Tabla de contenidos para Summer 2021 en Empire

PIXAR FAMOUSLY LOVES its Easter eggs, loading every one of its films with hidden references to previous films for fans to discover. But there is one Easter egg in the studio’s next film, the Italian Riviera-set Luca, that’s just for its director, Enrico Casarosa. “My greatgrandfather was an opera singer,” says Casarosa. “He was with [legendary Italian tenor] Enrico Caruso when they travelled to the United States. So I’m like, ‘We’re gonna put a little sign in the film with his name on.’” The sign is so hidden in the film that even the director isn’t sure where to find it — it really is just for him. “I honestly don’t know where it ended up. But it’s really fun to put these little Easter eggs in and bring something…

IT’S AN UNUSUAL THRILLER The genesis of I Blame Society, a mockumentary about a murderous filmmaker, came when Gillian Wallace Horvat received an odd compliment. “I went to a bar with a couple of friends,” Horvat says. “They told me I would make a good murderer. I took it as a compliment.” A version of that conversation is recreated in the film, setting Horvat — who also stars in the movie, as a twisted version of herself — on a murderous path. IT BLURS REALITY AND FICTION Horvat made the film in documentary vérité style. “A lot of things… draw on my real life,” she says. “We’re definitely playing with a Herzogian sense of hybrid documentary and fiction, blurring the lines to make it more disturbing.” Horvat’s real-life mother and…

PICTURE THE SCENE: a warm summer’s evening, a sky glowing soft hues of pink and orange, a boat trip out on a tranquil lake in which you’re allowed to be sat less than two metres away from a significant other. It’s bliss: a distant dream, the sort that’s been literally illegal for over a year as the pandemic rages on. But it’s also an idyll just about within reach in a different form, by simply pressing play on one of the last decade’s finest Disney movies, and one of our greatest comfort movies full stop: Rapunzel spin-off Tangled. The princess Rapunzel, on a mission to see an annual display of lanterns that fills the sky on her birthday every year (sent out, unbeknownst to her, by the King and Queen…

★★★ OUT 21 MAY CERT TBC / 101 MINS DIRECTOR Philippe Falardeau CAST Margaret Qualley, Sigourney Weaver, Douglas Booth PLOT New York City, 1995. College student Joanna (Qualley) gets a job at a prestigious literary agency, headed by the stern Margaret (Weaver). When the agency’s most famous writer, The Catcher In The Rye author J.D. Salinger, decides to publish a new book, Joanna must navigate both the professional and personal challenges that ensue. “NEW YORK!” SWOONS Margaret Qualley’s Joanna during My New York Year’s prologue. “Isn’t that what aspiring writers did? Live in cheap apartments and write in cafés?” Then she offers a little apologetic sigh. “I know.” Joanna, inevitably, goes on to live in a cheap apartment (one without a sink) and write in cafés; writerdirector Philippe Falardeau’s script,…

★★★★ OUT 28 MAY CERT TBC / 122 MINS DIRECTOR Kelly Reichardt CAST John Magaro, Orion Lee, Toby Jones PLOT 19th-century Oregon. Travelling west with a band of fur-trappers, talented chef Cookie (Magaro) forms a fast friendship with on-the-run immigrant King-Lu (Lee). Years later the pair cook up a moneymaking scheme involving Cookie’s skillset, a wealthy landowner (Jones) and the region’s only cow. KELLY REICHARDT’S FIRST Cow is the latest in the director’s increasingly long line of mini-marvels. From Old Joy to Wendy And Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff and Night Moves, the writer-director has carved a distinct niche, exploring ideas around the nature of friendship, the struggles of rural people to make ends meet and our co-dependent relationship with nature. Co-written with long-time collaborator Jonathan Raymond, First Cow doesn’t particularly stake…

★★★★ OUT 4 JUNE CERT 12A / 89 MINS DIRECTOR Aleem Khan CAST Joanna Scanlan, Nathalie Richard, Talid Ariss PLOT Mary (Scanlan), a British Muslim convert, is devastated over the loss of her husband Ahmed (Nasser Memarzia). Sorting out his personal effects, she discovers he was leading another life over the channel in Calais. Still numb, she heads to France to learn the truth. IN OUTLINE, AFTER Love has all the hallmarks of a potential Channel 5 soap: mixed marriages, withholding secrets, shocking revelations and a death in the first five minutes. But in débutant writer-director Aleem Khan’s hands, it’s a sensitive — sometimes subtle, sometimes not — look into bereavement, private lives and cultural divides, all brought to life by a stunning performance by Joanna Scanlan working at the…

★★★★★ OUT 14 MAY (AMAZON PRIME VIDEO) EPISODES VIEWED 10 OF 10 DIRECTOR Barry Jenkins CAST Thuso Mbedu, Chase W. Dillon, Aaron Pierre, Joel Edgerton PLOT In an alternate 19th-century Southeastern United States, slaves Cora (Mbedu) and Caesar (Pierre) escape captivity via the Underground Railroad, a secret railway and series of safehouses, relentlessly pursued by infamous slave-catcher Ridgeway (Edgerton). AFTER HIS WORK on If Beale Street Could Talk, Barry Jenkins travels further back in time with The Underground Railroad. As much of American history will attest to, violence carried out against Black people is circular. Everything repeats, changes, repeats again. Based on the book by Colson Whitehead, this ten-part Amazon Studio series is constructed to embody that very fact. It studies the recurrence throughout, via different genre conventions and a…

