Tabla de contenidos para June 2025 en Empire

WHEN I WAS but knee-high to a bow-legged woman — about seven or eight years old — I saw Jaws for the first time. And I was not okay. In fact, for a while I refused to go into any swimming pool, convinced that a great white shark might somehow enter through the water filter system and wreak havoc on my thrashing legs. This was unlikely: I lived in Gerrards Cross. But such was the fiendish relentlessness of the shark, at least the shark in Steven Spielberg’s movie, that it seemed plausible. I was safe from most of the far-fetched villains I’d seen on screen. But this one was different. Real. Unseen. Out there, somewhere, cruising for food. Millions upon millions of people have their own Jaws story. It put…

Empire has long celebrated Jaws — the massive shark previously appeared on our cover in 2008 and 2018 — but we last took a truly deep dive as part of our mammoth 300th issue celebration, which saw Steven Spielberg graciously unearth some of his most prized treasures from the film (while posing in front of a replica shark at Universal Studios in Los Angeles). Among the artefacts dusted off included Spielberg’s original shooting script (with the dialogue, “You got to get a bigger boat!” scribbled in handwriting); the one-eyed prosthetic of Ben Gardner’s head; and a framed and mounted tooth from the great white model. “I named the shark Bruce after my lawyer, Bruce Ramer,” Spielberg said. “I would never have named the shark after my attorney if my attorney…

WHEN TIMES GET tough, horror is my ultimate comfort food. Not dour, heavy-handed metaphors for intergenerational trauma that are so often mistakenly labelled as ‘elevated horror’. I’m talking balls-to-the-wall, unhinged, blood-splattered excess: Evil Dead, Braindead, Dawn Of The Dead. The deader the better. And when few things are as disturbing as the news headlines, great solace can be taken in the fact that, as bad as things get, at least no-one has read aloud from the Necronomicon. But in the wake of stone-cold classics like The Babadook, Get Out and Hereditary, the genre has striven for the fashionable label of ‘elevation’. We’ve been inundated with repetitive narratives about the pressures of parenthood and a slew of hackneyed arthouse fare that seems too embarrassed to have any fun. So many of…

STICK Comedy stalwart Owen Wilson takes to the range as a washed-up former pro who finds new hope in a dishevelled teen protégé. From Ford V Ferrari writer Jason Keller, the ten-part Apple TV+ series will swing for the heartstrings as Wilson swaps Cars for pars in his first TV leading role. HAPPY GILMORE 2 Sand-heads rejoiced when the return of Adam Sandler’s rage-stifling putting maverick was announced, nearly 30 years after his first feature outing. An early look at the sequel promise cameos, cursing and caddies aplenty. Time to find your happy place again. UNTITLED TIGER WOODS BIOPIC An Obama-produced feature on the teed-up titan is reportedly in development, with King Richard’s Reinaldo Marcus Green in talks to direct. Based on the book The Tiger Slam: The Inside Story…

“WE ALL RELATE less to the princess and more to the tiny whirlwind-of-disaster goblin that Stitch is.” Dean Fleischer Camp, director of the upcoming live-action Lilo & Stitch remake, is a longstanding fan of the stowaway alien star of the 2002 original. And he’s far from alone. The latest trailer for the new film — which again sees Stitch crash-land in Hawaii and form a found family with two orphaned sisters — hit 158 million views on social media in 24 hours, which are big numbers for a live-action-remake preview. Then there’s the social-media frenzy sparked by the character’s return, from fans creating ‘Stitchcore’ videos — montages of the lively critter’s craziest moments — to documenting “vintage” merchandise from the animated film on TikTok. “People never forget how much they…

IT’S ALMOST WEIRD that The Phoenician Scheme is Michael Cera’s first film with Wes Anderson. With his deadpan delivery, knowing awkwardness and old-soul vibe, Cera just seems so obviously Wes Anderson-y. He’s been a fan of Anderson for decades — “I saw The Royal Tenenbaums in the theatre… and watched Rushmore on a loop,” he says — but while he came close to appearing in Asteroid City, before “the [shooting] dates of the movie got pushed to my son’s delivery date”, it’s only now he’s finally working with the symmetry-loving filmmaker. The wait was worth it, thankfully, because Cera’s been given a role that is about as quintessentially Anderson as it gets. The Phoenician Scheme centres on Zsa-Zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro), an extraordinarily rich businessman whose schemes have given…

