Tabla de contenidos para January 2026 en Empire

WHEN I WAS at school, a mere slip of a lad, my favourite subject wasn’t History (too many kings called Henry), Geography (why so much silt?) or Maths (enough said). No, the one I looked forward to the most was Classical Civilisation. There, we sat entranced as Mr Bradby spun tales of long-ago heroes, vengeful gods and the odd three-headed dog. It was pulse-racing stuff, especially compared to the lesson coming up about oxbow lakes. You’d think these stories would be perfect for cinematic retelling. But to date, the big screen has been surprisingly timid when it comes to the legends of Mount Olympus. Ray Harryhausen created magic with his stop-motion beasties, yes, but over recent decades the best it’s got is Sam Worthington twatting a Kraken in Clash Of…

Cyberpunk 2077. I’m sure Keanu would be up for reprising the role on the big screen. @RUBYMALVOLIO.BSKY.SOCIAL Space Invaders. (Maybe that’s what Steven Spielberg’s next movie is about?) @WINDYERNECKIN.BSKY.SOCIAL Sensible Soccer. @DANCHILTON.BSKY.SOCIAL Manic Miner. Yes, I am that old. @THEPAULMELLOR.BSKY.SOCIAL The Secret Of Monkey Island. With the Pirates franchise dormant, it’s a great chance to bring swashbuckling back. @THISISNOTWHOIAM.BSKY.SOCIAL Lemmings. @VICARDAVE.BSKY.SOCIAL WATCH OUT FOR THE NEXT QUESTION VIA OUR BLUESKY ACCOUNT: @EMPIREMAGAZINE.BSKY.SOCIAL…

THE APPROACH Playing conniving court composer Antonio Salieri in Joe Barton’s five-part adaptation of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus hit hard for actor Paul Bettany. “This is probably horribly revealing, but I feel closer to this character than any others I’ve played,” he laughs. “One has slightly feral instincts that you choose not to act on. We all recognise those instincts in ourselves and also the realisation of one’s own mediocrity.” Working hard behind the scenes to sabotage the innate genius of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (The White Lotus’ Will Sharpe), Salieri is, for Bettany, “a man who’s close to greatness, but not quite great”. The role won F. Murray Abraham an Oscar for his performance in Milos Forman’s 1984 classic, but Bettany remains undaunted. “It’s an extraordinary performance but, like Iago or…

THE 98TH ACADEMY AWARDS may be in March, but film studios are already laying the groundwork for their would-be winners. Efforts for scooping the Best Actor prize in particular seem to be heating up, with stars trying new tactics on top of conventional press tours. So fear not, wannabe winners — if you’re lagging, here’s your go-to guide for getting ahead. LOG INTO TIKTOK Even the most formerly elusive A-listers are getting on the video-posting platform to boost exposure and heighten their accessibility. Case in point: Leonardo DiCaprio. Inspired by his younger co-star Chase Infiniti, the One Battle After Another actor made his TikTok debut by featuring in a series of viral clips with his on-screen daughter and pal Benicio Del Toro in promotion of the movie. With some videos…

THE FIRST EXCAVATION “An extraordinary adventure beyond life and time,” was how Stephen Sommers’ 1999 epic was billed, and audiences went wild for it. The ’20s-set film about American heroic type Rick (Brendan Fraser), English bookish type Evelyn (Rachel Weisz) and their Egyptian quest to prevent an ancient high priest from being resurrected raked in over $400 million (considerably more today). It may have received mixed reviews from critics, but with its groundbreaking special effects (giant faces in sand! Swarms of murderous scarabs!) and charismatic leading duo, The Mummy has become a longstanding source of nostalgia for a generation who grew up after the whip-cracking thrills of Indiana Jones. MORE TALES FROM THE CRYPT After sand-storming the box office, The Mummy Returns was immediately greenlit by Universal. Rick and Evelyn,…

A FEW weeks ago, Gurinder Chadha’s new spin on Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol — Bollywood-inspired Christmas Karma — jingled onto our screens. Just before that, Pearl filmmaker Ti West announced plans for another adaptation, Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol, with Johnny Depp starring as the miser, and Robert Eggers is planning yet another version with (naturally) Willem Dafoe in the lead. It’s possible that these upcoming movies may be great; if Eggers can make Nosferatu a Christmas movie, we can’t wait to see how he tackles Dickens. But there feels like an air of festive fatigue around the story. Let’s not forget the 2022 animated musical Scrooge: A Christmas Carol, or the quasi-sequel Spirited out the same year, plus any number of Hallmark and Netflix variations. Has the time come…

OUT NOVEMBER 28 / CERT 18 / 107 MINS DIRECTOR Harry Lighton CAST Harry Melling, Alexander Skarsgård, Douglas Hodge, Lesley Sharp, Jake Shears PLOT Motorcyclist Ray (Skarsgård) sparks a BDSM awakening in Colin (Melling) that will change his life irrevocably. IT HAS ALL the trappings of a great British romantic-comedy. A Christmas meet-cute. An awkward first meeting with the family. A dash of Hollywood glamour. But Pillion is, in all its tender, bum-baring glory, so much more: a nuanced and affirming exploration of intimacy within a subculture that so rarely sees this kind of big-screen treatment. Adapting Adam Mars-Jones’ novel Box Hill, Harry Lighton, bringing boundless first feature energy to his adaptation, carefully shades in all the corners of Colin (Harry Melling). Starting with what is quickly understood to be…

