Tabla de contenidos para June 2020 en Empire

IT WAS IN 2018 that Michaela Coel first spoke publicly about her sexual assault. While giving the MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh TV Festival, the BAFTA-winning Chewing Gum writer and actor used the platform to recount when the painful realisation landed that she had been drugged and attacked while out taking a break from a writing deadline. Today, that experience has formed a key component in January 22nd (working title), a new 12-part series starring, written and co-directed by Coel, about a woman’s experiences as a rising talent in the TV industry. Describing the moment where she decided that she would turn her trauma into something creative, Coel says, “I had this very weird experience of being in the police investigation room with my friend, who was playing Pokémon GO.…

FOR HIS first venture into TV, Oscar-winning La La Land director Damien Chazelle has teamed up with prolific Brit writer Jack Thorne — whose credits include This Is England, The Virtues, His Dark Materials, and the stage play Harry Potter And The Cursed Child — to create an eight-part musical drama about a troubled jazz club in Paris. Thorne takes us on a tour of The Eddy… THE IDEA “The premise came from Glen [six-time Grammy-winner Glen Ballard, who exec-produces and wrote the original music]. He wanted to do a contemporary show about American jazz in Paris. And brilliantly, the idea came with a sound. I had 60 songs to study before I put pen to paper.” THE RESEARCH “It required extensive research. A lot of talking to incredible musicians…

★ ★ ★ ★ CHANNEL 5 AND gripping, sophisticatedly executed family dramas were perhaps not an immediate partnership that sprang to mind a few years ago. Then in 2018 Blood came along, Sophie Petzal’s meticulously written, stylish slowburner that saw a battle-hardened Cat (Carolina Main) return to her home in rural Ireland following the suspicious death of her mother. The unravelling relationship between Cat and her father Jim (Line Of Duty stalwart Adrian Dunbar) showcased Petzal’s writing at its best, and when the season’s big reveal turned out to be more painfully sad than shocking, it was clear that there was more mileage left in the Hogan family and their indiscretions. Like the first season, the new episode of Blood opens with a speeding car, Cat’s frantic outline in the…

RYAN MURPHY’S LATEST truth bomb of a TV drama, following on from the likes of Pose and The Politician, addresses many of his recurring concerns. With echoes of LA Confidential, Once Upon A Time In Hollywood and Murphy’s own Feud: Bette And Joan, Hollywood takes us behind the curtain of the movie industry in its golden age, exposing the harsh reality of rampant sexual exploitation, racism and sexism beneath the shiny glamour. In fact it’s got all the ingredients of Peak Murphy TV. THE HISTORY The seven-part limited series, co-written by Murphy with Ian Brennan (Glee) and Janet Mock (Pose), traces the backstory of post-World War Two Hollywood, mixing fictionalised characters with real historical figures such as actor Rock Hudson (Jake Picking) and his legendary agent Henry Willson, played by…

IT IS SOMEWHAT DISCONCERTING to be talking to Dennis Kelly just as the UK is getting to grips with the coronavirus outbreak. After all, he is the man responsible for creating Channel 4’s cult hit, Utopia: genre-bending, chilling and thrilling in equal measure, it explored the threat of global epidemic outbreaks and accompanying conspiracy theories. And now, here he is ominously explaining that his new plan is to plunge viewers even more viscerally into his latest story, The Third Day — an unprecedented fusion of television and live theatre that will somehow collapse the boundaries between television and viewers. “It’s just mad that we’re doing it,” Kelly cheerfully exclaims. It was around eight years ago that Felix Barrett, founder of immersive theatre company Punchdrunk, first approached Kelly with the suggestion…

Marco Vittur, BBC THERE’S ONE UPSIDE TO WHAT’S GOING ON RIGHT now: lots and lots of time to watch telly. After all, there are only so many laps around the living room you can jog, or videos of you and your mates singing ‘Imagine’ you can make. So thank goodness we’re in the era of Peak TV, where brilliant shows are coming thick and fast. In this issue, we dive into some new ones that will provide a much-needed escape from the world outside, including The Third Day and The Undoing. And we celebrate the greatest characters we already know and love, from Fleabag to Fox Mulder. Plus, you can download the Pilot TV podcast every Monday, for much, much more — perfect for those indoor jogs.…

THE INBETWEENERS SHOULD never have been a hit — and infamously, in the beginning it wasn’t. These days everyone and their little brother has mimicked Will’s memorably poor Yoda impersonation (“Feisty one you are”), yelled “Briefcase Wanker” or mockingly mispronounced the word ‘friend’. But in 2008, Iain Morris and Damon Beesley’s crude, lewd celebration of suburban schoolboy life was panned by critics and initially struggled to find an audience on E4 in an era when teenage TV life was all Skins-style shows stuffed full of parties and pills. “We’d been given the Skins slot and that had pulled in record viewing figures for the channel so there was quite a bit of pressure,” says Morris. “They screened the first two episodes on the same night and said, ‘We think the…

JUST OVER A year ago, US Vice President Mike Pence announced plans to put American “boots on the moon” by 2024. Whether or not NASA manages this feat, in the meantime we can at least enjoy the new comedy that writer/producer Greg Daniels (Parks And Recreation) and his longtime collaborator Steve Carell have created about the maverick idea. Their raucously funny ten-parter is partly a traditional workplace comedy, albeit where the workers are trying to make that new moon-landing mission happen, brought to us by the duo who gave us the American version of The Office, one of the ultimate examples of the genre. This, though, is not only one of the most highly ambitious examples of a workplace comedy, it also works as a Trump-era political satire. “We wrote…

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ IT WAS ONLY a matter of time before Sally Rooney’s novel with a devout millennial following would be adapted for the screen. A startlingly well-observed account of the tempestuous relationship between young lovers Marianne (played in the show by Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Connell (Paul Mescal), Normal People saw Rooney hailed as the voice of a generation, meaning the task of bringing her words to screen couldn’t be handed to just anyone. Enter Lenny Abrahamson, the Oscar-winning filmmaker behind Room, whose awards clout and Irish heritage made him a natural fit for tackling Marianne and Connell’s migration from their native County Sligo to college life in Dublin, while Rooney co-wrote the 12-episode series with Lady Macbeth screenwriter Alice Birch. As a show that pivots on the…

SETH ROGEN: GOT STONED AND WATCHED CATS “WHAT IS JELLICLE?!,!?”, a high Seth Rogen asked of his Twitter followers during his running commentary, which also saw him baffled by Jason Derulo’s feet and Judi Dench’s jacket. He later gave up and watched 90 Day FiancŽ instead. KAT DENNINGS: PUT MAKE-UP ON A CAN OF COCONUT MILK Nothing if not resourceful, the Thor star spent her hours of isolation applying make-up to a can of organic coconut milk. By the end of this oddly mesmerising tutorial, the can had received full lashes and red, bee-stung lips. SHARON STONE: TRIED HER HAND AT PAINT-BY-NUMBERS One small upside to self-isolation was that the world got a peek into what the Hollywood elite might do for downtime. For Sharon Stone, this was a spot…

