Tabla de contenidos para July 2021 en Empire

Steve Toussaint is glad that he never bagged a role in Game Of Thrones. At one point, it seemed like every British actor alive had snagged a supporting role on HBO’s blockbuster fantasy, and sure enough Toussaint, a fan of the show, had tried and failed to book a gig. “But it never happened,” he says now. “I’m very happy I didn’t get those other parts.” The Seven Gods — or fate — had other ideas. Toussaint has since landed a plum role on the much-anticipated spin-off prequel show House Of The Dragon, not as a day player but as Corlys Velaryon, the lord of a noble house of Westeros. “He’s basically the richest man in the land,” Toussaint explains. “He’s called the Sea Snake, because he is this great…

THE SIX STARS of Friends had only been together once in the 17 years since the show ended, when Jennifer Aniston opened her Instagram account with a group selfie in October 2019. Until April of this year, that is, when they gathered for Friends: The Reunion, produced and directed by Ben Winston, whose day-job is exec-producer of The Late Late Show With James Corden. The initial push for a Friends special came from Mike Darnell, President of Unscripted and Alternative Television at Warner Bros. He called Winston in August 2019, and said that the 25th anniversary of Friends was approaching, that Warner Bros. owned the rights to the show, and that their new streaming service, HBO Max, was launching soon, so maybe Winston could give some thought to how he…

IT’S A MEDITATION ON RELIGION Set on a remote Colombian mountain, Luz: The Flower Of Evil sees a cult-like preacher attempt to keep sway over his pious daughters by capturing a boy he claims is the new Messiah. “I don’t believe in God at all,” says director Juan Diego Escobar Alzate. “But I do believe in Spinoza’s idea of God — that God is everywhere, in all of nature. Within that God lives also the devil.” IT WAS INSPIRED BY A DRUG TRIP Alzate initially tried ayahuasca — a psychedelic brew used as spiritual medicine among some communities in South America — “to heal my internal wounds”. These “spiritual trips” ultimately shaped the script, and its “relationship with nature”. IT HAS A UNIQUE LOOK The gorgeous landscapes of the Andes…

“THERE WAS ONE rule,” says director Matt Thompson, of his bonkers adult animated film America: The Motion Picture. “No research.” The film, which reimagines the founding of the United States as a wild, animated action-movie farce, is revisionist history at its most insane. “That’s my goal: to make people laugh and set back education,” says Thompson, with a laugh. With Phil Lord and Chris Miller on the production team (“They watched the film the day after winning the Oscar for Spider-Verse,” Thompson recalls), here are three ways that America: The Motion Picture will make history teachers very unhappy. 1. GEORGE WASHINGTON — AS A MUSCLE-BOUND IDIOT One of America’s Founding Fathers and its first President is here reimagined as an action movie-esque hunk (voiced by Channing Tatum) who says things…

Alamy, Getty Images, MPTV WHEN WE THINK of a scene-stealer, we usually picture someone who grabs attention by force, whether it’s the flamboyant villainy of Alan Rickman’s Sheriff Of Nottingham, or the raw emotion of Viola Davis in Doubt. But Charles Grodin wasn’t that kind of scene-stealer. He operated stealthily, with a silk-gloved subtlety that often meant you’d wind up focusing on him before you’d even realised it, then find it hard to look anywhere else. Take the scene in Midnight Run where he, as Mob accountant Jonathan ‘The Duke’ Mardukas, and Robert De Niro, as bounty hunter Jack Walsh, arrive at Jack’s ex-wife’s house to borrow money, and unexpectedly meet Jack’s daughter. It’s a key moment for the usually abrasive Jack, who hasn’t seen his kid in years and…

★★★★★ Excellent ★★★★ Good ★★★ Okay ★★ Poor ★ Awful ★★★★ OUT 18 JUNE CERT TBC / 143 MINS DIRECTOR Jon M. Chu CAST Anthony Ramos, Corey Hawkins, Leslie Grace, Melissa Barrera, Jimmy Smits PLOT In New York’s Washington Heights, bodega owner Usnavi (Ramos) plans his move back to his family’s home in the Dominican Republic to set up a beach bar, but is distracted by wannabe fashion designer Vanessa (Barrera). During a summer heatwave, a blackout and a winning lottery ticket change both his and his neighbours’ lives. BEFORE THERE WAS Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda won a Tony for In The Heights, the 2008 Broadway musical set in his home neighbourhood. While fans will recognise the rhythm of his hip-hop style, this is a looser, simpler affair than his later…

