Tabla de contenidos para August 2020 en Empire

SET IN SUBURBAN Houston, Annie Silverstein’s gentle drama Bull focuses on a paternal relationship between 14-year-old Kris (a brilliant Amber Havard, making her debut) and troubled rodeo rider Abe (a just-as-brilliant Rob Morgan). Having won acclaim for her 2014 short Skunk, Silverstein initially set out to expand it — but was drawn to the world of Black rodeos. Here she tells Empire how she brought a unique world to the screen. FIND THE STORY “I had met a man while location-scouting for Skunk who came from a well-known Black rodeo family. I didn’t realise there was this culture of African-American cowboys that dates back to slavery. They were doing the ranch work. When slavery was over, they weren’t allowed to participate in white rodeos, so they started holding their own.…

Sam Neill/Instagram THE SLOGAN FOR Two Paddocks, the New Zealand wine company owned and run by Sam Neill, reads: “In the cheering up business since 1993.” It is a principle the 72-year-old Kiwi actor has tried to apply to his social-media presence too, ever since he was “reluctantly” persuaded to join Twitter by his Two Paddocks colleagues in 2011. Social media can be a toxic place, he acknowledges; he wants to be the antidote. “Everybody’s angry about everything. I’m very sad that nuance has disappeared. So,” he says, with the gentle smile that made Dr Alan Grant a father figure to millions, “I just try being stupid instead.” Neill’s social-media feeds have quickly become a beloved corner of the internet, famous for wholesome dispatches from his New Zealand farm and…

OXYGEN MASK TENET At the time of writing, it’s unclear what exactly the oxygen masks are in Christopher Nolan’s mysterious thriller. Are they time masks? Do they reverse your breathing? Do the masks... wear you? WIth Nolan, nothing’s off the table. NOSE TUBE DUNE As a key part of the ‘stillsuit’ worn by the Fremen on the desert planet of Arrakis, these nose tubes help keep you cool (and handily convert sweat and pee into drinking water). If it’s good enough for Timmy Chalamet, it’s good enough for us. Getty Images, Shutterstock. Wolfman illustration: Stuart Manning TASKMASTER’S MASK BLACK WIDOW The enigmatic baddie in Marvel’s next outing mimics his enemy’s moves and weaponry — hence this hooded mask, reminiscent of Iron Man’s helmet (if Tony Stark was part of some…

SOUND OF METAL depicts the unravelling of one man, as Ruben (played by Riz Ahmed), a heavy-metal drummer and former addict, slowly loses his hearing. It’s a process that’s rarely shown on screen. But for debut director Darius Marder (a co-writer on The Place Beyond The Pines), it was important for the audience to feel that downward slide first-hand. “We cut in and out of omniscience to a first-person experience — a point of hearing, rather than a point of view,” Marder explains. The film forces the viewer to hear what Ruben does, muffling noise as soon as the first rupture hits; ingenious use of sound design was a key storytelling tool. “We mic’d the inside of skulls underwater to capture how Ruben would hear himself swallowing or blinking.” The…

IT’S DIFFICULT TO think of a filmmaker who loved life as much as Joel Schumacher did. It was evident in his work, in his off-screen exploits, and in person. The last time I spoke to him, for Empire’s retrospective on The Lost Boys, was December 2019. He was an absolute delight from the off. “Well, howdy!” he said, 80 years old, from his home in New York’s Greenwich Village. “I’ve got the fireplace roaring and I’m just about to put on Lost Boys, in case I have to make a reference.” For the next 90 minutes or so, he was a blast. He always was. Schumacher got his education on the streets, smoking and drinking from the age of ten, finding his voice among Greenwich Village’s bohemian community. After a…

★★★★ OUT NOW / NETFLIX CERT PT / 155 MINS DIRECTOR Spike Lee CAST Delroy Lindo, Norm Lewis, Isiah Whitlock Jr, Clarke Peters, Chadwick Boseman PLOT Four African-American veterans, Paul (Lindo), Eddie (Lewis), Melvin (Whitlock Jr) and Otis (Peters), return to Vietnam in search of the remains of their fallen squad leader, Stormin’ Norman (Boseman). But they are also motivated by the promise of the buried gold he helped them to hide. IT FEELS BOTH reductive and redundant to refer to a Spike Lee joint as “timely”, but his latest will feel this way to many. Da 5 Bloods recaps a long history of state-sponsored murder and abuse of Black people, and suppression of protests just like those against the recent police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade,…