QUESTS OF YORE: BARLEY’S EDITION The Dungeons & Dragons-alike role-playing game which guided the guileless Barley (Chris Pratt) through Onward’s adventure is soon to be available as a real-life tabletop experience. One player takes the role of the ‘Quest Master’ who runs the show, the others become intrepid heroes heading off on their own jaunts in Pixar’s fantasy world of Clovendell. Seems aimed at younger players, but is attractively shot through with top Pixar production values in its miniature figures and components. BACK TO THE FUTURE: DICE THROUGH TIME With Biff buggering up the timeline, it’s up to two-to-four players to work together to travel to the past (and future) and tidy up his mess, grabbing scattered items and restoring order to Hill Valley’s chronology. All this is done through…

IN CASTING-NEWS terms, the recent report that Clone Wars veteran Ahsoka Tano would be appearing — in the flesh! — in The Mandalorian Season 2 could hardly be more exciting for long-time Star Wars fans. Over the years, we have come to know this former Padawan of the Togruta race extremely well, watching her evolve from an overly perky, slightly irksome 14-year-old apprentice to a pivotal, shady figure in the Rebel Alliance, as seen in Clone Wars sequel show Rebels. It’s hard to think of another female Star Wars character who’s been given such a detailed and developed arc. We received a hint that she’d be moving over from the series’ animated strand, Saw Gerrera-style, when she was heard (courtesy of voice actor Ashley Eckstein) among the disembodied Jedi aiding…

STEVE TREVOR WONDER WOMAN 1984 The nature of exactly how Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) made a miraculous recovery from his plane exploding remains unclear. Theories range from possible (parachute!) to confusing (time travel!) to absurd (he’s powered by a magic fanny pack!). RAY GARRISON BLOODSHOT After finding fame in the resurrection-friendly Fast & Furious franchise, it’s fitting that Vin Diesel now plays a man resurrected by nanobots — who live their life a quarter millimetre at a time. WILDEN LIGHTFOOT ONWARD Elven brothers Ian (Tom Holland) and Barley (Chris Pratt) use a spell to bring back their dead dad — the latest, after Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2, in the ‘Chris Pratt Has Daddy Issues’ series.…

★★★★ OUT NOW / NETFLIX CERT 18 / 94 MINS DIRECTOR Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia CAST Iván Massagué, Antonia San Juan, Zorion Eguileor PLOT Every day, a platform covered in a sumptuous feast is presented to a prison tower with innumerable floors. The inmates of each floor must eat what they like, then leave the rest for the floors below. Greed and selfishness are rife, but one new inmate hopes that he can change that, one way or another. AN ACCIDENTALLY PERFECT parable for current times, The Platform has an ingeniously simple premise: Goreng (Iván Massagué) wakes up in a concrete room. In the centre of the floor and ceiling are large, rectangular holes, through which he can see other identical rooms stretching above and below across innumerable storeys. Each room contains…

★★ OUT 17 APRIL / DIGITAL / CERT 18 / 115 MINS DIRECTOR Rob Lambert CAST Zachary Ray Sherman, Sally Kirkland, Timothy V. Murphy There are plenty of similarities between Joker and Cuck , which follows Ronnie (Zachary Ray Sherman, effective and committed), an angry, racist loner who cares for (and steals from) his sick mother. But while there’s something to be said for an unflinchingly honest depiction of an alt-righter’s ugly worldview, Rob Lambert’s debut fails to illuminate anything new about those who embrace hate. It doesn’t help that Ronnie is shown to be an overt bigot from the outset; this gives his slide into more explicit xenophobia and violence more than a hint of inevitability, while ensuring zero audience sympathy. Additionally, a strange mid-movie pivot involving Ronnie’s neighbour…

★★ OUT NOW / DISNEY+ / CERT PG / 107 MINS DIRECTOR Julia Hart CAST Grace VanderWaal, Graham Verchere, Giancarlo Esposito A teen movie for the younger Disney+ audience, Stargirl follows Leo (Graham Verchere), an unconfident high schooler who finds love in a quirky new student (former reality show star Grace VanderWaal). With her rainbow knitwear and ukulele, bohemian Stargirl brings out a new side in Leo, until her outsider attitudes cause her to be shunned, causing him doubts. Herein lies Stargirl’s central issue. At a time where well-observed movies like Eighth Grade and Love, Simon are empowering the misfit, Stargirl fails to keep up. VanderWaal fans may enjoy the musical numbers, but nothing else exists in the film that hasn’t been done better by Stargirl’s more progressive coming-of-age peers.…

★★★★ OUT 20 APRIL / ARROW CERT 18 / 96 MINS DIRECTOR Kirill Sokolov CAST Aleksandr Kuznetsov, Vitaliy Khaev, Elena Shevchenko, Evgeniya Kregzhde PLOT Twentysomething Russian man Matvei (Kuznetsov) pays a visit to the apartment of his girlfriend’s parents in order to settle a score, only to find that her thuggish police detective father won’t go down without a fight — and isn’t afraid to use every weapon at his disposal. IT ALL STARTS with a series of extreme closeups, setting the scene in seconds. A hesitant finger over a doorbell; a pair of fearful eyes; a hammer clutched behind a back. And that effective command of the visual language infuses Russian writer/director Kirill Sokolov’s ultra-violent chamber piece Why Don’t You Just Die!, elevating it above standard genre fare into…

1 CECILIA’S ESCAPE Chris Hewitt: Now this is how you start in medias res. Not with a bang, but a whisper, the suspense ratcheting up to unbearable levels as Elisabeth Moss’ Cecilia makes her meticulously planned escape, in the middle of the night, from her abusive partner, Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen). Soundtracked just by the crashing of nearby waves (and the occasional whirring of cameras to suggest the presence of one of Griffin’s fancy-dan invisible suits), this wordless sequence, tight with tension, tells us everything we need to know about Cecilia’s situation. And without even properly introducing us to Griffin, who is asleep the entire time, it renders us terrified of the threat he holds. Leigh Whannell: I wanted to keep the character of Adrian mysterious. One of my initial…

