Tabla de contenidos para August 2023 en Empire

THE CAT IS SAT ON THE MAG I’ve been a long-time subscriber of your excellent magazine, but I’m afraid I finally have a complaint to make — your magazine is clearly too comfortable. (Evidence attached.) Each month I have to fight Harvey for my right to read it! Please ensure it is less comfortable for cats in future. (Unless he’s a Flerken?!) MEL CLARKE, VIA EMAIL Sorry to hear you’re having to share Empire with a possible Flerken, Mel. (We’d advise you to keep away from the freaky felines in this month’s Trend Report on page 15.) Next time Harvey has a tabby tantrum, maybe take a cinema trip — with a Picturehouse Membership, on us. Picture house Empire’s star letter wins a Picturehouse Membership, valid for one year at…

MOLLY GORDON WORE many hats on Theater Camp. She was co-lead, co-writer, co-director, co-producer, co-songwriter... Dennis Waterman would be proud. She’s been dabbling in theatre since she was three, and has poured her experiences into this eccentric, sweet comedy about a group of stage kids and their kooky teachers. We asked her how she makes the magic happen. ACCEPT HEARTBREAK Gordon has shone as a screen actor in the likes of Booksmart and Shiva Baby, but she’ll always have a soft spot for her first love: theatre. As well as her other first love: Ben Platt. He stars as teacher Amos, whom Gordon’s Rebecca-Diane had a childhood crush on. “I was so in love with him,” explains Gordon of Platt, whom she knew in real life growing up. “And he…

BLURP GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL.3 Adam Warlock’s adopted sidekick-turned-Guardian is an intergalactic mutant moggy. However, you can bet it wouldn’t say no to a laser-pen showdown. SPIDER-CAT SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE When not busy chasing Spider-Mice, Spider-Cat is spitting up slimy web furballs in the faces of its opponents. The whiskery webslinger has been a fan favourite since its comic debut in 2011. LOTH-CAT AHSOKA The Loth-Cat hails from the creators of that green wrinkly baby, Grogu. It has an animatronic skeleton, and according to Ahsoka herself, Rosario Dawson, “snarls and looks cute”. May the paws be with you.…

IMAGINE A ROLAND Emmerich disaster movie, only with clowns. Bad clowns. Who can’t summon a titter out of a sick child. This is Apocalypse Clown, an Irish comedy which sees a group of failed circus entertainers and a peppy journalist face the aftermath of a global technological failure. “Everyone has feelings about clowns,” director George Kane tells Empire. “They’re quite unpopular these days and all the scary movies have completely ruined their careers.” The combination of clowns losing their clout — cheers, Stephen King — while also being fundamentally terrible at their jobs and thrown into a catastrophic situation felt like a perfect comedic storm for Kane. “They have no skills, they’re not even good at what they’re supposed to be doing, but they see this as their time to…

PARTNERSHIPS IN FILM often result in some of the duo’s finest work: think Alfred Hitchcock and James Stewart, Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, and, more recently, Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone. The pair first worked together on their 2018 black comedy The Favourite, which saw Stone play a scheming scullery maid-turned-Queen’s confidante. They return five years later with Poor Things, a surreal sci-fi movie based on Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel. Stone stars as Bella Baxter, a young woman brought to life by an experimental scientist with dubious ethics (Willen Dafoe), who goes on a headspinningly peculiar odyssey around Europe. With another film, And, also in the pipeline, Empire sat down with the pair to discuss the expanding Lanthimos/Stone universe, monosyllabic communication, and magic. How well do you work together?…

THE DAY GLENDA died, I had to do a technical check of the film at Goldcrest. When it finished the technician asked if I was happy but, suddenly choked up, I couldn’t speak. He offered me a moment alone. This was her final performance, and it was the first time I’d seen it in that definitive light. I’d known her only a year, but her impact was seismic. I was always fascinated by her face. Sometimes glacial, sometimes sensual in those early iconic performances. A mouth that curled easily into a sneer or cracked into a seductive smile. And here, in her final film, were the same contours, now ringed with deep lines, each one holding the secrets of another age. One eye had grown cloudy, but the gaze was…

When were you most starstruck? I don’t get starstruck very easily for some reason, but it’s usually writers or musicians that do it for me. I got to know Hunter S. Thompson very well before he passed away. We were talking about doing The Rum Diary together many years ago and I brought him a bottle of absinthe, which was still illegal in the States. He was very excited about that. So we drank some absinthe and he made me read The Rum Diary after I was very drunk. It was four in the morning, and he was correcting everything that I was saying. I was nervous and in front of one of my literary idols, being corrected constantly. What one thing do you do better than anyone else you…

★★★★ OUT 28 JULY / CERT 15 95 MINS DIRECTORS Danny Philippou, Michael Philippou CAST Sophie Wilde, Alexandra Jensen, Joe Bird, Otis Dhanji, Miranda Otto, Marcus Johnson PLOT In South Australia, the latest craze among a community of bored teens involves a mysterious embalmed hand, which seems to be a gateway to the spirit world. When Mia (Wilde) appears to make contact with her late mother, however, she gets more than she bargained for. TWIN BROTHERS DANNY and Michael Philippou cut their teeth making YouTube videos bearing titles like ‘Real Life Mortal Kombat Fatalities!’ and ‘Ronald McDonald Playground Slaughter!’. Talk To Me, their first feature film, sensibly tones down the manic clickbait silliness of their web browser-based origins. Working from a story by Daley Pearson — Darryl from Thor: Love…