★★★★ OUT NOW CERT 15 / 92 MINS DIRECTOR Ilya Naishuller CAST Bob Odenkirk, Aleksey Serebryakov, Connie Nielsen PLOT When Hutch Mansell’s family is threatened during a robbery in their home, he (Odenkirk) does nothing. A former killing machine, trying to live a happy life in the suburbs, Hutch soon finds himself in the crosshairs of a Russian mobster (Serebryakov). Which, as it turns out, is just how he likes it. BETTER CULL SAUL, anyone? For a decade or so now, as Jimmy ‘Saul Goodman’ McGill in both Breaking Bad and its prequel, Better Call Saul, Bob Odenkirk has made talking — invariably of the fast variety — his way out of danger into an art form. When the bullets start to fly, he’ll be found running as fast as…

★★★★ OUT NOW (CHANNEL 5) EPISODES VIEWED 3 OF 3 DIRECTOR Lynsey Miller CAST Jodie Turner-Smith, Mark Stanley, Paapa Essiedu, Lola Petticrew PLOT England, 1536. Henry VIII’s (Stanley) second wife Anne Boleyn (Turner-Smith) has been queen for two-and-a-half years, delivered a daughter, Elizabeth, and suffered two miscarriages. Although the most powerful woman in the country, her failure to provide a son, plus the looming presence of her lady-in-waiting Jane Seymour (Petticrew), are threatening her status. THINGS HAVE CERTAINLY become more exciting since the refresh button was hit on the period drama. Armando Iannucci’s The Personal History Of David Copperfield pivoted on the earnest charms of Dev Patel as its beleaguered yet talented lead. Rachel Weisz’s leather trousers in The Favourite become a significant symbol of queer culture. Now we have…

★★★ OUT NOW (NETFLIX) EPISODES VIEWED 5 OF 5 SHOWRUNNERS Sharr White, Daniel Minahan, Ryan Murphy CAST Ewan McGregor, Krysta Rodriguez, Rebecca Dayan PLOT The life story of legendary American fashion designer Halston (McGregor), who became famous when he created Jackie Kennedy’s pillbox hat for JFK’s Inauguration in 1961. Revolutionising women’s high-end clothing, he enjoyed a hedonistic lifestyle until his death, at 57, of AIDS-related illness in 1990. Ryan Murphy’s latest series for Netflix, after The Politician, Hollywood and Ratched, is essentially a five-hour biopic of the kind of maverick genius Murphy’s been drawn to throughout his career as a TV showrunner. Yet apart from the occasional brief, impressionistic flashback to his traumatic childhood, this dramatisation of the life of Roy Halston Frowick, better known by his fashion-brand mononame Halston,…

Styling: Grace Gilfeather. Grooming: Joy Adenuga at Carol Hayes. There’s incredible buzz around your debut feature, Censor, about a psychologically scarred film censor who has trouble separating fiction from reality. What’s it like being in the eye of the storm? It’s really exciting. You squirrel away on something, in the shadows, for years, and even your friends and your family don’t really know what you’re doing. And then the trailer and poster come out and people go, “Oh, it’s a real thing!” When people who you don’t even know say positive things and are excited to see it, it’s lovely. Elijah Wood tweeted that the poster was “dope”. What was that like? That was so cool! One of our execs knows him so maybe that’s why he’s aware of it.…

Getty Niamh Algar plays intense characters in intense situations, embracing physically demanding roles: she’s “dabbled” in boxing for years, and is happy to put her skills to use. For her audition tape for Ridley Scott’s sci-fi series Raised By Wolves, as well as acting some scenes, she met with her trainer and had some fight moves filmed. Although, she had an ulterior motive. “When I was growing up, G.I. Jane was one of my favourite films, and I thought, ‘If I don’t get seen for this, maybe he’ll cast me in a G.I. Jane reboot,’” she laughs. The Irish actor, who was named a BAFTA Breakthrough Brit in 2019, is going full force. On the big screen this has included Nick Rowland’s drama Calm With Horses, Prano Bailey-Bond’s upcoming horror…

