Magazine re-design by Yunjae Woo

EMPIRE MAY 2018

FEATURES

PREVIEW

13 Three Billboards

03 X-Men: Dark Phoenix

33 Maurice

22 Molly's Game

57 Interview: Greta Gerwig

27 How much is a pint of milk?

Furiously Profane Frances McDormand Rage Against the Police.

One of the great queer romances.

Greta Gerwig talks about her debut film and filmmaking process with her team.

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Sophie Turner explains Jean Gray.

Aron Sorkin tells what he learnt from his directorial debut.

We asked Dan Stevens.

CONTENTS

MAY ON.SCREEN 37 The Disaster Artist

A lousy tribute to the greatest bad movie of our time.

42 Early Man

Back-of-the-net triumph from Aardman.

45 I, Tonya

A condescending bio-pic of Tonya Harding.

REVIEW

52 Dark

53 Wonderstruck

A classy, knotty, time-travelling whodunnit for TV.

A tender study of three children yearning to find their place.

60 Lady Bird

A hilarious love letter to teenagers and their mothers.

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PREVIEW

The New Mutant Directed by

Josh Boone

THE NEW MUTANTS — the 11th

X-Men film — isn’t exactly a superhero movie. In fact, it would be better described as a coming-of-age horror that just happens to have superheroes in it. And not your average superheroes, either. So, who are they? Who are these hormonal superbeings? Well, cooped up inside an asylum-like institution, it’s centred around Native American mutant Mirage (newcomer Blu Hunt), whose psychic abilities allow her to create hyper-real hallucinations of her enemies’ darkest fears. In the ‘Demon Bear' run of comics on which the film is based, Mirage’s dreams are haunted by an evil force that takes the form of, you’ve guessed it, a demonic bear. Mirage’s cohorts in the movie include Russian sorceress Magik (Anya

Starring

Anya Taylor-Joy, Charlie Heaton, Maisie Williams

Release date

APR.

Taylor-Joy), and Scottish shape-shifter Wolfsbane (Maisie Williams), who is struggling to align her fundamentalist Christian upbringing with her ability to transform into a wolf. The gang is completed by Brazilian rich kid Sunspot (Henry Zaga), who can harness solar power, and Kentuckian coal miner’s son-cum-human jet plane, Cannonball (Stranger Things’ Charlie Heaton). You’ll find no Spandex here: just young, confused mutants coming to terms with their powers. Director Josh Boone made his name with young adult blockbuster The Fault In Our Stars, and has signed on to adapt Stephen King’s The Talisman, so, clearly, he has a taste for both teen angst and dark fantasy. Handy, as The New Mutants looks to contain lashings of both.

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SPACED FEATURED A character

called Tyres. Hot Fuzz saw Simon Pegg pursue Timothy Dalton in a police cruiser. So perhaps it was inevitable that sooner or later Edgar Wright would make a full-on car movie. Baby Driver is that car movie, and it will be full-on. “The chase in Hot Fuzz was pretty small, and there’s a tiny bit of car stuff in The World's End as well,” reflects the director. “But this is something else.” The tale of hearing-impaired getaway driver Baby (Ansel Elgort), who gets caught up in a series of high-stakes heists, Baby Driver is the first film written solo by Wright. Expect something grittier than your average Cornetto. “I saw that it’s listed on Box Office Mojo as an action-comedy,” says Wright. "And I was thinking, ‘That’s not entirely right.'

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Obviously it has bits of humour and stylistic flourishes, but it’s closer to a crime film. If it was released ten years ago, it would be in the 'Action-Thriller' section in Blockbuster." As prep-work, Wright consulted a veteran of 23 bank robberies, learning about state-of-the-art tech such as "privacy goggles”, which blur your face on CCTV. Then, script complete, he assembled a crackerjack cast. Kevin Spacey plays crime boss Doc. Lily James is Baby’s waitress girlfriend, Deborah. And Jamie Foxx, Jon Hamm and Jon Bernthal are assorted lowlifes with whom the young wheelman finds himself sharing car-space. Many of the actors performed their own stunts. "There are a few shots where Jon and Ansel have done their

PREVIEW

All you need is one killer track.

Baby Driver Directed by Edgar Wright

Starring Ansel Elgort, Kevin Spacey, Lily James, Eiza González, Jon Hamm, Jamie Foxx

Release date SEPT. 1233

own driving,” Wright reveals. "There are some things the insurance company wouldn't let them do, but there have been chases and shoot-outs which the cast have been right in the thick of. It was surreal to watch Jon and Jamie and [legendary 76-year-old songwriter] Paul Williams in a gunfight.” As ever with Wright’s oeuvre, tunes play a major part too. The movie will be powered by Baby’s playlists, which he listens to as he drives. “The big thing for me when I cast Ansel was the fact he's so into music,” the director says. “He can play piano and sing and dance.” Just as well Blockbuster isn't around anymore, because ‘Action-Thriller-RomanceCrime-Comedy-Musical ’ is a lot to fit on one sign.

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Tomb Raidar Directed by

Roar Uthaug

TOMB RAIDER IS a big deal for

Norwegian director Roar Uthaug. He’s made features before, but only in his native tongue—this Lara Croft reboot, starring Alicia Vikander, is his first big studio picture. And if that didn’t invite enough pressure, he also has to contend with the issue that there’s never been a good film based on a game. But he thinks he knows how to crack it. “It’s about making the character the focus,” he says. “It’s about what she experiences, and not just action for action’s sake. I love how they made Lara Croft vulnerable in the

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Starring

Alicia Vikander, Dominic West, Walton Goggins

game, and that’s something we’re bringing to the movie. But there’s lots of great stuff in the game that’s inspired us—the authenticity and the grittiness. That’s something you haven’t seen in a Tomb Raider movie before.” “The game” is the 2013 Tomb Raider, itself a reboot, which showed Lara’s first adventure where she learned the tombraiding skills with which we’re all so familiar. Shipwrecked on an island off the coast of Japan, she’s attacked by the island’s inhabitants and discovers there are supernatural goings-on.

Release date

MAR.

It’s that story that’s the jumping-off point for this film. Filming started last January in South Africa, with the cast and crew spending months in and around the picturesque Cape Winelands during the southern hemisphere’s summer. By the time Empire visits the set, they’ve relocated. To Watford. And it’s pouring with rain. But—and thank goodness for small mercies — they’re shooting inside today. As a testament to the more story-first vision of this version, the scene we witness is refreshingly down-to-earth, with Lara enjoying music in her east London

Breaking the curse

Bright Directed by Taika Waititi

Starring Will Smith, Joel Edgerton, Lucy Fry

Release date DEC.

BRIGHT IS THE KIND of movie Hollywood doesn't

apartment. Which doesn’t mean to say there’s no action in the film. “All the resources are nice. It means you can dream bigger. We had a big boat on a giant gimble, with rain towers, wind machines and water cannons. We also shot at the Olympic rafting course in Lea Valley. We threw Alicia down the course with her hands tied. But she never complains. You’re used to seeing her in costume dramas, but she can fight. She’s just ferocious.” Strong characters, great action and a well-cast star: three good reasons to be excited. Curse? What curse?

make anymore — um, actually, Hollywood never made a violent R movie about tough LAPD cops fighting elves and orcs. "It was just so different." is how star Will Smith describes the Mas Landis (Chronicle) script, set in a Los Angeles where humans coexist with fantasy creatures. When human policeman Smith is paired up with Joel Edgerton's orc rookie, buddy-cop tensions run high — and that's before a routine patrol leads to a mysterious young elf (Lucy Fry) and a magic wand. "The use of a magic wand is on the level of a dirty nuke," Smith explains. Bright reunites Smith with Suicide Squad director David Ayer, a maestro of the L.A. crime milieu. It's also a significant play by Netflix, which ponied up a reported $90 milliion-plus. "If this were a studio movie, it'd be a cheesy PG-13," Ayer says. "It wouldn't have any edge. I wanted something with some realism." Bright filmed at night in downtown Los Angeles, so despite the fantastical universe, expect gritty thrills. Such as? "You can kill someone with a foosball table," Smith says. Holllywood never did that, either.

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The Nice Guys Directed by

Shane Black

IN THIS BLOODY, violent throwback

action-comedy, Ryan Gosling plays Holland March, a 1970s Los Angeles PI who teams up with hardcore muscle- forhire Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe) to find a missing girl. Put politely, Holland is the charmer to Jackson’s tough guy — the proverbial good cop to Jackson’s bad cop. But Gosling isn’t being polite about his character. “He’s a schmuck,” he says. “All I would hear from behind the monitor was ‘What a schmuck!’ It was almost like they stopped saying ‘Cut!’ and just said, ‘God, what a schmuck!”’ Writer-director Shane Black (Iron Man 3) knows what that feels like. His career skyrocketed after writing 1987’s Lethal Weapon in his early 20s, but when The Long Kiss Goodnight — for which he’d been paid $4 million to write the script — tanked at the box office in 1996, he became persona non grata in Hollywood. In 2001, when he and his writing partner Anthony Bagarozzi came up with the idea for The Nice Guys, Black couldn’t get a green light. “I was drifting off the map at a very alarming rate,” he says. Over the next decade, he pitched Guys first as

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Starring

Russell Crowe, Ryan Gosling, Angourie Rice

a contemporary film, then as a TV show, and then — after a Chinatown-inspired rewrite — as a ’70s movie. Still, it wasn’t until his directorial debut in 2005, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, that his luck started to change. That film starred Robert Downey Jr., which eventually led to Black landing at the helm of Iron Man 3, which grossed $1.2 billion worldwide in 2013. Soon afterward, Lethal Weapon producer Joel Silver persuaded Black to send out The Nice Guys script again, and this time Crowe and Gosling showed interest. But it wasn’t Black’s renewed bankability that got Gosling’s attention. He had wanted to work with Silver and Black for years. “Joel and Shane just creeped their way into my subconsciousness at a very young age,” says Gosling. “Between Joel being the screaming director in Who Framed Roger Rabbit or Shane writing The Monster Squad, they made a big impression in my early film life.” With his two stars on board, Black cast The Leftovers beauty Margaret Qualley as the missing girl, Crowe’s L.A. Confidential costar Kim Basinger as her

Release date

JUNE.

mother, and Matt Bomer as a hitman. When Crowe and Bomer came to film a physical scene, Crowe calmed Bomer's nerves by making fun of his performance in a certain film. “I had to strangle him at one point,” says Crowe. “I could tell Matt was a little bit tense, and I’m putting my hands around his throat, and just that millisecond before Shane called ‘Action!’ I just said, ‘This one’s for Magic Mike!' It made him relax, and we got on with the rest of the day's work.” Gosling and Crowe established an easy rapport early in the shoot, which took place in L.A. and Atlanta. “We were doing a scene where I’m in a bathroom stall, and I was trying to get the door to keep flying open every time I closed it,” Gosling says. “I had to deal with my pants around my ankles, a gun, a cigarette, a magazine. I was trying to keep all those things spinning, and I heard this chuckling. I pulled the bathroom door back, and it was Russell laughing at me. I knew it was going to be fun because we were finding the same things funny." Apparently, nice guys do finish first after all.

PREVIEW

The Legend Of Tarzan Directed by David Yates Starring Alexander Skarsgård, Margot Robbie, Christoph Waltz Release date JULY. 01

POTTER MOVIES, director David

Yates knew his next project had to be something unexpected. “I wanted to go into the dark and go somewhere I hadn’t been for a very long time,” he says. To his surprise, he found that sense of originality and epic adventure in a story that’s more than a century old: the tale of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes. Instead of focusing on the famed jungle

dweller’s origin story, Yates’ version picks up in England, where the former Tarzan (Alexander Skarsgård) has married Jane (Margot Robbie) and has settled into aristocratic privilege as Lord Greystoke. But when he’s lured back to the Congo as a trade emissary, he’s drawn into a colonialist conspiracy that threatens both his new life and his old home. Skarsgård spent months

training to build up muscle and working with a choreographer to show Tarzan’s transformation from staunch, upperclass Englishman to vine-swinging wild man. “It’s something that I think we all deal with in modern-day society: that duality, that dichotomy of human versus beast,” Skarsgird says. Welcome to the jungle indeed.

Moana Directed by Ron Clements, John Musker Starring Auli'i Cravalho, Dwayne Johnson, Rachel House Release date NOV. 23

THE DISNEY directors behind

Aladdin and Hercules are diving back into animation with a new story based on a cultural legend—although this one spends far more time on the open sea. Moana tracks a young girl (Auli’i Cravalho) on a quest to discover her ancestry in the South Pacific, but the scenestealer is Dwayne Johnson’s demigod Maui, who’s based on Polynesian mythology. "This guy’s a

bigger bigger-than-life character," says John Musker, who directs with collaborator Ron Clements (the duo’s credits also include The Little Mermaid). “He’s a shape-shifter and trickster, he’s covered in tattoos—all these things, in animation, would be so much fun, and yet I had never heard of him.” The filmmakers got wise to a modern-day mythic figure, too: Lin-Manuel Miranda, the Hamilton writer who joined the

movie’s composing team. “We pitched to Lin before we knew anything about Hamilton, but wow, if we had seen it...” muses Clements. Musker adds, "His enthusiasm and connection to this was all there when we invited him in. He had that Disney vocabulary already.” Considering Miranda cites Mermaid as one of his creative inspirations, we can guess where he learned the language.

