Table of contents for March 2022 in Empire

IT SEEMS IMPOSSIBLE now, but at the time The Godfather was a major risk. Its director, Francis Ford Coppola, was coming off a small movie called The Rain People, which had cost just $750,000, a sum Vito Corleone wouldn’t get out of his chair for. Marlon Brando was seen as a washed-up has-been, called “box-office poison” by a high-level executive who was agitating for Charles Bronson to play the Don instead. And nobody wanted the intense 31-year-old named Al Pacino to be in it either. The production was fraught, with raging arguments, tension and probably even the odd gun stashed behind a loo. Flash forward five decades, and nobody is taking sides against the family again. Ever. The Godfather is arguably the most influential drama in cinema history, referenced in…

AT FIRST GLANCE, Channing Tatum’s filmmaking debut Dog – co-directed with longstanding producer Reid Carolin – appears to be a heartfelt comedy about an army veteran (played by Tatum) and his bond with a mischievous hound. It is, in fact, the pair’s attempt to shake up the genre entirely. Speaking to Empire, Tatum and Carolin reveal how they set out to reinvent the dog-buddy movie. THEY WANTED TO SHOW VETERANS AS THEY REALLY ARE Reid Carolin: We made really close friends with a lot of vets through the film that we first met on [2008 war drama] Stop-Loss, and then again on an HBO documentary that we produced called War Dogs. Stop-Loss is where the journey to this film really began; in many ways Dog is a continuation of that…

TONY’S CABIN FROM AVENGERS: ENDGAME The lakeside retreat where Tony Stark and Pepper Potts raised a child, post-Snap — and where Tony accidentally discovers the secret of time-travelling successfully — can be found near Atlanta in Georgia. Possible Airbnb review: “We loved it 3000.” HARRY’S BIRTHPLACE FROM HARRY POTTER Harry Potter’s house in Godric’s Hollow can be found in the Suffolk village of Lavenham. Expect a string of Muggles to be peering in during your stay — the owners claim this is the “second most photographed home in the UK”. Possible Airbnb review: “The crumpets were an unexpected touch!” THE B&B FROM GROUNDHOG DAY Bing! The Victorian B&B that Bill Murray’s character repeatedly wakes up in can be found in Woodstock, Illinois, which doubles for Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, in the film.…

★★★★★ EXCELLENT ★★★★ GOOD ★★★ OKAY ★★ POOR ★ AWFUL ★★★★ OUT 21 JANUARY CERT TBC / 139 MINS DIRECTOR Guillermo del Toro CAST Bradley Cooper, Rooney Mara, Cate Blanchett, Toni Collette, Willem Dafoe, Ron Perlman PLOT Charismatic drifter Stanton Carlisle (Cooper) sets fire to his old life and joins a carnival where he learns the secrets of mentalism, witnesses horrifying ‘geek’ shows, and falls for fellow carny Molly (Mara). But when he later hatches a plot with sultry psychiatrist Dr Lilith Ritter (Blanchett), his manipulative abilities are pushed to the brink. FOR GUILLERMO DEL TORO fans who have followed the monster-obsessed auteur through decades of delicately drawn fantasy-horror fables (Pan’s Labyrinth, The Devil’s Backbone) and splashy sci-fi blockbusters (Pacific Rim, the Hellboy movies), the prospect of the filmmaker eschewing…

★★★★ OUT 21 JANUARY (CINEMAS/SKY CINEMA) CERT TBC / 111 MINS DIRECTOR Fran Kranz CAST Jason Isaacs, Martha Plimpton, Ann Dowd, Reed Birney PLOT Years after a tragic school shooting, Jay (Isaacs) and Gail (Plimpton) — the parents of one of the victims — meet face-to-face with Richard (Birney) and Linda (Dowd), the mother and father of the perpetrator. Gathered in an Episcopalian church’s antechamber, they reckon with their pain and try to find peace. FROM FIRST-TIME writer-director Fran Kranz (yes, he of The Cabin In The Woods stoner-guy fame), Mass is an impressive four-actor chamber-piece that combines the relentless emotional intensity of theatre with a voyeuristic intimacy that’s specific to film. The result, a potent study in tension and release, offers an arresting examination of grief that suggests the…

