Indice dei contenuti per March 2026 in Empire

ALWAYS FOLLOW YOUR NOSE. Handle fireworks carefully. If you’re getting advice from a guy called Wormtongue, seek a second opinion. All of these are valuable life lessons I’ve learned from watching The Lord Of The Rings. But one teaching stands out above all: nothing can stop a bunch of mates who have each other’s backs. This is true on screen: Frodo and co keep on trucking no matter how many hissing spiders or Christopher Lees get in their way. And it was true off screen, too: Peter Jackson and his own intrepid gang pulled off the impossible despite chilling odds. Friendship is what powered this trilogy, and what still gives it its enormous heart. That’s the theme of this very special 25th anniversary issue. We lit the beacons of Gondor…

The Hurt Locker. @NO-RAGRETS. BSKY.SOCIAL Postcards From The Edge. @JSLATERWILLIAMS. BSKY.SOCIAL Tempted to say Doomsday, but I remain an optimist almost as an act of defiance, so I’m gonna go for A Better Tomorrow. @DTHESLOP. BSKY.SOCIAL If all goes to plan, I expect my 2026 to be filled with Hundreds Of Beavers. @TOMATOTIN. BSKY.SOCIAL I haven’t seen it yet, but feel like Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die works for any new year. @LAURENDAMON. BSKY.SOCIAL Idiocracy. @ANALOGUESUNDAY. BSKY.SOCIAL WATCH OUT FOR THE NEXT QUESTION VIA OUR BLUESKY ACCOUNT: @EMPIREMAGAZINE.BSKY.SOCIAL…

The first time they handed my baby to me, I felt myself disappear. Euphoric and overwhelmed with love, for sure, but the film-obsessive in me could almost hear the credits roll. My character arc was complete, and I would now potentially emerge a few years down the line as a supporting character. As Rose Byrne, star of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, put it in an interview, “Mothers are both revered and ignored,” and films had taught me that I had a few potential paths ahead. Worst case, I’d become a villain from a Stephen King adaptation; best case, I’d be a saint passing down folksy wisdom, or perhaps I’d land somewhere midway and end up a ‘cool mum’ complete with a pink velour tracksuit à la Mean…

TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET AND SUSAN BOYLE “She dreamt bigger than any of us,” the star recently said of Britain’s Got Talent breakout Susan Boyle. Chalamet was referencing the vocalist’s headline-making 2009 rendition of ‘I Dreamed A Dream’. Boyle has since responded with gratitude on Instagram, saying she found his praise “so incredibly touching”. Hopefully a Marty Supreme jacket is in the post. ANNA KENDRICK AND MARY BERRY The Great British Bake Off has quite the Tinseltown following, from Dwayne Johnson to Hugh Jackman. It was Anna Kendrick, however, who took it hardest when host Mary Berry exited the show in 2016 after it migrated to Channel 4. “I am really upset about it,” Kendrick said, adding that the Bake Off fanbase was “so proud” of the pastry maven for her tenure.…

2022 PROVED A notable year for horror. Nope, Scream and The Black Phone made waves in the mainstream. Yet indie movie Hellbender — about a mother and daughter delving into their witchy lineage — was quietly receiving its own acclaim, scoring 97 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes for its fresh, DIY take on the folk subgenre. The creative force behind it is as intriguing: The Adams Family. No, not that one, but a mother-father-two-daughter unit now boasting a cult following (plus numerous awards), thanks to their multifaceted approach to horror filmmaking. And they’re about to release their most personal chapter yet. Sisters Zelda (22) and Lulu Adams (27) have been making movies with dad John and mum Toby Poser since they were, respectively, six and 11. “We all direct, write,…

“HAVE YOU DONE ayahuasca ceremonies?” It only takes a few minutes of talking to writerdirector Oliver Laxe to understand how his mind came up with the startlingly unpredictable Sirāt. The French-born Spanish director is not a man who thinks in typical directions. Sirāt is near impossible to categorise. It begins with a man (Sergi López) searching for his missing daughter at a desert rave, with his young son in tow. With no solid leads, they follow a group of nomads to their next party, across treacherous mountain paths and through pitiless desert, while reports of World War III crackle from car radios. Where the movie ends up — after a journey that’s part Wages Of Fear, part Mad Max, part Squid Game — is so unimaginable, you may feel like…