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FRANCES MCDORMAND’S CRY FOR JUSTICE AS TITLES GO, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri doesn’t sound like a movie. It sounds like a photograph. There’s a Walker Evans image, taken in 1936, called “Houses and Billboards in Atlanta,” and I like to think that Evans would have turned his lens upon the Ebbing billboards, too. They stand in a misty meadow, with an empty road running beside them and nothing else around. The advertisements that they once bore have peeled away, leaving only scraps and broken slogans (“of your life”), of the melancholy kind that Evans loved. The writer and director of the film, Martin McDonagh, is right to accord such prominence to the billboards; they get the movie going, and thereby display its wares — bereavement, rage, small-town venom, and the strange spoors that you find yourself tracking when you have to hunt down the truth. The main hunter is Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand), an Ebbing resident who runs a gift shop. She takes the step of renting the billboards and having three messages posted on them, against a blood-red background: “raped while dying”; “and still no arrests”; “how come, chief willoughby?” The victim was Mildred’s teen-age daughter, Angela (Kathryn Newton), who died less than a year earlier. Her body was set alight, and you can still see the scorched grass where she lay. The person whom Mildred holds responsible — not for the crime but for failing to solve it — is Willoughby (Woody Harrelson), the local sheriff. On the basis of the billboards, we expect him to be a slimeball or a slacker, but no. As played by Harrelson at his homeliest, he’s a decent man and an industrious cop, and, in this case, he’s taken some necessary steps. DNA matches have been sought, but without success. That’s not good enough for Mildred, whose idea of necessity goes a little further. “Pull blood from every man in the country,” she says. All our sympathies are with Mildred, and we prepare to join her in the fight for justice, but Three Billboards is not that kind of movie. No music soars in tune with her righteous quest. McDonagh’s ear is cocked, instead, for the noise of human dissonance, and never is the clash more jarring than when Willoughby explains to Mildred that he’s dying of cancer, and dying fast. His hope, evidently, is that she might rethink the billboards, or remove them. Mildred doesn’t budge. “They wouldn’t be so effective after you croak, right?” she says. I’ve

seen the movie twice, and each time I’ve felt the people around me rear back at that line, with a nervous gasp, suddenly forced to adjust their view of this woman, and to wonder if they should curb, or even withdraw, their pity. Does the ache for revenge surpass more tender emotions, or has she stepped too far beyond the decencies of grief? If so, how far is too far? These questions would scarcely plague us were it not for McDormand. Not since Fargo (1996) has she found a character of such fibre. She doesn’t pitch it to us, still less try to make it palatable; she seems to state Mildred, presenting her as a given fact, like someone unrolling a map. If her demand for the blood of every guy in America is unreasonable, so what? A parent from whom a child has been torn may no longer feel the need to comply with the powers of reason that constrain society and insure its peace. Hence, not just the rarity of Mildred’s smile but also the warring outfit — overalls and a spotted bandanna — that makes her look like a distant relation of Rambo and which she wears on most occasions, even at dinner with James (Peter Dinklage), a friend who’s done her a favor. She will not rest. Hers is the battle of all mothers. As commanding as McDormand is, the film does not lie in her sole possession. We meet her ex, Charlie (John Hawkes), a mean and wiry type, who’s dating a much younger woman; they happen to be dining in the same restaurant as James and Mildred, and she approaches Charlie’s table with a bottle of wine, bearing it as a gift yet swinging it like a club. Then, there is Angela’s brother, Robbie (Lucas Hedges), truculent and spiky, who is more exasperated than stirred by his mother’s campaigning wrath. The sight of Hedges cannot help but remind you of his fine performance as another youth in mourning, in last year’s Manchester by the Sea. He had more dramatic space in that movie, but its method was very different; rather than plowing ahead in the pursuit of facts, it stayed put and scraped away at unhappiness, twitching with flashbacks as if they were bad dreams. Three Billboards, in contrast, has only a single flashback, though it fells you utterly: a foolish family rumpus, with Mildred refusing to let Angela borrow the car and Angela saying, fine, she’ll walk, and shouting, “I hope I get raped on the way.” God help them all. >

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“I wanted to write a very strong female lead because my other two films [didn’t have that] at all. Her character popped out the moment I decided that it was a mother in my story and, to a degree, the film started writing itself after that.” -Martin McDonagh

What is most surprising about McDonagh’s film is how far it travels. Apart from a few scenes beside the billboards, or up at Mildred’s house, which overlooks them, we don’t stray much outside Ebbing. Nonetheless, there are inward journeys in progress — moral migrations that carry the characters, almost despite themselves, away from where they began. Take Red Welby (Caleb Landry Jones), the pallid creep in charge of the town’s advertising agency, who is first seen at his desk, reading Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find. Our last view of him shows him in pain, offering succor to a bandaged figure whose sufferings are, if anything, more acute than his. As for Dixon (Sam Rockwell), the in-house racist at the Ebbing Police Department, where to start? He’s a bully, schooled in abuse by his gravel-voiced mother (Sandy Martin), and dumb to boot. “How’s it all going in the nigger-torturing business, Dixon?” Mildred asks. He swiftly corrects her. “That’s the person-ofcolor-torturing business these days,” he replies. In a remarkable sequence, apparently shot in one take, Dixon enters a building, barrels upstairs, grabs hold of Red, and tosses him out the window. Passing citizens gaze in stupefaction, and so do we, and it wasn’t until the second viewing that I began to see what is fuelling Dixon’s frenzy. Sure, he’s got a grudge against Red, but there’s more; a friend of Dixon’s, the only person who spotted potential in him, has just died. In short, Dixon has joined the movie’s lamentation gang, headed by Mildred, and this is his choleric way of coping. Eventually, even he sees the light — or, at any rate, squints at the thought of wrongs being rectified. The turning point comes when he is burned in a fire, although, unlike Angela, he survives. The film may feature a diatribe against the Catholic Church, issued by Mildred to a priest who deplores her billboards (she fears that “there ain’t no God and the whole world’s empty and it doesn’t matter what we do to each other”), but McDonagh is not averse to purgatorial flames, from which a soul, chastened and purified, can emerge. All this asks a lot of Sam Rockwell, but he thrives here as he has seldom done before — not even in Moon (2009), where he had the screen to himself. His usual persona is that of the frowning goofball, at once puerile and intense, and Three Billboards is the first film to explore that tricky compound.

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Look at Dixon, standing in the police station and listening to abba’s “Chiquitita” — a sublimely ill-judged choice — on his headphones. When Mildred marches into the place and shouts, “Hey, fuckhead!,” he immediately answers, “What?” It’s difficult to imagine how Dixon could ever grow up, let alone grow wise, yet something in the fuckhead strives to become other than what he was. A good man is hard to find, but not impossible. Where Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri falls short, though not woundingly so, is inside Ebbing. You don’t feel that you know it as well as you knew Manchester by the Sea, for instance. The action shifts between Mildred’s home, Red’s office, the bar, and so on, as if from one stage set to the next, and the hum of other lives, around the central crisis, stays fairly low. Luckily, that crisis is compelling. We stick with these flawed and quarrelsome people, like Mildred and Dixon, because they alone can lay the memory of Angela to rest, and also because, would you believe, they are kind of fun to watch. McDonagh, who began as a playwright, made his name as a movie director with In Bruges (2008), which spat with nasty laughs. The comedy here is less militant, not straining to intimidate but arising from a more tolerant sense that most folks, most of the time, mess up. Their speech betrays a basic puzzlement; often, what they deliver are not lines so much as spurts of clueless yammering—“How come? What? What?” It seems only fitting, then, that pure chance, rather than sleuthing or spadework, should lead to a breakthrough in the murder investigation; as Willoughby says, you only get a break, long after a case has gone cold, when you hear someone bragging in a bar. So it is that Mildred, at last, gets out of town. She goes in hope, and in search of a promising lead, leaving those damned billboards behind.

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Queen Of Katwe Directed by

Mira Nair

FILMMAKER MIRA NAIR calls

Queen Of Katwe “the first Disney movie made in Africa not to feature any animals — except perhaps the occasional chicken.” Nor does the film include princesses, though it does have plenty of kings and queens. Little wooden ones. It’s the story of Phiona Mutesi, a girl from a Ugandan slum who one day wandered into a chess club mostly, as Nair puts it, “because they were offering free porridge", and discovered a gift for the game that would bring her international fame and change her life. The Indian-American Nair. who has lived in Uganda for years (her husband is a Ugandan academic), was attracted to

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Starring

Madina Nalwanga, David Oyelowo, Lupita Nyong'o

the project for any number of reasons. “If we don’t tell our stories, no-one else will,” she says. “I loved that it was about a girl and that it shows us that genius is everywhere, but that you have to be open to seeing it and nourishing it into being.” Nair’scast includes newcomer Madina Nalwanga as Phiona, who was discovered in a dance troupe, and Lupita Nyong’o. PlayingPhiona’s mother Harriet, this will be Nyong’o’s first onscreen appearance since winning her Oscar for 12 Years A Slave, having only lent her voice to some pixels in Star Wars and The Jungle Book. Though it’s the first time Nyong’o and Nair have collaborated on film, it’s not the first time they’ve worked

Release date

SEPT.

together. “She used to be my assistant!” laughs Nair. “She was an intern in my production company in New York, when I was making The Namesake. To see everything that has happened to her in just a few years, it’s wonderful... I wrote the role for her, and she’s fabulous." But Nyong’o’s triumphant rise has nothing on Phiona’s own. “Phiona’s storytells us that it’s not only possible for white people to triumph against all odds, but also that it takes a village to make a winner. If it weren’t for Coach Katende [David Oyelowo] showing her how to play chess and harnessing her ability, which far exceeded his own, her story would be very different.”

PREVIEW

Thor: Ragnarok Directed by Taika Waititi Starring Chris Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston, Cate Blanchett Release date OCT. 2

NOTE TO SUPERHEROES: If you're

tasked with saving the universe, it helps to show up with friends. It's a lesson that Chris Hemsworth's Thor learned from being a member of the Avengers, and he puts that strategy to use in this climactic moment from his third standalone adventure. With the assisiance of Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson), and Loki (Tom Hiddleston), Hemsworth's God of Thunder is attempting to stop Hela the Goddess of Death (Cate Blanchttt) from destroying his homeland Asgard (and the galaxy). The battle scene as a whole took more than a month to shoot. "You hear Thor in the trailer talking about putting together a team like the old days, and this is sort

of the culmination of that statement," Hemsworth says. "Their backs are against the wall and something pretty drastic needs to occur to change the tide at this point. It's a classic heroic lineup." In many ways, though, Ragnarok is not your traditional Thor flick. For one, the filmmakers chose to do away with the hero's signature look by chopping his long mane and pulverizing his trusty hammer. "When I didn't have the wig on, I instantly felt like I could move and speak and react differently" Hemsworth says. "Once we aesthetically stripped a lot of that away, it allowed the whole thing to take on a different attitude. It lelt like a completely different character, and that was hugely liberating

and freeing as an actor because I had become a bit bored with myself." In addition, director Taika Waititi (Hunt for the wilderpeople) imbued the threequel with a bright, giddy tone — a marked shift after Thor's 2013 installment, The Dark World. "The look is inspired a helluva lot by Jack Kirby and his art," Waititi says. "I loved the kind of cosmic trippy vibe of the Thor comics. I've often said if Freddie Mercury were alive, I would have asked Queen to do the soundtrack. The Movie just has that feel: It's a cool, bold, colorful cosmic adventure." Sounds as if Thor — like any good diva with a new 'do — has gotten his groove back.

Woodshock

Permanent

Happy End

SEPT. 22

DEC. 15

DEC. 22

KIRSTEN DUNST

AN ADOLESCENT girl

AMOUR filmmaker Michael Haneke reteams with Isabelle Huppert (The Piano Teacher) in this enigmatic family drama.

plays a woman under the influence of a dangerous drug in this eerie debut from the Mulleavy sisters.

struggles to fit in at her new school shile sporting a horrendous haircut in this '80s-set comedy.

EMPIRE

A L S O P L A Y I N G American Made SEPT. 29

EXPLOSIONS AND punchy one-liners abound

in American Made, but Doug Liman's reunion with his Edge of Tomorrow star isn't typical Tom Cruise action fare. "I love that there's the 'Tom Cruise movie' label, because it gave me something to work against," Liman says, noting his desire to cast he star as antihero Barry Seal, the real-life pilot whose flying skills (and greed) prompted him to doubledip as a drug runner for the Medllín cartel and an informant for the CIA. "Barry's the Federal Express of the underworld," Liman says. The need for speed just got a whole new meaning.

Downsizing DEC. 22

DESPITE a significant budget, mighty stars, and a

script over a decade in the making, Alexander Payne's ambitious dramedy features his tiniest characters to date: In an overpopulated world, scientists shrink humans to pocket size. Its satirical tone touches on issues of immigration and the environment, though Payne hesitates to call Downsizing political. "It takes something inherently absurd, but tells it with utter earnestness," he says, likening the sci-fi concept to Black Mirror by way of Robert Altman.

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Molly's Game AARON SORKIN SAYS he’s “never thought of

being a screenwriter as a stepping stone to being a director”. He had considered directing The Social Network, but happily handed it over to David Fincher. When it came to Molly’s Game, though, he felt differently. Adapted from the memoirs of Molly Bloom (played by Jessica Chastain), who went from being a Hollywood PA to running high-stakes poker games that got her mixed up with the Russian Mafia and the FBI, it made Sorkin feel protective in a way he hadn’t before. “There were emotional moments I wanted to preserve,” he tells Empire. “It would be very easy to make this a film about the shiny objects: decadence, glamour, money, gossip.” His directorial debut received a warm response on the festival circuit. In Sorkin’s own words, he shares what his first time out of the gate taught him.

Raising The Stakes Screenwriting legend Aaron Sorkin on what he learnt from his directorial debut, Molly's Game

CAST WELL

NEVER GIVE UP ON A TAKE

DON'T BE AFRAID TD CUT

“Day one: panic. Day two: cast the lead role. That’s the most important decision. There are certain things an actor can’t act. They can’t pretend to be smart or funny. Jessica [Chastain] brings those things and many other strengths”.

“If there’s one piece of knowledge I’d take from this film, it’s to never give up on a take. There were a few times in making Molly’s Game where I felt like [a take] was never going to be exactly what I wanted, so let’s just move on. I regret doing that.”

“When you’re writing you have to do multiple drafts to make it better. It’s the same with directing. There were plenty of moments that either were better in my head than they were in reality, or a moment that was terrific that nonetheless had a reason to be cut from the movie to make it better.”

WATCH EVERYTHING

LISEN TO COSTNER

USE YOUR CONTACTS BOOK

“I watched any movie that was in front of me. I had a particular interest in The Big Short. There was an editing style that Adam McKay and his editor. Hank Corwin, used at certain moments that I was very interested in. If you were to watch Molly's Game now knowing that, you'd see some moments that are reminiscent of The Big Short."

“One of my actors was an Academy Awardwinning director [Kevin Costner, who won an Oscar for Dances With Wolves, plays Molly Bloom’s father]. Kevin was there as an actor, but when he talked as a director it was to be supportive, to say, ‘You’re doing great. This tracking shot you’ve designed, if you want to hand off here at the end it might make a nice cut.’ His advice was always welcome.”

