Tabla de contenidos para February 2022 en Empire

IT’S CHEESY. IT’S campy. And it’s catchy as hell. Midway through the first episode of Hawkeye, we are treated to a full-blown Marvel musical moment: watching Jeremy Renner’s Clint Barton squirm in his seat to anachronistic sing-along anthem ‘Save The City’, a number from in-universe Broadway hit Rogers: The Musical. The idea for a musical based on Avengers Assemblers climactic Battle Of New York initially came from director and executive producer Rhys Thomas, who wanted an idiosyncratic entrance for Barton in his own story. “I liked the idea of dropping into this energetic, Men In Tights-type musical, and finding Jeremy’s world-weary face in the crowd,” Thomas says. “Then when Kevin [Feige] got excited about it, the reality of what I’d proposed dawned on me.” Thankfully, Feige knew just the men…

Illustration: Russell Moorcroft THE MEEK MAY inherit the Earth, but the geeks are after Middle-earth, and Westeros, and more besides. The quest for the “next Game Of Thrones” has been underway since before the HBO show finished, but it’s now at fever pitch. HBO has six Thrones spin-offs in development in the hope of cloning that cash cow: the ten-episode prequel series House Of The Dragon is first out of the gate in 2022, after being inspired by the wreckage of a failed pilot that reportedly cost $30 million for a single episode. HBO also has an adaptation of Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death, part of a new and less Euro-centric generation of fantasy novels. Amazon, meanwhile, has been on the hunt for its own Thrones, ever since CEO Jeff…

HE’S FROM THE FUTURE Spidey is about to get futuristic. Spider-Man 2099, aka Miguel O’ Hara – glimpsed briefly in the post-credits sting of 2018’s Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse – is set to take steal scenes in upcoming sequel Across The Spider-Verse (Part One). Created for the comics by artist Rick Leonardi and writer Peter David in 1992, Miguel is an Irish-Mexican geneticist living in a future New York (known as ‘Nueva York’), who accidentally becomes Spider-Man while researching the original hero’s powers. HE’S VERY DIFFERENT FROM PETER PARKER In the comics, Miguel is nothing like the original Spidey – not just in terms of his origin, but how he goes about his web-slinging. He’s unceremonious and cagey, mostly only trusting in his holographic artificial intelligence sidekick Lyla (voiced in…

Getty Images. Illustration: Mike Cathro WHAT WAS JONESTOWN? IN ONCE UPON A Time In Hollywood he faced down a terrifying real-life cult; now Leonardo DiCaprio will be starring as the leader of one. Jim Jones – soon to be played by DiCaprio in a new film he is also producing – was a pastor who started the Peoples Temple in Indianapolis in the 1950s. “He began with this message of social justice and racial equality,” explains Julia Scheeres, Jonestown expert and author of A Thousand Lives, a history of the Jonestown settlement and massacre. “He had an integrated church at a time when the US was deeply segregated. People were attracted to that.” But as his teachings grew more extreme, so did the media interest, which led Jones to move…

FEW SPY-THRILLER heroes have captured the imagination like Harry Palmer. Made legend by Michael Caine in five screen adaptations of Len Deighton’s espionage novels – including, most famously, the 1965 movie The Ipcress File – it now falls to Gangs Of London actor Joe Cole to reinvent the ‘working man’s James Bond’. And Cole is armed not just with a gun, but also with those signature black-framed glasses, worn by Caine with such élan in the movies. “Getting the glasses right was essential,” says Cole. “They bring the character alive. They’re Harry’s armour against the tough world he inhabits. Costume designer Keith Madden and I went to opticians Cutler And Gross, and I tried on hundreds before deciding on the pair. Whenever I put them on to play him, I’d…

★★★★★ EXCELLENT ★ ★★★GOOD ★★★OKAY ★★POOR ★AWFUL ★★★★★ OUT 1 JANUARY CERT TBC / 133 MINS DIRECTOR Paul Thomas Anderson CAST Cooper Hoffman, Alana Haim, Bradley Cooper, Sean Penn, Tom Waits, Benny Safdie PLOT 1973, San Fernando Valley, California. While waiting to get his high-school photo taken, 15-year-old budding actor Gary Valentine (Hoffman) asks 25-year-old photographer’s assistant Alana Kane (Haim) on a date – sparking a fiery friendship, business partnership, and possible romance. “YOU’RE A VERY powerful feeling,” one character tells another towards the end of Licorice Pizza. It’s a moment which feels like the film is describing itself. Paul Thomas Anderson’s ninth film is shaggy and shambolic but utterly lovable, equally as interested in mood and flavour as story and narrative. It’s a coming-of-age tale sketched with the kind…

