EmpireJune 2022的目錄

WAY BACK IN 1993, this magazine’s Jurassic Park preview feature ran with the headline, “IT’S BIG!” We briefly considered updating those words for this issue’s cover story on Jurassic World Dominion, before deciding against it. After all, “IT’S REALLY, REALLY, REALLY, REALLY BIG (SERIOUSLY, IT’S MASSIVE)” just didn’t look quite right on the page. Dominion is the kind of epic movie that doesn’t come along every day. The climax to not one but five dinosaur-crammed blockbusters, it’s got marauding creatures the size of a Caffè Nero. Action spectacle on land, air and water. And the return of three iconic characters last seen together heading towards a sunset in a helicopter in ‘93. In short, everything but the Kitchensinkosaurus. To do it justice, we’ve gone all in. I emerged after months…

TOM HIDDLESTON WAS finishing up the first season of Loki when he got the call: would you like to play a vicar? “They sent me the six episode scripts, and a letter from [director] Clio Barnard, ” Hiddleston recalls. “I was just immediately engaged by it.” The scripts he read were an adaptation of The Essex Serpent, a bestselling 2016 gothic mystery novel by Sarah Perry, set largely on the rural coastlines of Essex during the late Victorian era. Hiddleston, at the time, was engaged in a battle for the multiverse with a variant of his character that took the form of an alligator. The future job promised quite a different experience. “New experiences are always full of curiosity and interest to me, ” he says. Part of that difference…

WHERE? Campbell Studios, East London. WHEN? 9 December 2020. WHY? To find out how Rob Savage, the director of Host, is following up his Zoom-brewed, lockdown horror hit — the first of a three-picture deal he’s signed with Blumhouse Productions, the people behind The Purge, Get Out and The Invisible Man. While still a pandemic-related, found-footage affair (swapping video chat for an iPhone livestream), Dashcam sees Savage operating on a bigger, gorier scale. “It’s just like Host, except there’s more sticky blood!” he grins. WHAT DID WE SEE? Like the man said, a lot of sticky blood. All over Savage. All over the floor of the East London studio space he’s commandeered. All over the five dead suicide cultists lying around on that floor. And all over actors Annie Hardy…

DRAW ON YOUR WORST MEMORIES Tom Stourton knows a thing or two about feeling like the butt of the joke. The co-writer and star of the tightly wound All My Friends Hate Me, in which his character, Pete, is subjected to a nightmarish birthday weekend, remembers attending the wedding of distant friends after a big night out. As the day progressed, Stourton, who was feeling hungover and somewhat frazzled, worried that he had been invited as a prank. “It came to the speeches, and I thought that the groom was going to announce that the funniest part of the day was that I thought that I’d been invited for real, ” he tells Empire. CREATE EXTREME PRANKS In the film, Pete is subjected to japes of varying intensity, from a…

BIG SCREEN. SMALL SCREEN. YOUR REVIEWS BIBLE STARTS HERE EXCELLENT ★★★★ GOOD ★★★ OKAY ★★ POOR ★ AWFUL ★★★★★ OUT 15 APRIL / CERT TBC / 136 MINS DIRECTOR Robert Eggers CAST Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman, Claes Bang, Anya Taylor-Joy, Ethan Hawke, Björk, Willem Dafoe PLOT At the turn of the tenth century, a Nordic prince-turned-brutal-warrior named Amleth (Skarsgård) seeks bloody vengeance against the man responsible for the murder of his father (Hawke), and receives supernatural guidance along the way. NO FILMMAKER IN the last 20 years has done folklore quite like Robert Eggers. The Witch and The Lighthouse showcased his skilful ability to transpose the stories of old into celluloid form, without losing the historical, mystical and cultural veracity of their origin, and both have been weird and wacky…

★★★ OUT NOW / CERT 15 / 105 MINS DIRECTOR Seong-Hu Park CAST (VOICES) Megumi Ogata, Chinatsu Akasaki, Aya Endô, Kana Hanazawa Finding a happy halfway point between the non-canon, new-audience-accessible anime tie-in films and sequels demanding emotional investment like last year’s Demon Slayer: Kimetsu No Yaiba The Movie — Mugen Train, Jujutsu Kaisen 0 is for viewers new and old to enjoy. Those familiar with the TV show will find similar pleasures here, with its mix of fantasy, horror and dark emotion. The core concepts and tone remain the same too, as the film swings between scares and goofy comedy in its tale of cursed spirits and doomed love. The animation — a dazzling mix of fight choreography and magic powers defined by their own distinct textures — is…

★★ OUT NOW / CERT PG / 122 MINS DIRECTOR Jeff Fowler CAST Ben Schwartz, Idris Elba, Jim Carrey, James Marsden, Tika Sumpter, Colleen O’Shaughnessey The first Sonic The Hedgehog film overcame initial fan backlash, mixed reviews and the video-game-to-movie curse to become the most successful film based on a video game ever. This, the beginning of a burgeoning cinematic universe, is really just more of the same: a Saturday-morning cartoon with a Hollywood budget, targeted primarily at an audience of eight-year-olds. It’s still colourful and kooky, the CG character designs are still jarringly cartoonish in their live-action surroundings, and the jokes are still, on the whole, bad. The closest thing here to a saving grace is Jim Carrey, reminding us again that nobody in Hollywood can expertly gurn quite…