IN THE TEN YEARS AND MORE that he’s been playing Loki, prince of Asgard, Odinson, God Of Mischief, the rightful king of Jotunheim, Tom Hiddleston has assumed more than his fair share of guises. There’s been the emotionally wobbly Loki of the first Thor movie; the gloating megalomaniac of Avengers Assemble; the japing jester of Thor: The Dark World and Thor: Ragnarok; and the more rounded, humane Loki of Avengers: Infinity War. But, shortly before filming began on Loki, the six-part Disney+ series that will finally see Hiddleston’s trickster god take the solo spotlight, the actor found himself in an unexpected role: lecturer. Standing in front of cast and crew, Hiddleston had been charged by series director Kate Herron with putting Loki’s journey through the Marvel Cinematic Universe in context. If…

The idea for SHIVA BABY first came to me as a kind of bar joke – a girl runs into her sugar daddy at a shiva. And she had to face two different versions of herself – her ‘independent’ sex life and her infantilised family life. It was inspired by my Jewish community, my various friends who sugared or had tried it once or twice (like myself) and Joey Soloway’s Transparent. At the time, I simply thought of it as a fun, awkward concept. However, as I got further away from the short and closer to making the feature, I realised the story was more personal. When I approached graduation, I went through the difficult but common realisation for young women that there were limits to my sexual ‘power’, and…

SO, AC-12 HAS closed its doors. Possibly for the last time. Series 6 of Jed Mercurio’s hit BBC corrupt-cop thriller came to an end in May, and immediately seemed to split the nation down the middle. Yes, our intrepid heroes — Steve Arnott, Kate Fleming and Ted Hastings — finally got their mitts on H and lived to fight another day. But there was also a suggestion that the corruption they’re trying to root out is too systemic for them to truly get to grips with and, with AC-12 now under new management, it wasn’t the triumphant ride off into the sunset that some had been hoping for. “We knew a ‘down’ ending would rate less favourably with some viewers,” tweeted Mercurio. But he went for it anyway. Brave or…

Illustrations: Jacey Movie remakes Chris: I want to remove some of the stigma surrounding remakes. Usually, when you say, “Oh, that’s a remake,” people roll their eyes. “The remake is never as good as the original.” I want to prove that can be the case, and sometimes it can be even better than the original. Dan: There are lots of reasons to do remakes, aren’t there? Is it a genuine attempt to improve the original? Is it switching genres, like doing Fistful Of Dollars instead of Yojimbo? Is it a film you didn’t see because it was made in another country? Is it a generational thing? Perhaps with King Kong, for many kids, the 2005 King Kong will be the one they go to first. Nick: I like the Peter…

GIVEN THAT IT’S populated by characters who can fire laser beams from their hands or wield magic hammers, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has had more than its fair share of great action sequences over the years. Think Chris Evans beating up goons in a lift in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, or the backwards battle in Doctor Strange. But it’s fair to say the MCU has been lacking a great out-and-out action movie. Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings might just change that. Its title star — played by Simu Liu — is a master of pretty much any martial art you’d care to name, and some you wouldn’t. And, as he embarks upon a journey that may see him either take on the villainous mantle of his father,…

WEREWOLVES WITHIN STARTED life as a 2016 video game, in which players had to root out the werewolf among them. Now it’s a cult-in-the-making murder-mystery comedy, which sees an ensemble (led by Veep’s Sam Richardson) in a small town forced to figure out who the monster killer is. The film has already got people buzzing ahead of its Tribeca Film Festival premiere; here, director Josh Ruben explains how he crafted what could be, potentially, the weirdest film of the year. LOCATION IS EVERYTHING Like John Carpenter’s The Thing, Werewolves Within throws a bunch of hotheads into a snowy locale and lets the monster terrorise them, one-by-one. “It’s pretty much between two or three locations,” explains Ruben. “[But] the anchor location is the lodge. It’s got these high ceilings and wood…

THERE’S A SCENE IN The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent — the high-concept meta film in which Nicolas Cage plays himself, and an imaginary younger version of himself — which left writer-director Tom Gormican lost for words. “The line is just, ‘You’re Nic fucking Cage!’” he explains. Cage, however, chose to scream the line, making the word “fuckiiiing” last a full ten seconds. “Just imagine for a second you’re directing that scene,” says Gormican, laughing. “What notes do you give? Nic came over and said, ‘I wanted it to be transcendental.’ Under no other circumstances, with any other actor, do you get that. That’s a Nic choice.” Choices like that have come thick and fast with the making of this film, which takes a fictionalised Nicolas Cage, and plonks him…