OUT JANUARY 23 / CERT 15 / 90 MINS DIRECTORS Glenn Leyburn, Lisa Barros D’Sa CAST Éanna Hardwicke, Steve Coogan, Alice Lowe, Peter McDonald Perhaps the most dad-coded film of all time, it’s a wonder Saipan was not released on Father’s Day. Glenn Leyburn and Lisa Barros D’Sa’s film dramatises the incident on the titular Pacific island during the 2002 World Cup when the Irish football team’s captain, Roy Keane (Éanna Hardwicke), had a very public falling out with team manager Mick McCarthy (Steve Coogan). The performances are excellent and the direction stylish, weaving in real news reports to give it the feel of an electric Asif Kapadia documentary. But the real lack of tension or narrative substance — it is literally just about two men having a professional disagreement…

OUT NOW / CERT 12A / 197 MINS DIRECTOR James Cameron CAST Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Stephen Lang, Sigourney Weaver, Kate Winslet, Jack Champion, Oona Chaplin, David Thewlis PLOT On Pandora, the Sully family are still grieving. When Quaritch (Lang) and the colonising RDA team up with Na’vi nihilist Varang (Chaplin), a new battle looms. JAMES CAMERON HAS always excelled at part twos. Aliens and Terminator 2: Judgment Day remain among the greatest sequels of all time. And 2022’s Avatar: The Way Of Water proved that the 2009 original was no fluke; he expanded the world of Pandora, the sprawling story of the big blue aliens, with seeming ease, unfurling new cultures, new conflicts, new complications. But we’ve never seen a James Cameron part three. Until now. Or is it?…

OUT NOW / CERT 12A / 76 MINS DIRECTOR Ira Sachs CAST Ben Whishaw, Rebecca Hall Ira Sachs’ latest paints the interior life of the revered, queer photographer Peter Hujar in delicate brushstrokes, adapting verbatim a conversation between Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall) and friend Peter (Ben Whishaw). Twenty-four hours in Linda’s Manhattan apartment unravel with the blissfulness of a lazy morning. There’s not much in the way of plot, but Rosenkrantz’s transcribed script reveals lots about New York’s intelligentsia, while Alex Ashe’s cinematography comes close to matching the artistic heights of his subject. Later scenes are tinted with Hujar’s tragic death from an AIDS-related illness in 1987; the melancholy isn’t overworked, though, the film understanding the best way to do Hujar justice is to capture his spirit with honesty.…

OUT NOW (PRIME VIDEO) / EPISODES VIEWED 6 OF 8 SHOWRUNNERS Graham Wagner, Geneva Robertson-Dworet CAST Ella Purnell, Aaron Moten, Kyle MacLachlan, Moisés Arias, Xelia Mendes-Jones, Walton Goggins, Justin Theroux PLOT After finding out her father (MacLachlan) helped orchestrate a nuclear apocalypse, Lucy (Purnell) treks to New Vegas with the Ghoul (Goggins) in pursuit of him. FROM A CRAZED organ-harvesting robot to a chicken-fucking snake-oil salesman, it’s fair to say the first season of Fallout captured the offbeat, deeply messed-up sense of humour of Bethesda’s post-apocalyptic game series. On top of nailing the franchise’s retro-futuristic optimism, it introduced entirely new characters, all drawn together in pursuit of a MacGuffin that was, quite literally, a man’s severed head. As the new season kicks off, it seems determined to follow the wasteland’s…

