Indholdsfortegnelse for April 2025 i Empire

Rumours once again abound of a Goonies sequel, which got us thinking about the last time the Goonies gang were all together in person, at an Empire-organised reunion which was part of our 20th anniversary issue, guest-edited by Steven Spielberg. Happily, the whole gang showed up, gathering on the set of Spielberg’s Tintin film: Sean Astin, Kerri Green, Jeff Cohen, Martha Plimpton, Josh Brolin, Corey Feldman, and a pre-Oscar-winning Ke Huy Quan, plus the late director Richard Donner and executive producer Spielberg. It was an energetic, entertaining day. “This is amazing,” said Feldman (who handed out copies of his new album). “Everyone looks like they walked off the set five minutes ago.” Will we say, “Hey, you guys!” to these guys again? CONTACT US VIA: EMPIRE MAGAZINE, THE LANTERN, 75…

MR. & MRS. SMITH, The Americans, True Lies — the ‘married spies’ genre has definitely thrown up some bangers over the years. The latest entry in this niche canon is Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag, starring Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett as intelligence agents George and Kathryn Woodhouse, whose relationship is tested somewhat when Kathryn is suspected of betraying her country and George is dispatched to hunt her down. Empire caught up with the pair to talk espousal and espionage. This is the first time you two have worked together, right? Michael Fassbender: We actually did a scene together in Terrence Malick’s Song To Song [2017], but I don’t think it made it into the finished film. Cate Blanchett: We basically walked past each other. I only got a whiff of…

THE BLUEPRINT Stevens had cooked up an early version of his character — a popular American political broadcaster — ahead of joining the conspiracy-theory-fuelled show. “In-between characters that I’m asked to play, sometimes — from global events [to] someone I’ve seen or something I’ve watched — a character will form in my mind,” he tells Empire. Having grown up on cable news, he’s become fascinated by the social phenomenon stemming from figures such as Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro today. So when co-creator Eric Newman approached him with the part of Evan and asked him to record some dialogue to share with star Robert De Niro, Stevens got straight to it. “Sometimes you’re making a tape for an audition and it’s a whole process,” he explains. “Instead, I immediately hung…

THE FINAL REEL of Avatar: The Way Of Water was a blast of nutso nautical action, as fish-riding Na’vi took on a giant human assault vessel, with an assist from heroic space-whale Payakan. But all that thunder, fury and sea-spray was, says production designer Ben Procter, “nothing but a skirmish”. He teases that in threequel Fire And Ash, “we’re going to see an airborne and water-borne battle for the ages, as the Pandoran forces and RDA clash in a really interesting environment”. Procter and fellow production designer Dylan Cole are two of the design wizards that help James Cameron expand his far-away universe (4.37 light-years from Earth, to be precise). Broadly speaking, the former focuses on Avatar’s human tech, while the latter is charged with all things Na’vi. Or, as…

AS THE CLOSING credits rolled on the world premiere of Kiss Of The Spider Woman at this year’s Sundance film festival, the audience took to their feet for a standing ovation. At the heart of it was Jennifer Lopez, bejewelled in a web-covered dress. “I’ve been waiting for this moment my whole life,” she tearfully told the crowd. The film, set in ’80s Argentina, is adapted from the 1992 Tony-winning musical of the same name, based on Manuel Puig’s 1976 novel. It follows queer prisoner Luis Molina (played here by Tonatiuh, who has also received praise for their breakthrough performance). In an attempt to escape his dire circumstances, Molina regales a fellow inmate (Diego Luna) with the story of Kiss Of The Spider Woman, an MGM-style musical starring his favourite…