★★★ OUT 7 JULY / CERT 15 / 77 MINS DIRECTOR Quentin Dupieux CAST Gilles Lellouche, Vincent Lacoste, Anaïs Demoustier, Adèle Exarchopoulos Shaggy-dog stories don’t come shaggier than this enjoyable load of old nonsense from French absurdist Quentin Dupieux. The backbone of Smoking Causes Coughing is a Power Rangers piss-take: a spandex-clad superhero team known as Tobacco Force, who use the power of smoking (Menthol! Nicotine!) to defeat alien enemies. Then it swerves into an even more bonkers Tales Of The Crypt-style anthology, with gory stories told around a campfire — one by a talking barracuda. There is very little point to any of it, which kind of is the point: none of the stories amount to much, and Dupieux selects the funniest or most absurd option over narrative sense.…

★★★★ OUT NOW (SHUDDER) / CERT TBC / 92 MINS DIRECTOR Ted Geoghegan CAST Anne Ramsay, Ron E. Rains, Jeremy Holm, Larry Fessenden Brooklyn 45 is a finely tuned, well-played chamber (of horrors) piece. In December 1945, four friends meet in New York, the trauma of World War II heavy in the air. Lt Col Clive ‘Hock’ Hockstatter (Larry Fessenden) gathers the group together to conduct a séance to contact his deceased wife, who died by suicide. Director Ted Geoghegan perfectly orchestrates the initial unease, but rather than full-blown horror the film pivots into a compelling drama exploring increasingly knotty questions: chiefly, can you commit a solitary heinous act in the cauldron of conflict and still consider yourself a good person? Occasionally Geoghegan’s reach extends his grasp, but this is…

★★ OUT 7 JULY (NETFLIX) / CERT TBC / 97 MINS DIRECTOR Tyler Spindel CAST Adam DeVine, Pierce Brosnan, Julie Hagerty, Richard Kind Meet The Parents meets Daddy’s Home 2 in this cheap-’n’-churned-out action comedy from Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison banner. It sees Adam DeVine in the Sandman mould as a giggling, manchild bank manager unwittingly led into a bank-robbery life by his wayward in-laws-to-be. DeVine overplays it, but the veterans are on better form: Pierce Brosnan chews on scenery, going full Taffin (choice line: “That’s my cock, you idiot!”, screamed during an impromptu skydive); Airplane!’s Julie Hegarty plays an anxious mum with a secret orgy past; and Richard Kind plays a nebbish patriarch with “traveller’s diarrhoea”. Seldom will it make you laugh, but it’s the kind of film purpose-built…

★★★ OUT NOW (DISNEY+) / CERT TBC / 99 MINS DIRECTOR Eva Longoria CAST Jesse Garcia, Annie Gonzalez, Dennis Haysbert, Matt Walsh Hollywood’s bizarre current obsession with corporate origin stories continues with Flamin’ Hot, which delves into the founding of a flavour of Cheetos — not Cheetos themselves, you understand; just one particular spicy flavour. It is a testament to Eva Longoria’s lively, stylish direction and goofy, charismatic performances from Jesse Garcia and Annie Gonzalez that the film largely overcomes not only a corn-chip-thin premise, but one that apparently isn’t entirely true. The wobbly relationship the narrative has with actual history does take some of the shine off, but the central message — that anybody can be a “somebody” — holds fast. In Longoria’s energetic hands, it’s hard not to…

★★★★ OUT NOW (NETFLIX) / EPISODES VIEWED 5 OF 5 SHOWRUNNERS Charlie Brooker, Annabel Jones CAST Annie Murphy, Salma Hayek Pinault, Aaron Paul, Josh Hartnett, Zazie Beetz, Paapa Essiedu PLOT Five dark new standalone stories. A woman unwittingly sees her life turned into a streaming hit; an old murder mystery gets turned into a true-crime doc; and a woman is forced to avert disaster of unimaginable consequences. SUCH IS THE ubiquity of the phrase “like something out of Black Mirror” that it’s easy to forget there’s actually a TV show behind it. But what does that phrase actually mean? Charlie Brooker’s anthology show has always had fairly loose parameters: in the broadest terms, its mission statement was satirical sci-fi with a sting in its tail. With its sixth season, however,…

FILM OUT NOW BROOKLYN 45 ★★★★ P40 THE EFFECTS OF LYING ★★ P40 EXTRACTION 2 ★★★★ P34 FLAMIN’ HOT ★★★ P42 THE FLASH (ABOVE) ★★★★ P43 NIMONA ★★★★ P32 NO HARD FEELINGS ★★★ P37 PRISONER’S DAUGHTER ★★ P39 LA SYNDICALISTE ★★★ P42 TRANSFORMERS: RISE OF THE BEASTS ★★ P41 7 JULY ELEMENTAL ★★★ P38 THE OUT-LAWS ★★ P40 SMOKING CAUSES COUGHING ★★★ P37 14 JULY BIRD BOX BARCELONA ★★ P40 MEDUSA ★★ P37 WHILE WE WATCHED ★★★★ P40 21 JULY MY NAME IS ALFRED HITCHCOCK ★★★★ P40 25 JULY YOU HURT MY FEELINGS ★★★★ P42 28 JULY TALK TO ME ★★★★ P36 TV OUT NOW THE AFTERPARTY: SEASON 2 ★★★★ P47 BLACK MIRROR: SEASON 6 ★★★★ P45 THE CROWDED ROOM ★★★ P45 THE IDOL ★★…

