Tabla de contenidos para December 2023 en Empire

LETTER OF THE MONTH DESERT POWER The latest Empire issue [issue #419] made for great beach reading, particularly the double feature on the upcoming Dune: Part Two and the chaotic behind-the-scenes story of Lynch’s version. The issue was made even better by how good the subscriber cover looked covered in sand. Thankfully there were plenty of places to get a drink and I didn’t have to resort to drinking my own… well, you know. DAVY FALKNER, VIA EMAIL The spice must flow! Enjoy this Picturehouse membership, Davy — their cinemas serve actual drinks so you do not need to resort to drinking your own, erm, stillsuit run-off. Empire’s star letter wins a Picturehouse Membership, valid for one year at all Picturehouse Cinemas across the UK, including the flagship Picturehouse Central…

WHEN KITTY GREEN speaks with Empire she’s in Barcelona, where she’s travelling with a friend. It’s a fitting setting to talk about The Royal Hotel, her pressure-cooker thriller about two holidaying friends (Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick) who take jobs in a pub in the Australian outback to make some much-needed cash. “I feel like naturally when you travel, someone has to take charge and be more cautious, and the other person can drink a little more and have more fun,” says Green sheepishly, the latter in this instance. The characters are out of their element, a dynamic which is exacerbated by the pub’s patrons, largely male miners, whose misogynistic behaviour curdles from jokey asides into violence. During a busy night, leering local Matty (Toby Wallace) asks Liv (Henwick) for…

ALICE WALKER’S SEMINAL 1982 novel The Color Purple is a story that warrants retelling. Following the trials and triumphs of Celie, an African-American woman living with an abusive husband in 1900s Georgia, it was first adapted for the screen as a drama by Steven Spielberg in 1985. Now it’s the turn of filmmaker Blitz Bazawule, who takes the story in a fresh, new musical direction, with Spielberg on producing duties alongside Oprah Winfrey, Scott Sanders and Quincy Jones. Bazawule recalls an early phone call with Spielberg. “I told him, ‘We’re going to give Celie a big imagination. She’s going to see things like a 50-piece orchestra,” he remembers. “He was just like, ‘Go make your movie.’” Here, he tells Empire how he did just that. FINDING THE STARS Bazawule sought…

THE MAN Jason Isaacs was not a fan of Cary Grant prior to being cast in Archie, an upcoming show that charts the Hollywood leading man’s early life as Archibald Leach. It was his deep research that changed him. “I’ve been through quite a journey,” he tells Empire. “The more films I watched, the more I realised that the reason he became the biggest star in the world was that you couldn’t take your eyes off him.” Isaacs read every biography available and had long, candid discussions with Dyan Cannon, Grant’s ex-wife, and his daughter, executive producer of the show, Jennifer Grant, who gave him home videos. “I’ve always found that you never get a fuller picture of someone than by talking to the people who love them, or who…

DISNEY’S HALL OF Fame of talking-animal buddies is vast. The pressure was on, then, for directors Chris Buck and Fawn Veerasunthorn to create a creature companion for Wish, Disney Animation’s feature-length celebration of the studio’s 100th birthday. They explain why confident goat Valentino — furry friend to Ariana DeBose’s hero Asha — is a worthy new addition. HE’S GOT PLUCK The culture of Wish is rooted in the Iberian peninsula, so a goat fitted Asha’s rural home — and story. “Baby goats love to climb,” Veerasunthorn says. “It’s a movie about pursuing your wish, so it’s good to have a character who is not afraid.” HE HAS A KILLER OUTFIT What’s cuter than a baby goat? One in frilly yellow pyjamas. “Valentino is very proud of his pyjamas,” grins Buck.…

IT’S HAPPENING IN A BONKERS LAS VEGAS VENUE Seemingly bored with old-fashioned rectangular screens, Darren Aronofsky’s latest project is the first film to be specially commissioned for new globe-shaped Vegas venue MSG Sphere. Postcard From Earth, which is part narrative, part documentary, has been made with experimental technologies to fit the world’s largest high-definition screen, which wraps both over and around audiences. Totally tubular! THE MOVIE CELEBRATES EARTH’S BEAUTY Some may dismiss 4D cinema as a gimmick. But Aronofsky is taking it deeply seriously. Postcard From Earth is set in the future, seen through the eyes of two humans, and use a mix of fictional and non-fictional footage filmed on all seven continents. He’s told the Hollywood Reporter that he wants to “pluck people from the bling and thrum of…