GOODBYE JUNE “A strong directorial debut from Kate Winslet with — as you’d expect — stellar performances from her cast. It might be the perfect antidote to other, overly saccharine Christmas films.” HELEN O’HARA PRIMATE FILM “Director Johannes Roberts is a reliable pulp-horror guy. Okay, so it’s Cujo with a chimp and a pool instead of a dog and a car — but this delivers good, gruesome business and has a sense of fun. Solid horror hokum.” KIM NEWMAN ELLA McCAY FILM “If nothing else, it is most certainly a throwback, plucked from a bygone era. An odd, messy, misjudged shambles, you can’t fault the earnest tone or the plucky performances, but you can fault almost everything else.” JOHN NUGENT FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDY’S 2 FILM “This is genuine weak…

I DON’T THINK I would be exaggerating if I were to say that Peter Jackson, as well as being one of cinema’s most phenomenal movie-makers, is also one of life’s great movement-makers. Over the years, I have met hundreds upon hundreds of filmmakers, students, animators, and CG artists, let alone fans, who, having watched the behind-the-scenes footage of the creation of the Lord Of The Rings trilogy, found the films so inspiring, they saw their own future in our creative industry, and started their own careers. Peter is genuinely one of life’s great inspirers, and I count myself so lucky to have been amongst the legions of creatives he’s interacted with, and developed long-term relationships with. One of Peter’s greatest attributes is that he’s a fantastic collaborator and is willing…

AKINOLA DAVIES SR WAS THE TYPE OF MAN PEOPLE WOULD TELL STORIES ABOUT. A man so charming that different spheres of people would want to be in his orbit, and a man so giving that friends would call him ‘Brother Akin’ because of how he’d regularly take people under his wing. “My aunts would tell me about how he had some old-school Mercedes-Benz,” says his son, Wale. “‘Whenever I sat in the passenger seat,’ his little sister said, ‘I used to feel like the coolest person in Lagos, and we would drive around.’ So he was very charismatic, very enterprising, very well liked, and well loved.” The brainchild of Wale and his brother Akinola Davies Jr, My Father’s Shadow is as much about their dad’s presence as it is his…

SAM RAIMI LIKES TO TORTURE PEOPLE. Not, as our lawyers are very keen to have us emphasise, in a very real sense, with pliers and blowtorches. Instead, whether it’s an Evil Dead movie, or a Spider-Man, or something like Darkman or The Quick And The Dead, he likes to put his characters through the wringer, heaping indignity upon indignity on top of them. And, by extension, his actors, too. Just ask Bruce Campbell, who, on more than one occasion while filming the Evil Dead movies, found himself on the receiving end of, say, a branch wielded by Raimi himself. “It’s not me,” chuckles Raimi. “The audience loves to see that stuff. For some reason, they love to see Bruce hurt. Don’t blame me. I just give them what they want.”…

IAN NATHAN INTERVIEWED PETER JACKSON AND PHILIPPA BOYENS “With Fellowship’s 25th comes the anniversary of my first interview with Peter Jackson. I’ve lost count of the interviews that followed with both Peter and Philippa, often in Middle-earth (see above). ‘Is there anything you haven’t asked?’ quipped Jackson this time. Two very old friends catching up.” OLLY RICHARDS SPOKE TO ALFIE WILLIAMS “Trying to resist the impulse to comment on how tall he’s getting, I spoke to the 14-year-old 28 Years Later star just after his photoshoot in East London. For someone so new to fame, he’s remarkably relaxed and chatty. It was upsetting when he referred to ’90s bands as ‘old music’.” TEAM EMPIRE WENT TO THE AVATAR PREMIERE “Our office Christmas party this year involved a turkey lunch followed…

This magazine has taken many a trip to Middle-earth, from the original trilogy to the Hobbit trilogy, to The Rings Of Power, to a memorable 2021 issue where we brought together Harry Potter and Frodo Baggins themselves, Daniel Radcliffe and Elijah Wood. Our first cover story came 25 years ago, however, in which The Fellowship Of The Ring was the centrepiece of our 2001 Preview. Excitement was at fever pitch. Filming on the trilogy had involved, we reported, “three years of planning, 438 shooting days incorporating 20,000 extras and 300 crew, a record 1.7 million trailer downloads and a court battle with a Long Island magician with the stage name Gandalf”. Mystery still abounded about the strange new motioncapture technology being used to bring Gollum to life, with Ian McKellen…

