Tabla de contenidos para December 2025 en Empire

PUT ON SOME acid-washed denim and grab your nearest Boglin — this issue, we’re going back to the ’80s. In the case of our epic cover story: 1987, and the small town of Hawkins, Indiana. This is when and where the final season of Netflix phenomenon Stranger Things will unfold, pitting its intrepid band of heroes against the forces of darkness one last time. Since launching in 2016, the show about a rift to another dimension known as the Upside Down has itself up-ended pop culture. It’s gotten Kate Bush charting again, spawned TikTok memes and a major stage play, and even inspired Robert Downey Jr to dress up as Hopper for Halloween. And it’s about to get bigger still. We sent Al Horner on his BMX to the show’s…

Watership Fucking Down! That film is pure traumatising nightmare fuel. @WILLCHICH. BSKY.SOCIAL Pinocchio. Lampwick turning into a donkey scared the bejesus out of me when I was little. It still freaks me out a bit now. I’m 52… @THATFILMGEEK. BSKY.SOCIAL The Empire Strikes Back. That nightmare vision in the middle was a lot when I was six. @CRAIGOXBROW. BSKY.SOCIAL Return To Oz, hands down. Saw it when I was five. Haunted me for MONTHS. @MOONJAM.COM Hey, you guys, it’s The Goonies, because Sloth scared the living daylights out of me as a child! @G-MAN07. BSKY.SOCIAL WATCH OUT FOR THE NEXT QUESTION VIA OUR BLUESKY ACCOUNT: @EMPIREMAGAZINE.BSKY.SOCIAL…

BRACE YOURSELF FOR one of the awards season’s heaviest hitters. Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet is an experience you need to be prepared for — so much so that the filmmaker has been leading festival audiences through meditative breathing exercises before screenings. Based on the novel by Maggie O’Farrell, the latest film from the Nomadland and Eternals director follows William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and his wife Agnes (Jessie Buckley) as their relationship fractures in the wake of an unbearable loss that inspires the playwright’s magnum opus. Cue the tears. Zhao speaks to Empire about her weepy epic. TO BE, OR NOT TO BE With the film taking place almost entirely from Agnes’ point of view, we first see her meet William, the pair hiding from her overbearing family as they quickly fall…

WHEN THE TRAILER for hauntedhouse movie Good Boy dropped this summer, internet searches for “Does the dog die?” soared by 2,000 per cent. That’s because every frame of the film either features or is shot from the point of view of Indy, an impossibly cute Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever whose keen eyes, ears and big, wet nose can sense sinister paranormal activity. One website that naturally benefitted from the search spike was DoesTheDogDie.com, launched in 2011 by John Whipple. “Oh yeah, it totally blew up my numbers,” says the Texan software developer, giving the sense that if he had a tail it would be wagging vigorously. “I’ve had tons of extra visitors. John Wick has the biggest numbers, but it’s over a long time. In terms of viral takeover,…

JULIA DUCOURNAU’S PROTAGONISTS, in 2016’s cannibalism drama Raw and 2021’s transhumanist shocker Titane, steadily but surely shake off the shackles of convention — as does the director. Her taboo-trampling films, acutely physical studies of transformation and emancipation, seem to be born kicking and screaming, Ducournau raging at the world. Her latest, Alpha, is a quieter, sadder study, but no less impassioned. See-sawing between the 1980s and ’90s, it examines the effects of an epidemic (AIDS is not namechecked but is clearly the inspiration) as it destroys lives, but more significantly exposes a sickness in society. After getting tattooed via a dirty needle at a party, Mélissa Boros’ 13-year-old Alpha quickly becomes an outcast, while her relationship with her mother (Golshifteh Farahani) reaches breaking point. “It’s a project that I’ve had…

MY VERY FIRST encounter with Robert Redford was not in The Sting or Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid. It was in the back pages of Blockbuster Video’s coming attractions magazine. There he was, gazing out of the poster for Sydney Pollack’s Havana, a four-of-hearts card in hand. It’s an indelible portrait. Quintessential, even. Gentle and flinty at the same time, acquiescing to the inevitable, yet completely in control. This was what a movie star could do. They could give you one look and tell you everything without giving away a thing. It was this same gaze that I attached to my understanding of independent film a year or two later, when my mother told me about the film festival in Utah that this same movie star had founded, which…

