Tabla de contenidos para March 2021 en Empire

A FUNERAL MIGHT have made more sense. But in fact, the story behind the latest instalment in a grisly horror franchise began at a wedding. After the nuptials of a friend, comedian Chris Rock spotted the head of Lionsgate — the studio which owns the Saw films — and spied an opportunity to offer his two cents on the series. “Chris is like, ‘If Saw had had a joke or two, it would have landed much, much better,’” says director Darren Lynn Bousman, as it was told to him. “‘Add a joke and you got yourself a bigger hit than you already have!’ So it started there.” This chance encounter led to Spiral: From The Book Of Saw: a fresh revival of a horror series that had been written off.…

“COVID!” EXCLAIMS MARTIN Scorsese. Empire has just mentioned that Killers Of The Flower Moon, his epic Western, had its shoot postponed by a year, and indeed, the pandemic is to blame. The film, starring both of Scorsese’s main squeezes — Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio — was slated to begin production in March 2020, but March 2020, it turned out, had other plans. Instead, Scorsese has elongated the pre-production process, reworking, re-tuning. “We’re casting, we’re working on the script, he says when we speak in late November. “There’s a crew out in Oklahoma scouting the locations and getting the production schedule worked out. Because we hope to go to Oklahoma sometime in January and we aim to start shooting 5 April. And then through April, May, June, July, because…

Marco Vittur, Disney, Shutterstock FIRST CAME THE Hitman’s Bodyguard. Incoming is The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard. It’s surely only a matter of time before we get ‘The Hitman’s Wife’s Second Cousin’s Mate Barry’s Bodyguard’. The “Wife” in question is Salma Hayek as Sonia Kincaid, partner of Samuel L. Jackson’s Samuel Kincaid — and it’s pretty clear from this image that she’s adding a completely different dynamic. Where the original traded heavily on the chemistry between its two leads, Jackson and Ryan Reynolds (as a hitman and his bodyguard, respectively), this follow-up sees the pair rescue Sonia from a mysterious baddie, played here by Antonio Banderas. High on the anticipation list: seeing more of the Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard’s Captor’s Dressing Gown. THE HITMAN’S WIFE’S BODYGUARD IS IN CINEMAS FROM AUGUST 19…

SPENDING YEARS ON Steven Spielberg’s legendary sets might put some people off ever attempting to direct. For Janusz Kamiński, Spielberg’s regular cinematographer, it’s only made him hungrier. Since the pair first collaborated in 1993 on Schindler’s List (both winning Oscars in the process), Kamiński has served as director of photography on 19 Spielberg films. Somehow, he has also found the time to forge his own directing career, and his third go is his most heartfelt yet. Here, Kamiński explains why American Dream is his dream project. IT’S A PERSONAL STORY (WITH MOBSTERS) It took the right story for Kamiński to return to directing (after 2000’s Lost Souls and 2007’s Hania). “I had some themes I wanted to explore,” he explains. American Dream is a gritty crime thriller about Russian mobsters…

THE PROLOGUE TO Black Bear sees a writer-director named Allison, played by Aubrey Plaza, take a seat at her writing table and begin the script for a film called Black Bear. Which is pretty much exactly how the film’s actual writer-director, Lawrence Michael Levine, kicked things off as well. “The movie is a look at the process that I was going through,” he says, “which was: I went in my office, and I looked out into an abyss and characters started talking to me. I just kind of recorded it.” The first half of the film begins fairly straightforwardly: Allison escapes to a cabin in the woods, seeking film ideas and inspiration, where she stays with a bickering couple, Blair and Gabe, played by Sarah Gadon and Christopher Abbott respectively.…

OUT 12 FEBRUARY CERT 18 / 92 MINS DIRECTOR Charlène Favier CAST Noée Abita, Jérémie Renier, Marie Denarnaud, Muriel Combeau PLOT When adolescent Lyz (Abita) joins an elite ski training programme in the French Alps, it’s not long before her talent catches the eye of trainer Fred (Renier). As he begins to blur the lines of their relationship, Lyz finds herself caught in a situation over which she has absolutely no control. FOR 15-YEAR-OLD Lyz (Noee Abita), the chance to take part in a high-level ski training programme in the French Alps doesn’t just represent professional opportunity, but the chance to find a place to belong. With her father absent and her mother (Muriel Combeau) having effectively abandoned her daughter for a new love in Marseille, Lyz is already adrift…