★★★★ OUT 17 JULY / DIGITAL CERT TBC / 112 MINS DIRECTOR Chinonye Chukwu CAST Alfre Woodard, Danielle Brooks, Wendell Pierce, Aldis Hodge, Richard Schiff PLOT Bernadine Williams (Woodard) is a prison warden preparing for the execution of a prisoner (Hodge) who proclaims his innocence and is hoping for a last-minute reprieve. Her husband (Pierce) asks her to prioritise life outside work, but has her job already taken too heavy a toll? CLEMENCY’S OPENING SCENE shows prison warden Bernadine Williams (Alfre Woodard) overseeing the 11th execution of her career. The inmate’s face contorts in pain and he recites the Lord’s Prayer as his mother raises her cross to the glass; the injection fails, and the execution is horribly botched. The prisoner dies on schedule, but he dies anguished in his…

★★★ OUT NOW / DIGITAL CERT 15 / 102 MINS DIRECTOR Jon Stewart CAST Steve Carell, Chris Cooper, Mackenzie Davis, Topher Grace, Natasha Lyonne, Rose Byrne PLOT Licking his wounds after defeat in 2016, Democratic strategist Gary Zimmer (Carell) heads to rural Wisconsin to help a grizzled former Marine colonel (Cooper) win a mayoral election in the key battleground. The only obstacle? A ruthless Republican rival (Byrne) sent to the same small town. MIDWAY THROUGH IRRESISTIBLE, Steve Carell’s hawkish political kingmaker describes his newest candidate with disbelieving glee. “He’s like Bill Clinton with impulse control,” he says, grinning into a phone. “Like a church-going Bernie Sanders with better bone density.” Two lines that, in their eyebrow-waggling vim, pretty much encapsulate both the strengths and deficiencies of Jon Stewart’s second film…

★★★ OUT NOW SKY ATLANTIC/NOW TV EPISODES VIEWED 4 OF 10 SHOWRUNNER John Logan CAST Natalie Dormer, Daniel Zovatto, Kerry Bishé PLOT In 1938, Los Angeles is an angry place, watched over by a furious supernatural entity, Magda (Dormer). Tiago Vega (Zovatto) is about to start his first day as the first Chicano detective in the LAPD. He’ll encounter murder, riots, Nazis and more in a city — a world — on the brink of eruption. THE FIRST ITERATION of Penny Dreadful mixed classic horror characters — Frankenstein, Dr Jekyll, Dracula — in Victorian London in a saga about the monstrousness of man and assorted psychosexual doings. It was handsomely produced, very creepy and a little bit camp. A marvellous combination. City Of Angels, a tangentially connected spin-off, takes a…

1 THE TRAGIC BACKSTORY John Nugent: Death and grief are undoubtedly odd themes for a comedy. The sustained, lifelong trauma of losing a parent in early childhood does not immediately suggest we’re about to witness the next Airplane!. But grief can be funny too. Aged seven, Pete Davidson lost his firefighter father while on duty in the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, and while the 9/11 element is removed for the film, his character suffers a similarly traumatic episode. Davidson and director Judd Apatow are clearly keen to shift into a more dramatic gear here, even while keeping one hand on the comedy wheel, as the opening scene’s off-colour ribbing is keen to emphasise (“Knock knock!” “Who’s there?” “Not your dad!”). As Scott, the…

THERE ARE LIVES ripe for brilliant biopics, and then there’s Aretha Franklin’s. It’s an extraordinary story of a girl from a complicated Detroit family, one that takes in grief, teenage pregnancy and early gospel stardom, before her remarkable voice leads to international fame. Her signature song is ‘Respect’, a cover of an Otis Redding original which she turned into an anthem for civil rights activists and burgeoning feminists in 1967; it’s no surprise that the forthcoming biopic shares its powerful title with the song, which also speaks volumes about the woman who sang it. Years before her death in 2018, Franklin hand-picked Jennifer Hudson to play her, then started coaching her how to do so. “We were just sitting round a table when she first asked, and I couldn’t believe…

Getty Images FROM ALL WE'VE SEEN SO FAR, Wonder Woman 1984 looks set to be bigger, brighter and, well, more golden than its pioneering predecessor. The sequel, though, will take us back a lot further than the ’80s — all the way back to Diana Prince's childhood, in fact, to a contest that shows us precisely what she's capable of. Themyscira’s answer to the Olympic Games promises to be a showstopping moment in the film — rightly, given that the event is a staple of Wonder Woman lore and often a part of her origin story. In the comics, it was by winning the Games that Diana showed she had what it took to escort crashed pilot Steve Trevor from her all-female island of mythic, immortal warriors and back to…

