Table of contents for October 2020 in Empire

RAVENOUS SANDWORMS. BREATHLESS action. Chiselled heroes seeking redemption beneath the scorching desert sun. Yes, Tremors is one hell of a film. But also very exciting is Denis Villeneuve’s upcoming sci-fi spectacular Dune, which happens to incorporate all of the above elements (though sadly not Kevin Bacon driving a bulldozer). In a year where big, event-movie releases have been few and far between, the prospect of a trip to the spice planet of Arrakis, navigated by the master behind Arrival and Blade Runner2049, couldn’t be any more tantalising. This is cinema: huge, operatic, eye-popping. And, yes, worm-ridden. To speak to Villeneuve and the astonishing cast he’s assembled, we sent Helen O’Hara to the Budapest set. Read her terrific, world-exclusive, access-all-areas, 12-page report on page 56 for the answers to all your…

Erik Tanner/Getty Images, Allstar, Getty Images. Illustration: Stuart Manning NIA DACOSTA WAS 16 years old when she first saw Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now. As the film started, she wanted to be a writer. But by the time it ended, her life — and path — had changed. “It was just so crazy, and had so much to say. It was super-audacious,” she remembers. “When I watched it, I thought, ‘Oh, you can do anything.’” Which could be the understatement of the century. Now, at just 30 years old, DaCosta is one of the most exciting and in-demand filmmaking voices in the business. With Candyman coming later this year, and the keys to a billion-dollar superhero franchise reportedly next up, it is a fairly stratospheric rise. That…

Alamy, Getty Images 1. JURASSIC PARK TOPPED THE BOX OFFICE (AGAIN) With new releases entirely absent during the summer months, movie fans spared no expense in making Steven Spielberg’s classic dino-nightmare number one at the box office, 27 years after it was first released, adding a respectable $1.3 million to its cumulative billion-dollar gross. Re-releases of The Empire Strikes Back, Ghostbusters and Jaws also gave cinemas an uncanny retro feel – like stepping into a deer cleaned time machine. 2. A CINEMA OWNER BEAT UP A CARDBOARD MULAN Feeling betrayed by Mulan’s shock move to Disney+, French cinema-owner Gerard Lemoine felt the most rational response to the situation was to beat the shit out of a foyer display stand. It’s possible to both appreciate the frustration of losing a film…

ON GETTING INTO ACTING “In high school, I was a really shy kid. I would never have thought that I’d want to be on a big screen at all. I wanted to be a vet! But I found myself in an acting class and had the opportunity to explore all sorts of characters in this safe space. And from there, I was hooked.” ON TAKING ON THE LEAD ROLE IN UNHINGED “It was scary and I was completely overwhelmed with imposter syndrome. But what helped was the fact that [her character] Rachel goes through a similar thing, in terms of finding strength over the course of the journey.” ON HER CO-STAR, RUSSELL CROWE “We really hardly shared any scenes together – I was in a car for probably 90 per…

WHEN THE CORONAVIRUS lockdown first hit worldwide, and Zoom became the videoconferencing app of choice, the question was soon on everyone’s lips: when is someone going to make a movie on this thing? “A couple of months in, nobody had done it,” recalls director Rob Savage. “So, we were like, ‘Fuck it, we might as well do it!’” “Might as well” became Host, an achingly timely chiller about a séance-gone-wrong, set entirely within the confines of Zoom – which has become an instant word-of-mouth hit in the horror community (“the scariest film of the past decade”, declared one blog) and beyond (Elijah Wood is a fan). But this lofty achievement started with a simple prank. “It all just came out of quarantine boredom, really,” Savage recalls. “I was hearing these…

CHRISTOPHER LEE RASPUTIN: THE MAD MONK (1966) Towering, lecherous, mesmerising, full of ecstasy and fire, Lee’s Hammer Horror take was also notable for the free ‘Rasputin beard’ (“for guys and gals alike!”) offered to cinemagoers. RA-RA-RATING: FOUR TSARS TOM BAKER NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDRA (1971) In the Fourth Doctor’s first film role, Baker captures the wild-eyed fanaticism of the notorious mystic and ‘holy man’ by boldly refusing to blink ever again. RA-RA-RATING: THREE TSARS ALAN RICKMAN RASPUTIN: DARK SERVANT OF DESTINY (1996) Imagine Sheriff Catweazle of Nottingham recreating Paul Reubens’ Buffy The Vampire Slayer death scene and you’re pretty much there. Sexy, creepy, beardy. RA-RA-RATING: FIVE TSARS CHRISTOPHER LLOYD ANASTASIA (1997) A rare animated Rasputin in the canon, sadly overshadowed by his sidekick: Bartok, his wisecracking albino bat minion. The bat…

