Tabla de contenidos para June 2023 en Empire

No./2 LOUIS LETERRIER, THE director of Fast X, the penultimate part of Vin Diesel’s increasingly deranged car-wars series, knows what people want this time around. “Forget the last six ones,” he proclaims. “We’re going to go much smaller.” ‘My Dinner With Dom Toretto’? Leterrier’s pulling your collective leg, of course. “No, the only way is up!” he laughs. “We want to finish this franchise at its apex.” Here’s how he’s amping up some of Fast & Furious’ fundamental elements. THE FAMILY Dom Toretto’s extended family is now so large that their barbecues should probably take place in a football stadium. There’s his wife Letty, his sister Mia, his brother Jakob, and honorary brothers galore. But there’s always room for more. “We’ve introduced a multi-generational aspect, with his grandmother, played by…

No./10  PIXAR HAS MADE characters out of toys, feelings, lamps, you name it — now, Peter Sohn’s Elemental fills a city with living elements. The film, which sees short-tempered fire being Ember (Leah Lewis) make friends with watery Wade (Mamoudou Athie), is set in a world inspired by Sohn’s New York upbringing. “The diversity of [the people] that arrived in my parents’ grocery store in The Bronx really impacted me a great deal,” he says. Speaking with Empire, the director explains how he brought the elements to life. 1. AIR The seeds for the air characters were sown in Sohn’s short film Partly Cloudy (2009), which featured cotton-textured living clouds. Newer tech allowed the Elemental team to give their vapoury creations a more graceful flow. But just because they’re “wispy…

No./13 “IT HASN’T QUITE hit yet,” Rachel Brosnahan tells Empire about The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s imminent end. The cult 1950s/’60s-set show about Miriam ‘Midge’ Maisel, a plucky stand-up who defied the odds to storm an all-male comedy scene, has been life-changing for Brosnahan, earning her two Golden Globes and an Emmy. The show began back in 2017 with the end of Midge’s marriage, the catalyst for her getting up on stage and turning her pain into punchlines. For Brosnahan, a stage and screen actor who “had died and cried for ten years prior to working on this show”, the biggest challenge of playing a comedian was tapping into Midge’s confidence. “Coming from the theatre, you spend all your time trying to forget that the audience is there,” she laughs. “In…

ON EARLY INSPIRATION There are people like Jim Carrey who I remember watching growing up and being so excited by, but also Bollywood stars like Aishwarya Rai and Madhuri Dixit. I wanted to be that mesmerising and that enchanting on screen. ON GETTING INTO ACTING I only studied acting part-time in the last few years, but I did every extracurricular thing that I could. I got a tiny part in The History Boys when I was about nine. That was such a big, “Oh my God, I’m in a movie!” moment. ON PREPARING FOR POLITE SOCIETY [Writer-director Nida Manzoor and I] discussed a few films that we thought would be good to watch, like The Matrix and Scott Pilgrim Vs The World. There’s a fight that was very much inspired…

No./20 A LONE FEMALE warrior, dispensing lightning strikes and fearlessly plunging into one melee after another. The Bride? No. Pauline Kael, who reigned supreme in the male-dominated world of movie criticism through the 1970s and ’80s. And, according to word out of Hollywood, quite possibly the subject of Quentin Tarantino’s tenth and final picture, reportedly titled ‘The Movie Critic’. Kael’s pen was truly mightier than the sword, her words every bit as razor-sharp and gleaming as a Hattori Hanzo blade. There was nothing and nobody she would not eviscerate if they failed to impress her. “Slurpy, bittersweet… fairly humourless,” she said of It’s A Wonderful Life. “Only his hands seem fully alive,” she declared of Clint Eastwood, for whom she reserved some of her most savage prose. Kael was formidable;…

★★★  OUT NOW (APPLE TV+) CERT 15 / 118 MINS DIRECTOR Jon S. Baird CAST Taron Egerton, Nikita Efremov, Sofya Lebedeva, Igor Grabuzov, Anthony Boyle, Ayane, Toby Jones, Roger Allam PLOT In the late ’80s, businessman Henk Rogers (Egerton) fights to run a Russian videogame named Tetris on Nintendo's fledgling Game Boy. He soon clashes with British press baron Robert Maxwell (Allam) and his son Kevin (Boyle) — and then the KGB become involved... WITH THE SUPER Mario Bros. Movie hitting cinemas almost simultaneously with the release of Jon S. Baird’s Tetris on Apple+, it seems Nintendo is having a bit of a cinematic moment. But beyond the fact both films are inspired by popular titles from the Japanese gaming giant, they couldn’t be more different. Thankfully, Tetris is not…

★★★ OUT NOW / CERT TBC / 112 MINS DIRECTOR Ben Affleck CAST Matt Damon, Viola Davis, Ben Affleck, Jason Bateman, Chris Tucker PLOT 1984. While sports-shoe giants Converse and Adidas dominate the world of basketball, scrappy upstart Nike struggles to make an impact. That is, until brash executive Sonny Vaccaro (Damon) has an idea, to woo just one player: up-and-coming court star Michael Jordan (Damian Delano Young). IF IT’S SUCCESSFUL, Air might just prove to be the first in a wave of films about shoes. Can we expect a feature explaining how Hush Puppies got their name? A Cole Haan origin story, starring Cole Hauser? ‘Crocs: The Movie’? It’s easy to joke, but Ben Affleck’s Nike thriller pulls off a pretty darn difficult task: making you care about how…

