Tabla de contenidos para November 2022 en Empire

WAKANDA FOREVER. Two words, uttered by the great Chadwick Boseman 28 minutes into 2018’s Black Panther, which immediately took on a life of their own. As bold as the film they featured in, they’ve inspired millions, who saw themselves represented on screen at last in a spectacular, huge-budget Black superhero movie. Those words stood for hope, pride, a vibrant new future. But in 2020, with Boseman’s tragic passing, there was suddenly a question mark after them. With its star gone, how could this story possibly go on? Well, fortunately, the answer was already with us, in the form of another quote from Boseman’s T’Challa: “The Black Panther has been a protector of Wakanda for generations. A mantle passed from warrior to warrior.” Yes, director Ryan Coogler has found a way.…

WITH 2017’S AFGHANISTAN-SET The Breadwinner, first-time director Nora Twomey earned an Oscar nomination for a sublime, hand-drawn animated movie that matched its vibrant visuals with tough subject matter (namely an 11-year-old girl’s life under the Taliban). The film was such a success — for both Twomey and Irish animation studio Cartoon Saloon (home also to The Secret Of Kells, which she co-directed, and Wolfwalkers) — you imagine she could have done anything for her next project. So you might wonder why she settled on an adaptation of a whimsical 1948 children’s book (written by Ruth Stiles Gannett) about a ten-year-old boy named Elmer (Jacob Tremblay) who befriends a young, blue-and-yellow-striped dragon called Boris (Gaten Matarazzo) on a fabulous island populated by fierce talking animals. Partly, it offered her the chance…

AT A TIME when the MCU is taking some wild creative swings (see She-Hulk: Attorney At Law), Werewolf By Night might be the wildest. Billed as a Disney+ Halloween special, it’s 53 minutes long, filmed in black and white, and stars Gael García Bernal as the titular terrieriser — sorry, terroriser. This ambitious new venture is the directorial debut from Michael Giacchino, who might just be the best — and busiest — film composer in the business. “This year, I had six movies to score,” he tells Empire (The Batman and Thor: Love And Thunder among them). So why then has he added to his worrying workload by becoming the director of Werewolf By Night, a TV movie that could well be the oddest offering yet from the Marvel Cinematic…

“THINK TERI GARR in Close Encounters, but there’s a deep okayness to her.” Greta Gerwig is describing to Empire her character, Babette, in White Noise, her first on-screen role since 2016’s 20th Centure Women. She pauses: “I guess there’s a deep not-okayness to her as well.” In Noah Baumbach’s apocalyptic comedy (based on Don DeLillo’s book), Babette is, according to Gerwig, “the archetype of an ’80s movie mom”, from her lilac leg-warmers all the way up to an intense perm. Gerwig came up with the idea for the hair herself, while texting with costume designer Ann Roth, who has worked on everything from Midnight Cowboy to Working Girl. “There’s a line in the book about her having ‘important hair’, so I knew that it had to be great.’” The six…

TRAILER TALK Chris Lupton (Creative Director): I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Damien Chazelle is like a new Spielberg. He always has that love of filmmaking that really comes through in his movies. And there’s this romantic notion of what Hollywood was or what it could be. Joanna Moran (Photography Director): And yet his films are so markedly different, you can’t guess what he’s going to do next. Alex Godfrey (Features Editor): Chazelle’s really good at worldbuilding, and every world he creates is different. I’m sure this film will be really rich in that regard. Joanna: This feels like it’s going to be a Hollywood fable, about handsome people who let drugs and power get to their heads. Liz Beardsworth (Production Editor): Well, Babylon is…

Do you have a favourite animal? I was brought up with cats. I find cats fascinating because they’re quite nuts. But I really understand them. In 2002 I got to do a film with tigers [Two Brothers], and Terry the tiger-trainer told me that the reason most people prefer dogs to cats is that cats — big cats — were historically our predators. Whereas dogs weren’t. So, dogs we can bond with, but cats we’re afraid of. For that reason, I find there’s something quite special about connecting with a cat. If you can connect with your predator, that’s pretty exciting. Do you have a nickname? I get called different nicknames by different people. My friend Ben calls me ‘Norbert’. My friend Jim calls me ‘Yug’ — which is ‘Guy’…

★★ OUT 14 OCTOBER / CERT TBC / 130 MINS DIRECTOR Frances O’Connor CAST Emma Mackey, Fionn Whitehead, Oliver Jackson-Cohen Not much is known about Emily Brontë. For her feature directorial debut, Frances O’Connor fabricates a fanciful, invented life for her that never dares to push the limits of acceptability. But this should be Brontë country — Yorkshire, wind, rain, earth and dirt, not clean white sheets and the missionary position. Emily further frustrates by suggesting a woman cannot create art that isn’t directly inspired by real, lived experience — the film’s imagined narrative mirrors that of her masterpiece, Wuthering Heights, with Emily (Emma Mackey) in place of Cathy and a preacher (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) as her Heathcliff. A bold experiment, perhaps, but it leaves us with a film that does not…