OUT NOW / CERT UNRATED / 90 MINS DIRECTOR Brandon Trost CAST Seth Rogen, Sarah Snook, Jorma Taccone Everything about An American Pickle screams screwball comedy. There’s its zany premise, in which a man awakens in the present day after being preserved in pickle brine for a century. There’s also its star, Seth Rogen, whose filmography is a carnival of stoner hilarity, and he’s superb as both pickled protagonist Herschel Greenbaum and his great grandson, Ben. But this is a film with more heart and fewer gags than the Pineapple Express funnyman’s usual fare, that finds Rogen fighting with issues around identity and ancestry. The result is a surprisingly poignant essay on the importance of understanding your roots. It doesn’t excel as a comedy but as a drama, this is…

OUT 4 SEPTEMBER / CERT 18 / 99 MINS DIRECTOR Sam Kelly CAST Jake Ryan, John Tui, Chelsie Preston Crayford Ripped from real-life stories, Sam Kelly’s debut charts the rise of a white man, Danny (Jake Ryan), in Maori street gang The Savages, in a grim but engaging takedown of toxic masculinity. Kelly employs flashbacks – Danny (Olly Presling) in borstal in the ’60s, as a gang sergeant (James Matamua) in the ’70s – to flesh out Danny’s arc as he rises through the ranks of The Savages to ulitmately lead them with childhood pal Moses (John Tui). The ideas around gang loyalty are familiar but, within the C-bombs and brutal violence, there are moments when the characters are given room to breathe that lends it a freshness, particularly in…

OUT 25 SEPTEMBER / CERT TBC / 102 MINS DIRECTOR Paul Morrison CAST Alison Steadman, Dave Johns Sixty-something dog walkers Fern (Alison Steadman) and Dave (Dave Johns) meet walking their dogs (hers: a Yorkshire terrier; his: a German Shepherd) in a North London park. Paul Morrison’s film subsequently doesn’t quite have the courage of its convictions to etch the tentative relationship solely through 23 walks (it’s about nine). Instead the result is a gentle, slightly dull, late-in-life romance that finds its dramas by characters withholding secrets (once is fine), contrivances and a social-problems agenda that seems to have been parachuted in from a Ken Loach movie. It doesn’t shy away from the realities of OAP love – there is a tastefully done sexagenarian sex scene – and Steadman and Johns…

OUT 18 SEPTEMBER / CERT 15 / 84 MINS DIRECTOR Nathalie Biancheri CAST Cosmo Jarvis, Lauren Coe, Sadie Frost In Nathalie Biancheri’s moody debut feature, teenage girl Laurie (Lauren Coe) realises that a 30-odd-year-old man, Pete (Cosmo Jarvis), is watching her through the school gates. Instead of shying away, she decides to make friends with the stranger, a local handyman with an unnerving stare, but with vulnerabilities beneath the surface. Dramatic and nerve-prickling, Nocturnal flips expectations of relationship dynamics; no-one is what you think at first glance. The first half is compelling, leaning mainly on an anguished, slow-burn performance from Jarvis. Were it not for his depths of feeling, his character could be written off as a garden-variety creep. But the clever turn that the narrative takes is also eventually…

JUDI DENCH There are two key things to know about Dame Judi’s time on TikTok. First, her grandson looks just like Ed Sheeran, making this a stage for (almost) two stars to share. Second, Dench isn’t just standing around – she’ll perform these dance routines better than anyone. This is why she’s the best of the best. ALFONSO CUARÓN The Gravity director was just trying to have his breakfast, but his daughter Tess had other ideas. There’s a strange sense of calm emanating from the Cuarón family’s clip, in which Tess commits to one of the more complex set of moves out there, and Alfonso sits, supportively, with a head-bob or two – without ever putting down his spoon. LAURA DERN She wasn’t meant to be on TikTok. But as…