13 FEBRUARY - 12 MARCH 2025 FILM MEMOIR OF A SNAIL DON’T POUR SALT ON THIS STOP-MOTION TRAGICOMEDY OUT 14 FEBRUARY / CERT 15 / 95 MINS DIRECTOR Adam Elliot CAST Sarah Snook, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Jacki Weaver, Dominique Pinon, Adam Elliot, Eric Bana, Nick Cave PLOT A lonely Australian woman, Grace (Snook), recounts the events of her tumultuous life to her pet snail. ALCOHOLISM. FETISHISISM. DEATH. Aardman this certainly ain’t, but Adam Elliot’s film-festival-storming stop-motion animation proves more than capable of summoning big emotions through its clay creations. The characters of Memoir Of A Snail are more scuffed and visibly weighed down by the world, but the earnestness and vulnerability they carry throughout this sombre and occasionally darkly funny saga implores you to stick with them through the pain of…

OUT 28 FEBRUARY / CERT 15 / 88 MINS DIRECTOR Gia Coppola CAST Pamela Anderson, Jamie Lee Curtis, Dave Bautista, Brenda Song, Kiernan Shipka, Billie Lourd, Jason Schwartzman PLOT Las Vegas showgirl Shelly (Anderson) questions the cost of choosing a life on stage as her final curtain call beckons. FEW CELEBRITIES HAVE been as denigrated throughout their career as Pamela Anderson — and so a sober, wistful character study would seem the perfect vehicle for her to prove her acting chops. The former Baywatch star gives a quite literally glittering comeback performance in Gia Coppola’s latest, The Last Showgirl, a dreamy, understated ode to the underdogs of Las Vegas. After Mainstream and Palo Alto, Coppola jettisons her usual wryly humorous tone in favour of a more pensive mood. But the…

OUT NOW / CERT 15 / 97 MINS DIRECTOR Drew Hancock CAST Sophie Thatcher, Jack Quaid, Lukas Gage, Megan Suri, Harvey Guillén, Rupert Friend PLOT Robot companion Iris (Thatcher) is whisked away by boyfriend Josh (Quaid) for a weekend that descends into bloody chaos. FROM THE GENRE-DEFINING image of Maria and her chrome curves in 1927’s Metropolis, to Jude Law’s Gigolo Joe in A.I. Artificial Intelligence, and Ana de Armas’ sultry Joi in Blade Runner 2049, hot robots have never been out of style. But with the rise of AI chatbots ready to profess their love, the futurism of Spike Jonze’s Her seems closer than ever before. The next logical step is Companion, in which even your android partner’s intelligence level can be customised by an app on your phone.…

OUT NOW / CERT 15 / 103 MINS DIRECTOR Leigh Whannell CAST Christopher Abbott, Julia Garner, Matilda Firth PLOT Blake (Abbot) takes his wife Charlotte (Garner) and daughter Ginger (Firth) back to the rural home where he grew up — but they find something terrifying waiting in the woods. LEIGH WHANNELL IS back in Universal’s world of classic monsters. Following 2020’s The Invisible Man, the filmmaker returns with Wolf Man, a new, modern take on the 1941 Gothic horror. It follows Blake (Christopher Abbott, replacing original star Ryan Gosling), a family man whose marriage to journalist Charlotte (Julia Garner) has hit a rough patch, his career on pause while he takes on the role of stay-at-home dad to their young daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth). After receiving notice that his father…

“VAMPIRES TRYING TO LIVE IN THE DAYLIGHT.” Empire has just asked Vincent D’Onofrio to describe the shared state of mind of his character Wilson Fisk, aka. Kingpin, and Charlie Cox’s Matt Murdock, aka Daredevil, in Daredevil: Born Again. “They’re trying to be something they’re not,” he continues. To be fair, they’re more likely to be spilling blood than sucking it. The epic rivalry between Cox’s masked, blind vigilante and D’Onofrio’s megalomaniacal, omelette-loving crime boss has been central to Daredevil’s success, ever since it arrived in 2015 and took superhero TV into edgier terrain. D’Onofrio’s right to describe Fisk and Murdock as nocturnal creatures. They are two sides of the same coin, one relentless in his quest for justice and the other in his quest for power, both inevitably drawn to…

