Table of contents for October 2022 in Empire

“AS THIS YEAR’S brain-meltingly hot summer fades away (was it just me or did it feel like we’d been beamed into the climax of Sunshine?), winter approaches, and with it all its cosy seasonal joys. Mugs of hot chocolate, scarf-wrapped walks in the park, and films where people get horribly slaughtered in the first act. Yes, nothing says “the holidays are coming” quite like a murder-mystery, that classic genre that mixes up sparkling dialogue with guns, poisons and assorted stabby objects. Which is why we’re very excited indeed to take you to the scene of the crime for Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. AS THIS YEAR’S brain-meltingly hot summer fades away (was it just me or did it feel like we’d been beamed into the climax of What exactly…

THIS MONTH’S FILM MOMENTS THAT MATTER KEATON. AFFLECK. PATTINSON. Reeves (Matt). Reeves (Keanu). It’s a demanding time to be a Batman fan — to keep track of everything going on requires a regularly updated Bat-planner. These days, including TV and big-screen animation, there are a possible six Batmen in play (not to mention a Batdog). Adding to the potential confusion is the recent merger of Warner Bros. with reality-based streaming giant Discovery, prompting a slew of cancelled projects and the announcement of a new ten-year plan for the DC Universe. So what exactly is going on? We attempt to unravel this Riddler-level mystery… BATGIRL IS CANCELLED The 95-per-cent finished film starring Leslie Grace, DC’s first Afro-Latina lead, as vigilante Barbara Gordon, and directed by Ms. Marvel favourites Bilall Fallah and…

LUCY GRAY BAIRD RACHEL ZEGLER Zegler will play The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes’ female lead, described by director Francis Lawrence as “the anti-Katniss”. A tribute for the tenth annual Hunger Games (set 64 years before the original film), Lucy is mentored by an 18-year-old President Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth), here an impoverished orphan hoping to reinvigorate his family’s status. DR VOLUMNIA GAUL VIOLA DAVIS The film’s major villain, Davis is the head of these Hunger Games, tasked with taking the most brutal elements of human nature and turning them into sport. CASCA HIGHBOTTOM PETER DINKLAGE The founder of the Hunger Games and Dean of the Academy, the prestigious high school belonging to privileged city the Capitol, Highbottom is the definition of a wrong’un. Described as “austere and vindictive” by…

Something’s come between old pals Colm (Brendan Gleeson) In 2017, Martin McDonagh unleashed Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, a fiery crime drama which won Oscars for two of its actors (Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell) and earned its budget back ten times over at the box office. The British-Irish writer-director scored the biggest hit of his career. After success like that, the world was his oyster. So why is his follow-up, The Banshees Of Inisherin, a quiet period drama set on a rural island near Galway in the 1920s? Or, as one of those billboards put it: how come, Chief Willougby? “I mean, I loved everything that happened with Three Billboards,” McDonagh explains to Empire, “but it was all unexpected. I actually think this is a really good way to…

IF YOU LOVED... BETTER CALL SAUL THE LONE GUNMEN (DVD) Unbelievably unavailable on any streaming or digital platform, but at least easily found on DVD, this one-season wonder of a spin-off from The X-Files remains one of Better Call Saul co-creator Vince Gilligan’s proudest achievements, despite disappointing ratings. “I would hold The Lone Gunmen up against anything that I have done before or since,” he said recently, and, along with fellow co-creators Chris Carter, John Shiban and Frank Spotnitz, he helped maintain a high level of smart writing, wry humour and inventive visuals across 13 fine episodes involving the trio of conspiracy-theory experts. FARGO: SEASON 1 (NETFLIX) The series that defines Bob Odenkirk outside Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul is, of course, the ridiculously funny Mr. Show, but if…

DID YOU KNOW that nurse Charles Cullen killed probably ten times as many people as Ted Bundy? Krysty Wilson-Cairns didn’t. The Oscar-winning screenwriter behind Last Night In Soho fell down the rabbit hole of the American healthcare system after reading about Cullen, the most prolific killer in US history, in Charles Graeber’s 2013 book, The Good Nurse. And what she learned inspired her to write a new kind of thriller. “I was adamant I wasn’t going to write another serial-killer movie,” Wilson-Cairns tells Empire about the film, due to screen at this year’s BFI London Film Festival, which casts Eddie Redmayne as Cullen and Jessica Chastain as Amy Loughren, the nurse who helped catch him. “It’s about systems failing people. In this case it’s healthcare systems, but systems failing us…

WHERE? Duxford Airfield, Cambridge. WHEN? 11 May 2021. WHY? To visit the set of Sally El Hosaini’s Syrian-refugee biopic, which follows two swimming sisters on a harrowing journey from war-torn Damascus to the 2016 Rio Olympics, where one competed. With three siblings himself, screenwriter Jack Thorne understood how to showcase Yusra and Sarah Mardini’s story, tracking their emotional departure from home, familial tension, and water-based acts of heroism. But Welsh-Egyptian El Hosaini has helped Thorne to authentically represent these Middle-Eastern women: “They’re like my friends and the people I grew up with,” she says. WHO DID WE SEE? Rising Lebanese star Manal Issa (Parisienne, The Sea Ahead) and her sister Nathalie play Sarah and Yusra respectively, and their sibling energy is evident as they bound onto set. Army Of The…

BEFORE WALKING THE halls of Rydell High School in Grease in 1978, Olivia Newton-John was a wholesome, Grammy-winning country singer with seven US number-one singles under her belt. Yet as Sandy — aka the painfully prim Sandra Dee — Newton-John turned in an astonishing, surprising and career-defining performance. We hail three of the key moments. THE DRIVE-IN Newton-John — aself-described girl next door who made an impression upon the film’s producer, Alan Carr, at a dinner party — was 29 when she was offered the role of high-school sweetheart Sandy opposite John Travolta’s heartbreaker Danny. The scene the pair acted out in their screen test — in which Danny and Sandy set off on an ill-fated date to the drive-in — proved such a hit that Carr claims it wasn’t…