Exploring souls is great territory for a film — how did you approach it as an animation? Pete Docter (below left): I’m always looking for stuff that we could animate that is not based in reality, because we get enough of that when we walk around every day. We wanted to explore what it looks like where our souls were trained – personalities and interests and things that we seem to just be born with. What would that look like? And the characters are made out of fog, this voluminous fog that we’d never done before. You can kind of see through them. Kemp, how did you get involved? Kemp Powers (below right): Well, when I came on board, the film had already been in development for a couple of…

CANNES HAD NEVER seen anything quite like it. It was 12 May 1990, early on in the town’s 43rd Film Festival, and on the famous pool terrace of the Hôtel du Cap, the swankiest, most eye-wateringly expensive of the area’s party venues, a movie bash of blockbuster proportions was in full flow. Earlier in the day a planeload of stars and industry bigwigs had flown in from Hollywood on a specially chartered 747. The passengers had been met on the airport Tarmac by a cavalcade of black Mercedes Benzes, equipped with mounted flashing lights, which negotiated tightly winding streets from the normally quiet Riviera town up to the Cap d’Antibes. That evening, speedboats roared in and out of the bay, ferrying yet more guests to the astonishing blowout, at which…

Harold And Maude A DISAPPOINTING, PREDICTABLE sort of outrage greeted Harold And Maude when it first reached cinemas in the winter of 1971. The peculiar yet enduring love story between a 20ish-year-old man and his 79-year-old girlfriend tanked financially, while critics not only brayed at the subject matter but dismissed its unbridled, vivacious approach to life entirely. “Harold And Maude has all the fun and gaiety of a burning orphanage,” read the Variety review upon release. And yet, like the sickly tree that Maude wrenches from a city sidewalk and rehomes in forest soil, this giddy rumination on life through death found a new life of its own. After a second theatrical release in 1972 (from when it went on to play for 105 consecutive weeks at Minneapolis’ Westgate Theater),…

EVEN IF YOU haven’t read Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (and if you haven’t, you should), chances are you’ve heard of some of its greatest characters. Uriah Heep. Mr Micawber. And, of course, the title character. But those are just names. When it came to turning them into flesh-and-blood creations for his adaptation of Dickens’ most personal novel, Armando Iannucci and his co-writer, Simon Blackwell, found themselves having to put meat on bones, motivations in mouths, and occasionally making great, big whacking changes to the source material. “If we had to make changes,” he says, “we tried to make them in the spirit of the book.” Here, Iannucci talks us through some of the standout characters. 1 DAVID COPPERFIELD Long believed to have been a thinly veiled stand-in for Dickens himself,…

Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan Chosen by STEPHEN McFEELY (co-writer Avengers: Endgame) STEPHEN McFEELY: “For 12-year-old Steve, but really for 50-year-old Steve, when Spock and Kirk say goodbye at the end of The Wrath Of Khan, I just get chills thinking about it. The whole movie’s leading to that, and it’s a lovely, lovely moment. It’s a movie that, whether I tell Chris [Markus, McFeely’s writing partner] or not, I keep going back to all the time in our work. It’s a lovely combination of genre and heart. We keep remaking Empire Strikes Back, The Wrath Of Khan and Aliens over and over again.” INT. ENGINE ROOM — ETERNAL, ENDLESS SPACE Kirk (William Shatner) has raced down to engineering, to find that Spock (Leonard Nimoy) has sacrificed himself…

THIRTEEN REASONS WHY It’s taken me three years to realise this but Empire now publishes 13 issues each year instead of 12. Thanks for the extra value. And for managing to entertain us, despite there being no cinema releases at the moment. I’ve always found your most fascinating articles to be about films, personalities or events that have no connection with what’s going on at the moment, your recent Edith Head article being a great example. DAVID THOMPSON, MANCHESTER Thank you for your kind words, David. Please have this Picturehouse membership in gratitude — it’s good for one year. Or as we like to call it around here, ‘13 issues’. TALK TO US  Empire’s star letter wins a Picturehouse Membership, plus one for a friend! Valid for one year at…

AT THE GENESIS of generation-defining musical Hamilton, director Thomas Kail was, as they say, in the room where it happened — a small New York City theatre in 2011, where Lin-Manuel Miranda, after debuting mixtape track ‘Alexander Hamilton’ at a White House poetry jam, performed new cut ‘My Shot’ for a live audience. “In that moment I knew there was a live version of the show,” says Kail. Four years later the fully formed Hamilton hit Broadway, astonishing audiences with its hip-hop retelling of America’s no-longerundersung founding father, complete with an intentionally diverse cast, and Kail as its director. Before the original cast — including breakout stars Daveed Diggs and Anthony Ramos — faced their final curtain-call, Kail directed the filmed version of Hamilton, now streaming on Disney+, which he…