IDRIS ELBA (HEADS OF STATE/A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE) Elba is the most recent star to enter this particular political-performance pantheon, with his roles as Prime Minister and army veteran Sam Clarke in Ilya Naishuller’s Prime Video action-comedy Heads Of State, and as the unnamed US President in Kathryn Bigelow’s nuclear drama A House Of Dynamite. He’s also the only one to play both roles in the same year — that’s some real effective door-knocking. GARY OLDMAN (DARKEST HOUR/OPPENHEIMER) Oldman donned major prosthetics to play Winston Churchill in Joe Wright’s 2017 drama Darkest Hour, sitting in the make-up chair for over three hours each day. It paid off, though, with him winning the Oscar, BAFTA, Golden Globe and SAG award. His appearance as 33rd POTUS Harry Truman in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer…

CHRIS EVANS IS no stranger to multiverses. And so it’s fitting that in Romain Gavras’ Sacrifice he is — to a degree — playing an alternative version of himself. As Mike, Evans embodies a world-famous movie star. Except this guy has gone off the reservation, donning a toga and wielding a flamethrower at a red-carpet premiere, chastising the phoniness of Hollywood as he “burns it all down”. Oh, and he’s developing a bald spot. “There were definitely things to draw on from his point of view,” says Gavras about Evans playing a constantly scrutinised star. “We cranked the button to 11, the scope of the actor and him being confused by reality and what’s happening to him.” That confusion fuels Sacrifice’s premise, which sees Mike attend a “bullshit charity gala”…

OUT NOW/CERT 15/112 MINS DIRECTOR Kathryn Bigelow  CAST Rebecca Ferguson, Idris Elba, Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris, Anthony Ramos, Greta Lee, Tracy Letts PLOT The US military and government are blindsided by an incoming nuclear missile, launched by an unknown source. FROM THE LATE 1980s to the turn of the millennium, Kathryn Bigelow was making exhilarating, borderline-trashy cult genre flicks like Near Dark, Blue Steel, Strange Days and Point Break. Later, she was granted prestige via her war-zone thrillers The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, the former of which made her the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Director. But she’s been somewhat AWOL since the tepid response to her 2017 rogue-police drama Detroit, only directing a handful of short films over the past eight years. What a…

OUT NOW/CERT 12A/119 MINS DIRECTOR Joachim Rønning CAST Jared Leto, Greta Lee, Evan Peters, Jodie Turner-Smith, Hasan Minhaj, Arturo Castro, Gillian Anderson, Jeff Bridges PLOT A sophisticated AI program known as Ares (Leto) is brought into the real world — triggering a deadly fight over the future of the technology. TRON HAS ALWAYS been a bit of a gamble. The original 1982 Steven Lisberger-directed sci-fi, about computer programmers entering vast, gleaming software landscapes, was a huge risk, being one of the first films to make extensive use of CGI. Joseph Kosinski’s Tron: Legacy, the belated 2010 sequel, was almost as risky, among other things for its early use of de-ageing technology, and for playing with what Jeff Bridges’ Kevin Flynn described as “bio-digital jazz, man!” This third feature-length effort is…

OUT NOW (APPLE TV+)/EPISODES VIEWED 5 OF 5 DIRECTOR Rebecca Miller PARTICIPANTS Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, Daniel Day-Lewis, Brian De Palma, Thelma Schoonmaker PLOT After 27 feature films, legendary filmmaker Martin Scorsese sits down to reflect on his life, with collaborators and old friends weighing in. “EVERY MAN HAS to go through hell to reach his paradise.” Not our words, but the words of cigar-sucking maniac Max Cady in Cape Fear. And they apply, aptly, to the director of that 1991 thriller, as is proven in this phenomenal fivepart documentary, so kinetic and compelling that it could be mistaken itself for a Martin Scorsese Picture. Scorsese has — despite his current status as a pop-culture icon, part cuddly grandpa, part saint-like protector of cinema — been through…