★★★★ OUT 17 SEPTEMBER CERT TBC / 140 MINS DIRECTOR Brett Morgen CAST David Bowie PLOT A new documentary about the life and work of the late, great pop pioneer David Bowie, created by Kurt Cobain: Montage Of Heck director Brett Morgen, with the backing of Bowie’s estate and featuring a wealth of rare and never-before-seen footage. WHILE DAVID BOWIE’S reputation as one of the greatest, most influential musicians of the 20th century remains unassailable, cynics might ask why we need another film about him. There have already been more than a dozen mostly made-for-TV documentaries profiling Brixton-born Bowie, as well as Gabriel Range’s misfiring 2020 biopic Stardust and Todd Haynes’ vivid, fictionalised version of Bowie and his glam-rock cohorts in Velvet Goldmine. Crucially, Range and Haynes weren’t allowed to…

★★ OUT 2 SEPTEMBER / CERT 18 / 117 MINS DIRECTOR John Michael McDonagh CAST Ralph Fiennes, Jessica Chastain, Matt Smith, Christopher Abbott PLOT On their way to a lavish party in the desert, a wealthy husband (Fiennes) and wife (Chastain) hit a young Moroccan boy with their car and kill him. The festivities go on while the husband seeks his redemption. THE TOXICITY OF white privilege and wealth seems to be having an on-screen moment. From Rian Johnson’s upcoming Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery to HBO’s comedy drama The White Lotus to Swedish provocateur Ruben Östlund’s Triangle Of Sadness, stories about the misdeeds and bigotry of the upper classes have become a mainstay of our cultural landscape. The latest work from John Michael McDonagh (The Guard, Calvary) treads…

★★★★ OUT 16 SEPTEMBER / CERT TBC / 86 MINS DIRECTOR Owen Kline CAST Daniel Zolghadri, Matthew Maher, Miles Emanuel No capes in this comic-book adaptation — instead, an excruciating, frantic and very funny tale about an arrogant, adolescent cartoonist and an infinite saga of horrendous decisions. A fan of gross-out comics, teenager Robert (Daniel Zolghadri) hurtles into a life of squalor, in the hopes of crafting art out of the pain. Robert’s world is a clammy, puerile place filled with characters lifted from his beloved pages; their wild curls, oily comb-overs and wide, bouncing eyes matching his caricatured drawing style. Although occasionally more like a set of sketches than a fully shaded story, Robert’s odyssey of sweat, ink and self-destructive pretentiousness is both cartoonish and compelling. One of the…

★★★ OUT 16 SEPTEMBER / CERT 12A / 91 MINS DIRECTORS Kentucker Audley, Albert Birney CAST Kentucker Audley, Grace Glowicki, Penny Fuller, Reed Birney It’s 2035, and James Preble (played by co-director Kentucker Audley) is a taxman, tasked with auditing people’s uploaded dreams. His lonely existence could do with some magic and, well, he gets it, when he’s assigned to investigate the elderly Bella Isadora (Penny Fuller). Stepping inside her dreams, he meets her younger incarnation (Grace Glowicki), and a surreal, subconscious romance blossoms. The filmmakers are clearly in thrall to the likes of Charlie Kaufman, Michel Gondry and David Lynch, but Strawberry Mansion doesn’t quite get there — it’s a little too kooky (and frankly too cheap) to manage it. However, this is a gentle, sweet film, which is…

★★★ OUT NOW / CERT 15 / 98 MINS DIRECTOR William Brent Bell CAST Isabelle Fuhrman, Julia Stiles, Rossif Sutherland This delayed follow-up to 2009’s Orphan is a better, weirder film. CGI, body-doubling and trick angles let the indispensible but now grown-up Isabelle Fuhrman reprise her role as Leena, a 30-year-old homicidal maniac whose growth-arresting medical condition allows her to pass for a child. Drawing from documentary The Imposter, Orphan: First Kill has the waif pose as the missing daughter of a rich family. And evoking Hammer’s Paranoiac, the ostensible villain turns detective as Leena wonders why some members of her new family eagerly accept her while others seethe. It defaults to the murder-every- 15-minutes horror sequel template, but Fuhrman’s calm malice remains fresh. Clever, unpredictable and gruesome. KN…

★★★★ OUT NOW (APPLE TV+) / EPISODES VIEWED 10 OF 10 SHOWRUNNER Sharon Horgan CAST Sharon Horgan, Anne-Marie Duff, Sarah Greene, Eva Birthistle, Eve Hewson, Claes Bang, Brian Gleeson, Daryl McCormack PLOT Nobody liked John Paul (Bang): he made life a misery for his wife, Grace (Duff), and was always arguing with her sisters. After his death, it seems everything is finally okay, but the men due to pay out on his life insurance suspect murder — and they think Grace’s sisters may be hiding something. A DISTRAUGHT WIDOW tenderly strokes the hair of her newly dead husband, then urgently tries to hide his sudden, rigor mortis-induced erection before the funeral guests arrive. That opening moment gives you the exact tone of Sharon Horgan’s latest. Like most Horgan creations, Bad…

