Table of contents for May 2020 in Empire

IT’S BEEN 34 years since Tom Cruise and Now and again, their orbits would cross, producer Jerry Bruckheimer (plus director Tony and now and again, the notion of getting back Scott, and producer Don Simpson) first felt the together one more time for another high-need… the need for speed, and made Top Gun, altitude adventure would come up. But every the movie that propelled Cruise’s already-rising time that happened, Cruise would say no. star into the stratosphere. Where he’s remained “Everywhere I went, people would be like, ‘Do since. Thirty-four years, during which time they Top Gun,’ and I’m like, ‘Guys, I don’t know how to felt the need again… the need for speed again by do it,’” Cruise tells Empire. “I don’t know what the essentially remaking Top Gun…

NIA DACOSTA GREW up loving horror. She counts Alien and Jaws among her favourite-ever movies, while The Fly and The Thing are “hugely important” to the Harlem-raised director. Yet they were all, for the most part, missing something: people like her. In 1992, that changed with Candyman, Bernard Rose’s adaptation of a Clive Barker short story, relocated to the Chicago projects and featuring the first Black horror icon: the hook-handed, bee-wrangling phantom played by Tony Todd. “It was awesome to see Black people in horror that didn’t all die immediately,” says DaCosta. “And Candyman lived in the projects. I lived near the projects my entire childhood, so it felt really close to home.” Rose’s film received some flak for its portrayal of racial stereotypes and DaCosta recognises that “when you…

A CHILLING METAPHOR for the patriarchy, The Other Lamb depicts a remote cult of women who follow a beardy, Jesus-like leader, played by Game Of Thrones’ Michiel Huisman; for British actor Raffey Cassidy, who plays cult member Selah, it meant getting a deeper understanding of the reality of religious sects. “There are so many documentaries out there that I watched and researched,” Cassidy says. “Because this is a real-life story, in a way. Catherine [McMullen, the film’s screenwriter] sent me the documentary The End Of The World Cult, where they follow this one man who was very abusive to the young girls and women.” Cassidy’s research helped kindle a respect for Selah and the women in the camp. “[Selah] has so many dimensions,” she says. “It’s easy from an outside…

AT THE LA PREMIERE of The Mandalorian, Werner Herzog went rogue. Director Jon Favreau was on stage with the cast of his Disney+ Star Wars TV show when the maverick filmmaker suddenly grabbed a microphone and started excitedly shouting about the revolutionary new technology used during the series’ shoot. “He was telling the audience, ‘You have to understand, this is something incredible! You see this world around you, you forget where you are!’ He couldn’t contain himself,” laughs David Morin, one of the people responsible for getting Herzog so worked up. Morin is head of the Los Angeles Lab of Epic Games, makers of the Unreal Engine. You might have heard of it: since 1998, it’s been the software behind over 500 blockbuster video games, including current hit Fortnite. Recently,…

WHAT DO YOU do after winning four Oscars in one of the biggest shocks in Academy Awards history? “I will drink until next morning,” Bong Joon-ho said while accepting his Best Director gong (he also picked up Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay and Best International Film) for Parasite at the ceremony in LA earlier this year. But Bong has post-Oscar plans beyond boozing. As he revealed to Empire, the filmmaker has a string of movies already in development. “It’s confidential, but what I can tell you is that it’s half located in London,” the auteur told us before his Oscars win, discussing one of these next projects: an English-language drama based on a news story that circulated in 2016. Bong wasn’t willing to be drawn on story details, but did…

★★★ OUT 27 MARCH / CERT 15 / 98 MINS DIRECTOR Lorcan Finnegan CAST Jesse Eisenberg, Imogen Poots, Jonathan Aris Director Lorcan Finnegan’s second feature is a bizarre and often grotesque parody of human ritual that leans into artificiality. The focus of the horror lies in the domestic space, as central couple Gemma (a fierce Poots) and Tom (Eisenberg, subverting his usual nerviness) are given no discernible way out of a creepy maze of starter homes. The film doesn’t do quite enough to move beyond its simple skewering of the ideal of the nuclear family. The point is mostly made about halfway through the film, and the dialogue handed to Eisenberg and Poots is often superfluous, but Vivarium at least partly makes up for that with a string of unpredictable…

★★ OUT 10 APRIL / CERT TBC / 120 MINS DIRECTOR Oleg Stepchenko CAST Jason Flemyng, Xingtong Yao, Jackie Chan, Arnold Schwarzenegger In all their years as kings of action-comedy cinema, it’s unlikely that either Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jackie Chan have starred in a weirder film than this Chinese-Russian fantasy. Pirates, dragons and the mythological meaning of tea are all packed into Oleg Stepchenko’s adventure about an English map-maker (Jason Flemyng) who meets a warrior princess (Xingtong Yao) off to battle a face-swapping witch. Chan and Schwarzenegger appear only briefly: the former as a prisoner, the latter as a guard. Their battle scene suffers the same problems riddling the rest of The Iron Mask: shoddy CGI, awful dialogue and the sort of confused storytelling no amount of high-wire fighting can…