ON A BRIGHT, CRISP NORWEGIAN DAY LAST SEPTEMBER, TOM CRUISE WALHED ONTO THE SET OF MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 7, READY FOR THE FIRST DAY OF FILMING. THEN HE GOT ONTO A MOTORBIKE, REVVED THE ENGINE, TWISTED THE THROTTLE, ACCELERATED ALONG A LONG RAMP. AND DROVE STRAIGHT OFF A CLIFF. At the exact moment he did so, as gravity tugged at him and tried to turn him into Tom Cruise pizza on the rocks of the Helsetkopen mountain a few hundred feet below, a million things raced through his mind. There was all the technical stuff, of course, that he needed to do to avoid that grisly fate. Things he had been in training for months to turn into muscle memory, so that the single-most dangerous stunt of a career filled with…

BACK IN THE summer of 2019, two major movie musicals battled for turf on the streets of New York. In the upper Manhattan neighbourhood of Washington Heights, director Jon M. Chu was bringing his adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s pre-Hamilton musical, In The Heights, to dazzling life. A few minutes further north, in Little Dominican Republic, Steven Spielberg was finally achieving his dream of making a new West Side Story. If it wasn’t quite Sharks versus Jets, the two productions occasionally clashed in the middle. “At one point, they were so close to us that their catering truck was in our shot,” Chu recalls. “We had to be like, ‘Yo, Spielberg! Move that truck!’” Thankfully, no scraps — dance-fights or otherwise — broke out. “We just snapped around each other like…

THE WORDS ‘PART II’ in a movie title don’t always mean that the sequel will pick up right where the first film left off, but it’s often a pretty good indicator. Think Doc and Marty flying off to the future, or the immediate aftermath of Daniel LaRusso’s crane kick. And, with A Quiet Place Part II, writer-director John Krasinski continues that proud tradition. Rather than skipping ahead in time after the embattled Abbott family found a way to fight back against the big-eared alien critters besieging their farm (and Earth), Krasinski picks up the action just a few minutes after the iconic Emily Blunt shotgun pump that closed the first movie. Which presented something of a problem for Millicent Simmonds and Noah Jupe, the actors who play Blunt’s oldest children.…

Why did you do the film? My mate Phil [Barantini] asked me to do a short set in a kitchen because he wanted to direct and wanted to get an agent. He had this DoP with a mad idea to do it one shot. He said he wanted five days, I said I’d give him three. How did it go? We made it with one take. Not like 1917, but one real, complete take. It got a lot of really good recognition and Phil got an agent. People loved it and said to us, “Can you do a feature?” It was one of the most exhilarating, nervewracking, lovely acting moments I’ve ever had. Describe your character, Andy. He thinks he’s a functioning addict and this is the day where everything…

Justin Chon has worn many hats. The Korean-American multi-hyphenate cut his teeth as an actor, broke through as a Twilight heartthrob, dabbled in YouTube and K-pop parodies — and has since made a name for himself as a filmmaker, with acclaimed indie work like the 2017 Sundance hit Gook. His new film as writer, director and actor, Blue Bayou, promises another searing take on the immigrant experience. “It’s about a Korean-American adoptee that’s facing deportation,” explains Chon, who plays the adoptee himself. (Alicia Vikander plays his wife.) “It’s kind of like this cyclical thing — because of deportation, he’s thinking about having to leave his stepdaughter. He’s doing the same thing. It’s this vicious cycle.” The script, Chon says, is fictional, but its story is plucked straight from the headlines.…

THESE DAYS, MULTIVERSES are all the rage. Marvel has begun to explore the concept. DC is about to double down on it with The Flash. And now Warner Bros. is set to smash together its own universes with Space Jam: A New Legacy. The 1996 original, now a cult classic, combined the world of the Looney Tunes with NBA basketball. With confirmed appearances from many characters in WB franchises — including The Matrix, Harry Potter, Game Of Thrones and more — its unlikely sequel is aiming for something more ambitious. “WB have a huge library,” says director Malcolm D. Lee, who is deep in post-production on the Ryan Coogler-produced movie. “It’s a great way to bring in modern technology with our characters and our villain, and it allows our Looney…

BY THE TIME No Time To Die debuts in cinemas, there’s a small chance that the title might have been changed to ‘About Bloody Time’. Because it will have been almost two years since the 25th Bond film was scheduled to make its bow. One consequence of that delay has been to extend Daniel Craig’s record as the longest-serving Bond. And over the course of 15 years, we’ve seen Craig’s 007 go from scrappy young pup to crotchety veteran spy. That’s a theme very much at play in No Time To Die, where director Cary Fukunaga has surrounded Craig with new blood, including Lashana Lynch, Ana de Armas and Rami Malek as the youngest Bond villain in yonks. “Bond’s quite old,” chuckles Craig. “You’re tiptoeing around it, and you’re trying…