IT WAS 2015 when we last saw a Neill Blomkamp film on the big screen. The South African, who made his name with 2009 sci-fi District 9, has spent the last half-decade making experimental short films with his company, Oats Studios. His return to feature-length filmmaking — Demonic, a supernatural horror about a demon that possesses people and forces them to murder — was triggered largely by last year’s lockdown. “It’s genuinely a child of the pandemic,” the director says. In early 2020 Blomkamp was due to start filming Inferno, a sci-fi with Taylor Kitsch, when all major productions shut down. He found himself at a loose end. “It was born out of, ‘How do we go into the backwoods and shoot something while we’re waiting [for the world to…

IF YOU’VE SEEN the famous one-shot corridor fight of Oldboy, or the giant, writhing octopus of The Handmaiden, then you’ll be familiar with the work of cinematographer Chung Chung-hoon. Since making his name in his native South Korea in the early 2000s, Chung has become one of the most admired cinematographers working today. He made history in February as the first South Korean cinematographer to join the Star Wars franchise, for the high-profile Disney+ mini-series Obi-Wan Kenobi — and has already staked a claim in Hollywood, working on major projects such as It, Hotel Artemis and Edgar Wright’s upcoming Last Night In Soho. But why is every director worth their salt lining up to collaborate with him? One reason might be that his approach stems from passion rather than technical…

Getty Images Are you a morning person? Because I could not do an interview at 8.30am. Not at all. This entire interview is sponsored by coffee. And it’s funny — I’ve been in the UK since August, and I came here to do press, and the first thing we’re doing is a lot of UK interviews. I was like, “We were right there!” A Quiet Place Part II was the first film many of us at Team Empire had seen in a cinema for ages. We wanted to reach out and clutch people, but couldn’t. But it was so great to have that experience back. Have you had that yourself? Have you been in a cinema with people yet? I’ve done a small screening with friends and family, so we…

1920s The actor turned professional aged just nine years old, having made regular appearances in vaudeville and women’s clubs since he was tiny. 1930s Lloyd left New York University aged 17, to concentrate on acting. He met Orson Welles as a teenager, and was a founder member of Welles’ Mercury Theatre in 1937 — the company that would go on to produce Citizen Kane. 1940s Lloyd’s first Hollywood gig was under the direction of one Alfred Hitchcock, playing the titular role in the 1942 thriller Saboteur. Lloyd later said of modern directors: “Most of these guys could never tell you what’s happening on the screen... Hitch could tell you every shot.” 1950s Lloyd starred alongside Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton in Chaplin’s 1952 talkie Limelight, though he and Chaplin were…

★★★★★ OUT 11 JUNE CERT 12A / 97 MINS DIRECTOR Florian Zeller CAST Anthony Hopkins, Olivia Colman, Mark Gatiss, Imogen Poots, Olivia Williams PLOT Octogenarian Anthony (Hopkins) spends his life pottering around a plush London flat. But despite all the amenities, his existence is hellish, thanks to the dementia which makes it impossible for him to know whether he’s had his dinner yet, or even what his daughter (Colman) looks like. BACK IN 2000, a filmmaker named Christopher Nolan made his American debut with Memento, an emotionally brutal thriller about a man named Leonard who is unable to retain a memory for more than five minutes. What was startling about it was the way in which Nolan locks the viewer inside Leonard’s mind, so that you too greedily grab on…

★★★★ OUT 18 JUNE CERT TBC / 107 MINS DIRECTOR Ben Wheatley CAST Joel Fry, Ellora Torchia, Reece Shearsmith, Hayley Squires PLOT In the midst of an unnamed pandemic, scientist Martin Lowery (Fry) and park ranger Alma (Torchia) set out on a trek through the woods to deliver equipment to Martin’s former colleague, Dr Olivia Wendle (Squires). Aware of the legend of Parnag Fegg, a malevolent spirit of the forest, the pair ignore it. Big mistake. IN THE EARTH opens with a monolith and ends with a hallucinogenic trip. Perhaps only Ben Wheatley could reimagine 2001: A Space Odyssey in a drizzly English woodland. After his starry adaptation of Rebecca, Wheatley is back on his bullshit: ambitious high concepts shot with lo-fi verve, ladled with molasses-black comedy, all played out…

