Indholdsfortegnelse for November 2021 i Total Film

Though popular enough to have grossed over $1bn across six entries, the recent run of live-action Resident Evil movies scarcely resembled the cherished survival-horror videogames they were based on. The same will not be true of Johannes Roberts’ Resi, which is returning to the source. “We treated Resident Evil like we were adapting a novel,” says the writer/director, who’s long been “obsessed” with the games. Specifically, Roberts is drawing from the 2002 remake of Resident Evil and 2019’s ground-up reimagining of Resident Evil 2, combining characters, stories and settings into a single tale set over one long night in a zombie-infested Raccoon City. While Chris Redfield (Robbie Amell), Jill Valentine (Hannah John-Kamen) and Albert Wesker (Tom Hopper) explore the sinister Spencer Mansion, Claire Redfield (Kaya Scodelario) and Leon S. Kennedy…

It’s a classic coming-of-age story,” Reggie Yates says of Pirates, the TV presenter, actor and documentary-maker’s first feature film as a director. “We’ve all grown up watching those sorts of stories but I’ve just never seen one based in London with a UK garage soundtrack and three young boys of colour.” Billed as “the world’s shortest road movie”, the comedy follows best mates and aspiring musicians Cappo (Elliot Edusah), Two Tonne (Jordan Peters) and Kidda (Reda Elazouar), who are trying to make a name for themselves on pirate radio. The action takes place on New Year’s Eve 1999 as they take an eventful trip through London in a tiny Peugeot, desperate to get into the ultimate millennium party. Cue heaps of ’90s nostalgia, some banging old-school tracks and colourful cameos…

As the daughter of legendary director Sir Peter, Rebecca Hall had always dismissed her lensing ambitions as an ‘arrogant’ pipe dream. But when she reached what she calls a ‘reckoning’ during her twenties as she explored her racial heritage, she was introduced to Nella Larson’s 1929 novella about two light-skinned Black women who choose different paths in how they present themselves to the world. While one lives in Harlem with her Black family, the other passes as white, her true heritage hidden from even her racist husband. “The book came to me at a point of my life where I was done not talking about my African-American heritage, because it had honestly been quite obscured from me,” she recalls. “I began to understand that what my grandfather must have done…

ENCOUNTER The second feature from Beast director Michael Pearce sees Riz Ahmed in an intriguing sci-fi-tinged thriller. Ahmed’s former marine Malik douses himself with bug spray to ward off the ‘non-terrestrial micro-organisms’ that have stealthily found a home on Earth. Collecting his estranged kids for a cross-country journey, he explains: “This ain’t a road trip, it’s a rescue.” It’s a gripping premise, and an impressive turn from Ahmed maximises the tension. Some later plot developments might go too far for some, but the chemistry between Ahmed and his onscreen sons make this a trip worth taking. TRUE THINGS British director Harry Wootliff follows her IVF drama Only You with another authentic tale of the male-female dynamic. Adapted from the book True Things About Me by Deborah Kay Davies, Ruth Wilson…

Being adopted from another country is a difficult, emotional process. So imagine the trauma when, through no fault of your own, your new country turns on you, leaving you facing deportation. It’s a nightmarish scenario found at the core of Justin Chon’s new movie Blue Bayou. “I started to snoop around about five years ago… and realised no one’s talking about this!” the actor/director tells Teasers over coffee during the Cannes Film Festival. Chon’s third feature, following Gook and Ms. Purple, Blue Bayou casts him as tattoo artist Antonio, who was adopted at the age of three from Korea by a Louisiana couple, now deceased. He’s lived in the States for over 30 years, and is married to physical therapist Kathy (Alicia Vikander), but an altercation with police draws the…

The first and (still) only woman of colour to have won the Academy Award for Best Actress, Halle Berry’s been a Bond woman, a superhero (or two) and is about to take on her biggest role yet, as the director and star of MMA drama Bruised. “The last thing I wanted was for all of that work to mistakenly fall in the hands of a visionary that didn’t quite see it how I saw it.” How easy, or indeed difficult, did you find the transition from acting to directing with Bruised? I’ll tell you this – I was scared shitless! If you’re not having some sense of worry, then I don’t think you really care about doing your best. The easiest part was, I think, working with actors, because being…