SLOW HORSES: SEASON 5 TV “These six episodes are packed with action, dry wit and the odd burst of Jackson Lamb flatulence. It remains a lot of fun, one of the freshest dramas on TV, despite those farts. But this particular batch doesn’t quite hit the heights of previous ones.” NICK DE SEMLYEN THE STRANGERS: CHAPTER 2 FILM “The storytelling makes hardly a lick of sense. At once explaining too much and not enough, this middle segment of the trilogy fails to amp up the stranger danger. Perhaps the scariest thing is the end title: ‘To be continued…’” JAMIE GRAHAM WAYWARD TV “Come for the cult, stay for the teen drama. It may lack edge-of-your-seat thrills, but this show’s abundance of ideas and big heart make it a weekend binge…

Rian Johnson began hatching his latest murder plot in October 2022. He’d already concocted death by pineapple juice; morphine mix-ups; lethal poisonings. The itch to strike again was rising. So he and his partner-in-crime, Daniel Craig, each lit a cigar and started imagining their next killer collaboration. Something darker, more sinister. Spookier. With Biblical implications. And more than just ideas sparked. “We almost burned down the hotel we were at,” laughs Johnson. “We set the smoke alarm off.” Add “arson” to the docket. Thankfully, in Johnson’s world, plotting a murder only means cooking up a new Knives Out mystery; a fresh case for Craig’s genius detective Benoit Blanc, the Southern gent who sorts truth from fiction, right’uns from wrong’uns. As their second outing — the tech-bro-skewering Glass Onion — received…

NOAH HAWLEY IS no stranger to playing with other people’s toys. From his reimagining of the Coens’ Fargo into a quirky anthology series, to his acid-trip X-Men riff with Legion, Hawley has developed a talent for taking a beloved property and twisting it into something entirely new. While Alien: Earth started with an homage to Ridley Scott’s original seemingly ripped straight out of the ’70s, it soon coalesced into its own star beast entirely, as Hawley told a Peter Pan-inspired tale involving hubristic trillionaires, vengeful cyborgs, and a group of children in synthetic adult bodies, led by Sydney Chandler’s Wendy, who might be the most dangerous creations of them all. There have been more than a few awkward misfires in the Alien series, but Hawley’s precision-tooled series proved a sight…

JOHN NUGENT HUNG OUT WITH CLOONEY AND SANDLER IN ITALY “This was one of the most A-list hotel rooms I’ve ever been in. George and Adam were on great form when I met them at the Venice Film Festival, good-naturedly shooting the shit about their new film Jay Kelly. They didn’t seem to mind that I look like a teenage son with my two dads.” ROBERT ASCROFT PHOTOGRAPHED SIGOURNEY WEAVER “I was a little too young when Alien was released, but I saw it anyway. Sigourney Weaver’s strong, complex characters have made her both a film legend and a hero of mine. Shooting on the Avatar stages was remarkable, but working with her made it unforgettable. She was kind, warm and effortlessly cool.” ALEX GODFREY INTERVIEWED JOACHIM RØNNING AT OUR…

Nearly a decade ago, we celebrated Stranger Things just as it was exploding out of the Upside Down. As part of our Review Of The Year 2016, we set up a special shoot with breakout star Millie Bobby Brown, in the midst of her first whirlwind year in the spotlight. Then just 12 years old, Brown was already an old hat at showbusiness, having recently performed at the Emmys — an engagement that she shrugged off. “I’ve never been shy of big crowds,” she told us, also acknowledging that she had done several photoshoots already. A dab hand at dealing with journalists, the star refused to give up any future Stranger Things spoilers. “I don’t know,” she claimed. “Of course, I might know already — but then I’d have to…

“THIS KIND OF thing doesn’t normally happen to a kid like me.” The first line of Stephen Graham’s Emmy speech, as he won an award for his lead performance in Adolescence, articulates a feeling familiar to anyone from a working-class background with a dream of working in film and TV. It’s a certain kind of imposter syndrome that comes from moving into an industry filled with people with whom you have little common ground, whether that’s in regards to your upbringing, education, or simply your accent. It’s an inner voice that, no matter how successful you get, never quite stops whispering: “You don’t belong here.” This feeling doesn’t come from nowhere — in 2024, research by UK social-mobility charity The Sutton Trust showed that adults from working-class backgrounds are four…

