Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2018 i Empire Australasia

DARK. BROODING. GRITTY . All words you’d normally associate with DC Extended Universe films (Man Of Steel, Batman v Superman, Suicide Squad), all set to bounce off Shazam! like bullets pinging off its hero. The first trailer for David F. Sandberg’s movie, unveiled at San Diego Comic-Con in July, showed off a much breezier side to the superhero stable, with its magic-channelling hero charging people’s phones using his powers, striding out of a grocery shop with armfuls of snacks, and doing the floss dance. Try to picture Batfleck doing any of that. While he exists in the same world as Batman, Wonder Woman and co, Shazam is unlike any other DC character. Behind the hero moniker he’s really Philadelphia-based foster kid Billy Batson (Asher Angel), who by…

IN THE OPENING seconds of Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone, Dumbledore motions his Deluminator at the street-lit suburbs of Surrey, drawing the light from each lamp one by one. It’s the very first use of magic in J.K. Rowling’s Wizarding World — and just one of several classic Potter moments recalled in the new Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes Of Grindelwald trailer, which debuted at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con. Where the first Fantastic Beasts was concerned with establishing the new saga’s 1920s New York setting, The Crimes Of Grindelwald seems to be rooting itself back into Rowling’s established mythology. The latest trailer is packed with creatures and artefacts ripped straight from Potter, from the return of Dumbledore’s Deluminator (also used by Ron Weasley when Potter and pals go Horcrux…

IT’S A WAR MOVIE Overlord borrows its title from Operation Overlord, the codename for the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944. Director Julius Avery explains that it’s “quite literally the jumping-off point”, as the film opens on a team of American paratroopers leaping from a burning plane on D-Day. Nazis are handy bad guys — “There’s nothing better than watching Nazis get blown up,” Avery notes — but once our heroes land, the film veers sharply into a fictional alternate history. IT’S AN ACTION MOVIE “I love intense, physical action,” says Avery, and as the AC/DC-soundtracked trailer hints, the emphasis here is on riotous B-movie fun. “I really wanted to put the audience inside the action and feel like they’re riding shotgun with the soldiers.” The film’s opening set-piece takes…

AS ONE OF the four Movie Chrises, Chris Pine is one of the most bankable names in Hollywood. So it’s somewhat incongruous to see him in a scraggly beard near Edinburgh, just off the M9. This is Outlaw King, a historical film shot in a style that Scottish director David Mackenzie dubs “epic realism”— and as Empire watches Pine receive his crown during a coronation scene at Linlithgow Palace, it all seems remarkably real. Here’s how he pulled off an unlikely epic. PICK THE RIGHT STAR Outlaw King sees Mackenzie continuing the acclaimed partnership he established with Chris Pine on Hell Or High Water. “We set about trying to do this in the same freewheeling spirit.” Pine, he believes, “has a heroic look to him but there’s also vulnerability.” And…

1 __ THE TIMELINE For the uninitiated, Resistance follows Kazuda Xiono, a rookie pilot recruited by the Resistance who is assigned a top-secret mission to spy on the mounting forces of the First Order. It’s set between Return Of The Jedi and The Force Awakens — though, in a bit of espionage of his own, Star Wars spy Jose Ruiz mined meta-data on StarWars.com and discovered a description that says the story is set six months before The Force Awakens. 2 __ THE OLD HANDS Given the timeline, it is perhaps no surprise that Kaz’s mentor here is ace pilot Poe Dameron, voiced by Oscar Isaac. (Thankfully, the animation maintains Isaac’s good hair.) Obviously where there is Poe, there is BB-8, who shares a moment in the trailer with Kaz…

Have you ever knowingly broken the law? I did break into a house with a friend once when we were 14 or 15. We knew nobody was living there and there was no furniture inside. We noticed there was a window cracked open, so we went back under cover of darkness and broke in and wandered around and felt really badass. What one thing do you do better than anyone else you know? I kind of gave up the goods on my hidden talent with the ‘Cups’ thing. I am out of hidden talents now, because I have revealed all of my talents. What is the worst thing you’ve ever put in your mouth? Once when I was in Tokyo, I went to the fish market in the morning. I…

★★★★★ OUT 11 OCTOBER RATED TBC / 141 MINS DIRECTOR Damien Chazelle CAST Ryan Gosling, Claire Foy, Jason Clarke, Corey Stoll, Kyle Chandler, Christopher Abbott PLOT The true story of Neil Armstrong, a quiet engineer who rose through the ranks of NASA’s 1960s space programme to become the first man on the Moon — in a journey that includes professional and personal tragedies. FIRST MAN IS not a million light years from Whiplash and La La Land, Damien Chazelle’s first two films. Gone are the drum solos and dance numbers, but it’s another study of obsession, and the compromises that inevitably brings. What’s notable is the upsurge in his cinematic ambition. A thunderous opening sequence sees Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling), as a young test pilot in 1962, catapulting…