It’s been a dozen years since Jane Campion last directed a feature film, the sensuous John Keats biopic Bright Star. Since then, she created and oversaw two seasons of the brilliant Kiwi murder-mystery Top Of The Lake, but even she began to “reminisce” about making another film. “Two hours… I think it’s such a beautiful length to communicate something,” she says. “There’s such a sort of discipline and rigour to it. So I yearned for the idea of doing something carefully and beautifully again.” It’s day one of the Venice Film Festival, and the silverhaired Campion is sitting with Total Film on the sun-drenched Excelsior Hotel terrace. By the eleventh day, she will be back on the Lido to claim the Silver Lion for Best Director for The Power Of…

DUNE 12A FILM OUT 21 OCTOBER CINEMAS This is only the beginning,” remarks Zendaya’s desert warrior Chani towards the end of Denis Villeneuve’s take on Frank Herbert’s colossal 1965 sci-fi novel Dune. Those words alone should thrill fans, for Villeneuve wisely does not try to cram all of Herbert’s hefty tome into his two-and-a-half-hour running time – a lesson clearly learned from David Lynch’s much-maligned 1984 effort. Given the care and attention paid to setting up this intergalactic adventure, there’s no need to rush. Like his last two movies, Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, Villeneuve’s third sci-fi in a row is jaw-dropping in its invention and boldness. While the film will play on small screens via Warner’s HBO Max streaming channel in some territories, there can be no doubt, you’ll…

HALLOWEEN KILLS TBC FILM OUT 15 OCTOBER CINEMAS There are multiple ways in which Halloween Kills is boxed in. For one, it has to plausibly all take place on the same night as its 2018 predecessor. It also has to explain how a gravely injured, ageing serial killer could survive being trapped in a flaming basement. And it needs to leave enough unresolved to justify its already-announced sequel. So, given those constraints, it’s a wise choice on the part of director David Gordon Green and co-writers Danny McBride and Scott Teems to barely move the narrative forward at all. Where the previous Halloween explored how the trauma of the original ’78 massacre affected Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), this toggles the action back and forth to see how the fallout…

01 DR. NO Would any list be complete without Mr. Bond, who has looked immaculate for 60 years? Of course not. But we’ll go back to the start and opt for Sean Connery at the baccarat table in Dr. No, dressed by Anthony Sinclair in a midnight-blue dinner suit. 02 NORTH BY NORTHWEST Dashing and debonair, Cary Grant always wore the hell out of a suit, and never more so than his plaid number in Hitchcock’s action-adventure classic. Grey with a blue weave, it was a shame to dirty it in the famous crop-duster scene. 03 PULP FICTION Tarantino made the black suit, white shirt and thin black tie combo look cool AF in Reservoir Dogs, then doubled down in Pulp Fiction. Hitmen Jules and Vince (Samuel L. Jackson, John…

There are plenty of movie spoofs out there, but few have had the same impact on pop-culture as those co-created by Jim Abrahams. Together with siblings David and Jerry Zucker, these friends-turned-filmmakers (collectively known as ZAZ) brought us 1980’s Airplane! – a movie that skewered the comedy genre and forever changed the lives of people named Shirley. Loaded with innuendo and an irresistible mix of the ridiculous and the deadpan, the film’s mile-a-minute humour quickly became the trio’s calling-card feature. However, as the ‘90s approached, they were itching to go solo – and while David found similar screwball success with 1984’s The Naked Gun and Jerry garnered Oscar nods with 1990’s supernatural comedy Ghost, Abrahams was finding it trickier to zero in on a film that best encapsulated his own…

ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA 1984 “The whole thing was larger than life, and magical, really magical,” said Connelly of going to Italy, aged 11, to appear in Sergio Leone’s sprawling gangster saga. LABYRINTH 1986 Connelly and an army of puppets do everything in their power (“What power?” “The power of hoodoo”) to distract attention from David Bowie’s crotch in this beloved musical fantasy. WAKING THE DEAD 2000 “It was a film I really campaigned for… I read the whole fucking script auditioning for it – twice!” says Connelly of the romantic tragedy she credits with transforming her career. REQUIEM FOR A DREAM 2000 Connelly’s astonishingly raw performance keeps you hoping for a redemption that Darren Aronofsky’s visceral, harrowing portrait of drug addiction refuses to provide.…

FADE IN: EXT. SOUTH AMERICA, 16TH CENTURY Conquistadors led by non-CG EDGAR RAMIREZ searching for a magic healing tree are cursed by a tribe to live forever. Which is probably what they wanted anyway. Later, in 1916, EMILY BLUNT meets some male chauvinist explorers. EMILY BLUNT Hello, can I have your mysterious arrowhead? It should lead me to a magic tree. MALE CHAUVINIST EXPLORERS No, we won’t help! It will ruin our reputation. Women don’t know how to do science. EMILY BLUNT Hey, I’m just as respectable as you. So I’ll steal the arrowhead instead. Yoink. EXT. AMAZON RIVER Terrible tour guide-slash-professional dad-joker DWAYNE JOHNSON goes about his daily routine: putting everyone off the real-life Disney ride on which the film is based. EMILY BLUNT I’m looking for someone to…

In August 2019, Warner Bros announced Lana Wachowski would be directing and co-writing a fourth Matrix movie. “Many of the ideas Lilly and I explored 20 years ago about our reality are even more relevant now,” she said. “I’m very happy to have these characters back in my life.” Just how Neo and Trinity, who both died in trilogy-closer Revolutions, are back in The Matrix Resurrections we don’t yet know. But Lana did explain, in September 2021, as the gobsmacking trailer dropped, why she chose to revive them – to help her deal with her parents’ deaths. “I couldn’t have Mum and Dad… yet suddenly I had Neo and Trinity,” she said. “It was immediately comforting.” Also comforting for fans is that the trailer and an early teaser gimmick make…

This is not your parent’s Christmas elf movie!” laughs Gil Kenan, only half-joking. “We had a set of rules on set: no red and green touching. No stripes. No bells on toes. And definitely no big buttons…” After spending most of his career celebrating Halloween with Monster House, City Of Ember and Poltergeist, Kenan decided to switch holidays after reading Matt Haig’s bestselling children’s novel about the origins of Santa Claus. “I just loved the character, and I loved the fact that there was an actual adventure at the centre of the whole story,” says Kenan. “But Matt Haig’s real masterstroke is in not holding back from the full weight of human emotior – this sense of darkness that’s there as a counterpoint to the light and the whimsy and…

When you put a camera in front of something real, magic happens,” says executive producer Sarah Cox. “There’s a depth to it, the shadows seem to be so much more three-dimensional, but you also see things that you didn’t plan for.” While the meticulous planning on Robin Robin started almost seven years ago, Aardman’s latest, most ambitious animated short took on a life of its own during production – with every character, prop and background element designed like handmade Christmas decorations, imperfections and all. “Everything has a wonk to it,” laughs Simon Farrell, the film’s art director. “We’ve tried to use real materials to keep them in their purest form, so we’ve used a lot of fabrics with fluffy fibres, like needlefelt for the puppets and floristry paper for all…

It could have been a disaster comedy if it didn’t work,” reflects writer/director Valdimar Jóhannsson, talking about his startling and surreal debut Lamb. The sensation of the recent Cannes Film Festival, this tale of loss and parenthood co-written by Valdimar with the famed poet, novelist and fellow Icelander Sjón was met with enthusiastic reviews along the lines of “batshit crazy” for its unique and off-kilter premise. “We really wanted to create a film we had not seen but really wanted to see,” comments Valdimar, who worked with Sjón for years crafting the story. For those who just want to take the plunge, stop reading now, as Lamb is difficult to discuss without spoilers. Still here? OK. Set on a remote sheep farm, the story follows childless couple María and Ingvar…

