Indice dei contenuti per July 2022 in Empire

WE’VE BEEN THERE. Now it’s time to go back again. Ever since Amazon announced its grand quest, to bring a Lord Of The Rings prequel to our TVs, our brains have been boggling, trying to figure out what a return trip to Middle-earth might involve. With Tolkien’s appendices stuffed with swathes of information (Appendix E, Part I: Pronunciation Of Words And Names is a particular banger), but precious little in the way of narrative throughlines, anything seemed possible. Which new heroes will rise? What monsters will be unleashed? Will we see Saruman apply for a building permit for Orthanc? Now, finally, answers are at hand. For within this issue is a deep dive into the most ambitious series ever made, containing world-first interviews with the key cast of The Lord…

AS A MAN who once rode into a river on horseback to save someone’s life, Baltasar Kormákur knows a thing or two about facing danger. “It sounds a little macho,” the Icelandic filmmaker tells Empire, “but I rode out and fetched a girl who had lost control of her horse. It was really dangerous, so I do think I have this instinct in life.” That instinct sure comes through in his films’ characters, from the band of mountaineers scaling gargantuan heights in Everest, to a couple stranded out at sea in Adrift. The threat in the director’s latest, Beast, is a little more on the furry side. The film stars Idris Elba as a recent widower, who must fend off a marauding lion to protect his daughters while on a…

ANTHONY IPPOLITO WAS at a birthday party when he got the audition call-out to play one of the most legendary actors of all time. “I was immediately very excited but also really intimidated,” the actor tells Empire. “I went down an Al Pacino wormhole right there at the party, watching footage of him from the ’60s and ’70s.” Ippolito’s iteration of Pacino is introduced in the second episode of The Offer, a ten-part miniseries about the tumultuous adaptation of Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather, told from the perspective of producer Albert S. Ruddy (Miles Teller). “It’s unequivocally one of the best films of all time,” Ippolito enthuses. “Usually you can’t say that, because it’s such a subjective medium. But this film is revered by everyone.” Pacino is introduced as the…

RIDLEY SCOTT DIRECTOR, BLADE RUNNER I remember my editor Terry Rawlings and I had done a very good temporary score for the final cut of Blade Runner. I had engaged with Vangelis to compose the score. Most musicians do not want to hear temp scores, particularly if it is really good, because it inevitably has a dominating influence on their creative process. However, I shoot very much with score tied to the visual and the two are inseparable. Vangelis had a large, barn-like space north of Marble Arch in London. I would turn up each night having been refining editing during the day, usually to discuss what he thought of the cuts and the temp score. On this particular evening, he looked exhilarated and said, “I think I’ve found…

THE STREETS OF 1980s Queens are a fair few miles from Neptune, the destination of James Gray’s last movie Ad Astra, or the Amazon from The Lost City Of Z, his film before that. For Armageddon Time, Gray has pivoted to something far more personal and pared-down: a drama inspired by his childhood. “I really wanted to understand why it is that I want to make films,” he tells Empire. “So I said, ‘Okay, forget all the nonsense — focus on making something small and personal. And get the best actors that you can to tell your story.’” Those actors include Succession’s Jeremy Strong and Anne Hathaway playing a version of Gray’s harried parents, and an exceptionally twinkly Anthony Hopkins as his grandfather. Gray’s onscreen iteration, Paul (Banks Repeta), holds…

★★★★ OUT 17 JUNE (APPLE TV+) CERT TBC / 107 MINS DIRECTOR Cooper Raiff CAST Cooper Raiff, Dakota Johnson, Leslie Mann, Brad Garrett, Raúl Castillo, Vanessa Burghardt PLOT Andrew (Raiff) has returned home after graduating from college. In a bid to find purpose, he takes up a regular job at Bar Mitzvahs, through which he sparks a friendship with Domino (Johnson) and her autistic daughter Lola (Burghardt). YOU DON’T HAVE to be familiar with America’s Bar Mitzvah party industry to know the moves to its dancefloor staple ‘Cha Cha Slide’. You slide to the left, then the right, do a criss-cross with your feet, and the rest goes from there. The same can be said for the film that references that song ’s lyrics, Cha Cha Real Smooth, Cooper Raiff…