SUCKER PUNCH (2011) Snyder’s “Alice In Wonderland with machine guns” goes fully speed-ramp-tastic when the katana-wielding Babydoll (Emily Browning) and friends raid a speeding train guarded by gun-toting robo-goons. They’re so shiny, they provide Snyder with the ideal reflective surface on which to showcase his heroes’ brutal moves. Yikes. JUSTICE LEAGUE (2017) Snyder’s predilection for metal men continued in his great big superfriends movie, though strictly speaking Cyborg (Ray Fisher) is a cyborg, not a robot. The clue is in the name. Like a certain bucket-headed Sith Lord, he’s more machine than man, which goes a long way to explaining his stiff, robotic demeanour for much of the running time. ARMY OF THE DEAD (2021 Like zombies? Like robots? Well, Army Of The Dead has a treat for you. Zombie…

NOT FOR THE LAST TIME, Xolo Maridueña felt somewhat out of his depth. In 2015, at 14 years old, he was cast in a small role in Twin Peaks: The Return, the third season of David Lynch’s head-scratching, nightmare-inducing show. The world had no idea what to expect, and on set, Maridueña was given barely any information himself. “It was super-secret squirrel,” he tells Empire now. “You know nothing about the character, nothing about the project. I’m playing ‘Boy’ — even now, my character is just named ‘Boy’ [in a short, romantic 1950s sequence towards the end of the now iconic eighth episode]. The scene is just me walking with this girl.” He did a take; it seemed fine. Enter the director. “I remember, chain-smoker David Lynch walks over and…

On a sunbaked roadside in Vancouver, the cast of Joy Ride are behaving strangely. Sabrina Wu ravenously bites into a hotdog-shaped plant as if it’s an actual hotdog. Everything Everywhere All At Once’s Stephanie Hsu squats behind a bush, pretending to locate the last of a generous number of cocaine-filled condoms inside… herself. Their characters Deadeye and Kat, along with Ashley Park’s Audrey and Sherry Cola’s Lolo, are aggressively high. It’s late 2021, and this is their first day of shooting. “Yeah, we really got thrown into the climax of the film,” laughs Cola. “Actually, I wouldn’t say it was the climax. The sex was the climax.” Joy Ride is a debauched, wild, hard-R comedy about four Asian-American friends taking a road trip across Asia which features yes, some no-holds-barred…

AT LAST — at long, long last — John Wick is gone. It took four films, armies of assassins, and thousands of bullets, but now Keanu Reeves’ Baba Yaga, the hitman’s hitman, has shuffled off the coil that is mortal, breathing his last on the steps of the Sacré-Coeur in Paris, thanks to a beautifully placed bullet from his spiritual brother, Donnie Yen’s Cain. Chad Stahelski has been there every step of the way, running alongside Reeves. As director of all four movies (he co-directed the first with David Leitch, although DGA rules prevented them from sharing credit), he has not only been the author of all John Wick’s pain, but the central creative force behind an astonishing odyssey that has rewritten the rulebook on how modern American action cinema…

AS A MAN with over 100 movies to his name, Stephen Lang has worked with a director or two. “By nature, I am a very collaborative actor,” says the 70-year-old. “I’m always willing to learn and be guided by the director. I accept and appreciate the fact that the vision is always larger than the actor, the world is larger than the actor, and that’s why the director directs and the actor is directed to act.” With the recently released Old Man, he adds Lucky McKee to a weighty roster of collaborators. Here, he looks back at some of the standouts. BUD YORKIN TWICE IN A LIFETIME 1985 Lang had been a theatre actor of note, and had made a couple of TV appearances, when Yorkin, a legendary producer who…

INT. THE DUDE’S CAR — DAY The Dude (Jeff Bridges) is driving along the freeway. He’s smoking a joint and smiling to himself. Creedence Clearwater Revival’s ‘Lookin’ Out My Back Door’ is blaring on the radio. Life is good. He bangs on the roof of his car in time with the music. Then he looks in his rear-view mirror, and squints. We see a blue VW Beetle pull into the lane behind him. The Dude eyes it for a second but, seemingly unconcerned, takes a swig from his bottle of beer. Yes, he’s also drinking beer. It’s the middle of the afternoon. He takes his hands off the wheel and, looking behind him in the mirror, transfers the joint to his right hand. The VW Beetle is still behind him.…

LILY GLADSTONE IS in the midst of an emotional return trip. “I’m back in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. It’s dance season,” she tells Empire over Zoom in early June. A key scene in Killers Of The Flower Moon — Martin Scorsese’s upcoming epic set in the historic city — involves the ceremonial dance of Native American tribe the Osage Nation, known as the In-Lon-Schka. After wrapping the film, in which Gladstone plays true-life 1920s Osage resident Mollie Burkhart, she wanted to experience the real thing, having only been able to witness a simulation of the dance during the shoot (filming the actual In-Lon-Schka is forbidden). “The district where Mollie Burkhart and her sisters were from had their dances this past weekend,” she says. “So I came back to town for that.” A…

HARRIS DICKINSON IS fast becoming a major-league British talent. The lead in Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or-winner Triangle Of Sadness will soon enter the ring with Zac Efron in family wrestling drama Iron Claw, and he recently wrapped on Steve McQueen’s World War II drama Blitz. Yet despite his burgeoning status, the actor is still making daring choices and working with first-time directors. As is the case with the upcoming Scrapper, a London-set, surrealism-meets-social-realism drama from debut filmmaker Charlotte Regan. He tells Empire what’s driving his decision-making. We’ve recently seen you as a grumpy model in Triangle Of Sadness and as Richard Attenborough in See How They Run. Now you’re a young dad trying to make amends in Scrapper. What drew you to that role? I’d worked with Charlotte before on…