★★★★ OUT NOW (CINEMAS/APPLE TV+) CERT. TBC/112 MINS DIRECTOR Benjamin Cleary CAST Mahershala Ali, Glenn Close, Naomie Harris PLOT In the near future, graphic designer Cameron (Ali) is given a terminal diagnosis and, wishing to save his wife and young son from the heartache of his death, has himself cloned by pioneering scientist Dr Scott (Close). Forced to spend a week with his identical clone, Cameron finds he must confront his own deeply held secrets and fears. CONTEMPLATING BIG QUESTIONS of mortality, identity and loyalty, Irish director Benjamin Cleary’s feature debut has sensitivity and style to match its sweeping narrative ambition. Featuring a superb dual performance by Mahershala Ali, Swan Song effectively balances science-fiction sentiments and distinctly human sentimentality to deliver an engaging study of what it truly means to…

OUT 04 MAR WHEN HE WAS THREE OR FOUR YEARS OLD, MATT REEVES FELL ILL WITH A FEVER. His temperature soared so high, he needed to be constantly hydrated. Day and night, his parents fed him water through an eyedropper. And as they did so, a dark figure in a cowl and a cap manifested from the shadows above him. “I remember very distinctly, even to this day, seeing Batman on the ceiling,” Reeves tells Empire. “I wasn’t afraid of him. I just thought, ‘Oh. Batman is on my ceiling.’” He smiles, like he’s speaking of an old friend. “There was something about him that connected to me.” When Bob Kane and Bill Finger’s crimefighting creation appeared in the pyretic Reeves’ bedroom, the character had already been going for three…

OUT 22 APR “I’M NEVER GOING to see that movie.” That was the solemn vow Nicolas Cage made earlier this year to Collider. The prolific actor and one-time Mongolian-dinosaur-skull-owner did not want to watch The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent, the gloriously titled upcoming meta-action-comedy-drama, in which he plays an exaggerated version of himself hanging out with a Mexican superfan who happens to be a crime lord. Seeing the reportedly neurotic screen version of himself, it seemed, would be too much for Cage to handle. Fortunately, though, that vow has been broken. “He has since seen the film,” director Tom Gormican confirms to Empire. “He’s since watched all the cuts, because he’s also a producer on the movie. It’s a very brave thing, just to be an actor — but…

OUT 04 FEB DISASTER-MASTER ROLAND EMMERICH ON HIS MOON-VERSUS-EARTH OPUS Disaster movies used to be a summerblockbuster staple, but you’re really maybe the only one making them these days with such big budgets. Why do you still love them? First of all, I don’t like superheroes very much and because of that I have to come up with big scenarios. So, a flood in 2012, or aliens in Independence Day, climate change in The Day After Tomorrow. The interesting part of all that is that I’m always coming up with scenarios that are bigger than just the destruction, like small groups of people having to come together to survive. There’s always a bigger story behind it. And really, I just like these kinds of films, because it’s always a lot…

ILLUSTRATION JAMES DAWE BIGGER, WEIRDER SEQUELS Last time we saw a Thor film, he lost most of his family and friends and had to navigate the Devil’s Anus. Aquaman’s last outing, meanwhile, featured a bongo-playing octopus and Julie Andrews as the voice of a gigantic sea-monster. So when the directors of both promise to really get strange this time, they mean it. Taika Waititi has said that Thor: Love And Thunder will be “so over-the-top, in the best way”, with Thor losing his powers to a woman and facing off against Christian Bale’s Gorr The God Butcher (alas, not the kind who supplies gods with fresh sausages and tripe). Meanwhile, Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom’s James Wan is taking inspiration from Italian horror Planet Of The Vampires, which features reanimated…

OUT 20 MAY AFTER NEARLY DYING, GASPAR NOÉ FLIPPED HIS FILMMAKING ON ITS HEAD GASPAR NOÉ IS synonymous with arresting filmmaking: provocative cinema preoccupied with violence, sex and drugs. Irreversible, Enter The Void, Love and Climax are not things you’d want to watch with your parents. Vortex, though, is a U-turn. Almost entirely set in a Parisian apartment, it introduces us to an elderly married couple, a film critic (played by legendary director Dario Argento) with a heart condition and a retired psychiatrist (Françoise Lebrun) with dementia. “It almost looks like a documentary. And it’s a very sad one. People have told me it’s the first movie I’ve made for a more general audience, but they also tell me it’s the most terrifying movie I’ve done,” laughs Noé. It had…