★★ OUT 10 APRIL / CERT PG / 110 MINS DIRECTOR Andy De Emmony CAST Michael Caine (voice), Matthew Goode, Paula Patton Kids discover a magical creature in this film based on Four Children And It by Jacqueline Wilson, in turn inspired by E. Nesbit’s classic novel of (nearly) the same name. Young teens Ros (Teddie-Rose Malleson-Allen) and Smash (Ashley Aufderheide) are forced together on holiday after their respective parents (Goode, Patton) begin dating. Along with their younger siblings, the girls find the Psammead (Caine), an ancient creature who can grant one wish a day, and might just bring this family together. There’s some amusement as they experiment with new powers, but the story is tonally confused by Russell Brand’s obsessive local landowner, and nods to E.T. just remind you…

★★★ OUT NOW / CERT 12A / 106 MINS DIRECTOR Philippa Lowthorpe CAST Keira Knightley, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Keeley Hawes, Jessie Buckley Keira Knightley and Gugu Mbatha-Raw headline this patriarchy-bashing would-be crowdpleaser. Knightley plays Sally, a member of the new Women’s Liberation Movement, set on protesting Miss World 1970. Inside the contest, Jennifer (Mbatha-Raw) hopes to be the first black winner and become a broadcaster. Through her, we see a far richer narrative that sadly plays second fiddle to the feminist-by-numbers journey of the Movement. The trophy-like treatment of the women in Miss World 1970 is shocking by today’s standards, but too much time is spent spelling out what an audience could readily piece together for themselves. There’s a great story within Misbehaviour — we just don’t get to see enough…

★★★★ OUT 27 MARCH / CERT TBC / 101 MINS DIRECTOR Haifaa Al-Mansour CAST Mila Al Zahrani, Nora Al Awadh, Dae Al Hilali, Khalid Abdulraheem For her fourth feature, Saudi Arabian director Haifaa Al-Mansour returns to her homeland for a compelling, sensitive and timely drama about a female doctor who decides to run for the local council. Just as with her 2012 debut Wadjda, about a young Saudi girl determined to own a bicycle, Al-Mansour is unafraid to tackle head-on the misogynistic traditions and customs which pigeonhole and shackle the country’s women, but does so with a light touch and a wry humour that avoids any soapboxing. That approach is shared by the strong cast: Mila Al Zahrani, in particular, is excellent in the lead role of Maryam, a modern…

★★★★ OUT 27 MARCH / CERT 18 / 85 MINS DIRECTOR Johannes Nyholm CAST Ylva Gallon, Leif Edlund, Katarina Jakobson There are plenty of film buff-y terms to help describe Koko-di Koko-da — “elevated horror”, “Groundhog Day meets Evil Dead”, “Lynchian nightmare” — but nothing does it as much justice as “batshit crazy”. Swedish writer-director Johannes Nyholm’s fable about devastating loss — a bereaved couple (Ylva Gallon, Leif Edlund) go camping and get caught in a repetitive cycle of torment and terror, meted out by three folkloric figures — has the repetitive logic of a dream, the insistent simplicity of a nursery rhyme and the unsettling nature of Ari Aster. It is a patience-tester (the title song is one of the most irritating earworms of the cinematic year), but if…

★★★★ OUT 27 MARCH CERT 18 / 170 MINS DIRECTOR Václav Marhoul CAST Petr Kotlar, Julian Sands, Udo Kier, Harvey Keitel PLOT In 1940s Eastern Europe, a young boy (Kotlar) is run out of town after accidentally burning down his dead aunt’s house. From there he is ejected from a succession of hamlets, thrown each time to an increasingly horrid set of lions. Evil is everywhere and somehow, he must survive it. BIBLICAL-GRADE HORROR show The Painted Bird begins with a young boy being chased, beaten and forced to watch while his pet ferret is urinated on, set on fire and burned to death, and it gets increasingly gruesome from there. “It’s your fault,” he is told, by one of the film’s kindlier characters, of what’s just happened. “You shouldn’t…

★★★★ OUT 24 MARCH EPISODES VIEWED 8 OF 8 SHOWRUNNER Jon Favreau CAST Pedro Pascal, Gina Carano, Carl Weathers, Werner Herzog, Nick Nolte PLOT Five years after the fall of the Empire, a Mandalorian gun-for-hire (Pascal) scrapes out a living tracking down strays for the bounty hunter’s guild. After accepting an off-the-books job from a former Imperial (Herzog), he finds himself custodian of a small, green child, and in the middle of a whole lot of trouble. IT’S BEEN A full four months since Disney+ and its flagship show, The Mandalorian, launched in the US. Four months during which Baby Yoda grew into an internet phenomenon, and the Mandalorian mantra, “This is the way,” became the mic drop at the end of every third Twitter exchange. This month UK audiences…

1 THE OPAL Alex Godfrey: The key gem in Uncut Gems is more than a MacGuffin. It’s a divine trick. A test. Howard Ratner, played by Adam Sandler, who’s done all the legwork to get hold of the Ethiopian black opal, hopes it will change his life. It definitely does that. As writer-directors the Safdie brothers were wondering which stone to feature while writing the film, Ethiopia began talking up their black opals, which were said to bring good luck — naturally this made sense for Howard’s story, on top of the fact that the vibrant colours were so visible in the stones. In the film, the Safdies bless the opal with magic realism — perfect for a man who attracts a beautiful, swirling chaos. 2 THE BASKETBALL Nick de…