Аn EMPIRE Presentation. Brought to you in TERROR-SCOPE GET READY TO CRACK… NO FORCE ON Earth has ever been able to stop Roger Corman. From the moment he bankrolled his first film, Monster From The Ocean Floor, back in 1954, he has worked at a velocity that makes even Ben Wheatley look like Stanley Kubrick. Churning out one low-budget genre flick after another, he’s given the world films with such glorious titles as The Beast With A Million Eyes, Teenage Cave Man and Attack Of The Crab Monsters. Along the way there have been clashes with Hells Angels, fights with studios, death threats from white supremacists, and one occasion where he had to defuse an argument between a gun-toting director and a sword-wielding David Carradine. But through it all, he’s…

GETTING THE GANG TOGETHER Dino De Laurentiis had first acquired the rights to Flash Gordon intending it to be an Englishlanguage directorial debut for Federico Fellini. But by 1978 Fellini had dropped out, and with the gargantuan success of Star Wars the year before, De Laurentiis decided to act. In place of one auteur, he hired another: Nicolas Roeg who, along with screenwriter Michael Allin, worked on pre-production for six months before their overtly sexualised, and increasingly expensive, take on the property fell out of De Laurentiis’ favour. Replacing them was screenwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr and Get Carter director Mike Hodges. Mike Hodges: Nic Roeg was originally going to direct it. And Dino was looking to use his sets for a sequel. So Nic, who was a friend, suggested me.…

Alamy, Allstar, Shutterstock SAM NEILL IS the master of acting without drawing attention to himself. Over a career spanning almost 50 years, the Kiwi actor has quietly built one of the most impressive careers around, his versatility standing him in good stead. From grumpy dinosaur experts to deranged doctors, he can pretty much play anything. We asked him about some of his signature roles and scenes. MY BRILLIANT CAREER (1979) Neill’s big break – the start of his brilliant career, you could say – came as Judy Davis’ lovelorn suitor in a Gillian Armstrong-directed drama “I was very taken with Gillian Armstrong. She was terrific. But I had a dog that didn’t like me, and the horse that they gave me wasn’t really much of a film horse. It was…

WRITER/DIRECTOR THOMAS CLAY on his eerie, English Civil War-era psychological thriller. TWO STRANGERS ARRIVE The film’s opening scene, shot on location in Shropshire in early spring, sees two naked runaways cut through the misty thicket surrounding the Lye family farmhouse. “Mystery is key for the beginning of the film,” says Clay of the scene, which establishes Freddie Fox and Tanya Reynolds’ fugitives. The filmmaker – who shot on 35mm – called upon a “very old giraffe crane” that had been salvaged from a warehouse in Germany to capture the majority of the film’s action sequences. FANNY PREPARES FOR CHURCH To watch Maxine Peake’s stoic heroine dutifully tend to her home is to behold Clay’s steadfast commitment to the Cromwellian era. Not only did he insist that the Lye family farmhouse…

A KEY WORKER WRITES Empire has been one of the small number of key things that has helped me through the craziness of the pandemic. I am a frontline healthcare worker in the NHS; part of why I do my job is because I find it fulfilling to help people. It struck me that the writers of Empire do exactly that – help people in a real and meaningful way. So thank you for keeping the fantastic magazines coming. AMY SMITH, WIRRAL Thank you, Amy – for your kind words, and your incredible work. We could never do your job, but we can at least keep banging on about films. Hopefully this Picturehouse membership can be an additional pandemic aid for you. Picture house Empire’s star letter wins a Picturehouse…

$200M BUDGET Rumoured to be more expensive than every other Netflix Original film, The Gray Man allegedly tops the likes of Triple Frontier and The Irishman, the only ones to come close. 10M NEW SUBSCRIBERS News of The Gray Man comes after the streaming giant boasted ten million additional users joining the platform during the coronavirus pandemic. $5.999 BILLION BOX OFFICE TAKINGS Over four films, the Russo brothers racked up just under $6 billion revenue from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame all set the bar for another high-earning franchise. 8 POTENTIAL SEQUELS The Gray Man could be ushering in an epic new saga of action films to root for, with the 2009 novel by Mark Greaney…

STELLAN SKARSGÅRD IS not afraid of stirring up trouble. The veteran Swedish actor is just as at home courting controversy with film such as Nymphomaniac as he is singing to ABBA in Mamma Mia!. His latest – a brief turn as a Nazi soldier in The Painted Bird, a gruelling black-and-white World War II drama with savage scenes of violence – is as controversial as they come. Now 69 and still as prolific as ever, he talks to Empire about violence on screen, his old pal Lars von Trier, falling asleep in front of Diane Keaton, and his future in the MCU. The Painted Bird makes for a very traumatic viewing experience… Oh, it’s ruined your weekend, hasn’t it? It’s not the best date-night movie if you want to get…

