Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2019 i Empire Australasia

THE MOST EXCITING films this winter are all glorious odes to pure, unadulterated action. Nothing encapsulates this more than the return of Rambo, still drawing blood after nearly 40 years, or the arrival of Hobbs & Shaw, a giddily ludicrous Fast & Furious spin-off . In fact, the genre has been reinvigorated by Mad Max: Fury Road, The Raid, John Wick, the aforementioned Fast & Furious movies and more. Plus, with two more Mission: Impossible sequels and John Wick: Chapter 4 on the horizon, the renaissance isn’t slowing. Yet these films continue to be underestimated and misunderstood, so let’s be clear: the action film is an art form unto itself. Action is sensory, immersive and something of a spectacle. It can be therapeutic and cathartic; the resurgence of the Mission:…

THE KING IS back, but you won’t find him in Wakandan finery. Chadwick Boseman’s first non-Marvel film role in two years sees him play a detective on the hunt for a pair of cop killers in 21 Bridges, a dark, gritty, grounded New York-set thriller. It’s the first post-Black Panther test of his star power — and the biggest flexing of his behind-the-scenes muscle; as well as starring, he’s also credited as a producer. But Boseman hasn’t left Marvel behind completely — the film is produced by the Russo brothers’ AGBO company. And with Black Panther 2 on the horizon, that Wakandan garb will be out before you can say, “Yibambe!” 21 BRIDGES IS IN CINEMAS FROM 24 OCTOBER…

IT’S THE FIRST ONE MADE BY A WOMAN All previous iterations of Charlie’s Angels have been male visions of a women’s world. The 1970s TV show was made by men; as were the two early 2000s movies directed by McG. Now it has a new director, co-producer, co-writer and co-star in Elizabeth Banks, marking her second time behind the camera (after 2015’s Pitch Perfect 2). Banks wanted to make a movie that had fun, but still took the private detective trio seriously. “I want to tell a story about women at work,” she says. “I don’t care about their boyfriends, the mum they don’t call, the cat they don’t feed. These women are here to kick ass and do a great job.” IT’S REPRESENTING A WIDER WORLD For her Angels,…

THE DEADLY SERIOUS Queen & Slim was born at a party, when Lena Waithe — the multi-hyphenate star of Ready Player One and writer/ cast member of Master Of None — bumped into A Million Little Pieces novelist James Frey. “I’ve got this idea for a movie,” Frey told her, “that I can’t write because I’m a white guy.” He outlined the scene. Waithe listened, then nodded. “I can write that movie,” she said. “I know what that movie is.” A few years later, that casual chit-chat has turned into one of the most urgent and significant films in development. Because Waithe did go away and write that movie (Frey gets a “Story By” credit): the tale of two African-Americans on a Tinder date who become nationally famous when, at…

Atmospheric scientist Prof David Lee on the ‘Oxygen Destroyer’ in Godzilla: King Of The Monsters “Dissolved oxygen is, of course, vital for life in the seas. It is actually possible to get ‘dead zones’ in the sea — usually where sewage or nitrogen-rich effluent enters it — which cannot support fish life. But the idea that something could be ‘set off’ that removed dissolved oxygen from large areas of the globe is fanciful in the extreme.”…

★★★★ OUT 8 AUGUST RATED TBC / 118 MINS DIRECTOR Kriv Stenders CAST Travis Fimmel, Richard Roxburgh, Daniel Webber, Luke Bracey, Nicholas Hamilton PLOT Vietnam, August 1966: Scouting for enemy artillery positions, a small unit of Australian soldiers find themselves surrounded and vastly outnumbered by the North Vietnamese and forced to fight a desperate holding action until help can arrive. IT’S BEEN A long time between drinks when it comes to the Australian experience of the Vietnam War being depicted onscreen. While the conflict has provided background colour for a number of films over the years, we have to go back 40 years to 1979’s The Odd Angry Shot for a boots-on-the-ground look at the Vietnam. With Danger Close, director Kriv Stenders and writer Stuart Beattie correct that, delivering a…

★★★★ RATED TBC / 22 AUGUST / 106 MINS DIRECTOR Daniel Gordon CAST Adam Goodes, Stan Grant, Linda Burney, Gilbert McAdam You may have heard of Adam Goodes by now, but in case you haven’t, here’s what you need to know about the man at the centre of this new documentary. First and foremost, he’s a proud Indigenous Australian, and an inspirational Australian full-stop. He made a name as a great of Australian Rules Football at the Sydney Swans from 1999 to 2015, where he twice won premierships and twice won the game’s highest individual honour, the Brownlow Medal. Thirdly, a series of events from 2013 to 2015 led to his premature departure from the game. You see (only) those years of Goodes’ career explored in greater detail in Ian…