★★★★★ OUT 14 APRIL / CERT 15 / 113 MINS DIRECTOR Mia Hansen-Løve CAST Léa Seydoux, Melvil Poupaud, Pascal Greggory One Fine Morning is Mia Hansen-Løve on tip-top form, aided by a never better Léa Seydoux. She plays Sandra, a single-parent widow living through the pain of caring for a father with a degenerative illness juxtaposed with the joy of new-found love with old friend Clément (Melvin Poupaud). In outline it sounds histrionic; in actuality it’s a beautifully drawn gift of a film, Hansen-Løve and the cast alive to both the practical and emotional conundrums of dealing with dementia and the rush of a new relationship. It’s a beautifully made, personal flick but not a navel-gazey one, full of humour and warmth. It does that Hansen-Løve trick of being serious…

★★★★ OUT 5 MAY / CERT TBC / 116 MINS DIRECTOR Davy Chou CAST Park Ji-min, Oh Kwang-rok, Choi Cho-woo, Guka Han Since the 1950s, thousands of children have been adopted internationally from South Korea. Based on real testimony, Return To Seoul dramatises the story of one such adoptee: Freddie, played by Park Ji-min, who left Seoul as a baby and grew up in France. Set over the course of nearly a decade’s worth of trips to her birth country, Davy Chou’s elliptical film sees Freddie chaotically grapple with her identity, responding to deep psychological scars with heavy drinking, sexual openness and a spot of arms-dealing. Despite the heavy subject matter, it’s rarely sentimental or judgemental. Chou’s direction is mesmeric, stylish and crisp, while Park’s debut performance is staggering, summoning…

★★★★ OUT 14 APRIL / CERT PG / 122 MINS DIRECTOR Makoto Shinkai VOICE CAST Nanoka Hara, Hokuto Matsumura, Eri Fukatsu It’s the classic tale: boy meets girl, boy turns into a chair, boy and girl stop natural disasters. Teen Suzume (Nanoka Hara), orphaned in the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, is still processing her grief; after meeting a man who protects Japan from similar calamities and gets transformed into a three-legged chair (you read that right), she joins his quest. After disaster tales Your Name and Weathering With You, Makoto Shinkai’s latest revisits familiar ground, but despite talking chairs, Suzume is far more realist. This is a memorialisation, grieving guide and historical document, told via road trip. Strongest in its ruminative moments, it’s visually striking and emotionally poignant —…

★★★★★ OUT NOW (SKY ATLANTIC/ NOW) / EPISODES VIEWED 4 OF 10 SHOWRUNNER Jesse Armstrong CAST Brian Cox, Jeremy Strong, Kieran Culkin, Sarah Snook, Matthew Macfadyen, Nicholas Braun, Alan Ruck PLOT After unsuccessfully trying to unseat their CEO father Logan (Cox), the Roy children — Kendall (Strong), Shiv (Snook) and Roman (Culkin) — are now working together, and still looking to get one over their old man. With big takeover deals looming, who will come out on top? THE CONCLUDING SEASON of Succession begins with an echo of the first: a birthday party. In the original 2018 pilot — an hour of television that only coyly hinted at the stunning shit-shows-at-fuck-factories yet to come — Logan Roy (Brian Cox) celebrates his 80th with a get-together only the Roys know how…

THR GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY ARE CRYING IT IS 23 JULY 2022, AND IN HALL H OF THE San Diego Convention Centre, the cast of Marvel’s most subversive superhero team take to the Comic-Con stage, having just debuted the first trailer for Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3 — which, among other things, teases the emotional origin story of Rocket Raccoon. It’s the first footage anyone has seen of the film, including the cast themselves. They’re visibly overwhelmed. “We’re all kind of having a moment here,” Chris Pratt (aka the Guardians’ self-appointed captain Peter Quill, aka Star-Lord) tells the audience. He gives his friend, writer-director James Gunn, a hug. “It’s very moving. We love you, buddy.” The crowd applauds. How did it come to this? How did Marvel’s most irreverent…

16 Walt Disney’s age when he volunteered as a Red Cross ambulance driver in 1918. Enlisters had to be at least 17, so the patriotic Walt changed his birth year by one on his application. 68 TOTAL HOURS OF FILM PRODUCED BY DISNEY FOR THE WAR. 165 Disney employees who served during World War II. As of 1944, 85 were in the Army, 49 in the Navy, plus there were 21 Marines, two Merchant Marines, and one Woman Airforce Service Pilot. 300,000 FEET OF FILM PRODUCED ANNUALLY BY DISNEY AS PART OF THE WAR FRONT, UP FROM 30,000 PRE-WAR. 38 MILITARY INSIGNIA FEATURING GOOFY. ONE MORE THAN MICKEY MOUSE. 5 Gold stars on a flag produced by Disney, representing the five studio employees who died in service. 22 Disney characters…