SHE’S PLAYED A spider-woman (Madame Web), a pregnant nun (Immaculate), and a member of the Manson family (Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood). But with Christy, about the life of pioneering female boxer and domestic-abuse survivor Christy Martin, Sydney Sweeney is taking on her most transformative role yet. Here, she talks Empire through the stages of bringing Martin’s story to the screen. ROUND 1: HITTING THE GYM As well as watching Martin’s old fights, reading her memoir and spending time with her, Sweeney committed to matching her physicality. “I had three months of training and worked out every day,” she recalls. “An hour of weight training in the morning and night, and boxing for three to four hours. I felt so strong.” To really get in the zone, she took…

IF YOU THOUGHT choosing between “tu” and “vous” in French was a linguistic minefield, wait until you have to make small talk with a Predator. “The creatures have various words for ‘you’,” says Britton Watkins, the man who created the dreadlocked aliens’ language, Yautja. “If you’re talking to someone you don’t think much of, you use ‘wol’, which is not polite. But if it’s familiar, you’re speaking to your bro, it’s ‘kai’. And if you’re talking up to somebody you respect, you say ‘thau’. Once you lock into those paradigms, it’s a pretty easy language to learn.” Constructed languages (known as ‘conlangs’) have been a feature of sci-fi/fantasy film and TV for decades, from Star Trek’s Klingon to Game Of Thrones’ Dothraki. But 2025 has been something of a conlang…

AT THE HEART of Nancy Meyers’ festive favourite, 2006’s The Holiday, lies a cosy Cotswold cottage. Owned by Kate Winslet’s Iris but occupied by Cameron Diaz’s Amanda after a heartbreak-fuelled house-swap, the fire-warmed abode has earned its own fervent fanbase. Now, almost 20 years since the film’s release, staunch admirers can live out that English countryside fantasy for real. They just have to travel to North Georgia first. Here, Lucy Small, of home-design company State And Season, has recreated Casa Del Break-up from the ground up. The idea came to her when she clocked just how die-hard the film’s following still is after all these years. “There are people who have tried to lay out the plans online,” Small tells Empire. Of course, her home state is a considerable stone’s…

THE PAST INCARNATIONS Hedda Gabler, the destructive, unhappy lead character in the Henrik Ibsen play on which Nia DaCosta’s new film is based, has been called “the female Hamlet”: the role every serious actor longs to play. Faced with this complicated figure, Thompson immersed herself in adaptations. She went to archives in London and New York to watch every version she could find: films, filmed stage shows, performances in foreign languages, even dance interpretations. “I loved seeing what Cate Blanchett did, or Fiona Shaw. Regrettably, there wasn’t a recording of [Thompson’s co-star in the film] Nina Hoss playing Hedda in Berlin. But it was a gift.” However, the actor made a promise to herself that she would watch everything just once. “Eventually we thought, ‘You know what, we’re doing something…

BOTH SCARLETT JOHANSSON and June Squibb have an affinity with New York. Johansson was born there in the ’80s, and Squibb, who got her start in theatre, has been performing on Broadway since the late ’50s. It’s fitting, then, that they should come together for Eleanor The Great, the story of a 94-year-old woman’s new start in the Big Apple, which is Johansson’s directorial debut. Based on a screenplay by Tory Kamen, the comedy-drama sees Eleanor (Squibb) strike up a friendship with 19-year-old student Nina (Erin Kellyman) after losing her live-in companion and Holocaust survivor Bessie (Rita Zohar). With Nina having recently lost her mother, the pair find solace together in the city. Speaking with Empire, Squibb and Johansson talk about the forging of their own unique partnership. What first…