OUT 29 JANUARY (NETFLIX) CERT TBC / TBC MINS DIRECTOR Simon Stone CAST Carey Mulligan, Ralph Fiennes, Lily James, Johnny Flynn PLOT Suffolk, 1938. Widowed Lady Edith Pretty (Mulligan) hires unorthodox digger Basil Brown (Fiennes) to investigate the mounds in the grounds of her estate. When Brown uncovers an Anglo-Saxon burial ship dating to around the sixth century, the discovery becomes a focal point for a battle of ownership between Pretty and the archaeological establishment. IF YOU’VE EVER pined for ‘Time Team: The Movie’, The Dig is for you. Adapted from John Preston’s novel, Simon Stone’s film details one of Britain’s most notorious archaeological digs, the discovery in 1938 of an Anglo-Saxon ship in the burial mounds at the delightfully named Sutton Hoo estate in Suffolk. As anyone who’s followed…

OUT 26 MARCH CERT TBC / 95 MINS DIRECTOR Joel Crawford CAST (VOICES) Nicolas Cage. Emma Stone, Ryan Reynolds PLOT Grug (Cage) is still looking for a safe home for his family of cave people. When they accidentally stumble into the jungle home of the Bettermans, old friends of Guy (Reynolds), the Croods think they’ve got it made. But the Bettermans’ paradise has some secrets. EIGHT YEARS AFTER the original film – aeons in child years – the Croods return for a second adventure. Originally intended for release in 2017, this sequel was scrapped, then resurrected amid some studio hokey-pokey too dry to detail. In that time, much of its 2013 audience has reached adulthood and memory of the first movie has faded. Fortunately, it doesn’t particularly matter if you…

Getty Images ALEXA RAISBECK WAS studying film and media at college in London when her career took a surprise turn. Curious about how things operated behind the scenes in her local cinema, she started working as an usher and, after being asked to help track down some film, trained as a projectionist. So began a life-long love of projecting films and now, 17 years later, Raisbeck works as the BFI Southbank’s Technical Supervisor. Here, she gives Empire an insight into the high points of the job, and reveals how it can be both thrilling and pretty nerve-racking, too. What does your day-to-day job involve? I’m not sure a typical day exists! It’s so varied, but it will typically involve some maintenance such as changing lamps, putting oil in the projectors, going…

New year, new hope! The 60 films and TV shows that fill us with optimism for the 12 months ahead LIKE EVERY YOUNG BOY in the mid-1980s, Jason Reitman was obsessed with Ghostbusters. But unlike any other young boy, he was the son of the man who had directed the pop-cultural phenomenon, Ivan Reitman. So instead of your bog-standard 12” Egon toy aiming its proton gun out of his toy box, Jason had props from the movie, including a chunk of the actual Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, decorating his bedroom. “I had to check underneath my bed before I went to sleep looking for a Terror Dog,” he laughs. “Except I was the only kid where there might actually have been one under there!” In the sequel, an 11-year-old Reitman…

“I’d never heard of it,” says director Roger Michell of the true story at the heart of The Duke. “And during the whole time I worked on the film I never met anybody who’d heard of it. It was probably notorious for a few months. And then just disappeared into that dustbin of history I guess.” Until, as they say, now. In 1961, Kempton Bunton, a retired bus driver furious that he had to pay for a TV licence, stole a Goya painting from London’s National Gallery, sending ransom notes and demanding the government show more compassion for pensioners. The story hit the headlines then vanished. Then a few years ago, Bunton’s grandson approached producer Nicky Bentham about it, suggesting a film. “I saw it as being a sort of…

Gagarine is not your average space movie. There is an intrepid astronaut, a claustrophobic capsule and moments of high peril. Yet the film never actually leaves the ground. Set around a run-down housing project in the suburbs of Paris — named after the Soviet cosmonaut who inaugurated it in the 1960s, Yuri Gagarin — it is the story of Youri (Alséni Bathily), a resourceful, Black 16-year-old who is fascinated by the stars above. When he learns that the gigantic building is set to be demolished, he refuses to leave, hunkering down and surviving like he’s Matt Damon in The Martian (minus the DIY fertiliser). In a case of life reflecting art, directors Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh themselves moved into Gagarin Towers to complete the shoot, just one month before…

IF THERE’S ONE thing Billie Piper has become pretty great at, it’s reinvention. That’s not to do a disservice to her achievements over the last two decades or her creative zeal, but Piper has certainly come a long way since she teleported down into a London street for the ‘Because We Want To’ music video in 1999. Within just two years, Piper went from teen pop star to Doctor Who companion, becoming — alongside David Tennant’s Timelord — one of the most popular pairings in the sci-fi show’s history. Then she switched things up in 2007 and swapped wholesome Rose for Belle de Jour, the high-end London escort in ITV’s Secret Diary Of A Call Girl, which she also executive produced. All the while, Piper was transforming herself into a…