As its title might suggest, the long-awaited Top Gun sequel will deliver its fair share of Tom Cruise and his cool-call-signed hero, Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell. But as with the first movie, which gave us a vibrant variety of supporting characters, with ridiculous names like Iceman, Goose, Slider and Merlin, so too will Joseph Kosinski’s long-anticipated sequel introduce a new generation of Top Gun pilots. The world may have changed a lot since 1986 — this group of young guns’ egos are attempting contactless payments their bodies can’t authorise — but some things remain the same. Just as Top Gun was largely a competition movie, this follow-up sees the likes of Miles Teller’s Rooster and Monica Barbaro’s Phoenix all jostling to be top of the class taught by Mitchell. “We were…

FOR A MAN who made films about zombies, George A. Romero sure had his finger on the pulse. In 1968, with Vietnam casting a huge shadow across America and the civil rights movement making huge strides, he made his debut film, Night Of The Living Dead, in which relentless waves of flesh-eating ghouls came back to life and tore entire families apart; and which ended with the sole survivor, a resourceful and compassionate Black man, having his brains blown out by a group of rednecks. It was a film that tore bloody chunks out of the American Dream. Romero knew that he wanted his horror films to slap you around the chops and get their hooks into your head. A decade after the remarkable if rough Night, during which time…

Will cinemas now show a different mix of fims? The industry had survived on a diet of major studio content: no-one ever expected that supply of films to be turned off. What we will see going forward is a desire on the part of cinemas to show a broader range of content because they will need to sustain an audience which last year [flocked] to films like Saint Maud. Some of those smaller titles, which would’ve struggled to get onto screens, will get space in the cinema. How is the release calendar looking? From July onwards, we have almost an embarrassment of riches when it comes to potential film content, and it may be that some of the smaller venues are waiting for when they have a broader choice of…

WHAT DOES A Ben Wheatley blockbuster look like? Soon, it seems, we’ll finally find out. After a career of keeping it low-budget and uncompromisingly indie, the Brighton-based auteur behind Sightseers and High-Rise is finally taking the plunge into the shark-infested waters of studio filmmaking, with the sequel to Jon Turteltaub’s 2018 tongue-in-jaws actioner, The Meg. As it’s clearly too early to answer the aforementioned “what?”, let’s focus for now on the “why?” “Um, well, I really like The Meg!” Wheatley tells Empire. “When I talk to people about it their eyes light up. They go, ‘Oh, The Meg! Brilliant!’ The script’s really good, and it’s an opportunity to do massive, massive crowdpleasing action. And work with Statham. It’s a double threat, basically.” Wheatley confirms it’s an adaptation of Steve Alten’s…

ONE DOES NOT simply belt out a tune to encapsulate an icon like Aretha Franklin. The latest edition of anthology series Genius sees Cynthia Erivo take on the legendary soul singer in an eight-part series; spanning nearly 50 years of the late singer’s life, Erivo had her work cut out. THE VOICE The British star spent hours listening to interviews and musical recordings from various eras to fine-tune both the singing and speaking voice she would use for each scene. “If you watch an interview from the late ’60s, she’s a little shy, then you look at an interview from the ’80s and she knows that she owns the room,” Erivo says. “Her music would change as she got to know who she wanted to be, which meant there were…

IF YOU’RE FAMILIAR with the boundlessly energised Ilana Glazer from pioneering stoner-girl comedy Broad City, the opening scene of False Positive will come as a shock. The pregnancy horror — Glazer’s first film screenplay credit and her first leading feature role — begins with the comedian sprayed with blood, her signature bouncy curls ironed straight, her animated features replaced with a vacant, traumatised stare. “It was such a painful shoot,” the 34-year-old tells Empire. In the film she plays Lucy (short for Lucia), whose infertility leads her and husband Adrian (Justin Theroux) into the hands of shady IVF miracle-worker Dr Hindle (Pierce Brosnan). It was not a character Glazer enjoyed playing. “Even for how short [the shoot] was, it felt so long,” she says. (Filming took just 21 days.) “I…

ON WHY THEY KEEP WORKING TOGETHER… MIKKELSEN: “There’s no-one like him; what he’s doing is very unique. He’s very poetic, he wants to tell stories about the big things — life, death, religion, Satan, God — all the questions that we ask ourselves in our early teenage years and keep asking ourselves until we die. He wants to twist and turn them up in the air [and] wrap them up in insanity. I love his universe, which is almost like a fairy tale [combined] with his very down-to-earth, pragmatic way of looking at life. I think it’s a beautiful, poetic combination.” JENSEN: “He’s the ultimate actor. He’s perfect: he was born to be an actor. He has such a sharp eye for sensing people’s comedy, for sensing people’s thoughts. We…