SINCE THE START, the Karate Kid franchise has behaved like an actual karate contestant. With the 1984 classic The Karate Kid, the rookie saga enjoyed an early victory and then an impressive enough follow-up fight with 1986’s sequel, before disappointing in its next bout, 1989’s The Karate Kid Part III. It reinvented itself with new vigour for 2010’s reboot The Karate Kid, starring Jaden Smith, before making a triumphant comeback with Netflix’s Cobra Kai. And now… Okay, this metaphor can only handle so much, but in a show of strength, the franchise is currently teaming up with, well, itself. Jonathan Entwistle’s Karate Kid: Legends unites Ralph Macchio’s OG karate kid, who turned sensei in Cobra Kai, with the 2010 film’s wise sage Mr Han (Jackie Chan). Here, young Li Fong…

OUT NOW (APPLE TV+)/EPISODES VIEWED 8 OF 8 SHOWRUNNER Peter Craig CAST Brian Tyree Henry, Wagner Moura, Kate Mulgrew, Marin Ireland PLOT Two Philly felons inadvertently rip off a major drug operation, putting them on the wrong side of a cartel, a gang of bikers, and the cops. DOPE THIEF OPENS with a bang. Two DEA agents storm a stash-house in Philadelphia, subdue the suspects, control the room and carry out a thorough search of the premises, turning up both narcotics and cash. The operation is efficient, detailed and by the numbers. “Just because we’re not real law enforcement,” insists Ray (Brian Tyree Henry), “doesn’t mean we’re not professional.” Manny (Wagner Moura) and Ray bring home the bacon by posing as federal agents and ripping off small-time dealers. The pair…

OUT NOW (SKY/NOW)/EPISODES VIEWED 8 OF 8 SHOWRUNNERS Kim Hong-Sun, Peter McKenna CAST Sope Dìrísù, Michelle Fairley, Joe Cole, Lucian Msamati, Narges Rashidi, T’Nia Miller, Andrew Koji PLOT Elliot Carter (Dìrísù) is now a full-blooded gangster. When things go sideways with a batch of spiked cocaine, the mayor of London (T’Nia Miller) goes on the warpath. GANGS OF LONDON has always been best appreciated as an alternate-reality affair — a bit like John Wick, except people drive on the left and there’s no hotel for hitmen. In this London the roads are free of traffic, nobody uses public transport, and a bullet-spewing gang war can rage without being interrupted by the police. It’s a fantasy-crime slayground where anything can happen, as long as that “anything” is deadly serious (no jokes,…

OUT 18 APRIL/CERT 15/107 MINS DIRECTORS Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck CAST Pedro Pascal, Jay Ellis, Ben Mendelsohn, Dominique Thorne, Normani, Tom Hanks PLOT Across one night in 1987 in Oakland, California, interconnected tales of punks, basketball stars, assassins, neo-Nazis, and rising rappers unfold under a green glowing haze. FROM ITS PULPY title, to its retro-computerised intro with Giorgio Moroder-style synths, to its opening voiceover (“Oakland in ’87 was hella wild”), it’s clear within seconds that Freaky Tales aims for culty midnight-movie status. On that front it largely succeeds, boasting a scrappy energy, outsider outlook, and local focus that feels like a sharp pivot from the slick universe-expansion of writer-directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s previous film, MCU behemoth Captain Marvel. As an anthology of stories inflected with supernatural flourishes —…

DIRECTOR Uberto Pasolini CAST Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, Charlie Plummer, Marwan Kenzari, Claudio Santamaria PLOT Ten years after Troy’s fall, Odysseus (Fiennes) finally reaches his home Ithaca, where suitors are pressuring his wife Penelope (Binoche) to remarry. WHILE WE WAIT to see Homer’s Odyssey as a big-budget Christopher Nolan blockbuster, Italian producer-director Uberto Pasolini brings us the low-budget, character-piece version. Rather than trying to mount a vast, effects-packed naval adventure featuring gods and monsters, Pasolini sticks to location-based terra firma, and focuses his narrative on the grizzled protagonist’s homecoming. The Return opens with Odysseus (Ralph Fiennes) washing up on a beach, and relies on good old-fashioned dialogue and performance to do the dramatic heavy lifting. There’s no reference to Odysseus’ adventures since leaving Troy — no recounted tales of sirens,…

DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN TV “The bread-and-butter of Daredevil is its action sequences. Any worries that the move from Netflix to Disney+ would mean the show is less violent quickly prove unfounded. The fights are just as bone-breakingly brutal and bloody as we’ve come to expect.” AMON WARMANN DAY OF THE FIGHT FILM “The screenplay is littered with stock situations and New York stereotypes, but Jack Huston the writer is well served by Jack Huston the filmmaker. The film is shot in monochrome that does much to evoke a power that probably wasn’t present on the page.” IAN FREER MARCHING POWDER FILM “Danny Dyer is a talented guy, and he really delivers what he’s given to work with, but his character shows little empathy for anyone beyond his family and…