I WAS HAVING my first dinner with David Lynch and Laura Dern to discuss the possibility of Wild At Heart, and the Pan-Pacific Auditorium was burning down. It was literally on fire as we were talking about maybe doing this movie together. And he put all those fire elements in the movie, largely because of the effect of having this beloved Art Deco building burning next door to our dinner meeting. David was a huge admirer of Federico Fellini, and I think that he is the American Fellini — he was able to create images that are enigmatic and yet informed emotionally. I had my own surrealistic dreams of what could I do with film performance. I was a big fan of what Andy Warhol had done with collage and…

I SAW ERASERHEAD and loved it. It was like you’d walked into somebody else’s dream. So when I found out David wanted to use my music in Blue Velvet, I was like, “You bet, let’s go!” We became friends and my music was also used in Wild At Heart [Lynch also directed a music video for ‘Wicked Game’] before I was cast in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me [as FBI agent Chester Desmond]. I was nervous on set because I was working with great actors and just trying not to get in the way. I did a scene with Harry Dean Stanton and [Kiefer Sutherland] and it was terrible. I thought, “Man, this is me. I’m screwing the scene up.” But David had a gentleness and a kindness and…

I DON’T KNOW if I think about death more, less, or the same as other people… I often wonder whether I think about it a little more. I had, of course, considered that one day, David Lynch — the man I consider a creative godfather — would leave his earthly body. But on January 16th he had been on my mind in different ways; a conversation with a collaborator marvelling at how stylish Lynch’s hair is, a moment visiting the Van Gogh exhibition where ‘La Berceuse’ inexplicably reminded me of a character from one of his worlds… On the train home, my phone began to ping. Multiple messages from friends reading, simply, “David Lynch”. I searched online and saw the news. A weight in my chest. I began to cry.…

IT TAKES A lot to stop Dracula. Stakes, sunlight, the odd beheading have tended to do the trick over the years in scores of films, but he’s never truly down for the Count. But the best way to put the brakes on the Transylvanian terror is, it turns out, to keep him locked up in a vault. That is the fate that befell André Øvredal’s The Last Voyage Of The Demeter, a horror film extrapolated from a single chapter, ‘The Captain’s Log’, in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, in which the vampire wreaks havoc aboard a ship carrying him, in his coffin, to England. Eagerly anticipated, as any film from the director of Trollhunter and The Autopsy Of Jane Doe should be, it opened in the States in August 2023, and was…

CHRIS HEWITT TOOK ON AN IMPOSSIBLE MISSION “I was lucky enough to visit the set of Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning last August, avoiding security by lowering myself from the ceiling. Here I am, seconds before being sent to man a radar tower in Alaska by Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie.” ROBERT ASCROFT PHOTOGRAPHED JAMIE LEE CURTIS “Jamie Lee Curtis and I found ourselves rethinking this shoot’s direction. I’ve always believed in collaboration, and JLC’s instincts made the process seamless. After the shoot, we spoke on the phone; I knew I hadn’t just gained a new creative partner but also a friend.” ALEX GODFREY SPOKE TO CLAES BANG AT THE EMPIRE PODCAST LIVE “I’d interviewed Claes for my 2022 feature on The Northman, and he was hilarious, so I…

AMAZING EVENTS EXCLUSIVE PODCASTS BESPOKE COVERS FREE CINEMA TICKETS EXCLUSIVE INVITES TO EVENTS CURATED BY THE EMPIRE TEAM VIP MEMBERSHIP ONLY £8.99 PER MONTH* Worth over £130! INCLUDES: ✓ Exclusive live events, including preview screenings and Q&As ✓ 13 print issues of Empire a year ✓ Choice of an annual Picturehouse Membership or a Cineworld regular Combo deal, with two cinema tickets** ✓ Access to the Empire Spoiler Special podcast ✓ Exclusive collectible covers ✓ Digital edition of Empire ✓ Access to back issues of Empire ✓ Empire Insider newsletter THE ULTIMATE EMPIRE EXPERIENCE Reading the magazine is only the beginning. To get closer to Hollywood than ever before, join the Empire VIP Club. Screenings with A-listers in the house, our deep-dive Spoiler Special podcast, the magazine direct to your door with bespoke covers, plus free cinema…