! SPOILER WARNING “YOU’RE STILL HERE? It’s over. Go home!” says Ferris Bueller in his film’s fourth-wall-breaking credit sting back in 1986. Yet what was once a rare joke for film enthusiasts has now become a mandatory part of movie-going. Yes, here in 2023, the post-credits scene has become so ubiquitous that leaving your seat when the main feature ends is no longer an option. Maybe they’re unleashing a big character reveal, like Dwayne Johnson’s shocking return in Fast X. Or even a surprise film — Ti West dropped the trailer for his horror origin story Pearl after X’s credits. In the rare instance that a film doesn’t feature a sting, case-in-point Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse, it’s a headline-making event. John Wick director Chad Stahelski, whose fourth instalment is the…

ALTERED CARBON (NETFLIX) Looking for another lavishly mounted, dystopian sci-fi epic? There are plenty of options, from the Snowpiercer series, with its similarly claustrophobic post-apocalyptic setting, to Under The Dome, whose central “what the hell is this dome thing anyway?” mystery mirrors the enigma of the Silo itself. But in terms of world-building and extraordinary production design, 2018’s Altered Carbon is unbeatable. Set hundreds of years in the future in an oppressive new world order where human consciousness can be transferred to different bodies, it stars a frequently naked Joel Kinnaman. BOOMTOWN (PRIME VIDEO) Prior to Silo, its creator Graham Yost was mostly known for outstanding neo-Western series Justified, but his first big TV drama triumph was Boomtown. On the face of it a mainstream case-of-the-week police-procedural airing on NBC,…

Alex Godfrey (Features Editor): So this is by the Game Of Thrones showrunners, right? John Nugent (Reviews Editor): They had lots of stuff they were attached to that didn’t work out, including a Star Wars film. This is the long-awaited follow-up to what was definitely, 100 per cent the most beloved final season in history. Beth Webb (News Editor): Also the most visually challenging final season in history. I couldn’t see a bloody thing in those last episodes. John: My first question is: why is it the number three and not “three” written out? Joanna Moran (Photography Director): Either way, it’s fewer problems than Jay-Z had. Alex: Is it just one book, James? Beth: Yes, let’s get the resident sci-fi guy in. James Dyer (Digital Editor-In-Chief ): It’s three books:…

SINCE 2006, PETER Berg has cast Taylor Kitsch as an all-American football player in Friday Night Lights, a recalcitrant Naval officer in Battleship and a Taliban-fighting Navy SEAL in Lone Survivor. All of those collaborations, it turns out, have been building towards something: the most personal story they’ve worked on together yet. “Taylor’s always a motivated, focused actor,” Berg tells Empire, “But every once in a while something hits just a little bit harder. We fall in love with all our projects but, like your kids, sometimes you secretly love one a little more!” In Painkiller, Kitsch plays garage mechanic Glen Kryger, whose life is turned upside-down after he suffers an injury at work and becomes hooked on the powerful painkiller OxyContin. The series itself might be a fictionalised account…

“WE HAVE A way of working together that eels like a choreographed dance,” says Julia Louis-Dreyfus of her collaboration with filmmaker and friend Nicole Holofcener. They have reunited after 2013 romcom Enough Said with You Hurt My Feelings, in which Louis-Dreyfus plays an author whose confidence plummets when she overhears her husband saying he doesn’t like her latest book. Here, the pair break down their unique partnership. JULIA ON NICOLE “The first time I met Nicole was for Enough Said, although it wasn’t an audition; we were meeting to see if we liked each other. We got along in such a way that I had this weird feeling like, ‘Why haven’t our lives crossed in the past?’ We lived on the same side of town, which in Los Angeles is…

EVEN THE DIRECTORS of Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse aren’t exactly sure how many Spider-People can be seen in the film’s big escape sequence. The buzzy set-piece in the hit animated sequel sees Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) go on the run at Spider Society HQ after being told he must make a brutal sacrifice, and pursued by pretty much every webslinger in the business. So what’s the ballpark figure? “If we take the sequence as a whole, there are over 600 different spiders,” Justin K. Thompson, one of the film’s three directors, tells Empire. “It’s somewhere in the neighbourhood of 630-ish.” That’s a lot of unfriendly neighbourhood Spider-People. “But some of that is just variations, to fill in the background,” Thompson adds. “If you’re talking about named characters, our character designers…

★★★★ OUT NOW (NETFLIX) / CERT PG / 98 MINS DIRECTORS Nick Bruno, Troy Quane CAST (VOICE) Chloë Grace Moretz, Riz Ahmed, Eugene Lee Yang, Frances Conroy PLOT In a futuristic fantasy kingdom, aspiring knight Ballister ‘Bal’ Blackheart (Ahmed) is about to be accepted into the elite fighting force led by the Director (Conroy). But when he’s framed for a shocking crime, he’s forced on the run — teaming up with shapeshifting outcast Nimona (Moretz), who hopes to become his nefarious sidekick. NIMONA IS MANY things. She’s a rebel. She’s a punk. She’s an instigator, a rabble-rouser, an agent of chaos. She’s a shapeshifter, able to transform into any animal — or any other human — you can imagine. More than anything, though, she’s a survivor. That her story is…

★★★ OUT NOW / CERT 15 / 103 MINS DIRECTOR Gene Stupnitsky CAST Jennifer Lawrence, Andrew Barth Feldman, Natalie Morales, Matthew Broderick PLOT When Maddie’s (Lawrence) car is towed, jeopardising her job as an Uber driver, she’s faced with losing her home. To secure a new vehicle, she makes an agreement with the parents of reclusive teenager Percy (Feldman): to bring him out of his shell sexually before he heads off to college. YES, THE PLOT of No Hard Feelings sounds inherently silly — girl is broke, girl needs car, girl makes deal with boy’s parents to take his virginity for the price of a Buick Regal (when has that ever, ever happened?). But underneath the C-bombs, wiener jokes and slapstick stunts, there’s an unexpectedly heartwarming tale of friendship, and…