GHOSTWATCH (1992) The participant ID for the Zoom call in the film is 31101992. “Which is the release date for Ghostwatch,” Shepherd explains. “It was a big influence on us.” ALICE, SWEET ALICE (1976) The creepy mask that hangs off the demon – a gag on the built-in masks found in video software – is the same one used in this influential slasher horror from the ’70s. “That’s a film we really love,” says Savage. SATAN’S SLAVE (1980) This cult Indonesian horror is homaged during one of the key scares. “The sheet gag, where Emma [Louise Webb] throws the bedsheets over the demon, is a reference to that film,” says Savage. WAIT UNTIL DARK (1967) The Polaroids featured at the film’s finale are a nod to this Audrey Hepburn movie.…

Do you have a nickname? I actually don’t have a nickname. I’m Welsh, and the Welsh word “craig” [means] “rock”. But that’s been taken by Dwayne Johnson. Do you have a signature dish? Scrambled eggs. I’ve watched enough Gordon Ramsay videos, and I’ve been shouted at enough by him via his YouTube page to know how to beat some eggs and put a lot of butter in it. There have been loads of scrambled eggs in lockdown. But that seems to be my limit – I’m not a great cook. When were you most starstruck? Meeting Dr. Dre. It was at a club and I don’t really find myself in a club very often. But I was at one and Kendrick Lamar was performing and I saw Dr. Dre in…

OUT NOW / MUBI / CERT TBC / 119 MINS DIRECTION Xavier Dolan CAST Gabriel D’Almeida Freitas, Xavier Dolan, Anne Dorval Matthias (Gabriel D’Almeida Freitas) and Maxime (Xavier Dolan) are childhood friends in the same Montreal social circle. At a group hang, Matthias and Maxime step up to be in a student film, discovering at the last moment that their scene requires a kiss. Director Dolan doesn’t show this, instead focusing on the electrified faultlines that fissure outwards in the countdown to the departure of Maxime. He is guardian to his abusive, ex-addict mother (Anne Dorval, hissing venom), but is soon to escape to Australia. A lovely delicacy of touch runs throughout, as desire and confusion are sublimated beneath the rhythms of friendship and life, with characters revealed in tender,…

OUT 11 SEPTEMBER / CERT TBC / 99 MINS DIRECTOR Natalie Johns PARTICIPANTS Max Richter, Yulia Mahr It feels strange to say that a documentary about an ambient album designed to make you sleep is among the more arresting films of this year. Yet Max Richter’s Sleep fascinates through its emulation of the album’s dreamy, wandering tones, the camera freely drifting over imagery of nature, the city, people connecting and lying in isolation. As he claims in the film, Richter intended the eight-hour-long concerts (the main subject of the film) to be an anthropological study, and director Natalie Johns emulates this by examining the audience as much as she does Richter. There’s as much empathy and personal introspection as there is technical detail, and the result is genuinely blissful.…

OUT 25 SEPTEMBER / CERT 15 / 91 MINS DIRECTOR Dave McLean CAST Conor Berry, Tara Lee, Sean Connor Davie (Conor Berry) is a late ’70s Dundee kid with the gift of the gab who can’t stay out of trouble. With a broken leg shattering his footballing dreams, he develops an ambition to promote gigs, which brings him into perilous contact with the local gangsters. Director Dave McLean is also Schemers’ producer, co-writer and director, as well as being a successful rock promoter – the parallels are clear. Davie’s tale is told with a sense of humour, but that doesn’t excuse McLean borrowing heavily from other, better filmmakers (Danny Boyle mainly) and employing hoary editing tricks to paper over cracks created by an inexperienced cast and an ultralow budget. McLean…

OUT 23 SEPTEMBER CERT TBC / 93 MINS DIRECTOR Dean Parisot CAST Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter, Brigette Lundy-Paine, Samara Weaving, Kristen Schaal PLOT Nineteen years after their last adventure, life isn’t going well for Bill (Winter) and Ted (Reeves), with both their band and marriages on the brink of collapse. The duo are contemplating growing up — until a visitor from the future tasks them with writing a song that saves the universe… “THE ONLY TRUE wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing…” “That’s us, dude!” Bill S. Preston Esq and Ted Theodore Logan once remarked to each other. How much wisdom there is in getting the loveable metalhead misfits back together for another time-travelling caper, two decades after their last, has been hotly debated since word first emerged…