OUT NOVEMBER 28 / CERT TBC / 135 MINS DIRECTOR David Michôd CAST Sydney Sweeney, Ben Foster, Katy O’Brian, Merritt Wever PLOT 1989, West Virginia. Female boxer Christy (Sweeney) meets trainer and future husband Jim (Foster), rising to the top of the sport while dealing with abuse, sexism and homophobia. THE ROAD HAS never been easy for women in combat sports. Of all the male-dominated forms of athletics out there, boxing has long been considered among the most exclusionary to women. That didn’t stop Christy Martin, who arrived on the boxing scene in the 1990s, became a pioneer of the sport, and was among the first of her gender to attract major media attention for it — undoubtedly a subject well-deserving of a biopic for her efforts. Yet David Michôd’s Christy,…

OUT NOW (APPLE TV) / EPISODES VIEWED 7 OF 9 SHOWRUNNER Vince Gilligan CAST Rhea Seehorn, Karolina Wydra, Carlos-Manuel Vesga, Samba Schutte PLOT After a virus turns most of humanity into a hive mind, virally resistant romance novelist Carol Sturka (Seehorn) must deal with the overbearingly positive fallout. JUST WHEN YOU thought it was no longer possible to do a new spin on the world ending, here comes Vince ‘Breaking Bad’ Gilligan. Despite its heart-on-sleeve influences (hello, Invasion Of The Body Snatchers), Gilligan’s follow-up to Better Call Saul feels not only impressively fresh but also ripe with juicy satire. While the source of the big Episode 1 earth-shattering event is extra-terrestrial, this is no invasion by beings from another world. They’ve just sent us a long-distance gift. And though most…

OUT NOVEMBER 21 / CERT 15 / 104 MINS DIRECTOR Dylan Southern CAST Benedict Cumberbatch, David Thewlis, Richard Boxall, Henry Boxall, Claire Cartwright PLOT A grief-stricken widower (Cumberbatch) finds himself assailed by a towering talking crow as he struggles to raise his two young sons. THE LAST THING you need when your spouse has just died and you can hardly lift your head, let alone get your young boys to school on time, is an eight-foot crow squawking abuse. But that’s just what Benedict Cumberbatch’s nameless widower has to contend with in director Dylan Southern’s narrative feature debut, The Thing With Feathers. There are physical attacks, too, with a talon-slash here, a beak-gouge there, and pummelling wing-slaps everywhere else. The assaultive crow in question — designed by Nicola Hicks, played by…

OUT NOW / CERT 12A / 119 MINS DIRECTOR Scott Cooper CAST Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, Odessa Young, Paul Walter Hauser, David Krumholtz PLOT Colts Neck, New Jersey, 1981. A burned out Bruce Springsteen (White) wrestles with his demons as he works on an experimental new album, Nebraska. RELEASED IN 1982, before Bruce Springsteen became a global superstar with Born In The U.S.A., Nebraska is a singular record — a dark, brooding, deeply vulnerable sonic howl into the void from a man trying to learn how to live with the ghosts that haunt him. The greatest compliment that can be paid to Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere — which chronicles the period in which that album was created — is that when it finally gets going, it really does…

IN CINEMAS FEBRUARY 6 THERE’S A NINE-YEAR gap on Sam Raimi’s CV, between 2013’s Oz The Great And Powerful and 2022’s Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness, where a ton of movies should be. And if you were concerned that the impish, endlessly inventive filmmaker might post another gargantuan gap in the wake of that Marvel sequel, fear not. A mere four years on, Raimi has returned. “I wanted to get back in the saddle again,” he says. And all because someone sent help, in the form of Send Help. That someone would be the writing team of Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, who found themselves in Raimi’s office pitching an idea to the man himself. It was an idea they’d had for some time, and had dusted it…

IN CINEMAS MARCH 6 THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, with her crimped-beehive, lightning-streaked hair, is a Hall Of Fame horror icon. But in her original 1935 film, she appears for just three minutes: awoken from death by the doctor, she catches sight of her betrothed and screams. The monster is so upset that he burns the lab down with both of them in it. Roll credits. Maggie Gyllenhaal thought there was something missing. “She’s clearly such a formidable presence from the moment she wakes up, which is why she’s so compelling,” Gyllenhaal tells Empire. “But she doesn’t open her mouth — well, she opens her mouth, but she doesn’t speak.” Gyllenhaal has written and directed her own version of the classic story: The Bride! — complete with exclamation mark. Set in…

IN CINEMAS JANUARY 30 “PROBABLY THE BIGGEST challenge was not being too obsessive,” says Zoey Deutch of her role in Nouvelle Vague, Richard Linklater’s affectionate account of the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. Not too obsessive, but some fixation was necessary. Because Deutch, Linklater and the team wanted to meticulously recreate the 1959 shoot to tell a story about artistic daring — and revolutionary filmmaking. It’s a celebration of the original film, but not a stuffy one. Breathless, or À Bout De Souffle, is the story of Michel, a petty criminal played by Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin), who lies low with American girl Patricia (Deutch’s Seberg) while on the run from the police. It was Godard’s (Guillaume Marbeck) first feature and a declaration of principles for the idealistic criticturned-film maker.…