IN THE BASEMENT CONFERENCE ROOM OF an upmarket West London hotel, a dozen actors and stuntpeople are charging around on all fours like damn dirty apes. The smell of sweat hangs in the air as they pound the carpet with the short, black crutches they’re using to extend their arms to simian lengths. Their teacher, a square-jawed man of 5’ 7” with expressive eyes, raises himself upright. “Now you’re tapping back into your roots,” says Terry Notary, encouragingly. “This is how we were designed.” When he’s not running movement workshops like this one, Notary is one of the world’s leading performance-capture performers. Having started as an acrobat with Cirque du Soleil, he gracefully tumbled into acting when he was cast alongside other circus artists in Ron Howard’s 2000 film How…

HE STARRED IN MOVIES WITH BRAD PITT, ANTHONY HOPKINS AND JOHN CANDY... PRESENTED AN AWARD AT THE OSCARS... EARNED $10,000 A DAY... AND ATE 48 CHICKENS A WEEK. MOVIE DIRECTORS, ONCE in a while, can come to blows with their stars. Just ask Werner Herzog or David O. Russell. But when Jean-Jacques Annaud got on the wrong side of his top-billed actor while making 1988 wilderness adventure The Bear, he risked far more than a cut lip or bruised ego. His lead performer was nine-and-a-half feet tall, weighed over 1,400lbs, and was strong enough to snap him in half like a stale baguette. During one lunchbreak while shooting in the Italian Dolomites, Annaud’s on-set photographer pointed out that they didn’t have any good photos of the director with Bart the…

ON THE SURFACE at least, The Limey made sense. Having turned out a slick crime caper with 1998’s Out Of Sight and belatedly delivered on the debut-movie promise of 1989’s sex, lies, and videotape, Steven Soderbergh encored with a taut, irreverent, culture-clash revenge thriller starring ’60s icon Terence Stamp. To the delight of critics, the film took a “cubist” (his word) editorial approach that filtered its events through the emotion-racked memory of its main character, Wilson (Stamp), a cockney criminal seeking revenge in LA for the death of his daughter. However, audiences stayed away, and the film earned a paltry $3.2 million off a budget of three times that. Yet The Limey is pure Soderbergh, strikingly inventive and intriguingly playful, and remains his greatest overlooked movie. Albeit one which, he…

Alamy cr MONOS, ALEJANDRO LANDES’ beautiful, brutal dreamscape about a group of teen soldiers in Latin America, is the real deal. Inspired by Colombia’s interminable civil war, Landes shortlisted a gang of mostly non-actors, stuck them in a boot camp, whittled them down to the toughest of the tough, then shot the film at first up a mountain, and then in a remote and unforgiving jungle. That jungle was rough. That jungle was tough. Landes tells us how he pulled it off. FINDING INTEL For expert guidance, Landes hired Wilson Salazar, a former child soldier. “He had risen to the top of one of the most feared combat units and he had deserted,” says Landes. “So he had a price on his head. I asked him to come on as…

The BFI’s Flipside label, dedicated to dark corners of British cinema, has issued its 40th title, Lewis Gilbert’s 1953 melodrama Cosh Boy — a look at psychotic teenage thuggery on bomb sites and outside dingy pubs, with young Joan Collins suffering in a tight sweater. Other recent highlights: Satanic 1970s sexploitation documentaries (Legend Of The Witches and Secret Rites), the 1980 true-crime featurette The Orchard End Murder, the demented biker folk-horror movie Psychomania (co-starring Beryl Reid and Nicky Henson), and the James Mason-starring sour-side-of-the-swinging’60s thriller Stranger In The House. The care lavished on these theoretically marginal films is consistently astonishing — it warms the heart to know that, say, Primitive London (1965) is out on Blu-ray in a more lavish, better-looking edition than, for instance, Return Of The Jedi (1983).…

It’s A Wonderful Life Chosen by GURINDER CHADHA GURINDER CHADHA: “I know it’s cheesy, but I’d have to choose It’s A Wonderful Life , when George Bailey [Jimmy Stewart], after all the pain he’s gone through, has got his little girl in his arms and the whole town comes and gives him money. I’m welling up even talking about it. I think it’s that sense of community. It’s hope, isn’t it? That sense that people will do the right thing. Someone once said about my work, ‘It’s quite Capra-esque.’ I’m never going to be as great as Frank Capra, but I do understand where that reference came from. He would always talk about the darkness in characters, but then bring them out the other end. It’s beautiful.” INT. BAILEY HOUSE…

MAGAZINE SHELF-ISOLATION Dear Empire, thank you for saving my sanity. I am in Suzhou, China, waiting for this whole coronavirus thing to blow over and you have provided the perfect way to help me through the tedium of quarantine: watching the films from ‘100 Greatest Movies Of The Century (So Far)’ that I had missed. It’s been a wild ride. Any recommendations to get me through the next three weeks ’til we go back to work? KATRIONA HOSKINS, SUZHOU, CHINA Thanks for your message, Katriona — we recommend you stay safe, dig into our ‘100 Greatest Films Of All Time’ list from 2017, and have this Picturehouse membership for the next time you’re in the UK. Empire’s star letter wins a Picturehouse Membership, plus one for a friend! Valid for…