★★★★★ OUT NOW (NETFLIX) CERT PG / 114 MINS DIRECTORS Michael Rianda, Jeff Rowe CAST (VOICES) Abbi Jacobson, Danny McBride, Maya Rudolph, Olivia Colman PLOT As Katie Mitchell (Jacobson) prepares to leave home for film school, her dad (McBride) realises how much they’ve grown apart. So he turns her journey into a family trip — which is hit by a robot apocalypse, leaving them the last family on Earth. WHEN PIXAR LAUNCHED Toy Story on the world, Disney suddenly looked like dinosaurs in comparison — not just because of those 3D graphics, but the creative storytelling smarts that came with them. It took over two decades for any other major mainstream animated movie to feel quite so revolutionary, but Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse — from powerhouse production duo Phil Lord…

★★★ OUT NOW (AMAZON PRIME VIDEO) CERT TBC / 110 MINS DIRECTOR Stefano Sollima CAST Michael B. Jordan, Jamie Bell, Jodie Turner-Smith, Lauren London PLOT After a Navy-SEAL incursion into Syria to rescue a kidnapped spy goes south, Senior Chief John Clark (Jordan) returns to the US to be with his pregnant wife (London). Then things go south again, and Clark resolves to find out who’s targeting him, and why, even if it costs him everything. JACK RYAN, THE sunny-natured boy scout of the CIA, has had so much screentime that he’s been played by five actors. Now, finally, his Tom Clancy counterpart John Clark — the real shadow recruit — gets his own starring vehicle, after lurking on the fringes of Ryan’s movies and TV show for the past…

★★★ OUT 17 MAY (SKY ATLANTIC/ NOW) EPISODES VIEWED 4 OF 6 SHOWRUNNERS Philippa Goslett, Joss Whedon CAST Laura Donnelly, Ann Skelly, Ben Chaplin PLOT After a strange event in 1896, a minority of mostly women find themselves “touched” with strange and sometimes dangerous powers. Amalia True (Laura Donnelly) is their leader, and fights to protect all the ‘Touched’ girls she can find — but strangers are seeking the girls for their own ends, and the Establishment is uneasy... HBO WON A frenzied bidding war to make The Nevers, and it’s easy to see why everyone wanted it. The premise — a female-skewing, Victorian X-Men from the creator of Buffy The Vampire Slayer — is rich in possibility for visual dazzle and a fresh take on an era where men’s…

ONE DAY WE WERE IN PREP ON MISSION 7, and the next we were not. After we shut down, the crew went into what I can only describe as Covid Shock, as it started to sink in that we were in some sort of futureless world. But we tend to take on the attitude that there are no setbacks. There are only creative opportunities. And Tom said, “What we’re gonna do now is create the future. That’s what we have to focus on.” He could see very early on, as he’s often able to do, what the long-term effects were going to be, not just for our film, but for the industry. Tom has been doing this for a very, long time. And he knows intimately how the machine works.…

Is the cash-truck world an itch you’ve wanted to scratch? It’s more about making a drama-revenge-action-thriller. It’s exciting for me to have a crack at a genre I’ve never had a crack at before. It’s not like I have a lob-on particularly for cash trucks. But once you start digging into it, it’s an interesting world. There’s a lot of dough on these cash trucks. Was it always going to be set in America? Actually no, it was gonna be English, but it was too small a world, because the guns had to come out. Cash trucks in the UK, you don’t have guns. So that was always going to be a stumbling block. Quite late in the day I shifted it from the UK to LA. You’d been wanting…

Edgar Wright’s latest movie is about someone coming to London from a small, picturesque English town, and tangling with the capital’s dark, disturbing underbelly. In some ways, you could call it an inverse Hot Fuzz, but there any comparisons to Wright’s previous movies end. Last Night In Soho is not an irreverent, fast-paced, gag-a-minute comedy. Instead, it promises to be an unsettling, unpredictable psychological horror in which anything goes. “It’s genuinely something I’ve never seen before,” says the film’s star, Thomasin McKenzie. “Very unique. I love things where you’re reading a script, and you know where it’s going, and then it just goes in a completely different direction.” That script, co-written by Wright and 917’s Krysty Wilson-Cairns, centres around McKenzie’s Eloise (Ellie to her friends), a young fashion student who…

S atirical website The Onion ran a video in 2011 purporting to interview the screenwriter of Fast & Furious 5 — a five-year-old boy. “I want the cars to drive fast and then some of them explode,” the little tyke explains of his process, a toy car gripped in each fist. Then he talks over a clip: “The car went out the train, then there’s a hole in the train, and then the car blew up the box, and the policemen went after them, and then the box hit the car and the car crashed into the ocean.” He concludes by promising 600 sequels. We haven’t had 600 yet, but with the ninth Fast & Furious film incoming, the series has never felt more like kids’ playtime writ large. And…