IN CINEMAS IN 2026 THE RIVALRY BETWEEN Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner is as long as it is storied. Since 1949, the two Looney Tunes stalwarts have been locked in battle, with the Road Runner always coming out on top. But with Coyote Vs. Acme, the next chapter in their saga promises to be something wholly different from what’s come before. “We really wanted to make the Iron Man of Looney Tunes movies,” director Dave Green tells Empire. “It feels like they had already made the Avengers of Looney Tunes movies several times. Those are all gigantic ensemble pictures that give you a sampling of many characters. What’s really going to surprise people, I hope, is that they’re going to get to know and understand Wile E. Coyote…

IN CINEMAS JANUARY 9 IT MAY BE based on a great Shakespearean tragedy, but Chloé Zhao’s riff on Hamlet doubles down on the, well, tragedy. Adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s speculative novel (first published in 2021), by O’Farrell and Zhao, it tells of how the passing of the playwright’s son inspired the ever-enduring masterpiece. Hamnet is more than just a Hamlet origin story, however. It’s a mystical drama about grief’s ability to fracture families — and how art can mend those cracks again. Anchored by its two leads — Jessie Buckley as Shakespeare’s wife Agnes, and Paul Mescal as Will himself — it follows the characters as they endure unspeakable pain. And as the actors share, working with Zhao required them to excavate the deepest parts of themselves — and even…

IN CINEMAS JUNE 19 “THESE TOYS DON’T age. They’re like little vampires,” says Andrew Stanton with a grin. Honestly, it’s not the first thing Empire expects the Toy Story 5 director to say when we chat about Pixar’s latest — but the man might have a point. After all, what are Woody, Buzz, Jessie and the gang if not ageless, timeless not-quite human beings who sleep in boxes and generally avoid sunlight? Alas, that’s not quite what Stanton’s getting at: Nosferatoys, this ain’t. Rather, having written these toys’ stories for over half his life, the dyed-in-the-wool Pixar OG has realised that this franchise and its pint-sized stars have cracked the code for cinematic immortality. “It’s really an infinite love story about growing up and getting older,” muses Stanton. “The toys…

James Cameron’s stay on Pandora is drawing to a close. For now. Eight years after principal photography first began (concurrently with The Way Of Water), he is putting finishing touches on the third instalment in his alien odyssey, Avatar: Fire And Ash. A few weeks from now, audiences will don their 3D glasses and witness a brimstone-tinged vision of the Na’vi homeworld as Varang and her Ash People, the Mangkwan Clan, rain fire upon Jake Sully and his allies in a fight for the heart and soul of Pandora. It’s crunch time, and Cameron is buried deep in a studio, plugged kuru-like into an audio console as he finalises the film’s sound mix, perfectly calibrating the screech of ikran, the thumping roar of RDA heavy machine guns, and the ethereal…

KATHRYN BIGELOW HAD a problem. She had begun work on a movie that depicts what might go on behind closed doors at the White House, and various US military facilities, in the event that a nuclear missile is launched at the United States. But the problem was, “Nobody is let into these rooms, or can observe a situation,” Bigelow tells Empire. “It’s very protected.” So she needed someone on the inside. Or, at the very least, someone who knew someone on the inside. Or someone who knew someone who knew someone on the inside. Which is why, when the Special Thanks section comes round at the end of Bigelow’s latest movie, A House Of Dynamite, one name is given special prominence above all others: Martha Raddatz. The Chief Global Affairs…

1 FRANKENSTEIN OUT NOW / NETFLIX Guillermo del Toro has waited a lifetime to make Mary Shelley’s novel into his own creation. It was worth the wait. Visually stunning (as per), del Toro takes his sweet time telling his tale, but by the end it’s alive with emotion and gives us, in Jacob Elordi’s hurting and strangely heroic Creature, a monster that’s more than just the sum of his parts. 2 A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE OUT NOW / NETFLIX Here’s an idea: why not double-bill Kathryn Bigelow’s latest movie, which counts down — in nerve-shredding detail — the minutes until the arrival of a nuclear missile aimed at a major American city, and the internal governmental debate about how to respond, with, say, 1980s nuke drama-doc Threads? And then spend the rest…

ALEX GODFREY HOSTED EMPIRE’S LFF SCREENING OF ANEMONE “Here I am on stage at the BFI, absolutely beside myself as I stood beside a powerhouse team: Daniel Day-Lewis, Sean Bean, Samantha Morton and director Ronan Day-Lewis. Whoa, mama. It was a proper thrill to do this, grinning my face off throughout. What a night.” HARRY STAINER INTERVIEWED JOACHIM TRIER AND RENATE REINSVE “Having coffee with the Worst Person pair the night after their London Film Festival gala screening of Sentimental Value, I caught them, well, sentimental, gushing over working together, the joy of making films, and the wildest fan tattoos they’ve seen. Sweet stuff.” CHRIS HEWITT HAD AN ENCOUNTER WITH A PREDATOR “I hosted the Predator: Badlands panel at MCM Comic-Con in October. All went well, until Father gatecrashed. Luckily,…

Christopher Nolan has been a big deal for Empire readers for a long time. (We even put out a special Nolan edition of the magazine last year, hot off the back of his Oscar win.) It was 20 years ago that the filmmaker enjoyed his first Empire cover, coincidentally like this issue also leading up a big Preview. At the time, Nolan was editing his blockbuster debut, Batman Begins. “It’s very much the movie I wanted it to be,” he told us. Even in his early steps into franchise filmmaking, the then-34-year-old director scoffed at any suggestion of using CGI if real alternatives were possible. “People said we should do a digital Batmobile,” he told us with a chuckle. “We said, ‘Fuck that, we’ll build it for real.’” Holy practical…

