Table of contents for December 2022 in Empire

Having read every issue of Empire for years, I was pleased to see that on The Ranking, not only had I seen every Marilyn Monroe film listed, I had a near-perfect match with your reviewers. Being a few generations older than your team, I wondered whether our tastes might differ. Not so. My first sighting of Monroe was when my parents took me to see Niagara. How many readers can claim this? JOHN MILNE (AGED 82 1/2), VIA EMAIL Amazing. Not even the more, shall we say, experienced members of the Empire team were there on opening night for a Marilyn Monroe film. John, for your wisdom and sagacity, have a Picturehouse membership on us. Empire’s star letter wins a Picturehouse Membership, plus one for a friend! Valid for one…

SMOKING AND SWEARING her way through royal duties, Vicky Krieps’ portrayal of Empress Elisabeth of Austria in Corsage is definitely not in keeping with the longstanding perception of the 19th-century monarch. Affectionately known as ‘Sissi’, the Empress has long been depicted as the perfect princess; celebrated primarily for her beauty and taste in fashion. Speaking to Empire, the Phantom Thread star breaks down how Corsage reclaims Sissi’s image as a formidable leader and independent hero. DIVE INTO THE RESEARCH Taking an interest in princesses wasn’t encouraged by Krieps’ free-spirited parents, so with her neighbour she sought out the 1950s Sissi films starring a teenage Romy Schneider. “It was my rebellion first to watch them, but then it was also my rebellion to make this movie and to reject the images…

A CURMUDGEONLY OLD geezer, cooped up at home, sneering at his neighbours. It doesn’t sound like the most engaging premise, yet Fredrik Backman’s 2012 novel A Man Called Ove was a worldwide bestseller and the foundation for an Oscar-nominated Swedish film. Now, under the eye of Swiss-German director Marc Forster (Monster’s Ball, Quantum Of Solace), Ove is coming to America in English-language remake A Man Called Otto. “It’s a redemptive story,” says Forster. “It’s funny, moving, emotional. It’s about how friendship can save a man’s life.” Here, he tells Empire how to turn a perma-crabby pensioner into crowdpleasing fare. CAST TOM HANKS The Nicest Man In Hollywood™ is playing against type here as surly widower Otto Anderson, who begins the film bitter, lonely and suicidal. “Tom saw the [2015] Swedish…

JEAN-CLAWED MINIONS: THE RISE OF GRU Jean-Claude Van Damme himself voices this French supervillain in the gargantuan summer hit. With a mechanical giant lobster claw instead of an arm, this is one baddy you don’t want in your bisque. NEWT SCAMANDER FANTASTIC BEASTS: THE SECRETS OF DUMBLEDORE In a surreal moment, Eddie Redmayne’s skittish wizard mimics pincers and infiltrates a gang of baby manticores (fiery crab-like creatures) during a prison break. Expect to see the move coming to dancefloors soon. THE CRABFEEDER HOUSE OF THE DRAGON Craghas Drahar, the disfigured Myrish prince-admiral known to his enemies as The Crabfeeder, likes to stake his victims to posts and let crustaceans feast on them. Think about that next time you order crab sticks off the menu.…

Sophie Butcher (Social Media Editor): I thought I was watching the wrong trailer for this on first viewing. Mario’s only in ten seconds of it! Alex Godfrey (Features Editor): I can’t fathom the structure of this trailer, but it’s quite a bold move to just go all-in on the villain. John Nugent (Reviews Editor): What were you expecting? Alex: Well, Mario bouncing around for a couple of minutes? I don’t know. James Dyer (Digital Editor-In-Chief ): I don’t know what to make of this. Mario’s voice is usually Charles Martinet, who’s the [adopts exaggerated Italian accent] ‘Okidoki!’ guy. But even then, Mario’s usually restricted to grunts and chirps and little Italian noises, so I can’t figure out if Chris Pratt is doing an Italian accent here or not. Beth Webb…

OF THE 110 CREDITS on Nicolas Cage’s IMDb page, a huge proportion of them list animals as co-stars. There’s a pig in, well, Pig, a jaguar in Primal, and a bunny in Con Air. He adds a few more animals in his latest film, Butcher’s Crossing; here, the tireless actor tells Empire why he can’t stop working with creatures great and small. BISON In Butcher’s Crossing, Cage plays Miller, a professional bison-hunter in the 19th century. “I am enchanted by animals that I will never get to see,” says Cage, wistfully. “I want to see a Tasmanian tiger. I want to see a dodo bird. But we can’t, because people were clubbing the dodo bird and shooting the Tasmanian tiger. And the same thing was happening with the bison.” HORSES…

When were you most starstruck? I met Tom Waits in an elevator. I was with my daughter, and he thought she was cute. He leaned down to her and said, “What’s your daughter’s name?” and I couldn’t even answer. He just stared at me like I was an idiot, and I was an idiot. Do you have a signature dish? I can cook a pretty good steak on the grill. What’s the strangest place you’ve ever thrown up? Bro, I’m not going to lie to you. I hate throwing up. I can probably count every time I’ve thrown up on one hand. The strangest place would have been in an ice cave in Canada. I was probably 15, and I went there to go ice climbing. I was shitting and…

★★★ OUT 4 NOVEMBER (APPLE TV+) CERT TBC / 92 MINS DIRECTOR Lila Neugebauer CAST Jennifer Lawrence, Brian Tyree Henry, Jayne Houdyshell, Linda Emond PLOT After suffering an injury in Afghanistan, soldier Lynsey (Lawrence) returns to her mother’s home to recover. While there, she strikes up a friendship with car mechanic James (Henry). It soon becomes clear that they are both dealing with painful histories they’d rather forget. 2010’S WINTER’S BONE — ableak, uncompromising portrait of poverty and family — felt like the announcement of a major screen talent in Jennifer Lawrence. Causeway, her return to independent filmmaking, is not quite as rich or suspenseful as that early breakthrough, but it shares the same tough, hard edges, showcasing Lawrence as an actor capable of rare emotional depth and resonance. Only…

★★★★ OUT 4 NOVEMBER (ROKU) / CERT TBC / 108 MINS DIRECTOR Eric Appel CAST Daniel Radcliffe, Evan Rachel Wood, Rainn Wilson, Will Forte, “Weird Al” Yankovic PLOT The supposedly true story of “Weird Al” Yankovic (Radcliffe). After being shunned by his parents, Yankovic is discovered by Dr Demento (Wilson) and becomes a parody-song superstar. But could a relationship with pop star Madonna (Wood) destroy everything? “WEIRD AL” YANKOVIC has been around for so long (his career began in 1976, aged just 16) that it’s easy to overlook that moniker: he really is quite weird, isn’t he? Think of Yankovic and a bizarre melting pot of trademarks comes to mind: the perm, the Hawaiian shirts, the virtuoso accordion-playing, the wild-eyed stare — and, fundamentally, a career’s worth of delightfully demented…