Mandalorian unit photography by François Duhamel, SMPSP, and Melinda Sue Gordon, SMPSP, courtesy of Lucasfilm, Ltd. Daniel Prakopcyk/Netflix ON HIS CHARACTER IN THE LETTER FOR THE KING “Tiuri is an underdog. He’s a failed knight, an outcast in Dagonaut. He doesn’t fit in as he’s not originally from there. At the trials you can see how much he doesn’t suit all the attributes of a stereotypical knight, but I guess he does have this bravery and courage you need to become a knight, that sends him on his mission.” ON WIELDING A SWORD “Sword-fight training was the death of me, but also the best part of filming. We had a lot of rehearsals with the stunt team and we’d go over our fights so many times. When it came to…

“WE JUST STARTED a new documentary series on longevity with Chris Hemsworth,” says director Darren Aronofsky, matter-of-factly, as if a Darren Aronofsky documentary series on longevity with Chris Hemsworth is a totally normal occurrence. And yet here we are. Coming later in the year on the National Geographic channel, Limitless is produced by Aronofsky and Jane Root, who previously worked together on the same channel’s Earth exploration One Strange Rock, hosted by Will Smith. Limitless will throw six immense mental and physical challenges at Hemsworth to examine how we — or at least the God of Thunder, which seems like a bit of an unfair advantage — can live healthier, smarter and longer. Indeed, battling age is a big theme of the series, which will investigate how humans can regenerate…

NETFLIX MAY HAVE lost the rights to produce Marvel TV shows, but that hasn’t quashed the streaming giant’s interest in comic-book properties. Among the slew of adaptations on their slate is The Old Guard, an original movie set to arrive later this year. WHAT IS THE OLD GUARD? It was originally published by Image Comics in 2017, as a five-issue miniseries by writer Greg Rucka and artist Leandro Fernández. A second series, The Old Guard: Force Multiplied, began at the end of 2019. Rucka is no stranger to screen adaptations: he’s the co-creator of Stumptown (now an ABC show starring Cobie Smulders) and is also known for his extensive work with DC Comics, which included the co-creation of the current Kate Kane/Batwoman CW series. WHAT’S ITABOUT? The series focuses on…

IF YOU WERE worried that Gareth Evans — the mastermind behind the bloody mayhem of both Raid movies — was about to lose his edge by moving into television with his new show Gangs Of London, allow Empire to disabuse you of that notion, sunshine. The screen may be smaller, but the stunts are just as big and intense. In the first, Evans-directed episode of this sprawling revenge thriller, for example, there are two fight scenes that are as good, and intense, as anything Evans served up in The Raid and The Raid 2. First comes a pub brawl in which a dart is repeatedly used to hit a different kind of bullseye; and then there’s an extraordinarily brutal showdown between a guy who has a meat cleaver, and a…

★★★★★ OUT 10 APRIL CERT 12A / 93 MINS DIRECTOR Sarah Gavron CAST Bukky Bakray, Kosar Ali, D’angelou Osei Kissiedu PLOT Sixteen-year-old Shola (Bakray) and her little brother Emmanuel (Kissiedu) live in an East London estate with little money. When their mother abandons them and social services are alerted, Shola is forced to take Emmanuel on the run, relying on the refuge of her friends to keep them from being separated. RARE AND JOYFUL are the times when you stumble across a film that simply can’t be bottled. Where the filmmaker, through the act of really listening to a story and committing to telling it through the right voices, can make a film with such life-altering capabilities that it outshines the work of its more polished, prestigious peers by light…

★★★★★ OUT NOW CERT U / 107 MINS DIRECTOR Dan Scanlon CAST (VOICES) Tom Holland, Chris Pratt, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Octavia Spencer PLOT On his PUth birthday, elf Ian Lightfoot (Holland) is gifted a magical artefact from his mother (Louis-Dreyfus) that will allow him and older sibling Barley (Pratt) to spend one day with the late father he never got to meet. When the spell goes wrong, the brothers set off on a fantasy quest to try it again. CERTAIN PIXAR FILMS — your WALL ● Es and Inside Outs — change the game. Onward, the animation studio’s 22nd film, doesn’t do anything so lofty as pay homage to silent cinema, or forever change the way we think about our emotions. It’s not even as tear-jerking as Toy Story 3 or…

★★★★ OUT 20 MARCH CERT PG / 107 MINS DIRECTOR Hirokazu Kore-eda CAST Catherine Deneuve, Juliette Binoche, Ethan Hawke, Clémentine Grenier PLOT Fabienne Dangeville (Deneuve) is French screen-acting royalty. On the eve of the publication of her memoir, ‘The Truth’, her daughter Lumir (Binoche), son-in-law Hank (Hawke) and granddaughter Charlotte (Grenier) arrive to celebrate. But sparks begin to fly when Lumir takes issue with the book’s rose-coloured view of their relationship. IT’S ALWAYS A concern when a filmmaker leaves their homeland and goes international. Movie history is littered with Hollywood disasters and Euro-puddings in which an auteur attempts to play out their obsessions in a new context. Rejoice, then, that Hirokazu Kore-eda’s sortie from his native Japan to Paris has seen his touch survive more-or-less intact. The Truth is a…

★★★★ OUT 3 APRIL CERT 15 / 87 MINS DIRECTOR Kitty Green CAST Julia Garner, Matthew Macfadyen, Kristine Froseth, Makenzie Leigh, Jon Orsini PLOT Jane (Garner) is a young graduate who has starting working at a film production company with the goal of ultimately becoming a producer. For now, she is an assistant — and on one crucial day she slowly realises just how much shady behaviour is running through the higher ranks. THE SKY IS dark and quiet both when Jane (Julia Garner) first walks into the office, and when she leaves. “First one in, last one out, right?” she’s reminded. Jane does everything, for everyone; taking calls, booking cars, cleaning floors, stacking bottles, washing dishes. Green spends the first 20 minutes or so showing this in real time…