FINN WOLFHARD’S CHILDHOOD was largely spent around monsters and ghouls. Demogorgons, Pennywise, ghosts — he’s busted the lot. So, no surprise that his feature directorial debut, Hell Of A Summer, which he’s co-directed, co-written and stars in alongside Ghostbusters: Afterlife actor Billy Bryk, is a bloody affair — asummer-camp slasher with tongue poking firmly in cheek. “The energy was crazy,” Wolfhard beams of the film’s Midnight Madness debut at the Toronto International Film Festival. With axes swinging, knives slathered in deadly peanut butter (it’s an allergy thing), and guitars used for more than just campfire singalongs, the body-count is high. “We had a lot of fun,” says Wolfhard of devising fresh kills. “It was years of going over what should be the ones to go in the film.” From their…

★★★★ OUT 6 OCTOBER (DISNEY+) / EPISODES VIEWED: 4 OF 6 SHOWRUNNERS Michael Waldron, Eric Martin CAST Tom Hiddleston, Owen Wilson, Sophia Di Martino, Jonathan Majors, Gugu Mbatha-Raw PLOT With the multiverse exploding and the TVA in chaos, Loki (Hiddleston) starts time-slipping, and seeks his variant, Sylvie (Di Martino), for answers. IT’S FAIR TO say that Marvel’s sacred timeline has had a little wobble. 2023 is the first year that the seemingly unstoppable superhero studio has looked vulnerable, after disappointments on both the big screen (Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania) and small (Secret Invasion). What a sharp intake of fresh Asgardian air Loki is, then, the first of the MCU’s Disney+ shows to earn a second run, and one that still feels distinctive, in a multiverse sometimes in danger of…

★★ OUT 27 OCTOBER (NETFLIX) / CERT TBC / 122 MINS DIRECTOR David Yates CAST Emily Blunt, Chris Evans, Andy García, Catherine O’Hara, Jay Duplass, Brian d’Arcy James, Chloe Coleman PLOT Liza Drake (Blunt) finds security working as a drug rep — only to be embroiled in a criminal scheme at the heart of America’s opioid epidemic. “I WILL MAKE my life count,” Liza (Emily Blunt) tells herself at her lowest ebb — or at least she thinks it’s her lowest; her car gets towed the next morning. When we first meet Liza in Pain Hustlers — anew drama from Harry Potter stalwart David Yates — she lives in her sister’s basement with her daughter Phoebe (Chloe Coleman) and mother Jackie (Catherine O’Hara). Her kid’s newly suspended from school, and…

★★★ OUT NOW (APPLE TV+) / EPISODES VIEWED 5 OF 10 SHOWRUNNER Chris Black CAST Kurt Russell, Wyatt Russell, Anna Sawai, Kiersey Clemons You’ve seen Godzilla Vs. Kong. Now there’s Russell vs. Russell. This TV take on the kaiju mythology takes a more human-level approach, headlined by the inspired casting of father and son Kurt and Wyatt Russell, both playing Monarch military man Lee Shaw at different ages. While its occasional deep-cut references demands a familiarity with a franchise most audiences are ambivalent about — who remembers Godzilla: King Of The Monsters? — its ambitious time- and globe-trotting storytelling makes the most of the universe’s giant canvas, even in small-screen size. Some characters feel like filler, but the kaiju, when they come, are satisfyingly epic. JN…

FROM GAMING’S BIGGEST LETDOWN TO ITS GREATEST REDEMPTION ★★★★★ PC / PS5 / XBOX / OUT NOW THE LAST THREE years have been a long road to recovery for Cyberpunk 2077. The game’s disastrous 2020 launch, in which it arrived littered with bugs and barely playable on console, still haunts the memories of those who had been expecting great things from CD Projekt Red’s follow-up to The Witcher 3. Thankfully, the studio has performed a long-haul course-correction by squashing bugs and streamlining gameplay. The game’s redemption comes to a fitting conclusion here with Phantom Liberty, 2077’s first (and last) paid expansion. Accessible early on during the base game’s main campaign, Phantom Liberty brings players to Dogtown, Night City’s lawless badlands, in search of a downed plane carrying the President, who…

★★★★ OUT NOW (NETFLIX) / EPISODES VIEWED 8 OF 8 SHOWRUNNER Mike Flanagan CAST Bruce Greenwood, Carla Gugino, Mary McDonnell, Carl Lumbly, Kate Siegel, Henry Thomas, Mark Hamill PLOT Near the end of his life, Roderick Usher (Greenwood) recounts how his six children met their horrible, supernatural deaths. IMAGINE IF SUCCESSION were not a prestige drama but a daytime soap, and for some reason it had a Halloween episode. That’s the kind of tone you’re in for with The Fall Of The House Of Usher, Mike Flanagan’s bloody, OTT and highly entertaining take on Edgar Allan Poe. This is no reverent Poe adaptation; instead, it’s more an interpretation of his themes of selfishness and regret, used as the foundation for an entirely invented story. The Usher dynasty is dying. As…