★★★ OUT 4 FEBRUARY / CERT TBC / 125 MINS DIRECTOR Michael Showalter CAST Jessica Chastain, Andrew Garfield, Cherry Jones, Vincent D’Onofrio There’s a lot to be said about televangelism, and this biopic of Tammy Faye Bakker (Jessica Chastain), one of its leading lights in the 1970s and 1980s, goes some way to interrogating the grungy reality behind the ministering. As a Christian leader Bakker did some commendable things — she was a rare televangelist who embraced the LGBT+ community — but she also turned a blind eye to her distant husband Jim’s (Andrew Garfield) corruption. The film’s handsomely made — director Michael Showalter warms the palette into golds and reds as Tammy and Jim get to work — but can’t quite explain why we should cheer for Tammy. It’s…

★★★★ OUT 11 FEBRUARY / CERT 15 / 121 MINS DIRECTOR Ryûsuke Hamaguchi CAST Kotone Furukawa, Kiyohiko Shibukawa, Katsuki Mori, Fusako Urabe, Aoba Kawai After the quietly sweeping Drive My Car, with Wheel Of Fortune And Fantasy, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi has weaved another gentle and powerful web of human intimacy. Within its spry two hours are three rewarding short stories that initially sound like TV melodramas. There’s a love triangle; a plot to seduce and disgrace a professor; and a school reunion in a future without computers. These slight tales don’t reach Hamaguchi’s previously realised emotional depth, and the third story is given arguably unnecessary worldbuilding. However, within their heightened worlds, these narratives are ambitious, incredibly moving tales that, via precise dialogue and delicate performances, tenderly reveal the value and power…

★★★ OUT 21 JANUARY / CERT 15 / 101 MINS DIRECTORS Joana Hadjithomas, Khalil Joreige CAST Rim Turki, Manal Issa, Paloma Vauthier, Clémence Sabbagh War, memory and generation gaps fuel Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s multi-layered, dual-timelined family drama. The story’s real-life roots imbue gravitas, although all has been created anew, down to the contents of a ‘memory box’ from Lebanon delivered on Christmas Eve to three generations of women in Montreal: Téta (Clémence Sabbagh), her daughter Maia (Rim Turki) and granddaughter Alex (Paloma Vauthier). Buried recollections resurface, some lovely, some traumatic, causing conflict but also catharsis in this small family. Weighty existential and formal ambitions are not always in harmony, but when they are, it’s magic.…

RUTH NEGGA HAD A PROBLEM. The ‘best friend’. She was sick of best friends. As a young actor working in Ireland and London in the early 2000s, she was frustrated. Ireland was tough, but “London was harder”, she says. “Nothing ever was completely direct, but there was very much this idea that as a woman of colour, you go in for the best-friend role. It was unquestioned and I remember thinking, ‘This is fucking narrow.’ I don’t recall many people I met, you know, directors, thinking outside the box — it depressed me.” So, on a mission to not play best friends, she found her own way, building a career that most actors, let alone women of colour, would covet. She won’t be typecast, won’t be constrained by one medium,…

Illustration: Neil Edwards. Alamy Burly Spanish character actor Paul Naschy (1934-2009) was so determined to become a horror star that he scripted his first vehicle, La Marca Del Hombre Lobo (1968). Released globally as Hell’s Creatures or Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror, the film set off a mini-boom for gothic horror in Spain, not a country which traditionally made monster movies. Naschy returned to the role of Polish werewolf Waldemar Daninsky in many wildly inventive, doggily endearing films, including Dr. Jekyll And The Werewolf, The Werewolf And The Yeti (once deemed a ‘video nasty’), The Beast And The Magic Sword (set in samurai-era Japan) and Buenas Noches, Señor Monstruo (a kids’ musical). Naschy also played Dracula, a mummy and an exorcist, and eventually directed as well as wrote his films. Among his…

Alamy AS BEFITS A film about throwback nightclub acts, writerdirector Steve Kloves came up with The Fabulous Baker BoyS most memorable scene – torch singer Susie Diamond (Michelle Pfeiffer) slinking through ‘Makin’ Whoopee’ on a piano played by Jack Baker (Jeff Bridges) – in the wee small hours. “I remember writing it at two or three in the morning,” recalls Kloves. “It’s just a paragraph, four or five lines, but it captured the spirit of the moment.” The scene was prompted by a script note from veteran screenwriter Alvin Sargent (Paper Moon, the Raimi Spider-Man trilogy), who suggested, according to Kloves, that Jack and Susie “needed a moment where you feel like they’re set free, a moment of joy.” After Kloves rewrote the script to get the other Baker boy…

