Empireの November 2020 の目次

THE EARLY HOURS of Saturday morning and I couldn’t sleep – my baby was stirring and I was idly scrolling Twitter, one eye open. What I read didn’t make sense at first. I thought I must have misunderstood; sleep deprivation making nonsense of the words. But no, unbelievably, it was true. At the age of just 43, actor and filmmaker Chadwick Boseman had died. As the day emerged and the world woke up to the news, there came an unparalleled outpouring of devastation, love and respect. People shared stories of his goodness, his grace, his generosity. Others spoke to his impact, both on screen and off. Of his brilliant, sometimes-missed sense of humour. So the day I returned to Empire after maternity leave, it was the first and easiest decision…

WOULD YOU BUY this for a dollar? A longawaited bronze tribute to RoboCop is finally ready for unveiling in Detroit. The idea was first proposed back in 2011, and has hit roadblocks galore since. “It’s been a slog,” laughs Brandon Walley, a Detroit-based filmmaker and one of the project’s organisers. “We never imagined it’d take this long, but it’s done. He’s 10’ 4”, nearly seven tons and looks awesome.” The catalyst for this nine-year odyssey was a tweet in February 2011, suggesting that Detroit needed a RoboCop statue to rival Philadelphia’s Rocky effigy. “So we thought we’d throw it on Kickstarter,” recalls Walley. Such was the love for Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 classic that donations surpassed $65,000 in under a week. “The first ‘oh shit’ moment came four days in, when…

SO, IS THIS HAPPENING? It’s much more than a hunch. Deadline reported last month that Booksmart’s Olivia Wilde (below) has signed to direct a film about a female Marvel character. Wilde then dropped some not-so-subtle hints about who this could be on social media, tweeting a spider emoji. WHICH SPIDER-WOMAN WILL WE SEE? It’s likely to be Jessica Drew, the first and best-established Spider-Woman, who debuted in the comics in 1977. Suffering uranium poisoning in childhood, Drew’s father injected her with a life-saving spider serum. Drew spent decades in stasis before awaking in her teens with exceptional superpowers. LIKE WHAT? She can stick to any surface – and produce a ‘Spider-Aura’ which causes confusion and ‘bioelectric energy’, a venom-blast to stun enemies. Which is pretty cool. WHAT’S HER HISTORY? She’s…

SHIRLEY Elisabeth Moss stars as horror writer Shirley Jackson in this biopic, which plays like one of Jackson’s own twisted psychodramas. 9 OCTOBER, BFI PLAYER, VENUES NATIONWIDE MOGUL MOWGLI A passion project for Riz Ahmed, who co-writes and stars as a rap star on the cusp of global fame, before an autoimmune disease changes his plans. 10 OCTOBER, BFI PLAYER, VENUES NATIONWIDE WOLFWALKERS The latest film from Ireland’s Cartoon Saloon (Song Of The Sea) is another blend of folkloric storytelling and gorgeous 2D animation. Sean Bean is on voice duties. 10 OCTOBER, BFI PLAYER SUPERNOVA Two of cinema’s most beloved middle-aged men, Stanley Tucci and Colin Firth, team up for a road trip – with early-onset dementia looming. 11 OCTOBER, BFI PLAYER, VENUES NATIONWIDE DAVID BYRNE’S AMERICAN UTOPIA Thirty-six years…

DIRTY GRANDPA (2016) LT COL DICK KELLY An absolute mess of a grandpa: he openly masturbates in front of his grandson, indulges in the occasional bit of crack, and declares that he wants to “fuck ‘til my dick falls off”. It’s the sort of behaviour that would surely get you kicked out of the Whist Club. RATING: “FUGGEDABOUTIT!” THE IRISHMAN (2019) FRANK SHEERAN Softly spoken, but scary. We never see Frank’s grandchildren, largely because neither does he: this grandpa is estranged from his family, due to him being a mass murderer. And you thought your Christmas get-togethers were awkward. RATING: “YOU’RE NOT TALKING TO ME?” LITTLE FOCKERS (2010) JACK BYRNES A by-the-book kind of grandpa, albeit not one who sets a great example – there’s a scene where he forces…

THE SCENE: We see what looks like a shooting star falling from the night sky towards the Nevada desert. It is an alien aircraft, making an emergency landing,and coming to a stop just a few feet away from a VW MiniVan, where inside PAULIE (Burt Young) is asleep. A door unfolds from the alien aircraft and we hear a humming noise. We then see the base of a robot, Sico, hovering down from the craft and floating towards the VW. Paulie finally awakens, staring at Sico. PAULIE What the hell is this? Who the hell are you? SICO Good. You speak. (pointing to the VW) Are you capable of operating this abominable craft? I need you to drive me to your place of shelter, human, where I may repair my…