★★★★ OUT NOW / CERT PG / 102 MINS DIRECTOR Loren Bouchard CAST H. Jon Benjamin, John Roberts, Dan Mintz, Kristen Schaal Bob’s Burgers may not have clocked as many seasons as The Simpsons, but its simple premise and kind-hearted characters make it a charming alternative. Bob’s insular world — afailing burger restaurant on a seaside wharf — is blown up for the big screen. A murder mystery and a sinkhole threatening the restaurant’s future drive the plot, while the show’s scale is upgraded via fresh, vibrant new palettes and intricate set-pieces (a dance ensemble in which the characters all move slightly out of time with each other feels especially joyful). Yet as with the show, the film is strongest in its minor interactions. Throwaway lines and small acts fuelled…

★★★★ OUT 17 JUNE / CERT 15 / 113 MINS DIRECTOR François Ozon CAST Sophie Marceau, André Dussollier, Géraldine Pailhas Everything Went Fine may be French director François Ozon’s most understated film yet: a calm, considered, ground-level account of assisted dying. When André (André Dussollier) has a stroke and requires round-the-clock care, he asks his daughter (a stoic Sophie Marceau) to help him end it all. They have a complicated relationship even before the question of euthanasia, but Ozon films it all with a clearminded focus, leaving the performances to sing. The inevitable conclusion is played out simply and straightforwardly; as that title suggests, the film is unsentimental, but still deeply affecting. “No crybabies”, André repeats throughout the film — good luck to any viewer following that instruction by the…

★★ OUT NOW / CERT 15 / 94 MINS DIRECTOR Keith Thomas CAST Zac Efron, Ryan Kiera Armstrong, Michael Greyeyes, Gloria Reuben When little pyrokinetic Charlie (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) starts a fire with her brain, the inferno explodes in shoddy digital ripples. Everything about this contemporised take on Stephen King’s 1980 bestseller is drably televisual. In broad strokes, it tells the same story as the 1984 Drew Barrymore version, with Charlie and her suddenly widowed telepath father, Andy (Zac Efron), fleeing a sinister government agency called The Shop. But King’s narrative made more sense as a 1970s hangover, a portrait of a family man feeling the side effects of a decade reshaped by hallucinogens and Watergate. To that end, at least the film sounds era-appropriate: the throbbing synth score comes…

★★★ OUT NOW CERT 15 / 100 MINS DIRECTOR Alex Garland CAST Jessie Buckley, Rory Kinnear, Paapa Essiedu PLOT After her husband dies, Harper (Buckley) goes on a rural getaway to try and heal. Once there, she runs into several men (all played by Kinnear), who start acting strangely around her. Intensely creepy goings-on ensue. WITH ALEX GARLAND movies, generally, you should expect the unexpected. A body, frozen in death, made beautiful by delicate climbing plants. Human cries for help in the mouth of a skeletal bear. A shaven-headed Oscar Isaac discodancing. With Men, the inimitable writer and director moves away from the science-fiction DNA of previous projects — but in digging into the fresh ground of full-on folk horror, he also delivers a film somewhat more predictable, if still…

★★★★ OUT NOW (PRIME VIDEO ) EPISODES VIEWED 5 OF 8 SHOWRUNNER Eric Kripke CAST Karl Urban, Jack Quaid, Antony Starr, Erin Moriarty, Claudia Doumit, Jensen Ackles PLOT A year after the events of last season, Butcher (Urban) is working for the government under the supervision of Hughie (Quaid), who runs the ‘Office of Supe Affairs’ with Victoria (Doumit). But even a subdued Homelander (Starr) is still dangerous. The answer to taking him down may lie with the original Supe, Soldier Boy (Ackles). MUCH HAS CHANGED since we last checked in on Billy Butcher and co. The Boys is no longer the only game in town when it comes to gory, superpowered-beings-gone-bad content: the brightly animated Invincible did not skimp on the blood-soaked gruesomeness, and both The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker…

HERE IS A BROAD SCALE OF IMPRESSIVENESS WHEN IT COMES TO robots in cinema. You’ve got your top-of-the-range Transformers, with lots of guns and the ability to fly/drive/squash houses. You’ve got your less weaponised options, like WALL•E or Short Circuit’s Number 5, which have just a few gizmos and a lot of sass. Or there’s your children’s plaything level, like Ron’s Gone Wrong’s titular machine — basically iPads with a personality. Very low on that scale is Charles. In terms of technical wizardry, Charles is quite possibly cinema’s crappest robot. Comprised of a one-eyed mannequin head, an old washing machine and a Speak & Spell voice box, Charles is seven feet of bad engineering that looks like Patrick Moore trying to digest a sideboard. He is nevertheless the star of…