In The Earth marks a return to the pastoral mayhem of Sightseers and A Field In England. What is it about the British countryside that brings out your horrific tendencies? I think it’s more a relationship with being British, generally. It’s something I’ve been exploring since Down Terrace — the weird, blood-soaked nature of our little island that we live on. Here you’ve captured a particular moment: Britain during Covid. Was that important? It goes back to films like Shock Corridor, which were ripped from the headlines. If you’re nimble enough, you can make stuff that’s actually about the moment, and I think that’s exciting. Usually cinema moves slowly — especially now. I’ve been watching movies during the pandemic and just thinking they’re period pieces now. “What’s that? A massive…

Director Ilya Naishuller has seen his film Nobody with a cinema audience four times in his native Russia, and it felt like the film’s natural habitat. “The energy was real,” he remembers. “There was a good kind of laughing. There’s a couple of moments people might turn their eyes away, but it’s surrounded by so much gleefulness and excitement.” This latest geriactioner, starring 58-year-old Bob Odenkirk as an ordinary Joe whose unguessed-at history of violence breaks loose after a home invasion, may have bruised knuckles, split lips and feature a bit of impromptu surgery that will cause audiences to wince, but its director never wanted it to be mean. “I love violence in movies,” he explains. “Hate it in real life. But I also want people to enjoy themselves. I…

You’re returning as Sonia, the wife of a hitman played by Samuel L. Jackson. How much do you relate to her? I worked closely with Patrick [Hughes, the director] to develop the role. I was like, “If we’re going to have a female role, let’s bring some stuff that girls are into and not just be badass.” She’s romantic, she wants a family and kids, and I can relate to that. She’s in denial about ageing! I’m very well aware of my age, don’t worry. She is badass, though. Did you get to do any stunts? Oh yeah, all of them. I’m very proud of that. Okay, I didn’t jump off the boat or off the cliff — there’s a couple I didn’t do — but most, yes. I’m 54…

Raya And The Last Dragon EXPANDING UPON DISNEY’S recent penchant for headstrong heroines in rich, complex fantasy worlds, Raya And The Last Dragon takes the Frozen and Moana template and swaps singalongs for smackdowns, in an action-packed animated adventure inspired by Southeast Asian cultures. Directors Don Hall and Carlos López Estrada discuss its bruising brawls, dragon dramas, and central message of hope and unity. ONCE UPON A TIME… In its opening minutes, Raya establishes the history of fictional kingdom Kumandra — ravaged by evil spirits the Druun, who petrify its mythical dragons and drive apart the human population into five warring tribes: Heart, Fang, Spine, Talon and Tail. It’s a gorgeously rendered sequence taking visual inspiration from Southeast Asian shadow-puppetry. “The prologue changed quite a bit,” Estrada reveals. “Any time…

Chris: We’re taking advantage of the perfect storm of the release of Zack Snyder’s Justice League, and a gap between that and the onslaught of DC movies due over the next 18 months, to assess the DC Extended Universe. All 11 films released with the DC Films banner since Man Of Steel in 2013. It’s been a rocky road to this point, but there have been signs over the last few movies that this is finally beginning to lock in its own identity and is separate from what’s happening over there at Marvel. Helen: I don’t necessarily think that’s what they’ve done. I don’t think this is a cohesive universe. They’re not even trying to do that anymore. They moved away from the, for want of a better word, Snyderverse…

LET’S START WITH the bad news. If you want to - when the pandemic is over and we can flit fearlessly around the world again, of course - recreate the moment in Big when Tom Hanks’ Josh (a 12-year-old trapped in a 30-year-old’s body) and Robert Loggia’s toy company owner Mac (a fiftysomething trapped in a fiftysomething’s body) perform a joyous duet on a giant piano on the floor of Manhattan toy store FAO Schwarz, you can’t. Well, not exactly. Because the Fifth Avenue branch of the famous toy shop, where director Penny Marshall shot the scene with Hanks, Loggia and a group of Schwarz employees as extras, closed its doors for the last time in 2015. There’s a new branch of FAO Schwarz in New York at Rockefeller Plaza,…

INT. DREXL’S CLUB – NIGHT Marty (Paul Bates) leads Clarence (Christian Slater) into a neon-lit room. Drexl (Gary Oldman) is sitting down next to a giant lamp. Food is on the table. Clarence stands next to a TV, on which a film is playing. Marty whispers to Drexl. MARTY: He was askin’ about Alabama. DREXL: Where the fuck is that bitch? CLARENCE: She’s with me. DREXL: Who the fuck are you? CLARENCE: I’m her husband. DREXL: [laughing] Well, that makes us practically related. Have a seat, boy. You have yourself an egg roll. We got everything here from a diddle-eyed Joe to a damned-if-I-know. CLARENCE: No, thanks. DREXL: “No, thanks”? What that mean? Hmm? I think you’re too scared to be eating. Drexl clicks his fingers. He sits forward, grabs…