LEIGH WHANNELL FIRST saw Jaws as a child. Transfixed by the cover in the Betamax section of a video store, he’d initiated a weeks-long campaign to convince his parents to allow him to see it, and when they finally caved it was, he says, “instant love, instant obsession”. He watched it weekly for a year and “just never stopped”, inspired for life, going on to direct his own genre — and monster — hits (including Upgrade, The Invisible Man and Wolf Man). Who better, then, to talk us through Spielberg’s enduring handiwork. Via Zoom, Whannell showed us office shelves lined with his own films’ memorabilia (Saw’s Jigsaw features heavily), but also laden with models of the Orca, Jaws books and a shark with a hinged jaw halfway through swallowing Quint.…

FOR ONE OF cinema’s most iconic beasts, Jaws’ marquee monster has gotten a lot of bad press. Legend has cemented the three remote-controlled ‘hero’ sharks — designed by Joe Alves and built by Bob Mattey — as malfunctioning, migraine-inducing nightmares which almost sunk the entire production. Well, Legacy Effects’ Shane Mahan, who has worked on otherworldly beings for everything from the first two Terminator films to Aliens, Jurassic Park and The Shape Of Water, has something to say about that. “Let me tell you, I defy anybody to make a 25-foot mechanical shark that actually has to work in the ocean,” he states. “Just go ahead and try, then come back to me in six months and tell me how you did. Because that was a Herculean task, to figure…

How did you get involved in Jaws? Steven called me. He was having trouble with a scene. Back in ’74, before success really hit for us all, everybody (Steven, George [Lucas], Francis [Ford Coppola], etc) worked on each other’s stuff. It was just fun to do. I suggested a few ideas including the Indianapolis incident. A lot of talents claim authorship of the scene. What’s the truth? I came up with it. Steven will confirm this. Edits were certainly made before and while it was filmed. Is it true you dictated script pages over the phone to Spielberg, who was on location in Martha’s Vineyard? Yes, absolutely. It was two phone calls. The first was to tell me to be prepared to write something about why this guy Quint doesn’t…

THE lights weren’t just blinding — they burned that night at LA’s SoFi Stadium too, a fierce heat overcoming Abel Tesfaye as he broke down in front of 80,000 fans. It was the final show of his 2022 North American tour, and the Canadian pop sensation known as The Weeknd was in a hot sweat, struggling to get through the opening track of his set. “I’d gone on stage before with the flu, a high fever, with injuries, after deaths in the family and break-ups, and I was always able to rely on my voice,” he tells Empire. Not on this occasion. Less than a minute in, stood atop a John Carpenter-esque replica of a burnt-out skyscraper, his voice began to falter. Realising he couldn’t fight through the problem, he…

THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU (1996) Mad scientist Dr. Moreau (Marlon Brando) has come up with a novel solution for staving off island loneliness: creating grotesque beast-human hybrids to keep him company. “I have almost achieved perfection,” Moreau says in the film; critics at the time sadly disagreed. CAST AWAY (2000) The modern-day Robinson Crusoe, Robert Zemeckis’ classic sees FedEx employee Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks) washing up on a desert island. A testament to the well-known truism that the only items required for happiness are a volleyball and a marker pen. JOURNEY 2: THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND (2012) An extreeeeemely loose adaptation of the Jules Verne novel, depicting a magical place occupied only by Michael Caine and some CG animals. This take on the story sees Caine ride a giant bee…

“HERE WE CAN see the dogs eating the dead horse,” points out Robert Eggers on his Nosferatu commentary. “It’s a nice detail.” This is Eggers in a nutshell. The grim everyday visuals. The passion for accuracy. The deadpan delivery. Among other things, Nosferatu’s home-entertainment release includes the extended cut (it’s four minutes longer), and Eggers’ accompanying unpacking. It’s great to have it all, when such extras are few and far between these days. “Well, I didn’t go to film school, and commentaries and special features were a lot of how I learned how to make movies,” he explains to Empire. “I think it’s important to do.” It’s his final bit of work on a film (his fourth, after The Witch, The Lighthouse and The Northman) that has been in the…

1 ANORA (OUT 5 MAY, 4K BR) “Anora uses the F-word 479 times. That’s three more than the record set by Karla Sofía Gascón’s publicist,” quipped Conan O’Brien at the Oscars. Now you can relive each one, and the rest of the award-laden drama, in the comfort of your own home thanks to this F-ing marvellous Criterion release. 2 NIGHT MOVES (OUT 28 APRIL, BR) Come for Gene Hackman slagging off Eric Rohmer films — “It was kind of like watching paint dry,” his PI quips — stay for one of the sharpest noirs of the 1970s. Not to mention one of the late Hackman’s greatest performances. 3 HARD TRUTHS (OUT 21 APRIL, DVD, BR, DIGITAL) “Cheerful, grinning people. Can’t stand them.” Whether sofa-shopping or parking her car, Pansy is…