★★★★★ OUT 18 OCTOBER RATED TBC / 135 MINS DIRECTOR Bradley Cooper CAST Lady Gaga, Bradley Cooper, Sam Elliott, Dave Chappelle, Andrew Dice Clay PLOT Bradley Cooper is Jackson Maine, a spiralling country star who meets and falls in love with waitress/wannabe singer Ally (Lady Gaga). As the two fall in love, her star — with his help — is on the ascendant, while his quietly sinks. Can their love save him? Or will he, and they, fall under the weight of his emotional pain and addiction? DEVELOPMENT HELL IS littered with victims and, for a time, it looked as though A Star Is Born might join the pile of broken bodies, with several huge-name directors, actors and singers linked with the project over the last decade. This wasn’t a…

★★★ OUT NOW CERT PG / 99 MINS DIRECTOR Eli Roth CAST Jack Black, Cate Blanchett, Owen Vaccaro, Kyle MacLachlan PLOT In 1955, young orphan Lewis (Owen Vaccaro) arrives in the town of New Zebedee, Michigan, where he’s entering into the care of his uncle Jonathan (Jack Black). Not that it exactly counts as ‘care’: Jonathan is a warlock who owns an enchanted house which contains a hidden clock that’s counting down to doomsday. And it’s up to him, Lewis and their witchy neighbour Florence (Cate Blanchett) to save the world. AFTER A DIRECTORIAL career of serving up torture porn and queasy thrillers, Eli Roth switches to something palatable for the pre-teen crowd, complete with magic, monsters and macabre puppets. Which, combined with the rotund presence of Jack Black and…

★★★ OUT NOW / RATED MA15+ 107 MINS DIRECTOR Shane Black CAST Boyd Holbrook, Trevante Rhodes, Jacob Tremblay, Olivia Munn PLOT Following the events of Predator and Predator 2, humanity is still being hunted, but a secret government organisation is now wise to the dread-headed aliens’ spine-collecting visits. After capturing one of the creatures, they’re shocked to discover it has human DNA — and is being hunted by another, bigger, nastier Predator. THERE IS A pleasing circularity to the fact the first person we saw killed by Jim and John Thomas’ Predator in 1987 has returned 31 years later to write and direct his own instalment of this seemingly unkillable series. Shane Black (formerly the unfortunate Hawkins) has made no secret of the fact that he took the gig writing…

You know what?” says Jamie Lee Curtis, “I scare easily. It’s not my gig. I don’t like it. But it’s the truth.” Given this, there’s glorious irony in the fact that Curtis, who began her career as the scream queen in John Carpenter’s original Halloween, The Fog, and a couple of inferior slashers, keeps coming back to this genre. And, in particular, this series. She last played Michael Myers’ nemesis, Laurie Strode, in 2002’s Halloween: Resurrection, where she was unceremoniously bumped off. But as her presence in David Gordon Green’s Halloween shows, you can’t keep a good survivor down... You must have thought Laurie was dead and buried. [Laughs] I don’t think anyone’s ever dead and buried in a Halloween movie. I certainly didn’t entertain, ever, that I would revisit…

As Ryan Gosling tells it, his previous feature film collaboration with director Damien Chazelle, La La Land, was the result of “a bit of a bait-and-switch.” What the pair had initially met up to discuss working on back in 2014 after the release of Chazelle’s celebrated drummer drama Whiplash was a biopic about American astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first person, for those who’ve been living in a nuclear bunker for the last five decades, to walk on the Moon in 1969. “There was no script, just a book [First Man: The Life Of Neil A. Armstrong by James R. Hansen],” says Gosling. “And we met to talk about it as it was something he was considering doing, but he had to do this musical thing first.” That “musical thing”, of…

Inside the anonymous grey building, the air is cooler, thinner, though cut through with quiet urgency and expectation. Goddard himself, despite being in what he describes as “the fine-tuning stage” of the edit of his second directorial outing, Bad Times At The El Royale, is smiling, maybe even surprisingly calm. He has just a handful of weeks to lock the film and deliver it to the studio; a deadline he also describes as the moment “they pry it out of my hands”. It’s barely 9am and already nigh-on 100 degrees, the July day that Empire meets Drew Goddard in his office in Los Angeles. Everything about Bad Times At The El Royale has been fast and in many respects, smooth. It became an official, formed idea, an actual thing, in…

CREED II _ 29 NOV In the movie that could have been called Drago, the returning Creed Jr (Michael B. Jordan) is set to face the offspring of his father’s one-time Soviet monster Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren). It’s a confident move, to follow the grounded Creed with a story that spins out the Rocky series’ most OTT entry — and without Ryan Coogler directing, either (Steven Caple, Jr. takes over). But Coogler is executive producing and the script’s co-written by Sylvester Stallone and Luke Cage showrunner Cheo Hodari Coker, so we predict plenty of brains with its brawn. HUNTER KILLER _ 25 OCT “If we don’t pull this off, it’s gonna be World War III.” The trailer for post-Cold War military thriller Hunter Killer couldn’t make its high stakes any…