“I wasn’t able to speak to Mike Nichols [who directed Charlie Wilson's War], because he died a few years ago, but I talked to a number of directors I’ve worked with over the years. I also talked to writers who became writer-directors. The best advice was, 'You should do this, because you know how to do this even if you don’t think you can.’”

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Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them Directed by

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David Yates

Starring

Eddie Redmayne, Katherine Waterston, Alison Sudol

Release date

NOV.

The ’20s are literally roaring in the epic Harry Potter spin-off

INSIDE A RITZY New York department store, all hell is

breaking loose. Tina Goldstein (Katherine Waterston) has just slid across the floor at breakneck speed. Her sister, Queenie (Alison Sudol), is cowering in a storeroom, a sflverpundi bowl atop her head. And next to her is baker Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler), limbs flailing. Despite all the evidence. Empire is not watching the Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them characters navigate a clearance sale, but a situation even more stressful. Magical creatures have escaped throughout the city, and several have ended up here, causing havoc with the Christmas displays. “There’s a lot of mayhem happening," confirms Sudol when the scene is wrapped, bowl now removed from bonce. Fogler is more forthcoming. “At that moment I was being crushed by a tentade-beast," he explains with a grin. “It's a very large creature which eats bugs, so Newt has told us to round up something for it to eat I come from theatre and I love this stuff” The Newt in question is magizoologist Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne), the hero of this feverishly anticipated 1920s-set Harry Potter spin-oft He and his trio of pals are faced with the formidable task of rounding up the critters accidentally unleashed from his suitcase, before Central Park turns into an enchanted safari park. Redmayne, who has been watching the department -store chaos from the sidelines, admits to having struggled with the fact said critters are absent from the set “We did some work before we started shooting on the scale of the animals,” he says. "I'd stand against a big wh ite screen and they were projected next to me. It was useful, because I have a bit of a shoddy imagination!" One person with too good an imagination: director David Yates, who found the menagerie invading not just the Big Apple but his downtime. “I direct in my sleep," the Potter veteran laughs, “and my wife kills me ’cause someti mes I go, 'No, no, no, we have to go wider... I'll find another shot...’” Why count sheep when you can count beasts?

Creatures

NIFFLER This adorable creature loves anything shiny.

DEMIGUISE Can become invisible and see the future.

OCCAMY Can shrink or grow to fit in any space.

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The Shallows Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

Starring Blake Lively

Release date JUNE. 24

What was once in a deep is now in the shallows

WHILE ON VACATION. Rain.

Sunburn. Food poisoning. But being trapped in the ocean and stalked by a 20-foot great white? The worst. And that's exactly what happens to Blake Livley's Nancy, a young woman grieving the death of her mother and surfing alone off a secluded South Pacific island beach. She unknowingly paddles into a feeding ground, is wounded in the shark’s first strike, and takes refine on a nearby rock island. “The tide is gonna

rise back up and kick her off,” says director Jaume Collet-Serra (Non-Stop). “And she has to figure out what to do." Evenntually, Nancy clings to a nearby buoy and makes a climactic stand against the man-eater, which was created entirely through CG. "She’s on the last inch of her life,” says Collet-Serra. “Basically it’s the turn when she decides to go from being a survivor to a fighter." Lively (The Age of Adaline) has the real battle scars to prove it. At one point,

waves sent her flying face first into the buoy. "It cracked my nose, and blood was pouring out," she says. "I'm very proud of my bloody nose.” Lively says The Shallow tries to be more than just another shark movie. “It’s really a story of us all trying to survive on this planet," she says. "What I really liked about this is that it wasn’t just Bikini vs. Monster." She pauses. “But you still get a little bikini, and you still get a little monster.” Something for everyone!

Wonder Wheel Directed by Woody Allen

Starring Kate Winslet, Justin Timberlake, Juno Temple

Release date DEC. 01

Only one who loves gets hurt

AFTER SETTING recent films in

locales like Hollywood, Rome, and the French Riviera. Woody Allen was lured back to his roots by the sand, surf, and sights of Coney Island. The Brooklynborn filmmaker's new drama is set in the beachside neighborhood In the 1950s, a place and period Allen knows well. "I grew up fairly near there, and I always thought it was a very colorful atmosphere to have a story in," Allen says. "[in] 1950, I was 15 years old and a perfect age to spend time there, so many of my fondest

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memories of Coney Island are from those years." The film revolves around Ginny (Kate Winslet), the wife of a carousel operator (James Belushi), who perks up when she falls for a handsome lifeguard, Mickey (played by real-life handsome person Justin Timberlake). But when her husband's estranged daughter (Juno Temple) resurfaces and also sets her sights on Mickey, it begins "the great unraveling of Ginny," Winslet says. In this scene, Ginny strolls the

shoreline in hopes of spotting a certain lifeguard at his post. "She just happens to have a nice dress on and just happens to have time in her day to go and just see if Mickey is working that afternoon," Winslet says with laugh. But playing Ginny wasn’t exactly a day at the beach. "There was not one single moment that I was not utterly teriified," Winslet says. "It's an incredibly complicated character — maybe the most complicated character I've ever had the challenge of grappling with."

PREVIEW

Ferdinand Directed by Carlos Saldanha

Starring John Cena, Kate McKinnon

Release date DEC. 15

Never judge a bull by its cover

THE PHYSICALLY intimidating bull,

Ferdinand is actually a gentle, flowersmelling soul who’s got an even bigger heart. Unfortunately, one small beesting-related accident sees him go on a rampage through the town marketplace, which then causes him to be taken from his home — and separated from the young girl who helped raise him — as he’s sent to take part in bullfights in another part of Spain. But, as the new clip shows, Ferdinand will do whatever it takes to get home.

The movie is based on a bona fide classic, children’s book The Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf and Robert Lawson, which tells the story of a bull who would rather smell flowers than take part in bullfights, refusing to take heed of the matadors or anyone else. With its charming drawings and kidfriendly prose, Ferdinand was an instant hit upon publication in 1936. (It also became politically controversial during the Spanish Civil War and World War II, thanks to its pacifist message, and Hitler

famously banned it.) Walt Disney released a short, animated adaptation in 1938, but Ferdinand is making his true big-screen debut now, with John Cena voicing the titular bull in an animated adaptation. Leaf’s book is less than 800 words long, so understandably, director Carlos Saldanha had to add some padding to create a full-length feature. John Cena, Trainwreck‘s wrestleractor, stars as Ferdinand in the animated Blue Sky production.

Pitch Perfect 3 Directed by Trish Sie

Starring Anna Kendrick, Rebel Wilson

Release date DEC. 22

Last call pitches

THE BARDEN BELLAS are back for

a treble threat, but find themselves a little off-key in post-Barden life. "These movies are so good at capturing relevant moments that happen to all kids," says director Trish Sie (Step Up All In). "In this case they're heightened and absurd, but most people's first years out of school are a pretty bleak reality check, and that's where we pick up the story." Unhappy in her NYC record-label job, Beca (Anna Kendrick) impulsively quits.

"She's immediately filled with horrible, crushing regret based mostly on fear," Kendrick says. The rest of the group have also hit a bum note, so they're available to regroup and rally for a USO tour of Europe, performing for the troops. After a moment or two of self doubt — “Is it weird that everybody is better at the one thing we do than we are at that thing?” questions Beca. Cue the explosions, cute camo costumes, a riff-off, far more action than

you'd expect from an a cappella showcase, and some character recelations. "Now the ensemble gets juicier," Sie says. Especially with Rebel Wilson's Fat Amy. "It was funny that Fat Amy chose that name, but is there more? Where did she come from? It's been fun to follow those rabbit holes." So, is this the final curtain for the Bellas, or could there be another encore? "Hell, Yeah!" Kendrick says. "We'd do them forever."

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How Much Is A Pint Of Milk? Dan Stevens

Does the Downton star do dairy?

Who were you in your first school play? I played Mrs Mop, who was a cleaning lady in an elementary school play about the environment called The Bumblesnout. She was using too many CFC sprays, and she had to learn the error of her ways. It was a great arc. What’s the one thing you do better than anyone else you know? I’m a champion napper. I can nap on any surface, in any environment, at any time of the day. Do you have a signature dish? I made my friends eat vegan brownies made from black beans for quite a while. They’re all sick of them now but they're really good brownies. What's in your pocket right now? I have a small rubber duck. It s about the size of a thumbnail. I have three kids and it’s always useful to have a rubber duck or the like about.

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I carry around these things periodically. They end up in strange places. How much is a pint of milk? God, I don’t know. I don’t drink milk. It’s too expensive! Have you ever kept any souvenirs from a shoot? I kept a hubcap from the car that killed Matthew Crawley [his character on Downton Abbey]. Is that weird? It's a memorial. Which film have you seen more than any other? Withnail And I. I can watch it any time of the day or night; it makes me very happy. Generally in life you find people who know it as well, and there will then ensue a good hour or two of pinging quotes back and forth. Also any Chris Morris stuff. If you can find somebody who's really into Brass Eye or The Day Today, you’ve got a friend for life.

Do you have a favourite videogame? Yes, Fifa 18. I’m an Arsenal fan and in my world we just won the FA Cup. I won the League with Swansea City the other day, which is quite an achievement. I've been playing this kind of game for years; when I started playing this kind of game, it was coloured dots passing a white dot to other coloured dots. Even that was quite entertaining. But now it’s phenomenal. When have you been the most starstruck? I met Ringo Starr very briefly. 1 was completely speechless — there were too many things I wanted to say because I grew up loving The Beatles — then for some reason I said, “I’ve got so much love for you.” It was a very odd phrase, but he looked at me and said, “Well, come here and give us a hug then." So I got to hug Ringo Starr. THE MAN WHO INVENTED CHRISTMAS IS IN CINEMAS FROM 1 DECEMBER

TV &

STREAMING BBC ONE

A new mob mentality Mcmafia BBC One's globe-trotting crim thriller gives the ganster genre a fresh spin IF YOU TUNE into McMafia, BBC

Ones eight-hour modern crime epic, there’s no point trying to play gangster cliché bingo. “Nobody is dressed in shiny bhck,” director James Watkins tells Empire while waiting for his camera crew to set up. “It's not about guns and people snorting cocaine. I don’t want it to be a heightened world. I want the world to be very real and happening around us." Based on the non-fiction book by Misha Glenny. McMafia is the story of hedge-fund manager Alex Godman (Happy Valley's James Norton), an English-educated son of Russian Mafia exiles who's pulled into a murky world of Mexican cartels, Pakistani drug lords and East European traffiickers. If the story has any Corleone similarities, it’s that McMafia operates in a new world whose gangsters have ambitions much bigger

neighbourhood than running the local neighbourhood. “It is one of the themes of the series: the corporate has become criminal and the criminal has become corporate,” says Watkins, best known for The Woman In Black and Eden Lake. “One of the notions we took from Misha’s book is how crime got really organised. They are transnational businesses. And the metaphor goes beyond crime to globalisation itself.” As such, the McMafia team has travelled the world — including the Caribbean, Turkey. Serbia and India — though Empire visits them in sunny Watford. Within a palatial house, they are filming a pivotal first-episode moment: a brutal struggle involving Alex and two heavies, which results in a death that provides the catalyst for Alex's journey to the dark side. “It was fun," reports

Air on

JAN.

Norton post-fisticuffs." These scenes are almost done for you because once you're in the moment, the adrenaline and sweat kick in. Especially since you've got a huge Uzbek dude behind you.” McMafia boasts truly international cast, including Aleksei Serebryakov and Maria Shukshina as Alex’s parents. “Whenever the art department put out blinis, the Russians go, 'Come on guys, would you eat fish and chips?'" laughs Watkins. It is also, says Norton, a crime story that taps directly into current concerns. “It’s so zeitgeist, talking about the liquidity between the Kremlin and the White House," he tells us. Then, as if realising he might be underselling the sexiness of the project, adds: "But we also have the anarchic. don't-give-a-fuck bad guy.” Ah, well maybe there is some scope for a bit of gangster-cliché bingo.

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NETFLIX

The future sound of Berlin Mute

Five fast facts about new Berlin-set sci-fi Mute from star Alexander Skarsgård SKARSGÅRD'S CHARACTER HAS BEEN MUTE SINCE CHILDHOOD “Leo [Beiler] was in a boating accident, and his vocal cords were severed when he was nine. He could have had an operation to save his voice, but his Amish mom basically said, 'God will heal Leo.’ For his entire adolescence, he was waiting for God to heal him. He didn’t learn sign language because, well, why would he? He was like, 'God will heal me any day now.’ He has a sense of abandonment, trying to find his place in the world.”

LEO IS A FISH-OUT-OF-WATER “Leo left the Amish community when he was in his early twenties, bringing only one suitcase and one suit with him [to Berlin]. He doesn’t have any contact with his mom anymore. She kind of disowned him. But, in an odd way, he’s still holding on to the Amish culture he grew up in. He’s in Berlin, 30 years from now, living between a nightclub and a brothel."

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GERMANY IS NO LONGER IN THE EU “The euro is gone, and they’re back to the Deutschmark. They have celebrities on their money, like Claudia Schiffer and David Hasselhoff. Duncan [Jones, director] has taken this whole notion of celebrity culture and mixed it in with the idea of a society run by corporations. Which, in effect, we have now in the United States.”

THE FUTURE WILL BE RUN BY BIG BUSINESS “In the movie’s future, we have militarised corporations that you have to subscribe to. They provide everything, from food to housing and everything in between. For example, one is called Volkea — a hybrid of Volvo and IKEA. They have militarised units out on the streets — sales reps for their corporation, scanning people to see if they’re subscribers or not. They’re way more powerful than the government. It’s not that far-fetched, unfortunately.

I mean, it’s incredibly scary, but I really think we’re headed towards a plutocracy.”