THE DUST HAS SETTlED Or has it? It’s been five years since The Last Jedi was released. The sequel trilogy wrapped up in 2019. Lucasfilm and Disney+ are wheeling out Star Wars shows like they’re trying to complete the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs. Rian Johnson has moved on, and is in the midst of an already hugely successful murder-mystery franchise. And yet… and yet. We wanted to revisit The Last Jedi because a) we love it so, and b) it’s hard to think of another recent Star Wars outing that has inspired quite so much discussion. And there was so much discussion. “Still is!” laughs Rian Johnson. Yes. There very much is. The Last Jedi fires people up. Passions still run high for the film that took…

FOR MORE THAN A DECADE, Andrew Dominik kept having ideas about Blonde. It was, frankly, inconvenient. He had first written the script for his adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ sprawling 2000 novel of the same name, an examination of celebrity, trauma and self-invention told through the story of Marilyn Monroe, in 2008. But fresh additions and tweaks occurred to him regularly. “The book will take a chapter of her life and it’s like a broken mirror; there are these shards,” says Dominik. “The thing I liked about the book was the opportunity within it to detail the childhood drama and some mistaken ideas that she inherits from her mother, and then to show an adult life through the lens of those ideas. It’s this whirlwind of anxiety, trying to pull…

INDISPENSABLE HOME ENTERTAIN MENT THESE DAYS, WHEN it doesn’t seem you can so much as open the fridge without finding a new Star Trek project in development next to the milk, it’s hard to believe that in the early 1980s the franchise was at death’s door. Cancelled in 1969 after three seasons and 79 episodes, attempts to revive it both as a low-budget movie and a new series had foundered. Worse was to come. Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) was a $40 million damp squib, lambasted by critics for its glacial pacing. But it made enough for a sequel in 1982, with creator Gene Roddenberry gently moved aside in favour of executive producer Harve Bennett and director Nicholas Meyer. And with Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan —…

Angels With Dirty Faces WHEN JAMES CAGNEY was a dirt-poor kid growing up in inner-city New York, he would see a sharply dressed pimp called ‘Smoke’, standing on a Yorkville street corner. Keeping one eye on his employees and the other out for the law, Smoke would hitch up his electric-blue suit, roll his shoulders, and greet passing friends with the words, “Whaddaya hear? Whaddaya say?” When Cagney, now aged 38 and a major star at Warner Bros., set about reinventing the screen gangster with Rocky Sullivan in Angels With Dirty Faces, he appropriated the hitch, the shoulder-roll and the catchphrase. Rocky may have had a code of honour, a legitimate grievance with society, and a priest for a best pal, but he also had the manners and mannerisms of…

BEFORE PARASITE, THERE was a pig. Two years before Bong Joon-ho became an unlikely household name with Parasite’s unprecedented commercial, critical and Academy-Award-winning success, the Korean filmmaker made one of the most idiosyncratic films of his career with Okja. Given it’s a CV which has also included an apocalyptic future-train (Snowpiercer) and a sea-monster that kidnaps children (The Host), that’s pretty darn idiosyncratic. Released on Netflix in 2017, Bong’s sixth film was a fable-ish tale of a 13-year-old girl named Mija (Ahn Seo-hyun) and her ride-or-die best friend named Okja, a giant, genetically modified super-pig. It is a strange, funny, exciting, profound cinematic experience — and like many films in Netflix’s vast catalogue, may not have enjoyed the whole hog of exposure at the time. Now, that humble porker is…

JOE CARNAHAN: “I was watching Zodiac the other night and it’s just a brilliant film. It’s underrated. I grew up in Northern California and I wanted that story, and I look at the movie, and there was no fucking way I could ever have made it as brilliant as Fincher made it. That scene at Berryessa Lake, where the couple’s just lying there and the guy shows up and he stabs them. It’s about eight shots, and it’s just sublime. Not a wasted frame. We could spend three hours talking about it.”  EXT. LAKE BERRYESSA — DAY Bryan Hartnell (Patrick Scott Lewis) and Cecelia Shepard (Pell James) are being held at gunpoint by a masked man. THE MAN: Don’t get up. I want her to tie you up. He produces…

THERE’S NO POINT asking David Gordon Green how Halloween Ends ends, because even he doesn’t know. “It changes every day,” he says from his office in LA. “In theory, the picture is locked, but this morning I called the editor and said, ‘What if we do this one thing…’” It’s understandable that the writer-director is fussing over how to close his trilogy. It’s not just the ending of his story; it’s also the conclusion to the story John Carpenter began in 1978, and of Jamie Lee Curtis’ time playing Laurie Strode. “I speak with John and Jamie Lee Curtis regularly about it,” says Green. “It’s exciting, uncertain, satisfying and sad. I’ve enjoyed the ride but it’s probably time to get off. I think we’re gonna go out with a bang.”…

ON GETTING INTO ACTING I breakdance on rollerskates professionally, but I’ve always wanted to act. My skating manager at the time told me I had to move to LA. My parents were really supportive — they said, “Just stop buying sneakers and pay rent.” So I moved to LA at 16, and that’s when I started acting. ON GETTING CAST IN NOPE My audition scene was set at a tech store, and usually the employees are depressed because they’re dealing with people who are dumber than they are. So I brought that energy to it, and that dark sense of humour made Jordan [Peele] laugh. He told me that the character he had written was far different from what I brought to the table, and that he was going to…

“It’s about exploitation,” Jordan Peele tells Empire about one of Nope’s scariest sequences. “It’s about feelings of rage. At the industry.” Halfway through Peele’s new film, we’re taken on set of [fictional] 1997 sitcom ‘Gordy’s Home’, where the eponymous chimp goes off script and on a rampage, mauling and maiming cast and crew. In a film about spectacle, this is Peele commenting on the more parasitical corners of showbusiness. Yet it also stands alone as a terrific, terrifying set-piece. For Gordy, created via a mix of live action and motion capture, Peele hired legendary movement coach and actor Terry Notary, who worked on the recent Planet Of The Apes films and Avengers: Infinity War. “He was my first call,” says Peele. “He’s the man.” And, indeed, the chimp. Notary knows…