BEN TRAVIS IS THINKING ABOUT… THE UGLY STEPSISTER’S NAUSEATING FINAL ACT Over a week since I caught this lauded Norwegian body-horror Cinderella riff, I still feel ill. Hooray? One for Substance fans, the last reel is literally stomach-churning. Even thinking of the word “stomach-churning”… nope! Sick-bucket, please! HARRY STAINER IS THINKING ABOUT… DAN STEVENS’ VILLAINOUS VOCALS Goldfinger and Le Chiffre, watch out. From Eurovision to Swiped, Stevens’ love of globetrotting voices seems destined to lead him to Britain’s most notorious double-O, cat on his lap, ready to declare: “Bonjour, Monsieur Bond.” BETH WEBB IS THINKING ABOUT… A NIGHTMARISH SCREENING SETTING A reader recently told me of a screening of The Descent in an Icelandic cave. Surely this is a ‘Don’t go back into the house!’ situation for anyone into horror?…

OUT NOW (PRIME VIDEO)/CERT 15/128 MINS DIRECTOR Shane Black CAST Mark Wahlberg, LaKeith Stanfield, Rosa Salazar, Keegan-Michael Key, Chukwudi Iwuji, Nat Wolff, Thomas Jane, Tony Shalhoub PLOT When professional robber Parker (Wahlberg) is double-crossed, he plans revenge — and the biggest heist of his career. IT HAS BEEN seven years since Shane Black’s last film, the muddled misfire that was franchi-serevival-attempt The Predator. Play Dirty feels like course-correction. Yes, obviously, it’s set at Christmas time — good luck finding a film in his catalogue that isn’t — but there are other familiar hallmarks of the writer-director here, too: deadpan dialogue, dead bodies as punchlines, a hard-boiled throwback tone and a smoky score to boot. It’s nowhere near the high-water mark of the man who was once the world’s best-paid screenwriter…

OUT NOVEMBER 14/CERT TBC/132 MINS DIRECTOR Noah Baumbach CAST George Clooney, Adam Sandler, Laura Dern, Patrick Wilson PLOT An ageing movie star (Clooney) embarks on an impromptu journey across Europe in search of who he really is. IN THE MOST revealing scene in Jay Kelly, the handsome, salt-and-pepper-haired titular movie star (George Clooney) stands in the cramped toilet of a moving train, staring into a mirror. He states the names of actors like Cary Grant and Clark Gable aloud before reciting his own name with a different intonation each time, as if trying to unearth a performance as himself with every repetition. It relates directly to the film’s opening with a quote by Sylvia Plath: “It’s a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It’s much easier to be somebody…

OUT OCTOBER 31/CERT 15/118 MINS DIRECTOR Yorgos Lanthimos CAST Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis, Stavros Halkias, Alicia Silverstone PLOT Tech CEO Michelle Fuller (Stone) is kidnapped by conspiracy-theorist beekeeper Teddy (Plemons) because he thinks she’s an alien. IS THERE A director-actor partnership quite as creatively fertile as that of Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone? Over the past decade, the Greek filmmaker has steered his favourite actor through a right royal fracas (The Favourite), a fantastical feminist fable (Poor Things), a pitch-black triptych (Kinds Of Kindness), even a 16-minute experimental opera (2022’s Bleat). And back these oddball kindred spirits come, with the gripping and misanthropically funny Bugonia. Stone here plays Michelle Fuller, the girl-boss CEO of Auxolith Biosciences. Terrifyingly panther-like, and taking all the wrong lessons from Chappell Roan lyrics,…

OUT OCTOBER 31/CERT 15/112 MINS DIRECTOR David Mackenzie CAST Riz Ahmed, Lily James, Sam Worthington, Willa Fitzgerald PLOT After getting caught up in a corporate scandal, Sarah (James) contacts a fixer, Ash (Ahmed). In order to protect her, Ash is forced to break his own rules. IF THERE’S ONE thing clear from the off, it’s that David Mackenzie’s Relay has its sights firmly set on the paranoid thrillers of the ’70s. Following Sarah (Lily James), a corporate worker looking to expose the questionable practices at the bioengineering company where she works, the opening plunges straight into the world of whistleblowing, with visuals that bring to mind genre classics like The China Syndrome and The Conversation. The twist is that once Sarah finds herself entangled with the wrong people, her only…

