Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2019 i Empire Australasia

AARON PAUL THINKS Breaking Bad ended “perfectly”. When we last saw his character — meth-cooking, magnet-loving Jesse Pinkman — he was ragged, scarred and reeling from his enslavement by Uncle Jack’s neo-Nazi gang, speeding off into the night, high on freedom. Jesse’s story was done. Paul was satisfied. “My God, did he pay for his sins inside that buried cage,” he tells Empire. Yet, he says, during the subsequent years, “People kept asking me: ‘What happened to Jesse?’ Although I loved how it was left unclear, I’m glad that now…” He pauses and chuckles. “… it’s a little less so.” That clarity comes courtesy of the movie El Camino, written and directed by Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan. Remarkably, it was shot completely under the radar last November in Albuquerque,…

BY ALL ACCOUNTS, Ruth Wilson is perfect casting as His Dark Materials’ Mrs Coulter. Empire tells her so. “I’m slightly offended by that,” she says. “Considering she’s described as the mother of all evils — ‘a cesspit of moral filth’.” That’s not what we took from it. “Well, that’s what I take from it!” she says, mock-horrified. “No, it’s great. She’s a brilliant character.” She is — and now, thanks to a lavish BBC/ HBO series adapting Philip Pullman’s epic literary saga, she’ll get her due. Finally. 2007’s The Golden Compass, starring Nicole Kidman as Mrs Coulter, was the first and last in a planned cinematic trilogy taking on the books: a limp disappointment, but the new series aims to put things right. “Several key landmarks in television have enabled…

“YEAH, I DON’T know a lot about fantasy!” It’s a brave thing for director Dan Scanlon to admit, given he’s about to complete animation on Onward, Pixar’s first high fantasy film. The setting, a fairytale world given a modern-day spin, originated with an idea about two sons looking to bring their late father back to life for one day with magic. “Luckily,” Scanlon says, “there’s a lot of fantasy fans here [at Pixar] to educate me.” Here, he introduces Onward’s fantastical multi-species world. UNICORNS Usually the most mysterious and majestic of fantasy creatures, unicorns in Onward are basically just common pests. “We thought, ‘If the world’s changed and magic’s gone away, maybe unicorns are everywhere? What if they’ve become a little bit like raccoons or squirrels?” Part of the subversive…

IN 1983, HE was Delirious. In 1987, he was Raw. Now, in 2019, Eddie Murphy is reborn. The comedy mega-star has been AWOL for many years, ensconced in his cliffside Beverly Hills mansion and only emerging occasionally to make such humdrum films as A Thousand Words or Mr Church. It felt like the man who once inspired the nickname ‘Money’ had lost his appetite. Actually, no. He was just taking a break. Right now, Murphy is in Atlanta, shooting a sequel to Coming To America, the 1988 comedy classic that introduced the world to the line, “The royal penis is›clean, your Highness.” And screening on Netflix is Dolemite Is My Name, in›which Murphy plays hustler Rudy Ray Moore, one of the star’s real-life heroes, as he tries to make a…

THE CHRISTMAS CLASSIC Home Alone has been designated ripe for reinvention, getting a reboot on Disney+. But how will the Wet Bandits fare when Kevin McCallister has a state-of-the-art smart home? After consulting with home security experts Will Hopkins and Sam Breen, we drew up some ideas. Alexa! Order a cheese pizza and play Angels With Filthy Souls! LIVING ROOM ENABLE ALEXA From his bedroom hide-out, Kevin instructs Alexa or Google Assistant to launch the living room TV to a deafening music channel, just as the bandits enter. TURN IT UP The McCallisters, of course, have multi-room audio installed, so the cacophony from the ear-splitting rock channel can be broadcast throughout the house. The bandits race around in a panic. UNLEASH THE BOTS As the bandits flap about, Kevin drives…

WHERE? Ahuriri Valley, New Zealand WHEN? 29 September 2018 WHY? Disney is making an actual flesh-and-blood live-action version of its 1998 animated musical Mulan, and we’re here to check that it’s all for reals. WHO’S IN IT? Liu Yifei, Donnie Yen, Jason Scott Lee, Jet Li, Yoson An, Gong Li, Rosalind Chao and more horses than you’ve ever seen in your life. WHAT DID WE SEE? Mountains! Everywhere you look there are beautiful, imposing, snowcapped mountains — this scenery, we’re told, uncannily doubles for China, where much of the film has already been shot. Above us, on a ridge, are dozens of spear-wielding Huns on horses. The bad guys. And there’s not a green-screen in sight. HOW DOES THE WISE-ARSE DRAGON FIT INTO IT? Sorry, Eddie Murphy fans: there is…

HULK’S RAMPAGE AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON Scorsese would instantly appreciate that the camera sticks to Hulk in this sequence, just as it did to Harvey Keitel in Mean Streets. It’s a nod to cinema history and smashing. MIRIAM SHARPE CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR Alfre Woodard’s mother confronts the superhero who killed her son while saving the world. It’s an emotional gut-punch, and the director of Silence would appreciate its moral power. THE CAR SCENE SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING Scorsese appeared in One Direction: This Is Us, so he must love teen movies — and Michael Keaton driving Peter Parker to prom recalls Marty’s cameo in Taxi Driver in its knife-thick tension. A SAD FAREWELL BLACK PANTHER Two men on a collision course with destiny: Scorsese’s The Departed or Ryan Coogler’s Killmonger and…