IT'S A DETECTIVE STORY - WITHOUT A DETECTIVE “Leo’s not a professional detective. He’s just trying to find his girlfriend, Naadirah [played by Seyneb Saleh]. The last time he saw her, she was very emotional, talking about leaving Berlin. He thought she was breaking up with him — but the next morning she was gone. Did she just take off? Did she dump him — or did something happen to her?” Directed by Duncan Jones Starring Alexander Skarsgård, Paul Rudd, Justin Theroux Air on FEB. 23

PREVIEW

The Alienist TNT

THE ALIENIST follows a criminal psychologist who joins

BERLIN, the future, but close enough to feel

familiar: In this loud, often brutal city, Leo (Alexander Skarsgård) - unable to speak from a childhood accident - searches for his missing girlfriend, the love of his life, his salvation, through dark streets, frenzied plazas, and the full spectrum of the cities shadow-dwellers. As he seeks answers, Leo finds himself mixed up with Cactus Bill (Paul Rudd) and Duck (Justin Theroux), a pair of irreverent US army surgeons on a mission all their own. This soulful sci-fi journey from filmmaker Duncan Jones ( Moon, Source Code, Warcraft) imagines a world of strange currencies in which echoes of love and humanity are still worth listening to.

forces with a journalist and a police detective to investigate the serial murders of young boys in the 1890s. Its cast includes Daniel Brühl, Luke Evans and former child star Dakota Fanning. The eerie-looking series — based on the novels by Caleb Carr — comes from the mind of Cary Fukunaga, the director who oversaw the entire first season of Nic Pizzolatto's HBO series True Detective which starred Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey. He's also written the series alongside Hossein Amini who penned Nicolas Winding Refn film Drive. If these credentials weren't enough, the series' directors include Jakob Verbruggen and James Hawes who have both directed episodes of Black Mirror, Game of Thrones and Jessica Jones. The eight-episode series is essentially a mystery crime series featuring characters who — much like those in recent Netflix series Mindhunter — shaped the area of psychology concerned with investigating criminal activity. "What compels a man to do evil?" the series asks with a confidence that suggests it will undoubtedly delve into that answer, much in the same way that Fukunaga's True Detective episodes did. It's no stretch to presume that Fukunaga was a key factor in the quality of True Detective's first season, especially upon considering the director didn't direct a single episode in its follow-up season starring Colin Farrell, Vince Vaughn and Rachel McAdams. For this reason alone, Fukunaga's return to television is something that needs to be heralded. Air on JAN.22

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NETFLIX

The devil in disguises Neil Patrick Harris previews four characters from his latest run of chameleonic capers in Lemony Snicket’s A Series Of Unfortunate Events

COUNT OLAF IS back. The hook-

nosed antagonist of Lemony Snicket's A Series Of Unfortunate Events is still attempting to steal the Baudelaire fortune by means of evil schemes, garish costumes and “terrible acting” — and still without much success. With Season 2 about to debut on Netflix, we enlisted Olaf himself, Neil Patrick Harris, to talk us through four of his most diabolical new disguises.

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DETECTIVE DUPIN

THE RINGMASTER

I “Detective Dupin was written by Mr. Handler [author Daniel Handler, aka the real Lemony Snicket] as a guy who wears everything and anything flashy to justify his authority. He comes strutting in with an unparalleled and embarrassing confidence. He likes to scat and sing musical poetry, but he is no Lin Manuel Miranda, I can tell you. I think Dupin maybe my favourite outfit to don: the purple leather jacket is super tight. I refused to let them wash it because I wanted him to stink a bit. “Lucy [Punch, playing Esmé Squalor] is absolutely hilarious. Watching her work is like watching an electrical storm. She is very kinetic and every take is a little bit different. It’s hard to tell if she’s really playing the character or just an over-zealous side of herself. But she is undeniably watchable and a magnificent addition to this ridiculous cast of circus freaks.”

“This is Olaf probably at his most unhinged in this season. By the time we get to the Carnivorous Carnival episodes, he’s been proclaimed dead by the local newspaper. So Olaf, by his logic, thinks he no longer needs a disguise — because if Count Olaf is dead, he can act exactly as he wants. So he ends up taking over a circus as the Ringmaster. Getting to don a proper circus outfit and live in a quasiCirque du Soleil-land was a fantastic way to spend a month. In all truth, I sort of live in that land every day of my life! [laughs]"

DR MATTATHIAS MEDICALSCHOOL “This all takes place in the ‘Hostile Hospital’ episodes. The voice I went for is reminiscent of a 1930s/1940s radio announcer. 'Please stay tuned for an exciting radio news cast!’ Those episodes are more like a horror movie than anything we’ve done. It leans towards

AMAZON PRIME VIDEO

American Gods The Shining.”

GUNTHER “They wanted it to be very Karl Lagerfeldian. Everything in that episode is related to society’s quick decisions on what is in and what is not. The ‘in-esf restaurants or cocktails. The elevators are closed because stairs are in and elevators are out. Gunther’s accent is mostly German. He’s a terrible actor, and we thought it would be fun to have his accents go from German to French to Scottish.”

TO NEIL GAIMAN FANS, an

adaptation of his much-loved fantasy book American Gods has probably seemed like a long-time coming. Such is the novel's fantastical scope that not just anyone could have adapted beloved material such as this. Fortunately — judging by episode one, anyway — Bryan Fuller and Michael Green have pulled it off, bringing fans this new Amazon Prime eight-part series that excites as much as it confuses. Former Hollyoaks star Ricky Whittle plays the show's lead Shadow Moon, a man serving three years in prison who is granted an early release when his wife Laura (Emily Browning) is murdered. One chance encounter with perennial scenestealer Ian McShane's character Wednesday later and Shadow Moon's life has collided with those of the Gods that have incorporated themselves into American life.

If it all sounds bizarre, that's because it is. Fuller has utilised the visuals he fine-tuned in the untimely cancelled Mads Mikkelsen-starring series Hannibal and thrown in so much blood and sex that it's almost too easy to paint it with the Game of Thrones brush. That would be unfair – where that series started out setting its scene in a rather laborious manner, American Gods chomps at the bit to get to where it's going. Quite where remains to be seen, but if episode one proves anything, it’s that by the end credits you’re buckled in. Granted, American Gods won't be for everyone but a sensory experience is close to guaranteed. For fans, the long wait seems to have been worth it – and for a series featuring a leprechaun named Mad Sweeney, how on God's earth could it not be?

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Why Maurice remains one of the great queer romances James Ivory and Ismail Merchantâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s stunning 1987 love story prizes sensuality over intellectualism.

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37 p

IN THE 1980S AND ’90S, film and life partners Ismail

Merchant and James Ivory produced and directed three period dramas based on phenomenally successful novels by EM Forster. Of those films, which included A Room with a View and Howard’s End, 1987’s Maurice is probably the least wellknown among mainstream audiences (among LGBT audiences it is a vital work of gay cinema, notably produced by gay men during the reactionary period of the AIDS crisis). However, its remastered release in 2017 coupled with Ivory’s Oscar-winning adapted screenplay for Call Me by Your Name (a film dripping with Ivory-isms) has brought renewed interest in this quiet work of art. Forster’s novel was published posthumously in 1971. The British author was himself a closeted gay man; he passed away in 1970, shortly after the legalisation of homosexuality in the UK. Set in early 1910s England, the book tells the story of Maurice (James Wilby) his best friend Clive (Hugh Grant), the life they attempt to build together in London, which is ultimately destroyed by societal conventions, Maurice’s affair with a country estate gamekeeper, Alec (Rupert Graves), and

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what they subsequently sacrifice to stay together. It’s your classic bait-and-switch love story, but adapted for film in the closest manner to perfect possible. The film is pure sensual agony, surpassing the similar but lusher (and more famous) Wilde from 1997, despite the latter’s phenomenal cast list: the nearly forgotten James Wilby has far greater on-screen chemistry with Hugh Grant and Rupert Graves than Stephen Fry with Michael Sheen and Jude Law. In addition to his chemistry with his co-stars, James Wilby gives a masterclass in naturalistic screen acting. He shines as the title character, effortlessly holding our attention for the full two-hour runtime. Indeed, you hardly recognise that Wilby is acting at all — you perceive only a lonely, painfully well-educated but ultimately unintellectual, middle-class stockbroker, bound by the conventions of masculinity in pre-World War One Edwardian England. That sounds like a bygone archetype perhaps, but here it seems perfectly normal and authentic. It’s chilling and terrifying: his warm, gentle, genuine humanity in contrast to the robotic period drama mechanics. >

In one scene, the night the rain comes through the parlor roof at the Durham estate, the others of the dinner party amuse themselves with cards or some other nondescript pastime, while Maurice sits to the side with just a cigarette. Only when Alec emerges from the outdoors, cap still in hand, to help move a piano, does Maurice come to life. He is very nearly alone in the world, but even so, rarely, you see bits of humanity slip through the tight, conservative Edwardian veneer — Ann Durham looking away from her own husband changing clothes, the butler Simcox and his bicycle and carefully balanced disapproval and subservience, the hesitance in the physical relationship between Alec and the maid — a story untold, the list goes on. This is how the world is — lonely and hollow, until Maurice meets Alec. He’s poor and proud and class distinctions are important to him and he doesn’t ignore them even in his relationship with Maurice. Furthermore, he’s exceedingly intelligent, probably more so than anyone else in the movie, while remaining sensual and earthy. His element is the outdoors, and so he’s not bound by the Durham family’s old,

creaky house, which he enters only to move the piano and on the night he goes to Maurice’s room (“I heard you callin’ to me, sir”). Alec, a name Maurice only ever says with the greatest awe and reverence, is thinner and more feminine than him, with long, curly hair and skinny-legged pants. He is the late-’80s version of a queer Englishman in the early part of the 20th century. This mix of contradicting stereotypes creates bit-by-bit a real figure, the only person in the entire movie, in the entire at-least-slightly-anachronistic world of a period drama, who is fit for the everyman titular character. One is educated and one is intelligent and neither are intellectual. They both forsake their careers, their families, their lives, everything, for the other, for an emotional sensuality set out of time and place. Forster himself, writing years after he initially drafted the novel, said that, “Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood.”

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ON.SCREEN

EVERY SIGNIFICANT FILM AND TV SHOW REVIEWED

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The Disaster Artist Sincere and sporadically funny, The Disaster Artist is an endearing tribute to failing in Hollywood. Anyway, how is your sex life?

Directed by James Franco Starring James Franco, Dave Franco, Ari Graynor Plot California, the late ’90s. Struggling actor Greg Sestero (Franco) befriends amateur actor Tommy Wiseau (Franco). Together, they move to Hollywood to follow their dreams. When Hollywood rejects them, they endeavour to make The Room — a film that would later become notorious as being one of the worst ever made.

THE ROOM is a bad movie. No

question. Whether or not it is officially The Worst Movie Of All Time is a matter of taste (countless films, from Sex Lives Of The Potato Men to Superman IV, could easily jostle for that crown of thorns), but cult status and midnight screenings have turned it into something else entirely: a latter-day Plan 9 From Outer Space, an icon of so-bad-it’s-good cinema, reaching beyond its meagre ambitions to become a timeless slice of outsider art. The question at its heart: how could a film so oddly incompetent ever exist in completed form? It’s a question The Disaster Artist certainly grapples with, faithfully adapting the memoir by The Room’s star and producer Greg Sestero. But what’s fascinating is how earnest the whole project is. The story of how the enigmatic writer-director-star Tommy Wiseau came to make The Room is certainly a farcical tale, but for all his blundering ineptitudes, he is treated here with

remarkable respect. Wiseau (played here by James Franco, who also directs) is a gift of a character. Petulant, unpredictable, with the wardrobe of a garish pirate and the accent of an Eastern European with a frog in his throat, Franco’s Wiseau is a comedy masterclass in both understatement and overstatement, summoning a belly laugh from an over-the-top dramatic reading of Shakespeare just as easily as a quiet guttural "yah". Wiseau’s eccentricities generate big laughs, as do the perfectly sweded recreations of The Room’s most infamous scenes. Wiseau had an inadvertent surrealist’s touch in his work: whether laughing inappropriately at a story about a woman being hospitalised, to inane scenes of ball-tossing, to remarkable respect. the abrupt and jarring tones swerves between melodrama and broad light entertainment. These recreations — deployed with the accuracy of a master draughtsman, as the post-credits sideby-side demonstrate — reach a zenith in the final minutes, as we watch the glorious disaster of the film’s premiere, which captures the spirit of The Room’s always-lively midnight screenings. It’s a reminder that cinema-going is always a participatory event (even if spoonthrowing is unique to this case). Franco allows himself the occasional snark, mostly through Sandy Schklair, the weary script supervisor played by Seth Rogen, hat-tipping the irony that the original film is usually viewed through. But elsewhere, it’s a surprisingly serious ode to the Quixotic chase of the Hollywood dream. It’s like La La Land for losers, where following your dream leads to failure and ridicule instead of romance and success. The question, then, becomes “why?”,

4 Good

rather than “how?” What is it that drove Wiseau to continue, despite all evidence suggesting he should stop? One of the film’s competing themes is that Hollywood is full of dreamers who don’t deserve to be there, and there is an entitlement to him that is not uncommon among wannabes. “Just because you want it,” insists Judd Apatow in one of the film’s many cameos, “doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. It’s one in a million, even with Brando’s talent.” Perhaps Wiseau realises his folly. As the shoot progresses, he takes on some of the industry’s more unpleasant traits: showing up late, treating his cast badly, engaging in shady accounting (it’s never explained how Wiseau funds the film, or where his fortune came from), and becoming stricken with toxic jealousy over Sestero, his more handsome, successful, reasonable friend. Franco is interested in creative differences as much as creative inadequacies. If the film’s latter third perhaps loses some comedic lustre, it still manages to be an authentic exploration of the artistic process, and the burdens of collaboration. This is a film about how painful art can be, but suggests that the pain is worth it, even if everyone laughs at you. Ultimately, it’s a romantic hymn to the old-school crackle of moviemaking, giving even the most preposterous dreamers credence. “The worst day on a movie set,” observes Jacki Weaver’s long-suffering luvvie Carolyn, after fainting under the hot studio lights, “is better than the best day anywhere else.” Even with no discernible talent whatsoever, The Disaster Artist argues, there’s something pure and noble about chasing that rainbow.