★★★ OUT NOW / CERT U / 100 MINS DIRECTOR Pierre Perifel CAST Sam Rockwell, Craig Robinson, Awkwafina, Richard Ayoade, Zazie Beetz The Bad Guys is no Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse, but it’s a fascinating example of its influence: a major studio making some brave creative choices. Opting for stylisation over realism, it has a lovely 3D-but-also-2D feel, which gives the film a much more handmade look. Shame, then, that the plot and characters run a little thin. It’s a fairly basic story (adapted from the books by Aaron Blabey) about baddies learning how to become goodies, but there’s some genuinely witty visual comedy: the army of hypnotised guinea pigs, for example, or the piranha who farts when he lies. With some gorgeously stylised animation and sharp comedy making up…

★★★ OUT NOW / CERT 12A / 136 MINS DIRECTOR David Yates CAST Eddie Redmayne, Jude Law, Mads Mikkelsen, Dan Fogler, Alison Sudol, Jessica Williams, Ezra Miller PLOT Dark wizard Grindelwald (Mikkelsen) is gaining followers and making a bid for political legitimacy. Meanwhile, Albus Dumbledore (Law) hatches a plot to thwart his efforts with the help of a ragtag bunch of heroes — including Newt Scamander (Redmayne), muggle baker Jacob Kowalski (Fogler) and teacher Lally Hicks (Williams). A HEAVY WEIGHT rests on Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets Of Dumbledore. In the four years since The Crimes Of Grindelwald arrived to muted reviews and underwhelming box office, much has changed in the Wizarding World’s orbit. J.K. Rowling’s controversial comments on gender identity have cast a long shadow over the beloved world she…

★★★ OUT NOW (NETFLIX) CERT TBC / 126 MINS DIRECTOR Judd Apatow CAST Karen Gillan, Peter Serafinowicz, Leslie Mann, David Duchovny, Iris Apatow, Keegan-Michael Key, Pedro Pascal, Guz Khan PLOT At the height of the Covid pandemic, the cast and crew of dinosaur-sequel epic ‘Cliff Beasts 6’, led by returning star Carol Cobb (Gillan), are forced to quarantine in an English country hotel before filming. But as the restrictions take their toll, the production descends into chaos. THE BUBBLE IS an odd concoction. It is, in part, a satire of a film that hasn’t even been released yet: co-writers Judd Apatow and Pam Brady were inspired by the production of Jurassic World Dominion, which was the first major film to resume work after the initial Covid lockdown back in 2020.…

★★★ OUT NOW (APPLE TV+) EPISODES WATCHED 8 OF 8 SHOWRUNNERS Lee Eisenberg, Drew Crevello CAST Jared Leto, Anne Hathaway, Kyle Marvin, America Ferrera PLOT Adam Neumann (Leto) is an entrepreneur going nowhere when he meets wealthy yoga instructor Rebekah (Hathaway). With her support, Neumann co-founds the office-space company WeWork, at one point valued at $47 billion. But Neumann’s lavish lifestyle and unconventional approach soon threaten to bring the company down. STORIES ABOUT THE rise-and-fall of start-up businesses have been experiencing their own bubble lately: this year alone has seen Inventing Anna, The Dropout and the forthcoming Bad Blood. WeCrashed, thankfully, isn’t a sign of any stock-market implosion, but it does hint at the limits of where this in-vogue subgenre can go. This story begins in September 2019, where, at…

THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS In Eugène Lourié’s 1953 B-movie, an atomic-bomb explosion in the Arctic rouses a frozen Rhedosaurus. Grumpy after being rudely awoken (relatable), big Rhed terrorises New York, infecting civilians and devouring coppers (slightly less relatable). ONE OF OUR DINOSAURS IS MISSING Helen Hayes stashes a valuable bit of microfilm in a Brontosaurus skeleton from the Natural History Museum in Disney’s 1975 dino caper. Cue silly car chases through a foggy London as Peter Ustinov tails the poorly hidden fossil. WE’RE BACK! A DINOSAUR’S STORY Spielberg produced this wackadoodle 1993 ’toon where non-violent dinosaurs rock, roll, and run amok in NYC. Nothing says ’90s animation quite like a Tyrannosaurus John Goodman and his prehistoric pals singing cheesy, earwormy pop. THEODORE REX This infamous 1996 flick sees a…

ALEX GARLAND WANTS TO SET SOMETHING STRAIGHT. IT’S ABOUT 28 Days Later, his first screenplay. “I’m aware for years and years there’s been debates about that, ” he says. “Over whether or not it’s a zombie movie.” The rage-infected horde that speedily lurches around its viral apocalypse are, many (including director Danny Boyle) claim, absolutely not zombies. They’re still alive, technically speaking. To the guy that wrote it, however, the film’s genre is obvious. “It’s a zombie movie, ” asserts Garland. “Whatever technical discrepancies may or may not exist, they’re pretty much zombies.” Debate over! Garland’s insistence on this matter is symptomatic of his lifelong affinity for horror. He remembers being a little kid during the ‘70s, sneaking downstairs after bedtime to quietly devour Hammer movies on his parents’ black-and-white…