OUT NOW / CERT M / 112 MINS DIRECTOR Bart Freundlich CAST Michelle Williams, Julianne Moore, Billy Crudup A remake of Susanne Bier’s Dogme 95 original of the same name, After The Wedding is what a soap opera would look like if it were made by A-list talent. Orphanage worker Isabel (Williams) arrives in New York to meet rich potential investor Theresa (Moore), who subsequently invites Isabel to her daughter’s swanky wedding. What happens next is that revelations, coincidences and awkward truths pile up on top of each other in such a mechanical, manipulative way that the film feels simultaneously too much yet undernourished. As you’d expect, Williams and Moore add colours and sensitivities to the hyper-dramatic premise and Freundlich’s filmmaking is cultured, but the classiness stymies any emotional heat.…

OUT NOW CERT MA15+ / 122 MINS DIRECTOR Vince Gilligan CAST Aaron Paul, Jesse Plemons, Matt Jones, Charles Baker, Scott Shepherd PLOT After speeding away from the neo-Nazi compound where Walter White met his end, Jesse Pinkman (Paul) is desperate to get out of Albuquerque and finally push the traumatic events of Breaking Bad into the past. But it isn’t that easy. He’s a very wanted man, and he hasn’t got a penny to his name... BREAKING BAD WAS always about difficult situations. Vince Gilligan’s lauded crime series regularly placed its protagonists, odd-couple meth-cooking team Walt (Bryan Cranston) and Jesse (Paul), in a seemingly inescapable trap, ramping up the complications and tension to cuticle-chewing degrees before revealing the pair’s usually ingenious exit route. Typically, it was Walt who did all…

OUT NOW CERT MA15+ / 128 MINS DIRECTOR Tim Miller CAST Linda Hamilton, Mackenzie Davis, Natalia Reyes, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gabriel Luna, Diego Boneta PLOT A terminator (Luna) is sent after auto worker Dani Ramos (Reyes) and her family — but enhanced human fighter Grace (Davis) arrives just in time to rescue her, followed swiftly by Sarah Connor (Hamilton). The pair must keep Dani alive to save the future. THE TERMINATOR IS an action classic and T2 one of the greatest sequels of all time, but none of the films that followed came even close to matching them. Until, perhaps, now. Dark Fate feels like a real Terminator movie at last, from the breakneck, deeply terrifying chase that opens it to its moving finale. This was never just Arnold Schwarzenegger’s series;…

OUT NOW CERT M / 118 MINS DIRECTOR Rupert Goold CAST Renée Zellweger, Jessie Buckley, Rufus Sewell PLOT 1968. With her ex-husband Sid Luft (Sewell) demanding custody of her children and struggling to pay a $4 million tax bill, fragile Hollywood legend Judy Garland (Zellweger) takes up a sold-out residency at London’s Talk Of The Town nightclub. Can she keep it together so the show can go on? THERE IS AN image halfway through Judy that captures Judy Garland (Zellweger) slumped in her dressing room, head bowed, cigarette burning in hand, surrounded by wall-to-wall flowers, a depleted Garland before literal garlands. It’s a moment that gets to the heart of the last days of Garland’s life, the difference between the private and the public, despair and sadness crystallised against a…

1 THE ATTACK John Nugent: Chapter Two’s shocking opening sequence sees a gay couple (played by Taylor Frey and LGBT actor/filmmaker Xavier Dolan) subjected to a devastating homophobic attack — only for one of the victims to then suffer a demonic clown one, too. Reactions to this sequence have been mixed, but whether it oversteps the line for you or not, it’s a pretty faithful recreation of the scene from the book, closely based on the real-life hate crime that killed Charlie Howard, a gay man from Bangor, Maine — Stephen King’s hometown, and the loose inspiration for Derry — in 1984. The event weighed heavily on King, and his commentary on small-town intolerance feels more depressingly relevant than ever. Whether you felt the violence was exploitative or necessary, it’s…

WHEN IT COMES to adapting video games for the big screen, director Shawn Levy has been burned before. “They have proven near-impossible to get right,” he admits. “I myself spent two years working on Uncharted. There’s something very scary about trying to do a literal transposing of an experience that audiences can already get in the game.” But this time he thinks he’s cracked it with Free Guy — by not adapting a game at all. An original story set in a fictional video-game universe, it’s an exploration of identity and existentialism within the confines of a fake reality. And the thing holding it all together? Ryan Reynolds. Levy first read the script three years ago. “It was wildly inventive, but I couldn’t find the spine of humanity through it,”…

AFTER BABY DRIVER became his biggest hit by a country mile, screeching its way to $227 million worldwide and counting (well, they’ve probably stopped counting by now), all eyes were on Edgar Wright to see what he would do next. Would he venture back into the world of blockbusters, enthusiasm renewed after the Ant-Man aberration? A fourth flavour of Cornetto with Simon Pegg, perhaps? Or would he go even further down the esoteric, original route? It’s safe to say that, with Last Night In Soho, he’s done the last. Empire had already revealed, earlier this year, that it is a psychological thriller set in London. And that it’s his first film to focus on a female lead. Well, actually, make that leads, as it stars Thomasin McKenzie as Eloise, a…

THE HYPER-COLOURED, neon-soaked posters for Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman 1984 made a bold statement in more ways than just the visual: they’re a declaration that this is a new era for Gal Gadot’s Diana. Unlike Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice, she’s out in daylight and openly fighting for justice. Unlike her first stand-alone film, she’s a fully-formed woman at home in a man’s world. And unlike Justice League, she shouldn’t be hamstrung by a hastily rewritten plot. But while the signs point to a more colourful, confident outing, don’t expect this Wonder Woman film to be all sweetness and light. Barring flashbacks, Diana’s home of Themyscira remains (presumably) closed to her. Sixty-six years since the end of World War I, her old comrades are dead and her Justice League…