IN 1950, 25 years and 36 films into a career that had made him richer and more famous than he had ever imagined, Alfred Hitchcock found himself wondering where it had all gone wrong. Ten years earlier, Hollywood mogul David O. Selznick had granted Hitchcock’s ultimate desire by bringing him to America, putting him under contract and giving him access to the bigger budgets and advanced technology Hitchcock needed to fully realise his visions. Financial returns were more than satisfactory, but the Selznick-Hitchcock relationship quickly soured. Their final picture together, 1947’s The Paradine Case, was a stinker, and Hitchcock’s most recent three — Rope (1948), Under Capricorn (1949) and Stage Fright (1950) — didn’t fare much better with contemporary audiences or critics. Worse, Hitchcock — who always liked to be…

The Wrong Trousers PETER SALLIS WAS exhausted. The veteran actor was in his early seventies when Nick Park asked him to reprise his role as the voice of Park’s Plasticine protagonist, Wallace, in a short stop-motion animation, The Wrong Trousers. Sallis had voiced Wallace before in 1989’s A Grand Day Out, which started life as Park’s graduation film before turning into something grander, but this recording session was a different kettle of cheese. Particularly for the part where Wallace and his beloved pet/guardian angel, Gromit, pursue an evil penguin (it’s a long story) on a toy train running through their own house. “I wanted loads of screaming and ‘aaaaaaah!’ and ‘Grommmmmit!’” laughs Park now. “We did take after take, and Peter went, ‘Why doesn’t he just get off the bloody…

ACROSS 1 — Rocket (Wes Anderson film) (6) 4 Jeremy Renner’s witch hunter (6) 8 His most recent film as director and star was Cry Macho (5,8) 10 Park Chan-wook’s decision was to do this (5) 11 Cameron Crowe’s Gen X grunge flick (7) 12 “Only their mother can tell them apart” according to this comedy’s tagline (5) 14 As kept by a chambermaid and a wimpy kid (5) 19 It’s what Charlie Babbitt used to call his brother (4,3) 21 Henry or Jane, or Bridget from 11 Across (5) 23 He’s been played by Bogart, Mitchum and Neeson (6,7) 24 The link between the 13th and Dan Aykroyd in Dragnet (6) 25 Warm ones for Nicholas Hoult, three of…

There are three new releases on DVD and Blu-ray out to buy, and we’ve got a copy of each for one lucky winner. First up is Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody, a look at the rise and tragic fall of the legendary performer. Next is A Man Called Otto (pictured), the Tom Hanks-starring American remake of the whimsical Swedish A Man Called Ove. And finally Matilda The Musical, Matthew Warchus and Tim Minchin’s big-screen all-singing, all-dancing take on Roald Dahl’s beloved tale. Not only that, we’ll give you a huge TV to watch them on! Just crack the crossword, solve the anagram and follow the instructions below. ALL TITLES ARE AVAILABLE ON DVD AND DIGITAL…

THE CHILD COMMENT OF THE MONTH Here is a picture of my husband and ten-week-old daughter enjoying the April edition [issue #412] of Empire. She was enraptured for a full 15 minutes. We’re starting her out as a film fan as early as we can. MEGAN WELSTAND-PATEL, CORNWALL This is the way! It is a high honour in the Mandalorian creed to encourage a foundling to read Empire magazine. (There are many parents who even use the magazine as a full-time babysitter.) For inspiring the next generation of film fanatics, please accept this Picturehouse membership, on us. Empire’s star letter wins a Picturehouse Membership, plus one for a friend! Valid for one year at 23 Picturehouse Cinemas across the UK, including the flagship Picturehouse Central in London’s West End, each…

No./3  THE NEWS THAT James Gunn is directing a Superman movie should come as little surprise. In fact, Superman: Legacy — which will open Chapter 1 of DC’s Gods and Monsters saga — feels like it’s been a long time coming for Gunn, and not only because he was already attached as a writer. With a love of the Man Of Steel harking back to his childhood, Empire digs into why Superman and Gunn were always meant to be. 1978 Gunn was 12 years old when he first watched the 1978 Christopher Reeve-fronted Superman, and it helped fuel his passion for superhero films. “I was really excited when they first started making those movies,” he said of the Richard Donner epic. “It was about the visual effects when I saw…

No./11 “I WANTED TO treat it like Aaron Sorkin [adapting] Shakespeare,” laughs actor-director Brando Crawford, discussing one of the most internet-breaking surprises of 2023. In March, news that Bob Odenkirk was to star in a remake of The Room sent fans of the cult 2003 film, written by, directed by and starring the mysterious Tommy Wiseau, into a frenzy. Not least because this was no ordinary remake. This version of The Room, dubbed “the Citizen Kane of bad movies” upon release, was going to approach the story of San Francisco love-trianglers Johnny, Lisa and Mark as a straight-faced drama, rather than the unintended comic masterpiece it’s celebrated as today. “There’s a possibility that Tommy’s work will be revered the same way [as Shakespeare] in a hundred years, because of the…

VEB ANT-MAN & THE WASP: QUANTUMANIA No./14 A Quantum Realm fan favourite, this hot-pink, hole-obsessed fella proved the MVP against Kang’s furious reign. Here’s hoping his oozy presence pops up in MCU adventures to come. SPLAT STRANGE WORLD What it lacked in ears, nose and mouth, this sassy blue blob made up for with moxie as an unofficial tour guide to young adventurer Ethan (Jaboukie Young- White) in Disney’s fantastical animation. GELATINOUS CUBE DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOUR AMONG THIEVES The iconic 3D jelly cube wobbled from the board game to the big screen in this fantasy caper. On-set reports claim diva behaviour, with the sucking of crew into its gooey centre if demands were not met.…