ELLIOTT’S FIRST KISS To illustrate the idea that Elliott (Henry Thomas) increasingly feels E.T.’s feelings, Spielberg delivers a moment of low comedy combined with high romance. An increasingly sozzled E.T. watches John Ford’s The Quiet Man on TV. Just as John Wayne pulls Maureen O’Hara into his arms for a passionate clinch, so Elliott, hopped up on Dutch courage by E.T.’s vicarious boozing, does the same with a class mate (Erika Eleniak, who later found fame in Baywatch)— only Elliott is standing on another kid to reach the taller girl’s lips. A simple idea beautifully executed. PETER PAN It’s one of E.T.’s most tender moments: E.T. eavesdropping on Mary (Dee Wallace) reading Gertie (Drew Barrymore) a bedtime story, Peter Pan (don’t forget Spielberg went on to make Hook), while simultaneously…

Alamy THE THING THAT is often forgotten about The Shawshank Redemption is just how long we have to wait for the redemption. Like It’s A Wonderful Life and, more recently, Paddington 2, Shawshank takes a deep dive into one character’s misery, putting them through the wringer, making them crawl through a river of shit. In the case of Shawshank, that river isn’t metaphorical, but when Tim Robbins’ Andy Dufresne emerges on the other side, it transforms the entire movie. The last 30 minutes or so (including credits) of Frank Darabont’s Stephen King adaptation, in which we discover how Andy escaped, how the evil Warden Norton (Bob Gunton) receives judgement and how Morgan Freeman’s Red reunites with his old friend, is among the most uplifting in cinema. Time for a little…

YAHYA ABDUL-MATEEN II has a Candyman problem. As in, he doesn’t like to say the word “Candyman”. Not once, let alone five times. “No no no no no,” he tells Empire. “You know, it’s interesting. I just realised I haven’t said that name in a very long time. Even talking about the movie, I haven’t really spoken the word ‘Candyman’. And now? It makes me a little bit uncomfortable just to say the word.” Which is understandable. Because, according to the rules laid down in Bernard Rose’s 1992 movie of the same name, this is how you summon the Candyman — a vengeful spirit with a hook for a hand, a thing for bees, and the kind of voice that sounds like the Honey Monster gargling with bleach — from…

Slacker THE FIRST PERSON we see in Richard Linklater’s Slacker is, well, Richard Linklater. As a character credited only as ‘Should Have Stayed At Bus Station’, Linklater climbs into a taxi at the bus station, talks his cab driver’s ear off about parallel universes and roads not taken (metaphorically), and ends up inspiring a generation of filmmakers. Though not his debut film (that honour belongs to the little-screened Super 8 film It’s Impossible To Learn To Plow By Reading Books), Slacker is Linklater’s breakout, a DIY cult hit that put him on the map as an indie filmmaker, and launched a thousand other films just like it. Shot on location in the director’s hometown of Austin, Texas, in 1989, with $23,000 and a 16mm Arriflex camera (the film going on…

CONCEPTION Neal Scanlan [creature and special effects creative supervisor]: Babu was one of J.J.’s [Abrams, director] early ideas. Ivan Manzella [creature concept designer]: [J.J.] says, “I’ve got this character, he’s nine inches tall, I want him kind of cute.” For two weeks I drew loads of aliens. I sketched a helmet from the side with a little hood. J.J. was like, “That’s kind of cool.” I made a seven-inch maquette, and they loved it. Scanlan: J.J. and Michelle Rejwan [producer] looked at it and went, “Oh that’s adorable.” Manzella: I didn’t make him cute, I made him ugly-cute, like a pug. My inspiration was Egg Shen from Big Trouble In Little China — he had one eye slightly closed. I said, “His eye has to be mechanically limited so he’s…

ACTOR AND PLAYWRIGHT Hayley Squires (I, Daniel Blake’s award-winning breakout star) can list a number of reasons for taking on the role of fictional adult-movie icon Jolene Dollar in writer Lucy Kirkwood’s frank character study of women working in the beleaguered British sex-film industry. At the top of her list are the nuanced questions that Kirkwood poses and explores about abuse, consent and workplace practices in a post-#timesup and #metoo but still free online porn-saturated world. “For instance, does consent exist if you’re a sex worker?” says Squires. “That’s one of the things that I love about Lucy’s scripts. She’s brave enough to ask about those people who every day are coming into contact with sex because it’s part of their career. Does consent come into their world as well?…

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ A GIGANTIC, CREEPILY hyper-realistic statue of a young girl stands at the centre of a tech corporation’s sprawling campus. In the company’s secret research lab, staff get transported around via a kind of hovercraft in the shape of a golden cube, held afloat by magnetic fields. The building is also guarded by dozens of gold obelisks, like glitzier, miniature versions of the black one in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Devs, the first adventure in TV drama from writer/ director Alex Garland (Ex Machina, Annihilation), is full of this kind of beautiful, weird, frequently breathtaking imagery, the like of which we’d have only seen in big-budget fantasy movies just a few years back. Garland’s plot is just as eye-catching. Karl Glusman plays Sergei, an employee at…

WHEN WE last saw police officer Marcella Backland (Anna Friel), she was living under a railway bridge, having been declared officially dead. Now, at the start of the third series of the wonderfully bonkers drama, she’s got a blonde bob, a new husband and is living with a family of gangsters. Oh, and she’s called Keira. Which is pretty out there, even by Marcella’s standards. So what was the thinking behind Marcella Mark Two? “Well, we couldn’t really bring her further down, she was very much at the bottom at the end of the last series,” says creator and writer Hans Rosenfeldt. “She’d found out she’d killed her own daughter, and tried to erase her identity because she didn’t want to be Marcella any more.” Handily, she didn’t have to…

THE LETTER FOR THE KING NETFLIX EPISODE 3 A bit like The Witcher meets Game Of Thrones but for a teen audience, this six-part drama adapted from a ’60s Dutch novel is set in an alternative version of the Middle Ages in which a knight (Amir Wilson) is tasked with delivering a secret letter to a king on the other side of some mountains. The charmingly quirky tone is fun, but the fantasy element doesn’t make sense until halfway through. TALES FROM THE LOOP AMAZON PRIME EPISODE 2 As might be expected for a drama based on a series of artworks (by Simon Stålenhag) which look like Prog Rock album covers, the narrative takes time to kick in but the visuals are extraordinary from the start. It’s set in a…

Niko Tavernise/HBO THE COMBINATION OF STAR/PRODUCER Nicole Kidman and writer/ showrunner David E Kelley has so far given us two spectacularly riveting seasons of Big Little Lies. Now they’ve collaborated again on another HBO limited series which is, if anything, an even more thrilling prospect. Based on the bestselling 2014 novel You Should Have Known, by Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Undoing stars Kidman as Grace Fraser, a successful therapist about to publish her first book; Hugh Grant, in his darkest role for years, plays her husband Jonathan, a highly respected doctor. Their son (Noah Jupe) attends an elite New York private school. When news of a high-profile violent death hits the media, Jonathan abruptly disappears, leaving Grace to deal with the fallout, while a series of shocking revelations about her…