SO THE STORY goes, the night after Invasion Of The Body Snatchers’ LA release in December 1978, some marketing wag scattered replica pods around the city. Inundated with panicked calls from people seemingly afraid of being assimilated by aliens, the LAPD did not appreciate the stunt. As PR pranks go, it’s hammy stuff, but the frazzled reaction shows how deeply the film rattled audiences — especially with that screamer of an ending still ringing in their skulls (more on that later). Philip Kaufman’s remake is a very different beast from Don Siegel’s 1956 classic. Whereas Siegel used the concept of brainwashed alien doppelgängers as a jittery allegory of Cold War paranoia, Kaufman’s film is far more slippery, wide open for interpretation and, let’s be frank, still fucking terrifying. The eerie…

POUND FOR POUND, there may be no more quotable film finale than that of Casablanca. “Here’s looking at you, kid”; “If that plane leaves the ground and you’re not with him, you’ll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life”; “Round up the usual suspects”; “We’ll always have Paris”; and “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship”. Hit after hit after hit after hit. Most of those lines of dialogue can be can be attributed to two of the film’s credited writers, twin brothers Julius and Philip Epstein (the third credited writer, Howard Koch, worked separately from the pair). Needing an ending for Michael Curtiz’s World War II movie (made, lest we forget, slap-bang in the middle…

Chris: This Ranking is dedicated to the legendary Bruce Willis. Of course, it’s in sad circumstances because he’s suffering from aphasia, and has decided to retire from acting. But he leaves behind an incredible array of movies, some absolute belters. When did we first become acquainted with him? James: My friend Squid had the soundtrack to Moonlighting, and I remember listening to the Moonlighting theme tune. I’m pretty sure that predated Die Hard. Helen: I think I was too young to be allowed to watch Moonlighting. I didn’t get to see Die Hard for a long time. Nick: I had the Bruce Willis Pulp Fiction character poster on my wall at school. But I have a boring answer: it’s Die Hard. It was on heavy rotation. James: I saw Die…

ELIZABETH OLSEN: “I’m working at lots of locations in Texas right now, and one of them is where they shot Waiting For Guffman. There’s this iconic staircase that leads to [theatre director] Corky St. Clair’s apartment, and all the players of the theatre run over to try and get Corky to come out of his home. There’s a moment where Catherine O’Hara says, ‘Corky, we love you!’, and I find that to be a great moment in cinema.” INT. REHEARSAL SPACE — DAY Lloyd Miller (Bob Balaban) is trying to address the cast of the upcoming production ‘Red, White And Blaine’, including Ron Albertson (Fred Willard), Sheila Albertson (Catherine O’Hara), Libby Mae Brown (Parker Posey) and Dr Allan Pearl (Eugene Levy). He stands on a step in an attempt to…

GOOD LIEUTENANT, BAD LIEUTENANT Thank you so much for indulging me with the Nicolas Cage Ranking! It says something about his remarkable career that a five-star film like Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans fails to get even a mention — personally I think it’s one of his best (and Cageist!) movies. I hope he finds an excuse to work with Werner Herzog again soon, it’s a match made in heaven. Keep up the good work! STUART MASTERSON, VIA EMAIL Thanks, Stuart! No room to mention it in print, but we did give it a nod in the full discussion, which can be heard on the Empire Podcast feed. Enjoy a Picturehouse membership on us. Empire’s star letter wins a Picturehouse Membership, plus one for a friend! Valid for…

AS TIME-TRAVELLING DC SERIES LEGENDS OF TOMORROW COMES TO AN END, EMPIRE CELEBRATES ITS WACKIEST STORYLINES GORILLA VS OBAMA! Perhaps the most talked-about event in the show’s spectrum of daftness. The Legends travel back to 1979 to stop a telepathic ape, Gorilla Grodd, from assassinating a young Barack Obama in order to, in his words, “make America Grodd again”. METAVERSE OF MADNESS! Going meta before the likes of WandaVision, this episode followed the Legends as they scattered into parodies of different popular shows, like a New York-set sitcom called Ultimate Buds, British period drama Highcastle Abbey and sci-fi series Star Trip. SHAKESPEAREAN SUPERHEROES! The Legends run into William Shakespeare while on a mission in the 16th century. Feeling a fresh wave of inspiration, the playwright revamps Romeo And Juliet as…

FOR ALL THE genres James Cameron’s Avatar traversed — sci-fi epic, war flick, Western parable, cross-culture romance, eco-cautionary tale — perhaps the most surprising and delightful was cosmic nature documentary. The natural world of Pandora, from bioluminescent flora to imaginatively but plausibly designed wildlife with cool AF names (banshees, thanators and viperwolves), was enough to fill 17 David Attenborough specials. Happily, in Avatar: The Way Of Water, the menagerie is expanding. Set over ten years after the events of the first film, The Way Of Water sees Jake (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) displaced from the Pandoran rainforests and sent running to the planet’s distant atolls. Here they encounter the Metkayina, a clan who reside on Pandora’s reefs and live in harmony with manifold sea beasties. Chief amongst them is…