Illustration: Vector That Fox The latest outing from the ever-unpredictable Pixar sounds like The Little Mermaid meets Stand By Me, except without the songs or a dead body. That we know of. Directed by Enrico Casarosa, who made the company’s Oscar-nominated 2011 short La Luna, it’s an almost literal fish-out-of-water comedy. The story follows two young male sea creatures — one shy, one bold — who take a trip to the world above, where they befriend a human girl and experience the marvel of life on dry land. “It’s a bit like two kids going to the big city for the first time,” says Casarosa, except in this case the big city is a sleepy fishing village in Italy, where denizens tell terrible tales of the monsters in the water.…

The filming of the third and final series of After Life is due to start this April, but Ricky Gervais already has a tagline for the poster. “I think about these things because it helps me to focus,” he explains. “So for series one, the tagline was ‘Hell is other people’, series two was ‘Hope is everything’, and this time I want it to be, ‘The love story continues’.” For Gervais, After Life is first and foremost a love story between a man and his dead wife. “It’s really a romcom,” he laughs. “But with elements of anger, suicide, violence, drug-taking, addiction and depression.” Discussing the writing of his character Tony’s arc across the three series, Gervais emphasises the importance of avoiding a glib Hollywood version of the grieving process.…

Saint Maud WRITER-DIRECTOR ROSE Glass on her horror debut, an astonishing, soul-searing examination of what happens when good faith turns bad. MAUD MEETS NANCY Saint Maud opens with a dark, dingy flashback to a nurse reckoning with literal blood on her hands. “I originally had a more expensive, abstract thing in mind, a visualisation of Maud’s inner turmoil before she found God, with this CGI tidal wave of a storm breaking,” Glass says. But a change of plan led to a more allegorical revelation, as nurse Maud (Morfydd Clark) finds enlightenment when her eyes meet a cockroach crawling across the ceiling in a hospital. “It’s her equivalent to seeing the light – but in this case it’s Nancy the cockroach,” she explains. “I liked this idea of God being represented…

Illustration: Jacey Stanley Kubrick films Ian: We think of Kubrick as one of the greats. How much of that is down to the work and how much is down to his process and his reputation and his perfectionism? Alex: I think it’s inseparable. My obsession with Kubrick grew out of wanting to know how The Shining was made. And what goes into that is absolute exacting, uncompromising obsession. That’s what’s so interesting about him. Whether you like the product or not, the process is on the screen. These are untouchable pieces of work. Neil: They’re extremely grown-up films. There’s a lot going on in them, even the ones that aren’t very good. Alex: His films at their best throw up questions and ideas. They’re not didactic. They don’t give you…

Alamy Scarface “DO YOU THINK you can take me? You’re gonna need a fuckin’ army if you’re gonna take me!” Tony Montana screams at his Colombian foes from the crassly ornate balcony of his palatial Miami estate, smeared with cocaine and his own blood, and toting a grenade-launching assault rifle like a one-man Wild Bunch. So high is the Cuban drug lord on his own supply, he thinks he’s invincible. And also, fatally, fails to appreciate that the Colombians have indeed brought a fuckin’ army. As written by Oliver Stone, the finale to 1983’s Scarface only involved “four or five gunmen sneaking up on him”. However, when he arrived on set, Stone was surprised to find that director Brian De Palma had taken it a bit further. Well, a lot.…

“IT’S A LOVE story inspired by 1940s melodrama,” Clio Barnard tells us of her upcoming Ali & Ava. A pretty traditional throwback, then. Or not. “It’s seeing what happens if you take that genre and set it in Bradford with characters based on two real people.” This is Barnard’s fourth feature, and every one of them blurs those boundaries. This one, though, takes things further than ever. The Arbor, her 2010 documentary about Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar, had actors lip-synching to audio of real voices (of Dunbar’s friends and family). Since turning to dramatic fiction with 2013’s The Selfish Giant and 2017’s Dark River she has continued to wrangle realism, using non-actors to augment her stories, embedding herself in communities, with real-life environments seeping into the productions. In Ali &…

Alamy THE BLACK LIST began out of boredom, and became a crystal ball. “I was just looking for some reading material for a vacation,” laughs Franklin Leonard, founder of the annual compendium of Hollywood’s best unproduced screenplays. The year was 2005 and Leonard was working at Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company, Appian Way Productions. “All the scripts I was reading were kind a underwhelming so I emailed other producers, asking them to add the names of great, unproduced screenplays to a spreadsheet.” When he got back from holiday, he discovered that the list had taken on a life of its own. “Execs were using it to discover the scripts they should be reading and the talent they ought to be talking to.” In the 15 years since, the Black List has…