★★★ OUT 8 AUGUST / RATED M / 97 MINS DIRECTOR Rachel Ward CAST Bryan Brown, Greta Scacch, Richard E. Grant, Sam Neill, Jacqueline McKenzie A group of late-middle-age friends decamp to a luxurious holiday home in the titular Northern Sydney enclave for a weekend away. The occasion is the birthday of retired streetwear impresario, Frank (Bryan Brown), which should be a happy event but, as is the way of such things, old secrets and current anxieties surface once the booze begins to flow. The top-notch cast, including Greta Scacchi, Sam Neill, Richard E. Grant, Jacqueline McKenzie, Claire van der Boom and Matilda Brown, are as watchable as ever, and the setting is gorgeous but, despite the occasional stab at depth or resonance, you can’t shake the feeling that these…

★★★★ OUT NOW / RATED PG / 80 MINS DIRECTORS Fergus Grady, Noel Smyth CAST Sue Morris, Julie Zarifeh, Father Manny Domingo, Mark Thomson, Belli Naima This New Zealand documentary follows six Kiwis and Aussies on the famous 800km Camino de Santiago pilgrimage that begins in France and ends in Spain, several of them using the punishing but picturesque trek as a means to deal with personal trauma. The film largely focuses on three key pilgrims: 70-year-old Sue who wills herself onward despite painful degenerative arthritis; 54-year-old Julie who’s dealing with the loss of family members and Mark whose stepdaughter has died. Their lengthy journey brings up pain of both the physical and emotional variety and, like them, at times you’ll wonder if you can take any more walking. But…

★★★★ OUT NOW / AMAZON PRIME VIDEO / EPISODES SEEN 1-3 SHOWRUNNER Eric Kripke CAST Karl Urban, Elisabeth Shue, Laz Alonso, Jack Quaid, Karen Fukuhara, Tomer Kapon, Erin Moriarty, Erin Moriarty, Antony Starr PLOT After his girlfriend is killed by a careless superhero, young Hughie (Jack Quaid) is recruited by Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) to join The Boys – a black ops unit who police the superhuman community with brutal and, if necessary, lethal force. BASED ON THE CONTROVERSIAL comic book series by writer Garth Ennis (Preacher) and artist Darick Robertson (Transmetropolitan), new series The Boys takes aim at the soft underbelly of the superhero genre and sinks its size 12 steel-capped Doc Martens right in. It’s a gleefully nihilistic and iconoclastic affair, dragging the cape brigade into the harsh…

1 THE GROUP ALL GROW UP Amon Warmann: This season sees Stranger Things’ core foursome deal with something just as terrifying as shadow monsters or the Upside Down — the inescapable fact that they’re growing up. With that growth comes girlfriends: Mike has grown closer to Eleven (to Hopper’s great chagrin), Lucas and Max are a couple, and even Dustin has found someone to sing epic duets with. After spending the majority of the last season as the host for the Mind Flayer it makes sense that Will would try to hold onto any semblance of normalcy with his friends — aka many games of Dungeons & Dragons — but eventually even he accepts change. Indeed, with it being hinted that he’s on the cusp of discovering his own sexuality,…

Joaquin Phoenix is pretty sure Empire hates him. We don’t. “It’s okay, man, it’s okay,” he says. “You hate me.” We’re 30 minutes into our interview about Joker, and there’s been little direct Joker talk. “I don’t know how to talk about this movie, man!” he says. He hates talking shop at the best of times, but the experience of making Joker has so profoundly affected him that he doesn’t want to ruin it with anything approaching explanation. Dressed in black here by the pool at Los Angeles’ A-list hideaway the Chateau Marmont, he enthuses forever about working with Joker’s writer-director Todd Phillips, but you want to know how he feels about his character? Good luck. “Am I the worst that you’ve ever had to deal with?” he asks. “You’re…

1. THERE ARE TWISTS In response to the question, “What’s your favourite ‘I did not see that coming’ movie moment?” on Twitter in July, Chewbacca actor Joonas Suotamo cheekily responded, “All of my next movie, but shhhh”. Could J.J. Abrams have more twists than a tornado ready to unleash on audiences when Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker hits in December? 2. LUKE’S A FORCE GHOST For a while Mark Hamill’s inclusion in the cast had people guessing if Luke Skywalker was still alive or was returning as a Force ghost. Turns out it’s the latter, the actor telling the Associated Press he was set to “make a curtain call as a Force ghost.” Luke’s lightsaber, which was ripped in half in The Last Jedi, also somehow makes a return.…