Priscilla Beaulieu walks down her high-school hallway. In languid slow-motion, she’s soundtracked to Tommy James & the Shondells’ sinuous, seductively repetitive ‘Crimson And Clover’. This young girl is not yet the famous wife known as Priscilla Presley, signified by the lacquered black beehive and ’60s cat eyeliner: she has lighter brown hair, swept to one side, and she looks her age, a whole 15, for one thing. But she has met — and kissed — Elvis Aaron Presley. Ergo the besotted smile and snagged-a-dreamboat stare. Sofia Coppola knows a thing or two about the interior daydreams and external trappings of girlhood. From her debut feature The Virgin Suicides through to Lost In Translation and Marie Antoinette, her films are often about teenage girls — or teen girls trapped in women’s…

“The past is another country: they do things differently there.” “You can put it anywhere.” THE BURNING HOT SUMMER MOVIE WAS the genre that obsessed me as a teenager. Bertolucci’s hazy, devastating, erotic masterpieces Stealing Beauty and The Dreamers blazed through our school like a fever: the sole DVDs had passed through so many hands that by the end of term you could barely even get to the Good Bits for the scratches. François Ozon’s Swimming Pool gave us all chronic, lifelong crushes on Ludivine Sagnier, Jude Law’s bottom in The Talented Mr. Ripley nearly finished us off, and Cruel Intentions, our North Star, brought about the immediate loss of virginity of an entire form. Craig Armstrong’s ‘This Love’ on MiniDisc (RIP) has a lot to answer for. I was…

21 Stand-ins Jimmy had when filming It’s A Wonderful Life, leading one paper to nickname him “the most spoiled actor in Hollywood”. 2 MONTHS The age Jimmy apparently was when he starred in his first picture. $10,000 Amount MGM insured Jimmy for when filming The Secret Garden. 95 Per cent of animals in movies that belonged to Curly Twiford in 1947, according to one newspaper. 1 Painted portrait commissioned of Jimmy. Curly and his wife displayed the “high-priced” image in their living room. 20,000 Number of ants Curly once had to procure for a movie. He captured them in glass jars in the desert. 16  Years Jimmy starred in the movies.…

AS IS OFTEN the case with a debut film, the Special Thanks section for Chloe Domont’s savage relationship drama Fair Play is packed with names. Some particularly stand out. There’s Karina Longworth (below centre), for example — host of the excellent movie podcast You Must Remember This, and wife of one of the film’s executive producers, Rian Johnson. “She was one of the first people we showed the cut to, once I was halfway through my director’s cut,” says Domont. “She was someone I was really curious to see what they think, and her notes were invaluable. Some stuff was very small and specific, and some of her thoughts were more about the last couple of scenes.” Later in the process on the movie, which stars Phoebe Dynevor and Alden…

THE MOST SHOCKING thing about Freaks — the film so supposedly disturbing its own studio tried to shut it down; the film that caused an audience-member at a preview screening to have a miscarriage; the film that with its own marketing campaign boasted of “pure sensationalism” — is that it really isn’t sensationalist at all. From the start it makes the extraordinary ordinary, contextualising the so-called abnormal as normal. As people. Its true subversion lies in the way it challenges our own prejudices, flipping horror on its head, taking society to task. Freaks was — and to some extent still is — ahead of its time. It’s hard to think of another film that has been so staggeringly, wilfully misunderstood. Even its status as a horror is something of a…

BETH WEBB HOSTED OUR SCREENING OF HOW TO HAVE SEX AT THE LFF “I’ve been to many LFF screenings in my time, but none have felt more lively, rowdy and warmly received than How To Have Sex, our sponsored film at the festival this year. The two standing ovations for filmmaker Molly Manning Walker and star Mia McKenna-Bruce were a total joy to behold.” AMON WARMANN TALKED THE COLOR PURPLE WITH BLITZ BAZAWULE “Blitz had energy and passion for days when we spoke on a sunny morning in the Rosewood London hotel. He also casually mentioned that he regularly talked to Spielberg, Oprah and Quincy Jones while working on the film. As contacts go, he’s set for life. Hope he never loses that phone!” CHRIS HEWITT CHAIRED A…

DECEMBER 2023 | EDITED BY BETH WEBB ALL THE ESSENTIAL INTEL, FROM HOLLYWOOD AND BEYOND ANDREW HAIGH WAS hoping for an emotional response to his latest film, but even he was not prepared for the reactions All Of Us Strangers is generating. When the film had its first public screening at the Telluride Film Festival on 31 August, audiences were largely rapturous, with five-star reviews from critics across the world and countless social-media posts about the enormous volumes of tears shed. “I would meet someone in the street who’d seen the film three days ago and they’d be talking and just start crying,” says Haigh, seemingly delighted if slightly Britishly embarrassed. “I just want the film to have an effect, without being manipulative.” It is not manipulative at all, and…