You’ll likely have heard the outline: centuries from now, with Earth long-since devastated by apocalypse, cities have taken to wheels to hunt down limited resources. This, though, is merely backdrop to the forthcoming techno-fantasy directed by Christian Rivers and produced by world-builder extraordinaire Peter Jackson, based upon Philip Reeve’s series of dystopian-hued novels. As Jackson says, for best results an epic has to be “anchored in humanity”. Their saga promises a tale of family intrigue and revenge worthy of Dickens, if Dickens’ sprawling London was fully mobile and currently gouging its way across the dried-up bed of the North Sea. THADDEUS VALENTINE _ HUGO WEAVING Erstwhile Elf-lord Weaving returns to the Jackson fold as the suave but deceitful conspirator at the dark heart of the story. “Valentine is the chief…

MUCH NOISE HAS been made about the fact The Old Man And The Gun, a beguiling crime comedy about the ‘Over-The-Hill Gang’, pensioners who rob banks politely, will be Robert Redford’s final film. Quite right, too. But one element shouldn’t be ignored: it is also director David Lowery’s latest effort. A filmmaker who has straddled both crowdpleasing Disney flicks (Pete’s Dragon) and weird arthouse experiments (A Ghost Story), Lowery has seized the opportunity to cut loose. “The rule on this movie was to just have fun,” he says with a smile. “I’ve made lots of movies where everyone’s coming to work ready to do some serious drama and get the waterworks going, but on this movie we just wanted to smile every day. It was one of the most effortless…

GOOSEBUMPS 2: HAUNTED HALLOWEEN _ 25 OCT Who you gonna call for a supernatural-themed kids’ movie? Jack Black, that’s who. This sequel to 2015 hit Goosebumps comes hot on the heels of last month’s The House With The Clock In Its Walls, proving Black is the schlubbier version of Dwayne Johnson (i.e. in every second movie released). Here he reprises his role of Goosebumps author R.L. Stine, battling ventriloquist dummy Slappy who is hellbent on creating the Halloween Apocalypse. Eat your heart out, Michael Myers. A STAR IS BORN _ 18 OCT At one point, this third remake of the 1937 Hollywood romance was going to be directed by Clint Eastwood and star Beyoncé. But, after years in development hell, it’s emerged as the directorial debut of Clint’s American Sniper…

ASK DIRECTOR Stephen McCallum if the process of directing his debut feature film 1% was a relatively breezy affair, and you’ll get a swift response: “No, it was really fucking hard!” the AFTRS graduate laughs. “The great thing though is that the cast and crew really committed and jumped in guns blazing.” And in 1% — a reference to a member of an outlaw motorcycle club — guns indeed blaze. Telling the tale of a power struggle between placeholder president of the Copperheads motorcycle gang Paddo (Ryan Corr) and just-got-outta-jail gang head Knuck (Matt Nable, who also wrote the screenplay), the film features plenty of visceral action — and a murderer’s row of Aussie acting talent. “Matt brings with him a lot of respect and interest from other actors, he…

For cast and crew, going into the final season of a long-running show will always be an emotionally fraught experience. Actors are saying goodbye to characters they’ve lived with for years, and the pressure is sky-high to deliver a satisfying final chapter. But as production unfolded on the sixth and final season of Netflix’s flagship show, House Of Cards, emotions were strained for darker reasons. On 30 October 2017, production was halted, about two weeks after it had begun, when Anthony Rapp publicly accused Kevin Spacey, the show’s lead, of making unwanted sexual advances towards him in 1986, when Rapp was 14. The following day, Netflix announced that production on Season 6 would be suspended “until further notice”. On 3 November a statement came: “Netflix will not be involved with…

IT WAS TIME. Idris Elba chose Yardie as his directorial debut, he tells me, because the story’s setting and era formed who he is today. Elba grew up in east London’s Hackney, then later in Canning Town, where he immersed himself in local sound systems, a culture that had arrived in the UK from Jamaica in the 1970s. When he read Victor Headley’s novel Yardie — about D, a Jamaican boy who witnesses his brother’s murder in Kingston then comes to London, seeking revenge while setting up a drug deal — art and life merged. Set in Hackney, the film is alive with the 1980s sights and sounds that hypnotised a teenage Elba. On the set last year, I watched him direct his young actors with calm confidence, the elder…