Long before Jason Reitman was crowned king of the noughties comedy-drama, he was the world’s first Ghostbusters fan. The son of director Ivan Reitman, who called the shots on both Ghostbusters and its ’89 sequel, seven-year-old Reitman Jr. was bewitched by the work-in-progress cuts of his father’s latest film featuring four funnymen running around New York in boiler suits, catching ghosts with the unlicensed nuclear accelerators strapped to their backs. To say the film left a lasting impression would be an understatement the size of a rampaging Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man. “It was a movie that I thought about more than anything, for years,” Reitman says over Zoom, speaking to TF while tousling a mop of unruly hair that could handily be described as Egon-esque. Several of Reitman’s earliest memories are…

NO TIME TO DIE 12A FILM OUT NOW CINEMAS Over an agonisingly protracted 18-month postponement, with the release date buffeted farther into the future at least three times, the title of the much-anticipated film formerly known as Bond 25 has taken on a grim irony. No Time To Die finally arrives six years after Daniel Craig’s last Bond adventure, Spectre (the second-biggest gap between films since the series began in 1962, eclipsed only by the hiatus between Licence To Kill and GoldenEye). This being the swansong for Daniel Craig’s take on the character, it was always going to be laden with expectation, something that the repeated Covid delays and its appointment as the potential saviour of cinema have only intensified. After such a long wait, you certainly get a lot…

THE HARDER THEY FALL TBC FILM OUT 22 OCTOBER CINEMAS 3 NOVEMBER NETFLIX It’s estimated that a quarter of cowboys were Black, but you’d never know it from Hollywood westerns, which so whitewashed American history that Mel Brooks found provocative humour in having a Black man holding the reins in 1974’s Blazing Saddles. Like Mario Van Peebles’ 1993 oater Posse, this debut by Jeymes Samuel looks to change things up and have a blast doing it, with its starry Black cast trading shots in thrilling sequences of stylised violence set to quality music. Many of the larger-than-life characters in The Harder They Fall are historical figures. But Samuel and his co-writer Boaz Yakin (Now You See Me, 2012’s Safe) aren’t past playing fast and loose with history themselves, albeit in…

THE FRENCH DISPATCH TBC FILM OUT 22 OCTOBER CINEMAS Wes Anderson’s latest, delayed a year by the pandemic, finally arrives in some style. The French Dispatch is a lovingly crafted tribute to old-school journalism; to an era long before tweets and ‘likes’ became a thing. The fictional French town of Ennuisur-Blasé plays host to the offices of the titular supplement, a satellite of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun newspaper. Dedicated to exploring politics, art and human-interest stories, the outfit is ably run by one Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Bill Murray). The (very) eclectic content of this imagined publication allows Anderson to go off-script, jettisoning the usual feature-length narrative to replace it with an anthology-style approach. Taking the reader/viewer through the magazine, the three main ‘articles’ unspool as short films, in a…

THIS MONTH JUNGLE CRUISE Q Emily Blunt’s botanist is in search of the all-healing tree of life in the Amazon. Possible plant or garden mulch? A JAMES WONG ETHNOBOTANIST@BOTANYGEEK In my experience researching traditional medicine in Ecuador, there are plants that are surrounded by all sorts of colourful mythology. However, these tend to be beliefs about everyday plants like corn, not legends of mythical plants with magical powers. The vast majority of medicinal plants are usually common weeds in people’s immediate vicinity. It is totally possible that there are astounding species out there yet to be recorded but statistically it’s very unlikely to be a medicinal flower. That’s because the botanical world doesn’t produce biologically active compounds for our benefit, but its own. These active ingredients are usually defence compounds…