RACHELL SMITH PHOTOGRAPHED ALEXANDER SKARSGÅRD “Photographing Alexander was an absolute honour. His trust in the process allowed us to create something unexpected — mixing surrealism with portraiture. I love using light to find those unplanned moments, and his openness made the experience exciting and creatively fulfilling.” JAMES DYER PRESENTED A GNOME TO BRIAN TYREE HENRY “Brian outed himself as a ‘gnome enthusiast’ in our recent Pint Of Milk interview, so I took it upon myself to expand his collection with this rather special Scarface-themed lawn guardian. He was immediately dubbed ’Steve’. (‘Al Pacignome’ was right there!)” CHRIS HEWITT HOSTED AN EMPIRE VIP SCREENING OF THE ELECTRIC STATE “Look at the absolute Electric State of me here, standing slap-bang in the middle of the Russo Brothers ahead of our exclusive Empire…

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A COUPLE OF weeks before cameras started rolling in late March on Avengers: Doomsday, Empire caught up with its directors, Joe and Anthony Russo. What, we wondered, was the state of preparedness? “Avengers: Endgame was shot six weeks after we did Infinity War, and we were really underprepared, but we had a really strong sense of the story,” said Joe Russo. “I’d say we’re probably in a similar position.” Anthony Russo smiled, and added, “We’re hurtling toward Doom.” But when it came to the announcement of the start of production on the film, and confirmation of its cast, which took place during a live-stream event on Wednesday 26 March, “ambling toward Doom” might have been more apt. Because the announcement was stretched out longer than Reed Richards, as 27 castmembers…

THE LOCATIONS Fiennes’ turn as Odysseus, based on the end of Homer’s The Odyssey, is something that began years ago, when director Uberto Pasolini invited him on a trip. “There was a moment when he asked me if I’d like to direct it, and we went on location scouts together with that in mind.” That trip was to Ithaca, the island kingdom to which Odysseus returns after his ten-year, well, odyssey following the Siege of Troy. Fiennes eventually passed on directing, but remained attached to the role, and when filming did begin in Corfu in 2023, that brought an authenticity to his performance. “It was lovely to be in a part of Greece, to feel that coastline and those rocks and that sea,” he says. “That helps, in a way,…

DINOSAUR HUNTERS DON’T usually fare well in the Jurassic movies. Both Bob Peck’s Muldoon and Vincent D’Onofrio’s Vic Hoskins were eviscerated by “clever girl” velociraptors in Park and World respectively, while Ted Levine’s Ken Wheatley was gobbled up by the wily indoraptor in Fallen Kingdom. But Jurassic World Rebirth’s Zora Bennett might just break the curse. After all, she’s a whole new breed of dino-hunter. “I like to think of her as an operator,” says Scarlett Johansson. “She’s ex-military, who works for independent contractors. She’s hired to do extractions.” And unlike the glory-seeking alphadudes who have gone before, Zora’s not exactly thirsting for dino-blood — or rather, dino-DNA, required in this instalment’s plot to create a lifesaving drug. “She’s kind of burnt out when we find her,” Johansson explains to…

‘ANAKIN VS. OBI-WAN’ JOHN WILLIAMS STAR WARS: REVENGE OF THE SITH RE-RELEASE With its swirling strings and haunting choir, Williams’ stirring music conveys the gravity and dread of this momentous battle. ‘OXYGENE’ FLYING LOTUS ASH A pulsing, synth-heavy arrangement sets an eerie tone for this psychedelic sci-fi horror. Both come from rapper-turned filmmaker Flying Lotus, making his violent, vivid big-screen debut. ‘(YOU’RE THE) DEVIL IN DISGUISE’ ELVIS PRESLEY LILO & STITCH TRAILER The King was key to the original Disney animation and the buzzy live-action adaptation pays homage with this racy song that mirrors Stitch’s chaotic cuteness. ‘RAMBLIN’ DOWN THE ROAD’ SADIE SINK O’DESSA The titular O’Dessa dreams of following in her father’s footsteps in this sweet and contemplative tune, elevated by a hum-worthy melody and Sink’s laidback vocals. ‘DAREDEVIL:…