TO CALL The Dead Don’t Hurt “a Viggo Mortensen film” would be an understatement. For his second outing as director, the man who mastered Minas Tirith also wrote the screenplay and the music, and appears in front of the camera as hardy wanderer Olsen, too. Speaking to Empire at the Toronto International Film Festival, where the film premiered, he explains how he did it all. WRITING From the beginning, the heart of the story was Vicky Krieps’ Vivienne, a steadfast woman undeterred by the patriarchal dominance of the time, inspired by Mortensen’s own mother — whose pioneering spirit also influenced the Western-frontier setting. “From the first draft, [Vivienne] was central to the story,” says Mortensen, “but she became more so. I started trimming things away that had to do with…

THIS YEAR ALONE has seen action films led by Tom Cruise, Sylvester Stallone and Harrison Ford. You might have watched Transformers: Rise Of The Beasts, Super Mario Bros. or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem in cinemas. Coming up, there’s a new Ghostbusters movie, another Sonic The Hedgehog, another Karate Kid. Director Chad Stahelski is working on another Highlander; Taika Waititi is trying to make a new Akira; studios keep trying to make He-Man happen. Even aside from the regular attempts to reboot Die Hard, Predator and Terminator, the ’80s seems to exert an intractable hold on our collective imagination — but it’s time, maybe past time, to move on. Some nostalgia is inevitable. Many of the people bringing back these characters, stars and franchises grew up in the 1980s…

IT’S NO COINCIDENCE that the driving force in William Oldroyd’s psychological thriller Eileen is named… Rebecca. Adapted from her own novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, it’s set in 1964 Boston, as downtrodden, wide-eyed prison secretary Eileen (Thomasin McKenzie) meets glamorous, no-bullshit new counsellor Rebecca (Anne Hathaway). Moshfegh’s book was inspired by Hitchcock’s take on Daphne du Maurier’s classic, and Oldroyd duly follows through — to the nth degree. “It’s funny, because a few years ago I got a script through, a remake of Rebecca,” the Lady Macbeth director says. “But would you ever go near it? Would you ever want to remake a Hitchcock?” Well, Ben Wheatley went there. But horses for courses. “With Eileen,” says Oldroyd, “I thought there was an opportunity to make an original story in the spirit…

“EXPATS” IS A tricky word, with many thorny connotations. But it’s a word Lulu Wang is determined to unpack in her new six-part TV show. Expats is the story of three American women living in Hong Kong, part of a community that’s been rocked by a child’s disappearance. Wang tells Empire how she wove together a trio of perspectives. MERCY JI-YOUNG YOO Mercy — aKorean-American central to the story’s tragedy — was Wang’s entry point into the story. Working odd jobs and with a group of rich friends, Mercy carries within her a “self-deprecating darkness”, the product of guilt stemming from her involvement in the disappearance. To secure the right actor, Wang searched for someone who could bring an unreadable mystery to the role. She landed on up-and-comer Yoo. “As…

SOPHIE BUTCHER IS THINKING ABOUT... GONZO PR STUNTS The Nun II’s demonic sisters trotting about the UK coastline? A giant hand made of fake cash with its middle finger up to promote Dumb Money? Masked figures on a gondola, roaming the canals of Camden for A Haunting In Venice? Enough with the creepy, real-world-invading film tie-ins, people! ALEX GODFREY IS THINKING ABOUT... ROTTA THE HUTT I’ve been having bad dreams recently. Night terrors. For Ahsoka has plunged me back to 2008’s The Clone Wars: specifically the appearance of Jabba The Hutt’s son, Rotta. A creature that can only be described as a little penis slug. I want him banished from my brain, but no go. Slither off, foul demon! BETH WEBB IS THINKING ABOUT... GLEN POWELL’S DOG A Hollywood star…

A QUEER HIGH-SCHOOL fight-club film influenced by everything from Shaun Of The Dead to 1917 is certainly uncharted territory for Hollywood. But for Emma Seligman, the filmmaker behind American summer hit Bottoms, this was the perfect project to follow up the brazenly funny Shiva Baby, which launched her career. We convinced her to break the first rule of Fight Club and talk about fight clubs (specifically, how she created one for her movie). ROUND 1: INSPIRATION Seligman originally wanted a heroic story for her leading lesbian duo PJ and Josie, played by Shiva Baby star Rachel Sennott and The Bear’s Ayo Edebiri. Yet Sennott, who co-wrote the film, had other plans. “Rachel was interested in the characters being really flawed and selfish and deceitful,” the filmmaker remembers. And so they…