IF YOU DID a double take, maybe a devilishly debonair one, when you heard Jason Isaacs was going to play Cary Grant in new ITV series Archie, you aren’t alone. Isaacs did too. “Someone called me and said, ‘Do you want to play Cary Grant?’ ‘Not in a million fucking years!’” laughs the actor, talking exclusively to Empire. “Then they said, ‘How about playing Archibald Leach?’” And that was it. He was in. Archibald Leach was, of course, a boy from Bristol who, due to a combination of good looks, fortune and talent, reinvented himself as Cary Grant, the matinée idol’s matinée idol, star of Charade and An Affair To Remember, and possessor of one of the most interesting accents in movie history. But Grant was very much a construct;…

KEN BARBIE This ridiculously fun-looking comedy boasts an array of retina-stinging ’fits, but you can practically touch the Kenergy emanating from this bold windbreaker (complete with neon-yellow fanny pack) worn by Ryan Gosling’s human doll. EDDIE MUNSON STRANGER THINGS Joseph Quinn’s guitar-shredding Dungeons & Dragons leader doesn’t just rock a Metallica cover. His stonewash-denim vest, worn with Hellfire Club tee, proves ’80s fashion can be cool, plus a practical choice for slaying bat demons. THOR THOR: LOVE AND THUNDER Why bother kitting out the God Of Thunder in Asgard’s finest armour when he can kick ass in a studded red-and-black biker vest capable of making KISS blush? When it comes to the hero of hair metal in the MCU, there’s no competition.…

SYLVESTER STALLONE DOESN’T do TV. Oh sure, there’s been the odd cameo and voice gig, but otherwise, he’s been committed to Rambo, Rocky and the rest on the big screen. As for the small? Fuhgeddaboudit. “I peaked when I did The Muppet Show in 1977,” laughs Stallone. “I can’t do any better than that. Then, everything changed.” Because Stallone is finally doing TV, starring in Tulsa King, a new series created by Taylor Sheridan, with whom Stallone became friendly after meeting at an LA ranch. “Where did this come from? A fellow cowboy. If we didn’t have a mutual interest in horses, we never would have talked,” says Stallone. When they first met, Sheridan was an actor dabbling with screenplays. Today, he is one of the biggest creative forces in…

★★★ OUT 7 OCTOBER / CERT 18 / 100 MINS DIRECTOR Carlota Pereda CAST Laura Galán, Carmen Machi, Claudia Salas A plus-size teenager in a sunny Spanish village is brutally bullied by her peers, who call her ‘Piggy’. When a serial killer rolls into town, things turn into an unlikely Bonnie-and-Clyde-style tale of bloody vengeance. But it’s never quite so straightforward, with neat spins on horror/ thriller tropes, and bullying in the first act that is genuinely distressing, built on the rocks of twitchy-curtained mistrust (“This town is full of spite,” one character spits). Director Carlota Pereda adapts her own 2018 short film, and sometimes it shows, occasionally feeling like it’s stalling for time. But the film is extremely well shot, with some sharp themes and a brave, soul-baring central…

★★★ OUT 16 SEPTEMBER / CERT TBC / 72 MINS DIRECTOR Marcos Mereles CAST Sid Phoenix, Yaseen Aroussi, Isabelle Bonfrer, Rosie Steel A pompous photographer (Sid Phoenix) and his idealistic intern (Yaseen Aroussi) are joined by a model (Isabelle Bonfrer) and a make-up artist (Rosie Steel) in a London warehouse for a fashion shoot. When one of the crew disappears, director Marcos Mereles weaves a meta-textual mystery that unpacks like nesting dolls. Set in a single location, the loft is at once cavernous and claustrophobic, and mirrors scattered around speak to the multiplicity of its narratives. There was potential for a Charlie Kaufman-esque mind-bender centred around the artificiality of filmmaking, but its messaging is muddled and its Chekhov’s guns go frustratingly un-fired; the result an unsatisfying puzzle weighed down by…

★★★★ OUT 2 SEPTEMBER / CERT TBC / 108 MINS DIRECTOR George Miller CAST Tilda Swinton, Idris Elba, Aamito Lagum, Burcu Gölgedar, Matteo Bocelli PLOT During a work trip to Istanbul, narratology scholar Alithea Binnie (Swinton) accidentally unleashes a Djinn (Elba). In a bid to earn her trust, the Djinn begins to recount his life story, which spans continents, millennia and several doomed romances. WHETHER HE’S SPINNING a tale of all-female rebellion in Mad Max: Fury Road, or drawing a prized porker into an urban animal underworld in Babe: Pig In The City, George Miller’s narratives often reveal themselves to be something unexpected, under the veneer of something familiar. In Three Thousand Years Of Longing, the filmmaker’s storytelling sensibilities are given a sprawling, colourful canvas upon which to weave an…

★★ OUT 14 SEPTEMBER / CERT TBC / 95 MINS DIRECTORS Samuel Gonzalez Jr., Bridget Smith CAST Michael Lombardi, Marc Menchaca, Joseph Gatt Films like The Retaliators rarely escape the bargain bin; what may have lifted this one into a cinema release is the slew of nu-metal rock-star cameos it boasts. Alas, stunt-casting members of the band Five Finger Death Punch as a biker gang does not a good film make. Cobbling together an uneven mish-mash of genres (a slasher horror, a revenge thriller, a crime drama, a meditation on grief... plus paedophile zombies?), it promises schlocky fun but — at least until the Evil Dead-aspiring final act — delivers only boring, B-movie mediocrity. If you’ve ever wanted to see Papa Roach’s Jacoby Shaddix play a murderous rapist, or Mötley…