Throwing a puppet off a cliff is a lot harder than you might expect. For the best part of 40 minutes, a very focused puppeteer on the Langley Studios set of The Dark Crystal: Age Of Resistance has been trying to lob a Gelfling, a small elf-like creature, to his death, but the stupid doll refuses to die properly. He hits a camera. He plops to earth before making it to the edge of the cliff. He frisbees off in completely the wrong direction. After repeated resurrection, persistence pays off and the Gelfling whizzes past the camera in just the right way, plummeting to his end as intended, his successful murder receiving a round of applause. On The Dark Crystal, you keep going until things work out. It took almost…

IN HOLLYWOOD HISTORY, few directors have been as much of a one-man band as Robert Rodriguez. From the moment he exploded onto the scene in 1992 with the gonzo action movie El Mariachi, he’s been a multi-hyphenate so prodigious they were in danger of running out of hyphens. Writing. Directing. Editing. Composing. Operating the camera. You name it, chances are Rodriguez did it, as he established his base of operations, Troublemaker Studios, in Austin, Texas, far from the gimlet-eyed glare of Hollywood. That changed with this year’s Alita: Battle Angel, the first true blockbuster of Rodriguez’ career. Working with his old friend, writer-producer James Cameron, Rodriguez found himself at the helm of a $200 million behemoth — but one that benefited from all those skills he had honed on the…

THIS MONTH ACTOR AND DIRECTOR JESSICA HYNES ON THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD I DON’T KNOW how I’d missed it, but I had a great time with Andrew Dominik’s three-hour opus detailing the final months of the vulnerable, paranoid, infamous outlaw Jesse James. The James gang, led by Jesse (portrayed delicately by Brad Pitt) and Frank James (Sam Shepard), are all but washed up. Most of the original gang have gone and the train heist at the start of the film — shot in shadowy sepia, the ghostly hooded heads waiting in the wooded railway sidings strobe-lit by the clickety-clackety passenger train — sees the James brothers working with two-bit hoodlums and hangers-on. Enter Robert and Charley Ford, played by Casey Affleck and Sam Rockwell…

ON THE QT, WHERE’S QT? I have been to four different newsagents to find Empire July. When I finally got to one newsagent and grabbed the last copy, the girl told me she sold almost all of them the first day she put it out. Of course it is thanks to the amazing Brad / Leo / Margot trio on the front... or is it? Maybe ‘normal movie’-related covers would attract more attention than the usual superhero covers? You alone will have the answers when you find out if July sold more copies then June. However, this is absolutely NOT a criticism! I love every single Empire copy, I buy them all, I collect them all, I read them all. I love superhero movies and as I have already told…

REDRUM Danny Torrance is back, and now a fortysomething called Dan (Ewan McGregor). After getting sober, his psychic powers return, manifesting in chalkboard messages on his wall. These culminate in the familiar "Redrum" drawn in lipstick by Danny on a door in The Shining although it reads "Murder" here , with Danny first seeing it reflected in his mirror. A signal that he's now receiving the messages, not sending them. THE TRICYCLE "When I was a kid, I bumped into these things," Dan says. And that's when we see director Mike Flanagan's first painstaking recreation of The Shining: young Danny, the tricycle, that labyrinthine carpet. This flashback is our first proof that, as well as being an adaptation of Stephen King's Doctor Sleep, this is very much a sequel to…

EZRA MENAS ANYBODYS (JETS) Menas, a non-binary actor, takes on the role of Anybodys. They appeared in a national tour of A Chorus Line, and later this year will star in the original cast of Jagged Little Pill on Broadway, a new musical inspired by Alanis Morissette. BEN COOK MOUTHPIECE (JETS) 21-year-old Cook played the title role in Billy Elliot The Musical on Broadway in 2012, and was part of Tina Fey’s 2018 Mean Girls Broadway transfer. He’s worked with Fey before, playing a young Alec Baldwin in a 2010 episode of 30 Rock. MIKE FAIST RIFF (JETS) At 27, Faist is the oldest of the Jets/Sharks cast. He dropped out of drama academy and sold tickets in Times Square beforelanding a role in the original cast…