No./16 LANCE AND I didn’t work together on the first John Wick, but we met there — Iwas doing a scene, and he just appeared on a bridge. He said, “I wanted to meet you,” and I said, “Good, I wanted to meet you too!” On the second film we had scenes together, and we’d talk about our backstories — our characters are so entwined, and we became very close. He was a delight: a marvellously composed, serious actor. He brought dignity and strength and gravitas. A graceful performer. And we’d make each other laugh. We did our press together — it made sense, [my character] Winston the manager and [his character] Charon the concierge. We’re very different people — I’m much more of a joker than he is. I…

No./18 TO DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKER Davis Guggenheim, Michael J. Fox’s life has played out like a Greek tragedy. “This short kid from Canada drops out of high school, wants to become a movie star and… it happens,” he says to Empire. Then in 1991, aged 29, Fox received a prognosis for Parkinson’s disease, permanently altering the course of his life. “It’s like the gods on Olympus said, ‘We’re going to give this thing to this guy and see what he does with it,’” Guggenheim adds. What he did with it forms the basis of Guggenheim’s deeply personal documentary, which charts Fox’s early success, diagnosis, and his life today, all narrated by the man himself. When Fox isn’t on screen being interviewed, the film cuts between recreations with a stand-in actor and…

★★★★ OUT 28 APRIL / CERT TBC 103 MINS DIRECTOR Nida Manzoor CAST Priya Kansara, Ritu Arya, Nimra Bucha, Akshaye Khanna, Jeff Mirza PLOT Ria Khan (Kansara) is obsessed with martial arts and dreams of becoming a stuntwoman. But she’s forced to put her passion into practice when her older sister Lena (Arya) gets engaged. With the help of friends, Ria decides to pull off an audacious, action-packed wedding heist. IF MICHELLE YEOH has taught us anything, it’s that martial arts are a woman’s game. Winning her first-ever Oscar for her barnstorming performance in Everything Everywhere All At Once last month, the indomitable actor brought good tidings to all the little girls who want to kick ass in the exact same way she continues to — a mantle gleefully picked…

★ OUT NOW / CERT 18 / 84 MINS DIRECTOR Rhys Frake-Waterfield CAST Nikolai Leon, Craig David Dowsett, Chris Cordell, Amber Doig-Thorne American copyright on A.A. Milne’s Winnie- The-Pooh expired last year, leaving British writer-director Rhys Frake-Waterfield free to make a gruesome horror movie in which Pooh and Piglet, abandoned by Christopher Robin (Nikolai Leon), become hulking mutants and slaughter anyone who ventures into the 100 Acre Wood. With the poorest writing and acting seen in a theatrically released horror film in ages, this fails on every level. As a subversive take on Milne, it’s achingly banal. As a rural horror film, it’s more inept than the most wretched Wrong Turn sequel. As a would-be cult classic, it commits the ultimate sin of being no fun at all. This bear…

★★★ OUT NOW / CERT 15 / 129 MINS DIRECTOR Zach Braff CAST Florence Pugh, Morgan Freeman, Molly Shannon, Celeste O’Connor Florence Pugh’s ability to convey emotional devastation — both outwardly, and behind a veneer of disconnected blankness — is always astonishing. In Zach Braff’s latest effort as writer-director, she gets to do so as Allison, a woman whose life has buckled after a tragic car accident, resulting in the death of her fiancée’s sister, the breakdown of her engagement, and a numbing pill addiction. Morgan Freeman, as her would-have-been-father-in-law, plays against type, swearing it up a storm as a fearsome grandpa. Their scenes together — digging through grief, substance abuse and deep emotional wounds — are the highlight. Elsewhere, familiar tropes and uneven writing threaten to derail the drama…

★★ OUT NOW / CERT 12A / 98 MINS DIRECTOR Kyle Marvin CAST Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Rita Moreno, Sally Field Space Jam meets The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel in 80 For Brady, a truly bizarre, frequently incompetent yet defiantly silly retiree comedy. Legends Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Rita Moreno and Sally Field play football-loving pals attempting to win tickets to see their hero Tom Brady (cameoing as himself) at the famous 2017 Super Bowl. What follows is an insane farce, lurching from one wacky set-piece to another (the gang try edibles! The gang pretend to be Lady Gaga’s backing dancers! The gang enter a hot wings contest with actual Guy Fieri!). The filmmaking is pedestrian, the script is barely coherent, and Tom Brady cannot act. It cannot in all…

★★★  OUT NOW / CERT 18 122 MINS DIRECTORS Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett CAST Melissa Barrera, Courteney Cox, Jenna Ortega, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Mason Gooding, Hayden Panettiere PLOT After the terrifying events in Woodsboro, Sam (Barrera) and Tara (Ortega) have moved to New York to try to start a new life. When a new Ghostface shows up, it becomes clear that they’ll not be allowed to just move on — they’re going to have to survive another murderous rampage. IT’S TOUGH TO carry on after losing your heart. Scream VI is the first without original survivor Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), who was the core of the series for 26 years. In many ways this film feels her loss, but new franchise guardians Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett conjure up enough…