★★★ OUT 17 NOVEMBER / CERT TBC / 131 MINS DIRECTOR Emerald Fennell CAST Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi, Archie Madekwe, Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant, Alison Oliver PLOT Oxford University, 2006. Outsider Oliver (Keoghan) becomes friends with the wealthy Felix (Elordi), and assimilates into his world. WITH HER FEATURE debut Promising Young Woman, Emerald Fennell took a scathing swipe at themes including rape culture, misogyny and violence against women. Her follow-up, Saltburn, sees the writer-director set her sights on class, social mobility and the über-rich, delivering a satirical thriller that leaves you holding your breath and rolling your eyes in equal measure. Barry Keoghan is the brilliantly named Oliver Quick, a working-class lad from Merseyside heading to Oxford University on a scholarship. A lone wolf, he immediately finds himself shunned,…

★★★★ OUT 3 NOVEMBER / CERT TBC / 91 MINS DIRECTOR Emma Seligman CAST Rachel Sennott, Ayo Edebiri, Havana Rose Liu, Kaia Gerber, Ruby Cruz, Nicholas Galitzine, Marshawn Lynch PLOT Sick of being the school losers, PJ (Sennott) and Josie (Edebiri) start a ‘self-defence’ club to get close to their crushes. THE FIRST RULE of Fight Club is that you do not talk about Fight Club. The first rule of Bottoms, the sophomore feature from director Emma Seligman, is to not take it too seriously. This is a film with barely a sincere moment in its 91-minute runtime, instead focusing on building an off-kilter, heightened high-school world, and having a helluva time playing with it. PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri) are outsiders, looking to level up their social…

IF A MACHINE CAN LEARN THE VALUE OF HUMAN LIFE, MAYBE WE CAN TOO ★★★★ OUT NOW / CERT 12A / 133 MINS DIRECTOR Gareth Edwards CAST John David Washington, Madeleine Yuna Voyles, Gemma Chan, Allison Janney PLOT After a nuclear bomb is set off in Los Angeles, America bans artificial intelligence. The super-continent of New Asia, meanwhile, is all for AI. And so war begins. THERE IS TECH to die for in The Creator. On every level. Boasting some of the best sci-fi design in years, there is personality to match each invention — most of which is programmed to kill. We have robot cops, 50 per cent humanoid, 100 per cent total bastards, running amok, stumbling about witlessly when sliced in half. There is the NOMAD, America’s mammoth…

FINGERNAILS ★★★★ “Cut from the same cloth as Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster, Christos Nikou’s sophomore feature earns its heartbreak through vulnerable, all-in performances from Jessie Buckley and Riz Ahmed.” ELLA KEMP EXPEND4BLES ★★ “In one of the most convoluted zingers of the year, Statham’s Christmas is likened to genital warts; like the STD, he is not welcome and refuses to go away. The observation could well be applied to The Expendables franchise.” IAN FREER FRASIER ★★★★ “Frasier is greyer now, and a little paunchier, but he’s lost none of his passion for pretension. As he proclaims, ‘I feel amalgamated with the hoi polloi,’ only a true grouch would deny that he is still delightful company.” NICK DE SEMLYEN CAT PERSON ★★ “Adapting a relatively uneventful short story was always going…

YOU DIE, AND YOU DON’T notice that you’re dying.” Nando Parrado remembers very little of the plane crash that changed his life on 13 October 1972, but he does remember that. As the airplane — Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 — that was carrying him, his mother, his sister, his teammates in the Old Christians Club rugby union team, and several other passengers and crew members, suddenly found itself struggling for speed and altitude in the Argentinian section of the Andes, Parrado found himself confronting his mortality. “It’s so fast,” he says. “From the moment I realised that there was something wrong to the moment it crashed, it was maybe two seconds, three seconds. It’s incredible how many things you can record on your mind in the last tenth of…

EVERYONE HAS AN IDEA OF WHAT WERNER HERZOG IS LIKE. The filmmaker has travelled to the frozen ends of the Earth where the sun only sets in winter; he has battled Klaus Kinski’s wild ego in the oppressive heat of the Amazonian jungle. He has staged operas, dragged a ship over a mountain, and descended into a pitch-black cave to film prehistoric paintings in 3D. He has stood inside a volcano as it erupted, emerging sooty and sweaty but alive, and eaten his own shoe after losing a bet. There is no one like Werner Herzog — his existence attracts parodies of a number usually reserved for American Presidents. But what is Werner Herzog like, as told by Werner Herzog? At 81, he has published his memoirs: Every Man For…

MEG 2: THE Trench (to be said aloud in the same way you would say Step Up 2 The Streets) stands out on Ben Wheatley’s CV like a… well, not exactly a sore thumb, more a 75-foot giant shark. Prior to this summer’s gleefully preposterous Jason Statham-starring sequel, the British director tended to stick to smaller British films, often with short shooting schedules and tiny budgets, that allowed him to indulge his darker sensibilities and mordant sense of humour. Those films included his micro-budget debut Down Terrace, Kill List, Sightseers and A Field In England and, even when big names like Tom Hiddleston, Cillian Murphy, Brie Larson and Lily James began to show up in the likes of High-Rise, Free Fire and Rebecca, Wheatley stayed on this side of the…