1. TARANTINO ACTS, A LOT The 1996 simulation game – designed to help wannabe directors understand filmmaking – features Quentin Tarantino as a convict on Death Row (with a Pulp Fiction poster in his cell). The director has rarely acted as much as he did here; the choose-your-own-adventure online version at one point gives the viewer the option of “Serious Tarantino” or “Comedy Tarantino”. 2. PENN & TELLER POP UP A ubiquitous sight throughout the ‘90s, the magician duo play the roles of the nominal villains who frame Tarantino’s character for the crime. As far as Spielbergian scumbags go, they’re more Hook than Jaws – though that depends on whether you choose “Creepy Magician” or “Appropriate Magician”. 3. FRIENDS LIKE THESE Jennifer Aniston makes a surprising appearance at the height…

EXCELLENT GOOD OKAY POOR AWFUL OUT 9 OCTOBER CERT 15 / 83 MINS DIRECTOR Rose Glass CAST Morfydd Clark, Jennifer Ehle, Lily Knight PLOT In a depressed seaside town, Maud (Clark), a deeply religious live-in nurse, leaves the NHS and takes a job looking after Amanda Köhl (Ehle), a terminally ill ex-dancer with a pitch-black worldview and a razor-sharp tongue. More than just providing palliative care, Maud soon becomes filled with a calling from God to save Amanda’s soul. SAINT MAUD IS one of a kind. Writer-director Rose Glass’ debut is brazenly unclassifiable, supremely comfortable in its own uncomfortable skin. In its tight 83 minutes, it blurs both psychological and body horror with the kind of religious ascetism you might find in a Paul Schrader flick to create a mood…

OUT 23 OCTOBER / CERT TBC / 94 MINS DIRECTOR Barnaby Thompson CAST Olivia Cooke, Alec Baldwin, Ben Hardy, Daryl McCormack An ensemble cast of colourful characters with criminal undertones; sparky dialogue in a rural Irish setting; a road trip with an unexpected threesome – Pixie is the answer to the eternal question: what if Guy Ritchie and John Michael McDonagh remade Y Tu Mamá También? As Pixie, the daughter of a crime boss looking to start a new life, Olivia Cooke is relentlessly charismatic and deserves all the lead roles you can throw at her, but she’s occasionally let down by a script obsessed with dated, horny humour. There are, however, excellent cameos from Dylan Moran (blunt and brilliant) and Alec Baldwin (ends up having a slow-motion gunfight with…

OUT 9 OCTOBER / CERT TBC / 94 MINS DIRECTOR Halina Dyrschka PARTICIPANTS Iris Müller-Westermann, Johan af Klint, Julia Voss, Ernst Peter Fischer You probably haven’t heard of Hilma af Klimt, even though Kristen Stewart name-drops her in Personal Shopper. Don’t worry, not many people have. Indeed, as this fascinating documentary reveals, the art establishment has done its level best to ignore the reclusive Swedish woman who invented abstract art in 1906, five years before Wassily Kandinsky. Debutant filmmaker Halina Dyrschka is right to expose this scandalous anomaly, while allowing her camera to rove across the colourful and dazzlingly innovative images that were inspired by spiritualism, theosophy and science. But it might have been useful to hear a bit more about af Klimt’s technique and the intentions behind paintings that…

OUT 23 OCTOBER / CERT TBC / 100 MINS DIRECTOR François Ozon CAST Félix Lefebvre, Benjamin Voisin, Philippine Velge, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi A throwback to his early sexy ones (Young & Beautiful, Swimming Pool), François Ozon’s Summer Of 85 is a melancholy-tinged seaside love story that plays out over one cruel summer (yep, Bananarama are on the soundtrack). Death- obsessed teen Alexis (Félix Lefebvre) is being held in police captivity following the death of older, more worldly David (Benjamin Voisin, a real force). The film flips back to trace their relationship and paints a joyous, intoxicating portrait of young passion. Ozon fills the romance with life (a capsized boat! Fairgrounds! Discos!), while the flashback structure builds genuine intrigue into the outcome. The result is a poignant ’80s idyll that includes…

OUT 23 OCTOBER / CERT TBC / 88 MINS DIRECTOR Adrian Shergold CAST Antonia Campbell-Hughes, Johnny Flynn, Joel Fry Grief, guilt and sanity are explored in this oddly haunting psychological thriller. Dealing with trauma from the past, it almost feels itself like an artefact from another age, featuring such anachronistic elements as a landline, 35mm Kodak film and complex, human characters. Antonia Campbell-Hughes is somehow fiercely vulnerable as a shellshocked twin being coaxed back to something like life by cello-playing neighbour Johnny Flynn. Repulsion springs to mind as a touchstone, but the film isn’t shamed by the comparison, with its enveloping photography providing an aesthetic of thrift-store opulence and its atmosphere an unpredictable blend of clamminess, dread and desire. Like its title character, you just don’t know where it’s going…