WHERE: Bourne End, Buckinghamshire WHEN: 10 December 2019 WHY? To visit the set of Maisie Williams’ first TV outing, post-Game Of Thrones. She made her name for ten years as the heroic, kick-ass Arya Stark, and some off the badassery of that character seems to linger here: Two Weeks To Live sees her as Kim, an imperilled combat-trained survivalist who has lived off the grid for most of her life, heading back into the real world to exact revenge on the gangster who killed her dad. It gets awkward. WHO’S IN IT? Williams, naturally, plus Fleabag’s Sian Clifford, as her no-nonsense, F-word-loving survivalist mother, Tina. Taheen Modak, Mawaan Rizwan, Sean Pertwee, Jason Flemyng, Kerry Howard and Thalissa Teixeira are in the mix too. WHAT DID WE SEE? How the other…

THROUGH DANGERS UNTOLD, and hardships unnumbered, it has fought its way here… 34 years after the original was released — and six years after a follow-up was first officially mooted — the promised sequel to Jim Henson’s beloved, bizarre cult fantasy Labyrinth appears to have finally found its way out of the development-hell maze. With Doctor Strange’s Scott Derrickson replacing Fede álvarez (Don’t Breathe) as director, and a fresh script by Maggie Levin (writer-director of Miss 2059), the Magic Dance is back on. Of course, there are reasons to be cautious. The ’86 original’s core creative team are sadly no longer with us: Henson, with his vision and puppetry genius; Terry Jones, whose script was witty, edgy and boldly surreal; and David Bowie, who wrote the songs, played baby-snatching Goblin…

A selection of Schumacher’s most defining, underrated films TIGERLAND For all his reputation as a flashy blockbuster filmmaker, here was proof Schumacher could do gritty and grounded — with star-making turns from Colin Farrell and Michael Shannon. Alamy, Moviestore Collection, Shutterstock THE CLIENT Schumacher’s versatility is evident in this, the first of his two John Grisham adaptations, stripping a courtroom tussle down to its leanest, most effective parts. COUSINS This raucous romcom remake of French film Cousin Cousine showcased Schumacher’s sense of humour — with a scene-stealing turn from Airplane!’s Lloyd Bridges.…

★★ OUT 10 JULY / NETFLIX / CERT 15 / 125 MINS DIRECTOR Gina Prince-Blythewood CAST Charlize Theron, KiKi Layne, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Matthias Schoenaerts PLOT Andy (Theron) leads a squad of elite mercenaries, taking on dangerous missions all over the world. They also happen to be immortals, who have fought in countless conflicts throughout the centuries. After their latest job goes bad, however, the team suspects someone is onto their secret. WHO WANTS TO live forever? So asked Freddie Mercury on the soundtrack to 1986’s Highlander, a film to which The Old Guard owes no small debt. That existential quandary lies at the heart of this Netflix original thriller, adapted by Greg Rucka from his and Leandro Fernández’s 2017 comic-book series. Charlize Theron’s Andromache of Scythia (Andy to her friends)…

★★★★ OUT NOW / NETFLIX EPISODES VIEWED 7 OF 7 SHOWRUNNERS Ryan Murphy, Ian Brennan, Brad Falchuk CAST Ben Platt, Judith Light, Bette Midler, Gwyneth Paltrow PLOT It’s the run-up to the New York State Senate elections, and Payton Hobart (Platt) is set on unseating incumbent Dede Standish (Light). In order to win, however, Payton must rely on his team of former school pals, and not all is going to plan. IT’S AN AMBITIOUS task trying to make a show about American politics today. With media manipulation rife and policies upended with a single tweet, its chaotic nature is fascinating in a car-crash sort of way, but also near-impossible to match with fiction. Season 1 of The Politician sidestepped this problem by focusing mainly on campaign strategy, using wax-like protagonist…

1 FAY AND EVERETT James Dyer: The heart and soul of The Vast Of Night is a pair of heroes wearing horn-rimmed glasses: DJ Everett Sloan (Jake Horowitz) and plucky switchboard operator Fay Crocker (Sierra McCormick). As the story slowly unspools, it’s the pair’s fizzing chemistry that retains our interest and energises the plot, dashing from one lead to the next with almost effervescent enthusiasm. 2 THE SOUNDS ON THE SWITCHBOARD Ian Freer: When finally Fay arrives at work at WOTW radio station (an homage to War Of The Worlds), she operates the switchboard, connecting and disconnecting calls until she hears an unusual sound coming through and tries to discern what it is. Director Andrew Patterson plays the drama out in one long take. Andrew Patterson: It’s 11 minutes long…

