Total Film

This month we take a bite out of the latest vampire to hit screens in the shape of Nicolas Cage's unhinged Dracula, the diabolical boss of Nicholas Hoult's Renfield in a movie that promises to be a bloody romp. The enduring appeal of an exsanguinator is also celebrated in these pages (wherefore Edward Cullen?), as well as the fun and games offered by Shazam! Fury of the Gods, Dungeons & Dragons, Brandon Cronenberg's Infinity Pool (also red in tooth and claw), and Tetris. I sat down with Florence Pugh, Morgan Freeman and Zach Braff to talk loss of a different kind in their new indie, A Good Person. At 85, Freeman is still a vital force who enthuses about getting work done with the gusto of actors half his age, and…

CONTRIBUTING EDITOR PAUL BRADSHAW @P_BRADSHAW Nicholas Hoult geeked out about his own feature when we chatted: ‘Are we… maybe… getting on the cover?! I've never been on the front of Total Film before!’ DEPUTY EDITOR MATT MAYTUM @MATTMAYTUM I loved the brightly hued painting behind Mia Goth during our Zoom call.‘It's by a British artist called Alan Fears,’ she said.‘I feel inspired – like, “I could paint something like that.”’ NEWS EDITOR JORDAN FARLEY @JORDAN FARLEY Spoke to Louis Leterrier, director of FastX, for this issue and he described Jason Momoa as a ‘6ft toddler’. May be the most accurate description of him I've heard to date. CONTRIBUTING EDITOR LEILA LATIF @LEILA_LATIF At the Critics’ Circle awards I loved it when Charlotte Wells had Paul Mescal read out her speech and describe himself as ‘Academy Award nominee Paul Mescal’. REVIEWS EDITOR MATTHEW LEYLAND @TOTALFILM Like the movie itself, the…

@JORDANFARLEY It's like a mini-Avengers movie,” says returning director David F. Sandberg of Shazam! Fury of the Gods, the sequel to his 2019 hit Shazam! ‘That's how I saw it because there are so many characters. You have all these heroes, you have the villains, you have the monsters… It's a lot of movie packed into its runtime. And it's complicated. Just shooting and staging up to 11 characters in a scene… Where do you put everyone? It's really hard!’ Playing like Big-meets-Superman, the first Shazam! movie was, by superhero standards, an intimate, light-hearted affair, zapping the gloomy DCEU with a ray of joy. In it, 14-yearold foster kid Billy Batson (Asher Angel) is granted superpowers by an ancient wizard (Djimon Hounsou), and finds himself transformed into a ripped adult superhero (Zachary…

I like stories where you can see the fight in someone,’ said Phoebe Waller-Bridge in a Guardian Q&A. She wasn't being literal, obviously; Fleabag, which she wrote, exec-produced and starred in, was more about internal conflicts than dust-ups. But the London-born multi-hyphenate is proving adept at the action-thriller scrum, as her latest rumoured gig implies. As part of her renewed deal with Prime Video, says The Hollywood Reporter, Waller-Bridge is thought to be writing a Tomb Raider series. And if the idea sounds far removed from Waller-Bridge's previous work, it also reminds us that wrong-footing expectation is something she does exceptionally well. That much was obvious from TV's Fleabag, which sprung from its Edinburgh stage origins as a closeto-the-bone comedy of sex, dysfunction and metacommentary before becoming more searching. Likewise, her writing…

Prepare for lashings of nostalgia in the quiff-heavy prequel series Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies. Set four years before the events of the much-loved musical movie, the show's story follows four teenage misfits at Rydell High who join forces to form the original 50s girl gang, the Pink Ladies. It's been 45 years since John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John shimmied their way on to the big screen in Grease, but the television prequel is packed with nifty nods to its electrifying movie predecessor. There's high-school angst, summer lovin’ and T-Birds, as well as 30 original songs and cleverly choreographed musical numbers. Despite being a big fan of the 1978 movie (and the 1971 stage musical that came before it), the series’ showrunner, executive producer, writer and director Annabel Oakes was initially…

For a moment there it looked like Fast X was a car crash in the making when, just two days into production, veteran Fast filmmaker Justin Lin slammed on the brakes and abruptly exited the saga's penultimate instalment as director (he would, however, remain on the project as a producer). Airdropped in to replace Lin was Louis Leterrier, whose action chops (he helmed the first two Transporter films) and deep knowledge of the series won over actor/producer Vin Diesel, putting him in the unenviable position of having to direct one of the biggest films ever made with next to no time to prepare. ‘I had to change everything. I had to make it work,’ says Leterrier, who is surprisingly upbeat given that a few moments later he admits, ‘I don't sleep!…