OVER THE COURSE of 16 years, Lorenzo di Bonaventura, producer of all seven Transformers movies, has had a front-row seat for one of the biggest franchises in Hollywood history, and has been able to chart its ups and downs, evolutions and — yes — transformations. “I couldn’t imagine anything going on this long, honestly,” he laughs. With Transformers: Rise Of The Beasts performing something of a soft reboot for the series, di Bonaventura sat down on Zoom with Empire to discuss the series with admirable candour. TRANSFORMERS (2007) Produced by Steven Spielberg (along with di Bonaventura), directed by Michael Bay, the first Transformers remains for many the best in the series. Its combination of cutting-edge effects and Shia LaBeouf ’s funny turn as a nerdy hero gave it the AllSpark…

1 HOUSEBOUND (OUT NOW, DVD/BR) Everyone knows M3GAN, but director Gerard Johnson’s first film remains underseen. Inspired by a viewing of Ghostbusters, it sets a woman under house arrest against... Well, you’ll see. Peter Jackson, no stranger to Kiwi horror-comedy, called it “bloody brilliant”. We concur. 2 PANDORA’S BOX (30 OCTOBER, BLU-RAY) Not be confused with a double-pack of Avatar Blu-rays (that would be ‘Pandora’s Box Set’), this 1929 German film still hypnotises. Following the intoxicating Lulu (Louise Brooks) as she leaves tragedies in her stylish wake, it’s strange, sultry, and iconically coiffeured. 3 SCROOGED (6 NOVEMBER, 4K BR) Making it was, apparently, grimmer than getting a lump of coal in your stocking. Bill Murray himself doesn’t like it. But the truth remains: Scrooged is a hoot. If you like…

FRIGHTFEST SINCE THE TURN of the century, I’ve spent August Bank Holiday weekend at FrightFest, arguably the UK’s flagship horror festival. One reason I risk screen blindness to see so many of the 65-ish films scheduled is to get ahead with the review slots of this column. Some FF films turn up on various platforms, formats or in cinemas immediately… others creep out over the months (and, sometimes, years) to come. A few are never heard from again — which means they’re possibly terrible, though occasionally luckless. Several I sometimes think I imagined, only for other festival-goers to confirm that, yes, there really was a Snoop Dogg’s Hood Of Horror… or a riffle through my shoebox of check discs* reminds me that someone remade The Banana Splits as a robots-on-the-rampage…

AQUAMAN ISN’T THE first watery hero to make a splash on an Empire cover. Nearly 30 years ago, we did a literal deep dive into Kevin Costner flop Waterworld, including a blow-by-blow account of the unfolding cinematic disaster, decorated with a curious choice of pull-quote (“We love Kevin Costner, he’s handsome and nice” — Shopkeeper, Hawaii). There’s a report on rumours from the set (one suggests Costner bought himself a portable solarium to get an all-over tan, “only to burn parts of a sensitive nature”), and then a somewhat testy Q&A with the man himself, offering some frank reflection. The film’s reported $150 million budget — the most expensive film ever made at the time — was, Costner acknowledges, “an embarrassing amount of money to be spent on a movie,…

“MY AGENT SAID, ‘I don’t know if you’ll like this: it’s about talking animals,’” says Simon Pegg of the moment when he first became aware of his new movie, Nandor Fodor And The Talking Mongoose. That agent’s scepticism seems misplaced — Pegg, as Narnia’s Reepicheep the mouse and Ice Age’s Buck the weasel can attest, is a man who knows his way around a talking animal. So, naturally, when Pegg read Adam Sigal’s script, he signed on — but not to star as the titular creature but as Nandor Fodor, a real-life Hungarian-American paranormal investigator who, in the 1930s, found himself on the Isle Of Man, trying to confirm the existence of a supernatural talking mongoose called Gef which had, apparently, rocked up on a local farm. “I read it…

“IT’S LIKE THE band getting back together for one last hurrah,” says David Tennant. The band, in this case, led by Tennant himself as the hugely popular one-time frontman of Doctor Who, with backing from Catherine Tate as his companion, Donna Noble, all orchestrated by Russell T Davies, the returning showrunner. The last time this particular trio worked together was the hugely popular 2010 New Year’s Day episode, which also featured a host of cameos from Doctor Who seasons past. Now this band of three Who legends is reuniting for three special episodes to celebrate the show’s 60th anniversary. “It was a very casual conversation between us initially,” Tennant tells Empire ahead of the SAG-AFTRA strike earlier this year. During lockdown the three of them took part in Doctor Who…