OUT 9 OCTOBER / NETFLIX / CERT TBC / 129 MINS DIRECTOR Radha Blank, CAST Radha Blank, Peter Y. Kim, Oswin Benjamin Taking its cues from Spike Lee and Woody Allen, Radha Blank’s directorial debut is a whip-smart comedy shot on black-and-white 35mm. Radha (Blank) is a once-hot playwright and inner-city drama teacher who for years has been struggling to get her stage-play ‘Harlem Ave’ produced. Torn between staying true to her authentic self, or allowing the liberal colonialism of white producers and directors to dictate the lens through which she is supposed to caricature her community, Radha takes up rapping to vent her frustrations and find the creative freedom she has been yearning for. Endearing, erudite and dripping with humour, Blank serves up an authentic commentary on the artist’s…

OUT 2 OCTOBER / CERT PG / 96 MINS DIRECTOR Malou Reymann CAST Kaya Toft Loholt, Mikkel Boe Følsgaard, Rigmor Ranthe, Neel Rønholt One perfectly normal day, 11-year-old Emma (Kaya Toft Loholt) is told that her father is transitioning to become a woman. Older sister Caroline (Rigmor Ranthe) accepts the news while Emma struggles. Danish debut director Malou Reymann flattens the specifics of transgender experiences to the point that this could be about a child dealing with any kind of parental change. Thomas/Agnete is played by a cis male actor (Mikkel Boe Følsgaard) who scans like a drag act with overemphasised mannerisms, and sails smoothly through transitioning in a manner that defies belief. Partly, this is the deliberate result of telling the story through the unreliable eyes of Emma, yet…

TENNIS BALL BARRAGE WAYNE’S WORLD 2 (1993) Always a master of the pratfall, when Farley goes down hard during Del Preston’s gruelling roadie training he even manages to turn getting pelted by tennis balls into an artform. “Why don’t you just quit?” demands Wayne, setting up Farley’s classic An Officer And A Gentleman-spoofing plaintive punchline: “’Cause I got no place else to go!” OLYMPIC FIGURE SKATING SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE (1994) Nancy Kerrigan was fresh from winning silver at the Winter Olympics when she teamed up with Farley to play figure-skating duo Anna and Wolfgang Wormeldanger. At first Farley appears unsteady on his skates, but he’s hustling us. Soon he’s flowing gracefully across the ice: forwards, backwards and even up on one leg. Give that man a medal. LUNCH LADY LAND…

Alamy. Illustration: Neil Edwards IT’S THE MONTH of the wolf, starting with Antonin Baudry’s French edge-of-doom submarine thriller The Wolf’s Call (aka Le Chant Du Loup), where the fate of humanity depends on Chanteraide (François Civil), whose acute eardrums augment arrays of high-tech sonar and detection equipment. When a missile is launched from an apparent Russian sub, Chanteraide deduces from the noise it makes whizzing towards France that it’s not carrying a payload and is a terrorist ploy. Then the race is on to intercept the hero’s former captain (Reda Kateb) – who has, per procedures, shut off all communication with the outside world – before he retaliates and starts World War III. Manly underwater hokum with nice moments of far-fetched heroism. Alistair Banks Griffin’s The Wolf Hour refers to…

We’ve got a treat for your ears in Competition Corner this month – a pair of award-winning AIAIAI TMA-2 HD wireless headphones, RRP £310. Long involved with the music and DJ scene, AIAIAI is dedicated to creating the best in portable sound quality – perfect for when you’re catching up with movies on the move or on your laptop, and want a bit of that cinema-style crystal audio. The TMA-2 HD headphones also have a super comfortable memory foam earpad, so you can get through even The Return Of The King’s Extended Edition no problem, and with AIAIAI’s commitment to sustainablity, they’re guilt-free too. To win a pair, crack the crossword, solve the anagram and text your answer to the number below. THE AIAIAI TMA-2 HD HEADPHONES ARE AVAILABLE NOW…

REVIEW REWIND I read your Tenet review and was disappointed with the four-star rating. This movie is perfect and five stars would have been justified. I propose we do a Temporal Pincer Movement to go back and change it. Here’s an inverted justification for that fifth star which you can read while you’re ‘inverted’ and rewriting the review: !srats eviF .etad ot seivom tsedlob dna tseb s’naloN fo eno yletinifeD .gniweiv amenic sdnamed taht aedi lanigiro gniwolb-dnim a htiw aznagavartxe dekcap-noitca nA PHIL SIMM / MMIS LIHP Fun fact: Empire watches all films both forwards and backwards. Tenet is the only one that’s been equally confusing in both directions. Picture house Empire’s star letter wins a Picturehouse Membership, plus one for a friend! Valid for one year at 23 Picturehouse…