★★★★ OUT NOW (PARAMOUNT+) / EPISODES VIEWED  6 OF 10 SHOWRUNNERS Ashley Lyle, Bart Nickerson CAST Melanie Lynskey, Tawny Cypress, Christina Ricci, Juliette Lewis, Lauren Ambrose, Steven Krueger PLOT In the mid-’90s, a high-school girls’ soccer team is forced to survive the Canadian wilderness after their plane crashes, with conditions only worsening. In the present day, their adult selves face the life-changing ramifications of what went on 25 years previously. LIKE THE SHOW itself, the opening title sequence of Yellowjackets initially took some getting used to. That unusual, oddly jarring theme tune playing out over scrappy, distorted video images was something of a hard sell. But the longer the first season went on, the more cunningly apposite the messy titles became. The same could be said for the series itself,…

Who is Blurp? What can you tell us about Blurp? Tell us everything you can about Blurp. That’s a good question. I will say, Blurp begins as a pet of one of the Ravagers in the movie. He carries him around. Blurp is what’s known as a furry F’saki. In the very first movie, if you remember, there was that Orloni table that they were betting on, with that beast that was eating the animals. The bigger thing was eating the smaller things. That thing was a non-furry F’saki. Blurp is a furry F’saki. So that’s what he is. He’s a pet. Boy, I went into a lot of detail with that! This is the ideal amount of detail. There are pockets of the internet already getting very excited about…

INVESTIGATING THE LITTLE MERMAID’S MORE OFF-KILTER JOURNEYS Decades before becoming his generation’s defining musical-theatre talent via In The Heights and Hamilton, the young Miranda was intent on connecting with his idol — the legendary musician who, along with lyricist Howard Ashman, had rocked Broadway with Little Shop Of Horrors, and reinvigorated Disney with 1989’s aquatic animated musical The Little Mermaid. The adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale — about a teenage mermaid who longs to live on land, and makes a desperate bargain to swap fin for feet — brought the studio into a new era of creativity, its ultra-expressive animation and musical-theatre structure generating cinematic dynamite. So much so, it exploded Miranda’s tiny mind. “I remember ‘Under The Sea’ starting,” he says. “Goose-pimples doesn’t do justice to the…

HORROR-FILM DIRECTORS, BY DEFINITION, TEND NOT TO AVOID GRAVEYARDS. Comes with the territory. But there are two types of graveyard that none of them would want to end up in. There’s your actual graveyard, of course. Nobody wants to end up there in a hurry. But the second graveyard, arguably even worse, is littered with the skeletons of some incredibly high-profile directors. It’s where Stephen King adaptations go to die. With the possible exceptions of Charles Dickens and God, no author has had more works translated to cinema than Stephen King. Adapting the oeuvre of arguably the greatest horror novelist of all time is difficult — his stories are often incredibly long, stuffed with idiosyncratic characters and turns of phrase that don’t always work on the big screen — but…

“IT’S ALWAYS RIGHT now.” That’s not only the final line from Mason (Ellar Coltrane) at the end of Boyhood — Richard Linklater’s 12-years-in-the-making, near-three-hour exploration of childhood — it’s also what the writer-director tells Empire to assure us that, yes, he was expecting our call at this time. Speaking from Austin, Texas, while editing the upcoming Hitman (“I’m so happy with it, it’s really fun,” he enthuses), the writer-director stopped to look back on his groundbreaking, generation-capturing classic, filmed incrementally over a dozen years — in which young Mason grows up before our very eyes, along with his sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater), mother Olivia (Patricia Arquette), and father Mason Sr (Ethan Hawke). Boyhood is so much about time — our relationship to time, and memory, and experience. What’s your relationship…

IN TÁR’S LYDIA Tár, writer-director Todd Field and star Cate Blanchett created a character for the ages. The venerated but problematic conductor, who undergoes a fantastic fall from grace, is so fully realised that audiences have been running to Wikipedia to find out more about the real-life Lydia (she has also spawned a not-particularly-funny parody Twitter account). Here, Field reveals the building blocks behind one of the most memorable protagonists in this or any year… THE NAME ‘Lydia Tár’ initially didn’t wash with the woman who would ultimately bring her to life. “Cate said, ‘I know why you’re doing it,’” recalls Field. “She said, ‘You’re doing it because rearranging the letters spells “rat”.’” Field protested that it reflected the character’s Hungarian origins and was originally spelt T-A-R-R. “She calls me…

ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT OUT 28 APRIL / CERT 15 / 147 MINS All Quiet On The Western Front started its journey relatively quietly: director Edward Berger’s film arrived on Netflix back in October without so much as a bugle’s fanfare. Word-of-mouth slowly snowballed, and now, seven BAFTAs and four Oscars later, this extraordinary German-language war/horror film finally has the world’s attention. It’s a brutal take on the famous anti-war novel by Erich Maria Remarque, one that beats its pacifist message into you through sheer force. Stunningly staged battle scenes impart the utter senselessness of trench warfare as well as any film before it. Inevitably, it is a gruelling watch. But history is gruelling. We need films like this, to keep our past alive in our present. ENYS…