DIRECTOR SHAWN LEVY was understandably disappointed when the release date for Free Guy, his Truman-Show-meets-Grand-Theft-Auto popcorn flick, moved from July all the way to December. But, he admits, “In the spirit of making lemonade out of lemons, I’m using that time to hone the movie in ways that I wouldn’t normally have had time to.” Luckily, his new film couldn’t be more audacious — visually or thematically. Ryan Reynolds plays the titular Guy — a cheery, obedient NPC (non-playable character) working as a bank teller in Free City, a violent shoot-’n’-loot video game loosely based on GTA. “Players do missions for money, points, and rewards,” Levy explains. “Bank robberies, muggings, carjackings, it’s pure anarchy.” But one day, blinkered, naive Guy is granted the ability to see the world for what…

DIRECTOR FRANCIS LEE has an uncanny knack for, if not exactly predicting world events, then making films that end up being surprisingly prescient. His debut, 2017’s God’s Own Country, which explored xenophobia in rural Yorkshire, was released into a country dominated by Brexit. And now his second film, Ammonite, concerned with isolation, is set to be released into a world shaped by Covid-19. “I hope people will find it resonant,” he says about the film, which he wrapped just weeks before lockdown dropped. “And I hope that they find it hopeful.” Hope — as evidenced by God’s Own Country — is a preoccupation for the filmmaker, and it’s not all the two films have in common, even if on the surface you’d assume there to be limited shared DNA, with…

BASED ON THE CAPCOM video game of the same name, Monster Hunter is husband-and-wife team Paul W.S. Anderson and Milla Jovovich’s sixth film together as director and star. In the story, which took the couple to some seriously far-flung locations, Jovovich plays Natalie Artemis, a US Army Ranger thrown into a parallel reality where gigantic monsters roam and rampage. The beasts, as she discovers, are stalked by that world’s rough, tough human inhabitants — including ‘The Hunter’, played by Ong-Bak’s Tony Jaa. For Anderson, the film is a long-gestating passion project, as he and Jovovich explain. First, though: some exercise… Hi, Paul. Hi, Milla. How’s it going? Milla Jovovich: Sorry we’re a little late. We’ve just finished our virtual gym class. Paul W.S. Anderson: Well, I needed a moment because,…

ANIMAL CRACKERS RAMBO III (1988) The third instalment in Carolco’s decade-defining franchise upped almost everything to typically gonzo levels for a mayhem-packed 102 minutes. But its defining sequence remains a bizarre sports match in which our friendly PTSDsuffering Vietnam vet plays polo against the Mujahideen with a goat corpse for a ball. BYE BYE BABY TOTAL RECALL (1990) Having travelled to Mars (or possibly not), reality-challenged Doug Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger) delivers a bloody decree nisi to his wife Lori (Sharon Stone) — accompanied with one of Arnie’s all-time great zingers: “Consider that a divorce!” Arguments about who gets to keep the dog are thus neatly averted. RIDING SHOTGUN TERMINATOR 2 (1991) Carolco’s bigger! better! shootier! ethos peaked with the motorbike-truck chase in T2. John Connor (Edward Furlong) evades the T-1000…

WHEN YOU LOOK at the perversions director John Waters has committed to celluloid over the last 56 years, you can see how he earned his monikers: King of Filth and Sultan of Sleaze, among others. There was the chicken penetration scene (exactly as it sounds), the lobster sex attack (exactly as it sounds), the eating of dog shit (yep, exactly as it sounds). The last was the final act of Pink Flamingos, John Waters’ transgressive 1972 hit, when Divine — the centre of his acting ‘troupe’, ‘the Dreamlanders’ — in drag, crouched down next to a dog and chewed the warm offering. When his next film, Female Trouble, arrived just two years later, the question was: how could John Waters shock us even more? But something had changed. Waters had…

THE GAME OUT 27 JULY / CERT 15 / 123 MINS Sandwiched between Seven and Fight Club, The Game tends to be overlooked in the David Fincher canon, but it is far smarter than its ‘lesser Fincher’ status suggests. A spiked cocktail of Scrooged, The Sting and any of Hitchcock’s twistier capers, it throws Michael Douglas’ Gordon Gecko-ish investment-banking git into an elaborate (and highly risky) live role-playing experience, which may or may not be an even more elaborate (and highly life-threatening) long con. As the red herrings pile up, so does your appreciation of the film’s underlying meta appeal. A fair reading of The Game is that it’s a movie about making movies — specifically the kind of movie you’d anticipate from the guy who just had a huge…