DUNE OUT JANUARY TBC / CERT TBC / 155 MINS DVD BR ⊻ 4K Denis Villeneuve’s majestic adaptation of Frank Herbert’s epic sci-fi novel could have disappeared up its own sandworm in a million different ways. David Lynch already found that to his cost. The danger of adapting a seminal work like this is that it can feel derivative of the movies that pre-date it, but which themselves were inspired by Herbert’s story, but Villeneuve skirts all the pitfalls, creating a universe that feels bold and exciting and fresh. Taking things like the Gom Jabbar and sandworms seriously helps, even if it’s not as po-faced as its reputation suggests, while the visuals are top-notch. And when it explodes into action, Villeneuve’s handling of the set-pieces is peerless. Part II can’t…

ACROSS 1 Naked actor who is Hogwarts’ Remus Lupin (5,7) 8 Jessica who was in remakes of Cape Fear and King Kong (5) 9 Eli, “the Ugly” (7) 10 Could be Joan, could be Broderick (8) 12 Annabelle, Woody or maybe even Vivian Blaine (4) 14 South Korean vampire movie from director Park Chan-Wook (6) 15 In which Ryan Reynolds wakes up in a coffin (6) 18 Ancient order that embraces the dark side (4) 20 Game played by Keira Knightley, Parminder Nagra and Dee Hepburn (8) 22 Gould, the original Trapper John and an associate of Danny Ocean (7) 23 One of the Little Women or what it is the penguins do (5) 25 From Here To Eternity soldier and On The Town sailor (5,7) DOWN 1 Cult French…

THE FILM JOURNALIST Peter Bogdanovich was a fanboy before the term existed. Between the ages of 12 and 30, he kept track of the films he saw on 3” x 5” index cards, racking up 5,316 flicks. In the ’60s, he started doing reviews and feature articles for Esquire — he did set visits for Howard Hawks’ El Dorado and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds — and even named his 1951 Ford Convertible ‘John Ford’. In a decade that saw US critics go crazy for Euro art cinema, Bogdanovich was a cheerleader for unsung traditional American filmmakers. THE DIRECTOR Bogdanovich crossed the critic-filmmaker divide with Targets, the excellent Roger Corman-sponsored horror flick, which brilliantly utilised Boris Karloff outtakes. His best work — from the sublime The Last Picture Show to the…

FRESH OFF THE success of Dune (and with Dune: Part Two en route in 2023), director Denis Villeneuve is set to bring us yet another awe-inspiring sci-fi adaptation that many have tried and failed to port over to the big screen over the years: Arthur C. Clarke’s Hugo Award-winning Rendezvous With Rama. Clarke’s novel is a typically thrilling and thoughtful sci-fi adventure involving mankind’s first interactions with a largely unknowable alien spacecraft (and the things that lurk inside). It’s a trip into the cosmos we should all be excited to take, and for those unfamiliar with the material, here’s what you need to know before packing your bags. EXPECT THE LOVE CHILD OF ARRIVAL AND DUNE Rendezvous With Rama is likely to feel a lot like the midway point between…

IN THE FIVE-DECADE history of the Sundance Film Festival, no film has won all three main awards (the Grand Jury Prize, the Audience Award and the Directing Award). Until last year, that is, when Hive, a low-budget arthouse film about a war widow who starts her own business selling honey and ‘ ajvar’ (a spicy Balkan spread) in the aftermath of the Kosovo War, swept the board. For Kosovan debut filmmaker Blerta Basholli, it was fairly stunning. “We’re a small country,” says Basholli. “We don’t produce a lot of films. It’s really hard as an artist to make it out of here, so we really didn’t expect a lot. I’m usually the sceptical one. And then we got the prizes... it was really surreal and amazing. Most of all, of…

★★★★★ OUT NOW CERT 12A / 148 MINS DIRECTOR Jon Watts CAST Tom Holland, Zendaya, Benedict Cumberbatch, Jacob Batalon, Marisa Tomei, Alfred Molina, Willem Dafoe, Jamie Foxx PLOT After being outed as Spider-Man thanks to Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal), Peter Parker (Holland) seeks an extreme solution to regain his privacy: get Doctor Strange (Cumberbatch) to magically bend reality so that nobody ever knew. However, when the spell goes wrong, the resulting multiversal mishap imports some of Spider-Man’s most sinister enemies from other universes... LET’S GO BACK for a moment to a scene in Spider-Man: Far From Home. No, not the one where J. Jonah Jameson appears in the very welcome form of J.K. Simmons. (Though that is obviously relevant.) But the scene where Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal) talks about there being a…