WHEN ORLANDO BLOOM received the script for Carnival Row — writer Travis Beacham’s inventive, eight-episode twist on the fantasy genre — it rang more than a few bells. “Coming from fantasy at the start of my career, I read it and thought, ‘Oh yeah, this keys into a lot of things that feel familiar,’” Bloom tells Empire as we join him on set at Barandov Studios in Prague. “But it’s different enough for me to enjoy.” After his first major role as Legolas in the Lord Of The Rings films, he spent years away from fantasy (save for a brief stop-off in The Hobbit). But now Carnival Row has tempted him back. “We’re in a big city called The Burgh, a steampunk world that represents London in the 19th century,”…

IT’S BEEN A whirlwind few months for cinematic video game adaptations. On the one hand we have Pokémon Detective Pikachu, thought by some to be the best video game movie yet made. On the other, we have the upcoming Sonic The Hedgehog, the trailer to which was mocked so loudly that director Jeff Fowler scrapped his design completely, tweeting, “The message is loud and clear... you want changes.” People who love video games are used to being disappointed when a beloved series makes it to the cinema. Video game movies have only recently made the transition from “universally awful” to “sometimes okay”. Last year’s Rampage and Tomb Raider adaptations weren’t bad, but Pokémon Detective Pikachu is still the only video game film to go ‘Fresh’ on Rotten Tomatoes. Video game…

★★★★★ OUT 29 AUGUST / 136 MINS / RATED TBC DIRECTOR Jennifer Kent CAST Aisling Franciosi, Sam Claflin, Baykali Ganambarr, Damon Herriman, Ewen Leslie PLOT Tasmania, 1825: As the British wage war on the Indigenous population, Irish convict Clare (Aisling Franciosi) hires Billy (Baykali Ganambarr), an Indigenous tracker, to help her hunt down the British officer, Hawkins (Sam Claflin), responsible for a horrific act of violence against her family. THE NIGHTINGALE IS not the first time that Australian cinema has tackled the horrific excesses of the so-called Frontier Wars, but never before has it been done so with such unflinching, merciless, brutality. While Warwick Thornton’s Sweet Country is redolent with mournful sorrow and John Hillcoat’s The Proposition is a savagely violent anti-Western, neither can match the sheer, relentless rage that…

★★★★ RATED MA15+ / 29 AUGUST / 103 MINS DIRECTOR Matteo Garrone CAST Marcello Fonte, Edoardo Pesce, Nunzia Schiano, Alida Baldari Calabria There’s nowhere bleaker than the seaside when the fun stops and it looks a while since anyone enjoyed themselves in the rundown setting for Matteo Garrone’s brutally sad saga. Castel Volturno also provided the backdrop to The Embalmer and there are echoes of that equally sobering story in this unflinching and similarly fact-based depiction of a naive nobody paying the price for trying to be one particularly undeserving man’s best friend. Garrone will forever be known for Gomorrah and he once again considers the extent to which crime seeps into the lives of ordinary people, as Marcello Fonte places greater value on his one-sided liaison with bruising loser…

★★★ OUT NOW RATED PG / 118 MINS DIRECTOR Jon Favreau CAST Donald Glover, Beyoncé, Seth Rogen, John Oliver, James Earl Jones, Billy Eichner, Alfre Woodard, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Keegan-Michael Key, Shahadi Wright Joseph, JD McCrary, Eric André PLOT Young Simba (JD McCrary, later Donald Glover) is destined to become king of Pride Rock like his father Mufasa (James Earl Jones). But his uncle Scar (Chiwetel Ejiofor) plots for the throne, and Simba ends up alone in exile. Can he ever regain his kingdom? ANOTHER MONTH, ANOTHER Disney remake of an animated classic. There are two reasons that this film exists, and neither is because anything was missing from 1994’s furry Hamlet. The first is to show off genuinely dazzling visual effects, technological marvels that give us photo-real animals in an…

★★★ OUT 29 AUGUST / RATED M / 118 MINS DIRECTOR Thomas Vinterberg CAST Matthias Schoenaerts, Léa Seydoux, Colin Firth Based on the tragic 2000 true story of the Russian submarine left stranded for seven days at the bottom of the Barents Sea following a series of explosions, Kursk flits between underwater survival situations (freezing to death, diminishing oxygen) and dry-land dramas as the Russians refuse help from the international community (aka Colin Firth) and the families fight for news of loved ones. Script-wise, it’s standard disaster movie shenanigans (a Poseidon Adventure-style hold-your-breath swim) with a little bit of old school World War I camaraderie thrown in, but it’s well played by the Euro star cast and the craft, from Anthony Dod Mantle’s snaking camera and inventive use of aspect…