JOHN MALKOVICH WALKS into a café, wearing an eye patch, in Riga, Latvia. No, this isn’t the set-up for an elaborate joke, but rather an odd experience that filmmaker Mark Anthony Green had while developing his directorial debut, Opus. The mysterious horror-thriller follows Malkovich’s reclusive musician-turned-cult leader Moretti, who invites burgeoning journalist Ariel (Ayo Edebiri), along with other prominent figures, out to his remote compound to witness him play, as the film describes it, “the greatest album of modern times”. Upon arriving, she becomes tangled up in something far more sinister. Green was interested in seeing what would happen if a musician with vast amounts of talent and influence — he looked at Elton John, Isaac Hayes and Liberace while developing the film — channelled that power into ruling a…

YELENA BELOVA PLAYED BY: Florence Pugh LAST SEEN: Hawkeye WEAPONS OF CHOICE: Guns, knives, maybe those little Black Widow wrist-zappy thingies. SPECIAL SKILL: Pretty much all forms of combat. WHAT’S HER DEAL? The free-spirited sister of Scarlett Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff is now front and centre in Jake Schreier’s team-up movie. She’ll be not only the de facto leader of the motley crew but its emotional core as well. IN A NUTSHELL: “She’s a completely different person to the person that you’d assume she would be,” says Pugh. “She’s coming out of a few years of quite traumatic events. Where does that leave a person?” BUCKY BARNES PLAYED BY: Sebastian Stan LAST SEEN: The Falcon And The Winter Soldier WEAPON OF CHOICE: That funky metal arm of his. SPECIAL SKILL: Hitting people with…

OUT 21 FEBRUARY / CERT TBC / 100 MINS DIRECTOR Osgood Perkins CAST Theo James, Christian Convery, Tatiana Maslany, Sarah Levy, Colin O’Brien, Elijah Wood PLOT As a child, Hal (Convery) was terrorised by a toy monkey that acted as a harbinger of death. Now Hal (James) is in his thirties. And the monkey is back. IN THE ’70S and early ’80s, perhaps the only thing that Stephen King liked more than a child with a psychic gift/curse (Carrie, The Shining, Firestarter) was an inanimate object that becomes possessed by evil. A car, HGVs and even a laundry press lurched into life to wreak destruction, and all of these mechanical menaces made their inexorable way from page to screen, directed by John Carpenter (Christine), King himself (Maximum Overdrive, based on…

OUT NOW (NETFLIX) / CERT 12 / 104 MINS DIRECTOR Chris Foggin CAST Rory Kinnear, Jo Hartley, Chrissy Metz, Rob Delaney You don’t often hear the words “feel-good” and “Financial Conduct Authority” in the same sentence. But 2023’s Bank Of Dave was as feel-good as they come, telling the “true-ish” story of David Fishwick (Rory Kinnear), a Burnley businessman who opened a community bank. Now he’s back, turning his attention to predatory payday lenders. This is not nuanced filmmaking, hammering its message home with the subtlety of a Lancashire hotpot to the face. But it’s still a powerful force of feel-goodery, largely due to Rory Kinnear’s charismatic performance. It’s not especially cinematic — and again, rather bafflingly ends with a Def Leppard gig — but it’s all to make you…

OUT NOW / CERT 15 / 83 MINS DIRECTOR Jonathan Eusebio CAST Ke Huy Quan, Ariana DeBose, Daniel Wu, Marshawn Lynch, Mustafa Shakir, Lio Tipton, Sean Astin PLOT Marvin (Quan) lives a quiet life as a successful realtor. But when Rose (DeBose) re-enters his life, he is forced to confront his past life as a hitman. KE HUY QUAN has had a life story itself worthy of a Hollywood biopic: from Vietnamese refugee to a child blockbuster star to relative obscurity to his triumphant, Oscar-winning 2022 comeback with Everything Everywhere All At Once. Now once again booked and busy, Quan enjoys leading-man status for the first time in new action-comedy Love Hurts. What really hurts, though, is that the film doesn’t know how to make the most of him. Quan…