★★★★ OUT 14 OCTOBER / CERT TBC / 97 MINS DIRECTOR Shaunak Sen CAST Mohammad Saud, Nadeem Shehzad In Delhi, once declared the most polluted city in the world, birds are falling out of the sky, suffocating on the fumes. In response, two eccentric brothers are trying to help, operating a bird hospital from their tiny basement. Shaunak Sen’s award-winning documentary frames the brothers’ tireless vocation through beautiful cinematography and existential interrogations. The threat of nuclear war, climate change, India’s nationalistic leanings and our relationship with nature are all examined through the care of migratory kites — and despite that weighty set-up, there’s room for idle conversations, games of cricket, and moments of dark humour (a kite nicks one of the brother’s glasses off his face). JN…

★★★★ OUT 21 OCTOBER / CERT TBC 109 MINS DIRECTOR Martin McDonagh CAST Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Kerry Condon, Barry Keoghan PLOT The small Irish island of Inisherin, 1923. Pádraic (Farrell) and Colm (Gleeson) have been friends for as long as anyone can remember. But one day, while civil war rages on the mainland nearby, Colm suddenly announces that the friendship is over. Pádraic is confused and devastated, while Colm starts taking incomprehensibly drastic measures. HOW DO YOU break up with a best friend? It’s a good question, tackled brilliantly by Seinfeld way back in its first season. After all, the rules of social disengagement are pretty clear when it comes to sexual relationships, even more so when they involve divorce. But separating from a buddy you just don’t like…

★★★★ OUT NOW / CERT 12A / 98 MINS DIRECTOR Tom George CAST Sam Rockwell, Saoirse Ronan, David Oyelowo See How They Run is built on a simple but delicious premise: a whodunnit buried inside an actual whodunnit, in this case Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap. It not only gives Tom George’s film many genres to satirise — it’s a backstage drama, crime potboiler and police procedural, all wrapped up in a farce — but allows for a knowing, self-referential quality that brings the conceits and conventions of the murder-mystery to the fore. It doesn’t completely work, but it is fast, funny and frequently stylish, topped off with great work by Sam Rockwell as world-weary Inspector Stoppard and Saoirse Ronan as greenhorn WPC Stalker. They make such an enjoyable duo, in…

★★★★ OUT 30 SEPTEMBER / CERT TBC / 115 MIN DIRECTOR Anthony Fabian CAST Lesley Manville, Isabelle Huppert, Jason Isaacs There’s a Paddington-y loveliness to Anthony Fabian’s adaptation of Paul Gallico’s 1958 novel. Lesley Manville plays a widowed cleaning lady who dreams, for no great reason, of owning a Christian Dior dress, so saves up £500 (it’s set in 1957, when this was a fortune) and heads to Paris to get one. There she meets a cast of extremely Parisian people, including Isabelle Huppert as Dior’s formidable manager, and brightens all their lives with her cockney cheer while boosting her own sense of self-worth. It’s a frothy story anchored by a layered performance by Manville, playing Harris as a woman who stays happy through sheer force of will. And the…

★★★ OUT 30 SEPTEMBER (APPLE TV+) / CERT TBC / 127 MINS DIRECTOR Peter Farrelly CAST Zac Efron, Russell Crowe, Bill Murray, Ruby Ashbourne Serkis PLOT New York, 1967. While drinking at a bar, John ‘Chickie’ Donohue (Efron) hatches a hare-brained plan: travel to the frontline of the Vietnam War and bring his pals a few beers as a show of support. When faced with the reality, however, Chickie’s experience becomes more than just a drunken bet. “DUMBEST THING I ever heard,” is how one character describes the big plan behind The Greatest Beer Run Ever. It seems appropriate that the filmmaker behind it all is something of an expert in the dumb field: Peter Farrelly, the co-director of Dumb And Dumber, among other goofy, gross-out ’90s comedies. But this…

★★★★ OUT NOW (PRIME VIDEO) / EPISODES VIEWED 3 OF 8 SHOWRUNNERS J.D. Payne, Patrick McKay CAST Morfydd Clark, Robert Aramayo, Benjamin Walker, Owain Arthur, Markella Kavenagh, Lenny Henry PLOT Several thousand years before Bilbo and Frodo, Galadriel (Clark) is determined to hunt down her great enemy, Sauron — but her prey is elusive. Elsewhere, a Hobbit-like people called the Harfoots find a mysterious newcomer, while something is seriously wrong in the Southlands… J.R.R. TOLKIEN WAS an Oxford professor of Anglo-Saxon and a philologist; and, by most accounts, a quiet, unassuming man, more at home with his family and his books than travelling the world. He is also almost single-handedly responsible for the high-fantasy genre we know today. So a new TV adaptation from his great epic, even one based…

★★★★ OUT NOW (BBC ONE, iPLAYER) / EPISODES VIEWED 6 OF 6 SHOWRUNNER Ben Chanan CAST Holliday Grainger, Paapa Essiedu, Lia Williams, Andy Nyman, Ron Perlman, Indira Varma, Joseph Arkley PLOT In Series 1, Detective Rachel Carey (Grainger) joined the unit responsible for deep-fake tech to manufacture evidence against its enemies — despite her anger at its use. Now she’s helping the investigation into the murder of a scientist killed by “invisible” assassins, which brings her into the orbit of politician Isaac Turner (Essiedu). IMAGINE YOU’RE A politician about to take part in a live BBC Newsnight interview via Zoom. You’ve prepared your key messaging with your advisors, adrenaline is coursing through you, and you’re as ready as you can ever be to face whatever questions the interviewer is about…