OUT NOW / SHUDDER / CERT NOT RATED / 56 MINS DIRECTOR Rob Savage CAST Haley Bishop, Radina Drandova, Jemma Moore, Caroline Ward, Emma Louise Webb, Edward Linard As we’ve learned in lockdown, Zoom calls can be pretty hellish. It’s not connection issues or a family quiz stretching on for eternity that’s the problem in Rob Savage’s Host, however: filmed remotely during the coronavirus crisis, this horror is a séance story for the Stay At Home generation, pitting six quarantined friends against a demonic presence who invades their houses after a Zoom conference gone spectacularly wrong. Over the last few years, ‘desktop movies’ like this, shot entirely through computer screens, have told feature-length stories through characters using apps to communicate and solve mysteries. Host, full of original ideas and plentiful…

OUT 11 SEPTEMBER / CERT 15 / 78 MINS DIRECTOR Aki Omoshaybi CAST Aki Omoshaybi, Pippa Bennett-Warner, Amanda Lawrence The past constantly threatens the future in Real, a promising debut feature from Aki Omoshaybi that earns its title over a taut 78 minutes. The writer-director also stars as Kyle, a smooth-talker struggling for work who is less than honest when he has a meet-cute with Jamie (Pippa Bennett- Warner), a single mother with secrets of her own. Their courtship is both sweet and naturalistic, and as the film starts to unpack why each of them is hiding their true selves, the screenplay weaves in sharp observations on middle-class Black British life. The final minutes feel unnecessarily rushed and there are multiple coincidences which feel far-fetched, but Omoshaybi’s understated approach gels…

How did you get involved in Dune? Not a super crazy story. I wish it were more exciting. When I found out that it was being made, I was extremely interested. I’ve always wanted to be a part of something sci-fi like that, and I’m a huge fan of Denis. I just went after it and auditioned. What was your impression of Chani, your fierce Fremen fighter? My part is very, very small in this movie and that’s why I’m so excited to see it, to see what everyone’s been up to. [Denis and I] had a little discussion about who Chani is and the strength she possesses. She’s a fighter, that’s what her people are. I only really had a few days with her, so I kind of scratched…

SENATOR #2 – THE GODFATHER PART II Francis Ford Coppola got his big break when he was a student at UCLA: Corman hired him to turn a Russian sci-fi film, Nebo Zovyot, into a monster movie, Battle Beyond The Sun. Coppola later repaid Corman by having him play a senator (specifically, Senator #2) in his Mafia sequel. FBI DIRECTOR HAYDEN BURKE – THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS A double cameo, as Corman appears as the FBI director in one scene, and in a framed portrait that Clarice Starling walks past. The connection? Jonathan Demme started out filming B-movies, such as Caged Heat and Crazy Mama, for Corman. CONGRESSMAN – APOLLO 13 On the set of 1977’s Grand Theft Auto, Corman told Ron Howard, “If you do a good job for…

Illustration: Neil Edwards THIS MONTH’S THEME is creepiness coming close to home – with mostly young folks subject to formless threats from the depths of the sea, or deep in the woods, or traumatic family history. To be fair, that describes about 90 per cent of horror movies… but binge-watching this little lot conveys a powerful sense of gathering gloom and contemporary ills, with only glimpses of cosmic catastrophe for relief. On the bright side, they’re mostly gorgeous to look at – whether set in crumbling old houses or out in a haunted landscape. Denis Rovira van Boekholt’s The Influence is a Spanish adaptation of a fine novel by Liverpool’s premier horror writer, Ramsey Campbell. It’s a strong, unsettling, old-darkhouse film with the requisite creaky stairs, but the biggest mystery…

1 ALIENS (1986) James: “James Cameron took Alien, wrapped it in a Vietnam war allegory, and in doing so turned a claustrophobic horror into a gung-ho platoon movie that only amplified the original’s creeping dread and unbearable tension.” 2 ALIEN (1979) John: “The original and, in my book, the best. It remains as atmospheric and terrifying as it did in 1979.” 3 PREDATOR (1987) Chris: “John McTiernan takes a laughable premise – Arnie vs alien – and turns it into an action classic.” 4 ALIEN3 (1992) Dan: “Fincher may have disowned it, but there’s still some artistry in this much-maligned threequel.” 5 PREDATORS (2010) Chris: “Going down the Aliens route (adding an ‘s’, more bad guys), this space actioner is hugely underrated.” 6 PREDATOR 2 (1990) Dan: “Danny Glover’s presence…