WHEN JOHN HANCOCK wrote the script for The Little Things back in 1993, it was a contemporary neo-noir thriller. In the following two decades, Steven Spielberg, Clint Eastwood, Warren Beatty and Danny DeVito all expressed an interest in directing it, before Hancock — now an experienced director with the likes of The Blind Side (2009) and Saving Mr. Banks (2013) — decided to do it himself. It finally emerges this year as a period piece, a deliberate throwback that sees Denzel Washington and Rami Malek’s mismatched cops searching for a serial killer. “There were conversations about whether to make it a modern-day story,” says Hancock. “But I wanted to show a landscape that existed back then: Hollywood was a lot tougher.” Originally the story was born out of a frustration…

A SUCCESSFUL 2018 play about racial injustice, ear for eye has now been reimagined for the screen. But as films go, it’s hugely experimental: shot entirely on a single soundstage, with everything from room furnishings to walls excluded, to give the feel of an abstract, infinite black space. “We are suggesting, as opposed to dictating, visually,” explains the film’s writer and director, debbie tucker green (she uses lower case for her name), adapting from her own play. “Which gives room for audiences to bring their own shit to the table. But you’re not just staring at a black screen.” The switch to film also allows for an “intimacy specific to screen”. Dialogue has been trimmed to focus more on the actors’ nuances. Visual effects have been added to imply seasonal…

OUT 29 JANUARY (DIGITAL) CERT TBC / 100 MINS DIRECTORS Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead CAST Anthony Mackie, Jamie Dornan, Katie Aselton, Ally Ioannides PLOT Paramedics Steve Denube (Mackie) and Dennis Dannelly (Dornan) encounter a series of strange deaths and injuries on their night-shift beat. After the pair realise these incidents are connected by a new designer drug named Synchronic, its effects have a devastating impact on their lives. SYNCHRONIC IS ONE of those tricky movies which isn’t really about what you think it’s about, and what you think it’s about is infinitely less interesting than what it’s really about. But to discuss what it’s really about is an arguable spoiler (in a second-act reveal kinda way), even though that would be the best way to recommend it. Still, we’ll do…

OUT NOW (APPLE TV+) EPISODES VIEWED 7 OF 10 SHOWRUNNER Tony Basgallop CAST Lauren Ambrose, Toby Kebbell, Rupert Grint, Nell Tiger Free PLOT We return to the urban nightmare being lived by Sean (Kebbell) and Dorothy (Ambrose) — an affluent Philadelphia couple dealing (or not) with the loss of their baby son. After creepy nanny Leanne (Tiger Free) disappeared at the end of the last season, they will go to any lengths to get her — and the baby she has with her — back. OKAY, BEAR WITH us. Much of what we’re about to describe will make no sense at all if you haven’t seen Servant Season 1, and possibly even less sense if you have. Created by Tony Basgallop and exec- produced and part-directed by M. Night Shyamalan,…

Alamy THE DESERT CROSSING STEVEN SPIELBERG on LAWRENCE OF ARABIA When I was in my teens, Lawrence Of Arabia opened in Phoenix, Arizona, and I went with my parents. It was a swanky theatre with 70mm projection and stereophonic sound, and the loge-style seating in the smoking section would rock back and forward as you sat back in your chairs. But Lawrence Of Arabia never gave me the chance to test how the chairs worked, as I sat bolt upright for the entire film. Then came the scene as Lawrence and Sherif Ali and 50 other true believers cross the Nefud desert. It was a prolonged sequence through every variety of arid landscape, much like the desert that surrounded that hometown Phoenix audience. That desert crossing cast a spell on…

Landmark THE CHORAL GROANS of a zombie horde. The wail of pursuing police sirens. The slap of a tongue on Cornetto… If you’ve heard it in an Edgar Wright movie, then Julian Slater is the guy who’s brought it to aural life. As a sound designer, supervising sound editor and re-recording mixer, he sets all the levels and tweaks all the knobs to ensure your cinematic experience provides maximal sensory immersion. And not just in Wright’s movies, either. Over three decades, Slater’s brought the noise to titles as diverse as Leaving Las Vegas, Mad Max: Fury Road and The Trial Of The Chicago 7, earning himself a couple of Oscar nominations for 2017’s Baby Driver along the way. And it all started, weirdly enough, with Sting… At what point in…

1. THE FILM — AND ITS HERO — ARE REFRESHINGLY DOWN TO EARTH In Samaritan, a young boy discovers that a legendary superhero (Sylvester Stallone) — one long thought missing or dead — is actually living incognito in his neighbourhood. And he’s not without issues. “Superheroes tend to be unbreakable and indestructible,” says director Julius Avery, “but it’s much more interesting to see flawed superheroes in a world that has real consequences. This is a grounded superhero movie.” 2. IT’S STALLONE’S FIRST SUPERHERO “When I was growing up, we had action heroes,” says Avery of the 1970s and ’80s. “Sly was the closest thing to a superhero before they were a thing. Having him in an actual superhero movie was such a rad idea.” Meanwhile, 74-year-old Stallone has embraced the…