IT SEEMS THAT virtually every Marvel TV show is trumpeted as something new, a world away from your run-of-the-mill MCU offering. Wonder Man, however, genuinely seems to be pushing the needle further. Its star, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, has even been doing early press appearances in character. “We’re doing something that, tonally, feels much different than really any other Marvel show, or any other films,” he promises Empire. “We’re doing something that’s fresh, and a bit tongue-in-cheek, a bit self-aware.” Of course, he would say that. Except this might not be marketing misdirection. Early footage of the eight-part miniseries seems notably un-Marvel-like. In fact, bar the presence of one key returning character — Sir Ben Kingsley’s befuddled Liverpudlian actor Trevor Slattery — you’d have been hard-pressed to say it even took…

THE STAFF AT Los Angeles’ Culver Theater are used to floors full of spilled popcorn in their screening rooms and foyer. Human hair, on the other hand? “Yeah, that was something new,” laughs Tom Beddow, Director Of Programming And Events at the historic cinema, which last month hosted a preview screening of Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia, with a bold, bald twist. To get in, attendees either had to be hairless… or willing to have their head shaved by an onsite barber, in a nod to Emma Stone’s appearance in the film. The event became an instant viral success. Hundreds of fans turned up, either already skin-headed or willing to sacrifice their locks for a sneak peek at the conspiracy thriller. “We turned the place into a barbershop for Letterboxd nerds,” one…

ELIZABETH OLSEN HAS seldom had a chance to really bicker on screen. As the Scarlet Witch she was more preoccupied with saving the world at great personal cost. And leading roles in Martha Marcy May Marlene and crime series Love & Death hardly called for comedy. So when she received the script for David Freyne’s conceptual romantic comedy Eternity — about Joan, a newly deceased woman forced to decide which of her two former husbands she will spend forever with — she jumped at the chance for a good squabble. Her co-quarreller is Miles Teller, who plays later husband Larry, to whom she was married for 65 years. “It started for me with Anne Meara and Jerry Stiller,” she says of her journey with Joan and Larry. “I’d watch all…

WHEN THE WORST Person In The World hit screens in 2021, nobody, least of all its creators, anticipated the impact it would have. Oscar nominations aside (for Best Original Screenplay and Best International Feature Film), the Norwegian drama-comedy about Julie, a wayward woman in her late twenties, garnered an international following. Fans even got Julie tattoos. It was quite an experience for star Renate Reinsve. “Watching great movies growing up, I found myself identifying with something that I didn’t know I even had in me,” she explains. “So it was great to be a part of that.” Having worked with Reinsve since his 2011 drama Oslo, August 31st, director Joachim Trier knew they had to make his next film another collaboration. And it needed to be something different. So he…

OUT NOW (SKY COMEDY/NOW) / EPISODES VIEWED 7 OF 8 SHOWRUNNERS Tim Robinson, Zach Kanin CAST Tim Robinson, Lake Bell, Sophia Lillis This eight-part series from Tim Robinson — a comedian whose singular brand of humour is fuelled by humiliation and defiance — is one of the year’s most bracingly funny shows. After suffering an embarrassing on-stage chair incident, property developer and family man Ron (Robinson) suspects he’s part of a bigger corporate conspiracy, and embarks on a mission to find the truth. His suspicions lead him down a grim and fascinating rabbit hole peppered with oddballs, played by a delightful array of unknown actors who nail the show’s strange dialogue and violent undertones. And at the root of the chaos, Robinson is a force, channelling relentless angst for our…

OUT NOW / CERT 12A / 107 MINS DIRECTOR Dan Trachtenberg CAST Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi, Elle Fanning, Mike Homik PLOT On the Predator home planet of Yautja Prime, runt-of-the-litter Dek (Schuster-Koloamatangi) is charged with a coming-of-age ritual: go to a death planet and kill a beast that cannot be killed. SINCE TAKING OVER the Predator franchise, Dan Trachtenberg has been like a kid in a grisly candy store. Not content with merely repeating the age-old formula — a band of humans face down an alien warrior — he’s gone buck-wild with the possibilities, first sending the Predator back in time to battle a female Native American in Prey, then chucking in Vikings, samurai and World War II pilots in animated anthology Killer Of Killers. For his latest trick, and his most…

OUT NOW / CERT 15 / 107 MINS DIRECTOR Nia DaCosta CAST Tessa Thompson, Tom Bateman, Nina Hoss, Imogen Poots Henrik Ibsen’s 1891 play Hedda Gabler — in which the titular high-society housewife manipulates practically everyone at a swanky party in order to escape her stifling life — has been mounted numerous times since it was first written. So it’s a credit to Nia DaCosta, directing her first non-franchise film since 2018, that this telling of the story feels entirely her own. It’s also an amazing showcase for Tessa Thompson, who puts in some career-best work: a fun, magnetic, scenery-chewing performance, her subtle but impactful facial expressions precisely revealing the vulnerability behind Hedda’s mask of control. Brimming with sapphic, sensual energy, it’s a big, bold swing, and a stylish reimagining…