10 APRIL - 7 MAY 2025 EXCELLENT STRONG GOOD WEAK YIKES WATCH FIRST Co-director Ray Mendoza previously produced the 2016 docu-drama series The Warfighters, which took a similarly unrelenting approach in chronicling the War On Terror, with testimony from real soldiers. FILM WARFARE ALEX GARLAND HEADS BACK TO A CONFLICT ZONE OUT 18 APRIL/CERT TBC/95 MINS DIRECTORS Alex Garland, Ray Mendoza CAST D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Cosmo Jarvis, Will Poulter, Joseph Quinn PLOT 2006, Ramadi, Iraq. Seizing an apartment to surveil the area, a group of Navy SEALs find themselves bombarded by Al-Qaeda insurgents. APPROPRIATELY, WARFARE BEGINS with a deafening assault, as Eric Prydz’s horny 2004 aerobics video for ‘Call On Me’ fills the screen, its sweaty, hormonal hardbodies lunging and lurching. We wonder what, in 2025, we’ve done to deserve this,…

OUT NOW/CERT PG/109 MINS DIRECTOR Marc Webb CAST Rachel Zegler, Gal Gadot, Andrew Burnap, Ansu Kabia, Tituss Burgess, Jeremy Swift, Martin Klebba PLOT When the Evil Queen (Gadot) commands that her stepdaughter Snow White (Zegler) must be killed, the princess must somehow fight for her people. THE ORIGINAL ANIMATED 1937 Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs was branded “Disney’s folly” before release, but soon became a landmark artistic and box-office success. This new live-action version, while similarly plagued with bad buzz and reports of creative chaos, seems unlikely to have such a lasting or significant impact. Despite committed performances from its leads and years of edits and re-edits, it can’t establish a consistent tone through its real and artificial locations. Director Marc Webb follows the Kenneth Branagh Cinderella playbook closely:…

OUT NOW/CERT 15/94 MINS DIRECTOR Steven Soderbergh CAST Cate Blanchett, Michael Fassbender, Marisa Abela, Tom Burke, Naomie Harris, Regé-Jean Page, Pierce Brosnan PLOT Veteran British spy George Woodhouse (Fassbender) is charged with sniffing out a traitor in the midst of his agency. Could the rat be, in fact, his wife Kathryn (Blanchett)? FOURTEEN YEARS AFTER announcing his retirement, Steven Soderbergh is busier than ever. Black Bag is his second film out this year — it arrives just two months after his unconventional ghost story Presence — and marks his third collaboration with prolific screenwriter David Koepp. And it’s tremendous fun: think Ocean’s Eleven, if they were spies. As with his earlier, Vegas-set escapades, Soderbergh’s camera is cool and confident; his handsome A-list cast are slick, sardonic and immaculately dressed; Koepp’s…

ROBERT SHAW’S AGENT might have begged to differ, negotiating so Shaw’s name came slightly higher in the opening credits, but there’s never been any doubt about the true hero of Jaws. Roy Scheider’s Martin Brody not only has more screen time than Shaw’s Quint and Richard Dreyfuss’ Hooper, he is the heart of Jaws. The soul of Jaws. Don’t take our word for it. Ask Simon Pegg, a man who knows a thing or two about creating enduring screen heroes. “When you’re a kid, Hooper is your favourite,” he says. “But when you become a parent, you start to drift towards Brody. You start to understand what’s at stake.” Here, Pegg talks us through key Brody moments. THE DINNER TABLE “Scheider is so great,” says Pegg. “He looks tough, like…

“HOLD ON,” SAYS Greg Nicotero. “I have the tooth!” And with that, the Walking Dead wizard, the ‘N’ in leading effects house KNB, disappears from the frame of our Zoom call. He returns seconds later, brandishing a great white tooth. Not just any tooth. This is the tooth that a particular shark left embedded in the hull of Ben Gardner’s boat. “I got a casting of the tooth from [special-effects artist] Roy Arbogast,” says Nicotero, schoolboy-giddy. “I did a little touch-up on the bottom to make it look more like a real tooth.” The tooth is not, of course, the only evidence that Jaws’ titular terror paid a visit to the boat of Ben Gardner (Craig Kingsbury), one of Quint’s rival fishermen in the Amity area. There’s actual Ben Gardner,…

SEVERAL MONTHS BEFORE Jaws opened, on 20 June 1975, Steven Spielberg, then just 28, sat in a Universal marketing meeting and floated an idea. His proposition involved a range of little chocolate sharks which, when bitten into, would squirt blood, or more precisely, cherry juice. “We’ll clean up,” he excitedly told the assembled suits. The myopic marketeers passed. Sixty-four days after the film’s debut, when Jaws passed The Godfather to become the then highest-grossing film of all time (eventually earning $478 million worldwide), the executive wonks must have regretted the confectionery kibosh. When the film hit big, Universal scrambled to meet demand, rushing into production licensed merch ranging from T-shirts and shark-teeth jewellery to beach towels and a toilet seat with gnashers. The Universal Studio Store also planned to stock…