DARIO ARGENTO AND GASPAR NOÉ HAVE SERVED UP SOME OF THE MOST EXTREME IMAGERY IN CINEMA. Italy’s Argento is one of the world’s greatest horror directors, having revitalised the genre in the 1970s and ’80s with a blend of vivid violence and amped-up atmospherics. Argentine provocateur Gaspar Noé, meanwhile, has his own proud record of subversive themes and sensory-onslaught visuals. Argento has given us maggots raining down on ballerinas (Suspiria), a woman forced to witness her boyfriend’s murder by needles taped under her eyelids (Opera), and Jennifer Connelly as an insect-controlling psychic saved by a cut-throat-razor-wielding chimpanzee (Phenomena). Noé’s showreel of shock includes a horrifically violent revenge story told in reverse (Irréversible), a trippy Tokyo odyssey told from the point-of-view of a dead person (Enter The Void), and a dance…

IF YOU WANT the true definition of Disney magic, look no further than the spaghetti-slurping date at the heart of Lady And The Tramp. Frankly, the idea is inherently unpleasant — two dogs chowing down on a plate of pasta, tomato sauce sloshing around, all ending in a smooch between a cocker spaniel and a street mutt. Instead, legendary animators Frank Thomas and Milt Kahl (two of Disney’s fabled Nine Old Men) served up one of the most swoonsome shots in movie history. Arriving just over halfway into the film, it marks the turning point in Lady (Barbara Luddy) and Tramp’s (Larry Roberts) courtship — having already protected the wellto-do Lady from menacing strays and helped her remove her muzzle, Tramp pulls out the ultimate romantic ace card: taking her…

We reassess the greatest films of all time, one film at a time Alamy, Getty Images, Photofest IN A MOMENT OF desperation towards Police Story’s end, maverick cop Chan Ka-Kui (Jackie Chan) has to figure out how he can traverse several storeys of a shopping mall before a Mob boss has a chance to destroy crucial evidence. The solution: he takes a daring, eight-foot leap onto a pole and slides down it, crashing through hundreds of sparking light bulbs and a glass kiosk at the bottom. One problem: Chan was sick with exhaustion from filming Heart Of Dragon during the day with long-time collaborator and friend Sammo Hung, then shooting Police Story at night. The latter had been going on for months by the time Chan elected to perform the…

ACROSS 1 Country of Isabelle Huppert and Isabelle Adjani (6) 4 It can follow Game, Date or Prom in film titles (5) 9/26 Across Avengers actor who joins Benedict Cumberbatch in the Multiverse Of Madness (9,5) 10 Aka Thomas Anderson (3) 11 Maybe Mara, maybe McKinnon (4) 12 Kathryn Bigelow’s vampire road movie (4,4) 14 This was Rian Johnson’s solid directorial debut (5) 15 Elgort, who sang and danced through West Side Story (5) 20 It threatened Armageddon in Armageddon (8) 22 — Year (Amy Adams) (4) 24 One in Beverly Hills or a Kindergarten (3) 25 It’s Cary Grant’s real first name (9) 26 See 9 Across 27 What the 4 Across is in a Jennifer Jones film (6) DOWN 1 Friday is like this if the name’s Jodie or…

COMMENT OF THE MONTH THE WAY HOME Just read Chris Hewitt’s story [in the March 2022 issue] on Spider-Man: No Way Home’s box-office take. The last paragraph, about cinema in the time of Covid, slew me — finished the article with tears in my eyes, for two years of lost and changed cinema experiences (and everything else). Hopefully, this is really the way home now. DR GRAHAM WHITE, STIRLING Hear, hear, Dr Graham. Unfortunately, we can’t cast a Doctor Strange-esque spell to make the last two years go away, but we can give you a Picturehouse membership — for many more return trips home to come. Enjoy! Empire’s star letter wins a Picturehouse Membership, plus one for a friend! Valid for one year at 23 Picturehouse Cinemas across the UK,…

SANA AMANAT REMEMBERS sitting in on a Zoom audition with Iman Vellani, the breakout star now playing Ms. Marvel, aka Kamala Khan, the character that Amanat created. “She showed me every corner of her room, and it was covered with Avengers, ” she says, laughing. “Then she said, ‘Oh wait, I’m not done, ’ opened up her closet, and there was more Marvel everywhere.” Amanat realised then, without question, that Vellani would be Khan, the Pakistani-American high-schooler who worships superheroes — Captain Marvel especially — before becoming one herself. “She gave me a list of feedback on every single Marvel movie, ” she adds. “Kevin Feige is like her Carol Danvers.” Danvers was the original Ms. Marvel, making her debut in 1968 before being promoted to Captain. Amanat’s reimagination of…

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN you stop a time loop of continuous death and decide to start living? That’s where you’ll find Natasha Lyonne’s Nadia Vulvokov in the second season of Netflix show Russian Doll, after breaking free of a cycle that forced her to relive her 36th birthday party. If Season 1 of the darkly comic, highly conceptual show was about self-destruction in your mid-thirties, Season 2 is about intergenerational trauma and, as Lyonne, who is also the show’s co-creator, says, a chance to “illuminate a deeper spectrum of humanity”. Set almost four years after Season 1’s finale, Nadia is in the final weeks before her 40th birthday. But this is Russian Doll, and soon Nadia and her fellow time-loop traveller Alan (Charlie Barnett) are confronted by a portal in Manhattan…