00:12:51 A FRIDGE TOO FAR __ Those expecting lotsa lols from Deadpool 2 are jolted early on by the shocking murder of Deadpool’s girlfriend, Vanessa (Morena Baccarin). It led to a backlash, with the writers (including Ryan Reynolds) accused of ‘fridging’ Vanessa, a term for killing a female character to motivate a male hero. “It wasn’t something we were aware of,” admits co-writer/ producer Rhett Reese. “We’re all learning.” 00:14:48 THE NAME’S POOL… DEADPOOL __ Vanessa’s death segues straight into a fun, very Bondian title sequence, complete with plenty of Reynolds cavorting, and Celine Dion belting out ‘Ashes’. “We fell in love with that song,” says Wernick. “We built the credits sequence around that song. It was tough — the credits sequence in the first movie was so beloved. How…

THERE ARE NO prizes for guessing that Creed II is the sequel to Creed. The clue’s in the name. But, as the eighth film in the Rocky saga, it also has the honour of being a sequel to six other movies. And one in particular: Rocky IV. In case you’ve forgotten the cheesiest of all Rocky movies, that’s the one where Sly Stallone runs up a mountain; the one where James Brown sang ‘Living In America’; the one with the robot butler. It’s also, crucially, the one where the beloved Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) met his end at the hammer hands of giant Russian punch-bastard, Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren). Drago is the reason why Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan) never got to meet, let alone know, his father. And if…

AFTER SIX DECADES, two Oscars and nearly 100 credits to his name, Robert Redford is retiring from acting. The Old Man & The Gun, in which Redford plays Forrest Tucker, a real-life criminal who would rob banks with disarming politeness and a sharp suit, will reportedly be his final role. “He mentioned that right before we started production,” says the film’s director, David Lowery, offering a slightly nervous laugh. “All of a sudden, the weight of that statement landed on my shoulders! We tried not to be too precious about what we were doing [but] I was certainly thinking, ‘If this is his last movie, I wanna make sure it’s a movie he’s proud of.’ I hope everyone loves it, but more than that, I hope it’s a movie that…

THERE’S NO SECRET to coaxing an outstanding performance out of an actor — that’s according to first-time director Paul Dano, at least. Not when you’re working with Carey Mulligan. “When you’ve got an actor that good,” he says, “my job is just to create an environment for them to do their best work.” Based on a 2006 novel by Richard Ford, Wildlife sees Mulligan play Jeanette, a 1960s housewife and mother in a boring Montana town. Her husband, Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal), a man mad at the world for his own shortcomings, leaves his family indefinitely to work as a firefighter while her teenage son, Joe (Ed Oxenbould), watches with horror as his parents’ marriage splinters. It’s a remarkably assured debut from Dano, who has had about as good a film…

SHOT BETWEEN 1970 and 1976, The Other Side Of The Wind would have been Orson Welles’ final film as a director. But he didn’t finish it. Finally, after various attempts, producers Frank Marshall and Filip Jan Rymsza have completed it. These are the five biggest challenges they faced. FINDING FUNDING Frank Marshall was part of the original crew, and recalls how Welles struggled to get funding. “We’d shoot in little spurts, in between the movies I was making with Peter [Bogdanovich]. Finally, in ’74, Orson called to say, ‘I’ve got money. We can finish it.’” It took a further two years. RECASTING NIGHTMARES On the final night of filming, Welles found his second lead, Rich Little, had left the Arizona set for home. Unable to shoot, Marshall shut production down.…

CONSIDERING MOST FILMS and TV series cost a mint to produce, the golden question invariably must be this: can you actually make a project flop-proof? Determined to prove it possible is Australian “Audience Producer” Peter Drinkwater, the CEO of audience-driven studio Cowlick Entertainment and its off-shoot Screen Audience Research Australia (SARA), a research body that aims to bring together art and science by testing audiences at the development stage before the megabucks start getting spent. “The net is bringing creatives and their audience closer together and you can’t be scared to involve them in co-creating,” Drinkwater says. “That approach plus research helps mitigate risk, and investors love the fact you’re so close to the audience all the way through, shaping it together.” Putting their money where their mouth is, Cowlick’s…

★★★★ OUT NOW / RATED TBC 117 MINS DIRECTOR Bart Layton CAST Barry Keoghan, Evan Peters, Jared Abrahamson, Blake Jenner PLOT Kentucky 2004. Following a tour of his school’s rare book collection, Spencer (Keoghan) and pal Warren (Peters) hatch a plot to steal the most valuable items. With two new recruits (Abrahamson, Jenner), can they realise their audacious plan? AT THE BEGINNING of Bart Layton’s American Animals we are cheekily told, “This is not based on a true story”, before the words “not based on” are erased from the screen. Like Layton’s calling card, The Imposter, American Animals has a ball with the tension between truth and fiction. Grabbing hold of a true story about four college kids’ plot to steal rare books — chiefly John James Audubon’s Birds Of…