★★★ OUT 7 JULY / CERT PG 109 MINS DIRECTOR Peter Sohn CAST (VOICE) Leah Lewis, Mamoudou Athie, Ronnie Del Carmen, Catherine O’Hara PLOT Ember (Lewis) is made of fire; Wade (Athie) is made of water. After a chance meeting which threatens to shut down Ember’s father’s store, they work together to save the family business — and, along the way, find out whether the ‘elements don’t mix’ mantra by which their city lives is really true. PIXAR IS A studio with proven form in telling heartfelt, impactful stories through the highest of concepts — agirl transforming into a giant red panda as she reaches puberty (Turning Red); an after-life littered with pastel-blue blobs, heading to The Great Beyond on a massive conveyor belt (Soul); emotions portrayed as walking, talking…

★★ OUT 14 JULY / CERT TBC / 111 MINS DIRECTORS David Pastor, Àlex Pastor CAST Mario Casas, Georgina Campbell, Naila Schuberth, Alejandra Howard Five years after the original Bird Box, this Spanish-language spin-off is not a sequel, but rather the baffling first instalment in a nation-hopping regional franchise. Sebastien (Mario Casas) and daughter Anna (Alejandra Howard) are fleeing the mysterious creatures who drive anyone who lays eyes upon them to suicide, crossing the Catalan capital — in blindfolds — in search of shelter. While it possesses all the component parts of its predecessor, this packs little of its punch, ending up a largely uninspiring re-tread of a superior film. Sebastien’s unconventional protagonist provides an interesting perspective, though, and there are enough gnarly deaths to keep horror hounds entertained until…

★★ OUT NOW (ITVX) / CERT TBC / 82 MINS DIRECTOR Isher Sahota CAST Ace Bhatti, Laila Rouass, Lauren Patel, Navin Chowdhry Dutiful husband Naveen (Ace Bhatti) — married to disinterested Sangeeta (Laila Rouass), coping with troubled teenage daughter Simran (Lauren Patel) — returns home to retrieve his phone, an act that brings to light a series of long-kept family secrets. Isher Sahota’s film has the hustle and bustle of farce but without the verve and wit to pull it off, Sahota and writer James Hey never finding a tone that lets the plot’s huge swings from drama to comedy (cue the gimp mask) land. Bhatti is likable as the put-upon Naveen — he forms a touching bond with Patel’s angsty adolescence — and there is something refreshing about a…

★★★★ OUT 25 JULY (PRIME VIDEO) CERT 15 / 93 MINS DIRECTOR Nicole Holofcener CAST Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Tobias Menzies, Michaela Watkins, Arian Moayed, Jeannie Berlin PLOT Following a well-received memoir, writer Beth (Louis-Dreyfus) earns glowing feedback about the various drafts of her upcoming novel from her loving husband Don (Menzies). Their marriage seems perfect, but Beth begins to question her relationship when she overhears Don confess his true feelings about her book. CAN A LIE be an expression of love? In Nicole Holofcener’s sharp comedy, fragile egos implode when faced with the uncomfortable truth. Julia Louis-Dreyfus (reuniting here with her Enough Said director) plays Beth, a writer in a rock-solid marriage with therapist Don (Tobias Menzies). Even now, they’re still disgustingly in love — so co-dependent that even their 23-year-old…

★★★ OUT NOW (APPLE TV+) / EPISODES VIEWED 10 OF 10 SHOWRUNNER Akiva Goldsman CAST Tom Holland, Amanda Seyfried, Emmy Rossum, Sasha Lane Apple TV’s latest buzzy prestige production is a psychological mystery-cum-character-study set in ’70s New York. Tom Holland stars as Danny, a troubled young man who we meet during an attempted shooting at the Rockefeller Center; Danny winds up being questioned by empathetic interrogator Rya (Amanda Seyfried). It’s a handsomely mounted production, and Holland gives so much of himself to conveying the many layers of Danny, but an otherwise gripping series is compromised by a sensationalist streak that perpetuates Hollywood clichés about mental illness. Still, the slick ’70s stylisation and mercurial Tom Holland will keep you watching. JK…

★★★★ OUT NOW (APPLE TV+) / EPISODES VIEWED 9 OF 10 SHOWRUNNER Chris Miller CAST Tiffany Haddish, Sam Richardson, Zoë Chao, Zach Woods, Paul Walter Hauser, Poppy Liu, Jack Whitehall, John Cho, Ken Jeong PLOT Following the murder of a wealthy groom (Woods) at his wedding, a former detective (Haddish) and her unofficial assistant (Richardson) interrogate his friends and family in a bid to catch the killer. THESE DAYS, MURDER-MYSTERIES are so prevalent that you can’t seem to swing a spyglass without hitting a suspiciously framed corpse. But in a landscape dominated by Rian Johnson, Only Murders In The Building and The White Lotus, The Afterparty’s multi-themed format manages to do just that. Created by Chris Miller (of Lord and Miller fame), the show loosely retells the same events from…

In racing, they call it switching gears. “I know, I know,” smiles Neill Blomkamp, welcoming Empire into his edit suite on a sunny morning in Los Angeles. “Everything I’ve done ’til now has been a bit sci-fi, a bit twisted. And this is evidently not that.” It’s mid-March, and the filmmaker is deep in post-production on Gran Turismo, his first big studio film in eight years (2021 micro-budget horror Demonic was a lockdown indie endeavour). Wait a second: that Neill Blomkamp? The architect of techno-anarchic dystopian dramas like District 9 and Elysium, Neill Blomkamp? The chap behind Chappie, for crying out loud, Neill Blomkamp? What is that crafter of futurist worlds, whose movies haven’t had a lot of great things to say about capitalism, doing making a movie based on…