CASSIAN ANDOR WAS DEAD, TO BEGIN WITH. Just like the rest of the Rogue One crew. Because, as Star Wars fans learned in 2016, the plot to snaffle those all-important Death Star plans was, in fact, a suicide mission for all involved. Diego Luna’s shady Rebel hero perished on the Scarif beach alongside Jyn Erso. Dead, done, dusted. Or not. Because six years later, in 2022, Cassian Andor — somehow — returned, in a show that, frankly, few were asking for: the world was not waiting for a Cassian Andor prequel series. As it turned out, Andor Season 1, set five years prior to Gareth Edwards’ Rogue One, was some of the most essential Star Wars ever willed into existence — a fiercely political, defiantly grown-up slice of sci-fi co-credited…

WHEN MOANA 2’S three directors — Dana Ledoux Miller, Jason Hand and David G. Derrick Jr — started work on the Disney+ show that would then transmogrify into the billion-dollar-grossing movie, they were faced with a challenge, musically speaking. The first Moana, which came out in 2016, boasted a soundtrack written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, featuring catchy tunes like the Dwayne Johnson-led ‘You’re Welcome’ and the Oscar-nominated ‘How Far I’ll Go’. But this time around, the trio weren’t read their Miranda rights. So they drafted in two new songwriters, Emily Bear and Abigail Barlow, to craft the songs that would accompany Moana (Auli‘i Cravalho) on her journey. “Yes, we didn’t have Lin,” says Derrick. “But when we talked to Emily and Abigail, we realised these are two young artists who can…

JOE PESCI HAS appeared in just two movies in the last few years. There’s The Irishman, of course, for which we have to thank Martin Scorsese. And there’s Jack Huston’s directorial debut Day Of The Fight, in which Pesci makes a memorable and mute cameo as a man struggling with dementia. And for that we have to thank, of all people, Adam Levine. Yes, the guy from Maroon 5. What gives, Jack Huston? “My wife’s very close with his wife, and we went over to his house,” Huston tells Empire. “And he gave me some earphones and said, ‘I’ll give you $100 if you can tell me who’s singing.’” Levine’s cash stayed safely in his wallet. Because the singer was Pesci, who had been a lounge singer before becoming an…

LETTER OF THE MONTH RAIDERS OF THE LOST EMPIRE Congratulations on a great magazine. The Empire standard has never dropped and your current team of writers is especially brilliant. I finally got round to taking my issues out of the loft to properly catalogue and re-pack them. In terms of boxes, it wasn’t quite the final act of Raiders Of The Lost Ark, but it felt like it by the time I’d finished! I really just felt compelled by my journey back in time to say that you’ve been a big influence on this 58-year-old’s life — you’ve kept my love for and connection to the silver screen alive. RICHARD CHAMBERS, VIA EMAIL As they say in Raiders, it’s not the years — it’s the mileage. Thanks for your kind…

“YOU GO TO his compound,” remembers director Joachim Rønning of his first meeting with Tron: Ares star Jared Leto. “It used to be an old Air Force base and it’s fascinating, because it basically still looks like one, and it’s in the middle of Hollywood.” Embedded deep in the hills overlooking Los Angeles, surrounded by dense woodland, Leto’s home was an air-traffic control station before being reconfigured as an Air Force operation in 1947 as the Cold War kicked in. Leto bought it in 2015, and so here Rønning went to discuss a very contemporary combatant: the mysterious title character of his sci-fi threequel. Who is, notably, named after the Greek God of War. And there in Leto’s old military digs, the actor and director discussed the future. The latest…

FOR TWO ACTORS whose careers both began in the late ’80s, it’s amazing that Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs have never shared the screen before. But finally their stars have aligned for British drama The Salt Path, based on Raynor Winn’s poignant memoir. They play real-life married couple Raynor (Anderson) and Moth (Isaacs), who, in the face of financial destitution and a terminal diagnosis for Moth, set out to walk the South West Coast Path with their remaining belongings packed into rucksacks. We spoke to the pair together about their stripped-back collaboration. How did preparing for playing Moth and Raynor feel different from previous roles? Jason Isaacs: Gillian and I have played very famous people, like Margaret Thatcher and Cary Grant, but in this instance, people don’t know who they…

“THERE WERE SOME panicked phone calls,” says Rod Mason. “I looked at social media and thought: ‘Oh my God…’ But we embraced it. When you become a sketch on Saturday Night Live, you have to accept you’re part of the zeitgeist.” Mason is Vice President of Business Development at Zinc Group, the merchandise company responsible for the sandworm-shaped Dune 2 popcorn bucket that swept America and went mega-viral last year due to its uncanny resemblance to certain, erm, ‘adult’ products. (“I’m gonna lose my virginity to the Dune popcorn bucket,” went the SNL skit.) “You don’t choose to go viral,” Mason laughs. “It’s uncontrollable. But that bucket was the catalyst for what’s happening now.” What’s happening now is that — in the wake of that unintentionally titillating container — wacky…