WE TALK TO HIM, LEAD JENNA ORTEGA AND MORE ABOUT GOING FULL GOTH. LET THE SPOOKING COMMENCE... In 1976, I went to a high-school prom,” says Tim Burton, with a tone far from nostalgic. “It was the year Carrie came out. I felt like a male Carrie at that prom. I felt that feeling of having to be there but not being part of it.” He gives a big, rueful smile. “They don’t leave you, those feelings, as much as you want them to go.” We tell this little story not to make your day a bit sadder, but to illustrate just why Burton decided to direct Wednesday, his first TV project. Despite years of fans clamouring for Burton — cinema’s patron saint of the macabre — to make an…

A hotel manager squats determinedly over an open suitcase. It’s the finale of The White Lotus’ first season, and Murray Bartlett’s harried head of staff, Armond, is orchestrating a gleeful act of revenge against a hotel guest. “It’s something that you would have never imagined yourself doing,” Bartlett later told Empire. Indeed. Armond, the suitcase, and its steadily cooling contents all came from the sharp, dark mind of writer/director Mike White. HBO reached out to him in 2020, while on the lookout for a single-location show that could be shot during the pandemic; White, who had been sitting on an idea about money and a couple on their honeymoon, saw an opportunity to shake off his lockdown funk. “I was just so tired of being in my house and felt,…

FOR NEARLY 30 years now, dinosaurs have ruled the box office. With the concluding chapter to his Jurassic World trilogy, filmmaker Colin Trevorrow gave us evolutions and endings — aconclusion for Chris Pratt’s Owen and Bryce Dallas Howard’s Claire; the long-awaited Jurassic Park reunion of Sam Neill’s Alan Grant, Jeff Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm and Laura Dern’s Ellie Sattler; and prehistoric creatures finally roaming the mainland. But it also marked an ending for Trevorrow himself, stepping down from the dino-franchise after a decade of recoding its DNA. Empire sat down with the director in Malta for an honest discussion about closing this chapter, Jurassic World Dominion’s 14-minutes-longer Extended Edition, and whether this really is an extinction event for the Jurassic saga, after all. How are you feeling a few months on…

JOE HILL’S SHORT story The Black Phone is just that: short. Around 30 pages, depending on which format you’re using. So when it came time for the writing duo of director Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill to adapt it for the big screen, they had to generate quite a bit of material themselves. Here, they talk Empire through some of the principles that guided them. FIND A PERSONAL CONNECTION The Black Phone may be Derrickson’s most personal film as a director to date. Which isn’t to say that the experience of central character Finney (Mason Thames), a boy who is kidnapped and imprisoned by masked serial killer The Grabber (Ethan Hawke), echoes Derrickson’s life. But pretty much everything else in the movie does, from the violence of Finney’s upbringing…

Helen: Do you remember a moment when you first became aware of Marilyn Monroe? Ian: Some Like It Hot was always on in my house. It’s my mum’s favourite film. When I was growing up, if you read about Marilyn Monroe, there was no description or conception of her as an actor. It was always about her as a movie star, as a sex bomb, as a tragic icon, but there was very little consideration of her talent. I wonder when that changed? Relatively recently, I would imagine. Christina: She’s always been a part of my consciousness in some way. It’s weird to even imagine the first time I saw her — Ifeel like it must be the iconic Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend pink gown. But in terms…

ARMANDO IANNUCCI: “I’m going to go with a film I’ve grown to really love, Miracle In Milan by Vittorio De Sica. I’d watched Bicycle Thieves and really loved it, and thought, ‘I must watch a few more of this guy’s films.’ It’s really funny, but visually really interesting. There’s an orphan who’s grown up and he befriends this guy and they stay in this little shack on this waste ground. And it’s a cold winter. Someone says, ‘Look! The sunshine!’ And there’s a shaft of sunshine and everyone piles into the shaft of sunlight. I love it. I recommend it to anyone. Anyone who watches this film will be absolutely uplifted by it.” EXT. SHANTYTOWN — DAY In a snowy Italian shanty town, we see a number of dilapidated shacks,…

THIS MONTH’S FILM M OMENTS THAT MATTER IN AN EARLY scene in Tár, Cate Blanchett’s Lydia Tár, a world-renowned conductor, is read a long list of her accomplishments during an onstage interview with The New Yorker. It’s a woman at the top of her game playing a woman at the top of her game. One of them is about to experience a very public fall from grace, while the other, fresh off a Best Actress win at the Venice Film Festival, is probably on her way to winning her third Oscar. The film is a psychological drama from Todd Field, who had almost worked with Blanchett on a 2012 political thriller that didn’t get off the ground. “As soon as I knew Todd was sending me a script, I instinctually…

JODIE WHITTAKER IS not one to play it cool. “I cannot talk about it without crying,” she says, looking away from Empire to take a necessary pause. “I’ve got to get better at this,” she adds, with a tremble of the bottom lip, “because this is the next few weeks for me — talking about my regeneration.” It would take a gargantuan effort for any actor to bow out from one of the most life-changing roles in all of pop culture without getting emotional, but Whittaker, in particular, is all about embracing the moment, revelling in the wild ride. And she’s clear her Doctor is getting the most spectacular of finales. Outgoing showrunner Chris Chibnall has written a 90-minute special which not only brings back two much-loved Who companions, Janet…