THE BOOK Foy first read H Is For Hawk, non-binary writer and naturalist Helen Macdonald’s memoir about adopting a hawk after losing their father, when producer Dede Gardner mentioned it as they worked on Sarah Polley’s 2022 drama Women Talking. “Like most people, I had a very strong connection to it,” Foy tells Empire. “It’s incredibly poetic and beautifully written, but there’s a humanity to it which is able to cut through a lot of extraneous crap, and be honest and open.” The book became an important tool for Foy throughout the project, especially when getting into more challenging states of mind. “I’d revisit certain things,” she recalls. “Especially about spatial or emotional dissociation, which they describe so vividly, to get into that space.” THE BIRD Struggling with grief and…

FOR CHRIS HEMSWORTH and Mark Ruffalo, working together for the first time outside the Marvel Cinematic Universe took a little adjustment. “There’s been such a comedic element to what we’ve done before,” says Hemsworth, “that the body almost wants to launch into that and go down that [route]. But that is definitely not the story we’re telling.” Crime 101 is very much not Thor and Hulk in plain clothes. Directed by Bart Layton (American Animals), based on a 2010 Don Winslow novella, it’s a star-packed crimethriller of the sort that used to be commonplace but now seems to have all but disappeared. “It’s really a throwback to those great films we grew up on,” says Ruffalo, “like Thief, or To Live And Die In L.A..” It also has particularly strong…

WHILE WORKING ON his 2022 Elvis Presley biopic, Elvis, Baz Luhrmann was hunting for archive material he might splice into the movie. He found, to his delight, “68 boxes of amazing footage” in a Kansas salt mine that MGM used for storing old film negatives. Said footage was primarily unseen film of Elvis’ Las Vegas residency, but Luhrmann also “found this [audio] recording of him talking about his life”. The two have been restored and combined into the documentary EPiC: Elvis Presley In Concert. Even to a superfan like Luhrmann, the process revealed new sides to the performer. HE WAS A GOOFBALL Some of the film’s most illuminating scenes are simply Elvis palling around with his band. They show an unguarded, playful man far from the polished media persona. “He…

KYLE MARVIN AND Michael Angelo Covino have been in scraps before. But not for a long time. Or with each other. “And never involving goldfish,” insists Marvin. “Well, I don’t know about never involving goldfish,” jokes his longtime co-writer, co-star and co-producing partner, Covino, reflecting on the real-life rumbles that informed one of the maddest movie fight scenes in recent memory. Early in Splitsville, the pair’s comedy-drama about a man who sleeps with his best friend’s wife, Marvin’s dorky teacher character, Carey, comes clean about his actions and a brawl ensues. Cue tumbles down staircases, faces scorched by makeshift blow torches — and yes, aquatic pets put in peril. “It was one of the early ideas that sparked us to want to make the film,” explains Marvin, who recalls how…

OUT JANUARY 14 / CERT 18 / 109 MINS DIRECTOR Nia DaCosta CAST Ralph Fiennes, Jack O’Connell, Alfie Williams, Erin Kellyman, Chi Lewis-Parry PLOT In quarantined England, Spike (Williams) becomes a reluctant member of ‘the Jimmys’, while Dr Kelson (Fiennes) makes an astonishing discovery about the infected. NIA DACOSTA HAS an unenviable task in following last year’s 28 Years Later. Not only is she moving into a directing chair vacated by Danny Boyle, she’s making the second part in a trilogy, blessed with neither a true beginning nor a definitive end. It’s a wonder, then, that her journey into the world of the Rage virus turns out to be such a satisfyingly complete experience. If its scope is somewhat smaller than the first film’s, in many ways it surpasses it,…