With thanks to Gavin Rymill IT CAN TRAVEL anywhere in time and space, is far roomier than it appears, and can adapt to blend in with any environment (but prefers to look like a 1960s London police box). The Tardis is The Doctor’s trusty time machine and M.C. Escher-inspired home away from home, kitted out with everything a Time Lord needs, from a swimming pool to a biscuit dispenser. Genghis Khan tried and failed to get inside, but here’s your guided tour. Try not to get lost. ROUND THINGS Originally inspired by the Modernist architectural flourishes of BBC TV Centre, the Tardis’ circle-patterned walls contain internal circuitry, and even a drinks cabinet. FOOD MACHINE Feeling peckish? The Tardis foresaw the modern protein bar in 1963 with a variety of compact…

Photofest WHAT WOULD YOU do if there was a drug that allowed you to access the full potential of your brain, instantly turning you into one of the smartest people on the planet? It’s a wish-fulfilment premise laden with so much potential that 2011 movie Limitless — which first introduced us to the smart pill known as NZT-48 — only skimmed the surface. It would take four more years for viewers to delve deeper into this world of nootropic drugs, switching from the silver screen to the small in a move that proved inspired. With room to breathe and a more playful tone, the spin-off took the concept and ran with it, becoming a rare show that is better than the movie it’s based on. Much of why Limitless 2.0…

FOR GANGSTER FANS, it’s a mouthwatering proposition. Former Peaky Blinders member Joe Cole (aka John Shelby, RIP) returning to the genre which made his name (following critical success in A Prayer Before Dawn, Pure and Black Mirror), and acclaimed Welsh director Gareth Evans (The Raid, The Raid 2) and his cinematographer Matt Flannery applying their trademark balletic bloody spin on martial-arts action and world building to a London setting. The execution of crime family boss Finn Wallace (Colm Meaney) forces eldest son Sean (Cole) to step up, Michael Corleone-style, and try to impose himself in the heightened, hyper-violent world that Evans sets up in the show’s opening 90-minute episode. We spoke to Joe Cole to find out more. Does London-born, privately schooled 21st-century gangster Sean Wallace feel a long way…

KEEPING THE BRITISH END UP You swines! In an age of Contagion, the May edition of Empire was a breath of (Covid-19-free) fresh air! Quint’s son, the return of Jesus (Quintana, that is), and the great bear that was Bart. Some nice segues into movies and boxsets to catch up on whilst in isolation. And then, the sucker punch: we conclude with It’s A Wonderful Life as Classic Scene. Not a dry eye in the house! PHIL REDHEAD, VIA EMAIL Thanks Phil. We hope you enjoy this issue too, which we put together in our personal quarantine quarters, sometimes wearing face-masks, but often forsaking our trousers. Meanwhile, we hope you can use your Picturehouse membership soon. Empire’s star letter wins a Picturehouse Membership, plus one for a friend! Valid for…

IN THE SPACE of 24 hours, the movie landscape became unrecognisable. Last month, one day after Boris Johnson advised people to avoid public spaces, every major cinema chain in the UK announced their venues would close indefinitely. Cinemagoing, at least for a little while, would have to take place outside of an actual cinema. For the studios, the response to this crisis has been simple: delay their films’ releases until all of this blows over. But some have taken the near-unprecedented step of making high-profile movies available to download, weeks or even days after their theatrical releases. Onward, Birds Of Prey, The Hunt, The Invisible Man and Bloodshot moved their digital release dates forward. Meanwhile, Easter holiday family fare Trolls World Tour just abandoned its theatrical release, moving, remarkably, to…

ILLUSTRATION MUTANT 101 Alamy, Allstar, Getty Images WITH THE MUMMY’S lukewarm reception in 2017, Universal’s Dark Universe, a new era of interlinked films resurrecting the studio’s classic monsters, crashed and burned. But then Leigh Whannell and Blumhouse rode into town, unleashing a fresh take on The Invisible Man perfectly suited to 2020. Lean, mean and cost-effective, this $7 million, relatively lo-fi exercise in terror was a one-off — but its success may well see those old monsters out for blood again. “It was always something that I’d wanted to do,” says producer Jason Blum, of getting to play in the Universal Monsters toybox. “I loved monsters as a kid. I was Frankenstein for Hallowe’en when I was eight years old.” Talking to Empire on the phone from his home, working…

THE SAYING GOES: if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. For his first film as a producer, Stephen Graham saw this as a challenge. Graham and his wife Hannah Walters’ newly formed Matriarch Productions is opening its account with Boiling Point, a drama about a chef on the verge of a breakdown, set and filmed, literally, in a kitchen. To turn the gas up higher, it’s improvised, filmed as one shot with dozens of speaking roles, and is also a debut feature for director Phil Barantini. It begs the question: why? “I saw a lot of chefs struggling with their mental health,” says Barantini, who once worked in the restaurant industry, when Empire visits rehearsals on location at Jones & Sons in East London. “I want…

Lynn Goldsmith/Getty Images IN 1994, SPIKE Jonze and the Beastie Boys made one of the best music videos of all time for their track ‘Sabotage’. Twenty-four years later, they teamed up again for a stage show, to promote Beastie Boys Book, which Jonze has now expanded into a documentary about the trio’s 30-year career, from their rowdy New York adolescence to the death of founding member Adam ‘MCA’ Yauch in 2012. They ended as a band that day, but Beastie Boys Story is a typically eccentric and irreverent reminder of their wild ride. The surviving Boys — Michael ‘Mike D’ Diamond and Adam ‘Ad-Rock’ Horovitz — hopped on a Zoom call with Empire to explain how it came about, and where this fits in their somewhat chequered cinematic canon. So,…

Getty Images WHEN QUENTIN DUPIEUX — the French DJ known as ‘Mr Oizo’-turned-film director — started writing his new movie, the pitch was simple. “It was supposed to be a stupid comedy about a fat guy buying small jackets,” he says. “That was it.” Anyone who sees Deerskin, his very funny and bizarre portrait of a man having a fashionable and violent mid-life crisis, will know that, in fact, it’s much more than that. In the film, Jean Dujardin plays divorcé Georges, whose life is upended when he buys a new jacket — a garish, fringed, mud-brown deerskin jacket, to be precise. His love for the garment turns into a dark obsession, to the extent that Georges decides every other jacket in the world must be destroyed — and the…