★★★★ OUT NOW / RATED PG / 88 MINS DIRECTOR Stephen Amis CAST Dan Aykroyd, Paul Watson Narrated by Dan Aykroyd, this gripping doco follows four ships as they set sail to Antarctica on the biggest anti-whaling campaign ever against Japanese fleets in the Southern Ocean. The 120 strong international crew gather together as part of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Movement, the only people bravely policing the high seas for the illegal slaughter of whales and attacking the problem head on. What unfolds is a battle of wits in a three-way cat and mouse chase between our crusading environmentalists, the justifiably vilified Japanese whalers and the majestic creatures themselves. In turn distressing, exhilarating – especially the tension drenched David v Goliath stand-offs – and moving, Defend, Conserve, Protect is a…

THE JOHN LENNON MEETING Chris Hewitt: The other month, we were shooting Danny Boyle as part of his #Empire30 interview, and got to talking about Yesterday. The film was still in the ‘upcoming’ column, and its central premise: a man enters a coma and awakens in a world in which The Beatles never existed, and so never wrote the songs that changed the lives of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. I mentioned that I was a huge Beatles fan. Boyle smiled. “I would love to know what you think of it,” he said. “There’s something in there that might divide Beatles fans.” And that was all he said on that. A couple of months later, I finally saw Yesterday, and the something in there that might divide Beatles fans.…

HE WAS A GANGSTER The Joker’s first origin story was by his co-creator Bill Finger, in Detective Comics #168, in 1951. Here, he was a lab worker turned criminal called the Red Hood, who escapes Batman by jumping into a vat of chemicals, leading to his disfigurement. HE WAS A STAND-UP COMIC In Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke (1988) he is once more the Red Hood, but this time a failed comedian. The Joker himself, though, says this might be BS: “If I’m going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice!” HE KILLED BATMAN’S PARENTS In Tim Burton’s Batman (1989), Joker again resurrects after falling into chemicals due to the Caped Crusader, but, more egregiously, this guy, named Jack Napier, is also said to have killed…

He’d wanted to for a long time, for no reason other than a deep love of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, but this was a particularly covert cosplay: while promoting his second feature Us, he arrived for a filmed interview seemingly incognito in a plaid shirt and red corduroy jacket. One eagle-eyed The Shining geek spotted the reference, though, duly screen-grabbing it and tweeting it to the movie masses. “All work and no play,” responded Peele, ’fessing up. “It was just a fun thing,” he says now. “I honestly didn’t expect anyone to pick up on it, but it was cool that they did. But I would have done that years before I was a filmmaker and doing press. The Easter egg life is a way of life.” He laughs. But…

IF YOU HAD turned up a little early to the world premiere of Blinded By The Light at Sundance Festival in Utah, and made your way towards the auditorium through the nearby car park, you might have seen something surprising: the director, Gurinder Chadha, dancing with the film’s star, Viveik Kalra, and co-writers Paul Mayeda Berges and Sarfraz Manzoor, to Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Hungry Heart’, as it blasted through a car stereo. “Got a wife and kids in Baltimore, Jack…” For Chadha, it was certainly one way to triumph over the nerves that naturally come when you watch your film with an audience for the first time. And by the time the film — based on Manzoor’s book, Greetings From Bury Park, about coming of age in 1980s Luton with a…

PEDRO ALMODÓVAR’S INTERNATIONAL breakthrough film is an odd beast: part 1930s screwball comedy, part 1960s thriller, and set in a contemporary, thoroughly forward-thinking 1980s Spain. Like so many of the director’s films it’s a story about women and the men who don’t deserve them. Betrayal, abandonment, attempted suicide and murder, terrorism and gazpacho all play key roles, yet despite the deadly serious issues, it all works out in the end, in an optimistic story that contrasts one woman and her resilience with her feckless lover. Our heroine is Carmen Maura’s Pepa, a voiceover artist and actress who has been dumped by her older, married colleague and lover, Iván (Fernando Guillén). She’s also pregnant and desperate to tell him the news, but he’s dodging her calls before he heads out of…

Captain Marvel DIRECTORS ANNA BODEN and Ryan Fleck weren’t kidding when they used the phrase “higher, further, faster, baby” for Captain Marvel. The first Marvel Studios movie to feature a solo female (Brie Larson’s Carol Danvers) in the lead role may have taken its sweet time to get here, but it made a huge impact, taking in over $1 billion. Here, Boden and Fleck talk us through its key moments. STANNING LEE The first MCU movie to come out after Stan Lee’s death pays tribute to Marvel’s founding father in two delightful ways. First, the Stan-centric tweak to the Marvel Studios logo. And second, his customary cameo. This time, he plays himself, poring over the script of Kevin Smith’s Mallrats (in which he played himself) on a bus. “We were…