OUT EARLY 2022 IN THE SHOW’S SIXTH – AND FINAL – SEASON, THE BRUTAL BRUMMIES ARE BACK WITH A VENGEANCE WHEN LAST WE saw Peaky Blinders’ original gangster, the right honourable Tommy Shelby MP (Cillian Murphy), he was stumbling wildly into a mist-shrouded field, bellowing his grief and grinding the barrel of a pistol into his head. After a particularly dark few episodes, it was a climax that ended the show’s fifth season on the bleakest, most uncertain note yet. And then the pandemic hit, leaving Tommy’s fate dangling for two-and-a-half years. “If we’d known that, we probably wouldn’t have done it!” laughs series director Anthony Byrne. “There was going to be a definitive end, but myself, Cillian and [writer] Steven [Knight] felt like Season 5 was part one of…

NIGHTMARE ALLEY, A NOIR THRILLER ABOUT A CLAIRVOYANT CON MAN, REQUIRED DIRECTOR Guillermo del Toro TO RIP UP HIS OWN RULEBOOK. EXCLUSIVELY FOR EMPIRE, HE WRITES ABOUT HIS JOURNEY WITH HIS MOST PERSONAL FILM YET ALL MY LIFE I have been obsessed with two genres: horror and crime. I’ve been devout to these dark materials because both, in a strange way, are genres that tend to become parable. They hint at the horror of the dark, but they are very strong chronicles of moral downfall or salvation. When you read a good noir, it has this existential, dire view of human nature, but you can see it is very much emotionally deep and vibrant. The serene, hardboiled voice of those that have lost it all. I read William Lindsay Gresham’s…

Training Day SIX YEARS BEFORE Training Day debuted in cinemas, David Ayer was struggling. He had been trying to make a living in Hollywood by anticipating what studios might like through spec scripts, and he wasn’t deriving much enjoyment — or money — from his work, with not even a bed or refrigerator to call his own. His path to change began in 1995, when he started penning a screenplay for himself about a young rookie cop and a veteran detective in a rough LA neighbourhood. The result is more than just a premier example of the first day at work often being the toughest. From an all-time-great, Oscar-winning performance by Denzel Washington to an ending that film fans still quote two decades after the fact, Training Day is a…

On The Waterfront EMILY MORTIMER: “There’s a moment in On The Waterfront where Marlon Brando is talking to Eva Marie Saint about their childhoods, because they grew up together. It’s a really sexy scene — incredibly romantic and fraught with sexual tension. She drops a glove and he puts it on his own hand, which I think just happened in the moment. It’s so sexy and cool and weird.” Terry (Brando) is walking Edie (Saint) back home, through a park. TERRY: You don’t have to be afraid of me, I’m not gonna bite ya. I guess they don’t let you walk with fellas where you been, huh? EDIE: You know how the Sisters are. TERRY: Yeah. Are you training to be a nun? Edie fishes in her pocket for her…

1974 A young Nicolas Cage first watches F.W. Murnau’s German vampire classic Nosferatu, starring Max Schreck as the Dracula-esque ampire Count Orlok. He is immediately entranced. “When I was ten, I can remember watching Nosferatu,” he later tells the LA Times. “Although it was terrifying to me at that age, it intrigued me and stayed with me.” 1988 Cage stars in cult horror-comedy Vampire’s Kiss, channelling Max Schreck in his performance as a mentally-ill literary agent who believes himself to be a vampire. In one memorable scene, Cage’s character runs down a street, screaming: “I’m a vampire! I’m a vampire! I’m a vampire!” 1988 Cage’s brother, Christopher Coppola, directs Dracula’s Widow: a gory horror about the bloodsucking wife of the Count who shows up in a Hollywood waxwork museum. 1992…

THE MOVES BELL Often described as cinema’s greatest dancer, Fred Astaire has some big tap-dancing shoes to fill. Handily, Jamie Bell’s breakthrough role was as a dancer, playing ballet prodigy Billy Elliot. But as Bell told Empire earlier this year, “I was never really good at ballet. Tap dancing was always my favourite thing to do.” The actor has been “training pretty intensely to even reach a standard that is worthy of [Astaire]”. HOLLAND Holland’s breakthrough role was also as Billy Elliot, playing the dancer in the West End musical version; his training for that role included gymnastics, a good background for Astaire’s physical prowess. Plus, his wall-climbing antics as Spider-Man should, at the very least, put him in good stead for Astaire’s famous gravity-defying dance from 1951’s Royal Wedding.…