BILL HADER ISN’T a hitman. He just plays one on TV. Which is probably a good thing, as it turns out that the co-creator/star of the dark and violent Barry, which has earned him two Emmys, wouldn’t last five minutes as a gun-for-hire. “I’m worthless, ” he laughs. “If you saw me exercise, it’s like, ‘I’m 43, it’s officially just Dad exercises.’” Still, as Barry, an expert assassin who finds a new home among an amateur acting troupe, he’s acquired a particular set of skills. Or, at least, the ability to fake them, as he tells us on the cusp of the show’s third season. SHOOTING Barry is an ex-Marine who constantly finds his attempts to carve out a new life as a thespian compromised by the odd murderous rampage.…

MIKE MYERS HAS been thinking about The Pentaverate — the secret society that forms the backbone of his brand-new, six-part Netflix comedy series of the same name — for a long time. How long, exactly? Well, in Myers’ 1993 comedy So I Married An Axe Murderer, his conspiracytheory-obsessed Scot, Stuart McKenzie, embarks on a rant that contains some very pertinent information. “It’s a well-known fact, Sonny Jim, that there’s a secret society of the five wealthiest people in the world, known as the Pentaverate, ” says Stuart, “who run everything in the world, including the newspapers, and meet tri-annually at a secret country mansion in Colorado.” So, a long time, then. “It’s been in my mind for forever and forever, ” confirms Myers, talking to Empire not from a secret…

Alamy, Capital Pictures, Getty Images AFTER TOM CRUISE secured himself to the side of a plane as it took off for Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation, and after he spent much of the making of Top Gun: Maverick hurtling around inside one, you’d think he and Christopher McQuarrie would have had it up to here with planes. Thankfully, as the star/ director turn their attention to shooting Mission: Impossible 8 on location in South Africa, that doesn’t seem to be the case. “We’re shooting this aerial sequence that’s pretty spectacular, ” confirms McQuarrie, who has taken time out from behind the camera to offer Empire an update on the shoot. The sequence in question involves Cruise climbing out onto the wing of a bright yellow World War II biplane, before…

★★★★ OUT 22 APRIL CERT 15 / 106 MINS DIRECTOR Tom Gormican CAST Nicolas Cage, Pedro Pascal, Sharon Horgan, Tiffany Haddish, Ike Barinholtz, Paco León PLOT Stuck in a slow career decline, actor Nick Cage (Cage) decides to retire — but not before banking $1 million for appearig at the birthday party of wealthy mega-fan Javi (Pascal). Unfortunately for the movie star, Javi is a drug lord suspected of kidnapping, and the CIA wants Cage to help. “I’M AN ACTOR, ” declares Nick Cage, in the role of his lifetime, playing Nick Cage. “No! You’re a fucking movie star, don’t you forget this!” screams back another Cage, digitally de-aged to his youthful, Wild At Heart heyday as a roaring ego-phantom version of the actor (playfully credited as ‘Nicky Kim Coppola’).…

★★★ OUT 6 MAY (PRIME VIDEO) CERT TBC / 103 MINS DIRECTOR Tarik Saleh CAST Chris Pine, Ben Foster, Gillian Jacobs, Eddie Marsan, Kiefer Sutherland PLOT James Harper (Pine), a Special Forces sergeant in the US Army, is involuntarily discharged without benefits. Broke and suddenly unemployed, he takes a high-risk private contractor job in Germany to settle his debts. When the job doesn’t go to plan, Harper is forced to take matters into his own hands. THE CONTRACTOR WAS originally called Violence Of Action, which at least gave some hint of explosions or excitement. The title they ultimately settled on sounds like a film where Chris Pine plays a handyman who spends most of the running time offering quotes to sort out your extension. It comes as some relief, then,…

★★★★ OUT 22 APRIL / CERT 15 / 99 MINS DIRECTOR Audrey Diwan CAST Anamaria Vartolomei, Luàna Bajrami A promising young woman’s life is thrown into disarray in ‘60s France as an unwanted pregnancy forces one bright student to embark on a perilous odyssey to get an illegal abortion. Director Audrey Diwan brings to life the true story of writer Annie Ernaux by adapting her memoir into an arresting, maddening yet always elegant feature. It’s anchored by a revelatory performance from Anamaria Vartolomei as Anne, telegraphing her tenacity and terror with equal commitment. Diwan does well to avoid melodrama, and never shies away from the degree of physical turmoil Anne suffers as she navigates her pregnancy and often takes matters into her own hands. It’s a powerful story told with…

★★★★ OUT NOW (NETFLIX) / CERT 12A / 97 MINS DIRECTOR Richard Linklater CAST Jack Black, Glen Powell, Zachary Levi, Milo Coy, Lee Eddy Richard Linklater has always mined his early years for cinematic treasures; this feels like his most personal film in years. Using a unique style of animation, this sweet, memoir-like film, told from the perspective of a ten-year-old in 1969, has its head in the stars but its heart on the ground. In Stanley’s (Jack Black) telling, there was a secret mission, days before the Apollo 11 walk on the moon, which saw NASA recruit him, a small child, to test their equipment first. That imagined mission bookends the film, but the meat of the thing is really the director luxuriating in his memories. As with many…