★★ OUT NOW / CERT 18 111 MINUTES DIRECTOR David Gordon Green CAST Jamie Lee Curtis, Andi Matichak, Rohan Campbell, Nick Castle, James Jude Courtney PLOT Four years after Michael Myers’ (Castle/ Courtney) 2018 Halloween massacre, the town of Haddonfield is struggling to move on — though Laurie Strode (Curtis) is determined to finally live her life. But her granddaughter Allyson’s (Matichak) burgeoning relationship with local outcast Corey Cunningham (Campbell) threatens to bring the boogeyman back to town. WHEN YOU’RE HEWING to the trajectory of the original Halloween movies — as David Gordon Green has done for his only-the-firs-tfilm-counts sequel trilogy, co-created with Danny McBride — the rules say you have to tear up the formula in film three. After 2018’s Halloween channelled John Carpenter’s original in bringing back Michael…

★★★★ OUT 4 NOVEMBER / CERT TBC / 96 MINS DIRECTOR Chloe Okuno CAST Maika Monroe, Burn Gorman, Karl Glusman An American woman in Bucharest grows increasingly uneasy after seeing a figure seemingly watching her from the window opposite her apartment. Debut director Chloe Okuno leads Watcher with gut-feeling, inviting the audience to share the experience of Julia (Maika Monroe): her loneliness, anxiety and steady descent into stomach-wringing terror. What might seem like a mundane encounter is handled with a gripping and steadily increasing sense of panic that Monroe — in another captivating horror performance — makes impossible to look away from. Beautifully shot by cinematographer Benjamin Kirk Nielsen and evoking the aesthetic of the giallo, Watcher will surely draw comparisons to Hitchcock — but in Okuno, it signals the…

★★★★ OUT 18 NOVEMBER / CERT TBC / 115 MINS DIRECTOR James Gray CAST Banks Repeta, Jeremy Strong, Anne Hathaway Many of James Gray’s films are interior personal journeys — Two Lovers, The Lost City Of Z and Ad Astra all feel disarmingly intimate. But now the director takes a trip into his own childhood with the more than semi-autobiographical Armageddon Time, a sometimes plaintive, always soulful drama that follows young Paul Graff (Banks Repeta) as he navigates adolescence within his white, middle-class Jewish upbringing. Gray tackles morality, class warfare and racism, but never with a heavy hand, as his younger avatar befriends Black kid Johnny (Jaylin Webb) and begins to see things from different perspectives. Every cast member is superb; cinematographer Darius Khondji gives the film a poetic, soft…

★★★★ OUT NOW (APPLE TV+) / CERT 12A / 111 MINS DIRECTOR Reginald Hudlin CAST Sidney Poitier, Oprah Winfrey, Denzel Washington, Barbara Streisand When Sidney Poitier was awarded the Presidential Medal Of Freedom in 2009, Barack Obama noted that the actor “does not make movies, but milestones”. That’s the dichotomy that Reginald Hudlin’s documentary explores: Poitier’s career as actor, producer and director, and the incalculable civil-rights legacy it left. An impressive conveyor belt of A-listers line up to tell his life story; perhaps most compelling is the testimony from the man himself, with interviews filmed shortly before his death in January this year. Hudlin’s film follows a straightforward, linear route. But for such a consequential life — in terms of cinema, and history in general — that no embellishments seem…

★★★★ OUT 18 NOVEMBER CERT TBC / 98 MINS DIRECTOR Greg Mottola CAST Jon Hamm, Lorenza Izzo, Roy Wood Jr, Kyle MacLachlan, Annie Mumolo, John Slattery PLOT While searching for stolen paintings in Italy, fast-talking undercover reporter Fletch (Hamm) is named the prime suspect in a murder. To prove his innocence, he is forced to root out the potential suspects — from an art dealer to a missing playboy to his own girlfriend (Izzo). AFTER MORE FALSE starts than we can possibly recount within an agreed-upon wordcount, Fletch — the LA Times investigative journalist with a knack for disguises and the gift of the gab — has finally returned to the silver screen. His long-awaited comeback arrives thanks to Superbad director Greg Mottola; a very game Jon Hamm, stepping into…

★★★ OUT NOW (SKY ATLANTIC/NOW) EPISODES VIEWED 7 OF 8 SHOWRUNNER Corin Hardy cast Sope Dirisü, Waleed Zuaiter, Michelle Fairley, Brian Vernal, Paapa Essiedu, Lucian Msamati, Narges Rashidi plot A year after infiltrating the Wallace gang, reluctant hitman Elliot Finch (Dirisü) is summoned back to London by his shadowy puppet masters, The Investors. Elliot must uncover and eliminate a new unknown assassin betöre the London underworld's fragile new order falls apart — but Elliot has other plans. BACK IN 1986, Hal Ashby and Oliver Stone posited that in Los Angeles there are 8 Million Ways To Die. Well, London 2022’s got that beat. Pick a death, any death. By carving fork? By pick axe? By shower head? By gold-sequined dress? By karaoke mic stand? By cling film? In the second…

In FUNKO’s officially licensed legacy board game, it’s your turn to open the gates of the iconic dinosaur theme park IF WE’VE LEARNED anything from the Jurassic franchise, it’s that running a dinosaur theme park isn’t as easy as it looks. You have guests to please, assets to develop, and — most importantly — the tricky task of making sure that as few tourists as possible are chomped by a Tyrannosaurus rex. Think you can do better than John Hammond and Simon Masrani in their doomed attempts? Test yourself out in Jurassic World: The Legacy Of Isla Nublar, a brand-new board game from pop-culture obsessives Funko and game designers Prospero Hall. Hold on to your butts! RUN ISLA NUBLAR AS A TEAM This is it — you and your fellow…

THE STAR “HIS EXPLOITS ARE LEGENDARY.” For all its bells and whistles and various selling points (real flying! Amazing aerial action! Lady Gaga!), Maverick’s real USP was, well, the man who is Maverick: Tom Cruise, dialling back into Pete Mitchell with minimum fuss and maximum movie-star intensity, but imbuing him with an inner sadness, a sense of a life well-lived but simultaneously wasted. Maverick’s fallibility is one of the biggest and most refreshing surprises that the most successful movie of the year — at the time of writing — has to offer. Yes, he often defies authority, and survives by the skin of his teeth, but Maverick also fucks up a lot here. The opening, hypersonic Darkstar sequence may see him become the fastest man alive, but seconds later he…