THANKSGIVING, THAT MOST American of holidays, is fertile ground for awkward cinematic get-togethers, from Planes, Trains And Automobiles to Paul Blart, Mall Cop. But it’s rarely been as clenched-sphincter awkward as in The Humans, writer-director Stephen Karam’s adaptation of his own one-act play, which sees young couple Brigid (Beanie Feldstein) and Richard (Steven Yeun) host a family dinner at their tiny, creaking, damp Manhattan apartment; as time goes on, it becomes closer to a horror film than a happy family portrait. “I know it’s an obvious word, but [the film] is such a true reflection of human existence,” says Feldstein, the aforementioned co-host. “I feel like it’s a very deep movie and sometimes that means it’s deeply funny and deeply heart-wrenching. But the love between them is so real.” She…

THE SIZE In Lee Child’s bestselling crime-thriller book series, antihero Jack Reacher – an ex-military police major who now roams America, going from place to place and invariably getting involved in all sorts of shenanigans – is 6’5” and 250lbs of eye-bogglingly oversized muscle. He has hands the size of turkeys and chest muscles so thick that they once stopped a bullet. The previous incumbent in the role, Tom Cruise, who starred in two Reacher films, was famously not quite a match for Reacher’s physical attributes. Ritchson meets the criteria. Just. “Barefoot I’m six-three-and-a-half... ish,” he laughs. “When I put boots on I’m six-five. And we decided we’re gonna come in at 235. I walk around at 205, so I wanted to put on some weight. And it shows on…

IF YOU LOVED... SUCCESSION BABYLON (BRITBOX) This 2014 one-series wonder was created by an extraordinary coming together of talents. Succession showrunner Jesse Armstrong and his longtime writing partner Sam Bain worked with director Danny Boyle to make a massively ambitious satirical drama that takes a scalpel to the entire institution of the police force. Tonally, it’s the closest show Armstrong has made to Succession, with each hour-long episode exploring the egomania of those in power, and the bizarre minutiae of daily life at all levels of law enforcement. And what a cast: The OA’s Brit Marling plays an American brought in to handle the force’s PR, and there are juicy roles for James Nesbitt, Daniel Kaluuya and Nicola Walker. BOB SERVANT (AMAZON PRIME VIDEO) Brian Cox is clearly having the…

‘AMERICA’ WEST SIDE STORY(1961/2021) West Side Story was Stephen Sondheim’s first produced gig as a lyricist and, in ‘America’, his genius is fully formed. A verbal tennis match between Puerto Rican girls and boys about the merits of living in America, it has many of the hallmarks of his subsequent work: smart, funny, grown-up. Sondheim’s lyrical dexterity is a major reason the number works so well, be it in the Robert Wise/Jerome Robbins’ rooftop version or Steven Spielberg’s streetset reinvention. LYRIC TO QUOTE: “Skyscrapers bloom in America/Cadillacs zoom in America/ Industry boom in America/Twelve in a room in America.” ‘SEND IN THE CLOWNS’ A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC (1977) Perhaps Sondheim’s most famous song, ‘Send In The Clowns’ from A Little Night Music showcases the composer’s ability to speak directly to…

★★★★ OUT 26 DECEMBER CERT 18 / 108 MINS DIRECTOR Julia Ducournau CAST Agathe Rousselle, Vincent Lindon, Garance Marillier PLOT Erotic dancer Alexia (Rousselle), who has a car fetish, enjoys a sexual liaison with a motor and acts upon her worst murderous impulses in the French region of Martigues. To evade capture, she heads on a bizarre journey that thrusts her into the world of a lonely fire captain (Lindon), where a peculiar bond is formed. OBJECT SEXUALITY, THE romantic attraction to inanimate objects, is hardly the most conventional subject for cinematic exploration, but 2021 has seen the release of two films that shine a light on this taboo desire. While Zoé Wittock’s Jumbo takes a sweet, tender approach to its love story between a young woman and a fairground…

★★★★ OUT NOW (CINEMAS) / 31 DECEMBER (NETFLIX) CERT 15/121 MINS DIRECTOR Maggie Gyllenhaal CAST Olivia Colman, Dakota Johnson, Jessie Buckley PLOT Leda Caruso (Colman) is a professor not far off 50, trying to have some downtime on a solo holiday in Greece. She finds her present upended and past unearthed after the arrival of a mysterious family — in particular Nina (Dakota Johnson), an enigmatic and unpredictable young mother. THE AIR IS salty and the sun is warm, but the fruit bowl is rotting. Something is very wrong for 48-year-old professor Leda (Olivia Colman), who is trying to relax on her “working holiday” on an idyllic Greek island but can’t shake the ghosts of her past. These aren’t just vague, hypothetical fears or regrets — the things haunting Leda…