THE NORTHMAN Anya Taylor-Joy’s sorceress whips up a psychedelic fungi broth for her enemies in Robert Eggers’ historical epic. Given the feverishly violent events that ensue, the filmmaker may have inadvertently made the world’s first Viking anti-drugs advert. SONIC THE HEDGEHOG 2 Jim Carrey’s Dr Robotnik has found himself banished to a mushroom planet. The mad scientist’s fungal new home is an Easter Egg for avid Sega fans, who will recognise the looming toadstools from the video-games’ Mushroom Hill Zone. THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD A few ’shrooms turn Julie’s (Renate Reinsve) anxiety into a one-woman show, which includes breastfeeding and a cartoon cat’s runaway ‘starfish’. It’s a lurid, hyper-intense sequence — maybe she should have stuck to shiitake.…

FOR AN EMOTIONALLY tense cinematic rollercoaster from a master of the genre, Decision To Leave sure has a lot of softshell turtles in it. A stolen bale of the creatures make for a surprising comedic presence in the film, which follows Hae-joon (Park Hae-il), a detective who falls for Seo-rae (Tang Wei), a recent widow who becomes a suspect following the death of her husband. “I really value absurd humour,” director Park Chanwook tells Empire. “I tend to include moments in life that don’t exactly go to plan in my films.” Park is no stranger to complicated romances, from The Handmaiden to Stoker, but in many ways Decision To Leave is a departure from his former films. For one, it keeps violence largely off screen; expect no hammer fights à…

Gutter credit When were you most starstruck? When I worked with Clint Eastwood [on the 1990 film White Hunter Black Heart]. I grew up watching A Fistful Of Dollars and Dirty Harry, and suddenly he’s sat right behind me. I remember thinking, “Come on, Spall, concentrate — this is Clint Eastwood!” He was very sweet, and his knowledge of film was astounding. But what amazed me was how shy he was. We went out one night, and he was being pestered by lots of people, and someone said, “Go and help Clint out, he’s struggling.” It was so funny. I thought, “What am I doing, rescuing Clint Eastwood?” Do you have a signature dish? I hadn’t really cooked anything apart from egg and chips until last year when I was…

★★★ OUT 24 JUNE / CERT TBC / 96 MINS DIRECTOR Damien Odoul CAST Theo Kermel, Pierre Meunier, Sonia Gondry Theo (Theo Kermel) is a young man with Down’s syndrome who lives in a cabin in the woods with his father. Through Theo’s (increasingly unreliable) narration, we learn that he is a dreamer and fantasist, who imagines himself a martial-arts expert, a photographer with a bionic eye, and “a doctor in demolition”. There’s a sweetness to the opening hour of this curious little film, but what begins as beguilingly joyful takes a disturbing and perplexing turn halfway through, when Theo’s father leaves and a snake becomes his new muse. When the film surrenders to more surreal flights of fancy, it becomes harder to warm to. Still, there are occasional flashes…

★★★★ OUT 8 JULY / CERT TBC / 90 MINS DIRECTOR Jim Archer CAST David Earl, Chris Hayward, Louise Brealey The heavy-bespectacled comedy character Brian Gittins (David Earl) gets his big-screen moment in the sun in this immediately likeable comic mockumentary fable. An eccentric loner, Brian lives in a remote Welsh village inventing useless tat — apine-cone bag, an egg belt. Then he decides to make a new friend: Charles Petrescu (Chris Hayward), a robot built from an old washing machine. With hilariously deadpan synthesised speech, Charles has a childlike curiosity, flummoxing Brian with toddler-esque questions like, “Can birds do what they like?” Consistently funny, the quirkiness of the premise is always tempered with genuine affection and surprising sagacity: this is really just a sweet odd-couple comedy about loneliness and…

★★★ OUT 24 JUNE / CERT TBC 159 MINS DIRECTOR Baz Luhrmann CAST Tom Hanks, Austin Butler, Olivia DeJonge PLOT When Colonel Tom Parker (Hanks) spots a young singer by the name of Elvis Presley (Butler), he knows he’s found something special. He has no idea just how special. Parker turns Presley into the biggest name in music, but fame does not bring Presley happiness. IT’S BEEN CLOSE to a decade since Baz Luhrmann’s last movie. Any question that time may have mellowed him is answered within the first few minutes of Elvis; even by Luhrmann’s usual standards, the first act of this biopic is frantic with filmmaking acrobatics. Rat-a-tat editing. Dream sequences. Animated sequences. Loop-di-loop camera moves. Incongruous modern soundtrack. He immediately puts his foot down and goes racing…