OUT JANUARY 23 / CERT 12A / 115 MINS DIRECTOR Philippa Lowthorpe CAST Claire Foy, Brendan Gleeson, Denise Gough, Lindsay Duncan Philippa Lowthorpe’s adaptation of Helen Macdonald’s memoir is an unconventional riff on grieving narratives. But despite impeccable performances, her film doesn’t quite convey the emotional toll of mourning. When academic Helen’s (Claire Foy) dad (Brendan Gleeson) dies unexpectedly, she finds distraction taming a goshawk. There’s strong onscreen chemistry with the raptor she christens Mabel; the tension could be cut with a talon. Yet while Lowthorpe nails this story’s soaring highs, the same can’t be said of its lows, Helen’s mental trajectory becoming increasingly difficult to comprehend. It’s a well-meaning drama, but could have been stronger had it embraced the complexity of its source material.…

OUT JANUARY 16 / CERT 15 / 89 MINS CAST Saja Kilani, Motaz Malhees, Amer Hlehel, Clara Khoury PLOT In Palestine, Red Crescent volunteers receive an emergency call from a five-year-old girl — and attempt to rescue her from an active warzone. IT IS DIFFICULT to cast a critical eye on something so devastatingly, uncompromisingly real as The Voice Of Hind Rajab. It is a unique and incredibly timely docudrama of very recent history, blending actual audio recordings with a dramatised telling of real events. In January 2024, volunteers at the Red Crescent (equivalent to the Red Cross) received an emergency phone call from a young Palestinian girl in Gaza. Trapped in her car and with the sound of gunfire audible in the background, she pleaded for rescue. It is…

OUT JANUARY 30 / CERT TBC / 121 MINS DIRECTOR Bradley Cooper CAST Will Arnett, Laura Dern, Bradley Cooper, Andra Day, Amy Sedaris, Sean Hayes, Christine Ebersole, Ciarán Hinds PLOT After Alex (Arnett) separates from his wife Tess (Dern), he impulsively decides to try stand-up comedy. BRADLEY COOPER’S DIRECTORIAL career so far has been fascinating and unpredictable: from a remake of a much-remade musical melodrama (2018’s A Star Is Born) to an awardsy period prestige drama (2023’s Maestro), to, now, Is This Thing On?, a very loose retelling of the life of British comedian John Bishop, in what may be the first Hollywood quasi-biopic of an 8 Out Of 10 Cats panellist. It’s Cooper’s funniest film behind the camera, and yet also his most unexpectedly humane. Where his first two…

OUT JANUARY 16 / CERT 12A / 110 MINS DIRECTOR Hikari CAST Brendan Fraser, Takehiro Hira, Mari Yamamoto, Shannon Mahina Gorman, Akira Emoto PLOT Tokyo-based actor Phillip (Fraser) is employed by a company that hires out its staff to stand in as family members. He soon begins to form real connections with his clients. WHAT IF HIROKAZU Kore-eda directed an episode of The Rehearsal? On paper, this is what Rental Family brings to mind. Like the Japanese auteur’s brilliant After Life, or Nathan Fielder’s strange series, this Brendan Fraser-fronted film follows an acting troupe committed to helping people on a bigger scale through their craft. This particular company — one of hundreds that actually exist in Japan — hires out its employees to play a mourner at a faux funeral…

PETER JACKSON PAUSES. Stares into the middle distance. The tousled hair is a touch more Gandalf The Grey, but the face strangely ageless, and the Hawaiian shirt a joyfully idiosyncratic move for first thing in Miramar, the Wellington suburb that slopes gently toward the sea. It’s the same house, with the same view, as it was 25 years ago. “What the hell were we thinking?” he starts. “I mean, I would hesitate to even think that we could do anything like that now. It’s almost overwhelming to think back on. I was younger, we were all younger, and enthusiastic and naive.” Another pause, the sense of a door being cracked open, behind which stirs the whole magnificent, insane journey of living The Lord Of The Rings, 18 months of shooting…