★★★ OUT NOW CERT 15 / 158 MINS DIRECTOR Ridley Scott CAST Adam Driver, Lady Gaga, Jared Leto, Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons PLOT In Milan, 1978, Patrizia Reggiani (Gaga) meets Maurizio Gucci (Driver), young heir of the formidable fashion dynasty. Maurizio isn’t power-hungry, but Patrizia is more ambitious, and their union soon begins to sizeably shake up the family. Over the next 20 years, everybody involved will see their fortunes changed forever. IT’S PROBABLY THE moment when Lady Gaga and Salma Hayek are having a mud-bath together and talking about casting spells that you realise House Of Gucci never had any designs on normality. Gaga is Patrizia Reggiani, the wronged woman who has turned the fashion world on its head. Hayek is Pina Auriemma, a clairvoyant who somehow becomes embroiled…

OUT 10 JUN In Jurassic World, Owen Grady [Chris Pratt] rode a motorbike alongside his raptor pack. It doesn’t look like he’s having such a good time in this image. What’s going on? It’s a sequence set in Malta. And the picture speaks for itself — it’s Chris Pratt being chased by an Atrociraptor. And if they catch up, he’s gonna die, I can tell you that. In Dominion, you’re letting all of the dinosaurs out of the toy box — they’re now loose all over the planet. How much fun is that? It’s fun. It’s the thing I’ve been waiting to do this whole time, and it really did take two movies of storytelling for this one to work. Now that we’ve justified how this is possible, how dinosaurs…

OUT 11 MAR STRANGE, EMBARRASSING THINGS happen in adolescence. Your body changes, your emotions go haywire, you... turn into a giant red panda? Maybe that last part is only true for the hero of Pixar’s Turning Red. Its director, Domee Shi, is returning to a theme she first explored in the animation studio’s Oscar-winning short film Bao: the delicate bond between mother and child. As with Bao, in which a mother imagines her son as a soft bun she must protect always, the themes are semi-autobiographical. “After Bao, people asked, ‘Why isn’t the bao a girl?’” says Shi. “I said, ‘A short film cannot encapsulate the complexity of a Chinese mother-daughter relationship.’” Turning Red, then, centres on 13-year-old Mei (Rosalie Chiang), whose teenage years are made extra awkward by a…

OUT 11 FEB DIRECTOR RUBEN FLEISCHER BRINGS THE BIG GAME SERIES TO THE BIG SCREEN FOR AS LONG as the Uncharted game franchise has been around (14 years and counting), fans have been clamouring for a big-screen adaptation. It’s not hard to see why: from puzzle-solving quests to taking down a host of bad guys, the adventures of Nathan Drake often feel like playable versions of film series such as Indiana Jones and National Treasure. Now, after years in development hell, the Uncharted faithful get their wish. “When you’re playing the games, it feels like you’re inside a movie, so having the opportunity to bring it to life was a real dream come true,” director Ruben Fleischer tells Empire. Fans of the games will have recognised familiar elements in the…

OUT 08 APR ROBERT EGGERS ON HIS BERSERKER VIKING EPIC ACCORDING TO THE Northman’s official synopsis, Robert Eggers’ third film after the one-two, wham-bam, holy-shit attack of The Witch and The Lighthouse is “an epic revenge thriller that explores how far a Viking prince will go to seek justice for his murdered father”. “It’s Viking Hamlet, ” says Eggers, when we ask him to expand. “That’s the simplest way to put it.” Although it’s not quite that simple. Eggers’ films are always steeped in research, all period-accurate, and all feel something like time-travel. The Witch was like a medieval artefact, The Lighthouse was like a weird piece of film unearthed from the 1890s. And from everything he tells us, The Northman will follow suit. Its roots are in Amleth, a…

THE SPACE RANGER Buzz Lightyear spends a good deal of 1995’s Toy Story convinced he’s more man than plaything, later suffering an existential crisis after realising he is, in fact, a mere toy. The sheer indignity! Now, though, Pixar is taking the character into an even more meta realm, exploring the real (well, you know) person that Buzz was based on. The actual Buzz Lightyear. Got it? This is the core concept behind Pixar’s Lightyear, a leftfield way back to the movie’s universe that takes place in an entire other universe. Yet with the studio coming off a run of original films (taking in 2022’s Turning Red), why go back to the Toy Story well at all? “Buzz is a character I’ve been attached to since I joined the studio…