★★★★ OUT 20 MARCH / CERT 18 / 105 MINS DIRECTOR Jukka-Pekka Valkeapää CAST Pekka Strang, Krista Kosonen, Ilona Huhta A strong contender for the best title of 2020, Dogs Don’t Wear Pants is a command given by dominatrix Mona (Kosonen) to her submissive Juha (Strang, funny and affecting) to take his trousers off and get on all fours. It’s a key moment in Finnish filmmaker Jukka-Pekka Valkeapää’s deftly judged black comedy-drama, as Juha embraces autoerotic asphyxiation as a means to reunite with his late wife in visions created in the hinterland between life and death. Dogs doesn’t pull its punches — the S&M is winceworthy — but it has different colours, too; desert-dry wit, unexpected bursts of tenderness and a worldview that surprisingly reframes the kinkiest, degrading acts as…

★★★★ OUT 27 MARCH / CERT 15 / 110 MINS DIRECTOR Daniel Gordon FEATURES Adam Goodes, Stan Grant, Nova Peris In 2013, Australian Football League legend Adam Goodes found himself in the spotlight when he insisted on the removal of a 13-year-old spectator who had loudly called him an “ape” mid-match. The ensuing media-fuelled racism that ultimately led to his premature retirement in 2015 is efficiently unpacked by veteran sports-documentary maker Daniel Gordon. Mileage may vary with the decision to give a significant amount of screen time to right-wing commentators to voice their misguided views, but the even-handed approach works well when it’s juxtaposed alongside interview subjects such as Stan Grant, a journalist of Indigenous Australian descent, whose perspective helps drive the film. And while Goodes’ story is compelling in…

OUT NOW (NETFLIX) / 115 MINS DIRECTOR Dee Rees CAST Anne Hathaway, Willem Dafoe, Ben Affleck, Toby Jones, Rosie Perez Dee Rees’ follow-up to Mudbound has sparks of her genius but is mostly a disappointing muddle. Based on Joan Didion’s 1996 novel, it follows committed journo Elena McMahon (a trying-very-hard Anne Hathaway). Obsessed with the Iran-Contra affair, Elena takes on a dodgy arms deal set up by her ill father (a rare poor Willem Dafoe performance), who ends up featuring in the story she is reporting on. What follows is ambitious but overstuffed, hamstrung by confusing plotting, an overwritten voiceover and baffling supporting characters, including Toby Jones’ resort owner and Ben Affleck’s politico. The longer it goes on, the more nonsensical, impenetrable and dull the film becomes. Which is a…

★★ OUT 3 APRIL / CERT 15 / 94 MINS DIRECTOR Emily Harris CAST Hannah Rae, Devrim Lingnau, Jessica Raine Based on Sheridan Le Fanu’s 19th-century novel, Carmilla tells the forbidden love story between Lara (Rae) and an elusive girl who seeks refuge in her stately manor. A salve for Lara’s swelling loneliness, the bloodthirsty Carmilla (Lingnau) quickly becomes a subject of infatuation, much to the disapproval of governess Miss Fontaine (Raine). Both actors carry the climactic relationship commendably, but their performances feel stifled by director Emily Harris’ overuse of visual metaphors (heavily stylised shots of neighbouring wildlife), which serve more as a distraction than a deeper narrative layer. Admirers of Le Fanu may enjoy this traditional take on gothic seduction, but those craving more bite for their buck will…

★★ OUT NOW / PRIME VIDEO EPISODES VIEWED 10 OF 10 SHOWRUNNER David Weil CAST Al Pacino, Logan Lerman, Jerrika Hinton, Greg Austin, Kate Mulvany, Josh Radnor, Louis Ozawa, Lena Olin, Jeannie Berlin PLOT In P977, comic-store clerk Jonah Heidelbaum (Lerman) discovers that Nazis have been living undercover in the United States. Spurred on by the murder of his Holocaust-surviving grandmother (Berlin), he joins a gang of Nazi-hunters led by eccentric millionaire Meyer Offerman (Pacino). STRUTTING ONTO SCREENS like the wannabe offspring of The Boys and Inglourious Basterds, Hunters certainly walks the walk. It has pop-culture references (Star Wars and superheroes, mainly). It riffs on the exploitation pictures of the era in which it’s set (the late ’70s). And it doesn’t stint on the extreme violence, with multiple stabbings and…

1 BAD DATE Amon Warmann: While Queen and Slim are at one point called “the Black Bonnie and Clyde”, that label feels reductive. The couple don’t start the movie as lovers, and by the end of the opening scene it’s hard to even see them becoming friends. Their first date is freighted with zingers (“Did you pick this place because it’s all you could afford?” asks Jodie Turner-Smith’s Queen. “It’s Black-owned,” is the fast reply from Daniel Kaluuya’s Slim), and the less-than-subtle shading doesn’t end there. Indeed, Queen’s harsh put-down of having only agreed to the Tinder date because Slim “had a sad look” on his face and she “felt sorry” for him is not exactly the kind of repartee that will lead to the post-date activity Slim is hoping…