1 Black Widow’s Russian interrogator (well, interrogatee, from her point of view) is played by Polish film director Jerzy Skolimowski, who won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 1967 for Le Départ. 2 The film’s working title was ‘Group Hug’. Age Of Ultron’s was ‘After Party’. 3 The Portland-based cellist Agent Coulson refers to later shows up in an episode of Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D., played by Whedon regular Amy Acker. 4 Enver Gjokaj, who plays a New York cop in a scene with Captain America, went on to star in Cap spin-off prequel show Agent Carter.…

Calling all action-movie fans and gamers – fancy putting your passion into actual, real-life practice? Rumble Live, set in eight acres of lush woodland in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, sees you take on other teams, bolstered by ammo and special weapon upgrades found in utility boxes hidden around the terrain. Using laser rifles and grenades that track your progress, you can see how you did at the end at the ranger’s cabin, and with all that space, it’s ideal for a bit of socially distanced fun. We’ve got three sets of five passes to give away, so if you fancy giving your daily exercise an extra twist, crack the crossword, solve the anagram and text your answer to the number below. Game on! RUMBLE LIVE IS OPEN FROM 11AM TO 6PM EVERY…

John Nugent (News Editor): So. Raised By Wolves. This is very much not the Caitlin Moran Wolverhampton-set sitcom. It’s a really bloody weird sci-fi HBO series, directed by Sir Ridley Scott. Or at least, he’s directed the first episode. Joanna Moran (Photography Director): How involved is he? John: Well, his production company is producing it. And he hasn’t directed any TV in decades. It’s a big deal. Alex Godfrey (Acting Features Editor): I doubt he would have directed the pilot if he wasn’t all over it. John: So I think Earth has been destroyed by something, and it’s set on a distant planet, where humanity is being repopulated. Also there are robots. And aliens. Liz Beardsworth (Production Editor): That looks like City Hall a bit. Joanna: And that looks like…

Alamy, Getty Images, Shutterstock THE OUTPOURING OF grief over losing Olivia de Havilland, at 104 years old, tells us something about the finality of it, knowing that the last major star of Golden Age Hollywood has left us. From her Technicolor swooning in The Adventures Of Robin Hood (1938) to her quiet strength in The Heiress (1949) and her enduring power in Gone With The Wind (1939), it is certain there will not be another like her. She was the last living co-star of some of the greats of American movie culture; the last woman alive to tell you John Huston and Errol Flynn once got into a fistfight over her; and certainly among the last to intimately describe the experience of a now-bygone studio system which kept its stars…

Shutterstock How has lockdown been treating you? I haven’t stopped working for the past four years so it’s been nice to have some quality time with the family. We’re not the fucking Waltons. Sometimes it’s a clash between the Waltons and the Addams Family. Sometimes we’re skipping on rainbows and it’s all lovely, then the next minute there’s a school playground fight. Since we last spoke to you, your team [Liverpool] has won the league… Yes! Which has been magnificent. What a wonderful experience to share with my children. What’s their secret? [Manager Jürgen] Klopp’s just got them playing for each other. We have some magnificent players but it seems there are no egos, as an observer looking in. They all play for him, play for the shirt and play…

THE FRENCH DISPATCH ZEFFIRELLI Boy wonder Timothee Chalamet now has facial hair, a true sign that he is a Serious Actor now. Expect the Chalamoustache to be 2021’s hottest trimming trend. DEATH ON THE NILE HERCULE POIROT Poirot couldn’t be Poirot without that moustache, but Kenneth Branagh took the epithet and ran with it: a bushy, boisterous coiffure, first debuted in 2017 and making a triumphant return this year. THE KING’S MAN SHOLA Matthew Vaughn’s World War I-set prequel boasts plenty of ornate ‘tashes (shout-out to Charles Dance’s lip-tickler), but best of all is Djimon Hounsou’s salt-and-pepper chin-puff, which sits on his face like a tubular flavour-saver.…

EXCELLENT GOOD OKAY POOR AWFUL OUT NOW CERT 12A / 150 MINS DIRECTOR Christopher Nolan CAST John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Kenneth Branagh, Elizabeth Debicki PLOT Having more than proved his worth, CIA superspy The Protagonist (Washington) is inducted into secret organisation Tenet, on the trail of bullets that go backwards in time. From there he finds himself facing off against arms dealer Andrei Sator (Branagh) in a bid to avert World War III. THE BLAMS COME thick and fast. Tenet, in fact, might be Christopher Nolan’s blammiest film yet. BLAM! A terrifying thing just happened. BLAM! A shocking moment of revelation. BLAM! Here’s a speedboat. (There really is a massive blam accompanying an otherwise ordinary shot of two people on a speedboat.) It’s not even Hans Zimmer this time…