“THANK YOU, ICE, FOR EVERYTHING.” Outside of the Maverick/Rooster dynamic, and the rather lovely, if slightly undercooked, relationship with Penny Benjamin (Jennifer Connelly) that sees Maverick finally confront his wandering ways, the film’s unexpected emotional core comes from a scene that throws Maverick back together with his wingman of old, Val Kilmer’s Iceman. Now an admiral who’s been protecting Maverick from up on high, their scene is notable because of what isn’t said between the two men — largely because Iceman, dying from cancer, doesn’t talk at first, choosing instead to type on a keyboard. There’s an extra emotional resonance stemming from the knowledge that Kilmer himself has been battling cancer, and can barely speak. “Val was the one who really came up with the idea of Iceman being ill,”…

“YOU WERE A TOP GUN INSTRUCTOR BEFORE.” Legacy sequels can often descend into a cynical exercise in You Liked That First Time Around So Here It Is Again box-ticking. One of the miracles of Top Gun: Maverick is how Kosinski and his team managed to nod to the original, sometimes blatantly, without ever seeming like they were running through a checklist. Some of those nods — the American football game, instead of a volleyball game; the opening credits exactly mirroring the original’s — were always planned. Some of them, such as Maverick’s reaction to hearing Rooster play ‘Great Balls Of Fire’, the song Goose sang in the first movie, came later. “I gotta give credit to another screenwriter on our team, Ehren Kruger, who came up with the idea of…

You can practically count the number of “a”s that Sophie Turner adds to her delivery of “cocaaaaaine!” in Netflix’s darkly comic teen movie Do Revenge. Her über-wealthy Erica, falsely accused of having a coke habit by the scheming Drea (Camila Mendes), explodes with rage. With just a few short scenes, Turner’s unpredictable, C-bomb-dropping performance was a comedic revelation — and, with clips being gleefully shared on social media, an instant online sensation. Turner, just as gleefully, tells us how she’s bulldozed into comedy. How have you found the world’s massive reaction to Erica? It’s been so funny and quite bizarre. It was just a two-day, fun little thing that I did on my days off from shooting something else. Someone said to me the other day, “Sophie, Do Revenge is…

MS. MARVEL WAS one of the most refreshing superhero outings in a long time — abright, colourful and hopeful show, all swirling around Iman Vellani’s delightfully fizzy performance. Her Kamala Khan is your everyday awkward Pakistani-American teenager, obsessed with the Avengers and trying to survive adolescence — oh, and she happens to have superpowers herself. Sana Amanat, who co-created the character for Marvel Comics in 2013, and was the series’ executive producer, tells us what it’s been like seeing Kamala become flesh and blood and be so wholeheartedly embraced. How has it been for you, seeing your character come to life, and portrayed so joyfully by Iman Vellani? The whole process has been very surreal. Meeting Iman for the first time definitely felt surreal, but felt right because she’s so…

NOBODY’S HAD A wilder 2022 than breakout star Charles Petrescu. Brian And Charles, the British mockumentary-tinged comic-drama from director Jim Archer and co-writers David Earl and Chris Hayward (who star, respectively, as the title characters), is an eccentric, charming story about a lonely Welsh inventor who builds a cabbage-loving robot friend. Nominated for a Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, it’s a film we at Empire fell in love with en masse. After we photographed Charles being mobbed by paparazzi at another recent awards ceremony, we sat down with him (and Hayward, his assistant) to find out how his life has changed since the film’s success. Hi, Charles. What’s your life been like since becoming a movie star? It has been like a rollercoaster ride at a funfair.…

PICK OF THE MONTH TOP GUN: MAVERICK OUT 31 OCTOBER / CERT 12 / 130 MINS The year’s biggest film (at the time of writing) isn’t always necessarily the best, but that might just be the case with Tom Cruise’s soaraway sequel. A rare legacy follow-up that manages to tick plenty of boxes marked Remember This From The First Movie? without ever seeming cynical in its intent, Cruise (giving one of his best performances), director Joseph Kosinski and writer Christopher McQuarrie have fashioned a movie that is unashamedly earnest and unexpectedly emotional. It may well lose some of the visual impact of those astonishing flying scenes on the small screen, but that unique swell of euphoria should stay intact. Better than the first, this was well worth the wait. CHRIS…

FOR ANY YOUNG actor, taking the lead role in a Steven Spielberg film would be a daunting prospect. A Steven Spielberg film where you are, essentially, playing Steven Spielberg? That’s another prospect entirely. For 19-year-old Gabriel LaBelle — who had just three film credits to his name, including 2018’s The Predator — taking the headlining role in The Fabelmans was, he tells Empire, “a surreal, incredible opportunity”. To begin with, LaBelle didn’t even know what the hell he had signed up for. “I originally auditioned for ‘Untitled Amblin Film’,” he recalls. Later, the truth emerged: The Fabelmans is Spielberg’s most personal film yet, a semi-autobiographical tribute to the filmmaker’s parents and the earliest years of his storied career; LaBelle auditioned for the role of Sammy Fabelman, a proxy for Spielberg…

HOW THREATENING CAN ghosts actually be? That’s the question that always frustrated Joe Cornish, a lover of spooky stories and horror films. “[A ghost] can make you jump or it can scare,” the Attack The Block director tells Empire, “but in terms of actual physical threat, movies sometimes struggle.” He mentions the possessed Regan in The Exorcist, for example. “She can’t actually do that much to you, other than terrify you.” In Lockwood & Co., however — ayoung-adult supernatural thriller series of books by Jonathan Stroud — Cornish found a gamechanger. If you’re touched by a ghost, you die. He was hooked. “Suddenly, you’re in a new kind of ghost story,” he enthuses, “where you can arm yourself against a ghost and use skill and intelligence and tactics to outsmart…

SAM MENDES’ EMPIRE Of Light may be led by Olivia Colman and Micheal Ward, but the title star is a cinema on the south coast of England that becomes a makeshift home for a group of outcasts in 1981. “I wanted it to stand alone in a way, and I wanted it to be slightly oversized,” says Mendes of his Empire. “The big movie houses I remember had a kind of magnificence to them: a scale and an architecture that you wouldn’t find in any other building.” Here’s how Mendes created his faded but still fabulous picture palace… THE BUILDING It was Empire Of Light’s production designer, Mark Tildesley, who found Dreamland, a former cinema with an adjoining ballroom-turned-bingo hall with an impressive Art Deco exterior on the coast in…

You fell in love with that incredible new TV show. And then it ended! Don’t despair — Boyd Hilton recommends the sibling shows to watch next IF YOU LOVED... THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RINGS OF POWER THE WHEEL OF TIME PRIME VIDEO In all the excitement around the arrival of its vast, Tolkien-based TV series, it was perhaps forgotten that Prime Video already has a big fantasy series to rival The Lord Of The Rings, namely this 2021 epic. Not only that, but standout episodes of both shows share the same director, Wayne Che Yip. The Wheel Of Time also benefits hugely from Rosamund Pike in the lead role as Moiraine, on a quest to find the mythic figure known as Dragon who could destroy her world. Overall,…