JOHN TURTURRO KNOWS A THING OR TWO ABOUT COMPLICATED MEN WITH TERRIBLE TENDENCIES. Suit by Suit Supply. Shirt by Eton.Shoes by To Boot New York “The worst people in the world don’t always know they’re being bad. Some of them think they’re right to do what they do,” says the actor/director, who has been indie cinema’s go-to guy for tortured souls with teetering temperaments for almost four decades now. From his racist street thug in Do The Right Thing to the put-upon patsies he’s portrayed in four Coen brothers collaborations, when it comes to untrustworthy rogues with the close-to-combusting energy of a shaken-up cola can, there’s no-one more reliable than the seasoned New Yorker, who’s been called upon to play such personality types again and again across his career. “I…

SCROLL THROUGH THE YOUTUBE comments on your average Marvel movie trailer and you’ll find a mixture of gushing excitement and nerdish pedantry. The October 2017 teaser for X-Men spin-off The New Mutants, however, is a different story. This page appears to have become a training ground for stand-up comedians. “Can’t wait to watch this... in 2030,” chuckles one wag. “I quit smoking to live longer so I can see this movie in 2060,” snickers another. A few lines down, the conceit is stretched to breaking point: “2079: Spider-Man retired, Snyder Cut released, Keith Richards still alive... New Mutants pushed back to 2080.” Yes, if you’ve been following the trajectory of The New Mutants — the 13th and final instalment of the X-Men film series, concerning a group of troubled teens…

Mean Streets TWENTY NINE YEARS old, long hair lank around a still somewhat adolescent face, Martin Scorsese fidgets in John Cassavetes’ office on the Universal backlot. It’s 1972. Cassavetes has proved a powerful screen presence in The Dirty Dozen and Rosemary’s Baby, as well as more-or-less invented the American independent film. Faces, his heart-rending depiction of a disintegrating marriage, was self-financed and took three years to make. It earned an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay in 1969, but he’s still swimming outside the mainstream, writing and directing movies only on his own terms. In contrast, young Marty has made one student feature, Who’s That Knocking At My Door, been fired from planned Hollywood debut The Honeymoon Killers, and just finished Boxcar Bertha, an exploitation picture for one-man film factory Roger…

AS A LIFE-LONG fan of his Westerns, I can’t explain why it took me until my mid-forties to watch Leone’s final film. Perhaps it was a distant memory of the film’s initial reviews; perhaps the intimidating (229 minutes!) running time. If I’m honest, these days I baulk at anything past the 90-minute mark, and if Empire hadn’t come knocking, my decidedly elderly copy would have remained in cellophane for at least another decade. What did I expect, going in? Nothing less than Leone’s unique, revisionist take on the classic Hollywood gangster film. Initial impressions were strong. The director’s trademark style was evident from the start, if muted in comparison to his earlier films; the aspect-ratio smaller, slow zooms on the close-ups looking a little dated for a movie made in…

IAN SHAW WAS around seven years old when he first watched his dad play salty fisherman Quint in Jaws. “I remember being very scared,” he recalls. “There were a couple of times when I had dreams I had sharks circling my bed and I would call out and my dad would actually come and save me. I somehow managed to separate the fact that he wasn’t Quint.” Fast-dolly-zoom-forward and Shaw has co-written and stars in The Shark Is Broken, a play examining Jaws’ tempestuous shoot, that was a hit at last year’s Edinburgh festival. Born from a literal moment of self-reflection (“I looked in the mirror and thought I looked like Quint because I had a moustache”), Shaw identified the behind-the-camera story’s potential for compelling conflict. “You had three actors,…

A NEW TWISTED WEB? After the success of the first film, master detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) will return. But, in true Poirot style, expect a new setting for the sequel, and a fresh set of supporting characters. “I’ll write the script, show it to Daniel and we’ll see what we see,” he tells Empire. “It’s a genre that has so many possibilities. If you think about the amount of books that [Agatha] Christie wrote, and how she didn’t repeat herself in terms of locale and theme, there are so many variables.” A NEW PROTAGONIST? Just as Marta (Ana de Armas) was the protagonist of the first film, so the sequel will be told from the perspective of a character wrapped up in the murder, not the detective himself. “I’m…

MAGNET PLANE FAST & FURIOUS 9 Oh, to be a fly on the wall of the Fast & Furious brainstorming sessions. Somewhere in Vin Diesel’s HQ, with the smell of petrol heavy in the air, there is a whiteboard with the words scribbled: “What if planes, but also magnets?” PLANE-WITHIN-A-PLANE NO TIME TO DIE James Bond has manned helicopters, jetpacks, even spaceships throughout the years. But never a plane within a plane. Here’s hoping he won’t be attempting re-entry this time. Alamy, Getty Images. The Old Guard by Greg Rucka E Leandro Fernflndez, published by Image Comics. HEDGEHOG-POWERED PLANE SONIC THE HEDGEHOG Dr Robotnik (Jim Carrey) uses one of Sonic’s magic blue quills to power his floating Egg Jet. Is he a supervillain or, in fact, an environmentalist who’s found…