“I LOVE BIG-SCALE action films,” Christopher Nolan told Empire in 2010, while editing conspicuously big-scale action film Inception. “I’ve been plundering ruthlessly from the Bond movies in everything I’ve done forever. I grew up just loving them and they’re a huge influence on me.” A decade later, that influence hasn’t waned. In fact, it seems likely that Nolan’s IMAX-sized adventure Tenet is going to be his biggest, boldest Bond tribute yet. The as-yet-unrevealed storyline is set “in the world of international espionage”, and Nolan is really pushing the “international”. In true 007 style, Tenet’s shoot has globetrotted to seven different countries: Denmark, Estonia, India, Italy, Norway, the UK and the USA. That’s more air miles than he’s clocked on any of his previous films. Once again, we’re guaranteed plenty of…

GOD’S OWN COUNTRY was one of Empire’s favourite films of 2017. Francis Lee’s debut feature contrasted intense soul-searching with immense beauty, presenting an authentic character study with huge emotional power — touching the hearts of many, it was a film for the ages. Needless to say, his second feature, another study of a same-sex romance, is much-awaited. Just as the action in God’s Own Country revolved around a Yorkshire sheep farm, Ammonite zeroes in on a specific locale. Once more written and directed by Lee, it is an 1840s-set English romance based in the world of fossil-hunting. Filmed on the ever-picturesque Jurassic Coast, it introduces us to real-life rock-botherer Mary Anning (Kate Winslet). With her glory days in the past and her fortunes on the slide, she agrees to look…

THERE ARE CERTAIN things you need when making a murder mystery. A murder, ideally. A mystery, preferably. But that’s not all. As Rian Johnson found when he was writing and directing his latest movie, Knives Out, there are staples of a genre that stretches all the way back to the 1800s that must be incorporated; that help set a whodunnit apart from any other type of detective fiction. “When people say what’s a good whodunnit and start listing stuff, I’m like, ‘That’s more of a procedural, that’s more of a detective noir,’” says Johnson. “Whodunnit to me is much more specific than that. It’s a tricky genre to do, cinematically, because it has that basic weakness Hitchcock always talked about, where the whole thing hinges on one big surprise at…

CHAD STAHELSKI IS a man of action. Literally. This is a guy who started off as a stuntman, became one of the best in the business and is the sort of person who can nonchalantly drop a sentence like, ‘“I’ve been in a lot of environments where you see actual violence, and it’s brutal,” into casual conversation. He’s walked the walk, talked the talk, jumped the jump, exploded the explosion. And now he’s channelling all those years of experience into becoming one of the best action directors around. He’s directed three movies so far, but those movies just happen to be the John Wick trilogy, in which Stahelski and his creative partner, one Keanu Reeves, seek to elevate the modern American action movie into a hybrid of influences and styles…

JIM CUMMINGS IS a writer. A director. An actor. A producer. An editor. And a composer. Yet before his debut film, Thunder Road, a slow-burn, pitch-black, funnier-than-it-sounds dramedy about a small-town cop having a breakdown in the wake of his mother’s death, he was none of those things. Now, he’s keen to inspire others to follow in his footsteps. So here, exclusively for Empire, is Jim Cummings’ guide to how you — yes, you — can become the next Jim Cummings. 1 PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT “The first hurdle to get over is inadequacy. That’s natural in every industry. It comes about from inexperience and naivety. People shouldn’t hold themselves back with thoughts of, ‘I can’t do this,’ or, ‘This will never happen.’ Think, ‘I have a story to tell. I…

Psycho PSYCHO’S SHOWER SCENE is Ground Zero for cinematic terror. “It was the first time in the history of the movies where it wasn’t safe to be in the movie theatre,” remembered critic-turned-filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich. “There is enough blood on screen to satisfy the most bloodthirsty movie fan,” offered The Hollywood Reporter. Nearly 60 years on, Marion Crane’s (Janet Leigh) shower slaughter is the most intense 45 seconds you can imagine and perhaps the most famous single scene in film history. It spawned untold parodies (Scream Queens’ version featured Janet Leigh’s daughter Jamie Lee Curtis), an entire documentary about its creation (78/52, the number of set-ups and shots), and gifted the world the international hand gesture for scary/crazy behaviour: a stabbing motion, accompanied by Bernard Herrmann’s violin shrieks, As cinematic…

Good Fellas Chosen by MICHAEL PALIN MICHAEL PALIN: “It would be that scene around the table in GoodFellas, where Joe Pesci shoots the waiter [Spider, played by Michael Imperioli]. That’s such an explosive scene. It’s so awful. It’s like an explosion, a human explosion. You see how anger works, and how devastatingly dangerous it can be.” INT. BAR — NIGHT Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) is laughing up a storm at a poker game with his pals, including Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro) and Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci). He’s just won a hand. HENRY: Goodbye, Jimmy! We see a bandaged foot limp across the floor. It belongs to Spider, his first time back at work since Tommy put a bullet in his foot at the last poker game. JIMMY: Spider, what’s…

GREATEST HITS Empire, I was reading the story on The Irishman in the last issue and it got me thinking – who is the greatest film hitman? My favourite has to be Jules Winnfield from Pulp Fiction; it doesn’t get much more badass than Jules quoting Ezekiel 25:17 before killing a man. Keep up the good work. STAVOS, VIA EMAIL We wouldn’t mess with Jules, and nor would we like him to lay his vengeance upon us. Good choice. COVER LOVER Dear Empire, what a dilemma your two Star Wars covers had me in! Do I pick Rey or do I go to the dark side and purchase the Kylo cover? After a good ten minutes at my newsagents, I decided I had to have both. I will read the…