★★★★ OUT 27 0CTOBER RATED M / 98 MINS DIRECTORS Jeremy Dyson, Andy Nyman CAST Alex Lawther, Martin Freeman, Andy Nyman, Paul Whitehouse, Jill Halfpenny PLOT Professor Philip Goodman (Nyman) investigates three unsolved cases of men falling victim to supernatural shenanigans. Dispatched around England, the pragmatic Goodman attempts to unravel their stories — but something scarier starts to take hold. GHOST STORIES SETS out its stall early, and what a bizarre stall it is. At its start, a supposed psychic is on stage acting as a vessel for a dead, leukaemia-stricken child to speak through him: “My blood hurts, Mummy,” the conman wails as the grieving mother breaks down. A couple of minutes later, a few decades earlier, a possessed old woman spits some bile. “She fingered herself…

★★★★ OUT NOW CERT M / 90 MINS DIRECTOR Corey Pearson CAST Jessica Falkholt, Eamon Farren, Jerome Meyer, Jacqueline McKenzie PLOT Harmony (Falkholt) has the ability to take away people’s fear by absorbing it, at great cost to her health. She lives a solitary existence until she meets Mason (Meyer), who provides a strange balance as the world begins to seethe with negativity and fear, personified in villain Jimmy (Farren). WHAT WAS SLATED to be actress Jessica Falkholt’s big break has tragically become her final film, following a horror car accident that claimed her life as well as the lives of her sister and parents on Boxing Day in 2017. It is then a rather bittersweet experience watching her powerful performance as Harmony, a reluctant superhero type who can take…

★★★ OUT 23 OCTOBER RATED TBC / 102 MINS DIRECTOR Idris Elba CAST Aml Ameen, Sheldon Shepherd, Stephen Graham, Shantol Jackson PLOT It’s 1983, and young Jamaican gangster D (Ameen) has been sent to London to smuggle cocaine. But, after angering local kingpin Rico (Graham), D strikes out on his own — and stumbles across a chance to avenge the murder that has haunted him for a decade. THERE HAS BEEN the sense, in recent years, of a rapid up-tick in Idris Elba’s involvement behind the camera. We’ve already had TV’s breezily autobiographical comedy drama In The Long Run; he is co-creator and star of upcoming Netflix series Turn Up Charlie; and here, perhaps most intriguingly, is his proper feature debut as a director. If the proposed endgame for Elba…

★★★ AMAZON PRIME VIDEO OUT NOW EPS VIEWED 4 OF 8 CREATED BY Carlton Cuse, Graham Roland CAST John Krasinski, Wendell Pierce, Abbie Cornish, Ali Suliman, Dina Shihabi PLOT While tracking some shady monetary transactions, CIA agent Jack Ryan (Krasinski) uncovers evidence of a previously unknown terrorist, who he believes could be the next Bin Laden. Despite his misgivings about being in the field, he’s brought in to take him down. WHAT IS IT about Jack Ryan? This series marks the fifth new actor to play Tom Clancy’s CIA agent which, while hardly on a par with, say, Hamlet in the multiple interpretations stakes, is still pretty good going. Certainly, he’s been rebooted with enough regularity to suggest Hollywood (and now TV) execs believe he has the potential to hit…

If you had to guess the identity of the director tasked with resurrecting the Halloween franchise, chances are you’d work through most of Hollywood before alighting on David Gordon Green. He’s the indie wunderkind who these days oscillates between daft comedies and impactful dramas. Horror has been conspicuous by its absence. But that’s without reckoning on the number Michael Myers did on Green as a teenager. “I was a very sensitive kid, and it got under my skin,” he admits of John Carpenter’s Halloween. “The relentlessness of it horrified me.” So, when Blumhouse invited pitches for a new instalment, Green and his long-time collaborator Danny McBride leapt to the head of the queue with a take that would wipe out all previous sequels and re-establish Myers as the daddy of…

I WAS FIRST approached by producers of the project back in 2014 right after I had just come back from Sundance where I premiered Whiplash. At the time I wasn’t really interested in doing a biopic. They gave me this book by James Hansen called First Man and I sat with it for a little bit and I started becoming fascinated specifically with the mission to the Moon. Now we’re coming up to 50 years from the event and the questions it brings up is, “What’s the cost and the worth of a goal like that? What toll does it take?” It’s one of these things that I think you either take for granted or you try to grapple with it and it becomes unfathomable because it’s just too big…

1. A PERFECT GETAWAY _ 2009 He’s on a tropical island. Bye bye, shirt. 2. CA$H _ 2010 Ordinary guy Sam finds stolen money and hops into bed. 3. THOR _ 2011 Thor changes clothes. 4. SNOW WHITE & THE HUNTSMAN _ 2012 The Huntsman’s pec is healed. With leaves. 5. RUSH _ 2013 Two sex-scene montages, one with a shot of a parakeet. 6. THOR: THE DARK WORLD _ 2013 Thor has a long, hard wash, before an afternoon brood. 7. BLACKHAT _ 2015 Hacker Hathaway strips and uses magazines as DIY body armour. 8. AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON _ 2015 Thor enters the Water Of Sights. Nobody’s sure exactly why. 9. VACATION _ 2015 Guileless hunk Stone rocks a pair of tight pants, with a prominent bulge. 10.…