★★★★★ OUT 11 FEBRUARY CERT TBC / 90 MINS DIRECTOR Jonas Poher Rasmussen CAST (VOICES) Daniel Karimyar, Fardin Mijdzadeh, Milad Eskandari, Belal Faiz PLOT After years of keeping it private, gay Afghan Amin (Daniel Karimyar, Fardin Mijdzadeh), living in Denmark, shares his story of migration, an exodus from repressive Kabul through Russia and Estonia. REFUGEE STORIES HAVE a tragic, crushing universality about them: dank cargo-holds and shipping containers, thuggish human traffickers, the desperation of families torn apart by war and persecution. But in the telling of one such story — that of Amin Nawabi (Daniel Karimyar, Fardin Mijdzadeh), an Afghan academic settled in Denmark but still shaken by the escape he made during his teenage years — documentary filmmaker Jonas Poher Rasmussen has somehow found a way inside these horrors…

★★★ OUT 11 FEBRUARY / CERT 18 / 146 MINS DIRECTOR Kirill Serebrennikov CAST Semyon Serzin, Chulpan Khamatova, Yuliya Peresild Petrov’s Flu is the first film made by Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov since his release from a 20-month period of house arrest and has the no-holds-barred quality of a filmmaker let loose. It’s essentially a day in the life of influenza-ridden comic-book writer Petrov (Semyon Serzin), making his way across the city of Yekaterinburg, but Serebrennikov throws in the kitchen sink — flying saucers, kung-fu, rough sex, political satire, a whole section in black-and-white — as, without warning, the story jumps around time, space and characters. The hallucinatory filmmaking gives Serebrennikov’s film the feel of watching through the fug of a cold, an idealised flashback to a simpler time that…

★★★ OUT NOW / CERT 12A / 123 MINS DIRECTOR Simon Kinberg CAST Jessica Chastain, Diane Kruger, Lupita Nyong’o, Penélope Cruz At last, there’s a charismatic, female-centric team of super-spies to balance all those male-led thrillers. Jessica Chastain’s Mace is sent to retrieve the sort of crypto-doomsday device familiar from a thousand other spy capers, and ends up teaming up with a multinational group of women to save the world. These spies are both fierce and fun, and the film’s best scenes involve them holing up together and planning. Their chases, fights and fun bits of spy-craft are brightly and pacily shot but it would be nice to see some nuance for the male characters here. Unfortunately, the story is less innovative than the casting, and the twists are screamingly…

★★★★ OUT 21 JANUARY CERT 12A / 98 MINS DIRECTOR Kenneth Branagh CAST Caitriona Balfe, Judi Dench, Jamie Dornan, Ciarán Hinds, Jude Hill PLOT Belfast, August 1969. As the Protestants mount a full-on assault on Catholic households, nine-year-old Buddy (Hill) is coming to terms with love, religion, growing up and the prospect of leaving his stomping ground for a life in England. BELFAST, KENNETH BRANAGH’S semi-autobiographical take on growing up in Northern Ireland’s capital during the tumultuous ’60s, ends with a dedication for the ones who stayed, left and were lost. It’s a sentiment redolent of the filmmaker’s big-hearted, emotionally direct approach. While it lacks the dramatic heft of the similar Roma, Branagh applies epic filmmaking style, driven by a bouncy Van Morrison score, to a small, intimate scenario. Winning…

★★★ OUT 22 DECEMBER CERT 15 / 148 MINS DIRECTOR Lana Wachowski CAST Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Jessica Henwick PLOT Two decades after Neo supposedly died, we find his synthetic alter-ego Thomas Anderson (Reeves) living out his life obliviously, munching blue pills prescribed by his therapist (Neil Patrick Harris). In recovery from a mental breakdown, he’s having visions, and after meeting the familiar Tiffany (Moss), his world starts to open up. THE LEGACY OF 1999’s The Matrix endures and evolves. It has been exalted, co-opted, bastardised. With every passing day, the film, directed by Lilly and Lana Wachowski, seems to mean different things to different people, who all claim it as their own. To some it’s merely a groundbreaking, hugely influential, oft-imitated sci-fi action movie that’s rarely…

★★★★ OUT NOW (NETFLIX) EPISODES VIEWED 10 OF 10 SHOWRUNNERS Josh Heald, Jon Hurwitz, Hayden Schlossberg CAST William Zabka, Ralph Macchio, Martin Kove, Mary Mouser, Xolo Maridueña PLOT With the future of both their dojos on the line, Johnny Lawrence (Zabka) and Daniel LaRusso (Macchio) join forces to take down John Kreese (Kove) and his Cobra Kai at the All-Valley Karate Tournament. But old rivalries don’t die easily, and Kreese has an ace up his sleeve in the form of an old friend… THE KARATE KID Part III might not have been the most illustrious entry in the wax-on/wax-off saga, but it did introduce a compelling wrinkle, driving a wedge between Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) and his bonsai-trimming mentor, Mr Miyagi (Pat Morita). This fourth season of Netflix’s hugely enjoyable…