MARRIAGE STORY BEST PICTURE NICK DE SEMLYEN (at Toronto International Film Festival) Movies about divorce aren’t meant to be this entertaining. 1979 Best Picture Oscar-winner Kramer Vs Kramer, for example, is an intelligent and moving piece of work, but there’s less fun in its entire run-time than in the joke at its expense in The Return Of Spinal Tap, where schlocky filmmaker Marty DiBergi reveals he made a sequel called Kramer Vs Kramer Vs Godzilla. This year’s Marriage Story, on the other hand, is a triumphant blend of comedy and drama, finding the absurdity as well as the melancholy in what occurs when partners consciously uncouple. It even has Adam Driver singing Stephen Sondheim, something very few films this year can claim. Noah Baumbach has tackled relationships before, and specifically…

GARY OLDMAN/ GARY BUSEY To find actors as fearlessly demented as Cage and Travolta, turn to cinema’s greatest Garys. Guaranteed to dial it up to 11 — and then shout at the dial. MARTIN LAWRENCE/ WILL SMITH This shit just got real. Meet the only thing that can separate the Bad Boys for life — some highly experimental facial transplant surgery. ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER/ DANNY DEVITO The Twins reunion you never knew you needed. Potential highlights: DeVito’s face on Arnie’s huge body; Arnie delivering the line, “I can eat a peach for hours.”…

WHEN RICHARD LINKLATER’S latest film was announced, a few sceptical eyebrows were raised. The filmmaker, who famously took 12 years to make Boyhood, will now spend a full two decades making Merrily We Roll Along, an adaptation of the musical by Stephen Sondheim and George Furth, which is set across a 20-year period. Many corners of the film world carped: why bother? When there’s de-ageing CGI as seen in Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, or make-up and prosthetics at hand... what’s the point? But this surely misunderstands the artist. Watch any of Richard Linklater’s films, from Slacker to the Before trilogy, and you will understand why he is not interested in CGI. This is not a filmmaker accustomed to green-screens and dots on faces. He is a student of filmmakers like…

OUT 7 NOVEMBER (CINEMAS), 27 NOVEMBER (NETFLIX) CERT M / 209 MINS DIRECTOR Martin Scorsese CAST Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, Anna Paquin, Harvey Keitel, Stephen Graham, Bobby Cannavale PLOT 1950s America. Frank Sheeran (De Niro), a war veteran and truck driver, falls in with crime boss Russell Bufalino (Pesci). He rises up the ranks and is seconded to work with Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa (Pacino). But eventually his two pay masters clash. IF YOU KNOW anything about The Irishman, you’ll know two things: CGI ageing technology has made Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci look like young bucks, and it’s really long (three-and-a-half hours). Well, it’s the genius of Martin Scorsese’s film, based on Charles Brandt’s book about Mob foot soldier Frank Sheeran I Heard…

OUT 14 NOVEMBER CERT TBC / 120 MINS DIRECTOR Scott Z. Burns CAST Adam Driver, Annette Bening, Jon Hamm, Corey Stoll PLOT Washington, 2009. Idealistic Senate staffer Daniel Jones (Driver) is tasked to lead an investigation into the ‘enhanced interrogation’ tactics of the CIA in the aftermath of 9/11. Jones’ research job becomes an obsession, one which intensifies when he faces an uphill battle to get his incendiary findings published. SCOTT Z. BURNS’ film initially announces itself as The Torture Report until the word “Torture” gets blocked out or — in CIA parlance — redacted. The more prosaic, less emotive title suits Burns’ film down to the ground. As a director, Burns, a writer for Steven Soderbergh on The Informer, Contagion and The Laundromat, has little interest in the handheld…

OUT NOW / CERT M / 117 MINS DIRECTOR Ang Lee CAST Will Smith, Will Smith, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Clive Owen, Benedict Wong First conceived in the late ’90s, Gemini Man took over 20 years to arrive. On the evidence of its final incarnation, the oft-rewritten script is to blame — a bad mix of tell-don’t-show characterisation and murky plotting. Will Smith puts in a solid dual performance as retiring hitman Henry Brogan and his young-gun clone Junior — but the dialogue is clunky, and the action marred by dodgy physics and unintentionally laughable moments. Its flaws are only boosted by a high-frame-rate presentation that gives it the visual sheen of an episode of Hollyoaks. Gemini Man’s long journey to the screen ironically saw it superceded by a newer, superior…

OUT 28 NOVEMBER CERT M / 130 MINS DIRECTOR Rian Johnson CAST Daniel Craig, Ana de Armas, Chris Evans, Christopher Plummer, Michael Shannon, Toni Collette PLOT Acclaimed murder-mystery novelist Harlan Thrombey (Plummer), he of such literary hits as ‘The Menagerie Tragedy’, is turning 85. But his birthday celebrations are marred by the small fact that he’s discovered dead and bloodied in bed. Can freelance detective Benoit Blanc (Craig) crack the case before the killer strikes again? HOW DOES ONE let off steam after a gruelling experience making one of the most anticipated films of all time, and the even more gruelling experience of weathering feedback of that film from people with Twitter handles such as @sithmaster81? Easy: you kill someone. After sending his camera whizzing around the galaxy in The…

OUT 28 NOVEMBER / CERT M / 138 MINS DIRECTOR François Ozon CAST Melvil Poupard, Denis Ménochet, Swann Arlaud Perhaps best known for Hitchcockian thrillers, François Ozon’s gripping dramatisation of a real-life case of child sex abuse in the French Catholic Church is the filmmaker in a more sober register. By The Grace Of God follows three men —Alexandre (Poupard), François (Ménochet, terrific) Emmanuel (Arlaud) — who expose the priest (Bernard Verley) who assaulted them as boys. The film’s relay-race structure sees each character pass the baton to the next, the stories highlighting but not judging a different response. It has tasteful flashbacks to camping trips but Ozon’s film lives in the present, a fast-paced, beautifully played film that matches Spotlight as a searing portrait of modern heroes who stood…