OUT NOW (SKY/NOW) / EPISODES VIEWED 5 OF 8 SHOWRUNNERS Jason Fuchs, Brad Caleb Kane CAST Taylour Paige, Bill Skarsgård, Chris Chalk, Clara Stack, Jovan Adepo PLOT In a sleepy town, adults and children alike come to learn the ancient origins of clown monster Pennywise (Skarsgård), and pray they can end his murderous reign. ROLL UP, ROLL up. Come be terrified by the ashen clown once more. After his two-part movie adaptation of Stephen King’s doorstop 1986 novel (2017’s It: Chapter One and 2019’s It: Chapter Two) about an extra-terrestrial jester haunting a group of friends, director Andy Muschietti (alongside producing partner Barbara Muschietti and co-showrunner Jason Fuchs) returns to the sinister town of Derry for an invented prequel. Much like the movies, and the book, it’s a mix of…

NOBODY WANTS THIS: SEASON 2 TV “It’s good to see a show getting into the ups and downs of what comes after a big romantic gesture, but it’s undeniable that without the will-they-won’t-they thread from Season 1, a lot of the tension is gone.” SOPHIE BUTCHER KENNY DALGLISH FILM “He might not have led the life of Asif Kapadia’s previous documentary subjects — the closest Dalglish comes to Maradona’s cocaine addiction is McVitie’s biscuits — but the film is an engaging, football-centric study of a humble, likeable man.” IAN FREER EDEN FILM “It is perhaps the darkest work yet from Ron Howard, a film with very few Beautiful Minds and far more Demons than Angels. It is adult in its themes, full of bloodshed and carnage and sex. But it…

L’ODISSEA (1911) This highly-ambitious-for-its-time silent Italian film races through the tale in 43 minutes: we’ve barely begun before sailors are getting squashed. Despite that, it packs in all the key moments and the special effects are impressive for 1911. It has been described as “a new epoch in the history of the motion picture as a factory of education”. It also has a cool bit where the Cyclops chomps on someone’s head. ULYSSES (1954) If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if Kirk Douglas teamed up with Mario Bava, here’s your answer. This Italian epic undeniably skimps on the mythology: there are no cannibal giants or gods, while the Sirens stay off-screen. But Douglas makes for a strapping hero, while Bava (on cinematographer duties, as well as co-directing the Cyclops…

IN CINEMAS FEBRUARY 6 SHAKESPEARE’S TOWERING TRAGEDY gets an update for 2026. Shot mostly at night around London, on more building sites than featured in the original text, Hamlet now plays as a fast-paced thriller, our hero delivering his signature soliloquy while he’s racing along in a sports car. It’s a far cry from Laurence Olivier chatting to a skull in tights. But for Riz Ahmed, who plays the prince — or rather, construction-company heir — this is a passion project years in the making, and more faithful than it might seem. Ahmed became obsessed with the play as a teenager and worked on his adaptation with a friend, screenwriter Michael Lesslie. They were initially, Ahmed says, hampered by reverence for the text. It was only when they recruited Aneil…

ON NETFLIX FROM JANUARY 16 IT’S A MATT AND BEN REUNION Joe Carnahan’s new movie, The Rip, is a high-octane action-thriller in which a group of Miami cops discover $20 million of cartel cash during a routine house search (or rip), turning them into sitting ducks. The unit is led by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, who not only produced it through their company Artists Equity, but play Dane and JD, two old friends who soon find their relationship under great strain as cartel members and possibly corrupt cops come knocking. It’s not so much Good Will Hunting, more ‘Good Will Hunted’. And while an Affleck-Damon on-screen reunion isn’t as rare as it once was, this one could be something special. “The meta is, this is a 40-year friendship,” says…

IN CINEMAS JULY 10 IN THE ORIGINAL 2016 animated Moana, a teenage girl leaves her Polynesian island to find adventure on the wild, squalling ocean and save her community. In the new live action take, she does the same, but with a key difference: this time the water is real. And that makes things a little more complicated. “For scenes on water, we were always on water, whether it was ten-feet-deep or three feet deep,” says director Thomas Kail. Wave machines created storms, tossing around a little wooden boat in vast studio tanks. That same boat was set loose on the uncontrollable Pacific Ocean. “Many times I said [to Moana actress Catherine Laga’aia], ‘Believe me, this will prepare you for everything your creative and showbiz life ever throws at you.’”…

IN CINEMAS AND ON SKY CINEMA IN SPRING 2026 HIS CONSPIRACY THRILLER Relay only recently landed in cinemas, but already the fuse is burning down on the release of David Mackenzie’s next film: a similarly no-nonsense, hand-crafted affair entitled, appropriately enough, Fuze. Starting off as a literal ticking-bomb drama that sees London’s Paddington Basin evacuated when an unexploded relic of the Blitzkrieg is unearthed on a construction site, it morphs into a heist movie, as we quickly learn that a gang is using the distraction to hit a bank. And the surprises don’t stop there. “It just keeps on twisting, which is part of the fun of it,” says Mackenzie, who’s interrupting his holiday in Mexico to chat to Empire. “It doesn’t let up. I wanted to do something that…