None of us would have touched a remake in a million years,” promises Rob Marshall, director of upcoming sequel Mary Poppins Returns. “The original film means a lot to all of us.” But when he set out to recruit his cast for a sequel, proposing an original story that aims to capture the tone of the 1964 original, Marshall found stars eager to help. Emily Blunt plays Poppins, Meryl Streep signed on as her cousin Topsy, and Broadway hero Lin-Manuel Miranda takes his first major big-screen role as lamplighter Jack. Ben Whishaw and Emily Mortimer are the grown Michael and Jane Banks, and Colin Firth plays Michael’s boss Mr Wilkins. Even Disney legends Angela Lansbury and Dick Van Dyke, both 91 at the time of shooting, turned out, with Van…

Agent Burns works for Sector 7, the shadowy organisation we’ve seen before in Transformers films. Is he friend or foe to Bumblebee? You’re going to find out very quickly that this is a secretive interview! The folks who have made the movie have let me know they’d like to keep things intriguing, so I’ll let people continue to debate that. You’ve not done a big blockbuster movie before. Why this one? I try to not only work with good people, but also projects I’m comfortable with, and this was no exception. Travis [Knight] was a wonderful director. And I truly love the story of this movie. This is a new take on the Transformers series; a much more intimate look at the Bumblebee origin story. Not…

“MY BIG THING in my career is, I just want to do something different,” says Viola Davis. “Something that wakes people up.” Starring in Widows, a heist movie from 12 Years A Slave director Steve McQueen, certainly qualifies. Davis plays Veronica, the wife of a thief (Liam Neeson). But when he and his crew are killed, she and the other widows must continue their husband’s planned job to get the money to survive. “The men put us in the hole, and now it’s up to us to dig ourselves out — not just as individuals but by collaborating.” With Veronica is a “motley crew” played by Michelle Rodriguez (Linda), Elizabeth Debicki (Alice) and Broadway star Cynthia Erivo (Belle). After being denied help by a family of politicians, the unlikely group…

WHEN DIRECTOR MIKE Leigh was growing up in suburban Salford, he had no idea he lived a mile or so away from the site of a defining moment in British democracy. Save for “about four brief seconds of O-level history in 1959”, Leigh knew nothing about the Peterloo massacre of 1819, which saw up to 80,000 peaceful reformist protestors attacked by cavalry, leaving at least 15 dead and around 700 injured. Peterloo, the first film to be made about the event, aims to shine a light on a forgotten chapter on the road to democratic reform. It’s an ambitious undertaking for a director known for kitchen-sink realism, with his biggest budget to date. But Leigh shrugs off the jump in scale. “Whether it’s a film about three people arguing with…

IN 1980s DETROIT, Ricky Wershe Jr, so the legend goes, was an FBI informant and drug kingpin at 15, and imprisoned by 17. In fact, the truth is less grand, and director Yann Demange (’71) found the initial draft of White Boy Rick that landed on his desk “a bit sensationalised, too preoccupied with being a Wolf Of Wall Street rise and fall of a teenage gangster”. Instead, Demange homed in on the relationship between Wershe and his father. Demange saw an opportunity to tell “a story about a family trying to survive abject poverty.” He was intent on casting a real kid with an affinity for Wershe’s roots, finding Baltimore’s Richie Merritt, who had “never even done a fucking drama class before”. For balance, he went A-list with the…

EMINENTLY QUOTABLE AND endlessly rewatchable, Die Hard remains the gold standard for big-screen action. Adapted from a Roderick Thorp novel by first-time screenwriter Jeb Stuart and fizzed up by Steven E. de Souza’s quippy dialogue, it was meticulously directed by set-piece maestro John McTiernan. Combined with the movie’s secret weapon — TV star Bruce Willis — these ingredients added up to create an action film like no other. For the movie’s 30th birthday, we asked McTiernan, de Souza and Stuart to talk us through Die Hard scene by scene. Yippee-ki-yay, motherfuckers. 0:01:00 __ New York detective and reluctant flyer John McClane (Bruce Willis) touches down at LAX with some handy jet-lag advice from a fellow passenger: “Walk around on the rug barefoot…

HAILED BY STEPHEN King in 1981 as “the most ferociously original horror film of the year”, The Evil Dead easily earned its reputation as a blood-thirsty video nasty with a Grand Guignol display of demonic possession and bodily dismemberment. Made on a shoe-string budget by a group of young Michigan filmmakers including director Sam Raimi, producer Robert Tapert and star Bruce Campbell, the relentless ultra-violence delighted grindhouses and video store visitors the world over, but it would be six years before the team created one of the finest horror sequels of all time. The 1987 sequel, built on the director’s love of The Three Stooges, went for slapstick gags rather than gag reflexes. Not that the film skimps on the axe-wielding carnage, it’s just the resultant arterial sprays are now…