ILLUSTRATION JAMES DAWE EPIC FANTASY At the height of its popularity, it was reported that each season of Game Of Thrones cost a whopping $90 million. Amazon’s Lord Of The Rings series, though, makes that figure look like spare change: they’ve spent $465 million on what is officially television’s most expensive season ever. That money will very much be on screen: Amazon’s Jennifer Salke says it will ensure “a huge, world-building show”. Spectacle awaits. Still, Thrones is hardly skulking off into the sunset: it’s back too, with prequel House Of The Dragon. Set 300 years before its predecessor, it follows House Targaryen as they head towards the Dance Of The Dragons – a bloody, brutal civil war. Meanwhile, with Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman finally hitting screens, The Witcher prequel Blood…

INDISPENSABLE HOME ENTERTAINMENT “IT’S NICE THAT WE don’t have to talk in code anymore,” laughs Cary Joji Fukunaga, relaxing in a London hotel-room armchair. The reason for his relief: after months of radio silence following the release of No Time To Die — the 25th James Bond film, the fifth and final one to star Daniel Craig, and a movie that rewrites the Bond rulebook in ways ranging from subtle to seismic — the impending home-entertainment release has given the film’s co-writer/director licence to natter. And so Empire jumped at the chance to pump him, and his DP, Linus Sandgren, for information. Needless to say, spoilers follow, so be warned. This is for your eyes only. FLASHBACK No Time To Die isn’t the first Bond movie to open without 007…

Illustration: Jacey Movies of 1997 Chris: What does 1997 mean to you, cinematically speaking? Dan: This was the year I got a proper job in journalism. And I also got married. Alex: I was working at the Prince Charles Cinema in 1997, and I was trying to break into film journalism. It was an amazing place to work. I would just watch films all day long. Helen: I was in my first year of uni, and going to the cinema a lot. In a couple of cases, like The Fifth Element, many times. Chris: I think it’s genuinely a great year, with a really deep bench. It was an incredible year in arthouse terms and for action cinema, there were films that scared me shitless, and it contained, right at…

THIS MONTH’S FILM MOMENTS THAT MATTER AFTER TWO YEARS of living largely online, watching a film about the internet might not sound much like escapism. But Mamoru Hosoda’s Belle — which earned a 14-minute standing ovation at this year’s Cannes — is no gloomy technophobic parable. Instead, this retelling of Beauty And The Beast offers an insightful and epic outlook on the internet’s possibilities. Belle is the avatar of Suzu (voiced by Japanese singer-songwriter Kaho Nakamura), a meek teenager who finds anonymous stardom as a singer in ‘U’, the film’s vast virtual-reality setting, created by Hosoda and London-based architect/illustrator Eric Wong. Here, Hosoda and Wong reveal the blueprints, foundations and philosophies of their online world. THE GENESIS “I find that other directors’ depictions of online worlds tend to be too…

THE PERSONA HALL OF MIRRORS Get lost, literally and figuratively, in our winding hall of mirrors. Lose your sense of self in under a minute, or your money back! THE SEVENTH SEAL CHESS BOARD Pit your wits against a succession of jobbing actors pretending to be Death on our giant-sized board! Small print: if you lose, you will be killed. SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE Our version of a ghost train. As you ride through the enclosure in a Bergmanmobile, images of a disintegrating marriage will pop out at key moments. THE DEVIL’S EYE Feel the wind whip through your hair as you hit speeds of up to 90mph on a vertigo-inducing experience that has nothing to do with the film!…

HALFWAY THROUGH ACCLAIMED new romantic-comedy-drama The Worst Person In The World, everything stops. Our hero, Julie (played by Renate Reinsve) is having a tense conversation with her boyfriend Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie). Dreaming of an impossible affair, Julie imagines the world freezing around her as she runs through the streets of Oslo to have a stolen afternoon with a prospective new love, Eivind (Herbert Nordrum). It’s a bravado set-piece in a largely naturalistic film – but as Norwegian director Joachim Trier explains, it had a Hollywood inspiration. “Y’know, I could talk for hours about the French New Wave or Ingmar Bergman,” says Trier with a laugh. “But honestly, my one main reference for this scene was Ferris Bueller’s Day Off by John Hughes. When Ferris sings ‘Twist And Shout’, and…

ROMOLA GARAI’S CV is not short of English costume dramas: Atonement, Suffragette, the BBC’s Jane Austen adaptation Emma among them. You might be forgiven, then, for thinking her directorial debut would be along similar lines. At one point, she thought so too. “When I started writing in my twenties, I was probably writing more in the space that I had been working in as an actor – doing adaptations of novels,” Garai explains. “But I’ve always had a real love for the uncanny.” Her first film as writer-director, Amulet, is not short of uncanniness. A slow-burn horror about an immigrant (played by God’s Own Country’s Alec Secareanu) escaping the internal demons of war, only to confront a very literal demon, it is unlike anything we’ve seen Garai do before. But…