SPIKE LEE: “I’m going to choose a scene from one of my favourite films, On The Waterfront, written by my dear friend Budd Schulberg. It’s the scene where Lee J. Cobb and his gangsters beat up Terry Malloy, played by the great, great Marlon Brando. And Karl Malden and Eva Marie Saint urge a bloodied, beaten Terry to get up, because if he gets up, the longshoremen will follow him. He gets up and then you hear this great cue come in, written by Leonard Bernstein. He falls down, gets up, falls down, gets up, and he goes in past Johnny Friendly [Cobb] and all the workers go with him. Then the steel gate closes, and it says ‘The End’. One of the greatest, greatest endings of a film. I…

No./1 “THAT’S NO MOON.” Obi-Wan Kenobi’s reaction to the Death Star in Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope could, in another world, have been echoed by British animated icons Wallace & Gromit in A Grand Day Out. There, though, the moon was cheese rather than a space-station super-weapon. Star Wars and Aardman Animation might seem poles apart in sensibility, but fans of Bristol-based stop-motion and the galaxy far, far away will finally see them collide in Volume 2 of Star Wars: Visions — the animated anthology series telling non-canonical short stories in the world of Jedi, Sith, Mandalorians and more. Where Volume 1 featured work from seven Japanese anime studios, this time the series is going even more global — with contributions from France, Chile, South Korea, South…

No./4  FOR SHOWRUNNER SIMON BARRY, it had always been a dream to have a billboard for one of his projects on Sunset Boulevard. In January he got his wish, though not quite as he’d expected. After Warrior Nun, the fantasy show he worked on, was cancelled by Netflix in December after two seasons, its fiercely dedicated fanbase rallied together and raised money to erect a #SaveWarriorNun billboard directly opposite the streamer’s LA headquarters. “It really dominates the landscape,” says Barry, who visited the billboard with his wife in February. “It just crystalised how lucky the show is to have this kind of fan engagement.” Warrior Run launched on Netflix in July 2020. True to its name, the show followed a gang of habit-wearing demon fighters tasked with saving the world,…

No./7 HOW CAN YOU solve a missing-person case without leaving your bedroom? That’s the question at the heart of Missing, a mystery unravelled entirely on a computer desktop, which builds on the success of its 2018 predecessor Searching. The first film saw a father (John Cho) try to find his daughter using their combined phones and laptops. Missing flips the dynamic, and follows teen June (Storm Reid), a student-turned-amateur-online-sleuth, on the hunt for her mother (Nia Long) after she vanishes on a Colombian holiday with her new boyfriend Kevin. What unfolds is much more than just June typing some words into a search engine. As directors Will Merrick and Nick Johnson (who both edited Searching) explain, the story needed to jump between multiple apps to build a picture of June’s…

No./9  AT THE 2023 Oscars, Everything Everywhere All At Once made history, winning seven awards, including Best Picture, Best Actress, and Best Director. In another universe, it could have won for its stunts, too. Michelle Yeoh is no stranger to stunt work herself, having pulled off jawdropping physical feats throughout her career, from glass-smashing brawls in 1985’s Yes, Madam! to leaping a dirt bike onto a moving train in 1992’s Police Story 3: Supercop. EEAAO’s high-octane set-pieces — including Yeoh’s dust-ups with multiversal minions — came courtesy of martial-art practitioners Andy and Brian Le, whose work pays homage to classic Hong Kong action films while giving the combat an absurdist bent. Beyond EEAAO’s fanny-pack fights and racing raccoons, the past year has been a spectacle-laden showcase of stuntwork, from the…

No./15 IN A SUBTERRANEAN labyrinth inhabited by flesh-eating mutants, a cutesy android takes on a mission that could be key to the preservation of mankind. This is Junk Head — an eye-popping one-man stop-motion feature fuelled by pulsating techno. But it’s not just the dystopian story and visuals that make it such a mind-blowing prospect — the tale of its production is half-mad, too. “I was working for commercial restaurants doing interiors, murals, that kind of thing…” first-time filmmaker Takahide Hori tells Empire from Japan. “But I loved watching sci-fi films, right from when I was young.” Hori was 40 when he started working on Junk Head. “ [That]’s normally an age when people have given up on their dreams and are aiming for stability in life, but I couldn’t…

John Nugent (Reviews Editor): This is historic. This is the first film that Tommy Wiseau has directed since The Room, I think? Beth Webb (News Editor): Yes, his first film in about 20 years. Alex Godfrey (Features Editor): I don’t get the whole phenomenon around The Room. As legend has it, he didn’t see the joke at first but then decided to embrace it, and he’s done very well out of it. John: Tommy Wiseau knew exactly what he was doing. He’s a genius. He only makes films every 20 years, like Terrence Malick or Stanley Kubrick. He makes films once every epoch. Ben Travis (Deputy Online Editor): Incidentally, that’s also how often Pennywise The Clown resurfaces. Alex: I just don’t think it was supposed to be a cult film.…

No./19 IT MAY BE vying for a place on the podium of summer 2023’s biggest blockbusters, but when Neill Blomkamp was first sounded out about directing a film about Gran Turismo, he wasn’t sure how it would ever get out of first gear. “I was like, ‘Gran Turismo doesn’t have a story!’” the District 9 director recalls of the PlayStation racing simulator. Then he read King Richard writer Zach Baylin’s proposed screenplay, and discovered “something I hadn’t seen in a videogame adaptation before”. Here’s why he thinks moviegoers should be revved up for his movie... THE PREMISE The film tells the true-life tale of Gran Turismo player-turned-professional-racer Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe) — aCounty Durham teen who “went from racing at home to getting selected for GT Academy,” says Blomkamp, referring…