ON SKY AND NOW FROM JANUARY 19 THIS ISN’T GAME OF THRONES Tell someone there’s another spin-off of HBO’s behemoth fantasy series in the offing and chances are they’ll conjure images of clashing armies, stolen crowns, and giant, fire-belching reptiles. Such was the case with House Of The Dragon, after all. A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms is a very different proposition, though, starting not with a portentous threat to the kingdom, but with one nervous knight shitting his guts out behind a tree. “We mix it up a little bit,” grins showrunner Ira Parker. “It’s not that Game Of Thrones isn’t absolutely incredible, but you can’t do the same thing over and over again and expect people to stick around.” IT IS SHOWN THROUGH THE PRISM OF PEASANTS Set…

IN CINEMAS MARCH 27 IT’S BONKERS The nuttiest of Enid Blyton’s endeavours, the Magic Faraway Tree books follow a group of kids discovering said tree, scaling its heights and entering magical lands. There they meet a host of bizarro characters, among them Dame Washalot, Moonface and Saucepan Man. It’s a charming, ridiculous and very British universe, so who better to give it its inaugural big-screen treatment than Paddington 2 co-writer Simon Farnaby. The film, according to director Ben Gregor, who has worked in TV on Britannia and Brassic, maximises its source material. “Blyton has got this delicious insanity about her,” he says. “It’s about food and tea and cakes, and is also utterly bonkers. I call that particular flavour ‘Blytopia’, and briefed all the departments that that’s what we were…

IN CINEMAS AND ON SKY CINEMA IN 2026 ASHLEY WALTERS IS now a quadruple threat. To accomplished actor/producer/musician, we can now add film director. His debut feature, Animol, written by Nick Love, details the experiences of two teens sent to a young offenders’ institution. But Walters is keen to emphasise this is not just another prison movie. “I knew that people would expect me to make a film like this,” he begins. “I’m not stupid. I know that everyone will be thinking, ‘This is the guy from Top Boy, and he’s done a lot of gangster stuff, so he’s obviously going to do a film about gangs and whatever,’ but everyone’s wrong.” Instead, Walters has no truck with tired tropes or hackneyed stereotypical inmates, giving his story a fresh, human…

FISH SWIM OUTSIDE Pee-wee Herman’s window. Inside, right after he awakens from a dream in which he wins the Tour de France, begins the world’s most delightful Rube Goldberg sequence, in which a plastic woodpecker pecks an egg, a pterodactyl skeleton drops slices of bread into a toaster, and an Abraham Lincoln mannequin tosses pancakes. All along, cacophonous circus-music plays. Amid it all is Pee-wee, elated by existence. What joy it is to be alive! And what joy this film is: Paul Reubens’ actual dream come true, made flesh by debut feature-director Tim Burton. This was true harmony, from two misfits who’d miraculously found each other, both having been creatively stifled for years, fit to burst with invention, joining forces to unleash their zany charm offensive on an unsuspecting public.…

STEPHEN KING CALLS fans of his work ‘Constant Readers’. They’re the folk who pick up everything the extraordinarily prolific writer produces, without fail. Mike Flanagan has been Constantly Reading since he was around ten or 11. But he’s taken things a step further than most King fans. Pretty much from the off, he’s wanted to adapt King stories for the screen. And he’s succeeded. With three King adaptations — Gerald’s Game, Doctor Sleep, and now The Life Of Chuck — under his belt, he’s not just a Constant Reader. He’s a Constant Maker. “I started adapting King when I didn’t have the legal right to, as a fun thing to do with my friends,” laughs Flanagan. “I did a backyard adaptation of It in fifth grade on VHS.” But it…

LETTER OF THE MONTH SOME SERIOUS SHIT I delighted in reading December’s Back To The Future 40th anniversary interview (on page 88!). It got me harking back to my very first issue of Empire — your 250th and a 25-year anniversary edition of BTTF. I laid out my Empire collection and snapped the attached picture. I then climbed down the ladder, slicing my knee open on a sharp bit. As I sit here in a pool of my own blood waiting for a plaster and maybe a Penguin bar, I wanted to say, goodjoboverthelast15years. Youkeep writing ’em, I’ll keep reading ’em. (If I survive.) RYAN BAMFORD, VIA EMAIL Great Scott! We hope you lived through this bloody trip down memory lane. If not, we would like to bestow a Picturehouse…

“WHATCHA GOT THERE?” asks Jack Black, eyes narrowing as he peers at his computer screen. “What’s that?” Black is in his home in Los Angeles. About 3,000 miles away, at his gaff in New York, Paul Rudd is holding up his phone to his laptop camera. On it is a picture of a snake. “Remember that, Jack?” says Rudd. “That’s when we were at the sanctuary.” Black nods, excitedly: “That’s when we got to touch them!” And that, readers, is as close as the stars of Anaconda got to an actual anaconda while making the film. “We never were in actual danger of being bit by snakes,” confirms Black. “But I do have a fear of snakes that I was able to draw upon in my Method acting.” Riffing on…

BACK IN 2021, before Russell T Davies had embarked on his journey with Ncuti Gatwa’s 15th Doctor, he had his sights set on another corner of the Who-niverse. The showrunner wanted to make a five-part eco-thriller still set in the world of the TARDIS, but with a more adult tone and realistic style. He’d even written his opening episode. “I wanted to show the BBC what this universe is capable of,” Davies tells Empire. “And the potential that it has, and the punch that it can deliver.” Cut to December 2024, and Empire is on the gigantic set of The War Between The Land And The Sea in Cardiff, watching Davies’ vision come to life. In terms of scale and tone, it’s reminiscent of the kind of big swing Andor…