THE KNOWLEDGE Naomi Ackie — who made her Hollywood debut in Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker — took a varied approach to researching Whitney Houston. To prepare for the film, directed by Kasi Lemmons and written by Bohemian Rhapsody scribe Anthony McCarten, she spoke to producer Clive Davis (played by Stanley Tucci in the film) and members of Houston’s family to understand who the singer was offstage. For her, it was important to understand how Houston made people feel. “There was this feeling that wherever she went, people felt impacted by her presence, and that is something you can’t force,” she says. She also devoured every book, documentary and video clip that she could get her hands on: “I watched a lot of YouTube videos, organising those into segments…

“WHAT CANNOT BE known hollows the mind,” says Galadriel in the seventh episode of The Rings Of Power. “Fill it not with guesswork.” It’s advice that the internet has wholeheartedly ignored: the online guesswork about Amazon’s mega-budget Middle-earth saga has been off the chain. Specifically, the big question on everyone’s lips: who, exactly, is Sauron? Finally, in Episode 8, it was revealed that Lord Halbrand, played by Charlie Vickers, was in fact the Dark Lord himself, hiding in plain sight this whole time. It was a reveal meticulously planned from the start by showrunners Patrick McKay and JD Payne. “The storytelling is very specific and deliberate,” McKay says. “We’re tipping the show’s hand throughout the season, and making you wonder about this guy.” There were clues everywhere — some more…

28 OCT- 18 NOV BIG SCREEN. SMALL SCREEN. YOUR REVIEWS BIBLE STARTS HERE ★★★★★ EXCELLENT ★★★★ GOOD ★★★ OKAY ★★ POOR ★ AWFUL ★★★★ OUT 28 OCTOBER / CERT 15 116 MINS DIRECTOR Nicholas Stoller CAST Billy Eichner, Luke Macfarlane, Jim Rash, Kristin Chenoweth PLOT Podcaster and author Bobby Leiber (Eichner) is successful, self-sufficient, and very single. Resigned to a life of soul-sapping dating apps and casual sex, his cynicism around modern love is challenged when he meets hunky Aaron (Macfarlane) — right in the middle of a huge career moment, opening a new LGBTQ+ museum. THE MERE EXISTENCE of Bros shouldn’t be remarkable, but it is. If you can believe it, this is the very first romcom starring openly gay people to be released theatrically by a mainstream studio.…

★★★★ OUT 4 NOVEMBER (CINEMAS), 23 NOVEMBER (PRIME VIDEO) / CERT TBC / 105 MINS DIRECTOR Ryan White CAST Angela Bassett (narrator) The MER-B (Mars Exploration Rover – B), known as ‘Opportunity’, or more informally Oppy, is about as close to a real-life WALL•E as we’re likely to get. At least, that’s the premise offered by this extremely watchable documentary from Ryan White (The Keepers), which plays like a robot Apollo 13. Designed only to explore Mars for a few weeks, Oppy spent 14 years on the planet, supervised by the likeable nerds at NASA, who tell the story with their own personal attachments included. Oppy’s plucky underdog story, the scientists soon realise, could charm the world; as one puts it: “Try to explain gamma ray spectroscopy to an eight-year-old.…

★★★★ OUT 28 OCTOBER / CERT TBC / 102 MINS DIRECTOR Zach Cregger CAST Georgina Campbell, Bill Skarsgård, Justin Long, Zach Cregger Barbarian is best experienced with little foreknowledge. Researcher Tess (Georgina Campbell), just out of a bad relationship, arrives in a rundown Detroit neighbourhood only to find her Airbnb double-booked by the mysterious Keith (Bill Skarsgård); what follows is surprising, disturbing and wildly entertaining. Writer-director Zach Cregger maintains a thoughtfulness in his tale of urban decay and abusive affection, while twisting the screws with the same kind of building absurdity deployed in his TV sketch show The Whitest Kids U’ Know. Every music cue and lens choice serves the film’s tonal hopscotch, transforming it from run-of-the-mill spooky-house saga to beguiling genre romp. Claustrophobic, amusing, and in its best moments,…

★ OUT NOW (NETFLIX) CERT 12 / 147 MINS DIRECTOR Paul Feig CAST Sophia Anne Caruso, Sofia Wylie, Laurence Fishburne, Michelle Yeoh, Kerry Washington, Charlize Theron PLOT In a fairy-tale world, friends Agatha (Wylie) and Sophie (Caruso) find themselves in the School For Good And Evil. Long accused of being a witch, Agatha accidentally ends up in the School For Good, while princess-wannabe Sophie is sent to the School For Evil. YOUNG-ADULT FRANCHISES are a golden goose. If you’re a film studio or streaming service with a Harry Potter or a Hunger Games on your docket, chances are, it’ll be laying lucrative little eggs for years. It makes perfect sense, then, that Netflix — who have cornered the teen market in recent years — might want to adapt The School…

★★★★ OUT 11 NOVEMBER (NETFLIX) / CERT TBC / 99 MINS DIRECTOR Nora Twomey CAST Jacob Tremblay, Gaten Matarazzo, Ian McShane, Whoopi Goldberg Has Cartoon Saloon ‘gone Hollywood’? My Father’s Dragon is the first film from the Irish animation studio made for Netflix — but its lovingly hand-drawn 2D aesthetic is fully intact. Moving away from the studio’s staple Celtic myths, Nora Twomey’s charming film about a troubled boy (Jacob Tremblay) who befriends an equally anxious dragon (Gaten Matarazzo) is undeniably made for kids first, yet while it doesn’t hit the visual lusciousness or emotional resonance of Song Of The Sea, it is so beautifully crafted, so rich in detail, that grown-ups will be spellbound in other ways. Shout-out, too, to the goofy, garrulous voice work from Matarazzo, who brings…

★★★ OUT 2 NOVEMBER (CINEMAS), 16 NOVEMBER (NETFLIX) CERT TBC / 103 MINS DIRECTOR Sebastián Lelio CAST Florence Pugh, Tom Burke, Niamh Algar, Toby Jones Sebastián Lelio prides himself on telling the formidable stories of mysterious, unassuming women, from Julianne Moore’s Julia to Daniela Vega in A Fantastic Woman — an ambition that peaks with eerie period horror The Wonder. Florence Pugh impresses as a nurse tasked with observing a girl in a religious 19th-century Irish village who has not eaten for four months. Writer Emma Donoghue smartly wrestles with the lost faith many felt just after the Great Famine in Ireland, and Pugh questions the possibility of miracles in a curt but compassionate turn. Lelio’s thoughtful but slow direction leaves too much empty space to keep you fully gripped,…