★★★ OUT 26 DECEMBER CERT TBC / 131 MINS DIRECTOR Matthew Vaughn CAST Ralph Fiennes, Gemma Arterton, Rhys Ifans, Matthew Goode, Tom Hollander, Daniel Brühl PLOT World War I is about to break out. After the loss of his wife in a combat-related accident, the Duke of Oxford (Fiennes) has sworn never to be involved in violence again and to keep his only son Conrad (Dickinson) from joining the military. Hoping he can stop the conflict without bloodshed, the Duke heads a secret mission to bring down its mastermind. A PREQUEL IS generally the lazy option for the third part in a franchise, cobbling together a story of where it all began rather than opting for the more complex task of deciding where it goes next. But Matthew Vaughn’s Kingsman…

★★★★ OUT NOW (CINEMAS / AMAZON PRIME VIDEO) CERT TBC / 125 MINS DIRECTOR Aaron Sorkin CAST Nicole Kidman, Javier Bardem, Jake Lacy PLOT In 1952, at the peak of I Love Lucy’s success, Lucille Ball (Kidman) and Desi Arnaz (Bardem) are about to face the worst week of their career. The media have found out that Lucy has ties to the Communist Party, her pregnancy could nix their show, and the couple’s marriage is about to explode. Nobody is laughing except the studio audience. IN TV TERMS, there has probably never been anybody more famous than Lucille Ball. As television became America’s primary source of entertainment in the 1950s, Ball was its biggest star, the title character of number one show I Love Lucy. At its peak, 75 per…

★★★ OUT 14 JANUARY CERT TBC / 124 MINS DIRECTOR Joe Wright CAST Peter Dinklage, Haley Bennett, Kelvin Harrison Jr, Ben Mendelsohn PLOT Lovelorn poet/soldier Cyrano (Dinklage) is unable to express his deeply buried feelings for childhood pal Roxanne (Haley Bennett). When she falls for Christian (Kelvin Harrison Jr), Cyrano is devastated, but, wanting Roxanne to be happy, helps his romantic rival pen love-letters to woo his own crush. JOE WRIGHT’S CYRANO opens on a beautifully framed image of a marionette. After his mishandled attempt at noir-y thriller The Woman In The Window, the director, whose parents ran a puppet theatre, has returned to more solid, fruitful ground, ironically by embracing his more experimental side: a musical adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac, based on Erica Schmidt’s…

★★★★ OUT NOW (DISNEY+) EPISODES VIEWED 4 OF 6 SHOWRUNNER Jonathan Igla CAST Jeremy Renner, Hailee Steinfeld, Vera Farmiga, Fra Fee PLOT While in New York for the holidays, Clint Barton (Renner) begrudgingly works with aspiring hero Kate Bishop (Steinfeld) to confront old enemies from his past as Ronin, and return home in time to spend Christmas with his family. LET’S BE HONEST. Not many people were thrilled when Hawkeye, aka Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner), was first announced as star of his own television series. Since Natasha (Scarlett Johansson) sacrificed herself for Clint to obtain the Soul Stone in Avengers: Endgame, fans have questioned if the right person was killed off – especially given Clint’s killing-spree as the vengeful vigilante, Ronin, during the Blip. Fortunately, Disney+’s delightfully entertaining Hawkeye paints…

JOHN WICK 4 OUT 27 MAY Few would have expected that Keanu Reeves’ low-budget actioner about a retired assassin avenging his dead dog would turn into a megabucks franchise, but here we are. The ending of Chapter 3 had a presumed-dead John ready to declare war on The High Table, the organisation that governs the criminal underworld, but also betrayed by Winston (Ian McShane), the head of assassin safe-space The Continental. Basically, he’s now an enemy of everyone. Chad Stahelski directs again, with Laurence Fishburne, Lance Reddick and McShane returning alongside Reeves, as well as new cast members Rina Sawayama, Donnie Yen, Bill Skarsgård and Marko Zaror. Expect much pain. KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON OUT TBC After teaming up with Netflix for The Irishman, Martin Scorsese is leaping to…

OUT 18 MAR IN WHICH DOUGLAS BOOTH BATTLES GARDEN-VARIETY GOBLINS IN DIRECTOR JON Wright’s 2012 horror-comedy Grabbers, a small island off the Irish coast is invaded by alcohol-averse aliens, prompting the mother of all lock-ins. In his 2014 follow-up Robot Overlords, the whole Earth has been invaded by robots, putting (quite presciently) the human race on lockdown. And now, rounding out an unlikely invasion trilogy, Wright is back with Unwelcome, a home-invasion horror he tantalisingly describes as “Straw Dogs meets Gremlins”. “The idea of not being safe in your own home – being frightened in the place where you should feel secure – is powerful,” Wright says. For the protagonists of Unwelcome, newlyweds Maya (Hannah John-Kamen) and Jamie (Douglas Booth), fright follows wherever they go. A violent experience in their…