Ice Cold In Alex WHAT’S THE GREATEST drinking scene in movie history? Rick’s gin joint session as Sam plays ‘As Time Goes By’ in Casablanca? Withnail sampling the “finest wines available to humanity” in Withnail And I? Or how about Annie (Kristen Wiig), high on sedatives and alcohol, invading first class in Bridesmaids? All good contenders, but you’d have to go a long way to beat the final scene of J. Lee Thompson’s taut World War II drama Ice Cold In Alex, a constant fixture not only in any self-respecting Best Big-Screen Booze-Up List, but also one of the greatest British war films ever made. After a treacherous journey escorting an ambulance across the hot desert from the Libyan port city of Tobruk to Alexandria, Captain Anson (John Mills), joined…

ILLUSTRATION PETER HORVATH Portrait: Shayan Asgharnia LAST YEAR’S ACCLAIMED romantic drama Queen & Slim, which dealt head-on with police brutality and racism, has taken on profound relevance in the wake of worldwide protests following the killing of unarmed African American George Floyd. Its searing and thoughtful take on race and intersectionality is typical of its screenwriter Lena Waithe; since she first emerged a decade ago, she’s been both a groundbreaking writer (as well as Queen & Slim, she won an Emmy for her work on comedy-drama Master Of None) and in-demand actor (with roles in Ready Player One and Westworld). Empire caught up with her to discuss her reaction to the Black Lives Matter movement sweeping the globe, and how she hopes it could lead to real change in Hollywood.…

Getty Images. Illustration: Stuart Manning Hi, Charlize. How’s life been treating you in lockdown? Are you binge-watching anything at the moment? No, I am home schooling. And I’ve just been told that the computer isn’t working right now, so that’s great [laughs]. If I didn’t have to do this part of quarantine I think I’d be okay with it, but the home schooling is just... Yeah. Do you have kids? No, I don’t. Hence my lockdown experience being very binge-watch-heavy. Oh my God, I hate you right now [laughs]. Honestly, I thought making action movies was hard. But this… How often do you watch your own movies? If I catch one on television I’ll watch a bit of it. But I’m never like: “Okay, tonight I’m going to sit down…

HOLD ONTO YOUR butts — film shoots are getting back underway, with Jurassic World: Dominion leading the charge. In mid-June, 90 days after productions around the world were shut down to halt the spread of coronavirus, Hollywood finally got the green light to get back to work, with Colin Trevorrow’s trilogy-closer the first movie to resume shooting in the UK, from 6 July. At the start of lockdown, industry insiders questioned how movie sets would be able to safely function in a post-Covid world. After all, bringing to life hair-raising T-Rex attacks and tense velociraptor stand-offs requires busy sets, full of hundreds of people. How do you manage that in a socially distanced manner? “Dominion was already the biggest creative challenge of our lives, before the lockdown,” says Trevorrow, whose…

Eyevine, Getty Images Unhinged moved its release from September to July — the first major film to release post-lockdown. Why? We were getting the film ready for our September release date — and then I got a call from the head of the studio, asking what I thought about going for a more aggressive release date. It was bold! My concern was obviously whether it would be safe for people to go to the movie theatre. Was this film always meant to be seen on a big screen? Absolutely. [The studio] always planned to go wide theatrically. That absolutely influenced the way that we approached everything. I saw it in a test screening with 450 people, and it’s such an immersive theatrical experience. You could feel the tension in the…

“THINK REBECCA MEETS The Red Shoes meets Hammer horror,” teases Anna Biller. “With shades of Frenzy.” The lockdown may have paused plans for Bluebeard, the filmmaker’s follow-up to The Love Witch, but her vision for the film seems crystal clear. Her third film will be loosely based on the gothic folk tale of the same name. Originating from French legend, Bluebeard tells the tale of a woman who marries a nobleman — one who, it turns out, is not only a philander but harbours a murderous secret (hint: there’s a magic key, plus a room bursting with blood and corpses). Biller has chosen this narrative, she says, to shake up the genre for a modern audience. “I want to do a horror movie that’s different from anything out there,” she…