THE 1960S WAS a seismic decade for the lives and deaths of Black Civil Rights activists. You know about Martin Luther King Jr, the man behind one of the most famous speeches in American history. Elements of his story have been told on screen 13 times. You know about Malcolm X. Denzel Washington has played the icon twice, and he has been immortalised on screen on 11 other occasions. And then there’s Fred Hampton. The leader of the Black Panther party’s Illinois chapter and the mastermind behind the Rainbow coalition, which united political organisations to work towards social change. He’s never been the focus of a film. The history books at schools have no mention of him. “Sixty to 70 per cent of the articles that appeared in the press…

Illustration: Vector That Fox Just over a year ago, Disney’s last animated feature transported us back to Frozen II’s Arendelle. Now, with Raya And The Last Dragon, the studio’s first animated film to be heavily influenced by Southeast Asia, they will introduce us to a new fantasy world: Kumandra. This new land is “inspired by the myriad of cultures in Southeast Asia,” says Don Hall, who co-directs alongside Blindspotting’s Carlos López Estrada. And of course the representation is reflected in the casting too. Star Wars’ Kelly Marie Tran will become the first actress of Southeast Asian descent to lead a Disney animation as Raya, a warrior princess who must find the last dragon, Sisu (Awkwafina), and save her kingdom. Both vocal performances, say the filmmakers, are dynamite; an early recording…

How do you top a nerve-shredding slasher that took one of the most iconic characters in horror back to his bloody roots? David Gordon Green knows what not to do. “I do not think fans would thank me if I put a scene into this movie where Michael Myers starts dancing,” laughs the Halloween Kills director, who’s spent a portion of the pandemic enjoying memes created by fans of the notorious serial killer. Particular favourites include ones applauding Myers on his responsible attitude towards public health — if this monstrous boogeyman can wear a mask, why can’t the bloke in the cereal aisle in Tesco? - and any video in which a fan has donned Michael’s mask to showcase awesome dance moves. “I love the way people on the internet…

1. IT’S HIS FIRST PROPER HORROR FILM A new Edgar Wright movie is always a big deal. Last Night In Soho perhaps more so than usual, as it sees the long-time horror fan finally pop his chiller cherry (yes, Shaun Of The Dead had zombies, but the emphasis there was very much on the romcom part of ‘romzomcom’). Don’t expect a stalk-and-slash, though. “It’s in the psychological horror vein,” explains Wright. “It gets increasingly tense as it goes along.” 2. THIS TIME IT’S PERSONAL The film follows Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie), a young girl from Cornwall who moves to London with dreams of becoming a fashion designer. The broad strokes echo Wright’s own journey, from Wells, Somerset, to the big city. “I share characteristics with Eloise,” he says. “Everybody’s got a…

NONE OF THIS happens if Jamie doesn’t wear the dress. It’s 2011, and County Durham-based teenager Jamie Campbell wants to attend his Year 11 prom in drag. If he does, the school won’t let him in — a classmate’s parent has already called in saying the idea is “disgusting”. But he goes anyway, his loving mum Margaret backing his every high-heeled step. “I’m sick of hiding,” he says in BBC Three documentary Jamie: Drag Queen At 16. “I want them to see me and know that they haven’t won.” It didn’t take long for Jamie’s modest act of defiant self-expression to become something much bigger. Fast-forward ten years, and it’s the genesis of something just as miraculous and anomalous as Jamie himself: a rare, major, mainstream LGBTQ+ movie centred around…

Jimmy McGovern has always been intrigued by prisons. “I’ve been to quite a few prisons in my life. I used to go a fair bit.” He pauses to clarify. “Although only as a visitor.” As a prolific writer of many acclaimed TV crime dramas, from Cracker to Accused, it’s been a key source of inspiration for decades; in his new BBC miniseries Time, it takes centre-stage. The three-part drama tracks two perspectives via two British acting powerhouses: a prisoner, played by Sean Bean, and a prison officer, played by Stephen Graham. Bean’s character, a school teacher, “has been sentenced to four years because he drove a car when he was pissed,” McGovern explains, “and killed a cyclist.” Graham’s character, meanwhile, is a “typical firm-but-fair prison officer. He’s a good one,…