ETHAN HAWKE AND Ewan McGregor have much in common. They are both the same age (51). They have both had long, rich careers that blossomed in the mid-’90s. And, er, they both have names that start with ‘E’. Which is why casting them as half-brothers in the new dramedy Raymond & Ray makes such obvious sense. In the film, they’re bickering bros who go on a road trip to bury their estranged late father; in real life, they are easy company, joining Empire for a lively chat. This is the first time you’ve worked together, right? Ewan McGregor: Yeah, amazingly so. Ethan worked with my old mate Jude [Law] a long, long time ago on a film called Gattaca, so we knocked about a bit together then. But I always…

ON HER AUDITIONS I got a call from my agent. He said, “Check your emails!” It was about this [role]. I had to keep it a secret for a year. It didn’t feel real until I got to New Zealand. ON MOVING LIKE A MEERKAT Obviously, Nori’s not a canon character. I wanted to make sure I was respecting Tolkien, and then we could build her from the ground up. Lara, the movement coach, gave us monster slippers and told us to move like a five-year-old child. And we’d watch clips of animals. Meerkats was a big one for me. Really alert. ON SEEING THE SHOW FOR THE FIRST TIME We had a cast screening, and I felt subjective watching it, apart from when I would come on, and then…

STRANGE WORLD MAY have echoes of Indiana Jones or National Lampoon's Vacation as its co-director Qui Nguyen suggests, but this intergenerational, interplanetary adventure is also moving the boundaries of animated storytelling in fresh and innovative directions. A NEW HERO! going through all the same stuff that a of 16-year-olds go through: ‘Who am I?’ ‘What am I doing with my life?’” Sixteen-year-old Ethan (Jaboukie Young-White) is the youngest of the Clades, a family known for its famous explorers, and craves life outside the farm of his dad Searcher (voiced by Jake Gyllenhaal). The wayward teen will also be part of the first openly gay relationship in a Disney feature, although co-director Don Hall confirms that this won’t be his defining feature. “It’s not a coming-out kind of story,” he says.…

BIG SCREEN. SMALL SCREEN. YOUR REVIEWS BIBLE STARTS HERE ★★★★★ EXCELLENT ★★★★ GOOD ★★★ OKAY ★★ POOR ★ AWFUL ★★★★ OUT 7 OCTOBER / CERT 15 / 135 MINS DIRECTOR Gina Prince-Bythewood CAST Viola Davis, Thuso Mbedu, Lashana Lynch, John Boyega, Sheila Atim PLOT Dahomey, the 19th century. An all-female unit of warriors known as the Agojie, led by General Nanisca (Davis), protect the kingdom and its young King Ghezo (Boyega) against the larger Oyo Empire. Sold by her father to the royal guard, young Nawi (Mbedu) joins the unit — just as existential threats to the kingdom grow. “ALL I EVER knew of Africans was slaves,” says Malik (Jordan Bolger) in one scene in The Woman King. He is a Portuguese-African man, and son of a woman stolen from…

★★★★ OUT 30 SEPTEMBER / CERT 15 / 111 MINS DIRECTOR Peter Strickland CAST Fatma Mohamed, Gwendoline Christie, Asa Butterfield In some ways, this is filmmaker Peter Strickland’s most accessible work yet, but it is still defiantly, divinely Stricklandian. It tells the strange tale of a “Sonic Catering Institute”, a quasi-1970s performance art collective dealing primarily in food, sound and sex, documented by a journalist with some unpredictable bowels. There is a straightforward story lurking beneath the abstract imagery: a piece of art about the creation of art, a subversion of, and an embrace of, pseudo-intellectualism. But like any Strickland joint, it is categorically Not For All Viewers — its curious delights include monologues about worrying farts, pillow talk about flangers, and the most grotesque colonoscopy ever filmed. JN…

★★★ OUT 7 OCTOBER / CERT 12A / 108 MINS DIRECTOR Stephen Frears CAST Sally Hawkins, Steve Coogan, Harry Lloyd 2013’s Philomena was a moving and gently funny account of a real-life hunt for a lost son. The creative team behind that film reunite here for another real-life search — this time for the 700-year-old skeleton of Richard III. There’s lots to admire: Sally Hawkins’ performance as the history nerd who found the King’s remains; Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope’s warmly written screenplay; a Hitchcockian score from Alexandre Desplat; the playful inclusion of Richard himself as a twinkly-eyed apparition, played by Harry Lloyd. But the film sometimes struggles to rise above the low stakes of its story. Perhaps the most dramatic scene comes, genuinely, at a Leicester City Council planning…

★★★ OUT NOW / CERT 15 / 123 MINS DIRECTOR Olivia Wilde CAST Florence Pugh, Harry Styles, Olivia Wilde, Chris Pine, Gemma Chan, Timothy Simons, KiKi Layne PLOT Alice (Pugh) and Jack (Styles) are happily married and madly in love, living in a remote company town in the desert. But Alice begins to suspect that all is not quite right with the company, Victory, or its charismatic founder, Frank (Pine). OLIVIA WILDE’S DIRECTORIAL debut, Booksmart, is a delightful portrait of teenage life that constantly sidesteps your expectations to hilarious effect. This follow-up is vastly more ambitious and harder to instantly embrace. The good news is that it shows considerably more ambition and is anchored by an extraordinary performance from Florence Pugh. We open in the apparently ideal community of Victory,…