★★★★ OUT NOW (CINEMAS), 28 OCTOBER (NETFLIX) / CERT 15 / 147 MINS DIRECTOR Edward Berger CAST Daniel Brühl, Felix Kammerer, Albrecht Schuch, Moritz Klaus This is the third cinematic adaptation of the novel by Erich Maria Remarque, and the first all-German production; while it is a looser take on the book, it is no less powerful for it. In 1917, teenage friends led by Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer) sign up excitedly to the Great War; 18 months later, they are all either dead or war-weary, waiting for an armistice to be signed by a politician played by Daniel Brühl. Edward Berger’s direction is hard-nosed in its stance and vast in scope, with stunning recreations of trench warfare, while the anachronistic synths of Volker Bertelmann lend a doom-sodden feel. War…

★★★★ OUT 14 NOVEMBER / CERT 15 / 121 MINS DIRECTOR Tobias Lindholm CAST Jessica Chastain, Eddie Redmayne, Kim Dickens True crime is home to everything from the most exploitative of sexy murder sagas to the most respectable of dramatisations; The Good Nurse falls into the second category. Based on the story of convicted serial killer Charlie Cullen, Krysty Wilson-Cairns’ script is at least as interested in the mistakes of the multiple hospitals that failed to report their suspicions about their employee as it is in Cullen himself. Eddie Redmayne does excellent work as Cullen, but Jessica Chastain is the real lead, blending vulnerability and guts to portray Cullen’s gutsy friend Amy. This is a thriller that reminds us that disturbed individuals will always exist, but asks whether the real…

★★★★ OUT NOW (NETFLIX) EPISODES VIEWED 10 OF 10 SHOWRUNNERS Mike Flanagan, Leah Fong CAST Iman Benson, Adia, Igby Rigney, Ruth Codd, Aya Furukawa, Annarah Cymone PLOT Straight-A student Ilonka Pawluk (Benson) has her whole life ahead of her — until she gets a terminal-cancer diagnosis. Refusing to give up, she enrols at a hospice she believes could be her salvation — alongside an ensemble of patients who gather each night to trade sinister stories and contemplate the great beyond… IN THE GHOST-RIDDEN manors at the heart of most Mike Flanagan stories, all is rarely as it seems and appearances can be deceiving. The same might be said of The Midnight Club, the horror auteur’s latest Netflix offering: with its YA source material and bouncy pop-rock trailer needle drops, you’d…

CHRISTMAS, AS ALAN Rickman so memorably said in Die Hard, that most incontrovertibly Christmassy of movies, is the time of miracles. Well, notch up another one to ol’ Saint Nick, who, this holiday season, has taken the liberty of enabling two of the funniest actors on the planet — Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell — to star together in their very own festive movie. Spirited is the latest adaptation of A Christmas Carol, but before you can say, “What the Dickens? Another one?”, this one is different. First of all, it digs deep into the logic barely holding Charles Dickens’ timeless tale up, and shows us just how the Ghosts Of Christmas Past, Present (here played by Ferrell) and Yet To Come pick their soulless, Scrooge-like targets (public enemy number…

“There’s only so much emotional drama you can play up between jets,” smiles Kosinski. Of all the relationships in the film, none is more important than that between Maverick and Bradley ‘Rooster’ Bradshaw (Miles Teller), the son of Maverick’s old chum Goose (Anthony Edwards), who took Berlin’s advice perhaps a little too literally in the first movie. The big surprise here isn’t that Rooster is simply angry at Maverick over the death of his father — Maverick also used his influence to impede Bradley’s progress as a pilot, lest he suffer the same fate as his old man. With Rooster understandably pissed, that drives the strained dynamic between the two as Maverick tries desperately to prevent history from repeating. But where Top Gun: Maverick banks hard left to avoid any…

Amber Midthunder seems destined to have led Prey. Her own origin story is embedded in the film industry — her stunt-actor parents met on the set of 1995 film East Meets West — and as an Assiniboine Native American, First Nation heritage runs through her veins, connecting her to Naru, the indigenous warrior-in-training in Dan Trachtenberg’s action-packed Predator prequel. Set in 1719, in the Northern Great Plains in North America, Prey sees a Predator arrive to battle the Earth’s fittest, from bears to Comanche war chiefs… Then it runs into Naru. With a performance defined by ferocious determination, vulnerability and charm, Midthunder blew us all away. She is still, she tells us, reeling from it all. It’s great how resourceful Naru is. Making things, and being a healer, is just…

Back in January, The Sandman creator and co-showrunner Neil Gaiman made Empire a promise: “People will be completely traumatised by the diner in Episode 5.” He didn’t break it. After Gaiman, Allan Heinberg and David S. Goyer’s note-perfect adaptation of Gaiman’s seminal, epic comic-book series dropped on Netflix in early August, it didn’t take long for the impact of its fifth chapter, titled ‘24/7’, to hit. Focusing on David Thewlis’ mild-mannered psychopath John Dee, now in possession of the Lord Of Dreams’ (Tom Sturridge) reality- warping magic ruby, it microcosmically drills into the fragile psyches of a small group of everyday folk in a 24-hour diner. Under Dee’s insidious influence, they experience the nightmare of a life lived in complete honesty — while society runs amok outside. Deftly directed by…

“SOME PROBLEMS,” TWEETED a devotee of RRR in May, “can only be solved by throwing a leopard at them.” It’s a point amply proved by the Indian blockbuster, which features much flinging of large jungle cats (computer-generated ones, of course) over its three-hour runtime. In any other movie, a snarling tiger sailing across the screen would be a top-three moment. In RRR (pronounced not ‘triple-R’ but ‘arr-arr-arr’, like an enthusiastic pirate), it barely cracks the top 30. The film stuffs its volley of set-pieces with imagery so wildly creative and gloriously massive that the results are marvels more marvellous than Marvel. There is an underwater fistfight. Bow-and-arrow mayhem to make Legolas envious. Teeming seas of extras. And an extended dance-off with so much sugar-rush energy, it’s near-impossible not to cheer…

A CREEPY CHILDHOOD Behind every great monster is a creepy kid. Perhaps one who shows an odd fascination with deadly spiders and an obsession with the concept of time. Young Henry Creel (Raphael Luce) is a still, sullen child when his family moves to Hawkins. Anywhere else, that might simply have been an awkward phase; the difference with Henry is that — perhaps thanks partly to his proximity to the Upside Down — he discovers unusual abilities, and learns to use those to manipulate and eventually torment the people around him. If only they’d had Game Boys in the 1950s, things might have been very different. THE FIRST KILL It’s clear early on that something awful happened to Henry’s family; the twist was that the awful thing was Henry himself.…