Alamy, Getty Images, Shutterstock, HBO Good morning, David. Where are you and what time is it? It’s 10 o’clock, am, in Los Angeles, California. I’m in quarantine. Haven’t been out of the house for months. Do you miss any of it? No. I’m very happy being quarantined. Why? Has it forced you into a more intense period of creativity? Yeah, I’m in painting mode, and doing small sculptures, working on things for my YouTube channel. I’ve got many projects going. Do you have any pets with you there? No. I have some small birds. I put out some seeds for some birds. Do they have names? No, they haven’t told me their names. But I do talk with them. Do they talk back? Yeah, they do. They love the seeds.…

THE ‘TIMESTILE’ TENET Director Christopher Nolan has said Tenet is “not a time-travel film”. Except it is a bit, isn’t it? Those giant industrial turnstiles merely ‘invert entropy’, of course, but that can be quite useful for travelling in a time sort of way. THE PICKLE VAT AN AMERICAN PICKLE Here, Seth Rogen plays an Eastern European immigrant who falls into a vat of pickles and wakes up a century later. If you’re thinking, “That’s not how pickling works, he’d surely die” – don’t worry, it’s all explained off-camera. THE CAVE PALM SPRINGS The premise of this upcoming romcom? Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti wander into a cave and get sucked into a Groundhog Day-esque time vortex. It’s the most terrifying cave mishap since The Descent Part 2.…

ON ACTING AS A CHOICE OF CAREER “I’d never thought of it in terms of vocation. I was into politics and community. My dad is a journalist who was part of the pro-democracy movement in Nigeria and my mum works in communities in developing nations, and I am still really interested in that kind of work. I always thought I’d go into something along those lines. But acting came and got me and I said, ‘Okay, I’ll go along with you, then.’” ON KEEPING MARVEL’S SECRETS SAFE “I see it as fun, really. I’m not keeping nuclear secrets. If they come out, the world won’t collapse! But you’re protecting fans’ enjoyment of what you’ve made, so I care about it for their sake. I’m that weirdo who literally sits with…

Alamy, Getty Images THE OSCARS ARE changing. Last month, the Academy announced that there would be new inclusion standards for the Best Picture category from 2024 onwards, with each film required to meet at least two of four new standards, including on-screen rules (such as featuring a major character from an underrepresented racial or ethnic group) and off-screen rules (two or more department heads be female, LGBTQ, disabled or part of an underrepresented group, for example). It’s the latest attempt to improve diversity in the awards in the wake of the #OscarsSoWhite campaign, started in 2015 by writer and activist April Reign. That hashtag, born out of Reign’s “frustration with the fact that no people of colour were nominated for any of the acting categories”, as she puts it, has…

OUT 16 OCTOBER / PRIME VIDEO / CERT TBC / 81 MINS DIRECTOR Garrett Bradley PARTICIPANTS Fox Rich, Rob Rich In 1999, in an act of desperation, Rob Rich, aided by wife Fox, was arrested for an armed bank robbery and sentenced to 60 years in prison. Garrett Bradley’s film follows Fox’s attempts to get him released in the face of a racist prison system, expensive legal fees and courthouse indifference. Lensed in timeless black and white, Bradley combines contemporary footage of the campaigning with touching, poetic video-diary footage captured over 20 years that sees the Rich children grow up without a father. It lacks narrative impetus, but what stands out is Bradley’s non-judgemental, probing approach to his subject – does imprisonment uphold safety or simply divide families and communities?…

OUT 16 OCTOBER / CERT TBC / 97 MINS DIRECTOR Nathan Grossman CAST Greta Thunberg, Svante Thunberg A climate-change movement that shook the world began with a solitary act of defiance: 15-year-old Greta Thunberg sat outside Sweden’s parliament with a home-made sign, “School Strike For Climate”. Soon, young people across the globe would join her. From her earliest protests to her epic sea voyage to address the UN, documentary maker Nathan Grossman filmed every step, charting her development from lone schoolgirl protester to a powerful voice holding politicians to account. While the film captures Thunberg’s passion and determination, at times it treads an uncomfortable line between access and exploitation (such as when Thunberg breaks down in a private moment). It’s also a largely one-sided portrait too, a chronicle of Thunberg’s…

OUT NOW / NETFLIX CERT 18 / 138 MINS DIRECTOR Antonio Campos CAST Tom Holland, Eliza Scanlen, Bill Skarsgård, Riley Keough, Jason Clarke, Robert Pattinson, Sebastian Stan, Mia Wasikowska PLOT Between World War II and Vietnam, a crossgenerational melodrama plays out in the backwoods of West Virginia and Ohio. In 1957, Pacific campaign veteran Willard Russell (Skarsgård) wrestles with his faith and his wife’s illness. In 1965, their son Arvin (Holland) deals with the threats levelled at his pious stepsister, Lenora (Scanlen). IT WAS BOUND to happen. At some point in his career, Tom Holland was gonna grow up and go properly dark. He’s already in his mid-twenties, but Holland possesses a Michael J. Fox-esque power to appear (and sound) forever teenaged, and has channelled that well into fresh-faced charmers,…