★★★ OUT NOW / CERT 12A / 108 MINS DIRECTOR Lena Dunham CAST Bella Ramsey, Andrew Scott, Billie Piper The brittle humour of Girls meets the brutal underlying themes of Game Of Thrones in Lena Dunham’s adaptation of Karen Cushman’s Medieval era-set novel. Bella Ramsey plays Lady Catherine, a plucky teen who crushes on local boys but has no intention to wed, to the chagrin of her father (Andrew Scott), who hopes to absolve his debt with her bride price. Meanwhile, her long-suffering but loved-up mother (Billie Piper) endures a string of unsuccessful pregnancies, further adding to Catherine’s disdain for domesticity. This central trio are, despite their hardships, endlessly charming and the actors master the beats of Dunham’s comic writing effortlessly. The film falters tonally though, shoehorning forced feminist flourishes…

★★ OUT NOW (NETFLIX) / CERT 15 / 104 MINS DIRECTOR John Hamburg CAST Kevin Hart, Mark Wahlberg, Regina Hall In one early scene in Me Time, Kevin Hart’s father character, Sonny, tells his child to stop watching videos of stand-up comedians. “Enough with the comedy,” he says — advice which this very unfunny film seems to have taken to heart. Sonny is a stay-at-home parent who never makes time for himself; enter old friend Huck Dembo (a Mark Wahlberg name that might top his Transformers moniker, Cade Yeager), the macho man-child who can show Sonny the errors of his domestic ways with a week of debauchery. There’s a birthday celebration that’s more Fyre Festival than Coachella, a bizarre cameo from Seal, and an alarming amount of supposedly amusing animal…

★ OUT NOW / CERT 15 / 88 MINS DIRECTOR Michael Flatley CAST Michael Flatley, Eric Roberts, Patrick Bergin, Nicole Evans Cheapo James Bond knock-off Blackbird is unequivocally un film de Michael Flatley, the dancer-choreographer acting as star, writer, executive producer and director. Flatley is Victor Blackley, aka Blackbird, a former secret agent who, following the murder of his fiancée by terrorists, leaves the spy life and starts a nightclub in the Caribbean — like a Poundland Rick Blaine. The writing is as leaden as Flatley’s footwork was light, and some of the dialogue is so tin-eared it could have been written on the yellow brick road to Oz (“Bless me father for I have sinned… and I’m about to sin again!”). Down the line there will be glorious participation…

★★★★ OUT NOW (DISNEY+) / EPISODES VIEWED 7 OF 7 SHOWRUNNER Jonathan E. Steinberg CAST Jeff Bridges, John Lithgow, Alia Shawkat, Amy Brenneman PLOT Ever since Dan Chase (Bridges) absconded from the CIA decades ago he has been living off the grid. When an assassin tries to kill him, the ageing operative realises that to ensure his future he now must reconcile his past — which includes a reckoning with his closest family. PLENTY OF VETERAN actors have pivoted to become out-and-out action stars in their later years, and The Old Man sees Jeff Bridges join the likes of Liam Neeson and Bob Odenkirk among the ranks of geriaction heroes. He’s certainly had his moments in the past (True Grit, Blown Away, Iron Man), but The Old Man takes Bridges’…

“‘HOW DO YOU CARRY ON IN THE FACE OF SEEMINGLY INSURMOUNTABLE ODDS?’” Each time he begins writing a movie, Ryan Coogler poses a personal question he wants to find the answer to. For Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, he tells Empire, it was that one. Yet he had no idea how personal it would turn out to be. Or how insurmountable the odds would get. “Unfortunately, that question became more and more relevant. Both for humanity as a whole,” he says, referring to the pandemic that came out of nowhere, “but also for the people in our production who were coming back for this one. It became super-relevant when we lost our bro.” Unbeknownst to anyone in Hollywood, Chadwick Boseman had been defying the odds for years. Though he was diagnosed…

IT’S 14 YEARS since Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson and writer-director Martin McDonagh headed to Belgium to debate whether or not the pretty medieval town of Bruges was, in fact, “a shithole”. In Bruges, McDonagh’s feature debut back in 2008, was a cult hit almost instantly, beloved for its stout-black sense of humour, revealing performances, unique take on the crime genre, and endlessly quotable dialogue (“You’re an inanimate fucking object!”). As that film’s cachet grew over the years, so did the call for a reunion. Farrell and McDonagh did team up again, on 2012’s Seven Psychopaths, while Gleeson worked with the older McDonagh brother, John Michael, on The Guard and Calvary. But though they didn’t lose touch, the original Bruges trio never found a way to rekindle that cobbled spark. Now,…