Ross and Matt Duffer are deep inside the Upside Down. “Please God, no more spores!” begs Matt, as he and his brother — the creators of Stranger Things — contemplate the remaining items on their to-do list for the day. Dusk is drawing near as Empire meets the twins on a sweltering Friday afternoon inside their LA post-production HQ. Outside, traffic is building as people leave their offices and begin their commutes home — a city winding down for the weekend. But the Duffers wouldn’t know much about that. Sixty-eight days from now, volume one of the show’s fifth and final season will hit screens. In 103 days, its last-ever episode will air, drawing to an end nine years of inter-dimensional terror, telekinetic chaos and coming-of-age adventure in a town…

ON THE SURFACE, GEORGE CLOONEY AND ADAM SANDLER MAKE STRANGE BEDFELLOWS. One is an actor, writer and director, who moved past his ’90s-TV-heartthrob status to become one of Hollywood’s most recognisable leading men, an old-fashioned A-lister in the Cary Grant mould. The other is a comedy superstar, whose prolific film output since leaving Saturday Night Live has earned him billions in box office, a legion of loyal fans and a lucrative Netflix deal (with occasional stints working with serious dramatic directors like Paul Thomas Anderson and the Safdie brothers). One is known for suave sophistication; the other is known for the line, “He called the shit ‘poop’!” Not exactly alike, then. But in Jay Kelly, the latest film from writer-director Noah Baumbach (of Marriage Story and Frances Ha fame), they…

DEVOTEES OF 007 may recall You Only Live Twice, and the moment when Bond suavely attempts to explain the Japanese concept of ‘kiri-sute gomen’ to a deeply unimpressed Blofeld. “Spare me the Lafcadio Hearn,” the SPECTRE boss snaps. For most audiences, the literary allusion would have sailed straight over their heads — they were, perhaps, more interested in whether Kissy Suzuki had made it intact from Ian Fleming’s pages to the big screen. But for those in the know, it was a nod to a fascinating, if slightly marginal, figure in the literature of the uncanny. Lafcadio Hearn was a Greek-Irish journalist who, after stints in America and the West Indies, moved to Japan in 1890, reinvented himself as Yakumo Koizumi, and dedicated his life to chronicling the country’s folklore…

SAM NEILL IS many things — actor, wine expert, national treasure in at least three different countries — but he never considered that he’s something of a horror icon; a Scream King, if you will. “I’ve been in work for 50-something years,” he reflects. “Someone said I’ve made 90 movies. The odds are there’ll be some horror amongst it.” And yet, the Kiwi actor’s impact on horror, and vice versa, is undeniable. This Halloween, you could do a lot worse than programme a Neillathon of the third Omen film, The Final Conflict (1981), Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession (1981), Paul W.S. Anderson’s Event Horizon (1997), and John Carpenter’s In The Mouth Of Madness (1994), which this month gets the 4K treatment and is ostensibly the reason why Empire is Zooming with the…

LETTER OF THE MONTH MEN OF LETTERS I thought it was about time I wrote to you to acknowledge my awesome friend Paul, who has subscribed to your amazing magazine for over 20 years now. The twist? He subscribes in my name so that I get to read each sacred edition while it is still in minty-fresh condition. I then post the much-thumbed copy to him along with an old-fashioned hand-written letter, which has helped maintain our friendship since 1987. He is a top friend and worthy of a shout-out. IAN RUSSELL, VIA EMAIL Lovely stuff all round. Maybe we should consider offering hand-written letters as part of the Empire VIP package. For your heartwarming act of friendship, Ian, have a Picturehouse membership on us. And shout-out to Paul! Empire’s…

“A STAR IS digitised. You know what this means? We have stepped into a new dimension. Our ability to manufacture fraud now exceeds our ability to protect it.” This is a line from Al Pacino’s fictional director Viktor in the 2002 sci-fi satire S1m0ne. After his lead actor walks off a production, Viktor creates an AI replacement (played by Rachel Roberts), whose performance is so convincing that she becomes an Oscarwinning Hollywood sensation. Twenty-three years later, we have stepped into that new dimension. Or have we? At the Zurich Film Festival in September, actor-turnedproducer Eline Van der Velden introduced Tilly Norwood, whom she hailed as the first AI star. “We want Tilly to be the next Scarlett Johansson or Natalie Portman,” she said. Norwood was created by Xicoia, the “AI…