Alamy, Getty Images. Illustration: Mike Cathro SPRING Bada bing! The Sopranos gets a big-screen prequel, featuring a young Tony in a supporting role, with The Many Saints Of Newark (12 March)… Jared Leto plays a vampire and probably guzzled blood between takes for Morbius (19 March)… Marvel up-and-comers Sam and Bucky take centre stage for The Falcon And The Winter Soldier (19 March)… Zack Snyder tries again with, well, Zack Snyder’s Justice League (March TBC)... Daniel Craig wears his final tuxedo in No Time To Die (2 April)… The big-eared beasts are back in A Quiet Place Part II (23 April)… And Kate Winslet gets gritty as a small-town Pennsylvania cop in HBO drama Mare Of Easttown (TBC). SUMMER Natasha Romanoff is dead, yet here she is in Black Widow…

SHOT IN 17 days with very little money and no stars, Paco Plaza and Jaume Balaguero’s 2007 Spanish horror Rec instantly became a classic. The story of a TV reporter (Manuela Velasco) and her crew as they get trapped in an apartment building that just happens to be home to an apparent viral outbreak that turns the infected into feral cannibals, it’s inventive, relentlessly paced, convincingly ‘real’, and one of the most effective found-footage films. Via Zoom from Madrid, Plaza takes Empire back to that cursed apartment building to tell us how to do found footage right… REC: GENESIS “We had no expectations for the film at all,” recalls Plaza, who had previously co-directed a music documentary, OT: La Película, with Balaguero in 2002. “We thought it was something to…

INDIANA JONES AND his old man; John McClane and John Jr; Peter Quill and a planet-sized Kurt Russell... the father-son action film is a fairly well-worn trope in Hollywood. Its mother-daughter variant, less so. Which is precisely what makes Gunpowder Milkshake so intriguing — and borderline radical. Told largely over one ultra-violent night, the film is the English-language debut of Israeli director Navot Papushado, whose darkly comic thriller Big Bad Wolves was hailed as 2013’s best film by no less than Quentin Tarantino. And happily, that movie’s blend of sharp humour and brutal fisticuffs is still very much in place in his follow-up. The film’s genesis lies in the director’s fascination with “the gun for hire, the samurai ronin figure”, and a desire to put that character into situations we…

DIRTY ROTTEN SCOUNDRELS — a fine film, a funny film, an inspired double-act in the form of Michael Caine and Steve Martin — it’s always a pleasure. Around half an hour in, though, for five blissful minutes, there is a self-contained package of pure joy. Steve Martin’s Prince Ruprecht is a hall-of-famer, a comic invention so perfectly realised, so wonderfully stupid, so gloriously ridiculous, it’s a thrill to behold, a guaranteed pick-me-up again and again. A pretty faithful remake of the 1964 caper Bedtime Story, starring David Niven and Marlon Brando as con artists fleecing fortunes out of a succession of women, director Frank Oz’s film goes through the same motions with the Ruprecht sequence, in which Martin’s Freddy poses as Lawrence’s (Caine) idiot brother. In order to send Lawrence’s…

AT LAST YEAR’S Sundance Film Festival, Minari won big. Korean-American director Lee Isaac Chung’s semi-autobiographical snapshot of his own childhood in the 1980s picked up both the US Dramatic Grand Jury Prize and the US Dramatic Audience Award at the festival in January. Arriving days before Parasite’s historic Oscar wins, the awards buzz for Minari was almost immediate. Most of that buzz centres on former Walking Dead star Steven Yeun, who plays Jacob, a young entrepreneurial farmer and father-of-two. When the script landed on Yeun’s desk, the 36-year-old actor knew that he had to be involved with this film — even if it would lead to his most emotionally challenging role yet. “It was a painful, difficult journey in the best of ways,” he says, speaking from Los Angeles. “I…

Charlie Gray IT’S EXTREMELY MINIMALISTIC Russian filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky has been trying to make Gunda, a non-fiction film about a pig and her piglets, for years, but struggled to have his vision understood. “It’s very difficult to achieve: a 90-minute film without words, without music, without voiceover,” he says. “All documentaries immediately put voiceover on. Excuse me! I don’t need your opinion — I need your eyes.” IT’S A HYMN TO VEGANISM The idea first came to him as a boy. “When I was four, I spent a couple of months in the countryside,” he recalls. “We took a one- month-old piglet inside the house. He became my best friend. And then he became food for my relatives.” This led him to become “the first vegetarian in the Soviet Union”.…