OUT 16 DEC AVATAR OWNED 2009. James Cameron’s blue-people blockbuster ushered in an era of technological change, both in production (performance capture) and exhibition (a boom in 3D) to the tune of $2.847 billion, making it the highest-grossing film in the world. But more than number-crunching, it became a potent reminder of the joys of the big-screen experience (it’s a crime in 17 US states not to use the word “immersive” when writing about it), so much so that the ‘Avatar Blues’ — fans becoming depressed because they couldn’t actually visit the verdant world of Pandora — became a legitimate concern. Yet it’s been 12 years, and Cameron’s clutch of sequels have yet to appear. If you’re concerned a decade’s wait means the director might have missed the moment, Avatar…

OUT 17 JUN THE IRANIAN FAMILY DRAMA THAT WANTS TO MELT YOUR HEART PACK YOUR BAGS and fasten your seatbelts: Panah Panahi’s Hit The Road is about laughing through tears and feeling the wind in your hair, led by a tiny kid hero (six-year-old Rayan Sarlak) enjoying a life-changing car-journey with his family. The roadmovie genre often features heartwarming, galvanising adventures, but for Panahi, one of Iran’s most promising emerging filmmakers, it was made out of necessity. “Many young Iranians cannot project ourselves here anymore,” he tells Empire. “We can’t consider our future at home, so the only way we can do that is by taking the route to move away.” And there’s something vital about the idea of the car as a “second home” too, he says. “The atmosphere…

OUT TBC At what point during The Suicide Squad did you realise you wanted to spend more time with Peacemaker? I think I made jokes about it while we were shooting. I was a big fan as a child of [1979’s] Reb Brown-starring Captain America TV movie. So I imagined doing a very fucked-up version of that, but with Peacemaker, who murders people. His patriotism is a bit more fanatical. So I was joking around on set, and John [Cena] was able to do so much with the character. We didn’t show his background in the same way we saw Bloodsport’s or Ratcatcher’s or Polka-Dot Man’s. I felt there was a lot more to explore. At first it seems like he dies in The Suicide Squad, but then a post-credits…

LEST WE FORGET, thoughtful, bespectacled Swedish director Tomas Alfredson is responsible for two modern genre classics. Clothed in atmosphere, both are haunting studies in loneliness and deception, both adaptations, and both highly personal films. Rising out of television — “I was known for that oxymoron, Swedish comedy!” — Alfredson awoke to find himself an overnight sensation following vampire hit Let The Right One In, based on John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel about a bullied boy who bonds with a very strange girl in wintergripped suburban Stockholm. Resisting the siren call of Hollywood, he then applied an equally vivid gloom to John le Carré’s whack-a-mole spy masterpiece Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. It was if he hadn’t changed genres. He also scored Gary Oldman an overdue Oscar nomination as veteran spook George Smiley…

Steamboat Bill, Jr COMEDY IS A serious business. Buster Keaton knew that as well as anyone, and while his most iconic gag has been literally bringing the house down for nearly a century, the circumstances of its execution and aftermath are enough to leave anyone with an expression like that of The Great Stone Face himself. The climax of Steamboat Bill, Jr (1928) sees a hurricane of biblical proportions tearing the fictional town of River Junction a new one. Willie Canfield Jr (Keaton), having fled a hospital which was uprooted from around him by the storm, is taking stock of his injuries in front of a house on the verge of collapse. In an unfussy, square-on long shot, the entire facade of the house is ripped clean away from the…

ACROSS 1 On Precinct 13 (John Carpenter) (7) 5 Pixar animation that introduces Lightning McQueen (4) 10 The shot that Norma Desmond is ready for (5-2) 11 Night On — (Winona Ryder) (5) 12 Where Krakatoa is in relation to Java, if disaster movies are to be believed (4) 13 Number of monkeys favoured by Terry Gilliam and Bruce Willis (6) 16 Gary, who’s played Winston Churchill and Sid Vicious (6) 18 “You maniacs!” he cried. “You blew it up!” (6) 20/28 Across They call him Mister Tibbs! (6,7) 21 Wilson, who leads the voice cast in 5 Across (4) 25 His name was Montgomery (5) 26 Classic film noir starring Marilyn Monroe (7) 27 Director Glass or actress Byrne (4) 28 See 20 Across DOWN 2 Moira’s are red, while the…