IN THE SUMMER OF 1985, a 14-year-old boy entered his local bookstore in Florissant, Missouri, tucked a novel into his jacket, and left without paying. It was not an isolated incident. Over the next few weeks, the same boy hit the same store again and again, always targeting the same author (mystery writer Gregory Mcdonald) and the same series: a comedic neo-noir franchise about a wisecracking reporter named Irwin ‘Fletch’ Fletcher. Soon enough, the boy had collected the full set, and Waldenbooks Florissant was down to the tune of $35, plus interest. “Look, I couldn’t afford them,” says the shoplifter — Jon Hamm — today. “But I was radically interested in reading them, and the idea of going to a library never occurred, so...” The catalyst for this very specific…

THE MASTERPTECE we reassess the greatest films of all time , one film at a time ON 16 MARCH 1960, premiering on just four screens, Breathless changed cinema forever. Jean-Luc Godard’s debut feature — À Bout De Souffle in its native tongue — transformed the past, present and future of movies in just 90 minutes, playing fast and loose with classical cinema, loosening up its strictures to become something startling and new, a constant well for filmmakers to draw from that still feels refreshing today. Tonally, it’s a curio. It fizzes by on the joy of cinematic possibility but is tempered by an undertow of melancholy, a revelry in nihilism. It ODs on adolescent urgency, cinema as punk rock but with far more sophistication and better haircuts. It’s frankly as…

Chris: For me, this is the Oscar category that has made the most egregious whoppers. But since it was first introduced in 1934, it has thrown up some genuine all-time-great songs. Shall we start with the ‘Theme From Shaft’? An absolute banger. Helen: It’s pretty undeniable. It’s just so freakin’ funky. Chris: I think that song actually gets a little worse when Isaac Hayes starts singing. The intro is incredible. Don’t get me wrong — the lyrics are fantastic and really speak to the human condition. Helen: There are so many songs on this list that are absolute, all-time, sing-along classics. I love a power ballad. Amon: The term ‘Oscar bait’ exists for movies. You can’t really apply that to this category. Helen: You absolutely can. There are many songs…

IT MUST BE weird — bittersweet, let’s say — as an actor, to be offered the co-lead in a cool film, only to discover that halfway through, your character is to be played by someone else. David Lynch sent Bill Pullman the Lost Highway screenplay in 1995, asking him to star as saxophonist Fred Madison. Great! An hour in, banged up after killing his wife Renee (Patricia Arquette), Fred suffers some sort of psychological… happening, and the film changes course, now following someone called Pete instead — aversion, maybe, of Fred. Great! Or, not so great, if you’re Bill Pullman. He loved the script, and didn’t want to change anything, he says, except for that. Well, he adds, correcting himself, “I didn’t want to change it.” But he at least…

“THIS IS MY Pinocchio,” announces Guillermo del Toro of his stop-motion adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s boy-puppet fantasy story. The filmmaker has dedicated a career to bringing all manner of misfits and mythical creatures to the screen, but there was one who has spoken to him above all else. “No single character in history has had as deep a personal connection to me as Pinocchio,” he said in 2018, some ten years after first announcing that he would be adapting the story. A further four years down the line, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is finally entering the world. It was worth the fight to the finish line. “There are many ways you can make a Pinocchio movie happen,” del Toro tells Empire, “but not this particular incarnation.” Del Toro’s vision of…

THE SUBJECT OF death comes up early in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s conversation with Empire. It makes sense: shuffling off this mortal coil is in part what led the man behind Oscar-winning films The Revenant and Birdman to make Bardo (full title: Bardo (Or False Chronicle Of A Handful of Truths)). “I turn 60 next year,” he says. “When you’re closer to death, there’s an inevitable invitation to look inward and make sense of any questions that have been buried.” The writer-director is speaking to us on the 21st anniversary of his move from Mexico City to Los Angeles, a deeply formative journey that shaped Bardo’s messages about identity and family, told through the eyes of journalist Silverio (Daniel Giménez Cacho). “Once you leave your country, you find yourself in another…

SARAH POLLEY HADN’T made a film in nearly a decade when Women Talking — anovel by Miriam Toews, about a group of Mennonite women who debate whether or not to leave their abusive community — landed in her lap. “I hadn’t been motivated to direct anything since my kids were born,” she explains. (Her last film as director was the award-winning 2012 documentary Stories We Tell.) “A friend of mine gave me the book and said, ‘You should make this into a film.’” By eerie coincidence, Frances McDormand — who had optioned the rights to the book as a producer — had the same thought, and reached out to Polley a week later. Polley knew she had to do it. “It just felt so urgent,” she says. “It captured so…

“MY BATTERY IS low and it's getting dark.” These were the last words communicated from the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity — ‘Oppy’ — to NASA before it finally ceased to be. Oppy’s lifespan was expected to be 90 days; instead, she ran for 14 years from 2004 to 2018, rolling across Mars’ surface, searching for information and signs of life, alongside a second rover, Spirit (who ran out of power in 2010). “[The message] went viral because it was a real gut-punch to people worldwide to imagine this robot being in danger,” explains Ryan White, the director behind documentary Good Night Oppy. It’s this human connection that people, from NASA staff to space enthusiasts, felt towards the tinny trooper that forms the basis of the film, which is backed by…

IN MY PRE-TEENS I didn’t know what a film director was. I loved the trepidation of horror movies, and saw them on bootleg VHS tapes, but then I watched Psycho. It jangled my nervous system but I could see, also, that it had an extravagant form. In our school library I found that form came from a man called Alfred. Alfred made art. He had ideas and gave form to pleasure. He directed. I became obsessed with directing. In my mid-twenties I started directing too. I found myself sitting in a dark hotel room in Los Angeles watching, frame by frame, the shower scene in Psycho, the scene that taught me about form. Watching with me, watching herself with wide eyes, remembering it, was... Janet Leigh. I’d circled back to…

ON GETTING INTO ACTING The first person to see it in me was my mom. She keeps telling this story about when I was young and we were watching The Incredibles, and she saw me reciting Frozone’s lines. She got me into acting classes, and signed with an agency. ON HER LOVE OF HENRY SELICK I had a weird relationship with Coraline growing up because I loved being scared of it. I loved saying that I couldn’t watch it, but I would always go back to it. It was the same with The Nightmare Before Christmas; I would watch through my hands, but still my eyes were drawn to it. ON VOICING A CLAYMATION PUNK TEEN I remember the first time I went into the studio and I saw the…