OUT 23 OCTOBER / CERT PG / 99 MINS DIRECTOR Marc Munden CAST Dixie Egerickx, Edan Hayhurst, Amir Wilson, Julie Walters, Colin Firth Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic story of alienation, anger and illness gets a fresh adaptation from Utopia director Marc Munden. In some ways it’s a story perfect for 2020, because it sees a small group of traumatised people find solace in gardening and fresh air. Orphaned Mary Lennox (Dixie Egerickx) is brought from India to live with her uncle Archibald Craven (Colin Firth), and finds a dysfunctional household that begins to be healed when Mary reopens a locked garden in the manor’s grounds. But the film doesn’t quite trust the magic of the garden, adding visual dazzle and, sometimes, an air of artificiality. Lord Craven also now gets…

OUT 9 OCTOBER / CERT TBC / 103 MINS DIRECTOR Cassius Corrigan CAST Cassius Corrigan,Yara Martinez, Grégory ‘Cheetah’ Choplin The propulsive debut from director-star Cassius Corrigan, Huracán is the story of an MMA fighter with a criminal past and a personality disorder, attempting to go pro while battling his demons. Corrigan is convincing as Alonso, a young Latinx man seemingly floundering in the uncertainty of life in America as an ex-con. Drawing from the salt-of-the-earth redemptive tropes of classic boxing films, Huracán reaches a brutal, blood-soaked conclusion in a major battle in the octagon. It may be a familiar story, but it also spotlights the Latinx community of working-class Florida in a fresh way, showing Alonso bouncing between institutions from prison to therapy to the gauntlet of the mixed martial…

OUT 2 OCTOBER / SKY ONE / EPISODES VIEWED 9 OF 9 SHOWRUNNER David Wiener CAST Alden Ehrenreich, Jessica Brown Findlay, Harry Lloyd Aldous Huxley’s dystopian classic undergoes a modern reimagining, with Alden Ehrenreich as John, the American ‘savage’ trying to assimilate into New London’s caste-based social order. Thrust into a world where feel-good soma pills are popped to combat the slightest hint of upset, John brings an emotional tension, particularly for Harry Lloyd’s awkward Alpha, Bernard, and Jessica Brown Findlay’s discontented Beta, Lenina. Across the series we see the love triangle become more pointed and John’s disruptive influence magnify, but it’s here that it loses momentum. While the earlier, character- led episodes are compelling, when the revolution comes, interest starts to wane.…

6 NOVEMBER 2019 When I met Chadwick Boseman last November, in a London hotel to promote 21 Bridges, there was no hint that he might not live another 12 months, or that it would be his last interview with Empire. Far from it: I remember thinking how healthy and handsome he seemed, moving into the hotel room with a quiet but intense charisma – the very definition of a capital-M movie star. I was struck, too, by how busy he was; in our half-hour conversation, we covered a staggering 15 projects, including his plans to write, direct and produce. He seemed most enthused about returning to T’Challa, though. Black Panther 2 had been confirmed three months earlier, and he spoke remarkably earnestly about the responsibility he felt. We can only…

BACK IN AUGUST 2014, on her very first day of filming on Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, Rebecca Ferguson jumped 120 feet off an Austrian rooftop. Not bad for a sufferer of vertigo. And so impressed was Tom Cruise, that later in the shoot he asked her how she felt about joining him in another stunt – her attached to the wing of a biplane, him piloting it. “I said, ‘You must be fucking joking!’” she recalls replying. “‘What? Absolutely not!’” This may be the only – and completely understandable – recorded example of Rebecca Ferguson ducking away from a challenge. Over the past few years, she has forged a formidable and unpredictable path through Hollywood, appearing in big movie after big movie but never doing the same thing twice.…

THIS MONTH JAMIE McKELVIE, COMIC BOOK WRITER/ ARTIST EXTRAORDINAIRE, BREAKS HIS 2001: ASPACE ODYSSEY DUCK… I’M A HUGE fan of science-fiction, so I can’t really explain why I’ve never seen 2001: A Space Odyssey. Maybe because it’s so ubiquitous and has been referenced and parodied so many times, I felt like I already knew it. That’s a stumbling block from the very start. I’m so used to variations on the opening sequence – the Earth, moon and sun moving into alignment, scored dramatically by ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’- being played for laughs that it is hard to take it seriously. Even attempting to view it on its own merits, it seems heavy-handed. It’s an issue which pops up more than once in the rest of the film. A shot of dawn…