BRENDAN FRASER PLAYS a Tokyo-dwelling ex-pat actor who has fallen in love with his host country in Rental Family. For the Oscar-winning star, it wasn’t a huge stretch: he’d been visiting Japan for promotional junkets since 1999. “I was trapped in a hotel room, and I think I was let out at night only,” he remembers of his first trip to the country. He was delighted, then, to return for Hikari’s movie, about a small acting agency that hires out talent to play stand-in roles in other people’s lives. “To spend four months in Japan, immersed in that culture, did my heart some good,” Fraser says. So we asked him for a gaijin’s guide to Japan. TRY THE LANGUAGE Fraser speaks quite a bit of Japanese in Rental Family and…

OUT NOVEMBER 26 (CINEMAS), DECEMBER 12 (NETFLIX) CERT 12 / 140 MINS DIRECTOR Rian Johnson CAST Daniel Craig, Josh O'Connor, Glenn Close, Josh Brolin, Mila Kunis, Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, Cailee Spaeny, Daryl McCormack, Thomas Haden Church PLOT When a priest dies in an apparently impossible murder, it is up to Benoit Blanc (Craig) to once again solve the mystery. AGATHA CHRISTIE WROTE dozens of Hercule Poirot mysteries. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote over 60 Sherlock Holmes adventures. Rian Johnson, meanwhile, is on only his third Benoit Blanc whodunnit. But give it time. On the strength of Wake Up Dead Man, it feels like he and Daniel Craig’s Blanc could be solving murders for years to come. Completing an unofficial trilogy, the filmmaker and star have pulled off…

OUT NOVEMBER 21 / CERT 15 / 128 MINS DIRECTOR Julia Ducournau CAST Tahar Rahim, Golshifteh Farahani, Mélissa Boros, Emma Mackey Body-horror queen Julia Ducournau returns, with this metaphor for the AIDS epidemic and meditation on grief. It follows 13-year-old Alpha (Mélissa Boros), who, after being tattooed with a dubious needle at a party, is suspected of contracting an illness that turns people to stone. Less extreme and more unfocused than Ducournau’s previous work, Alpha is unrelentingly bleak, but punctuated with gut-wrenching emotional moments — and the way the victims morph into marble is an elegant device for expressing how those who leave us become frozen in time, before crumbling to dust. It doesn’t hit the heights of Raw and Titane, but strong performances and an undercurrent of AIDS-inspired melancholy…

OUT DECEMBER 5 / CERT 12A / 104 MINS DIRECTOR Jafar Panahi CAST Vahid Mobasseri, Mariam Afshari, Ebrahim Azizi, Hadis Pakbaten, Majid Panahi, Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr PLOT In Iran, a man thought to be a notorious former guard is kidnapped. The guard’s former detainees must decide what to do with him. THERE IS A DEFIANT, outlaw spirit to It Was Just An Accident, the 12th feature film by Iranian director Jafar Panahi. Like nearly all of his work over the past decade, it was filmed in secret, without a permit, away from the watchful eyes of the Iranian authorities, and like those films, it is unlikely to enjoy a release in his home country, where the ruling regime still imposes strict censorship. But it takes on a particularly potent flavour,…

OUT DECEMBER 12 / CERT 12A / 98 MINS DIRECTOR Scarlett Johansson CAST June Squibb, Erin Kellyman, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Jessica Hecht Any fool can have a great career third act; June Squibb, at 95, is on at least her fifth and still accelerating. Her Eleanor here is mischievous but spiky, a bereaved figure who sometimes takes her own unhappiness out on those around her. When she adopts her late friend’s story of surviving the Holocaust as her own in a moment of madness, she finds connection but also sets up an inevitable disaster to come. Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut is sharply written (by Tory Kamen) and beautifully performed, particularly Erin Kellyman as an idealistic student, and if it’s predictable, Johansson has still crafted a pleasingly old-fashioned character piece with just…

OUT NOW / CERT 15 / 133 MINS DIRECTOR Edgar Wright CAST Glen Powell, Josh Brolin, William H. Macy, Lee Pace, Michael Cera, Emilia Jones, Colman Domingo PLOT In a future dystopia, down-on-his-luck Ben Richards (Powell) enters the deadly-assassin TV show The Running Man. Can he change a rigged game forever? THERE HAVE BEEN plenty of dystopian reality TV game shows over the past few years, from The Hunger Games to Squid Game — but they were all predated by The Running Man. The original 1982 novel by Richard Bachman, aka Stephen King, was set in 2025, a year in which the world’s economy is in ruins and violence is rising, if you can imagine such a thing. Into this unlovely dystopia, a working stiff named Ben Richards enters the…

OUT NOVEMBER 28 / CERT 15 / 100 MINS DIRECTOR Richard Linklater CAST Ethan Hawke, Andrew Scott, Margaret Qualley, Bobby Cannavale, Simon Delaney PLOT On the opening night of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, Rodgers’ former songwriting partner Lorenz Hart (Hawke) slips out for a drink. REPORTEDLY, IT TOOK 12 years for Blue Moon to come to fruition. Ethan Hawke said he first heard about the project from his Before Trilogy director Richard Linklater over a decade ago, but that the filmmaker held off until the actor aged up for the role he had in mind for him. Fair enough: it would be difficult to imagine a then-42-year-old Hawke as the balding, vulgar and braggadocious songwriter Lorenz Hart, who wears his resentment like a badge of honour. But in true Linklater…