ZACH CREGGER WAS not expecting his horror directing debut to even make it to cinemas, let alone become one of the sleeper hits of the year. Yet when it opened in the US in September, Barbarian went straight to the top of the box-office charts. “I was hoping it was going to get released on a streaming platform and then hopefully people would find it over the next couple of years,” he tells Empire. Instead, the comedy writer and performer — known for US sitcoms like Wrecked and comedy troupe The Whitest Kids U' Know — found himself becoming one of the hottest new horror directors of the year. Barbarian pivots on a double-booked Airbnb in a sketchy Detroit neighbourhood that forces Tess (Georgina Campbell) to stay overnight with clean-cut…

★★ OUT NOW (CINEMAS), 4 NOVEMBER (PRIME VIDEO) CERT 15 / 113 MINS DIRECTOR Michael Grandage CAST Harry Styles, Emma Corrin, David Dawson, Gina McKee, Rupert Everett, Linus Roache PLOT Brighton, 1957. Shy schoolteacher Marion (Corrin) begins a romance with dashing policeman Tom (Styles). But Tom is secretly having a passionate affair with museum curator Patrick (Dawson). Years later, an ailing Patrick (Everett) is taken into the care of Marion (McKee) and Tom (Roache), and old wounds are reopened. UNDER ANY OTHER circumstances, My Policeman might not have attracted much attention. It’s a small, quiet period drama, adapted from the 2012 novel by Bethan Roberts about a gay love triangle, during a time in the UK when homosexuality was illegal. But the simple act of casting the world’s biggest pop…

★★★★ OUT 28 OCTOBER (NETFLIX) / CERT 12A / 105 MINS DIRECTOR Henry Selick CAST Jordan Peele, Keegan-Michael Key, Angela Bassett, Ving Rhames Over a decade has passed since Henry Selick’s Coraline — but the myriad ideas and dark comedy of Wendell & Wild make up for lost time. It tells the story of two demon brothers, Wendell (Jordan Peele) and Wild (Keegan-Michael Key), who recruit cynical teen punk Kat (Lyric Ross) as their ‘Hellmaiden’. The demons want to start their own hellish theme park; Kat just wants to revive her dead parents. It’s very trusting of its young target audience to handle both big scares and big ideas — but with all the angular German Expressionism and Phil Tippett-esque monstrosities, it’s a relief to see time hasn’t dulled the…

★★★★★ OUT 4 NOVEMBER / CERT 12A / 102 MINS DIRECTOR Oliver Hermanus CAST Bill Nighy, Aimee Lou Wood, Tom Burke, Alex Sharp “I took to looking around myself a little,” says Bill Nighy’s Mr Williams, in this gorgeous remake of Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece Ikiru. Nighy plays Mr Williams, a stiff-upper-lipped accountant in 1950s London who takes stock of his life when faced with a devastating medical diagnosis. There is some beautiful classical filmmaking from South African director Oliver Hermanus, recalling David Lean or Carol Reed, and stunning craft in Sandy Powell’s costuming and Helen Scott’s production design. But it’s Nighy’s show: face like a statue, he subtly conveys death bearing down on him in minute expressions and stately philosophising. It feels, in every sense, like the role of a…

★★ OUT NOW / CERT 15 / 134 MINS DIRECTOR David O. Russell CAST Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, John David Washington David O. Russell’s sprawling, intermittently enjoyable film is simultaneously overstuffed and under-nourished. The plot, centred on a friendship between doctor Burt (Christian Bale), lawyer Harold (John David Washington) and nurse Valerie (Margot Robbie) forged in the titular city during the ’20s, is chock-full of characters, story (there’s a murder mystery) and quirk — but doesn’t have the vigour to whizz you through it. Its second half brings in a dark chapter in US history (read: fascism), but it’s neither serious enough to be sharp satire nor sufficiently energetic to deliver exuberant farce. The film craft is on point — take a bow, composer Daniel Pemberton — and it’s winningly…

★★★★ OUT 4 NOVEMBER / CERT 15 / 115 MINS DIRECTORS Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead CAST Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead If you were worried that working for Marvel might have dragged lo-fi weirdmeisters Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead into the mainstream, Something In The Dirt is here to disabuse you of that notion. Rebounding with their most unapologetically batshit flight-of-fancy yet, this is a tale of two doofuses (Benson and Moorhead) who are inspired by a floating ashtray to document evidence of the paranormal. It’s no simple ghost hunt, but rather a trippy concoction that includes electromagnetism, a cult based on triangles, and a cupboard with a penchant for Beethoven. The latter half is occasionally overburdened by the weight of its own ideas, but this is an audacious, ambiguous head-trip…

★★★★★ OUT 18 NOVEMBER CERT TBC / 96 MINS DIRECTOR Charlotte Wells CAST Paul Mescal, Frankie Corio, Celia Rowlson-Hall, Brooklyn Toulson PLOT In the late 1990s, 30-year-old single father Calum (Mescal) takes his 11-year-old daughter Sophie (Corio) to a Turkish holiday resort for a rare trip together. Years later, an adult Sophie (Rowlson-Hall) pieces together the memories once shared with her now absent dad. RARE AND SPECIAL is a film capable of summoning this much poignancy: a feeling which lingers well beyond the film’s final, achingly moving moments on screen. That Aftersun is the debut from British filmmaker Charlotte Wells only adds to its accomplishment. For the most part, this two-hander of a drama moves along a languorous linear timeline: Calum (Paul Mescal) is on the brink of his 31st…

★★★ OUT NOW (APPLE TV+) / CERT 15 / 105 MINS DIRECTOR Rodrigo García CAST Ewan McGregor, Ethan Hawke, Maribel Verdú, Sophie Okonedo A father’s death prompts a road trip for estranged half-brothers Raymond (Ewan McGregor) and Ray (Ethan Hawke) in this pleasant if clunky comedy-drama. McGregor and Hawke are charming in their chalk-and-cheese dynamic, and bound by their turbulent upbringing, the pair commit to attending their father’s funeral together. Yet for all their earnest appeal, they can’t lift writer-director Rodrigo García’s screenplay above its conformity. The film lacks the necessary bite of a black comedy, the supporting characters are one-note, and its dialogue is bogged down with lengthy exposition. As an ambling two-hander, it's not quite memorable enough — though it has undeniable heart. BW…

★★★★★ OUT NOVEMBER 11 (BBC TWO/iPLAYER) / EPISODES VIEWED 6 OF 6 SHOWRUNNER Hugo Blick CAST Emily Blunt, Chaske Spencer, Tom Hughes, Stephen Rea, Rafe Spall PLOT Englishwoman Cornelia Locke (Blunt) arrives in the American West in 1890 on a revenge mission. She’s thrown together with Pawnee ex-cavalry scout Eli Whipp (Spencer), who’s trying to make his way home to a plot of land he owns. Together they forge an unlikely friendship while facing violent threats at every turn. HUGO BLICK FIRST came to prominence on British television in 2000, as co-creator of the Rob Brydon comedy vehicle Marion & Geoff. Its ten-minute episodes were entirely confined to the setting of a taxi and filmed by a single fixed camera. It was the definition of a small-scale, intimate little gem.…