FLIGHT RISK FILM “With its human-sized stakes, bruising fights and Mel Gibson’s name on the credits, it’s a bit like the ’90s never went away. It won’t win any awards for originality but this is a fun, unpretentious, tight 91 minutes.”  IAN FREER PRIME TARGET TV “As lively as a statistics manual and just as riveting. With clunky dialogue and tired action tropes, it all feels like a problem to solve rather than a show to be savoured.” DAVID OPIE BRING THEM DOWN FILM “This Irish thriller is as dour as they come. It can be frustrating — men will literally engage in a violent sheep-based turf war instead of going to therapy — but first-time writer-director Christopher Andrews tightens the screws nicely.”  JOHN NUGENT THE KILLER’S GAME FILM “While…

THE LANGLEY HEIST MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE (Brian De Palma………. 1996) For some, it’s still the signature sequence of the Mission: Impossible series, even though it doesn’t involve a life-threatening stunt. Ethan Hunt infiltrates the CIA headquarters at Langley, to retrieve vital information from a high-tech, temperature-controlled computer vault that is seemingly impossible to access. Enter Ethan, gliding down from the ceiling in complete silence, showing perfect balance and poise before making off with the info… “I was in Japan promoting a film, and De Palma called me and pitched me this. It was Rififi, but how do we do it? I knew this rig and I came back and showed him the rig that I wanted to wear. I was showing him different kinds of equipment and movement, and I would find out,…

1 EMBARKING I think my personality is like a cat. I want to be independent and do things my own way. After making my first feature, Away [2019, about a boy being chased by a monster], I had an opportunity to work on a bigger scale and so thought I should make a story about me figuring out how to collaborate. It wasn’t something I had past experience with; it was something I was going through in that moment. When I was 15 I made a simple, seven-minute, hand-drawn short, Aqua, about a cat’s fear of water. When I decided to revisit this premise for a feature version, I wanted to focus more on the cat’s fear of others, of relationships. Flow is the first time I’ve worked with a…

AUDITIONS WENT OUT for my character [Bytes’ boy] in The Elephant Man at [Wembley’s] Lee Studios, and I was the first kid in. I sat with David, just had a chat with him. And he didn’t see anybody else after that, from what I was told. He just went, “This is the kid.” We shot it in 1979. At first, David always wore this big overcoat on set, and a big hat, kind of hiding away. Tony Hopkins [Dr Treves] said to him, “Come out from behind that hat and Crombie, we need to see you, we want to talk to you!” And he did. I think Tony said that not only for his own benefit, but for David’s benefit as well, because it made him more accessible. There’s a…

DAVID ALWAYS SAID, “All the green lights are blinking.” He said that when he called me up about directing Wild At Heart [adapted from Gifford’s novel, in 1989]. He was in love with Sailor and Lula; he thought it was a great, true love story. It just set him on fire. We spoke the same language. In 1992 we did an HBO series called Hotel Room. David directed two plays of mine for that. The second one, they needed me to write in a week. As it turned out, I wrote it in two days, and they said, “This is only 17 pages, it’s got to go 30 minutes.” I said, “Well, who the fuck do you think is directing this?” David would stretch that into what we needed. And…

1 DRESSED TO KILL (OUT 3 MARCH, 4K BR) One of Brian De Palma’s most deranged Hitch riffs, specifically on Psycho, in which Nancy Allen and Michael Caine become embroiled in a murder mystery. Perhaps the strongest section is the Angie Dickinson-led opening third, but what follows is solid De Palma, as he gleefully indulges many of his preoccupations (sex, murder, voyeurism). The twist, in a movie made 45 years ago, might not work for many today, but what is undeniable is that Caine gives it his all. 2 PADDINGTON IN PERU (OUT 17 FEBRUARY, DVD/BR/4K BR/DIGITAL) Yes, Dougal Wilson’s trilogy-capper isn’t up to the standard laid down by Paul King in the first two Paddington movies, but given their beloved status, there’s no shame in that. What we do get…