Alamy, Getty Images, Todd Wawrychuk/©Academy Museum Foundation, Michael Palma/ © A.M.P.A.S. SHARKS CAN’T STOP moving. And for Bruce the shark, the infamous villain of Steven Spielberg’s iconic 1975 blockbuster Jaws, that has been true for 47 years. This year, Bruce — nicknamed after Spielberg’s lawyer, Bruce Ramer — finally stops swimming, as he’ll be the star attraction of the Academy Museum Of Motion Pictures, a new building in Los Angeles dedicated to cinema history, with the 25-foot-long shark hanging in the foyer. The behind-the-scenes turmoil of Jaws is almost as famous as the film itself. “We had less than half the time [we needed] to build it,” remembers Joe Alves, the production designer who created the three original props. “We went over budget, over schedule.” Technical problems forced Spielberg to…

OUT 10 FEBRUARY (NETFLIX) CERT 15 / 118 MINS DIRECTOR Paul Greengrass CAST Tom Hanks, Helena Zengel, Elizabeth Marvel, Michael Angelo Covino PLOT 1870 Texas. Ex-infantryman Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd (Hanks) makes a living roaming Dallas telling assembled throngs the news stories of the day. Yet when he runs into orphan Johanna (Zengel), raised by the Kiowa tribe, he takes on the job of returning her to her surviving family in San Antonio. A WORD CLOUD describing filmmaker Paul Greengrass, director of the best Bourne flicks, United 93 and Captain Phillips, would surely include “intense”, “political”, “shakycam” and “immediate”. What you wouldn’t expect to find is “stately”. But for News Of The World, based on the novel by Paulette Giles, Greengrass has made his most stylistically conventional, aesthetically beautiful flick…

OUT NOW (NETFLIX) EPISODES VIEWED 10 OF 10 SHOWRUNNERS Josh Heald, Jon Hurwitz, Hayden Schlossberg CAST William Zabka, Ralph Macchio, Courtney Henggeler, Martin Kove, Xolo Maridueña, Tanner Buchanan PLOT After a fight between rival karate dojos got out of hand at the end of Season 2, Cobra Kai veteran Johnny Lawrence (Zabka) seeks redemption by helping his young mentee Miguel (Maridueña) get over a serious injury. COBRA KAI IS a small miracle. It’s an extremely belated TV sequel to and spin-off from the ‘80s Karate Kid movies, made for the now defunct YouTube Red premium service, then subsequently picked up by Netflix, where it’s become a word-of-mouth phenomenon. Its half-hour episodes are part mini-action movies, part sitcom, part high-school comedy-drama, all made in a self-consciously kitsch style as if filmed…

Grooming: Victoria Poland “THE MOVIE PLAYS like gangbusters”: I’ve always been fond of this archaic term as it relates to law agencies tasked with breaking up Mob-run establishments. The curious thing is that I tend to think of Prohibition-era task forces storming venues where the patrons inside are having a damn good time, thank you. It’s ironic in a way that a lot of the language used to describe an uproarious audience’s reaction to a film relates to other activities you cannot do easily in a pandemic: “the movie plays like a rock concert” (no live music, alas), “that movie is a total riot” (also inadvisable). It’s also bittersweet that other terms relating to wild audience responses, such as “tearing the roof off” or “bringing down the house”, have an…

“THE PRINCE CHARLES is everything an independent movie theatre should be,” Quentin Tarantino once said. And since 1991 the cinema, sitting on a side street just off London’s Leicester Square, has operated on its own terms. Ben Freedman has run and owned it since then, when his father bought it after hearing about the building during a poker game, and from the start it’s been a snobbery-free cinematic church where pretty much anything goes, from astonishing movie marathons to gloriously messy audience-participation events. Here, Freedman tells us how he’s forged a unique community. There’s a spirit that underlines how the Prince Charles communicates with the customers. Did you set out to foster that? It was the original spirit of what we did. It’s a professional informality. We want to make…

We’ve been here before - a character trapped in a time loop - from Groundhog Day to Happy Death Day. But Joe Carnahan’s contribution to the sub-subgenre promises a fresh twist on the twist. “When you meet Roy Pulver (Frank Grillo), he’s already been through this about 150 times,” the Smokin’ Aces director tells Empire. “He’s aware of what’s going to happen: a guy with a machete tries to take his head off, a girl screams… So he’s grown rather bored by proceedings. He simply goes to a Chinese restaurant and drinks Biju until they show up and kill him.” Of course, this being a movie from the guy whose 1998 debut was called Blood, Guts, Bullets And Octane, it’s not all existential ennui and heightened fatalism. “It’s probably the…

Francis Lee left his scrapyard job just one day before starting official prep on his debut feature film. He hoped he wouldn’t be returning, but the possibility was there. “I just wanted to make that film,” he says of God’s Own Country. “I didn’t think about having a career as a filmmaker. So I hadn’t fully thought through what I might do when I finished. There was always the chance that I’d be back doing a manual job.” Much has changed since that day in 2016: God’s Own Country won both awards and rave reviews and Lee has made his second film, Ammonite, starring Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan as palaeontologist Mary Anning and her younger lover, Charlotte Murchison. The film was chosen for festivals across the globe including Cannes,…