ALL IT TOOK was a director daring enough to ask: what would happen if a knuckleduster was also a gun? In Boy Kills World, the unhinged, ultraviolent feature debut from German filmmaker Moritz Mohr, the answer finally arrives. “We call it the punch-gun. Which is really not that great a name,” Mohr laughs, after debuting the film as part of the Midnight Madness strand of the Toronto International Film Festival. “We were like, ‘We need to spice up this fight.’ Guns are fun, knives are fun and all that — but how about we create something better? Something fresh?” And lo, the punch-gun was born. That kind of anything-goes wildness gives Boy Kills World its unique tone — aferocious martial-arts revenge thriller set in a dystopian world, with a huge…

ALEXANDER PAYNE IS on-brand from the off. He’s with family in Athens, which is a glorious city, we comment. He fixes us with a deadpan stare: “People suffer here, too.” From the beginning of his career, with 1996’s Citizen Ruth and 1999’s Election, and later taking in the likes of Sideways and Nebraska, Payne has carved a wry and acerbic path. His films chronicle desperate, broken human beings, with hope always trying to break through the cracks, and his latest, The Holdovers, follows through. Pitting together an unlikely pair in an all-male boarding school — unruly student Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa) and the grumpy, unpopular history teacher Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) charged with supervising him over Christmas — it’s set almost entirely in the prestigious Barton Academy. Payne has education…

THE SLANG QUIZ In early October, Scorsese’s daughter Francesca tested her dad on modern slang via a TikTok video. The director brought his A-game, guessing the definitions of “tea” and “hits different” while jumping on the term “slept on” to talk about The King Of Comedy’s critical reception in 1982. As Francesca put it, “He low-key slayed.” THE FLEA A TikTok trend in which one person tricks another into holding an imaginary flea’s invisible jacket was turned on its head when Scorsese chose to believe that the flea, and its jacket, were real. And who are we to argue with him? Rumours suggest that the flea will have a leading role in the director’s upcoming crime drama, ‘The Fleaparted’. THE FAKE FILM The internet’s love of Scorsese peaked when fans…

★★ OUT NOW / CERT 18 / 118 MINS DIRECTOR Kevin Greutert CAST Tobin Bell, Synnøve Macody Lund, Shawnee Smith, Steven Brand, Renata Vaca PLOT John Kramer (Bell), the ‘Jigsaw Killer’, is dying of cancer. When he discovers a radical new treatment is a lie, he exacts revenge on the doctors behind it. DEATH ISN’T THE worst thing that can happen to you in a Saw film. Why, you can die and still return again and again, like Tobin Bell’s original bad guy here. Despite expiring in Saw III, he’s back with more horrible traps in this tenth film, a prequel, and if it should still be plenty gross enough for fans, the horror is as tired as his poor, cancer-riddled bones. Set shortly after the events of the first…

★★★ OUT NOW / CERT 15 / 111 MINS DIRECTOR David Gordon Green CAST Leslie Odom Jr, Lidya Jewett, Olivia Marcum, Ellen Burstyn Having completed his Halloween trilogy, David Gordon Green turns his attention to The Exorcist, another masterpiece tarnished by a trail of mostly unworthy sequels. It’s a mixed bag, full of interesting ideas that don’t always develop into cohesive, satisfying conclusions. It begins well, with a creepy set-up about a single father (Leslie Odom Jr) whose daughter (Lidya Jewett) and friend (Olivia Marcum) go missing in the woods, then re-emerge as hosts to something terrible. Green creates a mood where everything seems just slightly off. Then Ellen Burstyn arrives, reprising her role as Chris MacNeil. As good as Burstyn is, her appearance feels gimmicky — more cheesy tribute…

A NEW TODD HAYNES MELODRAMA; EXPECT HEAVY WEEPING ★★★★ OUT 17 NOVEMBER / CERT TBC / 113 MINS DIRECTOR Todd Haynes CAST Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore, Charles Melton, D.W. Moffett, Piper Curda, Elizabeth Yu PLOT Years after embarking on a scandalous age-gap affair, a couple rakes up the past when an actor arrives to research a film based on their lives. WATCH FIRST Todd Haynes and composer Marcelo Zarvos borrow some of the score from Joseph Losey’s 1971 film The Go-Between — another film about the loss of a young boy’s innocence. IN TODD HAYNES’ bitingly camp new film, two acting titans play manipulative women desperate to get what they want at any cost — all under the guise of polite respectability. It’s an intriguing approach that, initially, feels at…