★★★★★ EXCELLENT ★★★★ GOOD ★★★ OKAY ★★ POOR ★ AWFUL ★★★★ OUT 21 APRIL / CERT 18 97 MINS DIRECTOR Lee Cronin CAST Lily Sullivan, Alyssa Sutherland, Morgan Davies, Gabrielle Echols, Nell Fisher PLOT A reunion between sisters Beth (Sullivan) and Ellie (Sutherland) is interrupted by an earthquake in Los Angeles — which uncovers a mysterious book in the depths of their apartment building. Little do they know, it’ll unleash an evil force that wants to carve their family apart — quite literally. FOR FOUR DECADES, the Evil Dead has been the twisted Teddy Bear’s Picnic of horror — a black-humoured, blood-soaked saga in which young people go down to the woods one day, and find themselves in for a big surprise. Writer-director Lee Cronin’s new addition to the franchise…

★★ OUT 28 APRIL / CERT TBC / TBC MINS DIRECTOR Hettie Macdonald CAST Jim Broadbent, Penelope Wilton, Monika Gossman, Linda Bassett Harold (Jim Broadbent) lives a stilted life in Devon with his wife Maureen (Penelope Wilton), until an unexpected letter of farewell from Queenie, a former colleague dying in a hospice, jolts him out of his everyday stupor. Inspired by a conversation with a woman in a petrol station, he embarks on a pilgrimage of hundreds of miles on foot with the faith that she’ll still be alive to greet him, while grappling with a traumatic incident in his past. Adapted from her own bestselling novel by Rachel Joyce, the film is as twee as its title suggests, but outside of the stilted dialogue it manages a few snatches…

★★★ OUT NOW / CERT 15 169 MINS DIRECTOR Chad Stahelski CAST Keanu Reeves, Donnie Yen, Bill Skarsgård, Ian McShane, Lance Reddick PLOT Pursued by hitmen sent by the shadowy syndicate known as the High Table, John Wick (Reeves) discovers freedom can be achieved through a duel with the organisation’s Marquis de Gramont (Skarsgård). But with the bounty on his head forever rising, getting to that point isn’t going to be easy. JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 4 is relentlessly violent. It just does not stop. It bludgeons you like the endless array of assassins bludgeoning its hero. It is so incessantly, expensively savage, it may well be the end of civilisation. Weaponry this time around includes the following: swords, guns (sometimes both together), fists, feet, elbows, nunchucks, knives, dogs, bows and…

★★★★ OUT NOW / CERT 15 / 99 MINS DIRECTOR Martika Ramirez Escobar CAST Sheila Francisco, Bong Cabrera, Rocky Salumbides, Anthony Falcon A kind of arthouse take on Hot Fuzz, Leonor Will Never Die is essentially a postmodern homage to, and affectionate pisstake of, the action-movie heritage of the Philippines. But there’s more to it than that: Martika Ramirez Escobar’s debut film is a curious cocktail of tones, genres and styles that makes it hard, initially, to find purchase. Sheila Francisco plays Leonor, a fading screenwriter who, when hit on the head by a falling TV, finds herself in the fictional world of her own ’80s action movie. Pitch-perfect B-movie recreations — right down to the aspect ratio and tinny, muffled audio — blend with an understated and strange rumination…

★★★ OUT 5 MAY / CERT TBC / 90 MINS DIRECTOR Lotfy Nathan CAST Adam Bessa, Najib Allagui, Salima Maatoug Set in Tunisia, during the hangover from the Arab Spring, Lofty Nathan’s sporadically thrilling narrative debut is a grounded portrait of a country still reeling from dysfunction. Ali (Adam Bessa) is a struggling street vendor with dreams of leaving Tunisia for Europe. When his father dies, he becomes responsible for his sisters and is faced with debts, police corruption and compassionless bureaucracy. Peppered with fiery imagery and intensified by a mood-shifting score, the script doesn’t penetrate as much as Bessa’s searing performance. He articulates Ali’s growing vexation with subtle yet highly charged facial movements, and so much weighted silence, it becomes depressingly inevitable this poor guy is going to snap.…

★★★ OUT NOW / CERT 12A / 93 MINS DIRECTORS Scott Beck, Bryan Woods CAST Adam Driver, Ariana Greenblatt, Chloe Coleman, Nika King Big-screen dinosaurs, outside the Jurassic series, are a rare beast. Now along comes this dino-disaster-movie from A Quiet Place writers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, with a simple but effective premise: what if a spaceman from another world crash-landed on our planet 65 million years ago? This is a very straightforward, efficient kind of survivalist thriller, with so little flab it is almost skeletal. It plays as you might expect: problems to solve, a treacherous journey, the odd T-rex popping up. Bound together by a typically compelling Adam Driver performance — who brings a thoughtfulness to his genre character even when the screenplay doesn’t — 65 holds…