IN ITS ORIGINAL Spanish, the word “salvador” means “saviour”. The title of Oliver Stone’s third feature as a director (following the less-than-successful Seizure and The Hand) couldn’t be more apt. A kind of ‘Withnail And I Goes To War’, it rescued the filmmaker’s career from the scrapheap. Stone’s rough-hewn, vital, gripping true story throws two clowns into a morass of violence and political intrigue as photojournalist Richard Boyle (James Woods) and his buddy, DJ Doctor Rock (James Belushi), head to El Salvador and become embroiled in a civil war between the right wing military and left wing revolutionaries. Beset by battles on all sides, Stone’s film nevertheless went on to Oscar-nominated success. Here the colourful filmmaker recounts his descent into filmmaking hell. Why did you step out of the Hollywood…

DREW GODDARD: “This is certainly a scene that has been influential to me. Gabriel Byrne comes in, sits down, answers the phone. It’s shot from one side and when he hangs up, we see Bernie has been sitting across from him the entire time. Then they have the scene. It’s an extraordinary entrance for a character.” INT TOM’S APARTMENT — DAY The phone is ringing. We hear the door open. Tom (Gabriel Byrne) enters. He walks to the chair by the phone, sits down, takes off his hat. A long pause. He picks up. TOM: Yep? PHONE VOICE: Lazarre wants his money. He wants it now. TOM: I need a coupla days. PHONE VOICE: Why a couple of days? TOM: Because I don’t have it. PHONE VOICE: Alright. How do…

Please pass on my thanks to Empire’s Ian Freer on his touching and respectful ‘In Memoriam’ article on Peter Mayhew (Empire, July issue). Mr Mayhew through his amazing performance as Chewbacca brought real heart to the Star Wars franchise. Chewie, to this day, remains my favourite Star Wars character. Ian Freer’s words were very touching. Mark Cousins ‘In Memoriam’ article about Doris Day unfortunately left me feeling quite annoyed. It seemed to lack respect for the legendary actress with innuendo and backhanded compliments galore. Empire should perhaps focus on employing writers like Ian Freer at these times instead of guest contributors who seem more interested in trying to appear worldly rather than paying respect to the recently departed. JAMIE CAREER, RIVERHILLS, QLD Both icons will be missed. Glad the Mayhew…

YES, TAIKA’S PLAYING THE FÜHRER. SORT OF The film, Taika Waititi’s first directing effort since Thor: Ragnarok, sees him play a 10-year-old boy’s manifestation of the Führer: an “idiotic” imaginary friend combining Hitler with his missing dad. But this Hitler is not a cuddly comfort. Waititi told Deadline he “didn’t do any research” because the Nazi is “a fucking c**t”, and he would essentially play himself with “a bad haircut and a shitty little moustache. And a mediocre German accent.” IT’S (LOOSELY) BASED ON A HIT BOOK Christine Leunens’ dark, haunting Caging Skies was published in 2008. Its anti-hero is Johannes, a devoted Hitler Youth member who finds his mother is hiding a Jewish girl, Elsa, in their house in WWII Vienna — the boy becoming increasingly drawn to the…

THE LACK OF TEXT “There’s no text or logo. But the logo is the background — the W shapes. I think because it’s early in the promotion, and it’s a teaser poster, so for now it’s about creating interest and stirring controversy and discussion. Future [posters] will become more commercial.” THE COLOUR CLASH “A big trend in design in the last few years is to use gradients — a very soft transition from one colour to the next. This is not a gradient: these colours are very bright, and they deliberately clash with each other. It’s quite hard and geometric — it’s not soft and gentle wafting colours.” THE RISING GODDESS “This green element at the bottom makes you think of a landscape, behind her is a sunset, and Wonder…

ALLIGATOR CRAWL Director Alexandre Aja knows his violent-animal onions, having been responsible for 2010’s Piranha 3D, so expect this Kaya Scodelario-fronted disaster film involving an alligator attacking a flooded house to feature plenty of teeth. LION THE LION KING Live-actioning the classic ‘what if Hamlet, but Pride Lands’ Disney film looks set to make effete panto villain Scar into a violent and terrifying antagonist. Also lions are basically the sharks of solid ground. THE ROCK FAST & FURIOUS PRESENTS: HOBBS & SHAW The man who famously punted a torpedo with one of his size 14s in The Fate OfThe Furious has evolved into one of the most dangerous predators on our planet thanks to a heady streak of skull-bashing,terrorist-foiling and bicep-curling. Beware!…