THE VISION “This is something I’ve wanted to do since I was 16 years old,” says Christopher Nolan. “It’s the culmination of a long-held dream.” Ever since first encountering the large-scale IMAX format at museums, the filmmaker has been fascinated by it, experimenting with it to staggering effect. And he is now responsible for a cinematic milestone: The Odyssey is the first feature film ever shot entirely with IMAX cameras. The problem has always been audio: the cameras are as noisy as a belligerent tractor, meaning they’ve been limited to shooting action. But following a friendly challenge set by Nolan to IMAX CEO Richard Gelfond and the director’s “IMAX guru” David Keighley, the company has created its first new film cameras in decades, with upgrades including the ability to capture…

28 YEARS LATER: THE BONE TEMPLE (IN CINEMAS JANUARY 16) This sequel to 28 Years Later will build on that movie’s batshit ending by further exploring the blond-wigged, Savile-worshipping cult led by Jack O’Connell’s Sir Jimmy Crystal. Nia DaCosta directs. Rage on! SCREAM 7 (IN CINEMAS FEBRUARY 27) Scream OG Neve Campbell returns to the slasher saga, joining Courteney Cox and — bafflingly — David Arquette’s Dewey, despite the fact that he was seemingly killed in Scream 5. Ghostface is getting sloppy. READY OR NOT 2: HERE I COME (IN CINEMAS APRIL 10) Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (aka Radio Silence) unleash a sequel to their 2019 hide-and-seek-gone-very-wrong splatter comedy. Expect unholy amounts of blood. THE MUMMY (IN CINEMAS APRIL 17) Following his exceptionally gory Evil Dead Rise (2023), writer-director…

ON DISNEY+ FROM MARCH 2026 FEELING A DISTINCT lack of Catholic guilt, red-tinted glasses and cries of, “Vanessaaa!” on your telly lately? Good news — all hell is about to break loose in Hell’s Kitchen once again. Yes, we’re talking about Daredevil, aka Matt Murdock, Charlie Cox’s blind lawyer-slash-superhero, who returned to the small screen as part of the MCU proper in 2025 with Daredevil: Born Again, seven years after his original Netflix show was cancelled. Season 1 followed Matt and his nemesis, hulking crime-boss Wilson Fisk (aka Kingpin, played by Vincent D’Onofrio) — the former reckoning with himself after the (spoiler alert!) murder of best friend Foggy (Elden Henson); the latter making the New York mayoral office his own. A cliffhanger finale set up a conflict-filled second season. Matt’s…

IN CINEMAS MAY 22 ON THE SMALL screen, Grogu — the artist formerly known as Baby Yoda — conquered the world. He was The Mandalorian’s secret weapon, the breakout of all breakout characters, melting the hearts of hardened Star Wars fans and newbies flocking to ‘The Baby Yoda Show’ alike. So, what happens when you put him not just on the big screen, but the biggest screen of all? “Going all the way up to the tall IMAX format was really exciting,” says Jon Favreau, The Mandalorian co-creator and now director of The Mandalorian And Grogu — the first cinematic Star Wars since 2019’s The Rise Of Skywalker. That jump from streaming to filming digitally for IMAX is indicative of Favreau’s super-sized ambitions, promising a “big adventure story” for the…

IN CINEMAS FEBRUARY 13 YOU KNOW HOW to direct Whistle, don’t you, Corin Hardy? You just put your lips together and blow. Which, as it happens, isn’t far from the truth. The British director’s third movie, after The Hallow and The Nun, is a no-holds-barred horror in which a group of kids find themselves dying horribly after hearing the shrill cry of an ancient, and seemingly cursed, Aztec death whistle. Which Hardy found came in very useful. “I actually used the death whistle to help direct Whistle,” he laughs. “When you’re directing, especially in horror movies, you need to make timing cues for actors’ responses to things, and you do it by clapping or maybe saying something into a microphone. This was the first time I had an actual lead-character…

ON NETFLIX IN 2026 AFTER HURLING HIS characters into icy oceans (The Deep), sending them up the world’s highest peak (Everest), buffeting them with a cyclone (Adrift) and throwing them to a man-eating lion on the African savanna (Beast), rugged Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur accepts that he’s now, as he puts it, “the survival guy”. If you want a cinematic tale of ordinary folk exposed to the extremities of the natural world, he’s the filmmaker to call. But the pigeonhole didn’t bother him enough to resist the appeal of making Apex, which takes us to the treacherous rock faces and white-water ravines of Australia’s Blue Mountains for a movie that he winkingly pitches as “Hannibal Lecter meets Free Solo”. Charlize Theron stars as a professional climber who, while on a…

CELINE SONG LIKES to talk about love. Born in South Korea, the Canadian director has made only two films so far in an impressive fledgling career, but both Past Lives (her 2023 debut that was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar) and this year’s Materialists talk about modern love in myriad ways. In Materialists, Dakota Johnson’s professional matchmaker, Lucy, finds herself briefly torn between Harry, Pedro Pascal’s ‘unicorn’ (a rich, good-looking guy with taste), and her old flame John, Chris Evans’ rough-and-tumble, perennially broke actor. It perhaps didn’t make as big an impact as Past Lives, in which Greta Lee’s world was rocked by the sudden appearance of a figure from her past who might have blossomed into a great love, but it’s nonetheless a fascinating piece of work: more…