Alamy, Getty Images FILM 1: SHAME (1968) Max von Sydow came to the cinema in the stock company of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman — in The Seventh Seal, their first collaboration, von Sydow is the raw-faced knight playing chess with Death. They made 11 films together in total; the best when teamed with co-star Liv Ullmann — Hour Of The Wolf, The Passion Of Anna and most notably Shame, in which he is a failed musician in a troubled marriage, struggling on a farm as war causes the breakdown of society. Filmed and released while the war in Vietnam raged, it reflected the real-life conflict through themes of shame and moral decline. FILM 2: THE EXORCIST (1973) When Hollywood needed a Christ for the all-star The Greatest Story Ever Told,…

★★★ OUT NOW / DISNEY+ CERT PG / 103 MINS DIRECTOR Charlie Bean CAST Tessa Thompson (voice), Justin Theroux (voice), Kiersey Clemons, Thomas Mann, Sam Elliott (voice) PLOT Pampered pooch Lady (Thompson) thinks she’s got it made, at least until her family grows by one. Replaced in her owners’ affections by the new baby, she accidentally ends up on the street in the company of crafty, scruffy Tramp (Theroux), and discovers there’s more to life than home comforts. AS PART OF Disney’s swathe of animated-to-live-action adaptations, Lady And The Tramp was chosen to skip cinemas and instead ported straight to the company’s streaming service Disney+, to form part of the initial line-up of original films and shows bolstering the hefty back catalogue — though we doubt people were rushing to…

★★★★ OUT NOW / NETFLIX CERT 15 / 94 MINS DIRECTORS Mike Ahern, Enda Loughman CAST Maeve Higgins, Barry Ward, Will Forte PLOT Rural Ireland. Sweet-hearted Rose (Higgins) is a paranormal investigator-turned-driving instructor who blames herself for the death of her dad. When local widower Martin (Ward) asks for help dealing with the abusive ghost of his deceased wife, she soon finds herself in the middle of a Satanic plot involving a washed-up American pop star (Forte). THERE ARE MORE examples of exorcisms in horror-movie history than you can shake a projectile-vomiting infant at. Ex-wife-orcisms, on the other hand, are rarer in the horror canon. Extra Ordinary, a devilishly Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace-esque romcom courtesy of first-time writer-directors Mike Ahern and Enda Loughman, delights in exactly this kind of invention. The…

★★★ OUT NOW / DISNEY+ / CERT PG / 99 MINS DIRECTOR Tom McCarthy CAST Winslow Fegley, Ophelia Lovibond, Wallace Shawn, Craig Robinson Tom McCarthy follows 2015’s Spotlight with this Disney+ original, based on the series of Stephan Pastis novels. It’s a sweet, surreal dive into the life of an oddball 11-year-old (Winslow Fegley), wrapped in the trappings of classic film noir as Timmy runs his own ‘detective agency’ from his mum’s attic, with the aid of imaginary polar bear Total. That Timmy’s reality is clearly the result of past trauma is only lightly touched upon, the film instead choosing to embrace his quirky antics without peering too hard beneath the surface. The result is a frothy fantasy that, thanks to its ursine antics and a healthy dose of magical…

★★★ OUT NOW / DISNEY+ / CERT PG / 113 MINS DIRECTOR Ericson Core CAST Willem Dafoe, Julianne Nicholson, Christopher Heyerdahl Hot on the paws of The Call Of The Wild, dog-sledding drama Togo arrives with Willem Dafoe in for Harrison Ford and real dogs replacing Terry Notary on all fours. Dafoe is musher Leonhard Seppala, who goes on a 600-mile trip pulled by Siberian Husky Togo to track down vital anti-toxins to end a diphtheria epidemic in 1925 Alaska. Flashbacks to the origins of Seppala and Togo’s relationship dilute the drama, but the exciting dog-in-peril action (a close call with a cliff face, a perilous run across cracking ice) is well done, the landscapes are striking and Dafoe keeps the fairly sentimental story grounded. It’s in a slightly more…

★★★ OUT NOW / APPLE TV+ CERT UNRATED / 120 MINS DIRECTOR George Nolfi CAST Samuel L. Jackson, Nicholas Hoult, Anthony Mackie, Nia Long PLOT In 1960s America, two African-American businessmen — Bernard Garrett (Mackie) and Joe Morris (Jackson) — see an opportunity to buy a bank in Garrett’s deeply racist Texan hometown. The catch: to succeed, they need to use a dimwitted white guy (Hoult) as their front. Complications soon arise, with potentially serious implications… ON PAPER, THE Banker was a banker. As a film highlighting a little-known but very relevant true story about two Black men who used their smarts to outwit the American banking system, starring two bona-fide, Marvel-approved leading men, it seemed tailor-made to make a splash during Oscar season. And when Apple picked up the…

1 IAN LIGHTFOOT Ian Freer: There aren’t many cinematic heroes called Ian to root for ( Jurassic Park’s Dr Ian Malcolm, maybe?) so I was particularly delighted Onward’s protagonist shares my name. As the movie starts, elf Ian Lightfoot (Tom Holland, channelling Peter Parker) is a gawky, diffident kid, afraid to ask the other children to come to his birthday party and overwhelmed by his loud, brash brother, Barley (Chris Pratt). Ian’s father died before he was born (Barley knew him a little bit) and director Dan Scanlon (with co-writers Jason Headley and Keith Bunin) does an economic but telling job of sketching the absence in his life, while covertly suggesting the importance Barley plays without showing his hand. Ben Travis: One of Onward’s most touching scenes comes early on…

STASIS: A PERIOD OF INACTIVITY… OR CIVIL STRIFE. ALAN FURST, THE fabulous novelist of World War II occupations and spies, sets his books in the war years before the Nazi defeat at Stalingrad because up until then, the German army seemed invincible and Nazi Germany was sure to rule one side of the world. The Japanese Empire, with its sudden attack of Pearl Harbor, other bases and civilian populations across the Pacific, had conquered the territory it called The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Furst’s characters, then, have but three choices on how to conduct their lives — as heroes, as villains or as cowards. Now, that is a harsh sentence to pass onto the kids and old folks who were alive then, but it does capture the personal dramas…

THE BIG PIANO sequence is 2:04 minutes of pure joy. Josh Baskin (Tom Hanks), transformed from a 12-year-old into an adult’s body by a Zoltar Speaks fairground attraction, has found a job at MacMillan Toys. One afternoon he runs into company CEO Mac (Robert Loggia) at toy shop FAO Schwarz. The pair stumble upon a giant electronic piano and begin to dance on the keys, first playing Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘Heart And Soul’, followed by an energetic version of ‘Chopsticks’. The scene was inspired by screenwriter Anne (sister of Steven) Spielberg’s recce to FAO Schwarz, delivering a moment that perfectly encapsulates the film’s ethos: as Josh and Mac revel in childish glee, their dance erodes the difference between kid and grown-up, innocence and maturity. From Mac’s delight watching Josh slide down…