★★★ OUT NOW CERT 15 / 97 MINS DIRECTOR John Krasinski CAST Emily Blunt, Cillian Murphy, Millicent Simmonds, Noah Jupe, Djimon Hounsou, John Krasinski PLOT Day 474 of the alien attack. The Abbott family leave their farm house and venture into the outside world beyond the sand path. But now it’s not just those pesky critters who stalk by sound that they have to evade. THE NOTION OF what it means to be cinematic is baked into the terrific premise of the A Quiet Place movies. Built around blind monsters who have developed such an attuned sense of hearing they can track victims from even the slightest noise, John Krasinski’s films explore a world where dialogue has to be kept to a minimum, meaning the story can only move forward…

Paapa Essiedu is relishing being home in London, despite a “weird” transition after spending the last six months “out in the sticks”, in Wales and Bristol, filming sci-fi thriller series Extinction. “In central London, I feel trepidation every time someone looks at me — and I’m a Londoner,” he laughs. “I haven’t had a chance to do anything but eat or sleep or work since January, but it’s amazing to be at the centre of [the show].” It’s been a mad couple of years for the actor, who went from the West End stage, in productions of Hamlet and King Lear, to the small screen as pragmatic businessman Alex in crime series Gangs Of London and charming fitness instructor Kwame in Michaela Coel’s critically acclaimed series I May Destroy You.…

From the start, Wunmi Mosaku was on a mission, waiting patiently for the right projects, declining ones that felt wrong. “I just felt I couldn’t do them,” she says. “Morally, physically, emotionally. I’d say no. Before anyone even knew my name.” Now they know. Mosaku, born in Nigeria but a Mancunian since moving to England when she was one, spent a few years climbing the rungs of UK television drama, but recently everything changed. With incredible turns in Misha Green’s HBO series Lovecraft Country and Remi Weekes’ refugee horror film His House, in which she was the co-lead, she has come into her own. And both speak volumes about who Mosaku is. “I’m interested in racial inequality, social inequality, being a foreigner, being an immigrant, being an asylum seeker, being…

INDISPENSABLE HOME ENTERTAINMENT When you were a little boy, were films a big deal in your house? No, not at all. We very rarely went to the cinema; it was like a birthday treat, generally. Or we went to see Grease and Star Wars, but beyond that, we didn’t go to the cinema. It was the films that were on the telly on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon. My dad liked Westerns, so there was always one on, usually with John Wayne. The only access I got was watching films on telly. And you went to college to study Drama. So where did wanting to become involved in acting come from? It’s a bit of a cliché, but an uncomfortableness of being myself or feeling like I didn’t really have…

Getty Images WHEN ELVIS PRESLEY made his third movie in the summer of 1957, he knew, for all the risks, it would yield him a chart-topping hit. Sure, Jailhouse Rock was shot in black-and-white during Technicolor’s peak, and yes, his character, Vince Everett, was a hard-to-like thug with few redeeming features. But it also contained a number, the singer believed, which would be his biggest single yet. Namely, um, ‘Treat Me Nice’. Well, The King can’t be right about everything. No offence to that silky, boogie-woogie tune, but it had none of the raw, driving energy of the movie’s title song. Written by R&B maestros Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller in just a few hours, ‘Jailhouse Rock’ not only became one of Elvis’ best-loved hits, but it also gave cinema…

HOW DOES WRITER-director Mark Jenkin follow a debut as memorable as award-winning one-off Bait? Jenkin’s micro-budget hit — about a taciturn village fisherman tackling gentrification — won critical acclaim and a BAFTA. Now Jenkin — who also shot, edited, processed the film and post-synced the sound on Bait — pivots from abstract drama to earthy isolation horror with eagerly anticipated second feature, Enys Men. Can he repeat the trick? “It’s still got some moments of craziness,” Jenkin says, ahead of an eight-week edit. Enys Men (pronounced “Mane”), which is Cornish for “Stone Island”, sees a lonely wildlife volunteer (played by Mary Woodvine) studying a rare flower, when a mysterious Bronze Age standing stone appears to be getting gradually closer to her cottage. Though some have described the film as a…