TALIA SHIRE ON THE WEDDING TO PLAY THE treasured little sister in a powerful family empire, Talia Shire was well-suited to be Connie Corleone. In her brother Francis Ford Coppola’s film, we first meet Shire at Connie’s extravagant Italian wedding, which took over three days to film and included 700-plus extras. “Really, I had no business being in the movie,” Shire tells Empire. “I just wanted an audition! The Coppolas are a circus family, really. We support each other to do the most creatively dangerous things.” Yet despite her relative lack of experience — pre-Godfather, she’d only had a few small roles — her performance is by turns wounded, ferocious, endearing and ambiguous. It is the deeply traditional 1940s, and the only daughter of the Corleone family is getting married…

This month: The leading man who radiates authority SO STEADFAST IS the character of Denzel Washington, you have to look far and wide to discover some offscreen sizzle. But there is some. In 1994, shooting Tony Scott’s Crimson Tide on stage 16 of The Culver Studios, Washington went toe to toe with uncredited co-writer Quentin Tarantino about the number of racial epithets in the submarine script. When Tarantino replied, citing the need for realistic dialogue, Washington didn’t back down. “He’s a fine artist,” Washington later said to GQ magazine about Tarantino, “and I told him my feelings. So, he knows what I had to talk about.” You can count on Denzel to be direct. To speak his mind. And in facing off against Tarantino on this matter, the altercation suggests…

! SPOILER WARNING INDISPENSABLE HOME ENTERTAINMENT EDGAR WRIGHT’S LAST Night In Soho, as you might expect, doesn’t skimp on the sumptuous visuals and earworming songs. But the two come together most thrillingly in what has already become the film’s signature sequence, in the Café de Paris. It’s here where, bookended by two Cilla Black tunes, heroine Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie) travels back in time to 1965 and finds herself in the famous nightclub, beguiled by a young wannabe starlet named Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy). It contains meticulous design, innovative camerawork, invisible effects, and a rousing dance number between McKenzie, Taylor-Joy and Matt Smith as Eloise begins to break the boundaries of reality. Here, Wright, Smith, McKenzie and a host of key crewmembers tell us how they did it. Edgar Wright, director/co-writer: This…

HIS ARRIVAL WAS explosive. In the mid-’80s, Sylvester Stallone’s third sequel to Rocky needed an embodiment of Soviet might, and Dolph Lundgren — despite hailing from Stockholm, not Moscow — fitted the bill perfectly, staring down at Stallone with contemptuous cool, then upper-cutting his way through the astonishing final-reel bout. Lundgren became an instant A-lister. And though the decades ahead were, aptly enough, rocky, with times of hardship and a fallow stretch at the box office, Lundgren persists — still an ass-kicker at 64. Here, he gives us insights into his wild ride. ROCKY IV (1985) Competition for the role of dastardly Drago was fierce, but the unknown Lundgren wouldn’t take no for an answer, sending Stallone photos of himself in boxing gear even after being rejected for being too…

PRANO BAILEY-BOND WON’T settle for anything less than the right kind of foliage. For her directorial debut Censor, the filmmaker went to extraordinary lengths to intricately, accurately deliver a slice of 1980s-set meta horror, from lovingly made VHS covers to just the right type of leaves on a forest floor. Speaking with Empire, she breaks down the forensic detail that went into crafting the film. CASTING Niamh Algar plays Enid, a wilting film censor who discovers a video nasty that she believes stars her missing sister. Bailey-Bond describes the character as “a coiled spring”, who at the end of her character-arc transforms into “an explosion of emotions” when the trail runs cold and her world unravels. She hadn’t written the part with anyone in mind, but Algar, who Bailey-Bond had…

! SPOILER WARNING ONCE YOU’VE SEEN Malignant, chances are it won’t leave your head. Which is somewhat apt, as James Wan’s demented horror movie is based around one of the most audacious twists in recent memory; a gloriously ghoulish spin on that old horror trope, ‘the call is coming from inside the building’. Here, Wan and the film’s screenwriter, Akela Cooper, talk about the standout moments from their giallo-inspired, gore-soaked thriller about a woman who finds herself stalked by her kill-crazy imaginary friend… THE OPENING The film begins with a flashback to the ’80s, in which Dr Weaver (Jacqueline McKenzie), head of the Simion Research Hospital, is witness to a particularly bloody rampage by an unseen patient named Gabriel. It has flashes of the similar opening to Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator,…