TIM BURTON’S BIG Fish is a guaranteed weep-fest. Adapted from Daniel Wallace’s 1998 novel about a father-son reconciliation, it ends with Albert Finney’s story-spinner Edward Bloom in his dying moments, asking his son Will (Billy Crudup) to tell him how it all ends. Later, at his funeral, reality is served, with Will meeting characters from Edward’s life and realising that his father’s tales weren’t quite as tall as he’d first thought. Love floods the sadness. Writer John August seeded his relationship with his own dad into the screenplay, and Burton, who had lost his father a couple of years before filming, has called the movie a personal catharsis. For many others, it cuts just as deep. This film elicits an intense emotional response from people. What’s that like for you?…

NO DOUBT ABOUT it: Requiem For A Dream is painful. The film is flooded with hurt. It hurts to watch it. It hurt to make it. Which is as it should be — Requiem For A Dream was forged from pain. Hubert Selby Jr, author of the 1978 novel, knew pain intimately. At 18 he was hospitalised with tuberculosis. He suffered a collapsed lung and got hepatitis. Six months before writing Requiem For A Dream he contracted pneumonia. All of this fed into the book, a compassionate exploration of addiction, and a feverish nightmare if ever there was one. Darren Aronofsky wanted his film to feel the same. He succeeded, turning Selby Jr’s richly painted interior worlds into a soul-scarring assault. Aronofsky was 30 when he shot Requiem For A…

Frozen II DIRECTORS JENNIFER LEE and Chris Buck and producer Peter Del Vecho talk the songs and standout moments of Anna and Elsa’s second adventure. MOTHER’S MELODY Disney’s mega-sequel begins in surprisingly low-key fashion — a lullaby-laden flashback with a young Anna (Kristen Bell) and Elsa (Idina Menzel) being serenaded by their mysterious mum, now voiced by Evan Rachel Wood. “The mother has one line in Frozen , so little they had me do it,” says Lee. “On this one we actually got an actress who can act and sing.” Wood proved the perfect fit. “Her singing voice is right between Idina’s and Kristen’s: it hits this sweet spot,” says Buck. The lullaby ‘All Is Found’ foreshadows Elsa’s quest to mythical river Ahtohallan. “The secret lies in that song, the…

WITH ITS acclaimed first series, famously exec produced and beautifully written by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Killing Eve was the ultimate cat-and-mouse spy thriller, pitting the entirely relatable intelligence agent Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh) against playful yet psychopathic assassin Villanelle (Jodie Comer). As soon as series one aired, BBC America, who commissioned the show, ordered a second, then as soon as that slightly less consistently great run arrived, a third got the green light, and the producers established a unique system whereby each season gets a new showrunner. This time it’s Suzanne Heathcote who takes the writer/exec-producer role, following on from Emerald Fennell. Here’s everything we know about Heathcote and what to expect in the new series… THE NEW SHOWRUNNER Like Waller-Bridge, Suzanne Heathcote has a London stage background, and the two…

EVA GREEN AS LYDIA Penny Dreadful star Green plays the ruthless madam of a brothel who, as well as sorting out the town’s sex lives, has a rather busy one of her own. HIMESH PATEL AS EMERY A poor fortune seeker — albeit a rather dapper one — Emery meets Anna on a boat to New Zealand where they’re both heading as part of the great gold rush. EVE HEWSON AS ANNA Anna is an intrepid world-traveller who falls in love with Emery the minute she sees him. She also develops an unlikely friendship with the conniving Lydia. EWEN LESLIE AS CROSBIE The local misfit lives a hermit-like existence in his cabin, where he harbours more than a few secrets. Like being married to Lydia, for…

CREATOR AND STAR Lennie James faced a particularly thorny challenge when it came to writing series two of his hugely acclaimed Sky Atlantic drama Save Me: how to realistically keep his character Nelly in his trademark yellow puffa jacket. His solution was to build the first episode of the second season around Nelly’s birthday, when his mates gather at the Palm Tree pub, and give him the present of a new puffa. “Initially when I wrote it in the script, he opens it and there was a red puffa jacket,” James tells Pilot TV. “And everybody’s head exploded. Everybody who’d read the first draft was going, ‘What? It’s a red puffa jacket, what’s going to happen now?’ Everybody had such a visceral reaction to the fact that it wasn’t a…

10 MY HALF ACRE (SEASON 5, EPISODE 9) This episode is a nailed-on classic, but mainly on the strength of one specific scene. The story features the introduction of Mandy Moore’s endearingly clumsy Julie, who is basically a female JD (Zach Braff ). The standout moment in question, however, focuses not on her but on Turk (Donald Faison), who takes this opportunity to audition for heartbreakingly-named hospital band, The Cool Cats. Busting moves to Bell Biv DeVoe’s ‘Poison’, his joyously confident dance routine is purest Turk: extremely goofy, yet somehow still super cool. As The Janitor (Neil Flynn) observes, “I don’t know what ‘it’ is, but he’s got it.” 9 MY OCCURRENCE (SEASON 1, EPISODE 22) There were numerous wonderful guest appearances throughout Scrubs’ run, but none better than Brendan…

LONG BEFORE BEING HANDED THE keys to the Millennium Falcon and the Starship Enterprise and being entrusted with some of the world’s most beloved film franchises, JJ Abrams wanted to make a show about spies. Specifically about one double agent — a highly-skilled, uncompromising female spy desperately seeking humanity in a world that was far from ordinary. Amidst a body of work as sparkling and robust as Abrams’, it’s easy to lose sight of Alias. It wasn’t afforded the big-budget spectacle of Lost, nor the supernatural flare of Fringe, let alone the scope of the blockbusters Abrams would later direct, which came with their own enormous followings. What Alias had was Sydney Bristow, which is to say it had Jennifer Garner: a then small-time actress with Texan girl-next-door charm, who…

★ ★ ★ ★ YES, THAT’S PHOEBE Waller-Bridge’s name at the end of the cast list, and yes indeed. she does have a recurring, supporting role in this bold new eight-part HBO comedy, and she’s also an exec producer. But it’s mainly the creation of Waller-Bridge’s longtime collaborator Vicky Jones, who directed the original stage production of Fleabag. The ingeniously relatable premise asks what would happen if one of those college-age pacts made between two rash young people actually comes to pass now they’re grown adults living proper lives. Merritt Wever (Unbelievable) plays Ruby Richardson, who abandons her routine suburban existence to meet up with her college boyfriend, Billy Johnson (Gleeson), with whom she made a pact 17 years previously: that if either one of them texted the word “run”…