PERIOD MOVIES CAN be tricky beasts. But Emma Holly Jones was determined to make Austen-like romantic comedy Mr. Malcolm’s List her debut feature, after making a prequel short film, set in the Regency-era world of Suzanne Allain’s novel — featuring a diverse cast inspired by a trip to Broadway. “Hamilton changed my perspective on period films,” Jones says. “I’m English, I’m white, and the ones I have loved I’ve seen myself in forever. I thought it was time that someone did [the Hamilton approach] to Jane Austen.” That 2019 short, starring BAFTA nominee Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù, Gemma Chan, Oliver Jackson-Cohen and Freida Pinto, who she had found through a casting agent, racked up nearly two million views on YouTube, setting up the main feature story about a young woman of polite…

THE STARTLINGLY THRILLING trailer for BBC One’s forthcoming series Vigil had a pretty decent showcase when it first aired on 2 May after the series finale of Line Of Duty, which, as you may have heard, was watched by a record-breaking 12.8 million people. The six-part drama also happens to be made by World Productions, the company behind Jed Mercurio’s TV phenomenon, and just to seal the LOD connection, Vigil also has a juicy role for DI Arnott himself, Martin Compston. Compston stars alongside Shaun Evans and Paterson Joseph as a Royal Navy crewmember on the submarine HMS Vigil, where a death onboard is investigated by Suranne Jones’ detective, Amy Silva. The connections with the Beeb’s most high-profile smash aren’t something the creator and lead writer of the series, Tom…

CODA (SHORT FOR ‘child of deaf adults’) broke records when it premiered at Sundance earlier this year. The sweet-natured story of a Deaf family, and the hearing daughter torn between being an interpreter and a singing competition, became the biggest sale ever in the festival’s history, selling to Apple for a reported $25million. Here, director Sian Heder explains the winning formula of her feel-good festival hit. A TRUE-T0-LIFE CAST “I was determined to cast authentically,” says Heder, noting there was some “educating the producers on why it was important”. (The film is based on a French film, 2014’s La Famille Bélier, which was controversial for casting hearing actors in Deaf roles.) The key, she says, was hiring the Oscar-winning deaf actor Marlee Matlin as the matriarch of the family. “She…

THE ARRIVAL I arrive in Japan a bit late. I was supposed to fly out the night before, but there was actually a typhoon in Japan, so my flight was delayed. Straight away, drama! I’m really jet-lagged and have to go straight into rehearsal. Quite intense. No time to relax. Coming to Japan, there’s a massive culture shock anyway. In the world of Kurupt FM, ‘out-of-town’ is somewhere like Ipswich. My character, Chabuddy G, is not from England, but one of his talking heads in the show is like, “I’m a very well-travelled man — I’ve been to Luton, I’ve been to Wigan, I went to Leeds one time…” THE FIRST DAY OF FILMING The first thing we film is us walking through Tokyo. Literally, central Tokyo, Shibuya Crossing, all…

When were you most starstruck? I had a very bizarre one. I wasn’t aware that I was starstruck until it was happening. The first time I went to the Oscars, when we walked into the theatre, I saw George Clooney in front of me — and I put my arms open wide like I was seeing an old friend, thinking in my mind that I knew him. Him being the gentleman that he is, he got right up, put a big smile on his face and opened his arms. As I’m walking over to hug him, I’m thinking, “Wow, I used to work with this guy. It’s so nice to see him!” — and as my arms were coming around his back, I realised I’d never met this person in…

★★★ OUT 24 JUNE CERT TBC / 145 MINS DIRECTOR Justin Lin CAST Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson, Chris ‘Ludacris’ Bridges, John Cena PLOT Living off the grid in rural bliss, former criminal Dominic Toretto (Diesel) doesn’t often look in the rearview mirror. But when his long-estranged younger brother Jakob (Cena) re-emerges in bad company, the security of the planet is suddenly in his hands. FOR A SERIES that, at least for a while, used to be about nitro-injected street cred and grease-monkey car culture, the Fast & Furious movies really only have two gears. You’ve got fast and you’ve got furious. Stunts have gotten bigger, glossier and faker, but even at their worst, they’ve always been speedy, dangerously so. And just as crucially, every utterance about family out…