MIKE NEWELL, LIKE his contemporary Stephen Frears, is a hard director to pin down. He’s as comfortable making romantic comedies or lavish blockbusters as he is independent dramas, such as his latest, The Guernsey Literary And Potato Peel Pie Society. Is there a connective tissue? “If you boiled everything down, everything I’ve made is about good characters in bad fixes,” he says. We asked him to talk us through five of the best. Well, four winners and one near-career funeral. 1. FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL (1994) The Richard Curtis-written comedy that made Hugh Grant a star and launched a thousand imitators. “I was deeply negative about the title. I wanted them to change it. They said, ‘You’re mad, why?’ I said, ‘Audiences will count. If halfway through they’ve only…

Well, this vacuous “celebration”, Fathers Day, rolls around again. It’s a cash spend. It’s not remotely film related. Seems like utter tedium. I mean, young kids, it’s more for them I believe. But there is one thing I look forward to which my wife just reminded me of – it’s another year of my Empire subscription! It’s a running thing now since 2009. My gift each year is another year of movies, movies, movies! Love it. Thanks for being the best movie mag there is! (Oh, I’m yet to put up my Thanos and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom Raptor collector cover...) FABIAN KAHWATI, BALWYN NTH, VIC Happy almost-a-decade of collecting Empire, Fabian. Thanks for sticking with us through the good times and the... well, they’re all good times really. Glad…

FOUR YEARS. THAT’S how long it’s been since The Raid 2 thundered onto screens. After spending two years on an untitled, big-budget action epic that flamed out in development hell, director Gareth Evans is finally back. Apostle, his first English-language film, is set in 1904, but don’t expect a dainty Edwardian period drama. It stars Dan Stevens as a fallen preacher who, after receiving a cryptic ransom note, travels to an island to rescue his sister from Michael Sheen’s sinister cult. “He doesn’t know who the fuck has her,” says Evans. “Or the trap he’s walking into.” There’s certainly nothing dainty about the set that Empire witnesses. The first thing we clock are blood-spattered shirts drying on a clothesline: wardrobe casualties from the previous day’s shoot. Today’s sequence, shot on…

★★★★ OUT 25 OCTOBER RATED TBC / 109 MINS DIRECTOR David Gordon Green CAST Jamie Lee Curtis, Judy Greer, Andi Matichak, James Jude Courtney PLOT Forty years after his killing spree on Halloween night 1978, Michael Myers’ (James Jude Courtney) breaks free from a mental institution to hunt down survivor Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), now a weapons-savvy PTSD sufferer who has been preparing for his inevitable return... THERE’S A GOOD reason why John Carpenter’s taut 1978 horror Halloween is widely regarded as a genre classic that inspired a legion of imitators and a slew of sequels: he understood that there’s nothing more primal and terrifying than a knife-wielding “force of nature” killer remorselessly slaying any innocent victim unlucky enough to cross his path. Everything else is window dressing. Pleasingly…

★★★ OUT NOW RATED PG / 96 MINS DIRECTOR Albert Hughes CAST Kodi Smit-McPhee, Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson, Marcin Kowalczyk PLOT Life was hard 20,000 years ago. Keda’s (Kodi Smit-McPhee) father is the leader of a European tribe and expects his son to follow in his warrior footsteps. Keda, who shies away from violence, is injured on a hunt and left for dead. On his treacherous journey home he makes a surprising friend: an equally injured wolf. THE FILMS OF the Hughes Brothers — Menace II Society, From Hell, The Book Of Eli — have always had violence running through them and an element of battling for survival. Albert’s first film without his brother Allen keeps both, but is softer, and more family-friendly. This is the not-at-all-true story of the beginning…

★★ OUT NOW RATED PG / 109 MINS DIRECTOR Bruce Beresford CAST Angourie Rice, Rachael Taylor, Julia Ormond, Alison McGirr, Ryan Corr, Susie Porter, Shane Jacobson, Noni Hazlehurst PLOT Sydney, 1959: The employees of a department store grapple with change in their lives – finding love, losing love, becoming an adult, adapting to life in a new country – over the course of a summer… and the summer sales. YOU GET THE curious sensation watching this ensemble piece that the characters with the most interesting stories get the least amount of screentime, and vice versa. The Ladies In Black are the staff at Goode’s, a Sydney department store, where the dress code is like the paint options of a Model T Ford: anything you like as long as it’s black.…

How did you get involved with the new Halloween ? Well they keep on making Halloween films because they make money so it wasn’t a surprise that another one was being lined up. Then Jason Blum challenged me… “Why don’t you stop sitting on the sidelines and throwing insults at the sequels and help make one?! You can help make a better movie.” I said, “Okay, I’ll do that!” So that’s how I got involved! Why do you think the original Halloween is still so loved by audiences? I think Halloween had style. The horrors on display are certainly pretty tame by today’s standards, but for its time, it was groundbreaking. It really shocked audiences. None of the previous sequels have been my…