THE ULTIMATE STORY of he said, she said, he said and, er, he said, Rashomon is beyond a masterpiece. It is “the classic film statement of the relativism, the unknowability of truth”, according to critic Pauline Kael. Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 feature concerns the murder of a samurai in 11th-century Japan, the rape of his wife and the contrasting viewpoints of those involved. But it was a defiant battle on the part of the legendary auteur to secure his vision, with the odds against him. Disappointed by the end product of Scandal, his first 1950 release with Daiei Film studios, about the destructive force of the post-war tabloid press, Kurosawa came across a script by novice screenwriter Shinobu Hashimoto. Based on the short story In A Grove by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, it…

EVERY WEREWOLF MOVIE makes a promise: whatever else the film delivers, there will be a transformation. But the first, perhaps only, film to really deliver on that pledge was John Landis’ An American Werewolf In London. Unsurprising, since it turns out the iconic sequence was nearly a decade in the making. “John and I were shooting Schlock in 1973 and John said he’d written a werewolf movie,” special make-up effects director Rick Baker tells Empire. “We thought, ‘It doesn’t make sense if during this hideous transformation, you would sit in a chair and be still.’ He said, ‘I want him to be able to move around, I want to show the pain. How would you do that?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, but I’d like the chance to try.’” By…

VORTEX OUT NOW / CERT 15 / 142 MINS Vortex’s split-screen aside, notorious writer-director Gaspar Noé ditched the bells and whistles (and the sex and violence) for this devastating portrayal of an old Parisian couple succumbing to illness. Sounds like a good time, right? Clearly it isn’t — it’s unprecedentedly bleak. But it’s also so raw, so honest: an unflinching, unsanitised heartbreak. And in that respect, it’s just as extreme as Noé’s former work. The split-screen works wonders, providing two different perspectives but also dissonance, as these two terrific actors (Dario Argento and Françoise Lebrun) potter about their apartment, going through, as things develop, hell. So yes, it’s the downer of all downers, but if you’re up for that, it’ll fill your heart — and soul. ALEX GODFREY BRIAN AND…

IF YOU’VE SPOTTED Daniel Radcliffe looking anxious at an airport over the last year or two, there’s a good reason for that. “I travelled with an accordion so much for this film,” says the frontman of Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, “and had this major fear of going through security and them suspecting it was a bomb.” In this nightmare scenario, airport agents would challenge him to play the instrument in front of the entire queue. “You know, to prove it’s not an explosive,” laughs Radcliffe. “Do you know how stressful that would be?! It’s a very difficult instrument to play!” Welcome to the challenging task of playing one of the most unusual artists in pop-music history, in a biopic so batshit-crazy it threatens to make Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis look…

SHE SAID SOPHIE BUTCHER SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR Do you remember where you were the day The New York Times’ story on Harvey Weinstein’s decades of sexual assault broke, and changed Hollywood forever? Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor’s investigation gets the big-screen treatment with She Said, starring Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan as the two writers alongside a stellar supporting cast. High-stakes-journalism movies are often tense, thrilling and surprisingly cinematic — but to what degree can Hollywood really examine its own failings? It’s going to be intriguing to find out. LIVING JOHN NUGENT REVIEWS EDITOR For those who think that remakes have gone too far, here is a proposition much too intriguing to ignore: a new take on Akira Kurosawa’s profound 1952 drama Ikiru (itself based on a Leo Tolstoy novella),…

IF YOU LOVED... THE CAPTURE STRIKE (BBC iPLAYER) Before The Capture, Holliday Grainger was best known for her role as Robin Ellacott alongside Tom Burke’s private detective, Cormoran Strike, in the classy BBC series based on the books by J.K. Rowling, writing as Robert Galbraith. And as charismatic as Burke is as the bedraggled Cormoran, for many Strike fans, Grainger is the best thing about the whole show. Underpinning the crime-case storylines is Robin’s emotional arc — her feelings caught between her dullard of a fiancé, Matthew (Kerr Logan), and her essentially inappropriate boss, Strike. She’s also a pretty effective sleuth to boot. PRESS (PRIME VIDEO/SKY STORE) The Capture’s Series 2 guest lead is Paapa Essiedu, who previously dazzled us in Sky’s high-concept sci-fi drama The Lazarus Project and Michaela…

NICOLAS WINDING REFN’S neon-drenched, ultra-violent Drive is a defining film of the 2010s, and firmly established the filmmaker as a leading name in millennial neo-noir. Over a decade later, and with equally grisly, hyper-stylised titles like Only God Forgives and Prime Video series Too Old To Die Young under his belt, Refn’s love of the genre remains steadfast. “Noir is a celebration of the darker side of human characters — that’s where the great drama exists,” Refn tells Empire. Yet with Copenhagen Cowboy — asix-part series for Netflix — the Danish auteur updates familiar territory with a superhero edge. The drama, in this case, unfurls across Copenhagen’s criminal underworld, as seen through the eyes of one of the show’s lead characters, the vengeful Miu (Angela Bundalovic). In many ways Miu…

“I’LL BE A son-of-a-bitch, you killed me,” says the least lucky man in the climactic showdown that has been building since Dead For A Dollar’s opening scene. Yes, Walter Hill is back after six years with this Western throwback starring Christoph Waltz, Willem Dafoe and Rachel Brosnahan, and he’s doing what he does best: orchestrating hard-boiled, dust-strewn mayhem. Even when working in other genres, Hill has always had one spur-adorned foot in the Western, using pithy existential dialogue in starkly framed scenarios as old scores are settled in a stripped-down moral universe. Consider the tense simplicity of the Coney Island face-off in The Warriors, or the way Bruce Willis’ wanderer Smith and Patrick Kilpatrick’s Irish mobster Finn circle each other in Last Man Standing. It’s exciting, then, to see him…