GORE VERBINSKL IS GRINNING LIKE A MADMAN. Sitting in his bright, airy office in Pasadena, the director responsible for one of the most eclectic CVs in Hollywood is delighted at how Empire has just described his work. “I’ll take ‘gonzo’,” he beams. “That’s high praise. It’s curiosity, and the cost of curiosity: I’ve got burned fingers. But I keep being drawn to that light. If we landed on a weird planet, I’d probably be the first person to touch it and taste it and run across the field and get shot.” Verbinski is no stranger to sampling peculiar new flavours. Or, indeed, being gunned down. After netting Disney a cool $2.6 billion with the first three Pirates Of The Caribbean movies — a franchise, lest we forget, based on a…

“I HAVE NEVER really been a leading-man guy,” says Joel Edgerton. “Usually I’m number two or three on the call sheet, happily, because sometimes they’re the more interesting roles.” There’s a lot of truth in that. And there’s a lot of truth in Edgerton’s performances. The 51-year-old Australian actor has built his reputation as one of the most solid and dependable actors in the business by being, well, solid and dependable, either in ensemble casts, like Black Mass and The Green Knight, or bouncing off showier turns from the likes of Tom Hardy in the excellent Warrior, or Will Smith in Bright. Over the years he’s also developed into a really interesting multi-hyphenate, tastefully writing and starring in the likes of The King and Jane Got A Gun, and directing…

1 _____ TRON: ARES OUT JANUARY 12/DVD, BR, 4K BR, DIGITAL Joachim Rønning’s Tron threequel — following hot on the heels of Tron: Legacy, released a mere 15 years earlier — was poorly received at the box office, pretty much ensuring it’ll be at least another 15 years before we enter the Grid again. Yet there’s a lot here to like, in particular the visuals, the crunching and pulsating Nine Inch Nails soundtrack, and the Light Cycle street chase that really taps into the potential of Tron in the real world. 2 _____ BIRTH OUT FEBRUARY 9/4K BR Jonathan Glazer’s second movie as director, a world away from Sexy Beast, further confirmed him as a serious talent, and its reputation has only grown in the 20 years since. Chilly, austere and yet…

LETTER OF THE MONTH FAREWELL TO A LEGEND I met Rob Reiner in El Paso, Texas, in 2018 when he joined the protest against Trump’s separation of immigrant mothers and children — and watched him direct Spinal Tap II in 2024, as an extra. A warm man of talent and conscience. Besides directing the greatest mock-rockumentary of all time, This Is Spinal Tap, one cannot forget the great legacy of The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally and A Few Good Men. A horrible way to meet his end. May his memory be a blessing to all filmmakers now and in the future. STEPHEN CONN, NEW MEXICO Lovely memories, Stephen. One recurring theme from the outpouring of grief is that everyone who met Rob had a good experience. Head to…

TOM BLYTH AND David Jonsson have a lot in common. Not only are both rising British stars who have broken into Hollywood, they’ve both, wildly, starred in death-match-style movies directed by Francis Lawrence: Jonsson in The Long Walk, Blyth in The Hunger Games: The Ballad Of Songbirds & Snakes. In Wasteman, the prison-set debut drama from Cal McMau, they grow closer still, as Taylor (Jonsson) tries to outlive the mercurial wrath of cellmate Dee (Blyth), in the hopes of walking free. The pair tell Empire about forging a bond behind bars. David, you auditioned for Wasteman in 2017 but it would take several more years to get financed. What appealed to you about it? Jonsson: It was at a time when all I’d done before was theatre. I’d just left…

YOU HAVE TO speculate to accumulate, the old saying goes, and last year, Hollywood started heeding that advice in a big way. 2025 saw a huge surge in spending on ‘spec scripts’ — unsolicited screenplays telling new stories, instead of studio-commissioned scripts adding to existing franchises and IP. By mid-December, an estimated 44 deals had been struck by the likes of Paramount, Netflix, Searchlight and Apple for brand-new original scripts. Some of the buzziest projects — such as a supernatural series called Pagans and a comedy titled London Ghost Tour from Pirates Of The Caribbean scribe Terry Rossio — reportedly sold for over seven figures apiece, as bidding wars broke out for the next Weapons or Sinners, two box-office hits that began life as specs. Compare these numbers to previous…