★★★★ OUT 16 JUNE (SHUDDER) / CERT TBC / 83 MINS DIRECTOR Phil Tippett CAST (VOICES) Alex Cox, Niketa Roman, Satish Ratakonda VFX legend Phil Tippett has been working on Mad God for nearly 30 years; it’s immediately clear why it took him so long. The film is a stop-motion nightmare on a vast scale, a wildly ambitious rendering of a colossal techno-industrialist underworld, the kind that would make Dante blush. There is virtually no dialogue and barely a plot. A masked, wordless ‘Assassin’, whose only goal seems to be annihilation, is the ostensible protagonist, passing by a cornucopia of hideous monsters — from tea-drinking insects to a faecal-based torture trap. Such stomach-churning horror and homespun scrappiness won’t be for all, but there’s something exciting and transgressive about it, as…

★★★★ OUT 1 JULY / CERT TBC / 116 MINS DIRECTOR Ronnie Sandahl CAST Erik Enge, Frida Gustavsson, Alfred Enoch, Liv Mjönes Signed at 17 by Inter Milan, Swedish footballer Martin Bengtsson had not only achieved his dream, but that of millions of boys like him. Adapting his autobiography, writer/director Ronnie Sandahl captures how this dream turned into a nightmare as the player struggled to cope. Erik Enge is bracingly raw in the lead, restrained but allowing glimpses of the maelstrom bubbling under the surface. Intimate close-ups and disorienting angles from cinematographer Marek Wieser accentuate Bengtsson’s deteriorating state, while Jonas Colstrup’s score — stirring strings when Bengtsson is on the pitch, discordant tones as he suffers off it — further underscores the dangerous secrecy surrounding mental health in elite sport.…

★★★★ OUT NOW (NETFLIX) / EPISODES VIEWED 6 OF 7 SHOWRUNNERS Matt Duffer, Ross Duffer CAST Millie Bobby Brown, David Harbour, Winona Ryder, Finn Wolfhard, Sadie Sink, Noah Schnapp, Caleb McLaughlin, Gaten Matarazzo, Natalia Dyer, Charlie Heaton, Maya Hawke, Joe Keery PLOT The events of the Starcourt Mall battle, and the upheaval of the Byers’ move to the West Coast, continue to take a toll on the gang. But as kids from Hawkins High start meeting gruesome ends, it’s clear there’s a new mythical monster on the scene that will need them to work together to take down. FRIENDS MAY NOT lie, but they do grow up — and grow apart. This is the challenge facing the Stranger Things kids as we meet them in the fourth season, long before any…

Now, where have we heard this story before? Two unlikely heroes. Far away from the quiet shire they call home. The fate of Middle-earth in their hands. A perilous journey ahead. “We really did feel a lot like Frodo and Sam being handed the Ring,” laughs JD Payne, recalling the day he and Patrick McKay — childhood friends from McLean, Virginia — received the news they were being entrusted with writing a new chapter in the grandest fantasy mythology the world has ever known. Like the heroic Hobbits of J.R.R Tolkien’s literary epics, and later Peter Jackson’s acclaimed movie adaptations, they were surprise selections for such a quest. “There were so many people who pitched for this show with résumés that, on paper, were more suited to an endeavour of…

MY VERY FIRST memory of being alive was a dream. In the dream I was in a crib, with bars on it. (I was that young.) I had a nightlight in my room. The door was open, and I could see out in the hallway — and then this slurpy, four-foot-long, black octopus thing came into the room and slithered across the floor. I just watched as it put its tentacles up on the bars and plopped over into the crib. That was the dream. I couldn’t have been older than two years old. Later, when I was maybe about eight, I had a dream where I saw this huge monster, out in the back yard: just a black shape, about eight feet tall. It was standing there, staring at…

“A BELLY HANGING OVER HIS BELT, HE IS A SLUMP-SHOULDERED MAN, PUFFY, WILTED. DULL WITH BOOZE.” FREDDY HEFLIN IS the first person we meet in James Mangold’s 1996 shooting script for Cop Land, playing a Lethal Weapon pinball machine. He’s a nominal sheriff in a town inhabited by corrupt cops; a doormat who will become a hero; a turtle who finally comes out of his shell; a classic character that gave its actor a chance to surprise audiences, and its writer-director an entire career. James Mangold wrote Cop Land in 1994, while production delays had temporarily halted the shooting of his debut film, Heavy, a small indie about a lonely cook. Cop Land was supposed to be small, too — but things changed. Thanks to that script, and to Mangold’s…

INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956) Don Siegel’s black-and-white original, based on Jack Finney’s 1954 novel The Body Snatchers, tapped into the vein of paranoia that had begun to grip America in the era of McCarthyism and the panic over Communism. Told in flashback, as Kevin McCarthy recounts a bizarre story of an insidious takeover of America by people who look like us, talk like us, but have deeply disturbing motives, it’s one of the great B movies of the ’50s, down to the iconic ending in which McCarthy has a meltdown in the middle of a traffic jam. Unlike most of the movies and TV shows it inspired, it actually ends on a note of hope. BODY SNATCHERS (1993) In a way still the odd one out on the…

“MY WHOLE SCHTICK,” says Eddie Marsan, “is that people can’t define me. I get offended when people try to define me. Nobody wants me to be me.” Since his breakthrough in the early Noughties, the Londonborn Marsan has emerged as one of the finest character actors around, switching effortlessly between comedy, drama, TV, film, likeable supporting characters and loathsome slugs. Here, with recent projects The Contractor and Choose Or Die now available to stream, we ask him about some of his most memorable outings. MUGGER #1 THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO LITTLE (1997) There’s an early scene in the fairly minor Bill Murray comedy in which Murray’s character, a bumbling American in London who thinks he’s playing an elaborate spy game, is held at knifepoint by two thugs, who become…

THIS MONTH’S FILM MOMENTS THAT MATTER REMEMBER THE LAST time a season of Stranger Things ended? When a secret Soviet base exploded, a key character was seemingly vapourised and the enormous Starcourt shopping mall was burnt to embers during a fight with a 50-foot ‘Mind Flayer’, escaped from the Upside Down? Well, the climax of Stranger Things: Season 4 is about to make that finale look like a quiet episode of Countryfile. “The final episode has more FX shots than the entirety of Season 3,” grins Matt Duffer, who created the Netflix phenomenon, about a gang of 1980s kids navigating supernatural horrors, with his twin brother Ross. “There’s an hour-long chunk in the final episode that just doesn’t stop,” adds Ross. “It’s the most complicated thing we’ve ever attempted to…

RILEY KEOUGH WAS waiting to shoot a scene in American Honey — Andrea Arnold’s 2016 sprawling coming-of-age drama — when she struck up a conversation with supporting actors Franklin Sioux Bob and Bill Reddy. The friendship that followed between the actor and the two young Native-American men was the foundation for War Pony, Keough’s directorial debut (she co-directs with frequent collaborator Gina Gammell). The pair had to fight to get the film off the ground. “Two first-time female filmmakers, an all-indigenous cast and no famous people was not a combination that people were throwing money at,” Keough tells Empire. Yet they weren’t deterred from making the film, based on the stories of the people of Pine Ridge reservation, where American Honey was partially filmed, and where Sioux Bob and Reddy,…

IN THE WORLD of romantic-comedy films, love is a very heterosexual thing. Love on the LGBTQ+ spectrum is rarely seen in romcoms outside of indie or streaming releases. In the vanishingly rare times it does appear in cinemas, such as in 2018’s Love, Simon or 2020’s Happiest Season, the topic is usually the difficulties of coming out, and the parts are often portrayed by straight actors. Now, with Bros, Billy Eichner wants to make a studio romcom that portrays gay dating as every bit as joyful and ridiculous as straight dating, but different in many ways too. And he’s doing it with an all LGBTQ+ cast. The project began in 2017, when Eichner was contacted by director Nicholas Stoller, who wanted to make a comedy about a gay couple but…

Sophie Butcher (Social Media Editor): I like that they say the film is from ‘The Mad Genius Of George Miller’. They’re putting that out there right from the get-go. Ben Travis (Deputy Online Editor): Yeah, let’s not mince any words — George Miller, mad genius, makes sense. Liz Aubrey (Contributor): As a northerner, Tilda’s accent is a highlight. She has form here... Ben Travis: Yes! She did a northern accent in Snowpiercer, where she was basically a northern Maggie Thatcher. Liz: I love how bright and colourful it is — everything kind of clashes but in a good way. Ben: Yeah, it’s all popping in a weird way. I feel like everything is slightly off-kilter, from the colours to the music to even the slightly plastic-looking CGI. John Nugent (Reviews…