Alamy, Getty Images IT COMES FROM A NURSERY RHYME The film shares its title with a popular French lullaby. “I sang it a lot as a kid,” says director Johannes Nyholm. “It’s funny but also a bit scary. [The rhyme] is about a dead rooster which is still alive in a way, living in a limbo land between death and life.” IT’S BASED ON A NIGHTMARE The film depicts a grieving couple trapped in a hellish loop, repeatedly assaulted by a giggling Dutchman in a white suit. The Groundhog Day-esque structure borrows, Nyholm says, from his dreams. “I mean, it’s the way my nightmares work, at least,” he says. “You get stuck in a situation, you try to escape, then end up in the same spot again.” IT HAS SOME…

★★ OUT 20 MARCH / CERT 12A / 109 MINS DIRECTOR Marjane Satrapi CAST Rosamund Pike, Sam Riley, Aneurin Barnard Marie Curie lived her life amid radioactive fumes, which led to both her historic achievements as a scientist, and her ultimate demise, as the chemicals infected her. Rosamund Pike plays Marie Curie with spirited, stubborn authority, but feels like a struggling anchor in a film plagued by too many unstable elements; visually, the high frame rate, evoking nature documentaries, goes to war against animated montages, bringing director Marjane Satrapi’s previous experience with graphic novels to the fore. Extreme emotion distracts and distances instead of offering immersion — leaving the scientist’s achievements as incredible and impenetrable as they were before the film began.…

★★★★ OUT 27 MARCH / CERT TBC / 120 MINS DIRECTOR Nora Fingscheidt CAST Helena Zengel, Albrecht Schuch Germany’s entry into this year’s Oscars, System Crasher gets its title from the term for an anti-social child who can’t be contained within welfare institutions. Benni (Helena Zengel) is nine, traumatised and volatile, and is pushed between different care homes before inevitably escaping. The body of the film neatly etches Benni’s relationship with care worker Micha (Albrecht Schuch), raising questions about whether prescription drugs or plain old love is the most effective treatment. By staying true to Benni’s nature, the story feels repetitive (she runs away, she gets caught), but Zengel gives a tour-de-force performance by turns ferocious and touching, and Fingscheidt’s direction is equally raw yet sensitive. A tough but necessary…

★★ OUT NOW (NETFLIX) / CERT TBC / 111 MINS DIRECTOR Peter Berg CAST Mark Wahlberg, Winston Duke, Alan Arkin Spenser Confidential, the latest Mark Wahlberg-Peter Berg collaboration, is less the exercise in jingoism of Lone Survivor and Patriot’s Day, instead playing out like a parody of the earnest machismo that drove such movies. It’s a hackneyed premise — Wahlberg’s ex-cop Spenser teams up with MMA fighter Hawk (Duke) to investigate the murder of Spenser’s former colleagues — and, while it doesn’t take itself too seriously, relies on jokes that feel old, right up to Spenser’s utter confusion at things like ‘The Cloud’. Coupled with some regressive stereotypes, the overall feel of the film is akin to a TV pilot — right down to the bland camerawork and embarrassing dad-rock…

★★ OUT NOW CERT 15 / 90 MINS DIRECTOR Craig Zobel CAST Betty Gilpin, Emma Roberts, Hilary Swank PLOT Awakening as prey in a deadly game of class warfare turned real, a dozen confused Americans find themselves stalked by vicious, self-styled “godless elites” who seek release for their political rage. Crystal (Gilpin), a resourceful survivor with hidden skills, has a different endgame in mind. IN THE SPIRIT of John Waters, we’ll say that no film deserves to be banned, least of all by a disgruntled Twitter critic (or American President) who hasn’t even seen the darn thing. In the case of Blumhouse’s The Hunt, shelved by distributor Universal last August in the wake of the Dayton and El Paso mass shootings, the controversy turns out to be more sizzle than…

★★ OUT NOW / CERT 15 / 83 MINS DIRECTOR Miguel Arteta CAST Tiffany Haddish, Rose Byrne, Billy Porter, Salma Hayek, Jennifer Coolidge Tiffany Haddish and Rose Byrne play BFFs and business partners in this female-focused comedy that tries hard to cash in on the commercial success of its groundbreaking peers. Homing in on the leads’ abilities to blend bawdy humour with sentiment, the script lands Mia (Tiffany Haddish) and Mel (Rose Byrne) in a series of egregiously overused predicaments (food-based sabotage, weaponised karaoke), and pits them against Salma Hayek’s cosmetics titan in an outdated case of female rivalry. An established cast is here at director Miguel Arteta’s disposal — including a grossly underused Billy Porter — but Like A Boss falls foul of formulaic writing and a mistrust of…

★★★ OUT NOW / CERT PG / 100 MINS DIRECTOR Chris Sanders CAST Harrison Ford, Cara Gee, Karen Gillan Fitting into that sub-genre of movies that follows a dog from owner to owner, this charming remake of Jack London’s 1903 short story follows muscular mutt Buck (completely CG) through the Gold Rush, joining a mail-delivery team before winding up with bereaved outdoorsman John Thornton (Harrison Ford). Flitting between obviously animated to completely photo-real, Buck’s performance is so fine-tuned — he has the range of Joaquin Phoenix and the comic timing of Phoebe Waller-Bridge — it works against you believing he is a real dog. But the upside is that director Chris Sanders can design amped-up, dynamic shots — the sledding sequences are exhilarating — that give the film confidence and…