FOUR BOYS, ONE Duke of Edinburgh Award, the entire Scottish Highlands: what could go wrong? In director Ninian Doff’s energetic debut Boyz In The Wood, it turns out, everything. Reluctant hikers Ian, Dean, Duncan and Beatroot (played by newcomers Samuel Bottomley, Rian Gordon, Lewis Gribben and Viraj Juneja) encounter gale-force winds, their own ineptitude and a murderous aristocrat, played by Eddie Izzard. Here’s a guide to the obstacles they face. EXTREME WEATHER! “What they say about Scotland is that you go through every season every hour,” Doff says. “Gale-force winds, then some sun, then colossal rain.” The titular boyz encounter all of that, and even a spot of light British drizzle proves problematic when you’re wearing gleaming white trainers. But there’s also an invisible threat. “When it all clears, you’ve…

★★★★ OUT 10 JULY / PICTUREHOUSE CERT 12A / 107 MINS DIRECTOR Alice Winocour CAST Eva Green, Matt Dillon, Zélie Boulant, Lars Eidinger PLOT Engineer and astronaut Sarah Loreau (Green) is selected for the Proxima space programme, in which she will spend a year in space — the last mission before Mars. As she trains for the mission, she must also nurture her increasingly complicated relationship with her eight-year-old daughter, Stella (Boulant). YOU’VE HEARD OF the Sad Space Dad. In recent times we’ve also been getting the Glum Space Mum. The likes of Interstellar, First Man and Ad Astra are being met by the likes of Gravity, Lucy In The Sky — and now Proxima, the latest film to grapple with the cosmic challenges of both going to space and…

★★ OUT NOW / NETFLIX CERT TBC / 122 MINS DIRECTOR David Dobkin CAST Will Ferrell, Rachel McAdams, Dan Stevens, Pierce Brosnan PLOT Inept Icelandic band Fire Saga — made up of possible-but-unconfirmed brother/sister duo Lars Erickssong (Ferrell) and Sigrit Ericksdottir (McAdams) — are given a chance to fulfil a lifelong dream by entering the Eurovision Song Contest. Can they overcome hirsute love rivals, murderous plots and malfunctioning props in order to win? REMEMBER WHEN BLUE reformed in 2011, with the specific aim of reversing the UK’s wretched run of results in the Eurovision Song Contest? Those four loveable lads — Lee, Simon, Duncan, and the other one — carried the dreams of a nation on their backs and vocal cords. Glory was within their grasp. Victory was inevitable. They…

★★★★ OUT 14 JULY SKY ATLANTIC/NOW TV EPISODES VIEWED 6 OF 6 SHOWRUNNERS David Simon, Ed Burns CAST Winona Ryder, Anthony Boyle, Zoe Kazan, Morgan Spector, John Turturro PLOT In an alt-history ’S0s America, celebrity aviator Charles Lindbergh, a xenophobic populist, becomes President by leading the country away from World War II but towards fascism. The ripples of his bigoted world-view play out on the Levins, a Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey. US TV IS full of alt-timelines these days. Following on from The Handmaid’s Tale and Hunters, The Plot Against America, adapted from Philip Roth’s 2004 novel by The Wire masterminds David Simon and Ed Burns, imagines a future where Charles Lindbergh, American flying ace and Nazi sympathiser, becomes the POTUS. The result isn’t high on dramatic incident…

1 THE OPENING MONTAGE Christina Newland: Offering some context of the turbulent social and racial history of the ’60s, Da 5 Bloods opens with a montage of clips and images featuring Malcolm X, anti-war riots, Martin Luther King Jr, the Kent State shootings, Ho Chi Minh and Lyndon B. Johnson. The result is instructive, concise and charged with righteous energy; for anyone of a younger generation it helps to give a preliminary look at the clashes happening at the heart of American society. Particularly trenchant is the clip of Muhammad Ali, famously declaring his defiant refusal to be drafted into the army and fight in Vietnam when white Americans would not fight for his rights at home. 2 PAUL, THE MAGA MAN Kambole Campbell: As the opening montage ends, the…

IF YOU EVER happen to bump into Cary Joji Fukunaga, tap him up for the following week’s lottery numbers. Because he saw this whole damn lockdown fiasco coming, long before it actually arrived. “There were a lot of conversations happening as early as January,” he tells Empire. “My first movie, Sin Nombre, came out during [the 2009] swine flu [pandemic], and it came out in cinemas in Mexico right when the President of Mexico said, ‘Do not go to cinemas.’ So I had trauma from that experience, and as › I was following the news of this, almost every day I was asking [the producers], ‘What’s the plan, guys? Because this isn’t stopping.’” London’s Royal Albert Hall had been booked for the world premiere. Tuxedos had been ordered. Olives had…