WHEN THE FIRST season of post-apocalyptic series Fallout landed on Prime Video in 2024, its impact was nuclear. Based on the cult video-game franchise — which sees a group of vastly different characters navigate a dystopian world 200 years after an atomic armageddon — the show earned 65 million viewers in its first 16 days, 16 Emmy nominations, and became Prime’s second-most-watched title in history. For executive producer Jonathan Nolan (who co-created Westworld), this success wasn’t a complete surprise. “It’s uniquely gonzo, ambitious, hilarious, dark, and there’s nothing quite like it in the gaming space,” he tells Empire. “Which is why we felt there would be nothing quite like it on TV.” Walton Goggins, who plays mutated outlaw the Ghoul, believes the show’s success is partly due to the timeliness…

SPIDER-PIG’S BIG COMEBACK As the breakout star of the original Simpsons Movie, Plopper the pig got his own superhero moment (and theme song!). Could we please see not only the return of Plopper’s alias Spider-Pig, but also multiversal iterations of the same character, à la No Way Home? Their collective trotters could take down any nemesis. BETH WEBB THE MILHOUSE MOVIE Milhouse Van Houten is inarguably the show’s best character — his mum says he’s cool, after all — and while there have been episodes centred around Bart’s bespectacled BFF, why not a whole film? If they could tempt original voice actor Pamela Hayden out of retirement, then everything would be coming up Milhouse. JOHN NUGENT A MONORAILAISSANCE Is it too much to hope that The Simpsons Movie 2 could…

IT’S THE ANIME juggernaut that turned Channing Tatum into a fanboy, the record-breaking blockbuster with a title as long as your arm and legions of fans the world over. It’s Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba — The Movie: Infinity Castle, the latest theatrical epic in the all-conquering Demon Slayer franchise, a multi-media sensation that has come to epitomise Japanese comics (manga) and animation (anime) on the world stage. Adored for its rich storytelling, relatable characters and lavishly violent action, Demon Slayer follows a young boy’s journey of revenge against the demons that killed his family in an alternate, fantasy-tinged spin on early 20th-century Japan. Infinity Castle continues the saga, with two-and-a-half hours of high emotion and intense action set-pieces set within the walls of the physics-defying, multi-dimensional titular fortress. Simply…

TO PARAPHRASE THE poet Philip Larkin, they fuck you up, your mum and, well, mostly your dad. As is the case in Sky’s dark and bawdy miniseries The Death Of Bunny Munro. Based on the novel by the musician and screenwriter Nick Cave, the ’00s-set show follows beauty salesman and Lothario Bunny (Matt Smith), who’s saddled with his sensitive nine-year-old son Bunny Junior (Rafael Mathé) after his wife dies by suicide. The pair embark on a chaotic road trip around Sussex, with sex-addict Bunny neglecting his son and indulging in all his vices, haunted by his guilt over his wife’s death and the trauma inflicted by his own father, Bunny Senior (David Threlfall). Oh, and there’s a serial killer on the loose to boot. “It’s about fatherhood and the failure…

OUT 7 NOV/CERT TBC/120 MINS DIRECTOR Ronan Day-Lewis  CAST Daniel Day-Lewis, Sean Bean, Samantha Morton, Samuel Bottomley, Safia Oakley-Green PLOT Former soldier Ray Stoker (Day-Lewis) lives in the woods, a hermit-like existence that is interrupted when his estranged brother Jem (Bean) arrives with a plea for help. FOR THE HORTICULTURALLY challenged, the anemone is a delicate plant that closes its petals as a storm approaches. For a story about withdrawing from the world and becoming emotionally bottled up, the flower-as-metaphor title is perhaps the most on-the-nose thing about Ronan Day-Lewis’ feature debut. Anemone is co-written with and starring his father Daniel in his first on-screen appearance since 2017’s Phantom Thread. It is sad, absurdist, brooding, tender and intense. What were you expecting? Broad toilet humour? The dark heart of the…