Jonathan Lynn thought it was “an insane idea”. A movie based on a family board game? “I couldn’t see how you made that into a film. There was no story!” the British writer-director reasonably reasoned. It was 1983 and Lynn, a well-respected theatre actor and director, and co-creator of hit political sitcom Yes Minister, had been invited to meet with Hollywood big shot Peter Guber, who together with his partner Jon Peters had executive-produced Flashdance and An American Werewolf In London. Guber opened by announcing he had the “perfect project” for Lynn to write: a big-screen comedy adaptation of the 1949 Waddingtons game Cluedo (then published by Parker Brothers in the States as Clue), which saw players of colour-coded characters solving a murder in a mansion. Professor Plum! In the…

YOU DON’T NEED to watch The Fabelmans to learn that Steven Spielberg had daddy issues. Father figures loom large throughout his filmography, in a variety of ways. Sometimes they’re deeply unreliable, like Roy Neary, who abandons his family in favour of exploring the unknown in Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. Sometimes they’re reluctant, like Alan Grant in Jurassic Park. Sometimes they’re conspicuous by their absence, like Elliott’s dad in E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. Professor Henry Jones Jr is all three. Beautifully played, with a permanently raised eyebrow and a scowl, by Sean Connery (famously, just 12 years older than Harrison Ford), Indiana Jones’ dad is frustrating, funny, formidable, fastidious, and at least one more big F we could list (but which Indy could never utter; at least, not in a…

Illustration: JaceyTHE RANKING Four Empire writers. One icon. Lots of movies. Ordered definitively. Chris: So, then, Sly Stallone. One of the most imitated movie stars of all time. Nick: Why is it Arnie is so easy to do an impersonation of, but Stallone is elusive? Dan: I’m not going there. Nick: What is his most famous line? Arnie is obvious: “I’ll be back.” Chris: “Don’t push me”? “Adrian”? Nick: He never had a one-liner quite as good as Arnie’s. There isn’t one that stuck. Chris: There’s an incredible line in The Expendables 2 — “We keep it light until it’s time to get dark. And then we get pitch black.” But the best one-liner associated with Sly Stallone is the tagline for Cobra — “Crime is a disease. Meet the…

“ME AND JOEL would never have made this movie,” says Ethan Coen. “It would not have happened.” Returning after a five-year break, Coen’s debut ‘solo’ feature (there’s a good reason for those single quotes) might appear cut from the same cloth as any of his collaborations with his older brother. Drive-Away Dolls is, after all, a road movie involving a domino-toppling mix-up, a bunch of inept criminals and a few big names (Pedro Pascal, Matt Damon) in weird roles. Except… “I don’t think me and Joel would have written a romantic comedy with two female leads.” Those leads are the carefree Jamie and the buttoned-up Marian (played respectively by Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan): two twentysomething lesbians who, in 1999, hit the road to Tallahassee with, they soon discover, a…

ROBERT EGGERS’ PLAN to remake Nosferatu is almost as old as the ancient vampire himself: it was officially announced in 2015, before his debut The Witch was even released, and he’s been trying to make it ever since. Now, finally, his version, starring Nicholas Hoult (as Thomas Hutter), Lily-Rose Depp (Ellen Hutter) and Bill Skarsgård (Count Orlok), is in the can. “I’m feeling pretty good,” he tells us the day after wrapping principal photography in Prague. “Incredibly tired, but pretty good!” F.W. Murnau’s 1922 take on Dracula is one of cinema’s most influential horrors, and Eggers has been obsessed for aeons. It’s in his, well, blood, and he’s pushed himself more than ever to make this work: “I’m trying to go beyond what I’m capable of,” he says. His own…

CHARLIE DAY IS PROBABLY best known for playing a glue-sniffing, illiterate sociopath on It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia. Now he’s branching out with his feature directorial debut, Hollywood satire Fool’s Paradise, which brings together some of his biggest cinematic loves. He spoke to Empire about three of those inspirations. HAL ASHBY A huge touchstone for Fool’s Paradise — astory about a man (Day) who fumbles his way to the top of Hollywood, helped by a down-on-his-luck publicist (Ken Jeong) — is Hal Ashby’s Being There. “Being There’s the most obvious one,” Day agrees. “I was very unabashedly saying, ‘Okay, let me use the DNA, the engine, of Being There. Or Mr. Magoo or The Jerk — anything where someone bumbles through a story and everyone is putting things on them…

ON GETTING THE ROLE I was with my parents and my little brother. We were walking in London and we got a call from the casting director. She said, “Ethann is going to play in Indiana Jones 5.” And that’s when our hearts exploded. We cried on the side of the road. People were looking at us like, “What’s happening? Why are they crying that much?” ON MEETING HARRISON FORD I remember first seeing him in the studio, because I had to do make-up checks. I was like [whispers], “Mum, Mum — I think I just saw Harrison Ford!” But the first time I met him was on set. I was kind of nervous. We shook hands, and he was like, “Harrison.” And it was like [to himself], “I know…

★★★★ OUT NOW (NETFLIX) / CERT 15 / 122 MINS DIRECTOR Sam Hargrave CAST Chris Hemsworth, Golshifteh Farahani, Tornike Gogrichiani, Tinatin Dalakishvili, Idris Elba PLOT Tyler Rake (Hemsworth) was clinically dead after his last mission, but he got better. While recuperating, he learns that his ex-sister-in-law Ketevan (Dalakishvili) and her two kids need his help. Cue a heavily armoured dash for safety, with Ketevan’s dangerous brother-in-law on their tail. WHEN EXTRACTION HIT streaming in April 2020, it came as a welcome action distraction in a pandemic landscape bereft of blockbusters. This sequel arrives to a far more crowded field, but if anything it’s more eye-catching and considerably bigger in scale. Director Sam Hargrave and star Chris Hemsworth have clearly pushed themselves and one another to go harder, higher and bloodier…