★★ OUT 23 SEPTEMBER / CERT 15 / 92 MINS DIRECTOR Antonia Campbell-Hughes CAST Cosmo Jarvis, Rhys Mannion, Claes Bang After his powerhouse performance in Calm With Horses, Cosmo Jarvis returns to Ireland in Antonia Campbell-Hughes’ feature-directing debut, It Is In Us All. Jarvis plays Hamish Considine — the repressed son of wealthy, distant father Jack (Claes Bang) — who is involved in a violent car crash on the way to his late aunt’s estate in Donegal. Hamish is uptight and abrasive, so Jarvis’ wild, simmering on-screen energy is more restrained than usual. The stark, still cinematography is beautiful, and the themes of self-destruction and small-town despair are intriguing, but sadly the script is vastly underdeveloped. This renders the film slight and something of a slog, but it is at…

★★★ OUT NOW / CERT 15 / 126 MINS DIRECTOR David Leitch CAST Brad Pitt, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Brian Tyree Henry, Joey King, Sandra Bullock, Zazie Beetz PLOT Assassin ‘Ladybug’ (Pitt) is sent by his handler (Bullock) on a seemingly simple mission: get on a Japanese Shinkansen bullet train, retrieve a briefcase, and get off at the next stop. Except, the train is packed with other assassins — including ‘Tangerine’ (Taylor-Johnson), ‘Lemon’ (Henry), ‘The Wolf’ (Bad Bunny) and ‘Hornet’ (Beetz) — tangled in a web of vengeful violence. WHEN JOHN WICK’S co-director boards a film about a high-speed train packed with assassins, certain things are expected. Bullet-spraying brawls? Check. Creatively choreographed set-pieces, shot with precision and clarity? Check. A charismatic A-lister’s action comeback? Check. But if Bullet Train’s set-up sounds like…

★★★ OUT NOW (SKY ATLANTIC/NOW) EPISODES VIEWED 6 OF 10 SHOWRUNNERS Ryan J. Condal, Miguel Sapochnik CAST Paddy Considine, Emma D'Arcy, Milly Alcock, Matt Smith, Olivia Cooke, Emily Carey, Rhys Ifans, Steve Toussaint PLOT In Westeros, almost two centuries before the time of Daenerys, King Viserys I Targaryen (Considine) sits on the Iron Throne. When his brother Daemon (Smith) is disinherited, Viserys’ daughter, Rhaenyra (Alcock/D’Arcy), is made heir. But there are other claims to the throne — and war looms. PREQUELS ARE HARD. (Just ask George Lucas.) To make one work, you have to escape the shadow of the original, find stakes and tension in a story to which everyone ultimately knows the ending, and — if you’re House Of The Dragon — follow up a show like Game Of…

RIAN JOHNSON WAS DAUNTED He didn’t know if he could pull it off. For the first time, he had challenged himself to write a sequel to one of his own original films and make it just as fresh, unique and exciting, in a much shorter space of time. “It was quite terrifying for a moment there realising, ‘Oh, it took ten years to get Knives Out [made] — am I gonna be able to do it?’” he says of his follow-up sojourn into the world of murder-mysteries. “If you have a movie that’s well received, it becomes this gilded object that feels very outside of yourself and you forget how you made it. The insecurities can be a lot worse.” Johnson is no stranger to mystery-writing, and 2005’s Brick and…

BRICK (2005) LOCKER ROOM WITH A VIEW While on Brick, I was using my 2003-era Nokia cell phone to take photos. They’re pretty cool, though: they almost have an abstract quality because they’re so low-res. TUNNEL VISION Five or six years before Brick, I was trying and failing to get it made, and got really frustrated. So I took my little brother Chris down to my high school and we spent a day taking black-and-white photos, blocking out scenes from the movie. So this is Chris and his friends. Just a test shot that I did of them, on 35mm. SMOKE SCREEN There’s a big scene that takes place in this drainage tunnel. This was the day there. So this is Noah Segan, Joe [Gordon-Levitt], Noah Fleiss and Lukas Haas.…

SOPÈ ARE YOU UP FOR IT? It’s a freezing-cold February day in an east London studio that clearly is impervious to heat. Empire is huddled around a monitor with Corin Hardy, lead director of the second season of Gangs Of London, partially to stay warm, but mainly to watch Hardy and his crew shoot a sequence that will serve as the audience’s re-introduction to Elliot Finch, the show’s nominal hero, played by Ṣọpé. Dìrísù. The first season of Gangs Of London (in which, you’ll never believe it, a number of criminal gangs battled each other in London) quickly established itself as one of the finest action shows on television, with co-creator and lead director, Gareth Evans, pulling off the kind of bloody mayhem usually reserved for the big screen. When…

IT’S THE STUFF of socially anxious nightmares: you’re reunited with a bunch of old university pals on your birthday, and yet you can’t shake the feeling that nobody wants you there. This is the horror through which Tom Stourton’s Pete finds himself wading in razor-sharp comedy All My Friends Hate Me. Here, Stourton and co-writer Tom Palmer talk us through the film’s enthralling, empathy-deficient ensemble. PETE (TOM STOURTON) We see the cast of characters through the lens of protagonist Pete’s various anxieties — regarding his masculinity, his mental health, the value of his charity work, and guilt about his privilege. “Class definitely feels like a core part of Pete’s inner anxiety,” says Palmer. “He’s asking himself, ‘Am I agood guy who works with refugees, or a really obnoxious toff who…