★★ OUT 20 MARCH / CERT PG / 98 MINS DIRECTOR Shelagh McLeod CAST Richard Dreyfuss, Colm Feore, Krista Bridges, Lyriq Bent Richard Dreyfuss is pretty much the only reason to see Shelagh McLeod’s strangely low-key drama. He plays Angus Stewart, a retired civil engineer who is being farmed out to a senior citizens’ home, but finds a potential escape in a lottery to win the only civilian seat on a two-week journey into space funded by billionaire Elon Musk/ Richard-Branson-alike Marcus Brown (Feore). It starts slowly, relying on clichéd views of comedy OAPs, but doesn’t really pick up when Angus enters the world of the TV lottery show and the subsequent flight: both feel cheap and unconvincing. Dreyfuss adds some twinkle but his presence is a reminder of Spielbergian…

1 ONE HARLEY QUINN Getty Images, Landmark Cathy Yan: There has been a long cinematic history of male anti-heroes or pure villains — Scarface, Taxi Driver... They are compelling characters, not because you like them but because you like watching them. There has not been a long history of women doing that. Maybe it’s the feeling of responsibility to portray women in a certain light. I actually loved how fucked-up Harley [Margot Robbie] is and how fucked-up a lot of situations are because, frankly, women are like that too. I think they can be equally compelling characters even if they are not always being good. Christina Newland: Harley Quinn began in Suicide Squad as little more than a sexy, clownish girl sidekick to the Joker, but through the full-pelt movie-star…

THE MARVEL CINEMATIC Universe is like a shark: always moving forward. As Phase Four begins, the next few films that Marvel has planned — the cosmic shenanigans of The Eternals, the mysticism of Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings, the reportedly horror-skewed Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness and Thor’s, er, full-body Jane Foster makeover in Love And Thunder — all seem designed to push the envelope and drive the already-sprawling universe in new directions But sometimes, to go forwards, you have to go backwards. Black Widow, kicking off this new era, is reversing. Set between the Wars Civil and Infinity, Natasha Romanoff’s much-anticipated solo outing is an outlier: Marvel is turning back the clock after a major character’s death. This is not business as usual. This…

KITTY GREEN IS MOVED the most by the audience responses. At film festival Q&As and after screenings they queue to tell her what her debut fiction film The Assistant has meant to them. How they were, like the film’s protagonist Jane, stuck in a toxic work environment, carrying out banal tasks, shouted at, belittled, overlooked and ignored. “A lot of people respond strongly,” Green says. She’s in Berlin, where The Assistant has just been screened to rave reviews, an experience she has found almost overwhelming. “People really seem to get what we’re trying to say. I’ve had people grab my arm and want to touch me, which is very emotional, and others who have stood there quietly and then started talking about what it meant to them. I’ve had male…

IMAGINE THAT IT'S THE YEAR 1990 You’ve just got a ticket for Gremlins 2: The New Batch. You’re excited because you loved the first Gremlins when it came out a few years ago. You don’t know much about this movie, but the gang’s all here, and if it’s as scary as the first one, you’re in for a treat. The lights go down. The film starts. And 106 minutes later, you stumble out into the foyer, dazed and confused by a sequel that has ripped up the rulebook. A sequel that zig-zags constantly, and is a great big colourful comedy, in complete contrast to the smaller, scarier original. That was the general take on Gremlins 2 in 1990. Which is why Joe Dante’s follow-up is not regarded as fondly as…

Zombieland: Double Tap WRITER-PRODUCERS RHETT Reese and Paul Wernick on the best bits of their zany zombie sequel. LOGO A-GO-GO Ten years may have elapsed since the original Zombieland took a devil-may-care approach to the zombie genre, but the sequel very quickly establishes that nothing has changed by having the Columbia logo lady use that torch of hers to best some undead assailants. “That was the idea of our visual-effects supervisor, Paul Linden,” admits Reese. “We actually wrote it even crazier than it turned out. We had the woman setting a zombie on fire with her torch and wrapping it up in her sash. Discretion was the better part of valour.” The duo, and director Ruben Fleischer, were unsure whether Sony would give them permission at first. “Sony is pretty…

Illustration: Jacey Quentin Tarantino movies Chris: When you absolutely, positively have to rank every motherfucking Quentin Tarantino movie in the room, accept no substitutes. Now, we could wait for him to do his official tenth film, which could take years, or we acknowledge that Kill Bill is two films. Terri: Which it is. I know he insists that it’s still one film, but they were released separately. John: Also, one of the films is better than the other one. Terri: Only marginally. Depends if you have a heart and soul. Nick: I’ve flipped. I’ve changed my mind on it. For ages, I always said the second was my favourite and then I changed my mind. Ben: Did you think she shouldn’t have killed Bill? Nick: She should have killed him,…

FROZEN II OUT NOW (DOWNLOAD), 30 MARCH (DVD, BLU-RAY) CERT PG / 103 MINS The first film took the world by storm in 2013, so the stakes had to be astronomically higher for Frozen II to even try to compare. Thankfully, co-directors Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee build on the smart values established by their world-shaking wintry universe by giving Princesses Elsa and Anna much more to learn beyond their own little kingdom. One of the main challenges was, of course, the songs — can you really top something like ‘Let It Go’? Luckily for the dulcet tones of all ages, the answer was a resounding yes. Enter ‘Into The Unknown’, ‘Show Yourself’ and ‘Lost In The Woods’ — showstopping bangers all. The ambitious plot — decrying colonialism, hive-mind mentality…