★★ OUT 14 JULY / CERT 15 / 132 MINS DIRECTOR Anita Rocha da Silveira CAST Mari Oliveira, Lara Tremouroux, Felipe Frazão An intriguing but frustrating one here, as writer-director Anita Rocha da Silveira serves up an unsettling piece that has a lot to say but doesn’t quite know what to do with it all. In Brazil, female members of a fundamentalist Christian community step into the night, donning featureless white masks and beating all hell out of supposed sinful women. These extremist terrorists have had their humanity totally repressed — or so it seems. Da Silveira’s heavily giallo-inspired trip takes aim at oppressive patriarchal societies, group-think, hysterical conservatism and vapid religious media, with Medusa eventually unravelling these evangelistic hypocrites. But while there are arresting moments, as a story Medusa…

★★ OUT NOW (PRIME VIDEO) / CERT 15 / 100 MINS DIRECTOR Catherine Hardwicke CAST Kate Beckinsale, Brian Cox, Christopher Convery, Ernie Hudson, Tyson Ritter PLOT After being diagnosed with terminal cancer, Nevada inmate Max (Cox) is offered the chance to leave the cell where he’s spent the past 12 years and live his remaining months under house arrest, playing unhappy families with his estranged daughter Maxine (Beckinsale) and her smart-mouthed pre-teen Ezra (Convery). CATHERINE HARDWICKE’S PROSAIC, visually flat daddy-daughter drama Prisoner’s Daughter wasn’t made specifically for a streaming platform, but it sure feels like it. It starts, as most straight-to-streaming movies do, by barrelling through a head-spinning amount of plot, pleading us to stay engaged, as if algorithmically driven — yet the film’s truncated scenes run at such a…

★★★★ OUT 21 JULY / CERT 15 / 120 MINS DIRECTOR Mark Cousins CAST Alistair McGowan, Alfred Hitchcock, Mark Cousins For his Hitchcock documentary, Mark Cousins gives his lullaby voiceover a rest. The film claims to be written and voiced by Hitchcock himself. Obviously it isn’t — the script is all Cousins, while Alistair McGowan provides Hitchcock’s familiar tones. But it’s emblematic of Cousins’ sideways approach to his subject. Avoiding the well-worn path of listing Hitchcockian tropes, he opts for six atypically themed chapters of illuminating analysis. A comprehensive selection of clips illustrates the core arguments: that every film in Hitchcock’s remarkable canon boasts something fascinating and unusual, and their artistic value and relevance to modern audiences remain undiminished. That Cousins finds refreshing ways to discuss Hitchcock suggests an equally…

★★★★ OUT 14 JULY / CERT 15 / 95 MINS DIRECTOR Vinay Shukla PARTICIPANTS Ravish Kumar, Sushil Bahuguna, Deepak Chaubey Ravish Kumar is an anomaly in India’s TV-news landscape. Where all the successful, well-funded channels trumpet the brilliance of life in India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Kumar, on a minor network, reports from a different world, where unemployment is sky-high, people lack basics like clean water, and religious persecution is rife. For questioning the official government line, Kumar is labelled “anti-nationalist” and subjected to repeated threats. Vinay Shukla’s fascinating documentary follows him as he ploughs on with delivering truth, even as his ratings tumble and the country votes for Modi in ever larger numbers. It’s a gripping, moving, sometimes frustrating portrait of a man consumed by a need to…

★★★ OUT NOW / CERT 15 / 122 MINS DIRECTOR Jean-Paul Salomé CAST Isabelle Huppert, Grégory Gadebois, Yvan Attal, Marina Foïs Isabelle Huppert has been making films for over half a century and audiences have built up such an implicit trust in her that it’s hard to believe that the French legal system would ever doubt her character’s word. Director Jean-Paul Salomé relies heavily on a sense of outrage in recounting the case of Maureen Kearney, the trade unionist and whistleblower whose 2012 rape claim was dismissed as fantasy after she exposed French and Chinese companies planning to exchange nuclear technology. Huppert gives a masterclass in inscrutable intensity, but her stoicism can make her remote. It’s admirably acted, but this indictment of endemic chauvinism across French society lacks the intrigue,…

★★★★ OUT NOW (DISNEY+) / EPISODES VIEWED 2 OF 6 SHOWRUNNER Kyle Bradstreet CAST Samuel L. Jackson, Ben Mendelsohn, Olivia Colman, Emilia Clarke, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Cobie Smulders, Martin Freeman PLOT After a self-imposed exile in space, disillusioned super-spy Nick Fury (Jackson) is brought in from the cold by an old ally, Talos (Mendelsohn), who reveals that his race, the shape-shifting alien Skrulls, have infiltrated the highest ranks of the world’s government and plan to make Earth their new home. SECRET INVASION, CREATED by Kyle Bradstreet, is not a superhero show. This may surprise those familiar with the 2008 comic storyline from Brian Michael Bendis and Leinil Francis Yu, which saw nearly every costumed hero and villain mix it up with the alien intruders; the Disney+ series ditches the Avengers in…