17/7/1899 BORN JAMES FRANCIS CAGNEY JR IN NEW YORK 5’ 4” HIS HEIGHT Number of times he actually said “You dirty rat!” 9 Number of films in which he co-starred with Pat O’Brien (Here Comes The Navy, Devil Dogs Of The Air, The Irish In Us, Ceiling Zero, Boy Meets Girl, The Fighting 69th, Torrid Zone, Ragtime and, of course, Angels With Dirty Faces) NUMBER OF OSCARS HE WAS NOMINATED FOR 1 NUMBER OF OSCARS HE WON (Best Actor for Yankee Doodle Dandy in 1943) 6504 The location of his star on Hollywood Boulevard, on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame 1981 THE YEAR OF HIS FINAL THEATRICAL FILM, MILOS FORMAN’S RAGTIME 20 The number of years he was retired from the film industry, from 1961 on 30/3/1986 DIED, AGED 86…

Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness DEMONIC POSSESSIONS. DEADLY dark-magic books. Decapitated telepaths. This is what you get when you task a legendary horror filmmaker with directing a scare-packed Doctor Strange sequel. The long-awaited return of Sam Raimi, aka the Master Of The Sadistic Arts, sent him spiralling into the Multiverse Of Madness — taking on a Marvel Cinematic Universe movie decades after changing the comic-book blockbuster forever with his Spider-Man films. The result is a spooky, kooky, surprise-filled romp with gnarly kills, playful twists, and acts of good old-fashioned heroism. Here, writer Michael Waldron breaks down the secrets of Strange’s second solo outing. THE COLDEST OPEN Bam! We begin in media res, with a long-haired variant of Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and multiverse-hopping teen America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez)…

Lawrence Of Arabia DAVID LEAN HAD a very simple attraction to the complex hero of Lawrence Of Arabia. “This Oxford don on camelback,” he once said. “I mean, it was absolutely nutty.” Receiving every honour under the baking sun — from seven Oscars at the time to a place on the Library Of Congress National Film Registry List in 1991 — Lean’s masterpiece charts the exploits of T.E. Lawrence (Peter O’Toole) in assisting Prince Faisal (Alec Guinness) in the Arab revolt against the Turks during World War I. Playing up to Lawrence’s swelling ego, unscrupulous General Allenby (Jack Hawkins) convinces the soldier-scholar to take Damascus for the Arabs. Lawrence agrees but, now seeing himself as a kind of demi-god saviour, assembles a ragtag band of rough sorts (who care little…

TO BOLDLY GO… The news that Star Trek’s Nichelle Nichols passed away was so sad. She played an important role in the 1960s and was praised by Martin Luther King. We all know about the kiss with Kirk, but Nichelle was much more than that. I was so pleased when I got to meet her on a visit to this country some years ago — and I managed to turn her into a Walsall FC supporter just for a moment! MARK DABBS, GREAT WYRLEY Thank you, Mark. For your heartfelt tribute — and the surprising revelation that one of sci-fi’s biggest stars was an unlikely League Two football fan — have a Picturehouse membership on us. Empire’s star letter wins a Picturehouse Membership, plus one for a friend! Valid for…

SOMETHING’S WRONG with the basement fish tank in Owen Kline’s feature debut, Funny Pages. In spite of its neon-yellow glow, the water is unoccupied. The fish, teenager Robert (Daniel Zolghadri) is informed by his new landlord, has been eaten by a larger fish. No further explanation is given. It’s just one of many weird details that comprise the scuzzy world of the film, which follows Robert’s rebellious move out of his family home in the hopes of becoming a leading comic-book artist. “We wanted another light source for that basement and were like, ‘What if there’s a really foggy, disgusting fish tank that’s some unseemly colour?’” Kline tells Empire from an apartment lined with comic books. “I also find a lot of humour in decay.” The unsettling comedy that runs…

TOP GUN: MAVERICK became the first movie of 2022 to soar past the $1-billion mark earlier this year. But while both that and Devotion feature Glenn Powell, as well as their fair share of exciting aerial acrobatics, Tom Cruise’s film is all fiction. Which is what makes J.D. Dillard’s airborne epic — based on the true story of Jesse Brown (Jonathan Majors), the first Black aviator to see combat while fighting in the Korean War — an entirely different proposition. “We had the very specific task of honouring the story of the folks that Devotion is about, with the backdrop of a war that has not found its way to screen often,” Dillard tells Empire of the film, which follows Brown’s journey to becoming one of the Navy’s most celebrated…

AS THE DIRECTOR of some of Succession’s most memorable episodes — including its Season 3 finale — Mark Mylod knows all about conjuring great art from preposterous elitism. His new film, The Menu, packs a similar, darkly satirical punch to the hit HBO show, but aims its sights squarely on high-end, ultra-exclusive dining. “I’m fascinated by the idea of extreme privilege and how it perverts humanity,” Mylod tells Empire. “So while the film is comedic, there are thriller and horror elements, too. I like things you can’t easily put into one box.” Here, Mylod breaks down his category-defying cinematic feast. THE CONCEPT The film sees a wealthy couple (Nicholas Hoult and Anya Taylor-Joy) visit the remote island restaurant of famed experimental chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes). While the diners are busy…

EMPIRE IS SHOCKED. Mike Flanagan, director of Doctor Sleep and creator of three of TV’s scariest mini-series (The Haunting Of Hill House, The Haunting Of Bly Manor and Midnight Mass), has just admitted he couldn’t handle horror until well into his teens. “I would fake being sick at sleepovers if they were going to watch a horror movie,” he says. “I could only watch scary stuff through my fingers.” Instead, he came into the genre through books, whose frights he figured (incorrectly, it turned out) would be easier to manage. And the writer who made the biggest impact on the adolescent Flanagan was Young Adult thrill-maestro Christopher Pike. “His work was hugely formative for me,” Flanagan says. “He wrote some pretty advanced stuff for his young readers, and it was…