Marco Vittur. Prince Charles Cinema: Pat Mallows ONE OF MY favourite things to do is sit in the dark watching a movie. Whether I am with loved ones, a group of friends or just all on my lonesome (but with the tasty company of some Cadbury Dairy Milk Giant Buttons), going to the cinema has been the closest thing I have to a religion in my life. Sometimes people use the word escapism as a negative term, but there is real pleasure in being transported when the lights go down. The ongoing pandemic on this planet has made that experience a little darker than I care for, as silver-screen projector lights the world over are being switched off. Before this crisis I could, like many, appreciate the convenience of watching…

Getty Images, Shutterstock WHERE? Longcross Studios, Surrey WHEN? 12 April, 2018 WHY? Because Kenneth Branagh is adapting Eoin Colfer’s tooled-up fantasy novel into a spared-no-expense Disney blockbuster. Think Harry Potter, if Harry Potter were a cunning, Irish criminal mastermind who kidnapped a fairy to extort its gold. So, not actually much like Harry Potter. WHAT DID YOU SEE? A whacking great mansion — Fowl Manor has been built in its entirety, inside and out. Empire pores over the shelves of Fowl Library, stocked with 12,000 books (from Simone de Beauvoir to Nick Hornby), peeps into the master suite (gold bedsheets, pure luxury), walks the portrait gallery decked with paintings of Fowls past, and wanders around Artemis’ bedroom. 3D printer? Check. LEGO Death Star? Check. Raspberry Pi computer? Check. it’s the…

ROCKY REFERENCES! In Creed II, the main face-off came between Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan) and Viktor Drago (Florian Munteanu), the son of Papa Creed’s in-the-ring killer, Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren). Seeing Drago go toe-to-toe with Rocky — this time both as trainers to the respective opponents — was an immense pleasure. It would be equally thrilling to see some other familiar faces from the Rocky franchise pop up in the latest sequel. In other words: where’s Mr T? SOCIAL COMMENTARY! The best films about boxing are about other things, too: especially masculinity, class, and racial tension. Don’t forget that Adonis is the son of the Muhammad Ali-esque Apollo. In Creed 3, it’d be great to see some awareness of the legacy of the boxing film looking askance at the…

Christian Black, Alex Fountain, Getty Images Now that Game Of Thrones is over, you’re off making Hollywood movies. How is the experience different? The food, mainly. Over here [in the US], craft services [catering] make you so fat [laughs]. Every day, you have lunch and there are flame grills going — grilled shrimp, grilled chicken. Steak. A huge salad bar. Whereas on Game Of Thrones, it was just... A bit of toast? No! Not even that. You’d get, like, an apple. But one that had gone off. And not even a proper coffee machine. It was just instant coffee in polystyrene cups. Aside from avoiding rotten fruit, what other career ambitions are you working towards? I’d like to play a few more measured young women. I’m desperately trying to show…

BACK IN 2001, while still a freshman at the University of Dallas, David Lowery read the medieval English poem ‘Sir Gawain And The Green Knight’, a mythical tale by an anonymous author about King Arthur’s nephew Gawain, who takes on a mysterious green-coloured figure in a game of honour. “It was the last thing we read in our survey of the classic epic tomes of the Western tradition,” Lowery recalls. “And it always hung around in my head.” Seventeen years later, Lowery was having a clear-out in his house when unlikely inspiration struck. “I was unpacking some stuff in my closet and found my old Willow action figures. I’ve always been a really big fan of Ron Howard’s Willow. I don’t know what sort of spark it struck in that…

Do you have a nickname? I guess Jim itself is some sort of nickname. I did a movie with David Thewlis and Sir Ben Kingsley and Sir Michael Caine [2014’s Stonehearst Asylum]. We tried to convince the entire crew and any new actor that came on that I insisted on being called ‘The Sturge’. It didn’t work. Nobody called me that. But we tried. Sir Ben, Sir Michael and The Sturge. When were you most starstruck? God, I get starstruck all the time. Probably one of the first times was when I went to one of those Hollywood parties in Los Angeles. I remember using the urinal, and Sean Penn coming up next to me and using the urinal next to mine. I couldn’t do the business until he finished…

★★★★ OUT 24 APRIL / CURZON ON DEMAND CERT 18 / 104 MINS DIRECTOR Oliver Hermanus CAST Kai Luke Brummer, Ryan de Villiers, Matthew Vey In 1980s South Africa, 18-year-old Nicholas (Kai Luke Brummer) is conscripted to fight on the Angolan border but must first survive a brutal bootcamp. Oliver Hermanus’ coming-out and coming-of-age story is a tough watch: the first third is Full Metal Jacket on steroids as the recruits get drilled by sadistic Sergeant Brand (Hilton Pelser), during which feelings develop between Nicholas and fellow conscript Stassen (Ryan de Villiers). When the action moves to the front, the war sequences are powerful, yet the film’s grip falters slightly in the final post-conflict third. Still, the cast are strong, and the sense of homophobia within an entrenched white patriarchy…

★★★★ OUT 8 MAY / CURZON ON DEMAND CERT 15 / 102 MINS DIRECTOR Safy Nebbou CAST Juliette Binoche, Nicole Garcia, François Civil, Guillaume Gouix PLOT To cyber-stalk her younger ex (Gouix), fiftysomething Claire (Binoche) creates a much younger online alter-ego, Clara — who soon attracts the attention of her former lover’s roommate, Alex (Civil). THE STORY OF a fiftysomething divorced mother (Juliette Binoche) who lives another life online as a twentysomething, Who You Think I Am could take a number of approaches to its promising premise. It could be a comedy drama where a mature woman finds her true self through the prism of new-fangled social media. Or it could be a psychological thriller played out from the rarely observed point of view of the perp rather than the…

★★★★ OUT 2 MAY / MUBI CERT 15 / 107 MINS DIRECTOR Pablo Larraín CAST Mariana Di Girolamo, Gael García Bernal PLOT Following the short-lived adoption of a young boy which ended traumatically, Ema (Di Girolamo) and Gaston (Bernal) come to a crossroads in their relationship. She’s a dancer, he’s a choreographer, and through the movement in their professional lives, their personal ones begin to unravel. THERE ARE DENSE, delicious layers of poetry and physical language to sink your teeth into in Pablo Larraín’s incendiary drama Ema (his first since Jackie), in which the limits of human desire are stretched and tested. The somewhat simple premise — a couple suffering through the aftermath of a loss — unravels with serious intensity, with gripping performances and a labyrinthian story that just…