WHERE? Sofia, Bulgaria. WHEN? 22 April 2018. WHY? To see Gerard Butler back in his happy place as Mike Banning, Secret Service agent extraordinaire in the third of the Olympus Has Fallen series. WHO’S IN IT? Butler, Morgan Freeman, Danny Huston, Nick Nolte, Lance Reddick, explosions (lots of them), bullets (lots of them). WHAT DID WE SEE? An action scene where Banning and Lance Reddick’s Secret Service head David Gentry have to get the President (Freeman) into a hospital while being pinned down by a hail of gunfire. Freeman wasn’t there, so it was his double, keeping his head down for more than one reason. WHAT’S GERRY GOT TO SAY? “It’s not just about lots of gunfire. There are bombs as well. No, this is a new side to the…

★★★ OUT 8 AUGUST CERT M / 102 MINS DIRECTOR Nisha Ganatra CAST Emma Thompson, Mindy Kaling, John Lithgow, Ike Barinholtz PLOT Fêted US talk-show host Katherine Newbury (Thompson) is losing the ratings war, so demands a woman be added to the all-male writers room. Enter former chemical plant worker Molly Patel (Kaling) whose ideas — and jokes — could save the show, or at least Katherine herself. AS A VETERAN comedy writer on The Office (US) and her own The Mindy Project, who better than Mindy Kaling to script a comedy-drama about the pitfalls and privilege of the male-dominated media? Late Night, her feature-writing debut, is a smart piece of work that manages to weave notions of glass ceilings, internalised misogyny and the need for diversity through nearly every…

★★★★ OUT NOW RATED M / 129 MINS DIRECTOR Jon Watts CAST Tom Holland, Jake Gyllenhaal, Zendaya, Samuel L. Jackson, Jon Favreau, Marisa Tomei PLOT In the wake of Thanos’ defeat, Peter Parker (Holland) leaves Spidey at home for a class trip to Europe, where he can ask out MJ (Zendaya). But he’s soon approached by Nick Fury (Jackson) to save the day with new hero Mysterio (Gyllenhaal). AVENGERS: ENDGAME IRREVOCABLY changed the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The time-travel epic not only wrapped up a decade of narrative threads and character arcs, but set up a whole new world in which half the population has blinked back into existence, five tumultuous years after being blinked out of it. How will the MCU address such universe-altering consequences? The answer, as Spider-Man: Far…

★★★ OUT NOW / RATED M / 107 MINS DIRECTOR Claire McCarthy CAST Daisy Ridley, Naomi Watts, Clive Owen Playing in a similar just-left-of-centre plane as Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead, The Waiting City director Claire McCarthy’s lavish gothic period piece reimagines Shakespeare’s Hamlet from the perspective of Ophelia, one of the Queen’s Ladies-In-Waiting and later the object of the Danish prince’s desire. Unlike Stoppard’s absurdist comedy, Ophelia plays it straight; the fun to be had is watching familiar scenes unfold with a different skew. Rich in period detail and quality performance, especially Star Wars’ alum Daisy Ridley as the titular feminist heroine and Naomi Watts as the Queen. Only a wiggy Clive Owen risks derailing proceedings as the King’s murderous brother, exuding a muscular modernity at odds…

★★★ OUT 29 AUGUST / RATED R18+ / 159 MINS DIRECTOR S. Craig Zahler CAST Mel Gibson, Vince Vaughn, Tory Kittles FROM ITS TITLE (three words of purest pulp) to its casting (Mel Gibson as a racist cop) and its ultraviolence (three more words: key in stomach), Dragged Across Concrete is out to inspire a visceral reaction. In that, it succeeds. It’s a thrilling, grindhouse-flavoured heist movie with some ingenious plotting and a nice line in granite-tough dialogue; one character is described as a “human steamroller covered in spikes”. At the same time, it’s resoundingly grim, with cruelty played out in slow-motion, a disturbing portrayal of women (over-emotional wrecks or there for the camera to ogle) and, most troubling, scenes that seem to back up the white protagonists’ perspective on…

