark-infested waters (The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou), Indian long-distance trains (The Darjeeling Limited) and the post-War European service industry (The Grand Budapest Hotel), near-future Japan provides the latest quasi-fantasy setting for Isle Of Dogs, the ninth film from the Texan filmmaker. In the fictional city of Megasaki, 20 years from now, dogs have become effectively outlawed, reduced to second-class pet-izens by a fearsome, cat-loving mayor and his cackling cronies. In the midst of anti-dog hysteria, all canines are ejected from the mainland, and forced to live on Trash Island, a miserable “junktopia” where once proud domesticated alpha-pups live a feral life. Deploying…

00:03:11 ELIO ELIO, WHO’S THIS? Luca Guadagnino’s gorgeous, affecting love story starts very simply, with Elio (Timothée Chalamet) spying on Oliver’s (Armie Hammer) arrival from his bedroom. “Sometimes you see films in which the point of view is not rigorous,” says Guadagnino. “But we are seeing the arrival of this usurper, as Elio calls him, from the perspective of Oliver. It’s a reflection on the dynamic of the scene.” 00:14:33 SHOULDERING RESPONSIBILITY At first, Elio and Oliver seem to dislike each other. However, early on, Oliver touches Elio, fleetingly, on his bare shoulder. “You don’t want to overplay your hand,” says Guadagnino. “That scene’s a testament to the greatness of Armie Hammer as a performer, and his casualness in doing something that is a trespass, but in a way that…

MOST DIRECTORS, EVEN working at a fair old lick, will struggle to make 20 films in a career spanning three decades. Takashi Miike, the Japanese master of mayhem, has just polished off his 100th with the excellent Blade Of The Immortal, and he’s still in the mood for more. We asked him to select milestones from a career that has taken in everything from yakuza movies to musicals. RAINY DOG (1997) Movie #25. An ex-yakuza stranded in Taipei is working for a local crime boss when an old flame appears, bringing with her his mute son. “It’s a film that I made in Taiwan. All I had was money. Cash. It was just me and the cast, and I went off to Taiwan to make it. Until then, I knew…

THERE WERE ONLY a few lines in Alex Garland’s script. As his visceral reimagining of the zombie formula begins, former bike courier Jim (Cillian Murphy) awakens from a coma to find London abandoned and drifts through the deserted streets in his hospital scrubs, dazed and confused, forlornly calling out. Danny Boyle knew it was a “tip of the hat” to dystopian visionaries such as J.G. Ballard, and Boris Sagal’s last-man-standing thriller The Omega Man. Foremost, the vacated capital was a nod to John Wyndham’s The Day Of The Triffids (specifically, the seminal 1981 TV adaptation). “We were not stealing,” laughs the director, “but nothing can stand on its own anymore.” Plus, there was method in their mimicry: it set a striking, reality-inflected mood. When it came to officially clearing London…

Let’s start with the most pressing question: how did you settle on Big Mountain’s 1994 earworm hit Baby, I Love Your Way for the film’s classic dance-fighting scene? [Laughs] Y’know it’s funny, we shot that scene to another song, and as we were trying to figure out that sequence I had a moment where I thought, “Y’know, we can come up with something funnier for this.” My fantastic music supervisors sent over a handful of songs and that was in there. We put it up against that scene and realised it was a lot of fun. What was the original song that you used? It was Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game. It was a much slower, sexier version of that scene and I thought we could do…

LIAM NEESON: “I saw this as a boy, and thought it was terrific. What springs into my mind is an actor from Glengormley, a Belfast boy, William Millar, who was known as Stephen Boyd. His death scene in Ben-Hur still gives me the chills. I can feel all the pain that Stephen portrayed, and love this agonised, croaky voice that he got after being churned up by his chariot. It’s one of the great death scenes.” INT. ROMAN MEDICAL ROOM — DAY Messala (Stephen Boyd), Judah Ben-Hur’s childhood friend-turned-arch rival, has been mortally wounded in a chariot race against Judah. A doctor (John Le Mesurier) tends to Messala’s wounds. But it looks hopeless. DOCTOR: We cannot wait, tribune. MESSALA: He will come. He coughs and…