AUGUST 1969 The Haunted Mansion ride in Disneyland, California opens to the public. Designed by the park’s early Imagineers (attraction engineers) it sees visitors encounter eerie phantoms, a killer bride and the Hatbox Ghost. The ride remains popular today; families are even known to travel to it to scatter loved ones’ ashes. NOVEMBER 2003 Eddie Murphy stars in the first movie adaptation of the ride as a work-hungry realtor trying to reconnect with his family on vacation at the spooky residence. The film flops with critics, but its gruesome creations from horror effects legend Rick Baker gain cult appeal with the generations who grew up watching it. JULY 2010 Guillermo del Toro announces he will be writing and producing his own Haunted Mansion adaptation, yet the filmmaker’s schedule delays development.…

★★ OUT NOW (DISNEY+) / CERT U / 105 MINS DIRECTOR Robert Zemeckis CAST Tom Hanks, Benjamin Evan Ainsworth, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Cynthia Erivo, Luke Evans PLOT It’s the olden days, and in old-timey Italy, old-timer Geppetto (Hanks) builds a small, wooden puppet named Pinocchio (Ainsworth). Soon agog at the outside world, Pinocchio is tempted by fun, games and all manner of naughtiness, striding out on his own — to the dismay of his broken-hearted father. ONCE UPON A time, Walt Disney Pictures began producing so-called live-action remakes of their animated classics. Beauty And The Beast, The Lion King, The Jungle Book, Aladdin… on it goes, until we forget there was ever such a thing as hand-drawn animation. They’ve been so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop…

★★★ OUT NOW / CERT 15 / 100 MINS DIRECTOR Kevin Smith CAST Brian O’Halloran, Jeff Anderson, Jason Mewes, Kevin Smith, Rosario Dawson, Trevor Fehrman PLOT Over a decade after buying the Quick Stop for themselves, Dante (O’Halloran) and Randal (Anderson) are still working the convenience-store clerk life between bouts of rooftop hockey. But when Randal suffers a massive heart attack, he finds a new purpose: making a movie about a pair of convenience-store clerks at the Quick Stop. KEVIN SMITH HAS always had a tendency for self-mythologising. Back in 1994, he shot Clerks on a wing, a prayer, and a mountain of credit-card debt — turning his behind-the-counter experiences into a generation-defining slacker comedy, filmed through the night at the real-life Quick Stop shop he once worked at in…

★★★★ OUT NOW / CERT 15 / 107 MINS DIRECTOR Scott Mann CAST Grace Caroline Currey, Virginia Gardner, Jeffrey Dean Morgan Fall is a ruthlessly efficient genre exercise, a movie only interested in making your palms leak sweat and your adrenal glands go into overdrive. Hunter (Virginia Gardner) is a thrill-seeking YouTuber chasing clout by clambering up an abandoned 2,000-foot TV tower; her best pal Becky (Grace Caroline Currey) is a grieving widower seeking closure after tragedy hit a year earlier. Sure enough, the rusty steel cables soon start rattling, and so do your nerves, leaving the pair stranded up high, and us under no illusions as to what kind of film this is. It hardly matters if the plot is somewhat formulaic because the experience is so richly, stupidly,…

★★★ OUT NOW / CERT 15 / 93 MINS DIRECTOR Baltasar Kormákur CAST Idris Elba, Sharlto Copley, Iyana Halley In Beast, one character briefly wears a Jurassic Park T-shirt. Sure enough, this film about a family on a safari-gone-wrong starts with ooohs and aaahs, and, later, there’s running and screaming. Putting in the kind of gruffly amiable performance that has become his speciality, Idris Elba plays a good-hearted but emotionally troubled father; Sharlto Copley is the game warden who with him fends off a vengeful lion. The plot sails along with few surprises and a final showdown that is occasionally quite silly — yes, Idris Elba really does straight-up punch a lion in the face — but as far as trashy blockbuster entertainment goes, this is uncomplicated fun, an old-fashioned…

★★★ OUT NOW (NETFLIX) CERT 18 / 167 MINS DIRECTOR Andrew Dominik CAST Ana de Armas, Adrien Brody, Bobby Cannavale, Xavier Samuel, Julianne Nicholson PLOT Los Angeles, 1933. A little girl called Norma Jeane Baker is terrorised by her mentally unwell mother; this little girl grows up to be screen legend Marilyn Monroe (de Armas). We follow her journey from early roles and early lovers, all the way through to Some Like It Hot and encounters with JFK. OPENING WITH SCENES of child abuse, Andrew Dominik’s Blonde starts as it means to go on: by inviting us to browse an extensive rogues’ gallery of people who wronged Marilyn Monroe. These people range from the lightly patronising or averagely sexist, all the way through to the perpetrators of physical and sexual…