1 TACKLING THE BLIP James Dyer: How do you make a film about high school when half the students have been dead for five years? Coming hot on the heels of Avengers: Endgame, Far From Home was always going to have to do some narrative heavy lifting. Peter Parker’s mentor is dead, Earth was invaded by aliens (again), and 50 per cent of the population has spent the past half decade snapped out of existence. Rather than opting for clunksome dialogue, though, FFH’s solution is a simple as it is elegant: a student TV broadcast outlining the timeline’s existential hiccup — ‘the blip’. That said broadcast includes a my-firstiMovie eulogy composition for Tony, Cap and Natasha set to the strains of Whitney Houston’s ‘I Will Always Love You’ is simply the icing on a very tongue-in-cheek…

EVER SINCE THE Star Wars saga blasted onto cinema screens in 1977, movie lovers the world over have made makeshift lightsabers out of broom handles, pretended to open automatic doors using the Force and engaged in tense playground arguments about who gets to be Han/Luke/Leia/Chewie. And although many a committed Star Wars fan has dabbled in creative cosplay to feel a little closer to that fabled galaxy far, far away, none have ever been able to visit a place that lets you feel like you’re actually in one of the movies – until now. Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge is the brand new billion-dollar, 14-acre land that was unveiled in May at Disneyland Resort in California (and soon to open at Walt Disney World Resort in Florida on 29 August), and…

ARI ASTER IS trying not to lose his head. It’s a drizzly May afternoon in New York, where the man behind last year’s most disturbing, decapitation-filled horror, Hereditary, has been frantically finishing its follow-up. Locking yourself in a dark room for weeks on end to edit a movie is an intense experience at the best of times. It’s even more intense when that movie is Midsommar: a “bleak adult fairy tale”, as the 32-year-old calls it, brimming with blood rituals, pagan cults and revelations about death and the human condition. Throw into the mix the fact that Hereditary was among 2018’s biggest critical smashes, rocketing the first-time director from film school anonymity to horror’s top table, and you’d forgive him for looking like the moviegoers as they left cinemas after…

STEPHEN MERCHANT’S Fighting With My Family is a fun, compelling, feel-good comedy-drama that tells the story of the Knights, a working-class, wrestling-obsessed family in Norwich, and how their daughter Saraya made it all the way to the bright lights of big-time wrestling in the WWE — titles, big crowds, The Rock and all. If the story sounds familiar, it’s because the film was inspired by a 2012 Channel 4 documentary of the same name which followed the Knights’ journey. But, in creating the characters for the film, that was just writer-director Merchant’s starting point. 1 PAIGE Black-clad wrestling prodigy, played by Florence Pugh. “I could see why Dwayne [Johnson, who also produced] thought the documentary would be a good film, although I didn’t feel that it had enough for a…

BOB COE IS an unsung hero in one of cinema’s greatest moments. A crop-duster pilot from Wasco, California, Coe flew the Naval Aircraft N3N Canary, a World War II Navy pilot trainer nicknamed the Yellow Peril, that strafed Cary Grant wearing a grey Savile Row suit as he ran for his life playing Roger Thornhill in Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest. Coe was paid $150 per day with an additional $100 for every hour spent in the air, but what he helped create was priceless. Northwest’s cropdusting scene remains a masterclass in knuckle-tightening action cinema. “On the surface it’s ridiculous,” observed L.A. Confidential director Curtis Hanson. “Why would the villains lure Cary Grant to the middle of nowhere in order to shoot him from an airplane? And yet it feels…

Chris: I remember my job interview for Empire. I was asked what I thought of Harry Potter. I was like, “Ugh, kids’ books.” Stupid. And I was told I should have an open mind. I was like, “Oh God, have I just lost the Empire job?” I ran out, chastened and humbled, and bought Philosopher’s Stone. I loved it and from that point on I was a massive Potterphile, counting down the days to each book. But the movies have never really connected with me the way the books did. Amy: I have never walked out of the cinema disappointed with a Harry Potter film. I look back on Philosopher’s Stone and Chamber Of Secrets and can see the flaws — they’re a bit too long, they cram too much…

BORDER OUT NOW / RATED MA15+ / 110 MINS Adapted from a short story by Let The Right One In author John Ajvide Lindqvist, Border is another freaky fable about born outsiders, unorthodox love and unusual genitals. When unconventional-looking border agent Tina (Eva Melander) meets equally odd maggot-smuggler Vore (Eero Milonoff), they embark on a relationship that yields one of cinema’s most surprising reveals: I won’t spoil it here, but let’s just say this is a folk tale about folk with tails. Part love story, part crime mystery, Border takes a surreal approach to notions of identification and fluid bodies, only occasionally stumbling with excessive exposition and a deeply uncomfortable child-abuse subplot. But there’s poignancy at its heart, and Melander is terrific as Tina, projecting all sorts of emotions through…