THIS MONTH’S FILM MOMENTS THAT MATTER THE REX, BERKHAMSTED When James Hannaway, owner of The Rex cinema, walks around town, there’s only one question people have for him: when will the cinema reopen again? “I get stopped a lot,” he says. “People [tell] me how much they’re looking forward to coming back. We can’t wait to open our doors again.” On 17 May, it’ll finally be back. It’s no wonder cinemagoers want to return. Walking through The Rex’s impressive lobby doors, you’re transported back to the Golden Age of Hollywood with its sweeping balcony, cabaret-style, Art Deco proscenium and grandiloquent red-and-gold colour scheme. “It takes you right back to the splendour of the cinema when it first opened [in 1938]” Hannaway says. The cinema had just enough savings to get…

IT HAD EVERYTHING going for it — a great cast, a huge budget and immensely likeable characters — but The Falcon And The Winter Soldier had an unusually rocky time of it, thanks to reported chopping and changing in the last year. It was still entertaining; stars Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan saw to that. But what went wrong? 1 IT CAME AFTER THE RADICAL WANDAVISION It’s not the show’s fault that it followed the genuinely innovative WandaVision, but it created an unflattering comparison to what turned out to be a relatively standard thriller: find the bad guys, stop them despite opposition from your own side. Perhaps we’re spoiled — okay, we definitely are — but is it too much to ask for daring storytelling each time? 2 SAM AND…

THE INTERNET ALMOST went into complete meltdown. And it was all down to a hand-written treatment on the Instagram account of Sylvester Stallone. “This may be the strangest posting yet,” began the caption to his 12.9 million followers. “I started out this morning by writing a treatment for a Rocky prequel.” Stallone later confirmed to Variety that he was in discussions about the show, which would consist of multiple ten-episode seasons. As ever: Rocky Balboa just wants to go the distance. Here’s what the show could explore. A WAYWARD TEENAGER Stallone suggested Robert ‘Rocky’ Balboa would be 17 years old in a prequel. “When we first met Rocky, he was a very lost soul,” he shared. “We now see this young man struggling like all young people trying to find…

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN an underrepresented voice isn’t just given a trophy, but a platform? As history-maker after history-maker rose to the podium in a chaotic yet groundbreaking night for the Academy Awards, the results were more significant than they were perhaps given credit for. Daniel Kaluuya made headlines for praising his parent’s bedroom antics in his acceptance speech, but he also made history; speaking as the first Black Briton to win an acting Oscar, the actor thanked everyone “from London town to Kampala”. Chloe Zhao, the first woman of colour to win Best Director, used her platform to share memories from growing up in China. The message was clear: if we can do this, so can you. “I can picture Black trans women standing up here, and Asian sisters and…

WHEN THE OFFER of rebooting Paranormal Activity — the low-budget horror franchise that came to define the found-footage era — was first put to filmmaker Christopher Landon, he had a definitive answer. “My knee-jerk reaction,” Landon says, “was, ‘Oh God, no.’” Landon co-wrote the second film in the series, wrote the third and fourth, and wrote and directed the fifth, before making a name for himself directing Blumhouse hits such as Happy Death Day and this year’s much-delayed Freaky. When executives at Paramount proposed a new Activity of a Paranormal nature, however, he initially baulked. “I felt like everybody was burned out,” he says. “What are we going to do? I don’t want to say I was dismissive of it, but I just felt like I was probably going to…

HISTORY, ARGUES DIRECTOR Lynsey Miller, is not the same as historical fiction; even first-hand accounts can be open to interpretation. “When you start to delve into any period of history,” Miller says, “you quickly realise how malleable it is. As a storyteller, you have to decide what’s important to the story you want to tell.” That was the philosophy that Miller, along with newcomer screenwriter Eve Hedderwick Turner, took to their new period drama Anne Boleyn, a retelling of the story of Henry VIII’s tragic second wife with a fresh, feminist lens. When casting the lead role, Miller and her team looked for someone “who could embody the essence of the characters, rather than be bound by any physical preconceptions,” eventually deciding that Jodie Turner-Smith — the Black British actor…

Hi Aubrey. Are you filming right now? Wait — I have to get a Covid test, like literally right now. I’m being told I have to do it right this second. Can I call you in two minutes? No problem. [Two minutes later] Hi, I’m sorry. Do you get immediate results? No, but I have to do it every three days. I guess I’ll only hear if there’s a problem. Otherwise I don’t hear shit. I just [ditzy voice] do what they tell me to dooo. And try not to get into trouble. We saw online that you’ve been rocking a few tie-dye face masks. Tie-dye, yeah. I was doing that in LA. But now on set I’ve graduated to the N95. Maybe I’ll throw a tie-dye on the top…

IF YOU LOVED… LINE OF DUTY: SERIES 6 BETWEEN THE LINES (BBC iPLAYER) BBC Four smartly started re-airing this classic police corruption drama from the early ’90s as Line Of Duty Series 6 was in full flow on BBC One. Also made by World Productions, it’s the spiritual godfather of Jed Mercurio’s show, centred on the AC-12-style fictional Complaints Investigation Bureau, to which Neil Pearson’s suave DS Tony Clark is reluctantly assigned. Created by J.C. Wilsher, the show lasted for three series and 35 episodes, during which it grappled with themes including racism, exploitation and sexual harassment. Way ahead of its time. CRITICAL (SKY ON DEMAND/NOW) Line Of Duty creator Jed Mercurio, a former doctor, made his TV name with his raw, often brutally graphic medical series Cardiac Arrest in…