★★★ OUT NOW CERT TBC / 112 MINS DIRECTORS Adam Nee, Aaron Nee CAST Sandra Bullock, Channing Tatum, Daniel Radcliffe, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Brad Pitt PLOT When grieving romance novelist Loretta (Bullock) is kidnapped by an eccentric billionaire (Radcliffe), her cover model Alan (Tatum) takes off after her in an attempt to prove that he’s more than just a pretty face. Unfortunately for their chances of survival, that face might really be all they have. DEATH CANNOT STOP true love; it can only delay it for a while. Or so The Princess Bride taught us. Sure enough, the much bally-hooed death of the big-screen romcom is beginning to look more like a hiatus, because here we are in 2022 with a crowd-pleasing, star-led romance in an exotic location. If much…

★★★ OUT NOW / CERT 15 / 96 MINS DIRECTOR Antoneta Alamat Kusijanovic CAST Gracija Filipovic, Leon Lucev, Danica Curcic, Cliff Curtis Executive-produced by Martin Scorsese and exploring toxic masculinity in all its guises, Antoneta Alamat Kusijanovic’s debut feature won Cannes’ Caméra d’Or. The Croatian setting looks superb, as strong-willed teenager Julija (Gracija Filipovic) seeks to exploit a millionaire’s visit to challenge the grip that her father exerts over her and her mother. As Julija is imprisoned in an island stronghold, there’s a latter-day fairy-tale feel to the action, reinforced by mesmerising underwater sequences. Yet this can’t disguise the simplistic characterisation, and any sense of brooding menace is dissipated by a lengthy denouement that makes all too clear the story’s melodramatic beats.…

★★★★ OUT NOW (DISNEY+) EPISODES SEEN 4 OF 6 SHOWRUNNER Jeremy Slater CAST Oscar Isaac, Ethan Hawke, May Calamawy, F. Murray Abraham PLOT Museum gift-shop employee and Egyptologist Steven Grant (Isaac) has a sleeping disorder. He wakes up in strange places, experiences peculiar dreams, and regularly hallucinates a sinister, bandage-wrapped apparition. Except Steven is actually Marc, his dreams are real, and that spectral mummy is the earthly incarnation of an ornery Egyptian moon god. KARL PILKINGTON IS not, we might argue, the most obvious place to look to when bringing a Marvel superhero to life. And yet, that’s precisely the inspiration Oscar Isaac has cited when conjuring Moon Knight’s hapless alter ego: bumbling tat-peddler Steven Grant. A significant shift from the comics’ Grant (a genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist — you…

“YOU’RE GOING TO SEE JEFF GOLDBLUM DO SOME CRAZY SHIT.” This would be, at any time, in any place, an exciting promise. After all, Jeff Goldblum is a one-man carnival, a human so effervescently entertaining that there exists a YouTube video of his Jurassic Park character, Ian Malcolm, laughing on loop for ten solid hours (it’s been viewed, so far, by 137,000 people). His jazz nights are legendary, not just for the music but for the fact that he’ll happily read out audience members’ WhatsApp messages to the room in dramatic fashion. He might play an impromptu round of Seven Degrees Of Jeff Goldblum with you, or announce that he feels “sleek as a panther”. Anything is possible. But today that promise, delivered to Empire by director Colin Trevorrow, feels…

For someone who feels the need, the need for speed, Tom Cruise has taken his sweet damn time making a sequel to Top Gun. Admittedly, Top Gun: Maverick has been in the can for a couple of years, with Covid delaying the film’s release a number of times. But by the time it’s finally released this summer, it will have been 36 years since Top Gun came out. Back in 1986, director Tony Scott’s high-flying movie became a cultural phenomenon, with its stunning flying sequences, influential visuals, and string of sharp one-liners, but it was Cruise who was at the centre of it all, as cocky aviator Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell, deploying the kind of weapons-grade charisma and intensity that saw him quickly become The World’s Biggest Movie Star, a title…

WANTED:30-50 RATS This advert, placed in a local German newspaper in the summer of 1921, heralded the production of a film that continues to haunt our screens, and our imaginations. F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony Of Horror was the first and is arguably still the best vampire movie. Its influence is so vast, it is almost impossible to measure. It is as timely now as when it was made, in the wake of another devastating pandemic. “It’s kind of the invention of the modern horror movie, ” Robert Eggers tells Empire — the director of The Northman and The Lighthouse has long cherished a plan for his own Nosferatu remake. “The thing that really makes it so memorable and important for everyone is Max Schreck, ” he says of the…

CHRIS MCKENNA AND Erik Sommers have been the principal writing team behind all three of Marvel Studios’ Spider-Man films. But with No Way Home, they faced a particularly onerous and nearly impossible task: bring the story of Tom Holland’s Peter Parker to a satisfying close, while also incorporating key characters from the previous 20 years of Spider-Man movies, including a bunch of familiar villains and more Peter Parkers than you could spin a web at. IDENTITY CRISIS One of No Way Home’s first surprises is that the issue created by the end of the last film, Far From Home, in which Mysterio took his revenge from beyond the grave by revealing Spider-Man’s secret identity to the world, is dealt with in the breakneck opening section. “We had versions where the…

