Total Film

This month we couldn’t ignore the behemoth TV epics hovering into view on the small screen, with Tolkien’s famous appendix being unpicked to deliver 50 hours of sweeping fantasy spectacle in The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power. It’s been like a journey to the fires of Mount Doom getting this issue together, so massive are the shows we’re previewing, but that doesn’t mean we’re over film. Cinema is still our first love – the community nature of it, the joy of gasping with a crowd of strangers all suspended in dark-enveloped disbelief. I’ve watched a certain film four times this month at different cinemas and each time I’ve enjoyed the gang I’m with as much as the movie. Hearing people squeal together at certain bits and discuss favourite…

SENIOR ONLINE EDITOR JACK SHEPHERD @JACKJSHEPHERD The Lord Of The Rings cast were abuzz with excitement – each one on the brink of international fame, but still friendly, funny and fiercely passionate about all things Tolkien. NEWS EDITOR JORDAN FARLEY @JORDANFARLEY This month I sang happy birthday to Chris Evans… as part of a chorus at the UK premiere of Lightyear. The only person singing with more gusto was the six-year-old next to me in a Captain America t-shirt. CONTRIBUTOR ASHANTI OMKAR @ASHANTlOMKAR I had the pleasure of finding my inner Tom Cruise at the launch of Paramount+ in the UK, hanging on wires for the Mission: Impossible selfie challenge. Core strength required! CONTRIBUTING EDITOR LEILA LATIF @LEILA_LATIF I was enthralled by The Afterlight at the BFI. It’s a touring print of archive footage of dead actors, edited into the story of a single day,…

@JORDANFARLEY Good things come to those who wait. Even George Miller. The genial Australian director has spent over 20 years, on and off, getting his latest film, Three Thousand Years Of Longing, to the screens. He first read A.S. Byatt’s novella, The Djinn In The Nightingale’s Eye, in the late ‘90s, snapping up the film rights from the Booker Prize-winning author after paying her a visit. He then started noodling away on the script with daughter Augusta Gore, although other projects – Happy Feet and Mad Max: Fury Road – took precedence. Finally, Miller’s gotten around to making it – a beguiling love letter to the art of storytelling and a film that he’s already dubbed “the anti-Mad Max” for its palate-cleansing properties. Arriving seven years after Fury Road roared its way…

With A Star Is Born, Lady Gaga took a familiar role and owned it. If rumours deliver, she seems set to try a similar trick in the musical sequel to one of 2019’s hottest talking points. As we go to press, Gaga is reportedly under consideration to join director Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie À Deux as Harley Quinn, a role made to measure like the finest cuts-of-meat dress. A chameleonic pop firework with a taste for the theatrical, the New York-born Stefani Germanotta has previous with the kinds of fashion statements and wily moves Quinn might approve of. She has a show-stopper of a voice, too; put it alongside music from Oscar-winning Joker composer Hildur Guðnadóttir (presumably returning, please) and there may be more smiles on awards night. And while Joker…

Halina Reijn is not the most obvious filmmaker to take on a Gen Z horror-comedy, having made a name for herself in “Dutch hardcore theatre”, but she teamed up with A24 to bring Sarah DeLappe’s screenplay to life. Assembling a cast of screaming-hot young actors, including Amandla Stenberg, Maria Bakalova and Pete Davidson, the film is about a group of privileged twentysomethings reuniting at a remote mansion that looks like if “Sofia Coppola voted Trump”. The plan – to have fun and make passive aggressive digs at one another – takes a turn for the murderous when they play a drinking game called ‘Bodies Bodies Bodies’. Reijn, who had grown up playing the game, tells Teasers that murder aside, such games always have “really bad consequences”. With simmering tensions inside and a…

Between Mark ‘Chopper’ Read, Jesse James and Nick Cave, director Andrew Dominik’s films have gravitated towards mythologised men laden with charisma. For his latest project, he’s ringing the changes. Focused on one of Hollywood’s most mythologised women, Blonde is the story of Marilyn Monroe, the ‘50s superstar who died in 1962, aged 36. Adapted from a 2000 novel by US writer Joyce Carol Oates, Blonde is a passion project for Dominik. Development stretches back to 2010; Naomi Watts and Jessica Chastain were attached, long before Ana de Armas signed up. But the crux of Dominik’s attachment to Blonde stayed firm. “The thing about my films is that the feelings they give you always survive,” he tells Teasers. Immortalised on film, T-shirts, posters and otherwise, Monroe often inspires image-obsessed film portraits. Dominik’s aim…