Agonzo, big-budget collaboration between director Robert Rodriguez and writer-producer James Cameron, Alita: Battle Angel promises to deliver more cybernetically pumped-up action than a dozen Terminators. There will be hyperviolent battle royales between metal-limbed adversaries, not to mention ‘motorball’ sequences that threaten to make Speed Racer look like ‘Slow Racer’. But at the heart of the story is something much gentler: the relationship between cyborg Alita (Rosa Salazar) and cyberphysician Dr Ido (Christoph Waltz), the human who discovers her discarded remnants in a scrapyard at the start of the movie. “He’s a wounded person himself, who finds this core as he’s rummaging through the trash,” says Salazar. “And right away he has this connection to this young, angelic face due to traumatic events in his own life, having lost his daughter.…

Perhaps the biggest surprise about the new Coen brothers movie is that it turned out to be a movie. With their shock move to Netflix, it was taken as gospel that the unpredictable siblings’ next enterprise, a Western anthology diced into six discrete tales, was to be a television show. The IMDb still refers to it as Season 1. In fact, that was never the case. “Everybody got the wrong end of the stick,” laughs Tim Blake Nelson, who fills the boots of cowboy troubadour Buster Scruggs, misanthropic hero of the title story. Not that this was some cunning Fargo-esque ruse, he hastens to add. “Joel and Ethan simply chose not to dispel any of the misconstruing that was going on. This was always a movie.” 10 years ago, Joel…

Following the head-spinning experience of making 2013 astronaut epic Gravity, director Alfonso Cuarón felt the need to decompress. “I spent so much time in space,” he laughs, “I felt like I needed to be grounded.” The project that’s brought him back to terra firma couldn’t be more different. Roma is an autobiographical drama that Cuarón says is “90 per cent rooted in my own memory. In many ways it is unlike any other film I’ve ever done.” Named after Cuarón’s childhood neighbourhood, Roma chronicles a year in the life of a middle-class family in early ’70s Mexico City through the prism of nanny Cleo (newcomer Yalitza Aparicio). A love letter to the women who raised him, Cuarón has broadened the scope to take in the changing face of his homeland,…

Look at that big stone raven. Remind you of anything? If that side profile and those threateningly spread wings give you some pretty strong Nazi-heraldry vibes, then 10 points for historical-symbolism knowledge. And if you were hoping that a trip to the cinema this spring might mean a break from headlines about fascism and political demagogues, then we’re going to have to disappoint you. Bring your placards. Things are going to get fighty. David Yates describes The Crimes Of Grindelwald as a very different movie from Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them. “[It still has] some of its charm,” the director says, “but we’re exploring something deeper and darker and more intense.” Specifically, he means the rise of Gellert Grindelwald (Johnny Depp), who has graduated from secret baddie in…

If you were to list influences for Doctor Who, how long would it be before you got to Forrest Gump? Because as strange as it may seem, that’s the reference point of new executive producer Matt Strevens. “It’s a box of chocolates of a series,” he tells us. “There’s something different in every episode.” This new season, the 11th (or the 37th in old money), will have no two-parters, and the first episode will act as something of a reboot, in the same way Matt Smith’s first episode ‘The Eleventh Hour’ did in 2010. A “jumping-on point” Strevens calls it, but also “a restating of what the show is”. Or, particularly, what the show is under new showrunner Chris Chibnall (writer of Broadchurch), who has already bucked more than five…

IF THE ‘SUNG’ heroes of The Apartment are writer-director Billy Wilder, co-writer I.A.L. Diamond and a pitch-perfect cast led by Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine, the unsung hero is art director Alexandre Trauner (his name anglicised in the film’s credits to Alexander). The Hungarian’s genius for meticulous research and intricate detail is showcased in the stunning shot of Lemmon’s CC ‘Bud’ Baxter at his desk (no. 861) at Consolidated Life Insurance, going from a busy working office to staying late because he has leant his own apartment to his superiors for extra-marital hanky-panky in the hopes of promotion. The shot was inspired by a similar set in King Vidor’s silent classic The Crowd, another look at the de-humanising effect of modern working life and one of Wilder’s favourites. The set…

VINCE GILLIGAN: “My dad introduced me to this movie. The scene that tickles me the most is when Spencer Tracy karate-chops Ernest Borgnine in the throat and kicks him through the front door of the restaurant. He’s only got one arm — you’re just thinking, ‘Oh man, he’s gonna get his ass kicked.’ It’s probably a moment I was thinking of when I began conceiving Walter White for Breaking Bad .” INT. DINER — DAY Macreedy (Tracy) has come to Black Rock seeking a man named Komoko. In a diner, Macreedy is targeted by local thugs Reno Smith (Robert Ryan) and Coley Trimble (Borgnine), who don’t want him poking around. Trimble has intimidated Macreedy out of his diner stool, and is trying it on for size. TRIMBLE:…