OUT NOW / NETFLIX CERT 15 / 111 MINS DIRECTORS Ariel Schulman, Henry Joost CAST Jamie Foxx, Dominique Fishback, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Amy Landecker, Rodrigo Santoro PLOT A new drug called Power has hit the streets of New Orleans – offering the user five minutes of superpowers. Young dealer Robin (Fishback) is working with cop Frank (Gordon-Levitt) to stop its spread, while the mysterious Art (Foxx) is on his own hunt for the source of the pill. FROM THE GENETIC mutation of the X-Men, to the radioactive spider-bite of Spider-Man, to the cosmic blast absorbed by the Fantastic Four, the moment superheroes receive their powers on page or screen tends to be an irrevocable, life-altering event that forever changes their very DNA. Not so in Project Power. Netflix’s action-thriller offers an…

OUT NOW / PRIME VIDEO / CERT TBC DIRECTOR Richard Tanne CAST Lili Reinhart, Austin Abrams, Sarah Jones Teen love has rarely been lacking in cinema, but it’s always refreshing to see it depicted with depth and integrity. Chemical Hearts breaks down stages of grief, frustration and desire, letting Austin Abrams (Euphoria) and Lili Reinhart (Riverdale) give young adults another story to hold on to. With a script full of lines ready-made for social-media posts, the film boasts eloquent rationalisations of emotions delivered in an atmospheric package. It’s a shame, then, that it’s experienced through the eyes of the boy, who has lived so little, fascinated with a girl who has done so much — but this film is still certainly more bravely and beautifully realised than most adolescent-angst flicks.…

OUT 25 SEPTEMBER / CERT 12A / 85 MINS DIRECTOR Hong Khaou CAST Henry Golding, David Tran, Parker Sawyers In this follow-up to Lilting, Hong Khaou tackles identity and displacement through Henry Golding’s Kit, a British-Vietnamese man returning to his birth country for the first time in 30 years. His family had escaped to the UK as boat refugees and though he spent the first six years of his life in Vietnam, upon arrival in Saigon, he feels like a tourist. After reconnecting with childhood friend Lee (David Tran), and becoming romantically entwined with an African-American designer, Lewis (Parker Sawyers), Kit seeks out a place to scatter his parents’ ashes. But the years have weakened his cultural bond and the task becomes a complicated one. Beautifully shot and subtly delivered,…

OUT 28 SEPTEMBER / CERT PG / 83 MINS DIRECTORS Alastair Fothergill, Jonathan Hughes, Keith Scholey PARTICIPANT David Attenborough Intended as a continuation of (or epilogue for?) his famous Life series, first started in 1979, A Life On Our Planet finds David Attenborough in a wistful mood. Rather than opening on some grand vista of nature, the 94-year-old naturalist begins the film in the ruins of Chernobyl, as a dark omen of what could befall the world if we’re not careful. Thus begins an often apocalyptic natural history of our planet, and the relationship our species has had with it, told in a scattershot way. The message is urgently and passionately delivered by the national treasure, but the nature photography lacks the expertise of previous docs (while the sepia-toned recreations…

OUT 4 SEPTEMBER CERT 15 / 104 MINS DIRECTOR Ladj Ly CAST Damien Bonnard, Alexis Manenti, Djebril Zonga PLOT By-the-book cop Stephane (Bonnard) is transferred from Cherbourg to the Anti-Crime Squad to police ‘Les Bosquets’, an estate in eastern Paris. Working with less scrupulous partners Chris (Manenti) and Gwada (Zonga), the trio preside over a delicate status quo that soon escalates to boiling point. IT TAKES GROSSES boules of steel for a French film to name itself after perhaps the most famous work in the country’s literary pantheon. Yet Les Miserables gets away with it. The first feature from documentarian-turned-fiction filmmaker Ladj Ly, this mostly mesmerising street thriller shares little plot-wise with Victor Hugo’s 1862 doorstep (nor is there any warbling about dreaming dreams, masters of the house or one…