★★★★ OUT 11 JUNE (MUBI) CERT TBC / 77 MINS DIRECTOR Emma Seligman CAST Rachel Sennott, Molly Gordon, Danny Deferrari, Dianna Agron PLOT Having completed a sexual transaction with one of her sugar daddies, Max (Deferrari), 22- year-old Danielle (Sennott) rushes to meet her middle-class family at a shiva, a Jewish post-funeral service for the dead. There she runs into him again, and a closet-full of skeletons threatens to derail her day, and possibly her life. SHIVAS ARE INHERENTLY awkward: social gatherings for the newly dead, ostensibly sad, but social gatherings nevertheless. Before and after prayers you pass on your condolences, make small-talk with people you often haven’t seen in years and possibly haven’t wanted to, and eat. In another film a shiva might occupy a scene or two but…

★★★★ OUT NOW (CINEMAS/DISNEY+PREMIER ACCESS) CERT 12A / 134 MINS DIRECTOR Craig Gillespie CAST Emma Stone, Emma Thompson, Joel Fry, Paul Walter Hauser, Mark Strong, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, John McCrea PLOT After suffering tragedy at a young age, reckless, creative Estella (Stone) falls into a life of crime in ’70s London — until she has the chance to fulfill her dreams of becoming a designer under the tutelage of fearsome fashion legend The Baroness (Thompson). IN THE ORIGINAL, animated 101 Dalmatians, there was nothing black-and-white about Cruella de Vil. As her name less implied, more flat-out screamed, she was a Disney villain drawn delightfully, deliciously dark. Kudos, then, to director Craig Gillespie for pulling off a live-action prequel that adds a few shades of grey without muddying the character one bit,…

★★★★ OUT NOW (APPLE TV+) EPISODES VIEWED 4 OF 8 DIRECTOR Pablo Larraín CAST Julianne Moore, Clive Owen, Dane DeHaan, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Joan Allen PLOT The widow of celebrated author Scott Landon (Owen), Lisey Landon (Moore) becomes the focus for an obsessed stalker, Jim Dooley (DeHaan), who wants to bring Scott’s unpublished works into the world. But revisiting Scott’s manuscripts prompts Lisey to consider her husband’s dark past. THE BTS CREW of Lisey’s Story might be the creative backroom team of 2021. Executive produced by J.J. Abrams, directed by Jackie’s Pablo Larraín, written by Stephen King (adapting one of his own favourite novels) and brought to life by a crack unit of high-end artisans (cinematographer Darius Khondji, production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas and composer Clark), it’s a reflective collection…

Camera Press/Matt Holyoak, Getty Where are you at the moment? I’m in Connecticut, working on The Good Nurse. We’re halfway through the shoot and it’s really exciting. It [stars] Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne, who are great. And it’s from an incredible book by Charles Graeber. Funnily enough, my mum read the first two chapters and she was like, “You’re an idiot if you don’t do this.” I trust her guidance. Have you now hired your mum as your reader? Pretty much. She’s on staff, you know? Reader, therapist, dresser, emotional coach. You’ve had a pretty nuts few years. Oscar-nominated for your first script, 1917, co-writing Last Night In Soho with Edgar Wright, cooking up a new Star Wars film with Taika Waititi… Can I swear? I can? Well, it’s…

Sheila Atim’s talents seem to have no boundaries. An actor, singer and composer (who is also trained in biomedical science), she made her professional acting debut at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2013 in Ché Walker’s The Lightning Child, later composing the score for his play, Time Is Love. And this year sees Atim playing not only the Tooth Fairy, in Netflix’s The Irregulars, but the protagonist’s absentee mother in The Underground Railroad, a role she imbues with a similarly mythic presence. As Mabel, a character whose escape from a plantation has become practically legendary, she does wonders with little dialogue, conveying generations of matrilineal struggle. “The maternal aspects of their relationship was paramount from the beginning, in terms of things I was thinking about and trying to understand,” Atim reflects. “Mabel’s…

Styling: Grace Gilfeather. White blazer, vest and trousers: Reiss. Boots: Zara. Grooming: Joy Adenuga at Carol Hayes “I HAD A REALLY MASSIVE LORD Of The Rings trilogy obsession,” says Rose Glass, pondering her formative film experiences. “Once I got all of those on DVD, I was going over all the behind-the-scenes stuff. I think that was the first time I started to realise how much goes into making a film and creating something so fantastical. And that filmmaking is a job that someone can have.” Questing hobbits is perhaps not an image one would associate with the writer-director of Saint Maud, one of last year’s most startling (nails in a bloody Converse, anyone?) and best-received horror films. But when one considers Peter Jackson’s earlier, splatter-filled cinematic excursions, the surprise lessens.…