★★★★★ EXCELLENT ★★★★ GOOD ★★★ OKAY ★★ POOR ★ AWFUL ★★★★ OUT 21 MAY CERT 15 / 87 MINS DIRECTOR Billie Piper CAST Billie Piper, Leo Bill, Kerry Fox, Toby Woolf, David Thewlis, Lily James PLOT Single mother Mandy (Piper) is a millennial woman in crisis. She’s fallen in love — or at least, into a relationship of sorts — with colleague and kinda-misogynist Pete (Bill); she works for a toxic company; her parents (Fox, Thewlis) have separated and her son (Woolf) has behavioural issues. Will, can, feminism help her through it all? MANDY (BILLIE PIPER) and Pete (Leo Bill) are in a restaurant on a date; they spit venom across the white tablecloth. Pete finds “women in the main, intolerable”, complains that these days they want “less intimacy, more…

★★★★ OUT NOW (CHANNEL 4/ALL 4) EPISODES VIEWED 11 OF 11 SHOWRUNNER Noah Hawley CAST Chris Rock, Jessie Buckley, Jason Schwartzman, Ben Whishaw PLOT The 1950s. Kansas City crime bosses Josto Fadda (Schwartzman) and Loy Cannon (Rock) look set for gang warfare, nurse Oraetta Mayflower (Buckley) goes on a killing spree, and lawmen Dick Wickware (Timothy Olyphant) and Odis Weff (Jack Huston) chase two escaped cons. WELCOME BACK, FARGO. Three years after Season 3, Noah Hawley’s fourth amplification of the 1996 Coen Brothers classic sings with the eccentric ne’er-do-wells, stylised dialogue, twisty-turny narratives, hyped-up filmmaking and callbacks to both previous series and the CCU (Coens Cinematic Universe). It has so many characters and through-lines, you need an incident room to keep track, but it’s a rich tapestry of crime lore…

★★★ OUT NOW (DISNEY +) EPISODES VIEWED 2 OF TBC SHOWRUNNER Dave Filoni CAST (VOICES) Dee Bradley Baker, Stephen Stanton, Andrew Kishino PLOT A long time, in a galaxy far, far away, a crack team of five genetically modified commando clones known as the Bad Batch witness the execution of Order 66, which wipes out the Jedis, and ends the Clone Wars. The team’s rebellious spirit puts them at odds with their fellow clones — and the newly formed Galactic Empire. STAR WARS: THE Clone Wars, the animated series that filled in the gaps between Attack Of The Clones and Revenge Of The Sith, was not perfect; after 133 episodes, you’re going to get some crude matter in amongst the luminous beings. But at its best, Dave Filoni’s series had…

★★★ OUT NOW (NETFLIX) EPISODES VIEWED 8 OF 8 SHOWRUNNER Eric Heisserer CAST Jessie Mei Li, Archie Renaux, Ben Barnes, Freddy Carter, Zoë Wanamaker, Luke Pasqualino PLOT The kingdom of Ravka is divided into East and West — in the middle lies the Shadow Fold, a magical, enveloping darkness full of beasts. On a trip into the Fold, orphaned cartographer Alina Starkov (Li) indicates she might be the fabled ‘Sun Summoner’ who could banish the darkness once and for all. EVER SINCE GAME Of Thrones set the high watermark for televisual fantasy, the search for the successor to its Iron Throne has been on. Shadow And Bone, based on Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse novels, isn’t as bold or shocking as George R.R. Martin’s uncompromising epic, but the impact of Westeros is…

CONFESSION: BACK IN 2019, EMPIRE MAY have accidentally jinxed the third Jurassic World film. Speaking to Colin Trevorrow, its director, we pointed that the last time Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum were all in a Jurassic film together, a hurricane destroyed the set. Then we asked, “Are you worried?” He replied, “Well, now I am. Thanks, Empire.” Sure enough, just like Mission: Impossible 7, Jurassic World: Dominion was disrupted by another, far worse natural disaster: Covid-19. And in March 2020, Trevorrow, along with producers Patrick Crowley and Frank Marshall and executive producer Alexandra Derbyshire, had to scramble to regroup. It ended up becoming the first major Hollywood movie to resume filming, helping to set safety protocols that others would follow. Here, Trevorrow looks back at pulling off a…

In any other year, Freaky would have been the ultimate Halloween scream — a bloody (and bloody funny) genre mash-up from horror’s new king of high-concept, Christopher Landon, following his time-twisting Groundhog Day and Back To The Future Part II riffs in Happy Death Day and Happy Death Day 2U. But while 2020 had other plans, all these months later it’s set to be the gore-strewn, laugh-filled release we all need post-lockdown. “It’s a comedy, it’s a slasher movie, and there’s a little bit of drama in there,” says Landon. “The Happy Death Day movies definitely helped me find that tone.” This time, Landon and co-writer Michael Kennedy have smashed Freaky Friday body-swap antics into Friday The 13th murder sprees, with Kathryn Newton’s unassuming high-schooler Millie swapping corporeal forms with…