IMAGINE A CROSS between Michel Gondry, David Lynch and The Mighty Boosh, and you’re somewhere close to Strawberry Mansion, a hugely imaginative new indie sci-fi from co-writers and co-directors Albert Birney and Kentucker Audley. Audley also stars as James Preble, a government agent who audits dreams — joined by an ensemble cast of bizarre beastly bit-players, both dreamy and nightmarish. Here, the filmmakers explain three of their favourite phantasmagorical creations. SAXOPHONE FROG WAITER! “If you’ve got to have a waiter in a movie,” asks Birney rhetorically, “why have a normal human waiter?” So, in one dream sequence, Audley’s character has asparagus soup served to him by a jazz-loving amphibian. Like many in the film, the costume was homespun. “One of the great joys of filmmaking is the tactile nature [of…

BIG SCREEN. SMALL SCREEN. YOUR REVIEWS BIBLE STARTS HERE ★★★★★ EXCELLENT ★★★★ GOOD ★★★ OKAY ★★ POOR ★ AWFUL ★★★★ OUT 9 SEPTEMBER / CERT 18 107 MINS DIRECTOR David Cronenberg CAST Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, Kristen Stewart, Scott Speedman PLOT The future. Humans have evolved, pain can’t be felt and surgery is the new sex. With partner Caprice (Seydoux), Saul Tenser (Mortensen) is famed for sacrificing his organs as erotic performance art, but with the emergence of a mysterious group comes a sinister development: are humans evolving too fast? IN MAY, WHEN it played at Cannes, Crimes Of The Future was met with a quivering river of walk-outs, but also a six-minute standing ovation. Even in the fickle hysteria of Cannes, it was obvious Cronenberg’s latest would prove divisive.…

★★★ OUT NOW (APPLE TV+) / CERT PG / 105 MINS DIRECTOR Peggy Holmes CAST (VOICES) Eva Noblezada, Simon Pegg, Jane Fonda, Whoopi Goldberg The first film produced at Skydance Animation under John Lasseter certainly borrows Pixar’s visual style, talent and storytelling formula: it’s another tale of a reality-adjacent fantasy world that controls some elemental force. Lonely orphan Sam (voiced by Eva Noblezada) is seemingly cursed with terrible luck; a chance encounter with a magical cat (Simon Pegg) leads her to the mystical Land of Luck, where they must track down a lucky penny. You’re never more than five minutes away from a bit of exposition, but if you can keep up, there is some bright, lively visual comedy to be enjoyed. It doesn’t come close to Pixar in its…

★★★★ OUT 22 SEPTEMBER / CERT TBC / 96 MINS DIRECTOR Kogonada CAST Colin Farrell, Justin H. Min, Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja A family of the future copes with the potential loss of their android helper in this gorgeously melancholic sci-fi drama, Columbus writer-director Kogonada using his premise to meditate on questions of memory, humanity, and nature versus nurture. If his vision is vaguely dystopian, it’s also cosmetically appealing — asleekly pancultural tomorrow of chic architectural design and warm gel lighting. At times serene to a fault, the ghost of a full-blown tearjerker gusts through After Yang. It’s most clearly felt in Colin Farrell’s subdued performance as a family man investigating the secret history of his “technosapien” — all while keeping his own wealth of feeling concealed behind a sleekly unperturbed…

★★★★ OUT NOW (DISNEY+) CERT 15 / 99 MINS DIRECTOR Dan Trachtenberg CAST Amber Midthunder, Dakota Beavers, Dane DiLiegro, Stormee Kipp, Michelle Thrush, Julian Black Antelope PLOT To earn her stripes as a warrior, Comanche hunter Naru (Midthunder) must take the ritual of kühtaamia and bring down a particularly dangerous beast. Unbeknownst to her, though, she and her tribe are themselves being hunted, and by a creature more deadly by far. IF YOU WANT an accurate representation of the state of masculinity circa 1987, look no further than John McTiernan’s Predator. A platoon of oiled-up musclemen with biceps like bollards and Freudian überguns descend on Central America like some kind of WWE field trip — aRoyal Rumble in the jungle. It’s a big, fat testosterone milkshake of a movie that…

★★★★ OUT 16 SEPTEMBER (SHUDDER) / CERT TBC / 97 MINS DIRECTOR Christian Tafdrup CAST Morten Burian, Sidsel Siem Koch, Fedja van Huêt, Karina Smulders A Danish family goes on holiday with a Dutch couple they barely know, and the pretence of happy families soon gives way to unbearable tension. Speak No Evil initially plays like a Ruben Östlund film — as with Force Majeure, it’s a dark comedy of European middle-class manners and slowly ratcheting awkwardness. But a portentous score, that horror-laden title, and dialogue like, “What’s the worst that can happen?” teases something much, much darker. An arthouse take on a genre template, it doesn’t show its cards until the final act, but when it does... Bloody hell. The horror, once begun, is short, sharp and simple, but…

★★★ OUT NOW / CERT 12A / 159 MINS DIRECTOR Advait Chandan CAST Aamir Khan, Kareena Kapoor, Mona Singh Advait Chandan’s Hindi-language remake of Forrest Gump is a strange, slightly surreal experience. Less a remake, in places it resembles a Gus Van Sant-esque facsimile of Robert Zemeckis’ 1994 Oscar-winner. But it is not without its charms: warmly played, sincerely made and with the odd interesting tweak to the template. Shifted from the ’50s to the ’70s, the premise remains the same — acheck-shirted simpleton (Aamir Khan) glides through the tumult of (Indian) history while besotted with a childhood love (Kareena Kapoor) — but so do much of the dialogue, motifs (a white feather!), set-pieces and imagery. Khan makes for a winning, gentle presence, but ultimately Laal Singh Chaddha feels like…