WORDS IAN FREER IF YOU WANT AN IMAGE TO SUM UP FILMMAKER MARK JENKIN, TRY THIS ON FOR SIZE. Shooting his break-out Cornish-fishermen-versus-out-of-towners film Bait, he needed a shot of a crowbar falling to the floor. Jenkin captured the key moment in his tiny backyard, pressing his eye to the viewfinder, holding a Paglight [a small light] between his teeth and dropping the crowbar himself — all while his partner and constant collaborator Mary Woodvine was making dinner — or “tea”, in Jenkin’s jargon — in the kitchen just two feet away. “I just love filmmaking,” he enthuses about his DIY approach. “I love all of it. I’m like a kid who picks up a camera for the first time, like I did when I was 17 years old. I’ve…

”WE’RE GOING INTO COMBAT, SON, ON A LEVEL NO LIVING PILOT’S EVER SEEN.” While there’s a fair amount of CGI in the movie, it can’t be overstated how much the commitment to putting Cruise and his co-stars in cockpits and throwing them around at speeds that would pummel most of us into Play-Doh paid off. The rush of adrenaline, for example, that surges through Maverick as he accelerates off the runway of an aircraft carrier, the background zipping past like it’s being pulled on wires, is infectious, addictive, and surely triggered much of the film’s repeat business. Much has been made of how Cruise knows so much about flying that he concocted his own training programme for his young co-stars. But even Paramount and the US Navy stopped short of…

HALF AN HOUR into Everything Everywhere All At Once, everything changes, all at once, a quiet drama about an ageing Asian-American laundromat owner trying to do her taxes suddenly morphing into a full-blown Hong Kong-style action spectacular. Quiet dad Waymond — played by Ke Huy Quan, in his first major role in decades — chows down on some lip-balm, ‘verse-jumps’ his brain into the multiverse, and swiftly kicks serious butt, armed with only a humble fanny-pack. Daniels — writer-directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert — left all other 2022 action sequences scrambling in the dust. We asked Quan to reveal the secrets of the best fight scene in the multiverse. MAKE AN UNCOOL OBJECT COOL The fanny-pack was baked into the script from the start, to turn a nerdy stereotype…

Thor: Love And Thunder — the Norse god’s fourth (Thorth?) solo outing — boasted an all-star cast. Hemsworth. Portman. Bale. But none of them were a match for the characters that hijacked every scene they were in — Toothgnasher and Toothgrinder (as they are apparently named), a pair of ship-dragging goats gifted to Thor, charging through the galaxy upon endlessly materialising Bifrost, but more importantly, screaming themselves — and us — silly. Wow, those screams. Pained, demonic, tinnitus-inducing wails, horrible yet somehow wonderful all at once. They’re still keeping us awake at night, or at least haunting our dreams. Stephen Curry’s King Yakan gives the goats to Thor as gratitude for saving his planet (“As is tradition, the protectors of our world are bestowed with great beasts”). That’s not important,…

When dealing with a show that features octopus fellatio, a maniac with a prehensile penis, and a superhero sex festival, you’d imagine it being rather tricky to pull off one uniquely shocking moment. The Boys, however, manages a clear winner just ten minutes into Season 3, with a sequence that qualifies not only as the most demented moment of the show so far, but of anything this year — and possibly beyond. Inspired by the Thanos-arse meme (based on fan speculation that Ant-Man could have simply taken a trip up the Avengers villain’s backside, and then grown to full size and destroyed him via a severe case of rectumania), showrunner Eric Kripke set out to do what Marvel never could. But having already ticked the exploding-anus box in Season 1…

DESPITE ITS REMIXING of cinema — of sci-fi, of cult-horror, of the iconography of the Western — one homage in Jordan Peele’s sci-fi horror Nope was a particular surprise: a recreation of the iconic bike-slide shot from Katsuhiro Otomo’s cyberpunk anime opus Akira. The original, in one of animation’s coolest sequences, featured teenager Kaneda kicking up crackling electricity and smoke as he slides his motorbike to a halt. Since then, many animators have paid tribute — and now Peele has done it in live-action, an exciting flourish in an already impressive film. We spoke to him about riffing on a classic. THE INSPIRATION Peele tells us that Akira has long been a favourite. He was around 11 when he first saw it, he says, and at the time of the…

The hardest-working man in Hollywood is enjoying a day off. Well, his version of a day off. Which, when you’re Eric Roberts, the actor with the most film and TV credits in American motion-picture history, means a workout at the crack of dawn, a plate of egg whites for breakfast, a couple of scripts to read and a minor emergency to handle involving one of his and his wife Eliza’s two adorable pet cats (a mix-up with medicines; don’t worry, nothing serious). All of this before we come knocking at the door of his San Fernando Valley home, for an early-morning audience with the star of 697 films and TV shows, and counting. “Woah, 697! That many, huh? I lost count at about 70,” laughs the actor you’ve watched in…

IF THERE WAS ever a cinematic image that encapsulates the idea of rags to riches in its purest form, it’s the transformation of Cinderella’s dress. Stood in the tatters of her home-made pink frock — assembled by her loyal coterie of mice (don’t ask) but clawed apart by her jealous stepsisters — the ever-hopeful hero at the heart of Disney’s second princess fairy tale (after Snow White) is left with the disappointment that she won’t be heading to the ball, after all. Enter her fairy godmother, who bestows the ultimate glow-up — with a simple bibbidi-bobbidi-boo, Cinderella goes from derelict to downright ball-ready royalty. Legend has it that Cinderella’s transformation was Walt Disney’s favourite ever piece of animation — and as one of the godfathers of the entire animated-feature medium,…

MICHAEL FLATLEY: “Oh God, where do I start? Witness For The Prosecution, Marlene Dietrich at the bar when she’s in disguise and she’s explaining her sob story. She pulls back her hair, and she says, ‘You wanna kiss me, ducky?’ Such a great line. I’ve never heard it before or since, but the way she delivered that, priceless stuff. And Charles Laughton. My God, what an actor. They were the greatest.” INT. PUB — NIGHT Sir Wilfrid Robarts (Charles Laughton) and Mr Mayhew (Henry Daniell) have come to a pub to meet a woman who has promised crucial information in their defence of accused murderer Leonard Vole. The woman is credited as ‘Cockney Woman’, but she’s in fact Vole’s wife, Christine (Marlene Dietrich), in disguise, unbeknownst to Robarts and Mayhew.…