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WHEN TANGLED UNIVERSES,

complex mythologies and dystopian malaise are still the running trend in sequels, it's a breath of fresh air that the plot of Paddington 2 is, in essence: Paddington tries to buy a nice birthday present and it goes wrong. It goes wrong rather drastically, but it’s still a pleasingly straightforward plot. This splendid sequel, much like the first one. proves you can make a brilliant film by just doing simple things very, very well. The world of Paddington is much as we left it. It’s London, but a version far removed from reality, where even newsagents live in multi-millon-pound Georgian villas — as fantastical a notion as a talking bear. It's now, but not.

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example People use cassette tapes, steam trains pootle past in the background, everyone has a landline, yet kids wear Kanye-esque shutter shades and T-shirts with LCD panels, and a main character works in The Shard. It's a time that's never been; a very subtle form of fantasy. There, Paddington (voiced by Whishaw) lives with the Brown family, beloved by all. When he sets his heart on buying his elderly aunt a pop-up book, which is beyond his budget, he has to save up. Just a day away from earning enough, the book is stolen. In trying to apprehend the thief, Paddington is arrested as a suspect, sent to jail and the Brown family have to fight to clear his name.

Paul King should be forbidden from ever passing the series to another director because he has such a welltuned sense of Paddington's tone. It's cute, but not twee. It’s for all ages, but jokes aren’t divided into kid-friendly and 'for the grown-ups'. It mostly makes fun of circumslances, not people. There's so much warmth to it and not a hint of cruelty. There are wonderful sequences of physical comedy, with Paddington like an ursine Charlie Chaplin, messing up a haircut, washing windows with his entire furry being, or doing the laundry in prison and turning everyone's uniforms pink. King's visual comic timing is impeccable. He never oversells. For

Paddington 2 Paddington 2 should be prescribed as an antidote to anyone who finds the madness of the modern world a bit wearing. It’s probably possible to not absolutely love It, but it’s hard to see how.

example, he reveals the film’s title with Paddington writing his name on a misty window, then to better see through the window, smudging away the mist, in the approximate shape of a 2. That’s such a tiny, fleeting moment, but it’s so clever. His film is full of touches like that: tiny moments of comedy brilliance or visual dazzle, brushed past without fuss. Paddington 2 doesn’t like to make a fuss. Except when it comes to the bad guy. Filling the villain shoes this time round is Hugh Grant. And those shoes runneth over. As Phoenix Buchanan, a past-his-prime actor, now the face of “Harley’s gourmet doggy din-dins”, he performs his heart, lungs and every other internal organ out. Every second

is a joy. Buchanan's scheme to steal Paddington's coveted hook involves dressing up in a variety of costumes — nun, armoured knight, vagrant with the dodgiest cockney twang this side of Dick Van Dyke — and Grant passionately throws himself into the dressing-up box. His directorial instruction seems to have been. “Marvellous, darling, but camper.” So he goes over the top and then enthusiastically comes back round for another leap. Paddington 2 is every bit as enchanting us the first, perhaps even more so, but it feels arbitrary to pick a winner. The film is a pure delight, as sweet and sharp as, well, marmalade, really.

5 Excellent

Directed by Paul King Starring Ben Whishaw, Sally Hawkins. Hugh Bonneville, Hugh Grant. Brendan Gleeson. Julie Walters Plot Paddington (voiced by Whishaw) wants to buy his Aunt Lucy a unique pop-up book for her 100th birthday. But before he can save enough money, the book is stolen. Then, as he tries to retrieve the missing item, he’s framed for the theft and sent to prison—not exactly the marmalade- loving bear’s natural habitat.

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War On Everyone A thinking person’s Bad Boys, this off-kilter indie crime comedy introduces two deliriously warped lawmen to the screen. Here’s to a Cuba-invading sequel. Directed by John Michael McDonagh Starring Michael Peña, Alexander Skarsgård, Tessa Thompson, Theo James

“IT STARTS AND ends with the

script,” says one lowlife to another in War On Everyone, as they disapprovingly watch a low-grade porn flick. “If you ain’t got a good script, you ain’t got shit.” Fortunately, the person who wrote and directed this coal-dark crime comedy is John Michael McDonagh. the Irish auteur behind The Guard and Calvary. Both of those films are mordantly funny, unpredictable and set on the rain- moistened Emerald Isle. With his third feature, he has shifted locales to sun-baked New Mexico; but thankfully McDonagh’s delightful weirdness remains intact. War On Everyone is a spin on maybe the most hackneyed genre of them all, the buddy- cop movie. The customary tropes are all in place: Terry (Skarsgård) and Bob (Peña) ride around in their iceblue Monte Carlo coupe bickering and stopping for cheeseburgers, reporting in sporadically to their grouchy superior (Paul Reiser). There’s a foot chase

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4 Good

Plot Corrupt cops Terry Monroe (Skarsgård) and Bob Bolaño (Peña)have a cushy lifestyle, framing hoodlums and stealing narcotics as they patrol their beat in Albuquerque. But when an evil British lord (James) pings onto their radar, they find themselves in way, way over their heads.

originating in in a strip originating a club stripand club and soundtrackcd by a Fun Lovin’ Criminals track, while another scene riffs on Beverly Hills Cop. But for every moment that seems derivative, there’s a winningly absurd scenario or inspired touch. Terry and Bob, whose names may or may not be a tribute to The Likely Lads, arc introduced in hot pursuit of a mime. (“I’ve always wondered... if you hit a mime, does he make a sound?” ponders Terry, shortly before finding out.) There’s also a silly running joke involving our heroes' ongoing feud with a SWAT team. The bad-to-the-bones lead duo are joyously over-the-top: Terry, who has thrush and swigs bottles of beer at breakfast, is a lawman so excessively immoral he even outdoes Chief Wiggum from the famous 'Bad Cops’ skit in The Simpsons, while Bob makes for a fine foil as the family-man partner who’s far from squeaky-clean himself. The stars are clearly having fun, too — this is redemption for Skarsgård after his

bland-Tarzan misstep this summer. The villains they’re up against, meanwhile, are intentionally a lot less funny, but memorably peculiar. Theo James, best known for his role in the Divergent series, comes close to stealing the whole show as louche, Homer-literate aristocratscumbag James Mangan, not least because he dominates the best shot of the movie as a Stcadicam prowls with him through his debauched mansion. Only a late reveal involving him is misjudged, so bleak that it threatens to tip over the whole movie. There are other flaws: some scenes aren’t nearly as funny as they think they are (an exchange about Steven Soderbergh’s Out Of Sight starts and ends without scoring a laugh) and the plot itself fails to build up much in the way of suspense. But McDonagh - cutting with old-school line-wipes, cranking up the Glen Campbell — is clearly having a blast. The feeling’s contagious.

ON.SCREEN

Early Man Directed by Nick Park Starring Eddie Redmayne, Tom Hiddleston, Maisie Williams, Timothy Spall, Richard Ayoade, Selina Griffiths, Johnny Vegas, Gina Yashere, Rob Brydon, Simon Greenall, Miriam Margolyes Plot After being driven from their land, a Bronze Age tribe make a winner-takesall deal in an attempt to claim it back: a football match against the best team in the land.

An often amusing reimagining of Bronze Age history that, while it doesn’t quite match the best of Aardman, is still solid family entertainment.

3 ONCE FAIRLY PROLIFIC (for a man

whose actors can only move millimetres a day), Nick Park’s directorial output has slowed over the past decade — before Early Man, the BBC’s 2008 Christmas Day Wallace and Gromit short A Matter Of Loaf And Death was the last time he yelled, “Action!” to a cast of Plasticine figures. And so his precivilisationset return carries with it the weight of expectation only a long absence can achieve. A brief prologue retells how the dinosaurs became extinct: meteor hits, dinos die, humans survive (yes, they existed at the same time here) and discover the meteor is now ideally sized to kick around. Football is invented — animal skins for goalposts. Fast forward to the Bronze Age and a tribe of hunters living in the lush forests of the meteor’s crater are attacked by an advanced civilisation led by Frenchaccented Lord Nooth (Hiddleston), who wants to set up a mine in the ore-rich

area.willing to accept their banishment Not to the neighbouring Badlands, idealistic youngster Dug (Redmayne) challenges Real Bronzio, Nooth’s best football team, to a one-off match. Win and the tribe get their land back. Lose and they’ll be forced to spend the rest of their lives working in the mines. There’s just one problem: Dug’s tribe haven’t actually played football before. This set-up — the underdog training up for a match against superior opposition — is a sports-movie staple. It’s been mined continuously over the decades for both drama (Hoosiers, Rocky) and comedy (Cool Runnings, Space Jam). The sports and settings may change, as may the endings (choose between glorious victory or glorious defeat), but the rhythms of the films remain the same. And Early Man is no different in that respect. Park, as you may imagine, takes the comedy route. And, if it weren’t for the clearly Bronze Age setting, you’d

often be forgiven for thinking you were watching a baudy ’90s sitcom: the cast is filled with British comedy staples such as The Fast Show’s Mark Williams (“Which was nice”) and Johnny Vegas very much playing to type as a tribesman called Asbo. There’s also a running joke about the double meaning of the word “tackle”. There are moments of genius, though (including what may be the finest gag featuring a duck ever committed to film), and it takes The Flintstones’ use of animals in place of technology to darker conclusions — a zebra crossing is actually a dead zebra, splayed and laid across the road. But while Early Man zips along and has plenty of laughs, it’s neither as charming as Wallace and Gromit at their best nor as inspired a twist on a formula as Chicken Run. It’s an entertaining distraction, but not quite the all-conquering return for Nick Park we’d hoped for.

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The Ghoul Directed by Gareth Tunley Starring Tom Meeten, Alice Lowe, Rufus Jones, Paul Kaye, Niamh Cusack Plot Investigating a double murder, detective Chris (Meeten) takes advice from profiler Kathleen (Lowe) about feigning mental illness. Posing as a patient of psychiatrist Helen (Cusack). Chris begins to wonder If his cover story is actually his real life.

Powerful, disturbing and intense viewing, this isn’t going to be everyone's cup of tea — but Tom Meeten is a likely breakout British character star and Gareth Tunley is an ambitious, obviously talented filmmaker.

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IN BRITISH HORROR cinema. The

Ghoul is a perennial title — a Boris Karloff film from 1933 and a Peter Cushing film from 1975 — and writer- director Gareth Tunley knowingly appropriates it for an exercise in fragmented London noir. This The Ghoul begins as a supernaturally tinged detective story then opens out — or closes in — to become a study of depression and paranoia. It's a film in which everything is provisional, and the progresses of several strains of plot — undercover police investigation, socialrealist misery, psychotherapy sessions — function as beats in some sort of occult ritual. Cop Chris (Meeten) turns up at the site of a double murder, where the killer seems to have been spooked by his victims’ ability to stay upright after they’ve been shot. His only lead is Coulson (Jones), a 'ghoul' who loiters around crime scenes. Aided by cop partner Jim (Dan Skinner) and profiler Kathleen (Lowe), Chris goes undercover as a depressed, unemployed loser to gain access to the files of Coulson’s ambiguous therapist Helen Fisher (Cusack). Then, reality seems to shift with the possibility that the protagonist only fantasises he’s a cop on a case. In this reality, Kathleen is Jim’s girlfriend

and Chris is creepily hung up on her. But is this the cover story — and the more farfetched version the truth? Fisher refers Chris to Morland (Geoffrey McGivern), a genially sinister analyst (whose name echoes the character Karloff played in the 1933 The Ghoul) who is also treating the real Coulson (if there is a real Coulson) and talks about alchemy, maths, Möbius strips, paradoxical bottles and secret sigils. In either or both of his identities, Chris strikes up an acquaintance with the manic Coulson, seems to draw Kathleen to him with a magic ritual, names his depression 'the Ghoul' and is oppressed by the drab concrete city. The protagonist's single-room flat is especially characterless and oppressive, but this makes the riverside, streets and consulting rooms visited by Chris all threateningly bleak. In one scene at a glum party, Paul Kaye delivers a soliloquy anecdote about petty crime and the power of prayer which is either a distraction or the meat of the movie. Everyone is good — McGivern gets man of the match as the most entertaining eccentric and you know how out of whack the world is if Alice Lowe is playing the most normal character. But this is such an interior, solipsistic film that only the intense, impressive Meeten gets to play

2 A Bad Moms Christmas Directed by Paul King Starring Mila Kunis, Kristen Bell, Kathryn Hahn, Christine Baranski, Susan Sarandon, Cheryl Hines

a character with real depth. Both versions of Chris have the same essence, while everyone else changes their act depending on how paranoid the viewpoint character is about them. such an interior, solipsistic film that only the intense, impressive Meeten gets to play a character with real depth. Both versions of Chris have the same essence, while everyone else changes their act depending on how paranoid the viewpoint character is about them. Director Gareth Tunley is also an actor, and a regular in films by executive producer Ben Wheatley. The Ghoul fits into a fringe British cinema of miserablist social-realism psychohorror which has been quite active lately, for reasons evident to anyone who’s looked at a newspaper in the last few years. It relates a little to Kill List (in which Tunley plays the priest) but also slots comfortably in with a run of Brit-noir pictures with supernatural twists (The Glass Man, A Dark Song, Hyena, The Messenger, The Devil's Business). There’s a state-of-the-nation aspect to these stories of psychological isolation, and minds cracking as cities decay and social tics are sundered — the horror film offshoots of Broken Britain or Brexit.

BAD MOMS WAS a surprise hit back in 2016, striking a chord with viewers by suggesting that mums deserve more help. This seasonal follow-up starts off by touching on the same theme but then swerves abruptly into another 'Nightmare Relatives Are Visiting' comedy. With this star cast, and Baranski in particular, there can’t help but be good moments, but they're stuffed in amid so much absurdity — grand theft Christmas tree, charity scams, allout brawls — that the emotion is occasionally lost. It'll certainly entertain you while on the verge of a turkey coma, but it will never rank among the Christmas classics.

3 Murder On The Orient Express Directed by Kenneth Branagh Starring Kenneth Branagh. Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer, Judi Dench, Daisy Ridley, Willem Dafoe, Josh Gad, Derek Jacobi, Penelope Cruz

A RETELLING OF Agatha Christie’s classic murder-mystery that has a

mystery of Its own to solve: how to recount a murder story from 1934 in a manner that appeals to a genre-savvy contemporary audience? The answer lies in the details, and 8ranagh proves as meticulous a director as the man he plays on screen, revelling in the opulence of the era. The film’s starry cast is equally lustrous, but there are so many of them, they rarely get the chance to strut their stuff. They don't make too many classic 'whodunnits' like this anymore. Given modern tastes, there is probably a reason for that.