“WE WANTED TO spark a bit of a conversation,” Philip Barantini tells Empire. He’s certainly succeeded. More than a bit. Adolescence, his four-part Netflix series with each episode filmed as one approximately hour-long take, has become a global cultural phenomenon, inspiring discussion about not only its extraordinary technique, but also its urgent subject matter. The story, about a 13-year-old boy accused of murdering a female peer, has even inspired a Labour MP to propose that it be screened in Parliament and schools, an idea backed by the Prime Minister. “What it’s done has just blown my mind,” adds the director, speaking to us from the set of Enola Holmes 3 a week after the show’s launch. “Like, I’m in Malta at the moment with most of the same crew, and…

1970 – ’87: SADDLING UP Living in the Southwestern United States during the ’70s, screenwriter John Fusco developed an interest in notorious gunslinger William Bonney, aka Billy The Kid. Researching for five months in Santa Fe, Fusco zeroed in on the Kid’s participation in the Lincoln County War, where he joined a deputised posse known as the Regulators. Director Christopher Cain committed to making the film just 16 pages into reading Fusco’s screenplay, the script trimming the Regulators from 11 to a more movie-friendly six. Now they just needed to find their sharpshooters… 1988: RIDING HIGH Having worked with him on That Was Then… This Is Now, Cain cast Emilio Estevez as Billy The Kid, then assembled a gang of ’80s hot shots to play the rest of the Regulators:…

IT’S BEEN A trajectory that has veered between triumph and terror. In late March, No Other Land co-director Hamdan Ballal, a Palestinian, was attacked by Israeli settlers, and then detained and later released by the Israeli military, on the West Bank of his home country. Just weeks earlier, a standing ovation had filled LA’s Dolby Theatre when the film — about the forcible displacement of Palestinians under Israeli occupation — scooped up this year’s Best Documentary Oscar. The four filmmakers behind it, two of whom are Palestinian (Basel Adra and Ballal), and two Israeli (Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor), addressed the applauding crowd with urgency in light of the ongoing crisis in Gaza. “There is a different path, a political solution without ethnic supremacy, with national rights for both of…

OUT NOW (PRIME VIDEO)/CERT TBC/108 MINS DIRECTOR Mimi Cave CAST Nicole Kidman, Gael García Bernal, Matthew Macfadyen, Jude Hill PLOT When Nancy Vandergroot (Kidman) suspects her husband (Macfadyen) is having an affair, she uncovers an even darker mystery. YOU’VE ALREADY SEEN this Nicole Kidman movie. She’s a housewife and loving mother. She cooks dinner every night and looks gorgeous doing it. But there’s something wrong with her seemingly comfortable life, whether it be scheming spouses, a sudden tragedy, or — in the case of The Stepford Wives — a town that wants to turn her into a robot tradwife. Despite the white picket fences and the picture-perfect nuclear family, there’s an inner turmoil that betrays the shiny veneer of all-American suburbia. She always feels one thing: suffocated. The deviation from…

OUT NOW/CERT 15/123 MINS DIRECTOR Barry Levinson  CAST Robert De Niro, Debra Messing, Cosmo Jarvis, Kathrine Narducci, Michael Rispoli PLOT Mob bosses Frank Costello (De Niro) and Vito Genovese (De Niro) vie for power in 1950s New York. IF THE DIGITAL de-ageing of the holy trinity of Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci in Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman was a bit distracting at times, get a load of double De Niro in Barry Levinson’s long-gestating crime thriller The Alto Knights. Demonstrating that when it comes to the greats you can never have too much of a good thing, De Niro plays both leading roles: that of don Frank Costello, on the verge of a quiet retirement, and his hot-headed childhood friend and drug baron Vito Genovese, with whom…

OUT 9 MAY/CERT TBC/99 MINS DIRECTOR Lorcan Finnegan  CAST Nicolas Cage, Julian McMahon, Nic Cassim, Miranda Tapsell, Alexander Bertrand, Justin Rosniak, Rahel Romahn PLOT A man (Cage) looking to buy a house in a seaside community comes into increasingly violent conflict with a territorial group of surfers. WE NEVER LEARN the name of Nicolas Cage’s character in The Surfer. (He is credited simply as ‘The Surfer’.) It might, then, be tempting to think that this film — which features yet another Cage character slowly descending into madness — is simply an example of the ‘Nicolas Cage Type’, of ‘Cage Rage’, of the kind of uniquely bizarre freakout that has for years provided ample fodder for meme-merchants and YouTube compilation editors. But this is not quite the Cage of bees and…