You won’t find many, if any, filmmaking origin stories like that of Yorkshire-born writer/director Francis Lee. A working-class actor-now-filmmaker who was working in a scrapyard right up until the day production began on his BFI-backed debut feature, God’s Own Country. It was a first film – about the brutality of isolation, the soul-scars of being an outsider – that struck a big old emotional chord with critics and audiences alike, and landed Lee the World Cinema Directing Award at Sundance in 2017. Even bigger things were to come with his second feature Ammonite (starring Kate Winslet as 19th-century paleontologist Mary Anning and Saoirse Ronan as her lover), when it was selected for official competition at Cannes. It’s an experience that Lee describes now as “totally surreal. And actually the thing…

How has It’s A Sin changed your life? I was writing about this in my diary the other day. I literally wrote, “It’s A Sin has changed my life.” It was hard to get a proper perspective while we were in the middle of it, but now a few months later it’s really sinking in. Meeting and working with Russell [T Davies] was a dream come true and I learned so much about myself, as well as the whole subject of AIDS and British queer people in the ’80s. Filming it was such a great experience as well. I hadn’t done any acting for so long, so to suddenly switch to a completely different discipline [from music] was so exciting. When you were filming it, did you have any idea…

“I’m not great at stillness” RIZ AHMED HAD NEVER BEEN very good at sitting still. Until, that is, Sound Of Metal came his way. When he first read the script for Darius Marder’s story of a heavy-metal drummer who is suddenly afflicted by life-changing hearing loss, Ahmed recognised a lot of himself in the character, Ruben Stone. “I connected with his restlessness, that kind of high RPM in his internal engine,” says the 38-year-old Londoner. “The character’s workaholism, his obsessive quality, the feeling of being an outsider. All of those things really resonated, but there was also a lot of stuff I hadn’t explored before.” Namely, silence. And stillness. Since bursting onto the scene in Michael Winterbottom’s The Road To Guantánamo in 2006, Ahmed manifested that restlessness and workaholism in…

SINCE ITS DEBUT in Sundance in 2020, Florian Zeller’s The Father has caused the sturdiest souls to weep. It paints a nuanced, affecting portrait of Anthony (Hopkins – the first name is not a coincidence), an 83-year-old man who is suffering from the inexorable effects of dementia while his daughter Anne (Olivia Colman) looks on helplessly. Built around a tour-de-force performance by Hopkins (and a quietly effective one from Colman), plus smart, inventive filmmaking, it’s a small chamber piece that tenderly puts us inside the mind of a man who is becoming unmoored. And – perhaps unsurprisingly given its hefty themes, fêted cast and enough emotional beats to fill a dozen clips packages – it also dominated this year’s Oscars from the get-go. “We started the ceremony winning Best [Adapted]…

Sound Of Metal DARIUS MARDER CO-WROTE the Oscar-nominated screenplay for Sound Of Metal, in which Riz Ahmed’s drummer suddenly loses his hearing and struggles in the aftermath. The result is one of the year’s best films, a meticulously constructed depiction of one man’s battle with the five stages of grief. Here, he talks us through some of the key moments. THE OPENING SHOT Sound Of Metal begins with a shot of Ruben Stone (Riz Ahmed), one half of metal duo Blackgammon along with his girlfriend Lou (Olivia Cooke). He’s sitting at a drum kit, waiting to launch into a song. He’s poised, thrumming with anticipation, vibrating with nervous energy. The one thing he isn’t, is peaceful. “He’s naked to the waist but he’s got a lot of armour up,” says…

AUBREY PLAZA: “This is one of my favourite scenes. It’s from Border, which is a Swedish film that, in my opinion, was the best film of the year in 2019. It’s the scene where the two main characters get together. It’s the most insane sex scene I’ve ever seen. Hands down. Tops it all. Couldn’t turn away. Just stuck in my head forever. I still can’t understand what was going on when they shot that scene. I mean, how do you direct that scene? And the screaming? Oh my God! Man, what a movie.” EXT. FOREST — DAY Tina (Eva Melander) is a Swedish customs official who has an outlandish appearance and an uncanny ability to ‘smell’ guilt in other people, that she has never quite been able to explain.…