You fell in love with that incredible new TV show. And then it ended! Don’t despair — Boyd Hilton recommends the sibling shows to watch next IF YOU LOVED... SHINING GIRLS MESSIAH (BBC/PRIME VIDEO) The creators of Shining Girls have been totally upfront about the influence of Seven on the look and tone of the series, but it’s no exaggeration to say that the film’s exquisitely wrought visuals have been a pervasive influence on the entire genre of serial-killer thrillers in the last few decades. And there can be no finer example than this stylish, enjoyably twisted BBC series, adapted by brilliantly named writer Boris Starling from his own books. The show follows a detective (Ken Stott), who investigates grandiose cases, starting with a psychopath inspired by the Apostles to kill…

★★ OUT 24 JUNE / CERT 12A / 108 MINS DIRECTOR Jacqueline Lentzou CAST Sofia Kokkali, Lazaros Georgakopoulos An opening subtitle tells us that this is “a film about love, movement and flow — and the lack of them”. After years of estrangement, Artemis (Sofia Kokkali) returns to Athens to care for her father, who is suffering from multiple sclerosis. Impressionistic imagery — ’90s VHS footage, teenage-diary entries, an overly competitive ping-pong game — tells the story in an artful and unconventional way, but keeps the viewer at arm’s length, and doesn’t hang together in a strictly narrative sense. Meaning and intention hum only faintly in the background. The filmmaker’s sense of empathy can’t be doubted — one moving scene uses physical therapy to force a rare closeness between father…

★★★★ OUT 22 JUNE / CERT TBC / 108 MINS DIRECTORS George Michael, David Austin CAST George Michael, Tony Bennett, Mary J. Blige, Stevie Wonder An extended (by 13 minutes) cut of George Michael’s self-co-directed 2017 documentary, Freedom Uncut gives the superstar the theatrical release he, and his fans, deserve. Few artists in the history of pop have been so acutely aware of their own career path as Michael. No surprise, then, that this has a heavily curated feel — and despite his candid, confessional approach, there is a sense that even by the end, we haven’t really met the complex man behind the megastar. Nonetheless, it’s an intimate, moving (and starstudded) tribute to a true music legend, charting his path from geeky Bushey schoolboy to globestraddling icon. As the…

★★★★ OUT 17 JUNE / CERT TBC 97 MINS DIRECTOR Sophie Hyde CAST Emma Thompson, Daryl McCormack, Isabella Laughland PLOT Retired teacher and widow Nancy Stokes (Thompson) hires handsome sex worker Leo Grande (McCormack) to help her achieve the sexual fulfilment long missing from her marriage. Over several meetings, Leo aids Nancy in working through her anxieties to find satisfaction while also trying to keep up conjugal appearances. THERE IS NO shortage of sexual awakening stories centred on young ladies’ experience of the big O for the first time. Unfortunately, far too many women go through life without climaxing at all — and this is where comedian and screenwriter Katy Brand has stepped in to fill that orgasm gap. With Sophie Hyde on directing duties, this is an endearing, bubbly…

★★★★ OUT NOW (DISNEY+) / CERT PG / 97 MINS DIRECTOR Akiva Schaffer CAST (VOICES) John Mulaney, Andy Samberg, Will Arnett, Eric Bana, Seth Rogen; KiKi Layne PLOT Chip (Mulaney) and Dale (Samberg) have put their rescue-rangering days behind them, living quiet lives in Los Angeles. But when a cheese-obsessed former colleague is kidnapped, they must put their differences aside in order to rescue-ranger once more. WITH THE BLIZZARD of ’80s and ’90s reboots happening right now, it was inevitable that eventually pop culture would get around to two chipmunk crime-fighters who shun clothing below the waist. Chip and Dale are a relatively deep cut, as far as Disney animals go: while created in 1943, their peak period was 1989-’90, when they headlined their own TV show, Rescue Rangers. By…

★★★★ OUT 17 JUNE / CERT TBC / 109 MINS DIRECTOR Ninja Thyberg CAST Sofia Kappel, Revika Anne Reustle, Evelyn Claire, Chris Cock There are flashes of Sean Baker’s influence in Pleasure: the beauty of a Californian sunset contrasted with the scuzziness of LA — and somewhere in-between, snippets of genuine humanity. Swedish teenager Linnéa (Sofia Kappel, in an extraordinary screen debut) rechristens herself ‘Bella Cherry’ and sets out to be an American porn star. The tale is familiar — the naive starlet embroiled in an exploitative industry — but first-time feature director Ninja Thyberg is unflinching in showing the industry’s grislier side. Yet the film takes a refreshingly matter-offact approach to sex-work, and suggests there is room for a safe, boundary-driven environment — even in a scene involving double-anal…