Alamy. Illustration: Neil Edwards While demonstrating an astonishing career range from UK kids’ TV (M.I. High) and sitcom (Bob Servant Independent) to US high-end cult drama (The Walking Dead), Scots cult queen Pollyanna McIntosh has carved out an under-the-radar franchise as ‘The Woman’. She first played the cannibal matriarch in Andrew van den Houten’s makeshift splatter movie Offspring – a rare horror film to have superior sequels. The Woman (directed by Lucky McKee) and now Darlin’ (which McIntosh stars in, directed and co-wrote) bring the primitive savage out of the woods to interact with a ‘normal’ world that’s as horrific as the brutal cave she’s from. McIntosh is also memorable as ‘the Size Queen’ in Filth, has done good work in odd little British genre films (Exam, Let Us Prey),…

1 The Astro Spiral Jump was inspired by Raymond McHenry’s work creating simulations/reconstructions of single vehicle accidents. 2 Marketing exec Hy Smith flew out 100 journalists to witness the spectacle to prove Bond stunts were done for real. They still wrote about it, as Smith recalled, “as the most wonderful special effect they’ve ever seen”. 3 Still, star Moore was suitably impressed. After witnessing the jump, he told the stunt team: “You fellas make me look good.” 4 In June 2008, BBC TV’s Top Gear tried to recreate the stunt with a red MG Maestro. They failed.…

1. BLOODSPORT IDRIS ELBA With the absence of Deadshot, expect Bloodsport to fill the role of the gun-toting walking armoury in James Gunn’s Suicide Squad reboot. In the comics, Robert DuBois is a vengeful foe of Superman who comes close to killing the Man Of Steel with Kryptonite-laced bullets, and Gunn has hinted that Idris Elba’s version of the character is locked up for that very reason. His high-tech arsenal, supplied by Lex Luthor in the comics, should come in handy against rumoured villain Starro. 2. KING SHARK STEVE AGEE Yes, King Shark. An actual shark. Not to be outdone by the original Suicide Squad movie’s Killer Croc, the sequel will feature this brilliantly bizarre fan favourite from DC’s lower tier of villains. A humanoid shark, his origins are murky,…

Matt Holyoak/Camera Press WHEN WOODY HARRELSON made his directing debut, he did not make things easy for himself. 2017’s Lost In London was shot in one take and broadcast, live, to 500 cinemas around the UK. With the film finally making its non-live debut on Prime Video, Harrelson called Empire from his home in Maui, Hawaii, to look back on his mad first movie, contemplate what the next one might be and discuss a very strange year. Oh, and there’s also the small matter of fighting Tom Hardy in the Venom sequel. And becoming the next – potential – President of the United States. It’s now three years since you made Lost In London. Any thoughts about doing any more directing? I would like to. I’ve been working on some…

Alex Godfrey (Contributor): Bond has been going for so long now, every time a new one comes out, it seems to be battling to be relevant again, still trying to compete with everything that’s ripped it off. Nick de Semlyen (Deputy Editor): I’m not yet sold on the story of this one. I don’t know what the story is. The past has come back, and it’s wearing a mask from The Purge? I don’t buy the relationship with Léa Seydoux, either. Eva Green should come back. Joanna Moran (Photography Director): He loved Eva Green. Alex: Yeah, but Quantum Of Solace was one big grief-fest for her. He was so sad, he made a shit film. Ben Travis (Online Staff Writer): It plays the Bond theme, fast and exciting, which I…

CYNTHIA NIXON ILLUSTRATION ARNO Do you have a favourite joke? It’s a lame joke but it’s one of my favourites. “What did the zero say to the eight? Nice belt.” It’s so innocent! Have you ever been starstruck? When I was a little girl I used to love Carol Burnett. She was almost like a god to me. I remember watching her show and thinking about how she was such a big part of my life and she had no idea, and that she wouldn’t know me if she saw me. Then many years later I was backstage at Carrie Fisher’s one-woman show and Carol Burnett was there, and she recognised me and said nice things to me. I was blown away. She probably said something very simple. But it…

OUT 2 OCTOBER / CERT 15 / 95 MINS DIRECTOR Craig Roberts CAST Sally Hawkins, Alice Lowe, Billie Piper, David Thewlis, Penelope Wilton A step up from his directorial debut Just Jim, Craig Roberts’ second feature delivers a compassionate view of schizophrenia. Jane (Sally Hawkins) has suffered voices in her head and paranoid delusions since being jilted on her wedding day (Morfydd Clark plays the role in flashbacks). The film is essentially a character study as Jane navigates her tough family (Penelope Wilton, Billie Piper, Alice Lowe) until she stops taking the pills and finds moments of happiness with musician Mike (David Thewlis). Hawkins is superb – nuanced but never showy – and is aided by Roberts’ writing (it’s a funnier film than it sounds) and imaginative direction to vividly…