IN THE TEN years since his last movie, the gentle drama Song For Marion, director Paul Andrew Williams had been working almost exclusively in television, with the acclaimed likes of Murdered By My Boyfriend under his belt. But he was itching to get back to making movies, and decided to take matters into his own hands by writing and directing Bull, an ultra-low-budget revenge thriller in which Neil Maskell hunts down the men responsible for… well, that would be telling. But the moral of the story is, according to Williams, that anyone can follow in his footsteps. So here are some of his tips, should you wish to make your own movie. JUST DO IT At the risk of being sued by Nike, that’s Williams’ basic mantra. “Bull’s the third…

Illustration: Neil Edwards. Alamy Not to be confused with the Addams Family, the Adams family — John Adams, Toby Poser and their daughter Zelda — are a low-budget DIY filmmaking collective, who share writing/directing credits, act and compose/perform music. They’ve worked together since Rumblestrips (2013) and are drawn to backwoods horror, even making a spooky Western, The Hatred (2018). Their breakthrough was The Deeper You Dig (2019), an intense ghost story about a drunk driver (J. Adams) drawn to the psychic mother (Poser) of a teen (Z. Adams) he’s killed but can’t bury in frozen ground. Their follow-up, Hellbender (2021), is insanely ambitious for a small-scale movie. John is killed off early so mother and daughter hold centre screen as ‘hellbenders’ who live apart from humanity, perform together in a…

Chloe Zhao: “We didn’t have Star Wars when I was growing up. I saw it on VHS tape in boarding school. My order was all messed up. I watched The Phantom Menace first, before I watched the originals. There was no internet at that time. I remember seeing the poster of little Anakin and the shadow [of Darth Vader], and that poster affected me so much. I just knew, ‘Whatever that poster is saying, whoever that shadow is, is going to be my favourite character of all time.’ And it didn’t disappoint when I found the VHS tape of the original movies. So, ‘I am your father, ’ was a very big one for me.” EXT. CLOUD CITY WALKWAY — DAY Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) and Darth Vader (David Prowse…

THIS MONTH’S FILM MOMENTS THAT MATTER DAVID LEITCH AND Brad Pitt go way back. Not just to Deadpool 2, where Pitt showed up for a one-shot joke in the sequence where the newly formed X-Force get brutally slaughtered (Pitt plays the invisible hero, The Vanisher, flashing that world-famous fizzog of his for one second as he gets electrocuted). But all the way back to 2004, when Pitt entered Action Hero Mode in Mr. & Mrs. Smith. His stunt double on that film? David Leitch. “I’ve worked with Brad as a stunt double on five movies, ” laughs Leitch. “We have a history. That cameo on Deadpool was the first time he really saw me in the filmmaker role.” So, when Leitch started developing Bullet Train, a high-concept action-comedy in which…

ORBAK SEEN IN: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER What do you get if you cross a horse with a woolly mammoth? An Orbak! Despite their shaggy hair and tusks, this is the closest to an Earth horse. Except these are as happy galloping into battle on a Star Destroyer as they are grazing on grass. FATHIER SEEN IN: THE LAST JEDI What do you get if you cross a horse with a cat? A Fathier! Fast as lightning, tall as a double-decker bus, and ready to gallop through a space-casino at the drop of a hat, these mistreated racing beasts are ready for revolution. Don’t resist! EOPIE SEEN IN: THE PREQUEL TRILOGY, OBI-WAN KENOBI What do you get if you cross a horse with a tapir? An Eopie! These friendly snoot-horses…

OVER THE YEARS, cinema has not exactly been reluctant to embrace the majesty of The Rolling Stones. From a climactic rendition of ‘Sweet Virginia’ in Knives Out to pretty much the entire filmography of Martin Scorsese, Mick Jagger’s signature wail has been a staple at the movies. “Some people don’t really like to license their songs for TV and movies, but I think the Stones were very like-minded to it. And I enjoy it, ” says Jagger, talking to Empire. “Sometimes it’s weird if you’re in the middle of enjoying a movie, or not enjoying a movie, and suddenly one of your songs comes on, if you’ve forgotten you licensed it.” Yet the appearance of a custom-written Jagger original is a rarity, which is why it’s something of a surprise…

Getty Images, Marvel, Mindy Tucker, Marco Vitturr THE FIRING “It was a concentrated moment of failure, ” says Dead Eyes host Connor Ratliff of the day Tom Hanks — writer-director of Band Of Brothers Episode 5 — fired him from his big break (playing ‘Pvt. Zielinski’) before shooting in 2000. Hanks had apparently let him go for having “dead eyes”, and the whole incident put Ratliff off acting for a decade. THE PODCAST The incident gradually became “a charming story to tell people”. That story became an “X-Files model’’ podcast in 2019, where the arc is “the government conspiracy” (Hanks firing Ratliff), but you still get “monsters of the week” (other tales of showbiz disappointment). THE EMAIL “Connor, not sure how to volunteer my services to you, ” the message…

IF YOU LOVED… WE CRASHED THE DROPOUT (DISNEY+) In the avalanche of recent TV dramas telling the extraordinary true stories of grifters and scammers, The Dropout stands out. Like WeCrashed, which charts the rise and demise of WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann (played by Jared Leto), it explores the personality of an entrepreneur with way too much faith in their own expertise and abilities. Amanda Seyfried plays this particular charlatan, Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos, whose seemingly ingenious new tech promised huge medical advances but was, in fact, useless. Seyfried is phenomenal and the intricate storytelling works beautifully. JOE VS. CAROLE (PEACOCK) At one point it seemed like we were going to have multiple TV and film versions of Tiger King, the original Netflix documentary series exposing the antics of…