Nine films in, and the Fast & Furious gang have won over huge swathes of the world with their bananas set-pieces, insane stunts and endless chats about family. It’s a formula that creates a challenge, though, for returning director Justin Lin. In steering four instalments between Tokyo Drift and Fast & Furious 6, Lin took the series from a crime drama with fast cars to a globetrotting, world-saving action franchise. Now that he’s back after a two-film gap, he somehow has to amp up the drama and outdo his own action yet again, boldly going where no car movie has gone before. How do you keep going bigger instead of going home? “I don’t think we’re ever trying to do something just to do it,” claims Lin, speaking to Empire…

1. THERE’S A NEW ENIGMA Line Of Duty has a history of brilliant guest leads since its first series, when Lennie James’ senior cop was investigated. This time Kelly Macdonald is the protagonist, DCI Joanne Davidson. “She’s a senior investigating officer on the murder investigation team, who are conducting an inquiry into an unsolved case,” reveals writer and showrunner Jed Mercurio. “She’s a much less clear-cut character than some we’ve had in the past. She’s more enigmatic. She’s more elusive.” 2. THE CONSPIRACY DEEPENS Mercurio also assures us the new series will develop the over-arching storyline of senior-level police corruption involving balaclava men and officers known as ‘H’. “We look to the history of what’s gone before in terms of institutionalised corruption — characters who are very senior and still…

BY THE TIME HE MADE CRASH IN 1995, David Cronenberg was more than used to his films provoking reactions as visceral and extreme as any of the seamy goings-on up on the screen. His earliest films, Rabid, Shivers and The Brood, had established him as being at the forefront of what became known as ‘body horror’ (a lazy label he has been trying, with limited success, to shed for the subsequent five decades). The Fly in 1986 had harnessed his trademark extremist imagery in the cause of a commercial horror flick, but one still bearing the unmistakable interest in technology’s power to transform us. M. Butterfly (1993) had seemed to be a move away from the perverse imagery of his early films. But Crash was a thunderingly confrontational return to…

PICK OF THE MONTH SAINT MAUD OUT 1 FEBRUARY / CERT 15 / 86 MINS DVD BR One of the most bold and combustible horror debuts of recent years, Saint Maud is a film worth shuffling out of your comfort zone for. Morfydd Clark (ethereal and excellent) plays Maud, a devoutly religious palliative care nurse who is assigned to the home of terminally ill dancer Amanda (Jennifer Ehle). Though the pair’s initial bond appears charged with unspoken desire and trust, things turn toxic, and Maud’s faith takes an increasingly violent and demanding form. Writer-director Rose Glass uses her shocks sparingly throughout this taut and visceral character study, but when they land, they do so with skin-crawling impact. Moving through the gorgeously captured, gothic seaside setting, Clark’s devoted performance evokes sympathy…

ACROSS 7 Could be Scissorhands or G. Robinson (6) 8 Franchise that began with Eleven (6) 9 David Fincher’s film about screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz (4) 10 Jimmy Smits starred in this film about Mexicans who emigrated to LA (2,6) 11 This rock wild man appeared as Belvedere Rickettes in Cry-Baby (4,3) 13 Kenneth who directed Scorpio Rising (5) 15 Peter O’Toole and Vanessa Redgrave appeared in this British comedy drama (5) 17 This 1965 John Schlesinger film received five Oscar nominations (7) 20 Steve McQueen’s film about a London eaterie (8) 21 Marvel character first played by Tom Hiddleston in Thor (4) 22 Film based on a Guy de Maupassant novel (3,3) 23 The Fifth — (Benedict Cumberbatch) (6) DOWN 1 Canadian singer who appeared in Salmonberries (1, 1,…

Zodiac JOE CARNAHAN: “Zodiac is a brilliant film. I grew up in Northern California, and I wanted that story. But I look at that movie — there was no fucking way I could have ever made it as brilliant as [David] Fincher made it. The scene with Charles Fleischer, and the movie poster, at the end, where he [Jake Gyllenhaal] goes down to the guy’s cellar — so fuckin’ simple. It never relies on jump scares. To have that level of confidence in yourself as a filmmaker, I just think is remarkable.” INT. BOB VAUGHN’S HOUSE — NIGHT Robert Graysmith’s (Jake Gyllenhaal) obsession with unveiling the Zodiac Killer has led him to the home of Bob Vaughn (Charles Fleischer), an organist at the Avenue movie theatre, to ask about Rick…