Getty Images WEST SIDE STORY is the culmination of a career ambition: Steven Spielberg is finally directing a musical. There have been abandoned attempts (musical-about-a-musical Reel To Reel), false starts (Hook started life as a songfest) and tiny tasters (the jitterbug contest of 1941, the ‘Anything Goes’ showstopper that opens Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom), but this is the first time he has gotten to showcase that old razzle-dazzle for an entire feature. The film is actually less a remake of Robert Wise’s 1961 ten-time Academy Award-winner than an adaptation of the original 1957 Broadway show, the cast album of which Spielberg listened to over and over again as a kid. In the midst of a gang war between the American Jets and Puerto Rican Sharks for supremacy…

How are you doing? You should have been done and dusted by now. We were one week off finishing the edit [when] we had to stop, and then it probably took another two weeks to get the technology together so we could keep editing. The music’s all done. Almost there! Have you talked to Scarlett during this time? We text each other really silly jokes. Her partner, Colin [Jost, Saturday Night Live writer], bought a metal detector, and was walking around the living room [with it], and all I could hear was her saying, “Oh. My. God. It has come to this.” Well, you have to keep busy. So you’re starting Phase Four of Marvel with the prequel, going backwards to go forward. Is that contradiction something that you talked…

Under normal circumstances, Top Gun: Maverick would be just about ready for release. Now it’s a Christmas movie. I think everyone working on the movie was looking forward to a summer release, because it really felt like a summer movie. The first Top Gun was May of ’86. But at the same time, we feel this is a movie that needs to be seen on the big screen. So hopefully, by Christmas, everything will be back to normal. The first movie is a competition movie and it’s a sports movie. Is that the same here? Yeah, it is. Top Gun is a competition movie. It’s about friendship and sacrifice and family, and all of those themes play into Top Gun: Maverick. But we were able to take it to the…

EDGAR WRIGHT HAS dabbled in horror before, of course. Just look at the way Shaun Of The Dead slowly spirals into full-blown zom, rather than full-blown com, for its last ten minutes. Or the giallo-inspired jump-scarific murders in Hot Fuzz. Or Nick Frost in a nappy in his trailer for Don’t. Yet — Frost in a nappy aside — Wright has never made a movie that will haunt your dreams. That could be about to change with Last Night In Soho, his first foray proper into horror. But if you surmised from the title that it might be a stalk ’n’ slash movie set in the bustling heart of London’s West End (cast your minds back pre-pandemic — it definitely bustled), you would be very, very wrong. Wright has made…

JUST WATCH HER her show-stopping 2020 Oscars performance, which saw her rolling around in the aisles of the Dolby Theatre. There, she beguiled Tom Hanks with a rendition of Mister Rogers’ theme, ‘Won’t You Be My Neighbor?’. She rewrote her 2010 song ‘Come Alive’ to reference #OscarsSoWhite and the ceremony’s biggest snubs (Hustlers, Queen & Slim, Dolemite Is My Name, female directors at large). She thrust a microphone at Leonardo DiCaprio, which he just about managed to “la-la-la” into. That fearlessness runs through all of Monáe’s work. After a near-decade of releasing genre-melding, sci-fi-inspired R&B records — indebted to everything from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner — she kicked off her screen career in 2016 with the double whammy of Moonlight and Hidden Figures. From there, she…

ABeautiful Day InThe Neighbourhood DIRECTOR MARIELLE HELLER talks us through her heartwarming drama about children’s television legend Mister Rogers (Tom Hanks) and the journalist (Matthew Rhys) determined to figure him out. MISTER ROGERS’ NEIGHBORHOOD The film opens with a precise recreation of the set of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, down to the same foley effects and old TV cameras, and even filmed in the same studios. “It was to get the feeling right,” says Heller. “It was a very technical thing, to create something that felt right, so the one thing your brain would have to adjust to is this being Tom Hanks and not Mister Rogers. That was enough, so everything else had to be perfect.” Some of Mister Rogers’ original team worked on the film and provided expert advice…

Illustration: Jacey The Rocky Saga Chris: Let’s start with the age-old question. What’s the first Rocky film you remember? Terri: Mine is Rocky II. My mum used to be a barmaid in this pub and we’d sit in the lodgings upstairs while she worked. It was New Year’s Eve and we rifled through their tape collection and found Rocky II to put on. I must have been nine or ten. And it knocked my socks off. The fight scenes are incredible. The whole class element of Rocky really touches me, but I remember being blown away by the emotion and the heart of it. I think, cumulatively, I’ve seen them all over 100 times. Chris: How many times have you seen Rocky V? Terri: Only about six times. Chris: A…