TOM SAVINI: “My favourite scene would have to be Boris Karloff backing into the doorway, as the Frankenstein Monster, and turning around. When you’re a kid — eight, nine years old — you totally believe Frankenstein [the Monster] existed. I had no idea about makeup or any of that stuff. That’s the sad thing about learning to do make-up. You destroy that magic. I wish I could see the movie again, through the eyes of an eight-year-old child. Because when he turns around… holy shit.” INT. FRANKENSTEIN’S LABORATORY — DAY Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) sits at his table, smoking. Dr Waldman (Edward Van Sloan) paces behind him. FRANKENSTEIN: Oh, come and sit down, Doctor. You must be patient. Do you expect perfection at once? WALDMAN: [Banging the table, then sitting…

Empire’s Chris Hewitt on how Spider-Man: No Way Home’s ambitious storytelling marks a new era in the MCU Illustration: Mike Cathro ! SPOILER WARNING SPIDER-MAN, SPIDER-Man, does whatever a spider can, apparently. That’s a fairly long list, as it happens — it includes spinning webs (anytime), catching thieves (just like flies), and the most recent addition: saving cinema. Look out: here comes the four-quadrant event movie extravaganza-man. At the time of writing, Spider-Man: No Way Home has pulled in almost $1.4 billion at the worldwide box office in a little under three weeks, making it the 12th biggest movie of all time. By the time you read this, it will almost certainly be in the top ten. All of which would be fairly noteworthy in normal times. These are not…

FOR OVER 50 years, Sesame Street has been educating pre-schoolers and slyly amusing adults. In her new documentary, Street Gang: How We Got To Sesame Street, Marilyn Agrelo explores the show’s early years. For all its cuddly Muppets and fun with numbers, this was a series born from social unrest and a desire to change the world. Here are four things you probably don’t know about the most popular kids’ show in the world. 1 IT WAS FOUNDED BY ACTIVISTS Agrelo calls Street Gang “a story of a reckoning [in America] and people that had an ideal.” In 1969, when Joan Ganz Cooney and Lloyd Morrisett launched Sesame Street, America was in a time of great flux. “The Civil Rights Movement, the anti-Vietnam War protests, the Women’s Liberation Movement, all…

Illustration: Russell Moorcroft THE DEAD CERTS WEST SIDE STORY Why Oscar voters might go for it: Come on! It’s Steven Spielberg! Everything — from the grand directorial scope and timely pro-immigrant message to the glowing reviews — points to awards glory here. Why they might not: Despite a rapturous reception, West Side Story has struggled to make an impact at the box office, which might dampen its chances. Plus, Ansel Elgort’s presence in the film has slightly weakened enthusiasm for some. BELFAST Why Oscar voters might go for it: A heartfelt, deeply personal biopic from a much-admired industry veteran makes a lot of sense for the Academy. Despite being the first man to be nominated in five different categories, director Kenneth Branagh has never won an Oscar — the kind…

WHY IS ANDY GARCIA GAZING INTO THE DISTANCE? The genesis for Big Gold Brick came when a friend of filmmaker Brian Petsos was “attacked with a brick”. (“He’s fine now,” Petsos clarifies.) This encounter inspired the key moment in the film where Floyd (played by Andy Garcia) hits Samuel (played by Emory Cohen) with his car; the pair end up living together. Samuel then writes a biography about Floyd. Things only get weirder. “The film goes from head-injury absurdity into actual absurdity,” Petsos explains. WHY IS OSCAR ISAAC WEARING A SUNGLASSES EYEPATCH? Everything about Isaac’s eccentric character Anselm screams villain, from his ambiguous accent — “It’s British with a Germanic offshoot” — to his all-black attire and eyepatch-style gold glasses. Petsos describes his performance as “past a ten. It’s right…

SPOOF MOVIES USED to be everywhere. In the ’80s and ’90s they dominated the comedy landscape (The Naked Gun 2 1/2 and Hot Shots! made the box-office top ten in 1991); in the ’00s the landscape became oversaturated and spoofs became a watchword for cheap knockoffs. Lately, they seem to have disappeared. But the genre looks to be making a comeback, with a new Netflix series entitled — deep breath — The Woman In The House Across The Street From The Girl In The Window. This new Kristen Bell-starring mini-series parodies (you guessed it) The Girl On The Train and The Woman In The Window and offers up “a darkly comedic, wine-soaked, satirical slant on the psychological thriller”, according to the official synopsis. Now is as good a time as…