NOT ACTUALLY A HOW-TO GUIDE — MORE A STORMING BRITISH DEBUT ★★★★ OUT 3 NOVEMBER / CERT TBC / 98 MINS DIRECTOR Molly Manning Walker CAST Mia McKenna-Bruce, Shaun Thomas, Lara Peake, Enva Lewis, Samuel Bottomley, Laura Ambler PLOT Three teenage friends go on their first holiday abroad. As peer pressure intensifies, the less-experienced Tara (McKenna-Bruce) begins to struggle. STROBE LIGHTS. SWEAT-drenched skin. Head-pounding hangovers, treated with hair of the dog. On a holiday like the one in How To Have Sex, the air hums with possibility. It hangs on every particle, increases with every drink you down, seeps into every stolen glance across the dancefloor. For pals Tara (Mia McKenna- Bruce), Skye (Lara Peake) and Em (Enva Lewis), this should be an incredible trip — but when things start…

OVER ICED TEA and tortilla chips at a Bel-Air hotel, James Wan is talking Empire through arguably the most significant scene in Aquaman. The one sequence, the director says, “that really cemented in people’s minds exactly what the film was all about.” Is Wan perhaps referring to the emotional moment when our titular hero, played by Jason Momoa, reunites with his long-lost mother Queen Atlanna (Nicole Kidman)? Or maybe the heart-thudding climax in which Momoa’s aquatic vigilante finally wields King Atlan’s legendary trident to become ruler of all seven seas? Guess again. In fact, he’s talking about a six-second shot of an octopus playing the bongos. “Yeah, Topo the octopus is pretty beloved from just that one tiny scene,” laughs Wan of the tentacular tub-thumper that launched a thousand GIFs…

Film directors and chocolatiers have a lot in common. And not just because we need them to have a lot in common in order to make this intro work. Both are in charge of incredibly complex confections, where the slightest misjudgment — a dash too much sugar here, a touch too much bitterness there — can render the whole damn thing indigestible. So, when Paul King — director of both Paddington movies — took on the task of bringing Roald Dahl’s Willy Wonka back to the big screen in a prequel called, simply, Wonka, he had to blend his vital ingredients just so. Starting with… THE HEART OF A BEAR Not literally, of course. That would be awful. Especially when the bear in question is the kindest, gentlest, noblest ursine…

STARS CAN BE found in the unlikeliest of places. Marilyn Monroe was noticed at a munitions factory and Haley Joel Osment was scouted in Ikea, but the 20th century’s most prolific actor was discovered on a cactus. In the mid-1930s, ex-cowboy Henry Wagstaff Twiford was walking across the red rust of the Mojave desert when he stumbled upon a baby raven in an abandoned nest. He took him home, named him Jimmy, and reared him on boiled eggs, eggshells, and milk. Over the course of the next two decades, Jimmy became a star that needed no surname, billed alongside Bette Davis and Judy Garland during Hollywood’s Golden Age. Before he died, the raven was said to have appeared in more than 1,000 films. That is the extent of what most…

THELMA SCHOONMAKER IS one of the world’s most celebrated film editors; her shelves creak with awards from a decades-long collaboration with Martin Scorsese, dating back to his directorial debut, 1967’s Who’s That Knocking At My Door. But she has another, parallel career: as unofficial custodian of the legacy of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, the British-Hungarian filmmaking duo behind Technicolor masterpieces like The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus. Schoonmaker’s story is uniquely intertwined with Powell in particular. “Marty was training me to look at the Powell and Pressburger films, back when we were working on Raging Bull,” she tells Empire, speaking from her edit suite in New York. “He would send me home with the VHS tapes. I was falling in love with their films.” Eventually, Scorsese acted as an…

PETER SOHN’S ELEMENTAL, which takes place in a world populated by anthropomorphised versions of fire, wind, earth and water, is one of the feel-good stories of the year: not just because it turned things around at the box office after the slowest start for a Pixar movie, but because the movie itself is a charmer, packed with some of the animation studio’s most beautiful sequences. Here, writer-director Sohn talks us through the film’s key moments. THROUGH THE MIST Elemental is about many things, but it’s certainly concerned with the immigrant experience (Sohn’s parents came to America from South Korea), as seen in the opening shot where the camera pierces a sea fog to find a nervous immigrant couple, the Firish Bernie (Ronnie Del Carmen) and Cinder (Shila Ommi), huddled together…

BRIAN DUFFIELD [director, No One Will Save You]: “One of the best scenes ever in movies is Joaquin Phoenix in Signs, watching the news, and the news plays a pre-iPhone recording of a birthday party, and all of a sudden a tall green alien emerges from the bushes and walks by, Bigfoot-style, and Joaquin loses his mind. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a bigger jump scare in a movie. It’s so effective and cool, and it’s such an impactful, amazing exposition scene. The alien’s clearly CG, and you don’t care. It’s my favourite Shyamalan scene. It’s everything he’s perfect at.” INT. CUPBOARD UNDER THE STAIRS — DAY After his family has been plagued by what appears to be extra-terrestrial activity, Merrill Hess (Joaquin Phoenix) has fashioned a makeshift…