WHAT IF RAINBOWS were actually people travelling from the future? French animator Ugo Bienvenu channels this concept into a handdrawn, Oscar-tipped animated feature. Coproduced by Natalie Portman, Arco tells the story of the titular kid who mistakenly time-travels on a rainbow (via a magic cape) from an idyllic future to a dystopian one. Inspired by Jumanji, Casper, Peter Pan and “obviously the Ghibli ones”, Bienvenu says the movie “is not stuck in one field of fiction; it’s a mix of all the genres I love.” Here the debutant co-writer-director unpacks his ode to the power of imagination. THERE’S SCI-FI “It appeared to me in 2020 that we were living in a super-bad science-fiction movie,” says Bienvenu. A warm antidote to cold sci-fi, Arco is set in two distinct timeframes: 2932…

IT WAS A deal that would make anybody say, “Good grief!” A few months after Apple TV announced that it would be extending its streaming run of Peanuts shows and movies through to 2030 (having started in 2018), Sony paid a whopping $457 million to own the majority slice of the Snoopy action. The studio’s aim is to expand the franchise with an eye to bringing it to new audiences. So why are some of Hollywood’s biggest players splashing big bucks on what started as a late-’40s comic strip? Charles M. Schulz’s gang of sensitive kneehigh kids and animals debuted in his hometown paper under the title L’il Folks in 1947. Since then, the characters of the renamed Peanuts have become globally renowned: stars of the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day…

OUT JANUARY 30 / CERT 12A / 106 MINS DIRECTOR Richard Linklater CAST Guillaume Marbeck, Zoey Deutch, Aubry Dullin, Bruno Dreyfürst, Benjamin Clery, Matthieu Penchinat PLOT French film critic Jean-Luc Godard (Marbeck) burns to make his first movie. The resulting picture, Breathless, changes cinema forever. THERE’S ALWAYS BEEN a bit of Jean-Luc Godard in Richard Linklater’s work. From toying with film form in Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly to the verbose intellectualising of the Before Trilogy to the experiments with video in Tape, Linklater’s work has consistently shared DNA with the French New Wave icon. While too conventional to feel like actual J-LG, Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, a French language billet-doux to the making of Godard’s breakthrough Breathless, is affectionate, funny and hugely enjoyable. It’s not a warts-and-all portrait, rather…

OUT FEBRUARY 6 / CERT TBC / 90 MINS DIRECTOR Julia Jackman CAST Emma Corrin, Maika Monroe, Nicholas Galitzine, Amir El-Masry, Charli xcx PLOT A callous husband (El-Masry) leaves his wife (Monroe) with his caddish friend (Galitzine) as a potentially lethal test of fidelity. Loyal maid Hero (Corrin) must thwart his plans. THIS SECOND FILM from Julia Jackman is a fairy tale set in a nightmare world, a feminist parable that meanders between funny and furious. The setting is, if you can imagine, a world dominated by misogyny, where women are denied basic rights and authority over their own bodies. In that harsh reality, a few brave women fight back in the only way they can: by telling stories. Based on a striking graphic novel by Isabel Greenberg, this at…

OUT NOW (SKY ATLANTIC) / EPISODES VIEWED 5 OF 5 SHOWRUNNER Joe Barton CAST Will Sharpe, Paul Bettany, Gabrielle Creevy, Enyi Okoronkwo, Lucy Cohu, Jonathan Aris, Rory Kinnear PLOT Wunderkind Mozart (Sharpe) arrives in Vienna, leading to deep resentment in older court composer Salieri (Bettany). IT MAY TECHNICALLY be another interpretation of Peter Shaffer’s 1979 play, but it’s Miloš Forman’s 1984 movie and its eight Oscars that loom over this show. Written by Joe Barton (Giri/Haji, Black Doves), the lavish new expansion of Amadeus doesn’t soar as elegantly as Forman’s, but it finds a tune all its own. The story begins with an aged Antonio Salieri (Paul Bettany) confessing to the killing of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Will Sharpe). We then flash back to their initial meeting. In Vienna, Salieri is…