OUT 14 NOVEMBER (CINEMAS), 6 DECEMBER (NETFLIX) CERT TBC / 136 MINS DIRECTOR Noah Baumbach CAST Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver, Laura Dern, Ray Liotta, Alan Alda, Merritt Wever PLOT Nicole (Johansson) and Charlie (Driver) are navigating the choppy waters of divorce. After Nicole and their son move from their home in New York back to her hometown of Los Angeles, the couple bring in lawyers to negotiate the details of their future family set-up and struggle to maintain the amicability they’d initially sought. “WHAT I LOVE about Nicole,” begins the voice of Adam Driver’s Charlie in Marriage Story’s opening seven-minute montage. “She’s a great dancer, infectious. She’s a mother who plays, really plays, she gives great presents.” “What I love about Charlie,” picks up Nicole (Johansson), “He cries easily in…

1 THE PEEPER BEETLE Dan Jolin: Much like the original 1982 movie, Age Of Resistance admirably refuses to treat its family audience like delicate little flowers, serving up a squirming platter of creep-out moments, brutal violence and torture — like all the best classic fairy tales. The most memorable and distressing comes at the end of the second episode, when the Scientist (Mark Hamill) is punished for letting Rian (Taron Egerton) escape with the Essence. First, a skeletal cage is placed over his beaky head, in a disturbing echo of the Room 101 rat cage from Orwell’s 1984. Then a›skittering bug is released onto the shrieking Scientist’s face. Director Louis Leterrier pushes the PG rating as far as he can, even showing the nasty little Peeper Beetle gleefully prising the…

WHEN THE TOP GUN sequel is released next summer, it will have been a 34-year wait. Much has changed since 1986: most notably, it is not 1986 anymore. But while the world has moved on, Tom Cruise and producer Jerry Bruckheimer (who practically invented the ’80s) are leaning right into the iconography of yore. In Top Gun: Maverick, directed by Oblivion’s Joseph Kosinski, hotshot naval pilot Pete Mitchell, aka Maverick, is back, looking barely older (Cruise ages slower than standard humans). His partner Goose (Anthony Edwards), obviously, is six feet under, but his son Bradley, briefly seen in the original, is also back, now played by Miles Teller. Bradley has his father’s moustache (not literally — that would be horrible) and, as seen in the trailer, leads cheesy piano singalongs…

WHO, EXACTLY, ARE the wretched hive of scum and villainy that populate the Cantina in A New Hope? That was the founding thought that became The Mandalorian, when showrunner and producer Jon Favreau pondered the weird-looking freaks propping up the bar in Mos Eisley. It means the franchise, long-obsessed with a standard hero-versus-villain template, is now exploring a morally murkier story, about a bounty hunter on the fringes of the galaxy, with no Jedi around to stop him. Set around five years after the destruction of the second Death Star, and the Imperial government with it, it finds the Star Wars universe in flux. While the fledgling New Republic figures out how to restore order, the outer reaches of the galaxy are a lawless place. Favreau has compared the setting…

DOLITTLE? HARDLY. THE animal-communing doctor has been kept busy over the years in a series of screen adventures, from the dire Rex Harrison-starring 1967 musical (footage from which, of Harrison bizarrely throwing a seal off a clifftop, has been doing the rounds on the internet recently) to the 1998 Eddie Murphy reboot which featured a rapping guinea pig. But a new version, headed up by Robert Downey Jr in his first post-Avengers lead role, is set to be the most surprising iteration yet. For one thing, Downey Jr’s Dolittle is Welsh. “I don’t know what he was thinking!” laughs producer Susan Downey of the accent. “I don’t think he’s given himself a challenge on this scale since Chaplin, but he fully embraced it.” The doctor boasts the same unique ability…

A DAPPER, MIDDLE-AGED English gent who’s much more dangerous than he looks. A younger man, slightly rougher and readier, a diamond waiting to be polished. A London tailor’s shop that doubles as the front for an international spy organisation. And all under the auspices of Matthew Vaughn. But if The King’s Man sounds familiar, that’s pretty much where the similarities end. Firstly, this is a prequel, set 100 years before the events of the first two Kingsman movies. Secondly, although we can expect the odd raucous moment, Vaughn is turning over a new leaf with this movie. Nobody’s being fingered at a music festival, that’s for sure. “It’ll surprise people, hopefully in a good way,” laughs Vaughn. “The starting point was watching [1975 Sean Connery/Michael Caine adventure] The Man Who…

IT STARTED WITH a boy and a dress. In 2011, County Durham teenager Jamie Campbell dared to don a gown to his school prom — and while his teachers tried banning him from the bash, his classmates and mum supported him. Captured in BBC Three doc Jamie: Drag Queen At 16, the story delighted theatre director and choreographer Jonathan Butterell who, along with writer Tom MacRae and musician Dan Gillespie Sells, transformed it into a musical that quickly transferred from Butterell’s native Sheffield (where the musical is set) to London’s West End. Cut to 2020, and the story is hitting the big screen, from the same creative trio. Produced by Warp Films — typically associated with gritty Shane Meadows films — it’s an all-out musical, with sequinned gowns and lace-front…