OUT NOW/CERT 15/116 MINS DIRECTOR David Ayer  CAST Jason Statham, Michael Peña, David Harbour, Noemí González, Jason Flemyng PLOT When his friend’s daughter is kidnapped, ex-Royal Marine Levon Cade (Statham) hunts down the kidnappers — soon embroiling himself in Chicago’s ugly criminal underground. A WORKING MAN may be the Jason Stathamiest film ever to Stath. With its man-on-amission, hunt-for-a-kidnapped-girl narrative, it borrows wholeheartedly from the likes of Commando and Taken, and effectively steals from John Wick in the “weapons sommelier” played by David Harbour. But this is first and foremost a Jason Statham film, boiled down to its essential ingredients — losing all flavour and substance in the process. Statham ostensibly plays a character called Levon Cade, but in a very real, more accurate sense, he plays a character called…

JAWS IS, OF COURSE, a Steven Spielberg movie adapted from a bestselling book about an animal running (well, swimming) amok and eating humans. So, when it comes to appraising the film’s screenplay, credited to Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb, there is only one choice: David Koepp, the screenwriter of Jurassic Park and therefore a man who knows what it takes to write a Steven Spielberg movie adapted from a bestselling book about animals running amok and eating humans. “It’s a superb script,” says Koepp. “It’s a miracle of structure, of character, of suspense. What’s most surprising about it is the way it was written. It’s not the way a screenplay should ever be written. But there’s the occasional exception — Jaws being one of them, Tootsie being another — where…

THOUGH THE MECHANICAL shark on the set of Jaws often refused to function, John Williams conjured a theme for it that worked like gangbusters. And while the primordial dun-duns he landed on to signal the great white’s presence may be so simple that Spielberg assumed his maestro was having a laugh when he first heard them, the genius driving Jaws’ score is no joke. Take that main theme, a bassy, two-note tuba ostinato rooted in the stabs of Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho and the orchestral drama of Prokofiev’s Scythian Suite. What strange alchemy allows this basic semitone to give Jaws’ shark such power? “What you have to understand is, because these two notes, E and F, are so close together, they sort of clash,” explains fêted composer — and John Williams…

“THERE IS A bit of the showman in him,” lays out the preliminary description in Carl Gottlieb’s Jaws screenplay, “as well as a bit of killer-whale.” It’s well said. Because if there’s a character in Jaws to rival the raw screen presence of its Carcharodon carcharias villain, it’s Robert Shaw’s Quint. A grizzled sea dog with a dark past and a flair for interrupting town-hall meetings in the most uncomfortable way possible, he steals scene after scene — hook, line and sinker. If Brody is the strait-laced hero, and Hooper is the plucky academic, then Quint is the wild card, a briny bastard with a death wish and a single obsession: catching and killing Amity’s bane. Shaw, who had previously played memorable villains in the likes of From Russia With…

Every performer’s career is destined to have that one doomed gig. Whether you’re an actor, a musician, a comedian, or an experimental avant-garde mime artist, the ignominy of performing to a tiny audience is like a rite of passage — something you must endure, if only for the anecdote. For the comedian, writer, actor and poet Tim Key, one particular evening lingers in the mind. “I once did a show in the Hen & Chickens pub in Islington, where there were two of us on stage, and two in the audience,” Key recalls, with a mordant laugh. “And then — we needed two volunteers [on stage].” He smiles. “Well, at that point, it’s real tree-falling-in-the-forest stuff.” Tom Basden, Key’s longtime comedic collaborator, chuckles heartily at hearing this story about his…

Craig Perry has death on his mind. The home office of the man who produced the American Pie series, and other notable movies, is tastefully furnished — posters for exploitation films Young Sinners, Reefer Madness and Death Race 2000 hang on the back wall. But right now, all he can see are deathtraps. “I have a library of bookshelves. I know that they’re not particularly attached well, because the drywall is 100 years old,” he says. “So all it takes is a little tremor and they’re going to be mopping me up. And I might get speared with [genre trophy] the Saturn Award, because those things are heavy.” He pauses, looking around to see where else death might lurk. “My threat matrix is constant,” he laughs. “I can’t walk into…

WHEN SCOTT BECK and Bryan Woods — the writing/directing duo known simply as Beck/Woods — wrote their new movie, the excellent thriller Heretic, they knew that it was likely to piss off a whole lot of people. Because, as the title suggests, it was a film tackling the very concept of religion, as two young Mormon missionaries (Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East) find themselves challenged, philosophically and physically, by a man called Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant), a sinister scholar who claims to have found the One True Religion. And when you tackle religion, you run the risk of offending somebody. But even they didn’t think they would annoy John Landis. “Less than 48 hours ago, we were lucky enough to sneak into the Masters Of Horror dinner that Mick Garris…