OUT 9 OCTOBER CERT TBC / 106 MINS DIRECTOR Miranda July CAST Evan Rachel Wood, Richard Jenkins, Debra Winger, Gina Rodriguez PLOT The Dyne clan eke out a meagre living turning low-end cons. Needing to find $1,500 in rent, daughter Old Dolio (Wood) comes up with a lucrative new scheme but, much to her annoyance, Mom (Winger) and Dad (Jenkins) invite new pal Melanie (Rodriguez) to join the gang. ARTIST AND FILMMAKER Miranda July is many things – offbeat, iconoclastic, absurd – but one thing she is not is prolific. Following her classic calling card Me And You And Everyone We Know in 2005, it took her six years to follow up with The Future and now a further nine years to deliver Kajillionaire. But happily, it’s worth the wait.…

OUT 16 OCTOBER / CERT 15 / 97 MINS DIRECTOR Phyllida Lloyd CAST Clare Dunne, Harriet Walter, Conleth Hill If Herself were a house, it would have cathedral windows and a thatched roof, because it is two films in one. Phyllida Lloyd directs, but the film belongs to fantastic lead actor and co-screenwriter Clare Dunne. She plays Dublin mother of two Sandra, homeless since she fled her violent husband. Everything looks bleak, but when she seizes the opportunity to build her own house the film begins to crack in two. Sandra’s struggles and her violent flashbacks are interspersed with musical montages in which she and her new pals construct her new refuge. The story is compelling, but combining a realist drama about domestic abuse and homelessness with a cheery tale…

OUT NOW / CERT 12 / 102 MINS DIRECTOR Michael Almereyda CAST Ethan Hawke, Kyle MacLachlan, Eve Hewson If all you know about Nikola Tesla is his supporting turns in The Prestige or The Current War, this hybrid of documentary and biographical drama finally gives the Croatian-born inventor (for whom the car company is named) his due, presented in an ingenious structure that suits its unconventional subject. Tesla’s (Ethan Hawke) friend Anne Morgan (Eve Hewson), daughter of his patron J.P. Morgan, relates his story, from his early years as apprentice to Thomas Edison (Kyle MacLachlan), through his lifelong obsession with generating and harnessing electrical energy. Director Michael Almereyda uses budgetary limitations to his advantage, and Hawke manages to show us Tesla’s inner workings while remaining inscrutable – a paradox the…

OUT 2 OCTOBER / CERT 15 / 90 MINS DIRECTOR Peter Mackie Burns CAST Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, Tom Glynn- Carney, Monica Dolan After tackling a young woman on the edge in his debut, Daphne, Peter Mackie Burns turns to a tottering male psyche for followup Rialto. Colm (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor) is a Dublin dockworker in meltdown – he’s about to lose his job for starters –who finds himself blackmailed by male prostitute Jay (Tom Glynn-Carney) after a toilet quickie. Out of this potentially overwrought set-up, Mackie Burns crafts an intimate, ambiguous drama that never tries to put a label on Colm’s crisis (or sexuality). Aided by sensitive performances from the leads, Colm and Jay’s subsequent relationship is a quiet, complex portrait of men at different life-stages struggling to find their way but…

OUT NOW / NETFLIX / CERT TBC / 123 MINS DIRECTOR Harry Bradbeer CAST Millie Bobby Brown, Henry Cavill, Sam Claflin, Helena Bonham Carter Well-intentioned if sometimes simplistic, Millie Bobby Brown’s feminist spin on Sherlock Holmes is often sweet, family fun. The Stranger Things star plays Enola, Sherlock (Henry Cavill) and Mycroft’s (Sam Claflin) teen sister, who sets out on her 16th birthday to find their missing mother (Helena Bonham Carter). What ensues is a sprightly adventure through Victorian London, as Enola discovers herself through her disdain for men (yes, all of them), her admiration for her stubbornly independent mother, and an unexpected new friendship with a runaway young lord (likeable Louis Partridge). Jack Thorne’s script might contain a few heavy-handed morals, but Brown’s valiant attempt to entertain the viewer,…

OUT 23 OCTOBER / CERT TBC / 123 MINS DIRECTOR Lydia Dean Pilcher CAST Sarah Megan Thomas, Radhika Apte, Stana Katic, Linus Roache A Call To Spy is a noble attempt to honour the women recruited to spy against the Nazis in occupied France. Unfortunately, it never really grips. The stilted screenplay follows three women: Virginia (Sarah Megan Thomas, who also wrote), a wooden-legged American trying to help the French Resistance and British airmen; Noor (Radhika Apte), a Muslim pacifist who is a whizz with communications; and Vera (Stana Katic), a Romanian Jew who recruits the spies in London but is suspected of being a double agent. What you get is stale spy antics (lots of hiding notes in newspapers), smoking, Morse code montages, under-powered spectacle, on the-nose dialogue and…