OUT FEBRUARY 6 / CERT 18 / 128 MINS DIRECTOR Kristen Stewart CAST Imogen Poots, Thora Birch, Tom Sturridge, Kim Gordon, Michael Epp, Earl Cave, Jim Belushi PLOT Gifted swimmer Lidia Yuknavitch (Poots) grows up in an abusive household, and later finds herself through writing. THE CHRONOLOGY OF Water has been a long time coming. Kristen Stewart announced her plans to make her directorial debut as far as back as 2018. By 2022, the actor admitted that she would “die” if she couldn’t make the film. The years of hard work behind her adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s titular memoir can be felt in every single frame — covered, quite literally, in blood, sweat and tears. If it were possible to crack open Yuknavitch’s brain and project all the thoughts and messy…

OUT JANUARY 23 / CERT 15 / 128 MINS DIRECTOR Oliver Hermanus CAST Paul Mescal, Josh O’Connor, Molly Price, Chris Cooper, Hadley Robinson PLOT In 1920s New England, two young men fall in love as they collect folk songs from workingclass people and preserve them. THEY (USUALLY) DON’T make them like this anymore. The History Of Sound, directed by Living’s Oliver Hermanus, spans most of the 20th century, its prologue set in 1910 and epilogue in 1980. But even for a period drama it’s decidedly, almost defiantly old-fashioned. Those hoping to see scene after scene of it-boys Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor in the throes of passion will be rather disappointed; this is a much subtler and more sedate affair, reminiscent of Merchant-Ivory or the films of Terence Davies. Adapted…

FILLY BUSTER THE RING 2002 If Hideo Nakata’s lo-fi, J-horror original Ring (1998) was missing one thing, it was a horse jumping over the side of a ferry. Verbinski corrects that by having a chomping, stomping thoroughbred escape its horsebox, gallop over a car and nosedive into the churning sea. WHEEL DEAL PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN’S CHEST 2006 A three-way swordfight between Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp), Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) and James Norrington (Jack Davenport) spills onto a waterwheel that breaks loose and rolls down a hill. At one point Jack is inside the wheel, running in place like a hamster. BAT-TLE STATION RANGO 2011 Riding a wagon pulled by a boar, chameleon Rango (Johnny Depp) is chased by machine-gun-wielding, dynamite-tossing rodents that ride on bats to a…

ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE DIGITAL After a violent robbery, four crooks (pro Eddie Marsan, maniac Sam Claflin, rookie Tienne Simon, junkie Burn Gorman) hole up in a dilapidated farmhouse and go mad. A familiar premise — especially if you saw The World We Knew — is sold by a good cast and weird late-film plot-twists. ABOVE THE KNEE DIGITAL A tactful yet traumatising film about Body Integrity Identity Disorder, a real (rare) psychological condition. Sufferers believe they will be comfortable in their bodies if they were to lose a body part. Amir (Freddy Singh) schemes to get rid of his left leg and director Viljar Bøe observes with apt detachment. A DESERT DIGITAL Photographer Kai Lennox tours derelict locations in the American South-West to compile a book, discovering a…

RIAN JOHNSON’S KNIVES OUT movies are whodunnits, in which debonair detective Benoit Blanc tries to solve a string of murder mysteries. But the biggest mystery of them all comes in the Special Thanks section of the credits of all three films: Knives Out, Glass Onion, and the brand-new entry, Wake Up Dead Man. And it’s not so much a whodunnit, more a whodat? Some of the names that Johnson specially thanks across the trilogy are easy to explain away. Karina Longworth? That’s his wife. Bryan Lourd? His longtime agent. Bill Hader, for Glass Onion? “He gave me a note on the script that really helped a lot,” says Johnson. Perennial Special Thankee, Guillermo del Toro, for Wake Up Dead Man? “He gave me really specific, helpful notes at a point…