COOPER RAIFF IS on a one-man mission. “I want to make movies that make people feel really good, ” says the writer, director and star of Cha Cha Real Smooth, an emotionally rich indie film about a 22-year-old college graduate who takes up a side-hustle as a bat mitzvah hype man. The Sundance-winner is Raiff’s second film, after his equally tender (if rudely named) college-set debut Shithouse. “The idea came to me while I was watching Wedding Crashers, ” he says of Cha Cha Real Smooth’s party premise. “And then the school that I went to was 50 per cent Jewish. My seventh-grade year was defined by going to bat mitzvahs every weekend.” It’s here, amidst the torahs and the trap music, that Raiff’s aimless Andrew forges a connection with…

JUSTIN KURZEL HAS spent his career trying to understand violence. Since Snowtown, his 2011 debut about a real-life series of murders in 1980s Adelaide, Kurzel’s films — Macbeth, Assassin’s Creed, and most recently The True History Of The Kelly Gang — have all explored how men become killers and how killing becomes mundane. His latest may not be his most violent (most of the killing happens off-screen), but it is his most complex and incendiary. Nitram is another true story, based on the life of Martin Bryant, a young, intellectually disabled man who murdered 35 people in Port Arthur, Tasmania, in 1996. It was the most shocking mass murder in modern Australian history. “There are many people who feel this shouldn’t have been made, ” says Kurzel, who is from…

How much is a pint of milk? I’ve regressed. I knew how much a pint of milk cost when I was drinking a gallon of milk a day. Where am I? In Los Angeles? One hundred and 19 dollars. I think that might be accurate. It sounds like a joke, but I think it might be accurate. Do you have a nickname? When I was a kid, and which I never understood and still don’t, my dad called me ‘Squash’. I guess because it rhymes with Josh? It’s like a non-nickname. It’s the opposite of a nickname. It didn’t create a lot of confidence as a kid. Do you have a signature dish? I was a cook at a place called Rocky Galentis on the Lower State Street in Santa…

★★★★ OUT NOW / CERT 18 / 106 MINS DIRECTOR Ti West CAST Mia Goth, Jenna Ortega, Martin Henderson, Brittany Snow, Scott Mescudi Texas, 1979. Hustler Wayne (Martin Henderson) hires an isolated farm, intending to shoot a porn movie. Misunderstandings lead to a bloodbath. Considering that sequels to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre are still being cranked out, writer-director Ti West shows guts in reframing many images from Tobe Hooper’s 1974 classic early in X, to build background dread while the main characters think they’re in a comical, down-home Boogie Nights. When natural and unnatural desires are awakened on the shoot, the horrors go into overdrive with eye-opening shocks and surprises. West’s fright-films are playful but run to serious scares — and X is a properly satisfying shocker.…

★★★★★ OUT 22 APRIL / CERT TBC / 72 MINS DIRECTOR Laura Wandel CAST Maya Vanderbeque, Günter Duret, Karim Leklou It begins with a sobbing seven-year-old girl hugging her older brother before heading to school for the first time. It is the first of a few hugs in the film. Hugs so tight, so desperate, you want to cry. For this playground can be a battleground. Nora (Maya Vanderbeque) doesn’t understand why her brother Abel (Günter Duret) is being bullied or why he’s bullying other kids, her innocence being gradually corroded. Vanderbeque’s performance is impossibly great, and director Laura Wandel’s acutely empathetic filmmaking feels almost invisible. This is tender, sensitive, non-judgmental work, which doesn’t put a foot wrong. At 72 minutes, it verges on slight — there’s certainly no fat…

★★★★ OUT NOW / CERT TBC / 98 MINS DIRECTOR Daniel Roher CAST Alexei Navalny, Christo Grozev, Yulia Navalnaya This documentary follows Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in the days surrounding his poisoning. It was made before the invasion of Ukraine, but it couldn’t be timelier; here is a first-hand account of what it means to go up against Putin, delivered as a political thriller. The assassination attempt is the event around which the movie hangs: the first half establishes why Navalny was such a thorn in the Kremlin’s side; the second deals with the fallout, leading to the film’s most extraordinary sequence, where Navalny prank-calls one of the scientists suspected of poisoning him. It’s a remarkable, ground-level insight into a modern-day police state, and how any kind of meaningful…

★★★ OUT 29 APRIL / CERT 12A / 102 MINS DIRECTOR Nabil Ayouch CAST Ismail Adouab, Nouhaila Arif, Samah Barigou, Abdelilah Basbousi For filmgoers, the thought of music in Casablanca brings to mind the twinkling keys of Rick’s Café Américain. Nabil Ayouch’s charming new film hands the mic to the young Moroccans living in the city today, with a story about a mercurial rap teacher and a group of students who, thanks to the magic of hip-hop, find their own voices. If that sounds like Dead Poets Society with a backing track, you’re not far off. Hearty, complex and very real discussions about religion and politics evolve from debate into powerful lyrics, and an earnest crowd-pleaser becomes an invigorating rally for the arts and self-expression. The lesson plan is familiar,…