★★★ EPISODES VIEWED 7 OF 9 OUT 22 JUNE (PARAMOUNT+) SHOWRUNNERS Kyle Killen, Steven Kane CAST Pablo Schreiber, Yerin Ha, Natasha McElhone, Jen Taylor PLOT In the 26th century, humanity is at war with a coalition of alien races known as the Covenant. When a mysterious artefact makes its way into the hands of Spartan supersoldier the Master Chief (Schreiber), it not only escalates the conflict but triggers unforeseen changes in the Chief himself. THE FIRST THING you notice going into Paramount’s new flagship sci-fi series is that it does not fuck about. Within the opening ten minutes, we witness a group of wayward teenagers mercilessly butchered by Sangheili Elites, a bunker of cowering children casually gunned down where they hide, and an entire settlement slaughtered in the time it…

THE JAPANESE SHINKANSEN train — widely referred to in English as the ‘bullet train’ — has a spotless safety record. In over five decades of service, and over ten billion passengers, there has never been so much as a minor collision. In public transport terms, it is surely the safest way to travel. So what happens when you chuck around half-a-dozen cold-blooded killers onto one and let them run riot? That’s the premise of the efficiently titled Bullet Train, which sees an international cadre of assassins on a single Shinkansen train, all fighting — potentially, to the death — over a single briefcase full of money. “I have actually taken this particular journey,” says Brad Pitt, who plays one of said assassins, working under the operational codename ‘Ladybug’. “From Tokyo…

NOT MANY DIRECTORS have had a word coined specifically as a result of their dedication to the noble craft of blowing shit up. Michael Bay has. ‘Bayhem’ doesn’t just work as a word because it’s a damn good pun (and it is a damn good pun), but because Bay, from the minute he roared onto screens with 1995’s Bad Boys, showing off his trademark (if, it’s fair to say, not universally beloved) fast-cutting, camerawhirling style, has blown up anything that can be blown up, and most things that can’t. Yet, for all his success, it had seemed that the two-time Criterion Collection honouree (in the US at least) had perhaps lost his edge, dulled by a succession of Transformers sequels. Ambulance changes all that. The story of two brothers (Jake…

JUDD APATOW KNOWS a thing or two about comedy. Not just as a writer, producer and director of films such as The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, The King Of Staten Island and this year’s Netflix spoof comedy The Bubble, but as a lifelong student of the form. Recently, he’s turned his hand to documenting the greatest comedians on the planet, whether it’s in his interview books such as Sick In The Head (a sequel, Sicker In The Head, is on its way too), or documentaries. After his epic celebration of his former mentor in The Zen Diaries Of Garry Shandling back in 2018, Apatow has now co-directed (with Michael Bonfiglio) George Carlin’s American Dream, a two-part, fourhour deep-dive into the life and times of the legendarily subversive stand-up. Here, he…

JOACHIM TRIER’S MODERN romance — which has found fans in everyone from Paul Thomas Anderson to Jamie Lee Curtis — is a nuanced and tender story about a young woman falling in and out of love in her native Oslo. Here, Trier walks us through the key moments from his Oscarnominated film, which features a startlingly brilliant breakout performance from Renate Reinsve. THE BLACK DRESS The film opens with Reinsve’s glammed-up Julie smoking on a balcony, with a sundrenched Oslo cityscape behind her. Trier recalls working out the shot with his cinematographer, Kasper Tuxen. “I explained how the shot was all about Julie confronting the city, and how she was looking down on life as if she were in a different dimension,” he says. The frame belongs to a sequence…

PICK OF THE MONTH X OUT 20 JUNE / CERT 18 / 105 MINS Sex! Murder! ’70s cinema! All of Ti West’s stylistic signatures, developed over a decade of filmmaking, come to fruition in X. An intentionally old-school, throwbacky slasher, it follows a group of amateur pornographers who rock up at an elderly couple’s ranch to shoot a sex-flick — amusingly, director RJ (Owen Campbell) imagines it as an art movie — before being butchered one-by-one. But the staba-thon formula is subverted in surprising ways — most significantly with an underpinning of melancholy, as the perpetrator’s motivations are revealed. Mia Goth is excellent in a challenging role, West does slow-burn scares brilliantly, and the finale features the year’s most unforgettable sex scene. Rated X for X-cellent. BEN TRAVIS AMBULANCE OUT…