★★ OUT NOW (SKY/NOW) / EPISODES VIEWED 2 OF 6 SHOWRUNNER Sam Levinson CAST Abel Tesfaye, Lily-Rose Depp, Suzanna Son, Jane Adams “Who among us has not had cum on their face?” So asks Jane Adams in the opening episode of The Idol, the latest ode to excess from Euphoria’s Sam Levinson, about pop star Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp) who begins a toxic relationship with self-help guru Tedros (Abel ‘The Weeknd’ Tesfaye). According to Tesfaye, an earlier version of the show was “leaning too much into a female perspective”. Well, that’s certainly not an issue anymore. By the end of the first episode, Jocelyn has no perspective at all; as we see when she masturbates with an ice cube and chokes herself, this is (at least, in the writers’ minds) what…

A few years ago, when he was in post-production on Man Of Steel, Zack Snyder walked into a meeting with Kathleen Kennedy, freshly installed president of Lucasfilm, with a sure-fire slam-dunk show-me-the-money no-brainer of a pitch: he wanted to make a Star Wars movie. But not just any Star Wars movie. “It was Seven Samurai in space,” he says. “And a Star Wars movie was my original concept for it.” As they say in Star Wars, the circle was now complete. After all, no Kurosawa — no Hidden Fortress — no Star Wars. “I knew that the origins for George were a lot of those Kurosawa films. I was a big Kurosawa fan, so it made sense as a concept. A really simple story. Kind of clean. Good versus evil.”…

The Virgin Suicides was an audacious debut from the then 29-year-old filmmaker Sofia Coppola. Adapted from Jeffrey Eugenides’ 1993 novel, the 1999 adaptation told the story of the Lisbons, five teenage sisters living in the 1970s Midwest, their repressed, strictly religious parents who refuse to let them date, and the terrible repercussions. Coppola made a film that was all dreamy lassitude, intimations of teen sexuality and repression, with disturbing violence and an overtly feminine aesthetic. It also offered the first mature role for luminous 16-year-old lead Kirsten Dunst, who had up until then really only played more childlike characters. Although Coppola’s thematic interests and visual approach have evolved over her career, her fascination with the dark underside of girlhood remains omnipresent in her work, and you can find it in…

“ IWANT THE WORLD TO KNOW. IT’S THE MOST BEAUTIFUL THING IN THE WORLD. ” That’s what Evan, one of the two teen heroes of 2007’s raucous comedy Superbad, tells his foul-mouthed pal Seth of their fraternal love for each other — aremarkably sweet sentiment to cap off a two-hour odyssey of dick-drawing, drink-fuelled, puke-stained exploits. And for any fictionalisation at play there in the youthful misadventures of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg — childhood friends who started writing Superbad together at 13 and have since gone on to create genre-blending comedies like Pineapple Express and This Is The End, produced gonzo, gore-packed comic-book adaptations, and almost ignited nuclear war with North Korean-set The Interview — that sentiment seems to be the real deal. Nearly three decades since starting on…

CLUE WAS WHAT HAPPENED WHEN CLUEDO WENT TO CINEMA. BUT WHAT HAPPENS WHEN CINEMA (AND TV) COME TO CLUEDO? HARRY POTTER “Ginny Weasley! In the Room Of Requirement! With the Golden Snitch!” Okay, it doesn’t actually work like that. Instead, you play as Harry, Hermione etc, trying to solve the mystery of a fellow student’s disappearance. The big twist is you can actually change the layout of the board. Because magic. JAMES BOND 007 Usually Bond deals with things by killing people, hitting on women and blowing shit up, but here he must be more subtle to figure out who eliminated a fellow 00 agent. It’s a bit of a franchise mash-up, meaning it could, weirdly, be Goldfinger, with the mechanical arm, in Scaramanga’s Fun House. SEINFELD In this rather…

The number of movies (Raiders Of The Lost Ark, Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom, Indiana Jones And the Last Crusade, Indiana Jones And the Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny) 28 The number of episodes of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (four TV movies were also filmed), which ran from 1992-1996 7 The number of Young Indiana Jones Chronicles episodes to feature Harrison Ford The number of people who have played Indiana Jones in live action (Harrison Ford, River Phoenix, Corey Carrier, Sean Patrick Flanery, George Hall, Neil Boulane and Boutalat) $1.987 BILLION THE TOTAL GROSSED AT THE WORLDWIDE BOX OFFICE $20 MILLION The budget of Raiders Of The Lost Ark The number of Oscars won by Indiana Jonesmovies (Raiders Of TheLostArkbagged…

Renfield CHRIS McKAY’S RENFIELD brings the same dry wit and keen eye for a genre trope that the director brought to The Lego Batman Movie, as Nicholas Hoult’s long-suffering title character tries desperately to extricate himself from the most toxic of bosses: Count Dracula (Nicolas Cage). Here, McKay tells us about some of the film’s standout scenes. FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS Renfield begins with Nicholas Hoult’s Robert Montague Renfield informing the audience, via voiceover and flashback, of how he came to be Dracula’s familiar, supplying the vampire with plentiful food in exchange for a form of immortality. One incident he recounts is an attempt on Dracula’s life, when a group of vampire-hunters meet a sticky end while trying to impale Vlad. The hunters are never named, although it seems a fairly…

This issue we’ve got a rather nifty piece of kit to give away, especially if you struggle to get your TV volume just right. The OSKAR (worth £259), designed by award-winning German audio specialists Faller, was born out of founder Marcell Faller wanting to help his father enjoy watching TV again. The OSKAR is easily connected to the TV, and with its innovative voice-optimisation technology, speech is boosted at the touch of a button, while distracting background noise is filtered out and minimised. You don’t have to be hard of hearing to benefit — super-crisp dialogue enhances viewings of your favourite films and TV shows whoever you are! Fancy your chances? Simply crack the crossword, solve the anagram and follow the entry instructions below. THE OSKAR IS AVAILABLE TO BUY…