★★★★ OUT NOW (PRIME VIDEO) EPISODES VIEWED  7 OF 9 SHOWRUNNER Raelle Tucker CAST Toni Collette, Toheeb Jimoh, Halle Bush, John Leguizamo, Ria Zmitrowicz, Eddie Marsan PLOT The world descends into chaos when teenage girls develop the power to generate electricity from their fingertips. Allie (Bush) uses her ability to break free from her foster home; Roxy (Zmitrowicz) seeks vengeance; journalist Tunde (Jimoh) captures it on camera; and politician Margot (Collette) tries to understand why it’s happening. THE ALLEGORY AT the core of Naomi Alderman’s The Power, the novel on which this Prime Video series is based, isn’t a subtle one. Young girls across the globe start suddenly gaining the ability to create electricity, asserting dominance against the patriarchal system that so often sees them exploited and endangered — and…

ARIASTER DOESN’T KNOW HOW TO DESCRIBE HIS NEW FILM EITHER . Empire has just watched it and is still in a stunned daze: Beau Is Afraid is the kind of film where you need a sit-down by the popcorn counter, swaddled in a foil recovery blanket. “It’s supposed to really feel like you’ve been through something,” Aster assures us, grinning, because he knows exactly what we’ve just been through. “I want it to feel like you’ve actually lived in a person’s experience. It hopefully feels oppressively subjective.” Yes. That. For the last three hours we’ve been lost in the intense world of Beau Wassermann (Joaquin Phoenix), an anxious man who has to visit his mother but encounters, shall we say, some… problems. As he goes to leave his apartment, late…

THE LITTLE MERMAID (1976) An entrancing Soviet oddity that combines inventive slo-mo, psychedelic flourishes, and Avatar levels of blue to immerse viewers in a subaqueous fantasia, Karel Kachyňa’s low-budget fantasy is a visual marvel. Beyond the blueness and some spectacular head-pieces, though, this poignantly wrestles with the unrequited-love aspect of Hans Christian Andersen’s story. PONYO (2008) Okay, so Hayao Miyazaki’s minor masterwork isn’t technically about a mermaid — his titular ham-loving hero is a very literal fish-out-o-fwater — but it is a singularly joyous riff on the classic fairy tale, a spellbinding animated offering that leaves the heart full and that theme-song stuck in your head. All together now… “Ponyo, Ponyo, Ponyo, fishy in the sea!” THE LURE (2015) Agnieszka Smoczynska’s brilliantly macabre fantasy-horror musical has to be seen —…

EVERYBODY LOVED THE ELEPHANT. When Dumbo swooped into cinemas on 23 October 1941, he won the hearts and minds of audiences and critics, to the extent that Time magazine planned, for one year only, to ditch their ‘Person Of The Year’ story in favour of ‘Mammal Of The Year’, with the big-eared, huge-eyed pachyderm gracing their cover. Meanwhile, the film’s profitable box-office receipts — it would ultimately become Disney’s biggest hit of the decade — were a salve for the company, still smarting from the substantial financial disappointments of Pinocchio and Fantasia. That glorious trunk leading the way, Dumbo seemed to herald a new golden — or at least, golden-grey — age. And then a few weeks later, the bombs dropped. When Pearl Harbor was attacked on 7 December 1941,…

FILMMAKER DAMIEN CHAZELLE and composer Justin Hurwitz met in the first week of their first year at Harvard University. Becoming roommates (and band mates in the ’60s-influenced combo Chester French), Chazelle, studying film, and Hurwitz, majoring in music, collaborated on the former’s student thesis, a lo-fi French New Wave-y musical called Guy And Madeline On A Park Bench, which became Chazelle’s first feature, released in 2009. It was the start of one of the most exciting director-composer partnerships in modern film, leading to the blistering Whiplash, the glorious La La Land, the powerful First Man and most recently Babylon, an outrageous love letter to early Hollywood. Here the pair lead Empire through their greatest hits… WHIPLASH (2014) ‘CARAVAN’ For the moment Andy Neiman (Miles Teller) returns to the stage after…

M3GAN WHEN THE DUST settles on the films of 2023, expect M3GAN to still be standing. The killer doll at the heart of Gerard Johnstone’s wonderfully knowing horror-comedy stabbed, sang and sashayed her way to icon status, so much so that a sequel is already in the works. Here, Johnstone talks us through some of the movie’s key M3GAN m0m3nts. COMMERCIAL CINEMA If you went into M3GAN unsure of the tone that the film would strike, you’re set firmly straight in the opening minutes, as Johnstone opens with a pitch-perfect pisstake of children’s toy commercials, which feels like it’s an escapee from Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop. “When I got this film, it was a Blumhouse film, it was a horror,” says Johnstone. “But what excited me was all the things I…

Chris: So, Halloween. The series that has had more false starts, fake endings and retcons than Michael Myers has had hot dinners. But I’d be very surprised if John Carpenter’s original Halloween wasn’t our number one. Mike: It’s a classic, isn’t it? It’s 40-something years old and it still freaks me out. John Carpenter directing, Dean Cundey’s cinematography, Debra Hill writing it — for me, those three are Halloween. Becky: I came to the Halloween films relatively late. But as soon as you start dipping your toe in, Halloween has to be there. Debra Hill’s writing of the girls in the centre of that spoke to me on a deep level. Ben: The stalking element, that whole section through the day where Michael Myers is following Laurie Strode around town,…