★★★ OUT NOW / MUBI / CERT 12A / 89 MINS DIRECTOR Andrew Kötting PARTICIPANTS Eden Kötting, Iain Sinclair, Andrew Kötting There’s no-one quite like Andrew Kötting when it comes to challenging complacent conceptions of cinema. Who else would describe their film as “an exercise in hauntological confabulation”? At this nonfiction piece’s heart is writer Iain Sinclair’s bid to return a box sculpted by artist Steve Dilworth to a beach on the Isle of Harris. However, the dreams of Kötting’s daughter, Eden, shape the odyssey, along with the poetry, prose and archival plunderings on the eclectic soundscape. Some will focus on the Pandora/Schrödinger dilemma posed by the box’s contents. But more will be beguiled by a magical mystery, blending Super 8 footage, 16mm and pinhole imagery, whose denial of easy…

★★★★ OUT NOW / DISNEY+ EPISODES VIEWED 12 OF 12 DIRECTORS Nic Stacey, Karen McGann, Simon Lloyd CAST Jeff Goldblum PLOT Jeff Goldblum digs into the history and appeal of a variety of topics, including pools, jewellery, coffee and gaming, meeting people who are enthusiastic and channelling his own curiosity about the world around him. Along the way, he tries such varied practices as making his own ice cream and eating grilled crickets. WHEN YOU LOOK at the list of subjects that Jeff Goldblum is tackling in this first series of his eponymous documentary series for Disney+, you might wonder whether he came up with them simply by pointing at objects around his home — sneakers! Ice cream! Denim! But the series’ choices were made by show producer National Geographic,…

NO-ONE WAS QUITE READY FOR WONDER WOMAN. Oh, everyone knew the 2017 film was coming, but nobody expected the scale of its success. It had been budgeted as, and written about, like just another superhero movie, a nice-to-have while we got ready for the real business of Justice League. Despite the long history and popularity of the character, and the warm reaction to Gal Gadot’s first appearance in the role in Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice, when it finally arrived, the film still had the air of a sleeper hit. “We were underdogs,” Gadot tells Empire now. “It was the first time for all of us to shoot a tentpole movie by ourselves, and I don’t think anybody thought it was going to perform the way it performed.” That…

RGA, Shutterstock F YOU’RE TRYING to gauge the impact of the Catalina Wine Mixer — the fictional corporate event that provides the backdrop for the triumphant climax of Adam McKay and Will Ferrell’s Step Brothers — this is all you need to know: it’s no longer a fictional event. It’s the fuckin’ Catalina Wine Mixer, and it’s as real as a drum solo performed in the middle of an opera song. There can be no greater tribute to the strangely euphoric sequence, in which Ferrell’s Brennan Huff and John C. Reilly’s Dale Doback, estranged stepbrothers and butts of a never-ending joke, step up to the plate (and the mic, and the drumkit), and rock the hell out of it. Empire caught up with McKay for a deep dive into the…

AMY ADAMS WAS a relative unknown when she took the part of Giselle — the crinoline-clad heroine of Disney’s subversive feelgood fairytale — but that changed quickly. As the embodiment of this ridiculously optimistic princess who eschews her happily-ever-after for something a bit more realistic, Adams, stubborn and loveable, fizzed with playful energy. It was a performance capable of thawing the iciest of hearts. 2007’s Enchanted marked Disney’s first take on the traditional princess since 1991. Back then the princess was Belle, a well-read daddy’s girl whose happily-ever-after meant falling in love with her toxic, beastly captor. Disney wisely decided that their next fairy tale needed a tongue-in-cheek shake-up, and so with a wink, a nudge and some outrageously catchy musical numbers, Enchanted appeared, in a puff of glitter. A…

NATIONAL ANTHEMS SUCK. They’re tub-thumping, militaristic and usually include naff pleas to some god or king or, in the case of the UK, both. But every so often you get one that’s so genuinely rousing that it inspires passion far beyond its homeland. That’s the case for ‘La Marseillaise’, the French national anthem, and it rings out around the world at least partly due to Casablanca’s most uplifting scene. It starts, as so many shouting matches do, with a knees-up down the pub. A few visiting Nazis are living it large, and have a sing-song to ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’ (‘The Watch On The Rhine’), an old German patriotic number. They’re so loud and obnoxious (the latter probably goes without saying) that Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) and Czech resistance leader…

JUST A FEW weeks before the cameras were set to roll on Gladiator, director Ridley Scott and his leading man Russell Crowe sat down for a pre-production pow-wow with high-powered Hollywood executives. The clock was ticking and there was trouble ahead. Released in May 2000 to a fanfare of critical acclaim, it would, later, dominate the Oscars: nominated for 12, it won five, including Best Picture and Best Actor. But before taking its place in cinematic history, there was a long, arduous road to navigate. It would involve changing everything up, from the lead character’s name (originally Narcissus) to major story beats. It would, tragically, include the demise of Oliver Reed (cast as grizzled gladiator trainer Proximo), who died from a heart attack in a pub on a day off…

COUNT YOUR LUCKY stars that you weren’t hanging around the Empire office late last year. Because, for a couple of weeks in the run-up to Christmas, Benoit Blanc was everywhere. Every conversation, every bit of throwaway badinage had a Blanc reference or quote in there somewhere. And you couldn’t move for impressions; bad take-offs of Daniel Craig drawling, “I suspect foul play,” or, “I have eliminated no suspects,” or, most fun of all to say, “I am a passive observer of the truth.” All of which echoed the rest of the world’s reaction to the master detective created by Rian Johnson for his wonderful whodunnit, Knives Out. Johnson made no bones, from the off, about his desire to create a cinematic case-cracker to rival Poirot, and in the shape of…

THE BOYS: SEASON 1 OUT 11 MAY / CERT TBC / 472 MINS DVD BR Taking a simple but effective premise (what if the Justice League were arseholes?), this adaptation of the Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson comic takes a walk on the seedier side of superheroism. Jack Quaid stars as Hughie Campbell, a man whose girlfriend is inadvertently liquified before his eyes by high-speed hero A-Train (Jessie T. Usher). Traumatised, he teams up with foul-mouthed former spook Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) to expose super-team The Seven for the hedonistic, corrupt and occasionally homicidal monsters they really are. It’s an effective skewering of the superhero genre that takes a heavy swing at both celebrity culture and corporate corruption. Gleefully violent and blackly funny, The Boys has a stand-out turn from…

Ronald Grant Archive A Clockwork Orange STANLEY KUBRICK WAS never one to go easy on his actors. But few had it so hard as Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange. He received a real on-stage beating, suffering a blood clot under one rib; he had his head dunked in filthy water for a terrifyingly long time; and, most notoriously, underwent ocular torture for the film’s harrowing aversion therapy scene. At one point during the shoot, McDowell recalled, a crewmember leaned over to him and said, “Hey Malcs, I think he’s trying to kill you.” It wasn’t, as far as the then 28-year-old actor could tell, meant as a joke. To be fair to Kubrick, filming the pivotal ‘Ludovico Technique’ sequence, in which unrepentant delinquent Alex DeLarge is tethered to a…