You were the first one cast in the film. How did it happen? Well, I knew just from the film blogs that Denis had been working on it. I’d already done a good bit of research on the history of the project. I’m not alluding to Jodorowsky’s or David Lynch’s version, more around [production company] Legendary picking up the rights ten years ago. When I was fortunate enough to go to many of the awards-related events, I got to meet Denis a couple of times, and already had it in my head… You know, I was feeling a deep desire to be involved. Then when he was on the jury of the Cannes Film Festival, he asked me to fly out there to meet with him about it. I had…

A 21-YEAR-OLD theatre major with her hair in old-school pin curls, known as @feminist_fatale, hops through the frame of a video, acting along to a series of 1930s Warner Bros. bloopers featuring Bette Davis. A teenager with the username @Classic. Age makes precocious memes about her crushes on old movie stars like Gregory Peck and James Dean. Gen Z-er @lana40s shares clips of Rita Hayworth having her make-up done in Hollywood style in the musical Cover Girl (1944). In the comments, she discusses Hayworth’s complicated relationship with her ethnicity for those who don’t know about America’s long history of whitewashing its stars. On smartphones across the world, a retro revolution is taking place. On TikTok, of all places, an app primarily known for its bewildering dance routines, for its choreographed…

IT STARTED TO FEEL LIKE MORFYDD CLARK WAS IN EVERYTHING. Or everything worth watching, at least. There she was in BBC’s Dracula (as Mina Harker), and in Patrick Melrose (as Patrick’s long-suffering girlfriend Debbie), and again in His Dark Materials, as the chilling Sister Clara, one of the scariest guardians of sinister research facility Bolvangar. Coming off the back of early film roles in Carol Morley’s The Falling, opposite Maisie Williams and then-newcomer Florence Pugh, and Whit Stillman’s Jane Austen adaptation Love & Friendship, it’s little wonder she was pegged as a rising star. Now, fresh from playing both the title character’s mother and dog-obsessed wife in Armando Iannucci’s The Personal History Of David Copperfield, she is about to be seen in two of the most thrillingly unusual British films…

5/9/42 THE DAY HE WAS BORN IN MUNICH (HE’S 77) 73 NUMBER OF CREDITS AS DIRECTOR, INCLUDING DOCUMENTARIES, TV MOVIES, VIDEOS, AND SHORT FILMS 1 Number of times he’s been shot with an air rifle whilst in the middle of an interview with Mark Kermode 1 Oscar nomination (for Encounters At The End Of The World – Best Documentary, Features, 2009) 5 FILMS HE MADE WITH KLAUS KINSKI (Aguirre: The Wrath Of God, Woyzeck, Nosferatu The Vampyre, Fitzcarraldo, Cobra Verde) $1,500 The seminar fee payable upon acceptance to Herzog’s Rogue Film School (plus $25 application fee) NUMBER OF OPERAS HE’S DIRECTED ON THE STAGE (MOST RECENTLY PARSIFAL, IN VALENCIA IN 2008) 18 3 NUMBER OF EPISODES OF THE MANDALORIAN IN WHICH HE APPEARED…

THIS MONTH COMEDIAN TIERNAN DOUIEB ON HOW HE BECAME AN OLDBOY NEW BOY I HAD ONE solid, or rather squishy, reason for never watching Korean action thriller Oldboy. It wasn’t that the title made me concerned it was an unnecessary Benjamin Button sequel. No, I had read an article some years ago that said that it had taken the lead actor, Choi Min-sik, four takes to eat the live octopus in the sushirestaurant scene. He is a vegetarian Buddhist and so prayed for forgiveness from the octopus (or octopi?) in question before biting their heads off and trying to fit the wriggling tentacles into his mouth as they continued moving, long after the creature had died. This fact alone made me say out loud, on the train and upsetting other…

Canadian Stephen McHattie has acted for 50 years. After making a rebel-youth impression in 1976 TV movies – as James Dean in the biopic of the same name, and a mixed-up Antichrist in Look What’s Happened To Rosemary’s Baby – he went on to bigger fare like Beverly Hills Cop III (as a baddie) and Watchmen (as the first Nite Owl). These days, he is often found being weirdly menacing in interesting little pictures (Z, Rabid, Come To Daddy, The Sound). His best recent films are collaborations with director Bruce McDonald and writer Tony Burgess. After his tour de force in Pontypool, as a radio phone-in host besieged by a zombie virus, McHattie takes two contrasting parts as a hit-man and a jazz-man in the outlandishly quirky, seductive Dreamland (above),…