THERE’S A SCENE two-thirds of the way through Marriage Story that will rip your heart out. Charlie (Adam Driver) and Nicole (Scarlett Johansson), in the throes of a painful divorce that both wanted to be amicable, verbally knock seven shades of shit out of each other in the former’s spartan apartment, as a discussion of their child’s future devolves into a stand-up, no-holds-barred screaming match. Watching his actors lose themselves in the moment, director Noah Baumbach, veteran of 24 years of movie-making, experienced a brand-new feeling. “I would say it was the first time I’ve been affected by a scene,” says Baumbach. “Usually I find I can keep a distance as a director, no matter how emotional the material. But Scarlett and Adam gave so much, we’d have to take…

Grosse Pointe Blank NOSTALGIA WAS RIFE at the movies in 1997. Thanks to a vague fear of the oncoming train that was Y2K, Generation X embraced the past like never before. The original Star Wars trilogy made a hugely trumpeted return to the big screen, Austin Powers fondly fondled the Bond films of old, and Romy And Michele’s High School Reunion was one of two films that summer whose protagonists would confront the past in the faces of their former schoolmates against a backdrop of great ’80s hits. The other would do so with an equally killer soundtrack but more actual killers. Want to feel old? It’s 22 years since Grosse Pointe Blank was released! The story of a professional hitman, forced to reassess his life when his One Last…

THIS MONTH SCREENWRITER JOE BARTON SAYS HELLO TO HIS LITTLE FRIEND — AL PACINO/BRIAN DE PALMA’S SCARFACE— FORTHE FIRSTTIME IT’S TAKEN ME 34 years to see Scarface, surprisingly, given that it centres around two of my favourite things — doing cocaine and shouting at people. I actually thought that I had seen this film but it turned out I’d just fallen asleep in front of the telly and woken up halfway through Carlito’s Way. But even without having technically watched Scarface, it was easy to feel like I had. The poster and “Say hello to my little friend” have entered the cultural lexicon and the whole thing induced an almost Proustian memory of playing GTA: Vice City as a teenager, to the extent that whenever Pacino walked past a car…

FILMS OF 1989 Chris: 1989, then. The year that saw the launch of a movie magazine called Empire. What were we doing in 1989? Terri: I was ten. Everything I wanted to see was a 12. At that age, you’re just obsessed with how do I get into a 12? The answer in my case was an MC Hammer pantsuit from Tammy Girl and a perm with loads of hairspray. So 1989, I started going to the pictures. Chris: The pictures. This is 1989, not 1959. Terri: I’m from the North. I’m working class. Ian: In 1989, I was in my second year of doing a degree in film at the Polytechnic of Central London, whose most famous alumnus is Asif Kapadia. I was making really terrible short films and…

ROBERT EGGERS IS a stickler for period detail. His 17th century-set supernatural horror The Witch was eerily authentic, borne of going neck deep into New England Puritans and their supernatural fears. For his follow-up The Lighthouse, an absurdist 1890-set drama starring Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe, he doubled down. Surrounded by piles of books about lighthouses and their keepers in his personal study, Eggers tells Empire where he went to find what he›was looking for. THE LIGHTHOUSES “It was much easier to find evidence of the material world›for this than The Witch,” says Eggers, revelling in the relative modernity of 1890. “Craig Lathrop, the production designer, found many archives of blueprints of lighthouses.” For the film, Eggers wanted to›feature a Fresnel lens — which delivers the lamp’s beam — so…

THE LAST TIME Olivia Colman played a queen, she won an Oscar. Of course, that was less an exercise in serene majesty and more one of screaming, stuffing her face with cake and getting giddy over the sight of Rachel Weisz in leather breeches (quite understandable). So were there any similarities between playing Queen Anne in The Favourite and stepping into the sensible heels of Queen Elizabeth II in The Crown? “They were both called Queen?!” Colman hoots. “I couldn’t think of two more different people.” With a $90 million budget per season, a trophy cabinet stuffed with awards and a vast (although undisclosed) audience, The Crown is the epic jewel in Netflix’s original programming. The first two series, which spanned 1947 to 1964, were triumphs of detail, period set-pieces…

THE REVOLVING DOOR of Hollywood can move fast. A string of dud roles, a couple of reckless incidents, a redemptive new period — this could refer to a lot of high-profile actors who found fame and then became blinded by it. But the remarkable rise and fall and rise again of Shia LaBeouf shows a singular trajectory of creative catharsis and emotional maturation. It hasn’t been an easy road. Following a few golden years as a Disney Channel poster boy, LaBeouf became the face of a multi-billion-dollar franchise in the Transformers films. Off screen, he started to make a name for himself for other reasons: a car crash in 2008, an arrest in 2014 for disorderly conduct and criminal trespass, and another in 2017 for public drunkenness, disorderly conduct and…

HE SADDENED JAMES GUNN and disappointed Karen Gillan. Robert Downey Jr and Samuel L. Jackson also responded to Empire’s interview with Martin Scorsese, in which the filmmaking legend said Marvel movies “aren’t cinema”. The comments came in response to a question about the de-ageing process on The Irishman, but the conversation has since grown beyond. The craft of the MCU is accepted but, ultimately, Marty finds more similarities with theme parks than films, explaining, “It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.” In the year of Avengers: Endgame — where do we go now? One staunch Marvel fan takes on a long-time Scorsese fan to find balance in one of the most animated cinematic crossover debates of the year. Chris Hewitt:…

OUT NOW (ALSO NETFLIX) / CERT MA15+ / 140 MINS DIRECTOR David Michôd CAST Timothée Chalamet, Joel Edgerton, Lily-Rose Depp, Robert Pattinson How do you make a new Shakespeare adaptation fresh? Director David Michôd and co-writer/co-star Joel Edgerton’s approach is to ditch the iambic pentameter and compress his ‘Henriad’ into one lean two-hour film. It’s certainly the most lavish cinematic retelling of the famous story, with all the budget and cinematography we’ve come to expect in the Game Of Thrones era. But it suffers from a plodding middle third and a slow, dour tone. As the hedonistic-turned-hubristic Hal, Timothée Chalamet has the presence required for the boy king, but there’s something slightly off about his performance; Robert Pattinson’s vain Dauphin, meanwhile, boasts a ridiculous French accent that brings to mind…