OUT NOW / NETFLIX / EPISODES VIEWED 8 OF 8 SHOWRUNNERS Scott Kreamer, Aaron Hammersley CAST (VOICES) Paul-Mikél Williams, Jenna Ortega, Jameela Jamil With The Clone Wars and Rebels, Star Wars proved youth-skewing animated series don’t have to just be for kids. It’s a shame, then, that Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous is a blockbuster spin-off that only younger viewers will enjoy. There’s promise in the set-up — set concurrently with Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic World, fans will enjoy spotting familiar moments that intersect with World’s set-pieces. But the characters, Paul-Mikél Williams’ sweet- natured Darius aside, are deeply unlikeable — ranging from a self-centred social-media star to a self-centred rich kid — forced into contrived dinosaur encounters by unconvincing writing, and character animation that is rudimentary at best.…

IT’S A DRY AND WARM DAY when I first meet Chadwick Boseman in Atlanta. Three years and six months later, the same sun is setting on one side of the world and rising on the other as the simple statement is posted. Chadwick Boseman had died, at the age of just 43. The world responded with shock and devastation. Only his very closest family knew that Chadwick had been diagnosed with colon cancer four years previously. As I processed the news, my memory delivered me straight to Atlanta, February 2017. To the conversation on the sprawling set of Black Panther. A conversation in which he will have known he was ill. We spoke once more, six months on, when the film was in postproduction. This time, it was raining. I…

August Image “LIVE! FROM NEW YORK! IT’S SATURDAY NIGHT!” IT IS THE evening of Saturday 27 October, 1990. At NBC Studios, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, show four of Saturday Night Live’s 16th season is a few minutes into its live broadcast. In the wings Chris Farley, a 26-year-old newcomer to the cast, is waiting for his cue. He is wearing male-stripper garb: tight black trousers, a tearaway shirt and dickie bow and collar. Next to him is one of the biggest movie stars of the moment, Patrick Swayze, who is similarly, and perhaps more credibly, attired. Beyond a tinsel curtain, Loverboy’s ‘Working For The Weekend’ strikes up, and the two burst through the glitter and begin gyrating around the stage. Chris Farley doesn’t know it, but he is about to become…

THE WIZARD OF MARS (1965) Astronaut Dorothy crash-lands on Mars and sets out along with three companions to find the Wizard (John Carradine). Meanwhile, a later science-fiction film whose name escapes us also features a protagonist who wishes they didn’t live on a farm whisked off to an adventure with a space wizard, a prissy tin man and an alien lion. THE ABOMINABLE DR PHIBES (1971) Vincent Price’s demented but stylish disfigured genius plays a spirited theatre-organ rendition of ‘Over The Rainbow’ as he is exsanguinated in in his Art Deco Rolls-Royce coffin at the climax of the camp-classic horror film. For the sequel, Dr. Phibes Rises Again, the inimitable Price recorded a vocal version of the Judy Garland standard. ALICE DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE (1974) In the 1940s prologue,…

WHO WAS HE? King of the high-brow Hollywood thriller, Pakula made complicated, character-driven, adult thrillers like Klute and later on, Presumed Innocent and The Pelican Brief. HOW DID HE BEGIN HIS CAREER? He started out as an assistant in the cartoon department at Warner Bros., but quickly switched to producing. One of those movies was To Kill A Mockingbird, for which he received his first Oscar nomination. FIRST? HOW MANY DID HE RECEIVE? Three in total: one for producing, one for directing (for All The President’s Men), and one for writing (for Sophie’s Choice). Sadly, though, he never won. WHEN DID HE START DIRECTING? In 1969, with The Sterile Cuckoo. From the off, his was an assured, unshowy cinematic voice. In many ways, Klute, The Parallax View and All The…

1 A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984) Chris: “Dark, disturbing, and what a breath of fresh air Freddy was as a screen monster back then.” A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 3: DREAM WARRIORS (1987) Mike: “The most fun entry in the series – it’s here that Freddy begins to evolve into a wise-cracking joker.” 3 WES CRAVEN’S NEW NIGHTMARE (1994) James: “Managed the impossible task of making Freddy scary again, and laid the groundwork for Scream.” 4 A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 2: FREDDY’S REVENGE (1985) Owen: “More interesting than most of the sequels. Great poster, too.” 5 FREDDY VS. JASON (2003) Owen: “Exceptionally, cartoonishly violent, and it makes me laugh every time. These days I’d rather watch this one than any of the others.” 6 A NIGHTMARE ON ELM…