★★★★ OUT NOW (APPLE TV+) EPISODES VIEWED 6 OF 6 SHOWRUNNERS Will Smith, James Hawes CAST Gary Oldman, Jack Lowden, Olivia Cooke, Kristin Scott Thomas, Christopher Chung, Dustin Demri-Burns, Antonio Aakeel PLOT Disgraced MI5 agent River Cartwright (Lowden) is shunted to the service’s notoriously useless unit, Slough House, but he still finds a way to investigate the case of young Muslim Hassan Ahmed (Aakeel), held hostage by a far-right group who plan on executing him live on the internet. IT BEGINS WITH a spectacularly staged airport-set action set-piece which wouldn’t look out of place in a Bond or Bourne movie. Kristin Scott Thomas, proving she’d make a brilliant M, is MI5 Head Of Ops Diana Taverner, watching from her vast, shiny espionage HQ as young agent River Cartwright (Jack Lowden)…

THE DUETS The pair sang a series of duets together, Goldblum on piano and Neill (occasionally) on ukulele, including The Everly Brothers’ ‘Bye Bye Love’ and Kurt Weill’s ‘September Song’. “Sam is a songbird. He’s a nightingale, ” Goldblum tells Empire. “I just do my modest little bit to support him. But he’s a great, great musical star and I sit at his feet. Those toes aren’t always symmetrical, is all I’ll say. Maybe I’ve said too much.” THE RE-ENACTMENT Recreating an iconic Jurassic Park scene, but with Neill instead of Laura Dern, Goldblum pours water droplets onto the hand of his bewildered-looking friend, in front of a hotel bar. “That was pretty weird, ” says Neill now. “I’d forgotten it was a reference to the first film.” The video,…

NICOLS CAGE IS MAKING OUT WITH himself. Back in the summer of 2020, at the height of the pre-vaccine pandemic, not many people are kissing in the workplace (save for the odd government minister). But on a soundstage in Budapest, on the set of The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent, surrounded by a crew wearing masks, Nicolas Cage is planting a massive wet smacker right on his own face. “That was actually just a peck on the cheek, as scripted, ” co-writer and direActor Tom Gormican says now. In the film, Cage plays ‘Nick Cage’, a fictionalised version of himself; in the scene, he is haunted by a vision of his younger, more deranged self, known as ‘Nicky’ (also played by Cage, with de-ageing CGI). As Gormican recalls: “Nick came…

INDISPENSABLE HOME ENTERTAINMENT CAUTION: DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN SCREAM (2022) TO QUOTE THE name of a recent documentary, you cannot kill David Arquette. But you can, sadly, kill Dewey Riley, the loveable, bumbling, pure-hearted police officer whom Arquette has portrayed, winningly, across 25 years and all five films in the Scream franchise, from Scream to, erm, Scream. Arquette had developed the moustachioed mope, who was a minor character earmarked for death first time out, into one of the series’ three ever-present pillars, along with Neve Campbell’s Sidney Prescott and Courteney Cox’s Gale Weathers. The latter, in particular, formed half of a sweet and often surprising on-off relationship with Dewey which echoed the real-life marriage and divorce of Arquette and Cox. Across the four previous films, all directed…

Four Empire writers. Nine movies. Ordered definitively. Illustration: Jacey Chris: We’ve had nine standalone Spider-Man movies since 2002. Why does Hollywood keep going back to the spider? Ben: One of my favourite things about Spider-Man is that he’s a teenager. It’s a lovely combination to have that character being torn between normal kids’ stuff, while also dealing with the responsibility of saving an entire city. Helen: Kids can latch onto teenage heroes in a way that they can’t always latch onto adult heroes. Amon: The drive to do the right thing in spite of everything else you have to deal with is the core of Spider-Man. The best films have done a very good job of showing that in a very cool way. Chris: Plus, swinging around the city is…

THE LAST TIME Eric Bana watched Chopper was with his kids. Don’t worry — they were both more than old enough to watch Bana’s breakthrough performance in Andrew Dominik’s blistering debut, in which he played Mark ‘Chopper’ Read, a moustachioed, tattooed real-life criminal who stabbed and shot first, and asked questions later. “I probably watched the first ten minutes and left,” he laughs, down the phone line from his Melbourne home. “It’s amazing to have people talking about it all these years later.” Chopper, in which Bana is charismatic, terrifying, psychopathic and hilarious, often in the same scene, put him onto Hollywood’s radar and paved the way for Hulk, Troy, Star Trek and more. Now remastered for a new release, we asked Bana to break down how he got to…

PICK OF THE MONTH FLEE OUT NOW / CERT 15 / 89 MINS DVD BR The decision to animate this sublime documentary — Waltz With Bashir-style — originally served a function: to preserve the anonymity of its subject, a gay Afghan refugee (Amin), relating the story of his attempt to build a new life in Denmark after escaping the Afghan civil war in 1989. But out of that has flowed an artistry that elevates the narrative, whether it’s finding beauty in such moments as the sharing of a pair of Walkman headphones, or plunging us into the harrowing incidents of Amin’s journey. Director Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s highlighting of the West’s treatment of refugees feels dispiritingly timely, but he allows the joy to shine through, too, giving the film a piquant…