OUT NOW/CERT 15/150 MINS DIRECTOR Guillermo del Toro CAST Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Mia Goth, Christoph Waltz, Felix Kammerer, Charles Dance PLOT Mistreated and malcontent, a patchwork monster (Elordi) made up of ransacked body parts seeks revenge on its egotistical creator, Victor Frankenstein (Isaac). GUILLERMO DEL TORO’S been talking about it since his 1992 feature debut, Cronos. He’s been dreaming of it since 1971, when, aged seven, he first saw Boris Karloff shamble through James Whale’s 1931 masterpiece. And now he’s finally done it — adapted Mary Shelley’s incredibly influential 1818 Gothic novel about a scientist playing God (with hellish results) into his very own Frankenstein movie. Beginning in the Arctic, as the crew of a ship frozen in ice encounter Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) and the raging Creature (Jacob…

OUT NOVEMBER 14/CERT 15/119 MINS DIRECTOR Lynne Ramsay CAST Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson, Sissy Spacek, Nick Nolte, LaKeith Stanfield PLOT After moving to the countryside to start a family with husband Jackson (Pattinson), Grace (Lawrence) suffers from postpartum psychosis. THERE’S A FERAL ENERGY that courses through Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love. It’s there right from the film’s opening moments, when Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson’s young and oh-so-in-love couple Grace and Jackson crawl through tall grass like a pair of lions hunting for a vulnerable gazelle to chew on. In Ramsay’s explosive adaptation of the 2012 novel by Argentine writer Ariana Harwicz, these two characters are hungry. Hungry for love, hungry for sex — and when the couple move to his uncle’s rickety, remote house, they’re hungry for their lives…

Growing up is hard. Growing up with a broken barrier to protect, between our realm and one overspilling with Lovecraftian horrors? That’s even harder, as the young heroes of Stranger Things have found out across four (soon-to-be five) frantic seasons. At times, starring as those characters hasn’t been much easier. The day the show debuted on Netflix in July 2016, Millie Bobby Brown — then just 12 years old — was on a road trip with her family, driving from LA to Palm Springs. “I fell asleep on the car ride, and when I fell asleep I had 25 followers [on Instagram]. When I woke up, I had closer to a million,” the actor behind Eleven laughs. “When I left LA, no-one knew who I was. When we arrived, I…

1 THE LOST BUS OUT NOW/APPLE TV+ After a couple of missed stops (The News Of The World, 22 July), Paul Greengrass is back on board with this intense true-life tale about a school bus trying desperately to punch through a Californian wildfire. The last hour, in particular, as a sweaty, determined Matthew McConaughey drives through peril after peril, is Greengrass at his best. 2 A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE OCTOBER 27/BLU-RAY The first (and, in my opinion, best) pairing of director David Cronenberg and star Viggo Mortensen is a modern Western that sees the latter as a family man whose possibly dark past comes crashing into his idyllic life. A nasty piece of pulp, also notable for great guest turns from Ed Harris and William Hurt, who got Oscar-nominated for a third-act…

IN 1974, AMICUS Productions was Hammer’s rival in low-budget British horror, known for anthology films like Dr. Terror’s House Of Horrors (Christopher Lee pestered by a crawling hand; Donald Sutherland marries a vampire) and Tales From The Crypt (Joan Collins stalked by Santa; Sir Ralph Richardson as the Crypt Keeper). Producer Milton Subotsky had ambitions to move into fantasy adventures drawn from pulps, comics and 1940s Saturday matinée serials. He was so far ahead of his time, he wanted to make Spider-Man in the 1960s, with Bob Dylan as Peter Parker. Subotsky secured rights to novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of Tarzan, and hired Kevin Connor — fresh from the excellent anthology From Beyond The Grave — to direct and science-fiction writer Michael Moorcock to adapt (and update) the…

THE END CREDITS of All Of You — the romantic drama in which Brett Goldstein and Imogen Poots find that they may or may not be each other’s soulmate — throw up one of the most interesting Special Thanks we’ve seen since this column began. Who, or what, we wondered, are The Coastal Hotel Artists? We turned to the film’s co-writer and director, William Bridges, for answers. “I don’t know,” admits Bridges, with a faintly embarrassed laugh. “But we didn’t actually shoot in a coastal hotel. We used a house that we turned into a posh getaway place, and maybe there was a group of artists that did the paintings on the walls.” Thankfully, Bridges put us in touch with the film’s production designer, Luke Moran-Morris, who solved the mystery…