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â&#x20AC;&#x153;There's no such thing as truth. It's bullshit. Everyone has their own truth, and life just does whatever the fuck it wants.â&#x20AC;?

I, Tonya Directed by Craig Gillespie Starring Margot Robbie, Allison Janney, Sebastian Stan, Bobby Cannavale, Mckenna Grace, Julianne Nicholson

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4 Good

ON.SCREEN IN JANUARY 1994, Tonya Harding Robbie impresses as a woman who wasn’t

Plot As LaVona Fay Golden (Janney) forces her talented daughter Tonya Harding (Grace, later Robbie) into skating, the unconventional pair horrify the sport's genteel establishment. And when a rival skater is attacked, Harding is blamed.

Robbie and Janney are flawless in a compelling and corrective account of a misunderstood figure; one of the more darkly funny biopics you'll ever see.

ceased to be famous for figure skating and became infamous following an attack on her skating rival, Nancy Kerrigan. A media frenzy erupted, continuing throughout that year’s Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, where both women competed, before the disgraced skater was banned from major competition for good. But Craig Gillespie’s nuanced and bleakly funny I, Tonya reminds us, while it’s unclear how much or little she knew about it (she eventually pleaded guilty to conspiring to hinder prosecution), Harding did not personally attack her rival, and her reputation as a brawling skate monster is deeply unfair. We meet Harding as a child (played by Gifted's Mckenna Grace), pushed into skating by her overbearing mother LaVona Fay Golden (Janney). Golden insists on her daughter’s talent, browbeating local coach Diane Rawlinson (Nicholson) into taking her on. But motivating her daughter involves cruel taunts and the neglect of any of Harding’s needs beyond skating — even taking her out of school so she’ll be dependent on her mother’s support. Harding becomes a formidable competitor, but it leaves her isolated, a state of affairs that Golden seems to both cultivate and resent. The relationship we’re shown is physically and emotionally abusive, played out against a background of hard-scrabble poverty that’s a world away from the usual figure-skating ice princesses. As a teenager, Harding — now Robbie — escapes into the arms of mechanic Jeff Gillooly (Stan). He’s the epitome of’80s cool — all anoraks and Freddie Mercury moustache — but their on-off relationship is also abusive, with Harding dodging his fists between practices. Meanwhile, her talent is undeniable, hut her star rises slowly, held back by judges more fixated on her dishevelled appearance than on her ability to land a triple axel with double toe loop. The class commentary is clear: if Harding had come from a wealthier background, she wouldn’t have been shunned by the skating community — nor so pilloried for someone else’s actions.

initially given a choice about skating but who absorbed her mother’s resolve to win along the way. It’s a vanity-free performance under a series of horror wigs, capped by a desperate grin more disturbing than the one she wore as Harley Quinn. This Harding is more sinned against than sinning, but was still prone to outbursts of rage and terrible life choices — so she’s no bland heroine. Yet Robbie’s more than matched by Janney, uncompromising as she claims to have acted out of love. Golden is flamboyant, with her fur coat, a bird on her shoulder and an oxygen line snaking across her face after a lifetime of smoking, but also small, sad and bitter after her predictions of disaster come true. Even by Janney’s standards it’s an unforgettable performance (deservedly awarded a Golden Globe). And Stan, usually relegated to winsomely damaged roles, does an impressive face-heel turn when he morphs from Harding’s saviour into her nemesis. If there’s a criticism, ifs that the film sometimes gets distracted from getting under Harding’s skin by stylistic flourishes and its fascination with the weird world of her unbelievable life. Gillespie adopts a free-wheeling, unreliable-narratorled approach framed by contradictory interviews with an older Harding, Golden and Gillooly, mining humour from their disagreements. Add the quick cuts, bright colours and pumping soundtrack, and you can see why this has been compared to GoodFellas. But it’s a consciously less stylised film, shot under ugly fluorescents and in a bleachedout gold that matches Robbie’s frizzy perm. There’s also shakiness in some CG efforts to transpose Robbie’s face onto the skating double. Still, it’s consistently gripping — a tale that assumes the audience’s complicity in Harding’s trial by media, then forcing us to reconsider. Harding was a victim who refused to act like it, putting up an ultratough front for the world. So vve made her a villain instead, and never mind the human consequence. Until now, anyway.

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Carol Mara and Blanchett make for an unforgettable couple in a beautiful film about longing, loss and the confusion and wonder of love. Directed by Todd Haynes

4 Good

Starring Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Kyle Chandler, Sarah Paulson

Plot A chance encounter in a department store leads elegant housewife Carol (Blanchett) and uncertain shopgirl Therese (Mara) into a forbidden romance in 1950s New York.

THE SOUNDS OF a train station over

black and then, what’s that? A fence? A cage? No, it’s a floor grille we open on — elegant and iron and covering who knows what. This is a film about entrapment and escape and finding out what is underneath the veneer — of society, our ourselves. From Strangers On A Train to the various talented Ripleys, Patricia Highsmith’s novels and short stories have proved fertile fiction for big-screen skulduggery for 65 years, but this is the first film adaptation of her second novel, The Price Of Salt, and atypical in that the deaths are more of desire than physical. There is danger and violence here, but the emotional blows land heaviest. The film is measured and restrained and as muted as its autumnal colour palette but the little moments — the silences, the looks, the longing — build and build, to power a freight train of feeling. Highsmith’s story of a romance between two women was published under a pseudonym in 1952, so as to avoid scandal sticking to her. What was daring then should not now raise so many eyebrows, although Phyllis Nagy’s screenplay deftly shows how convention can trap us all — regardless of gender or status or sexual orientation. As much as the film is about a story billed at the time as “a love society forbids”, it is also about simple separation and divorce — that loneliness and confusion. It would have

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been very easy for the makers to present Carol’s husband Harge (the wonderful Kyle Chandler) as a villain, but we see that his actions come from confusion and desperation, rather than hatred. The film has some of its most poignant moments not in its central love but Carol dealing with her infant child — explaining, in a beautiful, sorrowful line, why she can’t be with her: “Sometimes mommies and daddies just decide there isn’t enough room for them in the same place at the same time.” Todd Haynes’ last big-screen story of’50s forbidden love was Douglas Sirktribute Far From Heaven, but the lack of irony or detachment here elevates Carol. Aside from a rather too knowing moment when a character, watching a film, talks of the difference between what people say and what they really feel, this is a straight, sincere picture (aided endlessly by Carter Burwell’s sumptuous score). The decision to film on Super 16mm makes its cleverly, feel both from another era and yet immediate. Characters are often eclipsed by edges — of doors, chairs, people — and beats pass where we can only imagine or anticipate how our lovers must be feeling. Blanchett is brilliant—she so often is it is easy to take it for granted—but Mara has the longer distance to travel, from confused girl to grown woman, and her versatility and sensitivity is simply stunning. She is very Other — “my angel, flung out of space”. But she is also Us.

Pacific Rim 2

These Mark 6 Jaegers with their electric whips, “gravity slings” and plasma swords deliver all the giant robot thrills you could wish. Thanks to Boyega and Spaeny, you might even care about the human characters, too.

Directed by Steven S. DeKnight Starring John Boyega, Scott Eastwood, Cailee Spaeny Plot Jake Pentecost, son of Stacker Pentecost, reunites with Mako Mori to lead a new generation of Jaeger pilots, including rival Lambert and 15-year-old hacker Amara, against a new Kaiju threat.

HERE’S THE THING about

movies where giant robots beat up on giant monsters: they should be fun. Guillermo del Toro’s 2013 Pacific Rim only sometimes delivered that, with its quasi-realistic focus on traumatised survivors teaming up to meet a monster invasion. Uprising, however, packs in more gonzo invention and giddy destruction than its progenitor and the director, Daredevil’s Steven S. DeKnight, manages to twist the franchise in some surprising new directions. John Boyega, employing every ounce of his considerable charisma, is the roguish Jake Pentecost, son of Idris Elba’s heroic apocalypse-canceller Stacker. But Jake turned away from the Jaeger programme, and now skulks about scavenging tech to fund an extravagant snack

-food habit. A chance encounter with a teen Jaeger builder, Amara Namani (Cailee Spaeny), and her Bumblebee-like creation Scrapper lands Jake in jail — until he agrees to go back and train a new generation of recruits. It’s all an excuse to give Jake some outsider cool in the pilot programme, because soon everyone is preoccupied by bigger issues. Tech tycoon Shao Liwen (Jing Tian) is pushing a rival drone project to replace the Jaeger pilots, with Charlie Day’s Newt Geiszler now at her side. When a rogue Jaeger appears in Sydney just as Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi) is about to vote on the drones, it becomes apparent that kaiju are not the only threat. There are probably allegories here about the proliferation of nuclear weapons post-World

Okay

War II, as well as the current rise of robot weaponry, but this is not a film meant to provoke deep thoughts: it’s a film where giant robots raze cities. The property damage is mind-boggling, and the action delivers in ways that the Transformers franchise hasn’t managed in a decade. This rushes through its character beats, especially Adria Arjona’s embarrassingly underserved Jules and the identikit trainees, none of whom stick in the mind like del Toro’s misfits, but then, there’s a lot to do. It’s not a spoiler to say that the kaiju eventually reappear (though not as you might think) and the destruction ramps up to even more devastating heights. The result is frequently ludicrous, but it is bigger and cleverer than we had any right to expect.

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NETFLIX

TV & STREAMING

Godless With its sprightly shooting style, topical themes and stellar ensemble Godless manages the near-impossible for a Western: it feels fresh. A triumph for writer/director Scott Frank. And Jack O'Connell looks badass on a horse.

AS SCREENWRITER, DIRECTOR

and executive respectively, Scott Frank,Steven Soderbergh and Casey Silver brought us the best-ever Elmore Leonard adaptation in Out Of Sight. Two decades later they reunite, with some seat-swapping: Silver and Soderbergh executive produce and Scott pulls double-duty as writer and director of an intimate odyssey into the West, plotting a vigorous new path through old terrain. Though an A-list screenwriter, Frank hasn't previously had much commercial success as director — The Lookout and A Walk Among The Tombstones were both very fine, absorbing pictures few saw — and Godless spent many years grazing in Development Hell. But the wait has been worth it for the weight — the story is told over eight hours (split over seven episodes of varying lengths) and wouldn't have been as engrossing as a film, where its character moments would have inevitably been cut to the 52

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bone bone. And those moments are what makes Godless sing: whether it’s the burgeoning love sffairs between supporting chanicters, the town populated entirely by African Americans (whose story we won’t spoil here), or simply showing the process of "breaking" horses. That sequence, taming mounts so they can be ridden, informs st least three crucial relationships, provides a sense of true character and a lovely connection to the land. This is a show that really loves the earth, even if it doesn't embrace the country — it knows what American can be at its best and what it is at its worst. Daniels is mesmerising as the outlaw leader with a twisted morality born out of his own hurts. At first it feels like he may become a caricaturc of twisted Christianity, but there is more depth and nuance here, just as there is in the inhabitants of the town, with noone — from school teacher to doughty

5 Excellent

widow — quite what they first appear. Frank teases by tweaking archetypes, presenting what feels familiar and then skewing so you think again. The casting is as superb as it is sometimes unexpected — Thomas Brodie-Sangster as a flash deputy? Downton Abbey's Michelle Dockery as a tough, sharpshooting rancher? Both unlikely bullseyes. Scoot McNairy is one of the best character actors working today and gives his world-weary sheriff a relatable humanity— he is just desperate to be useful. Perhaps the biggest joy, though, is to see Jack O’Connell as a fully fleshed out, rangy, American leading man. The Derby-born Brit has excelled in '71 and Unbroken and has long had a feral charisma, but here it's marbled with tenderness — a character saddled with regret, aiming for hope. You can’t make a Western without recalling the many classics of the genre and Godless is on the same prairie as

CHANNEL 5

Created by Scott Frank Starring Jack O'Connell, Jeff Daniels. Michelle Dockery, Scoot McNairy, Thomas Brodie- Sangster, Merritt Wever, Jeremy Bobb, Rob Morgan, Sam Waterson Plot Wounded stranger Roy Goode (O'Connell) is taken in by rancher Alice Fletcher (Dockery) on the outskirts of a town populated mainly by women. Unlikely bonds form, but it's only a matter of time before they must face a vengeful outlaw.

The X-Files: Series 11 Created by Chris Carter Starring Gillian Anderson, David Duchovny, Mitch Pileggi, William B. Davis Plot Last season’s climax saw Mulder (Duchovny) in the death grip of an alien virus and Scully (Anderson) staring down a hovering UFO. Now the duo must unravel the world-threatening conspiracy while solving a few open X-Files along the way.

A mix of well-crafted case-files and overblown conspiracy guff, Season 11 might not be vintage X-Files but it has the hallmarks of a decent send-off for TV’s best loved investigative duo.

Clint Eastwood's revisionist masterpiece, 1976's The Outlaw Josey Wales. It also echoes elements of the 1953 classic Shane — an influence that was also reflected in 2017's other terrific American Western, Logan (co-written by Frank). But Godless feels original and lively in how its shot - contemporary without being ostentatious (not as loose and live wire as Soderbergh's The Knick but with a similar, 'whatever works' energy). And, in its substance, very now — whether it’s in its depiction of violence fuelled by pernicious media (Jeremy Bobh makes a horribly convincingly conniving newspaperman), or the hopes and challenges of a town run by women, fighting the elements but, mostly violent, rapacious men. Whether it's appreciated as a characterful Western drama or a prescient exploration of a country's bloody birth. Godless shines its stars and has earned its stripes. Must watch.