OUT 14 NOVEMBER CERT TBC / 152 MINS DIRECTOR James Mangold CAST Christian Bale, Matt Damon, Tracy Letts, Caitriona Balfe, Josh Lucas, Jon Bernthal PLOT In the mid-’60s, Ferrari is dominating the racing world, effortlessly winning prize after prize. So Henry Ford II (Letts) orders his underlings to construct a car that will have Ferrari drivers choking on fumes. Enter Carroll Shelby (Damon) and Ken Miles (Bale), two mavericks who might just be able to pull it off. FORD V FERRARI may look like a film about slick motors and the handsome dudes who drive them. And it is that. But it’s also, in a roundabout way, a film about filmmaking. James Mangold, the veteran director who has had his fair share of tangles with studio overseers — he has…

OUT 21 NOVEMBER / CERT TBC / 106 MINS DIRECTOR Mirrah Foulkes CAST Mia Wasikowska, Damon Herriman An age-old toxic folk tale gets a feminist shake-up in Judy & Punch, Mirrah Foulkes’ eccentric yet bold directorial debut. Mia Wasikowska — ever the bristling ingénue — plays wife to Damon Herriman’s callous puppeteer, together entertaining the residents of Judy’s hometown. When Punch commits an unspeakable crime that leaves Judy violently ostracised, however, the film spins on its heel, evolving into a revenge romp for today’s audiences that reclaims masculine power and places it into Wasikowska’s capable hands. The world that Foulkes has built here is ambitious, a fantastical landscape that refuses to be tethered to reality, and while the film shoulders a few tonal misfires with its comedic handling of heavy…

OUT NOW CERT PG / 119 MINS DIRECTOR Joachim Rønning CAST Angelina Jolie, Elle Fanning, Michelle Pfeiffer, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Robert Lindsay, Harris Dickinson, Ed Skrein, Warwick Davis, Robert Lindsay PLOT Queen Aurora (Fanning) is engaged to marry Prince Phillip (Dickinson). When her godmother Maleficent (Jolie) loses her temper during dinner with his parents, King John (Lindsay) and Queen Ingrith (Pfeiffer), a war threatens to tear their worlds apart. THE FIRST MALEFICENT was a magnificently designed, too-densely plotted piece of fairy-tale revisionism, one that — just about — managed to redeem a character who cursed an infant. The good news is that this sequel has a better bad guy, Michelle Pfeiffer’s Queen Ingrith, who gives us a gloriously hateable rival to balance Jolie’s imperious anti-heroine. There’s still a lot of work…

OUT 28 NOVEMBER (NETFLIX) / CERT TBC / 105 MINS DIRECTOR Mati Diop CAST Mama Sané, Amadou Mbow, Ibrahima Traoré Previously best-known as the star of Claire Denis’ 35 Shots Of Rum, French actor-turned-director Mati Diop has quietly earned her auteurial stripes with a handful of striking shorts. Still, her first fiction feature, Atlantics, is a hell of an ambitious calling card. Set in Senegal’s coastal capital Dakar, it looks at the migrant crisis and the shaping influence of first love via Ada (Sané) and Souleiman (Traoré), separated when the latter’s money woes drive him out to sea. What begins as social realism morphs into a crime mystery and ends up as a story of supernatural justice.DP Claire Mathon adds atmosphere, filming the mass grave that is the ocean with…

Brace yourself for the most emotional and bruising Bond yet SPECTRE WAS MEANT to be it for Daniel Craig; the end of the whole kiss kiss shebang bang. His four-film contract to play James Bond up, that movie even ended with 007 doing his version of riding off into the sunset — slaloming through London traffic in an Aston Martin, with his latest lover (Léa Seydoux’s Madeleine Swann) by his side. And so, in theory, the search for a new Bond had begun, with no shortage of candidates, realistic or otherwise, to pick up the Walther PPK for what would be the 25th official movie. But all along, producer Barbara Broccoli, keeper of the family store for several decades now, had her ideal Bond in mind: Daniel Craig. And if…

SERSI PLAYED BY: Gemma Chan The Eternals are a superhuman, immortal race, created by the Celestials. Sersi, who is one of them, has the power to manipulate matter. Not to be confused with the Queen of Westeros. IKARIS PLAYED BY: Richard Madden At D23, Kevin Feige confirmed that Eternals will feature the MCU’s first openly gay character. Rumour has it that it may be Ikaris, the most human member of the Eternals. KINGO SUNEN PLAYED BY: Kumail Nanjiani Kingo is a more offbeat Eternal — in the comics he studied the ways of the samurai in Japan, then became an action-movie star. We’re excited to see the frontman of The Big Sick katana up. THENA PLAYED BY: Angelina Jolie In the comics, Thena can levitate, fly, teleport, cast illusions and…

TOOLING UP FAIRIES Disney has long given us magic-wielding fairies like Tinker Bell and the Fairy Godmother — but never one like Holly Short (Lara McDonnell). The lead fairy in Kenneth Branagh’s fantasy tale, based on Eoin Colfer’s popular book series, hails from Haven City, a super-advanced subterranean fantasy world deep beneath the hills of Ireland. And she’s a member of LEPrecon (see what they did there?), the Lower Elements Police reconnaissance squad — a high-tech force of fairy law-keepers, led by Judi Dench’s no-nonsense, pointy-eared boss Commander Root. The LEP are heavily armoured and armed to the teeth with Neutrino guns — multi-purpose weapons that can transform from a staff, to a bow, to a pistol that unleashes energy-pulsing blasts. It’s one hell of an upgrade from fairy dust,…