ILLUSTRATION ARNO What is the worst smell in the world? You’re talking to a guy that spends a good portion of the week cleaning up dog shit in his yard. But I’m sort of immune to that now. Vomit in a dirty bar bathroom, perhaps? I’ll hurl just thinking about it. What one thing do you do better than anyone else you know? Oh, man. Well, of my friends that aren’t in the industry — meaning my Jersey friends — I would say karaoke. But I can’t say that in the company of my Broadway friends. Do you have a nickname? Paddy is the most common. My closest friends call me Paddy. When I was a kid, I had some family members call me ‘Pack’. Definitely not Pat. I’m so…

★★★★ OUT 4 FEBRUARY CERT TBC / 127 MINS DIRECTOR Mamoru Hosoda CAST (VOICES) Kaho Nakamura, Takeru Satoh, Kōji Yakusho PLOT Troubled teen Suzu (Nakamura) struggles to express herself among her peers, and embraces the online virtual reality of ‘U’. There, she becomes ‘Bell’, a pop star and immediate viral sensation. One day she runs into the mysterious ‘Beast’, and finds herself drawn to this reclusive outcast. THOUGH CENTRED ON a teenager seemingly content to fade into the background amongst her peers, Belle itself is hardly lacking in ambition. It’s at once an homage to Beauty And The Beast, and a recollection of its creator’s greatest hits (Wolf Children, The Boy And The Beast, Mirai); a large-scale fantasy as well as a small-town coming-of-age drama, reflecting on the intertwining of…

★★★ OUT 28 JANUARY / CERT 15 / 99 MINS DIRECTOR Romola Garai CAST Alec Secareanu, Imelda Staunton, Carla Juri, Angeliki Papoulia Using a decaying house as a metaphor in horror movies isn’t new, but in her first feature, director Romola Garai executes it impeccably. Peeling wallpaper, spreading mould and dirty, glugging water become things for Tomas (Alec Secareanu) — a homeless migrant worker who moves in with Magda (Carla Juri) and her dying mother — to fix. The grim surroundings contrast with subtle performances — Secareanu’s wide-eyed stillness, Juri’s odd naivety — but Amulet’s crescendo is its downfall. Rushing into trippy surrealism as it reaches its convoluted conclusion, it attempts to thread together themes like guilt, motherhood and female rage. It doesn’t all work, but Garai’s boldness is admirable,…

★★ OUT 28 FEBRUARY / CERT TBC / 110 MINS DIRECTOR Garth Jennings CAST (VOICES) Matthew McConaughey, Reese Witherspoon. Scarlett Johansson, Halsey A gentle gorilla, dressed in a leather jacket with spikes, sings an impassioned cover of Coldplay’s ‘A Sky Full Of Stars’, while duelling with a proboscis monkey in a literal ring of fire. This is but one detail of Sing 2, the sensorially overwhelming — yet strangely low-stakes — sequel to 2016’s animated jukebox musical. New additions include Bono, who lends his voice to play reclusive musician Clay Calloway, while Halsey steals the show as entitled princess Porsha Crystal. They join Matthew McConaughey’s koala, Buster Moon, and his gang by putting on their biggest stage show and, while there are familiar pleasures in the head-spinning vignettes (a sunset…

★★★★ OUT 28 JANUARY / CERT TBC / 92 MINS DIRECTOR Salomé Jashi PARTICIPANTS None credited If you need proof of how far things have tilted in favour of the super-rich, look no further than the operation to uproot, transport and replant dozens of mature trees to satisfy the whim of a Georgian billionaire. Discreetly eavesdropping with a watchful camera on the grumbling locals seeing their natural heritage being vandalised, documentarian Salomé Jashi employs a mix of grit and lyricism to capture the effort and ingenuity required to excavate and relocate the trees. But she also subtly invites viewers to consider the ecological effects of these transplants, as well as what they say about migration, putting down roots and the philistinic ruthlessness of capitalism. A stealthily provocative and unflinchingly compelling…