★★★ OUT 9 SEPTEMBER / CERT 15 / 100 MINS DIRECTOR Malachi Smyth CAST Will Poulter, Naomi Ackie, Johnny Flynn Here is a curious concept: a jukebox musical of previously released Johnny Flynn songs, also starring Johnny Flynn. And while it will take your brain a bit of calibrating to reconcile this film’s two sides — astagey presentation of folk songs, melded with a gritty West Country crime-thriller — it just about works. The musician-turned-actor plays a self-confessed “nobody”, plotting a big deal with big criminals; Will Poulter is the “nobody’s gopher”. An unlikely romance with Naomi Ackie’s Gloria emerges in a roadside caff, where the entire film is set, leaving things feeling dramatically inert. But like the best musicals, Flynn’s arresting songs elevate everything: speaking intangibles that the characters…

★★★★ OUT NOW (DISNEY+) / EPISODES VIEWED 4 OF 9 SHOWRUNNER Jessica Gao CAST Tatiana Maslany, Mark Ruffalo, Tim Roth, Ginger Gonzaga, Jameela Jamil PLOT When lawyer Jennifer Walters (Maslany) is involved in a car crash, blood from her cousin Bruce (Ruffalo) enters her bloodstream, and she develops his ability to transform into a Hulk. But, trying to keep her green side hidden, she returns to work as head of a Superhuman Law Division. WHAT IS THE responsibility of those with powers? How can superhumans be held to account for their actions? And, most importantly, was Steve Rogers a virgin? These are all questions that new MCU show She-Hulk attempts to answer — and it does so, in style. The first episode sets up the premise at breakneck speed. Jennifer…

CRY, ONION! (1975) This Spaghetti Western from Enzo G. Castellari sees farmer Onion Jack (Franco Nero) battle an oil company for the rights to his beloved onion field. A curly-permed Nero not only eats and breathes onions, he uses them to pelt and suffocate his victims to death. Sadly, Jack doesn’t say, “That’s shallot” after each kill. THE ONION FIELD (1979) Highly regarded in its day, Harold Becker’s complex, detailed adaptation of Joseph Wambaugh’s novel tackles the survivor’s guilt of a cop (John Savage) following the murder of his partner (Ted Danson) by two hijackers (Franklyn Seales, an excellent James Woods), in Bakersfield’s onion fields. The greatest film with onion in the title to date. Your move, Rian. TRIADS, YARDIES AND ONION BHAJEES! (2003) A post Lock, Stock Brit crime…

LIKE MANY KIDS, little Billy Eichner was obsessed with movies. Growing up in New York in the 1980s, his parents would take him to the cinema often, sometimes at night, so he’d feel like a grown-up. It started with Bambi, but as Billy got a little older it was romantic comedies that awakened something in him. “I would see Sleepless In Seattle with my parents. Or When Harry Met Sally. Or Parenthood,” says Eichner. “Seeing all these funny guys — Tom Hanks, Steve Martin, Billy Crystal — starring in these big Hollywood comedies, I thought, ‘Oh, I could do that.’” It wasn’t until he got much older that Eichner was told, “No, sorry, you will not be doing that.” Because that’s not what gay actors do. Eichner has had, by…

AMERICAN CINEMA OF the 1970s is unthinkable without Pam Grier: she of the fearsome stance and long, supple limbs, toting a sawn-off shotgun and a come-hither-if-you-dare look. And talking to her today, it’s a joy to discover that that attitude hasn’t diminished one jot. “I was frustrated with society’s entitlement to women’s bodies whenever they wanted, and with patriarchal society and how imbalanced it was,” she says stridently of her pioneering screen career. It’s not an overstatement to say that Grier reinvented what it meant to be a woman on screen. She towered over her male co-stars, at least figuratively; in her female revenge classics of the blaxploitation genre, Coffy and Foxy Brown foremost among them, she became one of the only women of the 1970s to be able to…

The films of Jerry Bruckheimer Chris: There are some producers who are super-producers, who have become brands in their own right. I’m thinking of people like Joel Silver and Jerry Bruckheimer. By and large, you know what you’re going to get when you see the words “Jerry Bruckheimer” on a movie. Nick: It’s the high-concept thing, isn’t it? He and Don Simpson created the high-concept blockbuster in the ’80s and changed Hollywood. Chris: There will be some who see him as one of the key players in the rise of blockbusters and the dumbing down of cinema, but when I see a Jerry Bruckheimer film, I know I’m going to get some decent production values, some orange filters — especially if Tony Scott was director — some interesting comedy, some…

ELVIS OUT 19 SEPTEMBER / CERT TBC / 159 MINS Other than John Carpenter’s 1979 TV movie, which introduced him to Kurt Russell, Elvis Presley biopics have been markedly thin on the ground. Thankfully, Baz Luhrmann has rectified that with this thrilling, pulsating whizz through Presley’s life, as seen through the eyes of his conniving manager, Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks, cackling like a panto villain). Yes, Luhrmann has made his film again — afeverish intro overloads the audience before slowing down to find the emotional centre — but when it’s this good, when the music is presented so vitally, and when it’s anchored by a starmaking turn by Austin Butler that deserves to be remembered come Oscar-nominations time, who’s complaining? CHRIS HEWITT MEN OUT NOW / CERT 15 /…