TWENTY-FIVE years after The

X-Files first aired, it is synonymous with alien abductions, government cover-ups and shadowy cabals. Between contributions to the rambling conspiracy, the show’s heart lay with a string of taut, tightly written case-files, each one a paranormal horror story that tapped perfectly into ’90s paranoia. As a serialised conspiracy thriller The X-Files was good, but as a supernatural procedural, it was entirely without peer. It’s somewhat disappointing to see Chris Carter follow the (poorly received) finale to Season 10 by doubling down so unrepentantly on the show’s worst traits. Despite opting for a cop-out that renders the cliffhanger pointless, Carter ploughs on with the doomsday virus über-plot, slathering ever thicker

layers of preposterousness onto an already buckling conspiracy. When the episode culminates in a final, groan-worthy twist, it feels more reminiscent of an SNL send-up than The X-Files in its prime. Happily, with episode one out of the way, The X-Files clicks back into groove, swiftly reminding us why we all loved it so much in the first place. From the supernatural to the technological via the joyously absurd, we find Mulder and Scully doing what they do best, history and experience having now worn away their respective archetypes’ harder edges. With ten episodes providing more breathing room than Season 10’s measly six, the shift between episode types is also less jarring, reminiscent of The X-Files of old.

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Peaky Blinders: Series 4

BBC

Created by Steven Knight Episode viewed 1-4

Starring CilliaA Murphy, Helen McCrory, Paul Anderson, Adrien Brody. Sophie Rundle, Aidan Gillen, Tom Hardy

Starring It's 1925 and Brummie gangster Tommy Shelby (Murphy) is estranged from his family having strategically betrayed them. But his new life is rudely interrupted by the arrival of a vengeance-seeking American Mafioso (Brody).

Vivid new characters, returning old favourites, and the riveting challenge of proper American Mafia types combine to keep this ever-stylish series feeling as exciting as ever.

AFTER A THIRD series which

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wallowed not uupleasurably in the decadence of the extended Birminghambased Shelby family of criminals and their accomplices, this fourth run feels much more driven. The main catalyst for that is new character Luca Changretta, played by Adrien Brody in the kind of grandiose performance that fits right in with Peaky blinders’ operatic tone. Luca has just been released from prison and is part of a well-established crime family in New York, which makes the Shelbys seem small-time. But Luca’s immediate mission is to take vengeance on Tommy and co for killing one of his clan, a task he undertakes with a due sense of purpose by delivering death threats contained in Christmas cards sent to all rhe key Shelby family members. The resulting Godfather-stye blood bath, and death of a much-loved Peaky Blinder, gets the series off to a tremendously tense and vital start. From then on the episodes settle down to a slightly calmer pace, crosscutting between a rich array of sub-plots involving the various Shelby businesses, troublesome Communists riling up their workers, and Tommy's new boxing protégé Bonnie Gold (Jack Rowan), whose father Aberama (Aiden Gillen) wears a spectacular fedora, rivalled only by the returning Tom Hardy as Alfie Solomons, with his wide-brim old-school Jewish titfer. The first time these two huge

characters meet is a series highlight, and you can imagine writer Steven Knight rubbing his hands with glee at the prospect of further encounters between heavyweights Hardy and Gillen and their vivid headgear. Also making a welcome return is aristocratic horse trainer May Carleton (Charlotte Riley), last seen in series two when Tommy left her hanging at the Derby. Now she's back in his world, inevitably flirting but also heavily conflicted as she tries her best to keep him in the (mostly) legit horse-racing business, while he’s finding new and inventively dodgy ways of taking advantage of America’s Prohibition laws. We never know which way their relationship will turn. All of this plays out compellingly, but hovering above everything and everyone is that main threat of Changretta and his associates, as they attempt a series of further ambushes on the Shelbys, aided by a deliciously dark alliance between Luca and Helen McCrory's increasingly unhinged Aunt Polly. Her fury with Tommy lies beneath her every move, but she also thinks, perhaps delusionally, that she can protect her wounded son Michael (Finn Cole) from the Italians. When it started. Peaky Blinders felt like a dazzling attempt to prove British TV could be as cinematic and thrilling as anything on Netflix or HBO and this latest run reaches electrifying new heights.

Netflix

Dark Created by Baran bo Odar, Jantje Friese Starring Karoline Eichhorn, Louis Hofmann, Oliver Masucci, Jördis Triebel, Daan Lennard Liebrenz, Deborah Kaufmann, Angela Winkler

HERE’S A QUANDARY: how to discuss Dark while resisting the urge to call it the 'German Stranger Things', as many have in the lead up to its release. Written in isolation, Dark’s creators Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese have been keen to ward off claims of bandwagonjumping — after all, they'd already started shooting by the time Stranger Things hit Netflix. But the similarities are undeniable. Both are set in a rural town, surrounded by woodland and in the shadow of a mysterious government facility. Both concern missing children, ripped out of our reality and into another. And both employ a retro ’80s vibe. But if the set-up seems to veer remarkably close, then the reality is markedly different. Not least the time period. While some of Dark is set in 1986, the meat of the action actually takes place in 2019. And its a bleaker, more realistic world. These missing kids leave a hole, the parents suffering because of their loss — creating makeshift Ouija boards out of fairy lights couldn’t be further from their minds. In many ways (and not just because of the subtitles) it veers closer to

Dark is a compelling adult drama, full of mystery and intrigue, that rises above the surface-level similarities to other shows. Come via the Netflix algorithm. Stay for the just-one-more-episode quality. Plot When children start going missing in a remote German town, the police are stumped. But all is not as it seems, and old secrets begin to spill out, changing the lives of the families living there forever.

Scandi-noir, both in its look and eerie electronic soundtrack, with the first series of The Killing being an obvious reference point because of the similar emotional heft caused by the loss of a child. As if it's consciously trying to mark itself as different from the Amblin-aping tone of its studio-mate, the series begins with a suicide. A man hangs himself leaving a note that comes with strict (and very specific) instructions: "Do not open before 4 November at 10.13pm". It's a date some five months in the future. Wc then (post-opening credits) skip forward to the morning of that day. One child has already gone missing and, by the end of the episode, a second child has disappeared, too. At 10.13pm exactly. But those children aren’t simply being taken; they're vanishing without trace. Police are baffled, but it soon becomes clear there are those amongst the town's inhabitants who know more than they let on. Not least, that this has happened before, 33 years ago, in 1986. The show quickly sets up a number of intriguing mysteries to turn over in

4 Good

your mind. What's actually happening in the nearby nuclear plant? Wliy are the management there so disruptive to the police investigation? What’s going on with the mysterious stranger that’s checked into the local hotel? Who’s conducting experiments in the kitsch. '80s-styled bedroom? And why on earth are there so many dead birds everywhere? But instead of guarding these secrets (and others), Odar,and Friese drip-feed answers throughout the show's run, setting up new mysteries as they go. It's a well-paced series, one that never runs out of steam over its ten episodes. It's not entirely accurate, then, but there are worse things to be called than the 'German Stnmge Things’, Especially with most of that show's fans having sped through its second season and on the look-out for something to fill that void. Dark won't be for all of them. The odd Flock Of Seagulls track aside, it doesn’t have a sideline in cute '80s references — there's no E.T: The Extra Terrestrial or Dungeons & Dragons. But it’s an addictive drama that succeeds on its own, considerable, merits. Scandinavian

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REVIEW TH

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4 Good Directed by Todd Haynes Starring Oakes Fegley Julianne Moore Michelle Williams Released MAY. 3

Verdict Haynesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; film has lovely performances from both actors, and a keen sense of time and place help, but the story is a little too shaggy and unformed to entirely hold the attention.

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Last Flag Flying IT IS PEAK Richard Linklater to make an

4 Good Directed by Richard Linklater Starring Bryan Cranston Laurence Fishburne Steve Carell Released 3 NOV. 2017

Verdict Last Flag Flying is a thoughtful tally of the cost of war on ordinary lives that also manages to be a funny, moving menon-a-road-trip movie. It’s that rare thing: a sequel, albeit 44 years late, that is worth catching up with.

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unofficial sequel to a 44-year-old film he had nothing to do with in the first place. Last Flag Flying is a quasi follow-up to Hal Ashby’s 1973 The Last Detail starring Jack Nicholson, Randy Quaid and Otis Young (both films are based on novels by Darryl Ponicsan). It changes the names of the characters, but keeps similar story threads, moods and a sense of disillusionment. The result is by turns warm, funny, angry and melancholic. The Last Detail edges it, but Linklater has made a worthy successor. Ashby’s film centres on two US sailors transporting a third to a military prison. The new film shares a similar plot core. This time round, ex-Vietnam buddies Sal Nealon (Bryan Cranston) and Richard Mueller (Laurence Fishburne) accompany Larry ‘Doc’ Shepherd (Steve Carell) to attend the burial of his son Larry Jr, killed in action in Iraq, at Arlington Cemetery. Yet, when Doc learns the true nature of his son’s death, he decides to transport his son back to New Hampshire for a civilian burial. Sal and Richard come along for the ride, along with Larry Jr’s comrade, Charlie Washington (J. Quinton Johnson, holding his own amongst stellar company). It is hard to think of a better fit than Linklater to pick up Ashby’s mantle: both filmmakers prioritise people over plots, revealing flawed, very human characters in shaggy, free-wheeling stories told with

unflashy unflashy style. For most of its running time, Last Flag Flying is a car and train trip that allows Linklater to do his jugglingcontrasting-moods thing, from hilarious (the three men trying to buy a newfangled mobile phone) to the emotional (a visit to the mother of a dead soldier beautifully played by Cicely Tyson). It’s a film about war that has no truck with flashbacks and helicopters. Linklater raises questions about whether comforting fictions are better than hard truths, and takes a liberal stance toward patriotism and the military. This isn’t gung-ho flag-waving (which might go some way to explaining its lukewarm US reviews). The film respects the pride of those who serve while critiquing the government that has let the central characters down. It’s a sombre, often cold-looking film — Shane F. Kelly’s cinematography offers grey images of run-down neighbourhoods, cities and train tracks — but the film has heart at its centre. Always a terrific director of actors, Linklater gets great stuff from his cast: Carell, often most impressive when he is muted, is meek and moving, Fishburne is powerful in stillness as a hellraiser-turnedreverend, and Cranston is a force of nature in the Nicholson role. There is a terrific scene where the three men talk in a railway carriage about losing their virginity. It’s both a reference to an incident in The Last Detail and heartland Linklater: characters revealing themselves through talk.

REVIEW

Brad's Status BRAD SLOAN (Ben Stiller) should be happy. He has a good job, a nice home, a loving wife and a son on the verge of going to Harvard. He is comfortable. So why does Brad’s Status open with its protagonist lying awake at night, consumed by a gnawing sense that his life has gone wrong somewhere along the road? Brad’s problem is envy, provoked and exacerbated by the fact that his contemporaries from college have all gone on to achieve ridiculous levels of wealth and fame, leaving him feeling like an outsider with his nose pressed up against the glass. Much of Brad's Status takes place during a trip to Boston, where Brad’s son Troy (Austin Abrams) has a couple of college interviews scheduled. While he is initially excited to have this precious time together with his offspring before he leaves the nest, his insecurities threaten to scupper everything. He can’t go five minutes without letting his mind wander into a fantasy of what his life might have been like. What if he hadn’t been so quick to settle? What if he had taken more chances? Couldn't it have been Brad frolicking on the beach with two bikini-clad beauties whose combined ages don't match his own? What if...what if... In many ways Brad’s Status is a more effective Walter Mitty movie than the overblown boondoggle Stiller directed in 2013, but writer-director Mike White is walking a far more difficult tightrope. By

aligning us with Brad's embittered point-of-view, he's leaving himself open to accusations of indulging the whiny navelgazing of a middle-aged white man, beset by first-world problems. Crucially, White does give us some alternative perspectives, primarily through the bewildered Troy — who fears his father is on the brink of a nervous breakdown — and Troy's friend Ananya (Shazi Raja), a talented student and musician who becomes the unfortunate recipient of Brad’s self-pitying spiel. “You’re 50 years old and you still think the world was made for you,” she marvels, puncturing his blinkered sense of entitlement. “Just don’t ask me to feel bad for you. You’re doing fine. Trust me. You have enough.” Mike White isn’t interested in validating Brad or tearing him down; the film is simply about his gradual realisation that, yes, he does have enough, and the grass is not always greener on the other side. That other side is represented by a few choice cameos (Luke Wilson Michael Sheen), but Brad’s Status is Stiller's movie. Stiller has played many of these neurotic, man-on-the-edge roles over the years, but here it is augmented by a nuanced characterisation and a depth of emotion that is genuinely affecting. Whether audiences will still be invested in Brad’s journey when he has this moment of epiphany is an open question. He’s not an easy guy to spend time with, and many scenes of social embarrassment are agonising to watch. For those who stick with it, however, Brad’s Status is an unusually thought-provoking and rewarding comedy.

3 Okay Directed by Greta Gerwig Starring Saoirse Ronan Laurie Metcalf Timothée Chalamet Released 5 JAN. 2018

Verdict A droll and vigorous psychological study of an everyday egomaniac, but we’ve seen Stiller do this sort of thing before, and better.

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Greta Gerwig

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The Lady Bird director espouses filmmaking as a team game and writing scripts inspired by personal memory IT MAYBE WASN'T until we saw her as the lead in modem

rite-of-passage classic, Frances Ha, that we truly accepted Greta Gerwig as the indominable screen talent that she is. She rose though the ranks of the 'mumblecore’ revolution in films such as Hannah Takes the Stairs and Nights and Weekends, has dipped her to into the clammy pools of mainstream Hollywood, and has also fallen in with hyper-literate New York comedy director Noah Baumbach. Now, she’s moved behind the camera for her delicious feature debut, Lady Bird, the story of a outspoken teen (Saoirse Bonan) awkwardly (and often amusingly) transitioning into adulthood.

Lady Bird received its world premiere at the Telluride film festival. Has it been non-stop for you since then? Gerwig: It has been non-stop since Telluride. Every time I show it, I have nerves, but if s been very meaningful to give it to an audience. The film really stops being yours at that point, because they start owning it. Then people start coming up to me and telling me their stories about dropping their son or daughter off at college, or telling me about fights they had with their mother. It feels like it literally starts belonging to other people.

That sounds very bittersweet. It is, but that's why you do it. You want to let people own it themselves and you don’t want to keep it as your own secret. I love Emily Dickinson, but I'm not Emily Dickinson. I’m far too social. I can’t imagine making a bunch of art and never really showing it to anyone. I like the process of how a film, at each step, is owned by more people. You find a producer, you bring that person on. You find your crew, you bring those people on. You find your cast, your editor, your composer. By the time you give it to the public, you’ve shared your dream world with all these different people.