“IT’S FUNNY BECAUSE it feels like the film is about people getting back together,” says director Cate Shortland of Black Widow. “None of us knew that we were all going to be estranged and isolated. At this time when people have been apart, I think it’ll resonate.” Shortland’s Marvel film was one of the first big releases hit by Covid, and it’s since been rescheduled many times. Instead of being the opening salvo in the studio’s Phase Four, it will now follow WandaVision, The Falcon And The Winter Soldier and Loki to the screen. But the movie itself hasn’t changed to accommodate that reshuffle. “We finished the film a year ago or something, and we haven’t touched it,” says Shortland. She won’t comment on whether certain mysterious figures in any…

ANOTHER ROUND — THOMAS Vinterberg’s riotous, tender, funny, profound character study of four middle-aged schoolteachers tackling midlife crises with buckets of alcohol — is not autobiographical. It’s not based on his life at all. But his life has impacted it so much. “At the beginning, it was a provocative movie,” says the director behind 1998’s scorching Dogme drama Festen and 2012’s child-abuse thriller The Hunt. “It was solely a celebration of alcohol. But that movie would have belonged in my twenties. It felt wrong. And also, I felt an obligation to all the people who’ve died from alcohol, and all the families who have been destroyed by it.” Vinterberg has changed over the past two decades — who hasn’t? And his maturity shows. In Another Round the four men, with…

It was while shooting Channel 4’s 2013 series Southcliffe in the UK that Canadian-born director Sean Durkin was inspired to pen The Nest, an intense, 1980s-set drama about a British entrepreneur who uproots his American family from upstate New York to the English countryside, things soon taking a sinister turn. “It was the first time I’d been back to England since I moved to the US as a kid, about 20 years earlier,” he says. “I was going back and forth between London and New York and in that time of writing I also became a parent, so I started off writing a reflection on childhood and it became very much a reflection on parenthood, too.” The film, his first feature since 2011’s critically adored Martha Marcy May Marlene, draws…

FLORIAN ZELLER WAS nervous. He was in Los Angeles, where he’d flown to convince Anthony Hopkins to star in his directorial debut, and they were about to meet for breakfast. “I didn’t sleep much the night before,” he remembers. “The stakes couldn’t have been higher for me.” The big-screen adaptation of Zeller’s prize-winning play Le Père would see Hopkins play a 83-year-old man locked in a losing battle with dementia. Zeller had even renamed his lead Anthony (from Andre) in the hope of winning Hopkins over. After two hours of gentle conversation about the character and each other’s lives, the actor stood up to leave. “He gave me a hug,” remembers Zeller, “and said, ‘Let’s make that movie.’” Hopkins was already committed to Fernando Meirelles’ biopic The Two Popes, so…

In a new regular series, we pay tribute to the towering, mega-watt stars who still roam Hollywood “HELLO, YOU MOTHERFUCKERS!” So exclaims Eddie Murphy’s Rudy Ray Moore at the end of 2019’s Dolemite Is My Name. It’s a joyous moment, Moore having pulled off a cultural coup, making and selling his own film against all odds and landing a glitzy premiere before greeting the fervent throng on the street. The word “motherfucker” has never seemed so affectionate. It’s great to hear the grinning Moore say it, suited, booted and hanging off a lamp post. But more than that, it’s great to hear Eddie Murphy saying it. Gleefully, triumphantly, eyes twinkling. He uses that word liberally in Dolemite. The first time it happened on set, director Craig Brewer told Uproxx, everybody…

INDISPENSABLE HOME ENTERTAINMENT THE MOST COMMON shorthand phrase to describe Cartoon Saloon, the award-winning Irish animation studio, is “the next Studio Ghibli”. But really, it won’t be long before some lazy journalist will be describing another up-and-coming animation studio as “the next Cartoon Saloon”. With their first four feature films - The Secret Of Kells, Song Of The Sea, The Breadwinner and WolfWalkers - each earning an Academy Award nomination, the studio has built an astonishing body of work, known for its high-quality, hand-drawn 2D animation, with emotionally rich storytelling that leans heavily on local mythology. Along the way, the studio - who are still based in a tiny headquarters just off Kilkenny’s high street - have collaborated with the likes of Angelina Jolie and Apple, but remain resolutely Irish.…

AMY HECKERLING REMEMBERS the day that John Landis visited the set of Fast Times At Ridgemont High. She was shooting a scene in a restroom featuring Judge Reinhold’s character, Brad. And suddenly she got a heads-up that Landis, who she’d known for a while, was inbound. “I thought, ‘Oh wow, John’s coming to see me, that’s great,’ ” she recalls. He came down, they shot the shit, and off he popped. Heckerling thought nothing more of it. It was only years later, when the two found themselves on a panel at a film festival, that Landis told the truth about why he was there that day. Namely, Heckerling was just over a week into shooting her directorial debut, and the studio brass at Universal had concerns. So they asked Landis…