ALEXANDER MACKENDRICK, DIRECTOR of The Ladykillers and Sweet Smell Of Success, died in 1993. Milos Forman, director of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus, passed in 2018. They will live on forever through their classic work, of course. But one man is determined to keep their memories alive another way, through the Special Thanks sections of his credits. That man is James Mangold, who has thanked them throughout his career, starting with his 1995 debut, Heavy, and more recently Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny. “Each was a teacher of mine,” explains Mangold. “I met Mackendrick when I was 17 years old, and he was teaching at CalArts and became my mentor.” As for Forman, “I went to Columbia University in my late twenties,” adds Mangold, “and…

LETTER OF THE MONTH LETTING OFF SOME STEAM My brother and I grew up in the ’80s and loved the Sly/Arnie action films. But having read your ranking [‘The Ranking’, issue #437] where Commando came second (and very nearly first!) — are you kidding?! It is total arse and definitely not one of Arnie’s best. Yeah, it might have more cheesy one-liners than Rambo II, but surely nothing will beat: “Mission… (bit of a pause)… accomplished,” snarled by an angry John Rambo! TIM AND CHRIS WENHAM, VIA EMAIL Thank you, Tim, Chris, and the many, many readers who wrote in with feedback on Commando’s shockingly high place in our 1985 ranking. For your brutal honesty, Tim and Chris, have a Picturehouse membership on us. As penance, we’re off to hand-feed…

WITHIN HOURS OF the Golden Globes ceremony finishing at the start of January, Hollywood had moved from a state of celebration to one of abject horror. The city watched helplessly as hurricane-force winds simultaneously whipped two separate wildfires into raging infernos. In the west, the Palisades fire tore through the wealthy streets of Malibu and Pacific Palisades, leaving nothing but charred ruins in its wake. To the east, the Eaton fire burnt picturesque Altadena down to the ground. A total of 28 people were killed, 150,000 were forced to evacuate and more than 15,000 houses and other buildings were destroyed forever. Stars including Anthony Hopkins, Billy Crystal and Anna Faris lost their homes. In financial terms, the total damage is estimated to have exceeded $250 billion. The Brutalist’s Adrien Brody,…

‘SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE’ JON BATISTE SATURDAY NIGHT The Grammy-award-winning artist puts his own funky flavour on the TV show’s iconic theme, with lavish saxophone riffs adding to the rhythmic ’80s groove. ‘BEAUTIFUL THAT WAY’ MILEY CYRUS AND ANDREW WYATT THE LAST SHOWGIRL This tender ballad is filled with lyrics that cut to the heart of the film’s message of honesty and kindness, with Cyrus’ raspy vocals anchored by strings and an orchestra that swells at just the right moments. ‘WAY FORWARD’ JUNG JAEIL SQUID GAME: SEASON 2 The spiritual follow-up to the first season’s ‘Way Back Then’, this percussive piece gets darker and more intense as Seong Gi-hun plans his revenge in the hit Netflix show. ‘NEVER TOO MUCH’ LUTHER VANDROSS LUTHER: NEVER TOO MUCH The record that earned Vandross…

THE LAST PERSON you might expect to play an elite hitman is Paul Chuckle. And yet in the violent British crime thriller Fall To The Top, he’s trading mischief for murder. “It’s a very dark movie with lots of blood and gore,” warns Chuckle, who is speaking to Empire ahead of a panto performance in Nottingham. “But [my character kills] people with psychology. I whisper in their ears and make them top themselves. People hire me to do their dirty work.” Chuckle’s legacy has been defined by the slapstick comedy and catchphrases (“To me!” “To you!”) of the iconic BBC children’s show ChuckleVision, which co-starred his late brother Barry and ran for 292 barmy episodes over 21 years until 2009. Fall To The Top’s writer-director Peter Hirst is perhaps the…