How do you translate that dream world to other people? It's a lot of work. But I was very lucky. Sam Levy, my cinematographer is someone I've worked with as an actor and he's photographed things that I've co-written with Noah Baumbach. I knew that he had a way of shooting cinema that was driven by words, yet he could make it cinematic. I'm a word-driven writer. I love dialogue and have a very precise scipt that I don't change when we're shooting. He is a person who can collaborate with me to make it something that feels like it exists in the world of film. So we spent a very long time creating shot lists and storyboards, but also just hanging out and talking about movies and photographs and looking at references. You find these kindred spirits, but then you lay all ths groundwork which is both directly talking about the project, but also just spending a lot of time with each other.

Did you reach a point where you thought, 'Everyone gets it, we can go now?' Yeah, pretty early on. We did a ton of tests, with cameras and lenses — because we were using old lenses — and did all this work with the post-production colourist who was messing with the footage in New York and trying to establish what we wanted the film to look like. Sam looked at some of the lenses, and I went through a ton of them too, but then he said, 'OK, here are my top five, and I’m not going to say anything. Tell me which one you like’.

Top five lenses? Yeah. So I looked through the lenses and looked at the sample footage from each and picked number three. And he said that was the exact one he liked. When things like that happen you feel like everyone is on the same page. Then everyone looks at the screen test together to see it, and when every department says, 'Yes that’s the right kind of lighting', or, ‘that's the right location’, you feel like everyone is together. Also, when my costumer brought me a particular sweater that she used for Lady Bird, the sweater was almost a Proustian memory for me. I said, ‘I’d completely forgotten about this sweater, but it's completely right'. How much of Lady Bird is, for you, a Proustian memory? Well, none of it literally happened. It's not a documentary, it's completely fictionalised. But at the same time, there's a core of emotional truth at the centre which resonates very deeply with what I know to be true. I’m interested in memory. I'm interested in the cinema of memory. I think about Fellini’s Amarcord a lot, and the way you get this sense when you watch it of, ‘No, that's not what happened, but that is what that moment felt like’. The way he saw everything is heightened, but it also feels somehow correct. I think I’m interested in personal cinema. Not autobiographical cinema but personal cinema.

Is it difficult to build truth into fiction that isn't autobiographical? It’s interesting. I’m always interested in the way fiction — and in a way lies — can serve a greater truth in art. I guess one way to see it is fiction, and another way to see it is lies. But, to go back to Fellini, he says, "All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster's autobiography." I thought that was a great way to explain it. In a way, and maybe it's because I make films, I don’t have too much of a fascination with whether or not something is quote-unquote ‘true’. When I watch movies I don't think of it that way, I don’t want to go to Wikipedia and see what matches up.

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Coco HAVING ALREADY DEALT with such

5 Excellent Directed by Lee Unkrich Adrian Molina Starring Anthony Gonzalez Gael García Bernal Benjamin Bratt Released 19 JAN. 2018

Verdict Pixar has raised the animation bar again, with its most musical — and arguably most magical — film yet. If this is the afterlife we’re all headed to, don’t fear the reaper.

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existentially weighty topics as chronic depression (Inside Out), the nature of artificial intelligence (WALL-E) and the perils of physical decay (Up!), the crazy kids over at Pixar have landed on their latest family friendly discussion point: impending mortality. With this being a digitally animated adventure epic, the whole concept of merging with the infinite is repackaged in a way that’s cheerful, amusing and super fun for kids of all ages. Young scamp Miguel shines shoes by day and worships at his secret hand-built shrine to peacocking troubadour Erenesto de la Cruz at night. By strange quirk, his family abide by a strict no music policy, down to a romantic altercation from a few generations past. For reasons that are not altogether clear, Miguel is transported to the Land of the Dead on - coincidentally - the annual Day of the Dead, where he must learn a few lessons about pride and the importance of memory before he’s able to return back to the nest. The team behind the project (as Pixar’s film are rarely the product of a single mind) have parlayed years of Mexican tradition and superstition into a light-hearted fantasy about how life is extended for as long as people are able to keep our spirit alive in their hearts and minds. Photography - and, by extension, cinema - are the tools used to keep that flame burning. This time around, the intellectual basis isn’t quite served by a story which is often hampered by lazy contrivances and lots of lucky escapes. The design is as pristine as we’ve come to expect

from this outfit, although at times feels like it’s been pushed a little far. Subtle patterns are etched onto the skeleton faces of the denizens of the Land of the Dead, but the cute spirit Miraals are painted in garish neon and their purpose within the plot is largely functional. There is a barking mad mutt named Dante, yet any deeper literary allusions begin and end there. But if Pixar have a certain special touch to their work, ifs the tactile quality they achieve through the rendering of skin and the textures they build up on every surfaca Even though the film is very much a cartoon in the traditional Disney, its makers employ every trick in the book to make you question whether you’re watching an organic object implanted within a digital backdrop. It’s a weird one, though... On one side, you have to be thrilled by the fact that there are filmmakers out there willing to nudge the boundaries of family- oriented animated fare. Yet on the other, it’s appears increasingly clear that Pixar are becoming a victim of their own success. The issue isn’t down to what the films look or feel like - it’s more that they’re all starting to feel awfully similar. With a few lone exceptions, the very idea of a sequel appear to directly contravene Pixar’s constant push for originality. Coco isn’t a sequel, but its eccentnc quest narrative in which a young perswi ear valuable life lesson is starting to feel careworn unsurprising. This film positively pops with ideas and there’s more value in a single frame of this than in a entire air hanger’s worth of Emoji Movies.

REVIEW

Lady Bird AS AN ACTOR, the sensibility that Greta Gerwig brings to the screen is a tonic. She is entertaining and pained by life’s difficulties. She is energetic and earnest. She does not affect coolness, cleverness or any aloof state that people who are less secure about their humanity grasp to save face. No. Whether working with Joe Swanberg, Noah Baumbach or Whit Stillman, Gerwig brings an endearing, rounded presence. What a joy, then, to discover that she is equally capable at flooding a film with twisted livewire complexity. Years spent co-writing movies with Baumbach has clearly paved the way for her fully-formed solo directorial debut, Lady Bird. This coming-of-age story, set in 2002, takes the broad details of Gerwig’s upbringing in Sacramento, California and uses them to create a story full of spiky humour, all the while sketching a family set up loaded with struggle. Gerwig’s avatar is one of the most versatile young female actors working today. Saoirse Ronan’s characterisation of 17-year-old Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson has the forceful momentum of a natural disaster and the hot-blooded passion of, well, a teenage girl. Lady Bird is “from the wrong side of the tracks”, which means that unlike the rich kids at her Catholic school, her family is scraping by on mum’s nurse’s salary. But Christine has no interest in being defined by her socioeconomic status and clashes with her mother over everything. Ronan whirlwinds through every scene, bristling with a feral but eloquent desire for experience.

A standard growing pains set-up is imbued with originality by a glorious script, written with relish for odd vocabulary choices and attuned to the faux casual way some teenagers present. “You’re very dexterous with that,” says Lady Bird complimenting the boy about to take her virginity as he puts on a condom. The boy is Kyle (Call Me By Your Name’s Timothee Chalamet) who styles himself as a dreamy intellectual artist by draining his voice of all feeling. Of mobile phones he says things like: “The government didn’t have to put tracking devices on us, we bought them and put them in ourselves”. Laughs come fast and are generously distributed among the cast. Abrupt editing creates an enjoyable momentum. Ronan spins the film around her mood which can switch in ten different directions in the space of a scene. She ping-pongs between the relationships that nurture her and pursuing upward mobility with the rich kids. The most memorable moments are with the nurturers. Tracey Letts is heartbreaking as Lady Bird’s dad, an unemployed computer programmer trying not to show his depression. Laurie Metcalf as her mum bookends the film, as well as adding her weight to its centre. With her obsessive focus on survival, she cannot brook her daughter’s impractical urges. The arguments between the two are real, familiar, irreconcilable in the philosophical distance the two opponents. Gerwig nails how mothers and daughters argue always at each other’s throat. Because of the tonal breadth of the film, different shades of feeling are found in each grudge match.

4 Good Directed by Greta Gerwig Starring Saoirse Ronan Laurie Metcalf Timothée Chalamet Released 16 FEB. 2018

Verdict A coming-of-age story like no other, Lady Bird is smart, emotional, funny and completely original. Rarely has a directorial debut been so assured, so singular and so heartwarmingly affecting.

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You Were Never Really Here LYNNE RAMSAY likes to take her time. In the

4 Good Directed by Lynne Ramsay Starring Joaquin Phoenix Ekaterina Samsonov Alessandro Nivola Released 09 MAR. 2018

Verdict Dark, disturbing and difficult, this is a deep dive into a troubled headspace and never lets you leave. Ramsay is now one of our most exciting filmmakers. If she could not leave it so long next time, that’s justfine with us.

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space of 18 years she’s only made four feature films, the last of which - We Need To Talk About Kevin - was released what feels like a lifetime ago back in 2011. She almost made a female-fronted western called Jane Got a Gun, but considering how that one turned out, it was probably best that she scarpered early on. Finally our patience has been paid dividends, as Ramsay teams up with Joaquin Phoenix for the first time to deliver a brutal masterclass in sensory overload. Based on the novella of the same name by Jonathan Ames, You Were Never Really Here might have taken its time, but it is unequivocally worth the wait. Marrying brutality with a curious gentleness, Phoenix’s Joe is an ex-marine turned hitman who carries out retrieval operations across America, periodically returning to New York to check in on his elderly mother. Tasked with rejseuing a teenage girl from a sex trafficking ring, things take a turn for the worst when he realises how deep the rabbit hole goes. Joe leads a solitary life which we glean through glimpses. His demons are nestled deep but claw constantly beneath his skin. He’s unflinching and harsh, yet seems somehow afraid to disturb the atoms that surround him when he doesn t’ have a hammer in his hand and murder on his mind. There’s no better fit for the role than Phoenix, who presents Joe as simultaneously vulnerable and impervious, a solid mass riddled with keloid scars that tell a story his voice cannot. Far from being a Dolph Lundgren-esque hired hard man, Joe’s a fullyrealised vision, the embodiment of internalised

trauma cast adrift in a world he’s come to see only in black and white. In contrast, the film sings with color: the siennas and ochres of a city skyline at sunset; the purple halo of a fading bruise; the lush green lawns of a suburban mansion. Everything is amplified only to the extent of fine tuning, inviting you to notice details that might otherwise escape the eye. Ramsay’s violence is never gratuitous or overstated, and beautifully rendered shots of Joaquin’s weathered body remind the audience the film is much more a character study than anything else. It’s a haunting glimpse into a frayed psyche shaped by years of relentless horror, from childhood abuse to wartime hell. With a lean runtime of 85 minutes, Ramsay has shaved all possible fat from the bone, leaving behind only the raw, sinewy morsels. A lingering moment of softness amid the chaos shows Joe fussing over his cat, providing a glimpse of something gentle peeking out from behind the brute force, but the moment is fleeting. Respite is only ever temporary before you’re thrown face-first into the concrete, sent reeling by Jonny Greenwood’s electrifying, unsettling score, a different animal from the searing strings of his past composition work. There’s always been a sense about Ramsay that she doesn’t pour half measures. Being selective with her projects ensures each one is a perfectlycrafted visceral experience that shoots straight for your gut. You don’t watch a Ramsay film you’re consumed by it You Were Never Really Here is the greatest testament to that.

REVIEW

Lover for a day SVELTELY CONSTRUCTED , starkly monochrome, and fervent in its treatment of amorous matters. Lover For a Day completes what feels like a perfect triptych of miniatures from post- Nouvelle Vague auteur Philippe Garrel. It follows Jealousy (2013) and In the Shadow of Women (2015), and is another 70-odd minute film that’s tightly constructed while always conveying the emotional messiness of the tangled relationships at its core. These late films may superficially resemble the average Gallic divertissement in terms of content, yet Garrel’s own aphorism that “cinema is Lumiere plus Freud” holds truer than ever. The opening scenes establish a setup that’s markedly more high-concept than usual for him. Middle-aged teacher Gilles (Eric Caravaca) and his much younger student and lover Ariane (Louise Chevillotte) make off to a faculty-only area to have a breathless quickie against a bathroom wall. Then we are introduced to Gilles’ daughter Jeanne (played by Garrel’s daughter Esther - his films are frequently family affairs), crying while dragging a noisy roller suitcase through an empty Paris street at night. It’s the kind of economy of gesture that's common across Garrel’s extensive filmography; before learning that Jeanne’s boyfriend has broken up with her, we feel the loss acutely through the sharp contrast of intimacy and loneliness, narrow corridors and expansive streets, ecstatic gasps and

convulsive sobs of heartbreak. Jeanne’s discovery that her father has a new lover the same age as her (23) initially exacerbates the pain, but soon both her and Ariane form a gentle alliance rather than a bitter rivarly. "You'll get over it. We always do,” the more experienced Ariane tells Jeanne, and it’s these terse words of hard-earned wisdom that encapsulate the emotional tenor of the film, which might be best described as ‘depressive screwball’. Garrel doesn’t wring a lot of drama from the premise, and when he does, it’s deliberately subdued. With its diaristic second-person narration and clipped, staccato rhythm, the film has the fleet- footed essentialism of Robert Bresson, minus the fatalism and intentionally blank performances. Indeed, both Garrel and Chevillotte are luminous physiognomic opposites, and each display a natural expressivity that’s enhanced by Renato Berta's lush 35mm black and white cinematography. In such a crystalline context, moments of discrepancy stand out, particularly a scene involving Jeanne and her friends gathered at a bar debating the Algerian war with an older bartender. Lover For a Day eventually offers a concise overview of Garrel’s aesthetic and thematic gestalt in a brisk and compact package, and as such, it’s an ideal entry point for newcomers to the director. It’s a modestly scaled and eminently approachable addition to his filmography.

4 Good Directed by Philippe Garrel Starring Éric Caravaca Esther Garrel Louise Chevillotte Released 19 JAN. 2018

Verdict Beneath Garrel’s unassuming, subdued style lies a deceptively powerful study of fidelity, lensed in stark, moody monochrome and featuring a compelling screen debut from Louise Chevillotte.

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