★★ OUT 21 JANUARY CERT TBC / 131 MINS DIRECTOR Denzel Washington CAST Michael B. Jordan, Chanté Adams, Jalon Christian PLOT First Sergeant Charles Monroe King’s (Jordan) deployment to Iraq puts his life and relationship with partner Dana Canedy (Chanté Adams) in jeopardy. Fearing he might not make it home, he pens a heartfelt journal for his newborn son, Jordan (Christian). IF DENZEL WASHINGTON’S last directorial outing Fences was an Academy Award-nominated portrayal of dysfunctional families, then A Journal For Jordan is its cutesy, cookie-cutter followup. Based on the memoirs of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Dana Canedy, it’s a thin, mostly uneventful relationship flick, enlivened by engaging performances by Chanté Adams and Michael B. Jordan. Virgil Williams’ screenplay sketches Canedy’s love story with First Sergeant Charles Monroe King (Jordan) as a…

FILM OUT NOW THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS ★★★ P44 SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME (ABOVE) ★★★★★ P32 THE 355 ★★★ P38 21 JANUARY BELFAST ★★★★ P42 A JOURNAL FOR JORDAN ★★ P45 MASS ★★★★ P34 MEMORY BOX ★★★ P42 NIGHTMARE ALLEY ★★★★ P30 28 JANUARY AMULET ★★★ P38 PARALLEL MOTHERS ★★★★ P40 TAMING THE GARDEN ★★★★ P42 4 FEBRUARY BELLE ★★★★ P33 THE EYES OF TAMMY FAYE ★★★ P38 THE SOUVENIR PART II ★★★★★ P36 11 FEBRUARY FLEE ★★★★★ P35 PETROV’S FLU ★★★ P38 WHEEL OF FORTUNE AND FANTASY ★★★★ P38 28 FEBRUARY SING 2 ★★ P38 TV OUT NOW THE BOOK OF BOBA FETT ★★★ P48 COBRA KAI ★★★★ P47 FOR MORE REVIEWS, VISIT EMPIREONLINE.COM…

1 THE MAKE-UP Paramount didn’t want Brando for the film, but Coppola was hellbent on him, and got what he wanted by shooting a test. “Marlon put cotton in his cheeks and did this transformation into kind of what we see in the movie,” remembers associate producer Gray Frederickson. “Then Dick Smith, the make-up guy, was commissioned to make him look like he did in that test. They made little implants for him, to push his cheeks out.” They also needed to make Brando – then 47 – look 20 years older. “Marlon was technically too young for the role of the Don, a man well into his sixties, so he had to be aged,” says casting director Fred Roos. “Dick Smith was the best make-up man in the business…

AMID A RAIN of factory ash, cillian Murphy’s Tommy Shelby trots bareback through the cobbled streets of Birmingham’s Small Heath atop a monstrous black stallion. Over the yell of street hawkers and the belch of coal fires, the ominous chimes of Nick Cave’s Red Right Hand herald his passing. From this very first scene back in 2013, it was clear that Peaky Blinders was no run-of-the-mill period drama. Steven Knight’s show pictured a world in which flatcaps, razor blades, whisky tumblers, pocket watches, coal yards, canal boats, and an endless cloud of billowing smoke formed the backdrop for a gang of cool-as-fuck criminals in tailored tweed. A gang whose larger-than-life characters were drawn from the backstreet fables of Knight’s Birmingham childhood. Boasting a soundtrack for the ages, Peaky Blinders turned…

Alamy, Getty Images, RGA, Shutterstock IN MAY 1942, sometime between the Dunkirk evacuation and the Battle of Stalingrad, a troop of actors and crew members, under the command of a heavily accented Brazilian, gathered in the sleepy Buckinghamshire village of Turville to make a deceptively simple film with a distinctly odd title, drawn from a 1918 epigraph (“Went the day well? We died and never knew. But, well or ill, Freedom, we died for you”) by John Maxwell Edmonds. Expanded from Graham Greene’s 1940 short story The Lieutenant Dies Last and filmed as ‘They Came In Khaki’, Went The Day Well? (US title: 48 Hours) begins with a fourth-wall-breaking introduction by the vicar of ‘Bramley End’. Standing by a churchyard memorial to German soldiers – German soldiers? In Buckinghamshire? In…

Chris: When did we first discover Tom Cruise? Ben: The Mission films were always a big deal. I grew up with him as Tom Cruise: Action Star, but he’s done a lot of things through his career, starting off as that cocky upstart, then into intense character performances, and then ascending to a new level of action insanity. Beth: For me, it was Jerry Maguire. I could have watched other films of his, but they were quite mature. Risky Business was called risky for a reason. Helen: I remember the first time hearing about him was my mum telling me about Top Gun. They’d been to the cinema the night before. Chris: Did she wake you up in the middle of the night? “Helen, there’s a young man whose ego…