“THE LODGE DOOR OPENED. A guy in a dark suit stepped out… He was way bigger than me, which put him firmly in the freak category.” Not our words, readers, but the words of Jack Reacher himself, narrating the moment he — and, by extension, we — meet the villain known only as Paulie in Persuader, the seventh book in Lee Child’s Reacher series. He was a character introduced by Child for one reason: to give Jack Reacher, a man so large his nipples are in different postcodes, a run for his money. So, when Persuader was picked as the source material for Season 3 of Reacher, the Prime Video show that stars Alan Ritchson as Child’s nomadic troublepuncher, fans started getting excited about the possibility of seeing Paulie in…

BANG! EMPIRE HASN’T been on the Gangs Of London Season 3 set for more than ten seconds before we hear the piercing sound of gunfire. The location — St Augustine’s Church in north-west London — looks serene from the outside. But today, its inside tells a different story. The startling noise is part of an intense showdown between the Wallaces — here represented by Marian (a gun-toting, body armour-clad Michelle Fairley in full action mode) and her son Billy (Brian Vernel) — and another gang with whom they have some serious beef. The smell of pungent smoke lingers in the air. Bibles are mangled, pews are shredded, and even the flower pots are shot to hell. It’s less Holy Father, and more Holy Shit. “We’ve got about 20 people who…

OUT NOW (PARAMOUNT+) / CERT 12 / 95 MINS DIRECTOR Olatunde Osunsanmi CAST Michelle Yeoh, Omari Hardwick, Sam Richardson, Sven Ruygrok PLOT Philippa Georgiou (Yeoh), former Emperor of the Mirror Universe (stay with us), is recruited to track down a stolen super-weapon. WE’VE WAITED NINE long years for a follow-up to Justin Lin’s Star Trek Beyond. S.J. Clarkson’s sequel faltered and failed. Noah Hawley’s reboot never got out of space dock. Even Tarantino’s unexpected foray got sucked into a pre-production black hole. Instead, we are presented with the first of Paramount’s Trek TV movies: this long-gestating spin-off from Star Trek: Discovery. Smartly seizing upon that show’s most interesting character — the sociopathic former Emperor of Star Trek’s Mirror Universe (Michelle Yeoh) — Section 31 weaves a surprisingly accessible (for Star…

OUT NOW / CERT 15 / 133 MINS DIRECTOR Nick Hamm CAST Claes Bang, Rafe Spall, Golshifteh Farahani, Ben Kingsley William Tell’s status as a folk hero makes his story kind of a Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves for the Swiss, only they're taking a country from the rich (Austria) and giving it to the poor. This new take is roughly as historically accurate as that Kevin Costner film too — but if you can get past how old-fashioned it feels and lean into the Braveheart-esque fight for freedom, it’s rather fun. Tell (Dane Claes Bang) has a strong anti-authoritarian streak that makes him quick to stand up for the needy, and Bang is good: unshowy and serious, shaven-headed instead of sporting a Costner mullet. The script isn't quite as…

OUT NOW (APPLE TV+) / EPISODES VIEWED 10 OF 10 SHOWRUNNER Dan Erickson CAST Adam Scott, Britt Lower, Zach Cherry, John Turturro, Christopher Walken PLOT Having unlocked some secrets of their ‘outie’ life, four ‘severed’ employees of Lumon Industries learn the consequences of their actions. IT HAS, AS the creepily perma-smiling Lumon manager Milchick (Tramell Tillman) puts it, “been a minute”. Three long years have elapsed since the first season of Severance — the sci-fi-ish drama about an extreme form of work-life balance — became a sleeper hit for Apple TV+. If you’re feeling as forgetful as a microchipped ‘innie’ on what exactly happened during those first ten episodes, you would be forgiven. Thankfully, this much-delayed Season 2 begins with a three-minute recap to catch us up: reminding us how…