FROM HER EARLIEST imaginings of the film in 1985, writer-director Joanna Hogg always conceived The Souvenir as a two-part story. That she ultimately couldn’t shoot them back to back was initially a huge disappointment. “It came down to finances,” she says. “In hindsight I am happy there was a pause, because I came up with a lot of new ideas in that space after shooting part one.” The story picks up in 1985, straight after the events of the first film. Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) is still a film-school student trying to find her voice as an artist. Initially, Hogg wanted to cast Robert Pattinson as a new presence in Julie’s life, but scheduling conflicts proved prohibitive. “It’s hard for me to compete with Batman and Christopher Nolan’s new event…

PROLOGUE West Side Story opens with a street ballet that sets up the New York milieu and the tension between the ruling gangs, the Jets (Americans) and the Sharks (Puerto Ricans). When it erupts into a full-blown turf war as both gangs chase and ambush each other, it’s an almost wordless set-piece that presents Spielberg with an opportunity for the kind of virtuoso filmmaking that is his forte. Think the Cairo basket chase from Raiders but with more finger-clicking. DANCE AT THE GYM This is the story’s turning point: the moment American Tony (Ansel Elgort) and Puerto Rican Maria (Rachel Zegler) will lock eyes amidst a crowded hall and the world falls away. In Robert Wise’s 1961 film version, the real-life sound fades out and the focus singles out the…

WHEN EMPIRE SPOKE to A Quiet Place writer-director-star and monster-wrangler John Krasinski for our spoiler special podcast last April, he ruminated on the unseen scale of the world he’d created. Although he didn’t direct the film with sequels in mind, such narrative potential excited him. “What I did love is that other people have to deal with this,” he said of the monster problem. If the Abbott family were “living through it poorly”, he thought, “are other people living through it well? Is there some other way to survive? It’s interesting.” Universe expansion, you say? Indeed, we joked that a sequel could take place on a submarine. “Run Silent, Run Deep: A Quiet Place 2,” suggested Krasinski for a title. It’s unlikely he’ll take the franchise underwater (if he does,…

1. THE NEW ATTITUDE It’s no secret that a fresh trim marks a fresh start. One of the first things Harley Quinn does is snip off a chunk of her platinum pigtails, as her voiceover explains, “Joker and I broke up.” Living up to the film’s title, Birds Of Prey (And The Fantabulous Emancipation Of One Harley Quinn) capitalises on Harley’s independence. And if it wasn’t clear enough, take note of the knives she throws at the Clown Prince’s portrait, too. 2. THE MONROE TRIBUTE Throughout the iterations of Harley Quinn’s character, from comics to animation, the haywire villain has been partial to a musical number. With a rich red background and 1950s decor, there’s a teaser here that Harley will perform a tribute to Marilyn Monroe’s Diamonds Are A…

IT’S BEEN NEARLY 20 years between my first film as director and the second, Motherless Brooklyn. So I guess the question is: why the rush? Truth is, I didn’t intend for it to be that long. But I knew when I got the rights to Jonathan Lethem’s novel that I wasn’t going to work on it right away. We did Fight Club. I directed Keeping The Faith. For four years I just wasn’t working on it. Then I wrote about half of it but got blocked. Finally, the guy running New Line, Toby Emmerich — we’d become friends doing American History X — told me, “I want the rest. Write it!” He pushed me and pushed me and I finally finished it. And then Toby was the one who said…

Kubrick had been interested in adapting Traumnovelle [‘Dream Story’], Arthur Schnitzler’s novella about the romantic complexities of marriage, since 1969, and when he finally began developing it in earnest in the early ’90s, he knew the book’s sinister masked ball would be the centrepiece. Stanley Kubrick’s final film, 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut, had been a long time coming. Reeling from the fantasy confessions of his wife Alice (Nicole Kidman), Dr Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) treks into the New York night, eventually blagging his way into an elite evening involving dubious masked men, beautiful women, a whole lot of nudity and a shedload of threat. The dramatic highlight of the film, it’s a beautiful, foreboding sequence, dripping with atmosphere. But enough set-up — say “Fidelio” and head on in… Kubrick was…

Rocketman THE TAGLINE FOR Dexter Fletcher’s Rocketman was “Based on a true fantasy”. Which just about sums up the life of its subject, one Elton John, but also gave Fletcher all kinds of artistic licence to play around with the details — chronological or otherwise — of John’s life and career. The result is one of the freshest musicals and biopics in years, with a number of standout sequences. MEET ELTON “I wanted to make something as impactful and arresting as possible,” says Fletcher of the film’s opening shot, in which Elton (Taron Egerton) storms through a set of doors in full-on, gloriously over-the-top feathered regalia. What we don’t know at this point is that Elton is on his way to rehab. “I was trying to create an illusion that…

MIDSOMMAR OUT 6 NOVEMBER / CERT R18+ / 147 MINS Few horrors are as sun-drenched as Midsommar, a film deliberately set in northern Sweden where the midnight sun offers no hiding places. Few horrors contain as many smiling threats, full of hospitality and good cheer even as they burn you alive in the skin of a dead bear. And few horrors have as much to say about destructive relationships, mental health and family with such suffocating intensity. There really are very few horror directors like Ari Aster, who (much like Jordan Peele) seems to have confirmed his status as a master of the genre in his second film (after the equally impressive Hereditary), offering jaw-dropping visual iconography, a tone that quivers like a needle between the fears and the funnies…