★★★ OUT 30 SEPTEMBER / CERT 15 / 101 MINS DIRECTOR Alli Haapasalo CAST Aamu Milonoff, Eleonoora Kauhanen, Linnea Leino It is both a blessing and a curse that there are now tons of stories about young women growing up, as said stories have to shine to stand out. Alli Haapasalo’s Girls Girls Girls takes a slice-of-life approach, trusting in the charisma of her central trio. Linnea Leino stands out as figure skater Emma, who’s exploring her queer sexuality when she meets Mimmi (Aamu Milonoff), and there’s reflection on asexuality through Eleonoora Kauhanen’s Rönkkö. But the film’s script isn’t quite sharp enough for it to sing, instead offering a modest exploration of these characters’ world. Still, it’s perhaps not always necessary to break the mould, and Girls Girls Girls sits…

FUNNILY ENOUGH, THE DECISION TO MAKE DECISION TO LEAVE, which in some respects is the most Korean of all my films, was made in London. This was in August 2018, when I was in post-production on The Little Drummer Girl for the BBC. My screenwriting partner, Chung Seo-kyung, who has worked with me on the scripts for Lady Vengeance, I’m A Cyborg But That’s OK, Thirst and The Handmaiden, was in town on holiday. The sudden arrival of an old friend from my homeland, at a time when I was overwhelmed by work, sparked my motivation. That is, to start on my next film. (I’m a little bit embarrassed by the fact that when I’m exhausted from work, my chosen means of recovery is not rest, but to take up…

IT IS THE early autumn of 1978, Clairemont High School, San Diego, and the first day of the new school year is getting underway. In the parking lot, kids gather next to the smattering of cars paid for with the proceeds of tedious summer jobs. At the food court, last year’s tribes re-establish their old territories or try to mark fresh ones. And then there are the new kids, wandering the halls, clutching schedules and notebooks, scoping the social topography while trying all the while to melt into the background. Among them is Dave Cameron. He’s clad in the standard SoCal high-school student uniform of the era: carefully curated T-shirt, jeans, standard-issue footwear — Kickers or Keds. He’s a typical kid: quietly spoken, with a soft, oval face and watchful,…

23/3/10 BORN IN TOKYO, JAPAN 1943 THE YEAR HIS FIRST MOVIE, SANSHIRO SUGATA, IS RELEASED 30 Number of full-length theatrical films he directed 100 Number of favourite films he listed in a chapter of 1999 book Yume Wa Tensai De Aru. The films spanned from 1919 to 1997, and he limited himself to one per director. 148 THE NUMBER OF DAYS IT TOOK TO FILM SEVEN SAMURAI 16 Number of films he made with Toshiro Mifune (Drunken Angel was their first, in 1948; Red Beard was their last, in 1965) 1993 THE YEAR HIS FINAL MOVIE, MADADAYO, WAS RELEASED 1 NUMBER NUMBER NUMBEROF OSCAR SHE RECEIV ED(AN HONORARY AWARD IN 1990; HE WAS NOMINATED JUST ONCE, FOR BEST DIRECTOR FOR 1985’S RAN) 6/9/98 DIED IN…

WE’LL COME RIGHT out with it: Brian And Charles is the feel-good film of the year. The very funny, very sweet British buddy comedy, directed by Jim Archer and written by Chris Hayward and star David Earl — and inspired by their 2017 short — has it all: sci-fi (well, a homemade robot called Charles), action (specifically: cabbage guns) and romance (that bit’s pretty traditional, at least). Here, Earl tells us what the hell he was playing at. REFINING BRIAN Loosely, Earl’s Brian is Brian Gittins, the character he’s played on stage and screen for years, often for Ricky Gervais in the likes of After Life. Here, though, he went for something sweeter. “We just wanted to make him more likable,” he says. “I’ve got three boys, and two of…

“I’M TRYING TO be more focused,” says Baz Luhrmann, before adding with a laugh, “Not possible. You’ve seen my movies, right?” We have. And the Australian auteur’s latest is Elvis, a two-and-a-half-hour biopic of the King Of Rock ’N’ Roll, Elvis Presley. A dizzying, none-more-Baz-like roulette-wheel-spin through Presley’s life, it features a great central performance from Austin Butler, and a number of key performances from Presley’s career, some of which happened, some of which didn’t. We asked Luhrmann, in his inimitable, long-way-round, trying-to-be-more-focused, scenic-route way, to talk us through five of the best. AN AMERICAN TRILOGY The first time we hear Elvis’ voice in Elvis is over the opening salvo of studio logos, with a brief burst of ‘Suspicious Minds’. But that’s just a tease. The first time we really…

ACROSS 1/27 Across He asked, “You talkin’ to me?” (6,6) 4 Occupation of a Great Dictator’s double and a Man Who Wasn’t There (6) 8 Identity — (Melissa McCarthy) (5) 9 Miloš Forman’s eight-times Oscar-winner (7) 11 Alain, who directed Last Year At Marienbad (7) 12 It’s the Warmest Colour (4) 15 First name of Marty McFly’s pal Doc Brown (6) 17/26 Across Halloween Ends with Jamie Lee Curtis back in this role (6,6) 19 Henry Pym, who developed the Ant-Man suit (4) 20 Kurosawa film that was unofficially remade as A Fistful Of Dollars (7) 24 Kathryn Bigelow drama about the 1967 race riot in its titular city (7) 25 Her name was Bow (5) 26 See 17 Across 27…