OUT NOW (NETFLIX) / CERT 12 / 114 MINS DIRECTOR Seth Gordon CAST Jamie Foxx, Cameron Diaz, Glenn Close, Andrew Scott, Jamie Demetriou PLOT When their cover is blown, two former CIA agents (Foxx, Diaz) ditch their domestic life and go on the run with their children. YOU HAVE TO imagine that Back In Action began with its casting, and worked everything else — that apt title, the corresponding premise — backwards from there. Because those three words apply most directly to the film’s A-list star: Cameron Diaz, returning to the screen for the first time in over a decade, on hiatus since 2014’s Annie remake. Back in action, indeed. As a comeback vehicle, Seth Gordon’s (Horrible Bosses) fast and frothy action-comedy isn’t exactly a stretch for Diaz — from…

“OUR LIVES ARE THE SUM OF OUR CHOICES,” a wise man by the name of Eugene Kittridge once said. And few people know that better than Tom Cruise. In 1993, Cruise, already the biggest movie star on the planet, met with Sherry Lansing, then head of Paramount Pictures, to discuss the film he had chosen to make his producing debut. It’s doubtful that Lansing expected Cruise to plump for an adaptation of a 1960s TV show perhaps best known for its gadgets, guises and banging theme tune. “I had studied what circus guys were doing with wires and the new kind of rigs they were using,” Cruise tells Empire. “And I was like, ‘I’m going to apply that to live-action, and to a spy story.’ That’s why I chose Mission: Impossible.…

“YOU KNOW WHAT? I’LL TELL YOU A STORY.” Irwin Winkler has a lot of stories. To some extent because he’s 93. That’ll rack up some tales. But so will being a legendary Hollywood producer, who started in 1967 with Elvis Presley’s Double Trouble, then brought us Point Blank, Rocky, Raging Bull, GoodFellas, The Wolf Of Wall Street, Creed… Yes, he has stories. His latest film is Barry Levinson’s Mob drama The Alto Knights, starring Robert De Niro, twice (more on that later), and Empire has just asked Winkler how hands-on the actor is. So, here’s a story. “Back in 1971, I was doing a movie called The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight,” he says of James Goldstone’s gangster comedy. “Al Pacino was the leading actor, and I got a call…

I almost Googled, “How tall is David Lynch?” because I remembered him looming over me and wondered if that was accurate. Then I realised that the feeling had nothing to do with physical reality, so I decided not to ask my computer. The feeling of him looming over me was real, though. It was 2002. I don’t recall why David asked me to write an animated movie for him called ‘Snootworld’. Edward Scissorhands? The Nightmare Before Christmas? My feisty agent? But there I was. The launching pad was the idea that as a Snoot (already a small creature) gets older, they get even smaller. At seven, they are at their tiniest and most vulnerable so they are sent away from home for their own protection until they turn eight. But,…

Christina Newland (Contributing Editor): David Lynch was interested in both exploring and subverting cinematic archetypes around womanhood, and was firmly rooted, in my view, in old Hollywood and the film-noir femme-fatale archetype. He was really interested in the symbolism of blonde women resembling a kind of purity, and then dark-haired women as more dangerous sexual beings. Leila Latif (Contributor): He certainly leaned into female victimhood to a degree, but I don’t say that in a derogatory way. A lot of women in his films suffer greatly, but he had an incredible sensitivity for their plight and gave really interesting depictions of sexual violence, and the misogyny which is like an air that their entire ecosystem is breathing in. Iana Murray (Contributor): Accusations of misogyny against him never felt quite right. I…

CAPTAIN KRONOS: VAMPIRE Hunter is the last vampire film Hammer ever made. And one of the best. Freed from the creative coffin of Dracula, writer/director Brian Clemens (in the only movie he would ever make) set about tweaking both bloodsuckers and bloodsucker-botherer, in the shape of a sword-wielding, swashbuckling hero (the late Horst Janson, who died in January). Naturally, it was not well-received at the time, but its reputation has only grown in the 50 years since its release. So much so that it’s the first Hammer film to get the 4K bells-and-whistles re-release treatment, since the company was acquired by nominative-determinism fave, John Gore. Empire caught up with Hammer legend and Kronos co-star Caroline Munro to say fangs for the etc, etc. THE BEGINNING Munro, who was then in…