Grief’s stupid,” muttered Jean-Paul Belmondo’s hood Michel Poiccard in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960), the film that brought the French New Wave to international attention. But such was the impact of Belmondo on cinema and culture, there was no stemming the tears when the charismatic French star died on 6 September, aged 88. Born in Paris to a sculptor father and a painter mother, Belmondo had a brief spell as an amateur boxer before studying drama at the Paris Conservatory. A stage actor, he graduated to small roles for directors Marcel Carne (Les Trickers, 1958) and Claude Chabrol (À Double Tour, 1959) before Godard made him the face of the Nouvelle Vague, his sharp-suited car thief-turned-cop killer mimicking Bogart as he sucks on a Gauloise. Five years later, Belmondo reteamed with…

As John Barry’s epic score soars, a herd of 3,500 buffalo thunder over the curves of the South Dakota wilderness, dust spiralling and bodies jostling. Civil War soldier John Dunbar (Kevin Costner) and a group of 24 Lakota Sioux Native Americans race behind, the chase so exhilarating that Dunbar literally loses his hat. Over the next four minutes, the men take out several of the animals with gunshots and arrows – enough food to feed the tribe through the harsh winter to come… Though only four minutes long, the scene epitomised Costner’s (directing, producing and starring) intention with his film – to celebrate the American frontier in all its primeval glory and to hat-tip great westerns, despite critics coining his revisionist opus ‘Kevin’s Gate’ after Michael Cimino’s similarly epic, studio-sinking…

01 SNOW TIME TO DIE After a confession-box murder, Willem Dafoe’s assassin Jopling prepares to flee by ski… The shot’s a nod to George Lazenby’s James Bond in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, confirms director Wes Anderson, who wanted to do “the snowglobe version” of 007. But how do you make Bond Anderson-esque? 02 SMALL WONDERS Dafoe hurtles down the slope… except, says Anderson, “Willem Dafoe didn’t spend a lot of time on skis for this movie.” Anderson didn’t have Bond-level money; besides, he liked the charm of the old-fashioned. Duly, he used miniatures and stop-mo animation for the chase: this Dafoe stands about 3-4in tall. 03 SPEED CHASERS Ralph Fiennes’ concierge Gustave and Tony Revolori’s bellhop Zero pursue Jopling on bobsled… Prep for the sequence involved a soundstage with…

Old Henry is the sort of gloriously hyper-masculine film where you can smell the gunpowder and leather. For director Potsy Ponciroli, it was an opportunity to make the sort of western he had grown up loving, and judging by the acclaim it received following its Venice Film Festival premiere, he was not the only one feeling warm nostalgia for the genre. “Venice was a blast!” Ponciroli tells Teasers. “The premiere night was incredible, walking the red carpet and seeing how the crowd reacted to an old-school western was great. We left just glowing.” Ponciroli’s film stars Tim Blake Nelson as the eponymous Henry, living in isolation on a farm with his son Wyatt (Gavin Lewis) and trying to avoid any trouble. Their lives are thrown into disarray when an injured…

Encanto directors Byron Howard and Jared Bush (Zootropolis) always knew that they wanted to make a musical. “There was this idea… many of us have big, big extended families that we had never seen represented in a Disney film.” Soon, an ideal real-world setting became evident: Colombia. “It sits as this crossroads of Latin America, where naturally there’s European, Indigenous and African influence,” adds Bush (also co-writer). “It felt like a real, natural fit.” FAMILY FORTUNE The extended Madrigal family lives in a multigenerational house. Not only does the house possess magical properties, but each family member has a unique power too, from healing to super-strength. “I think as soon as we landed on this idea of being inspired by magical realism where the magic’s not arbitrary, where it’s actually…

It just popped into my mind – two kids playing with each other, and they were mother and daughter,” says French auteur Céline Sciamma of the genesis of her fifth feature, Petite Maman. She was halfway through the production of 2019’s Portrait Of A Lady On Fire when the lightbulb lit. “It was a mystical image,” she says. “A very troubling image...” Shot during the pandemic, Petite Maman is a drama of modest scale but huge impact. It begins with eight-year-old Nelly (Josephine Sanz) travelling with her mother Marion (Nina Meurisse) to the house of her grandmother, who’s just died. Marion can’t cope with packing the house up and exits, leaving Nelly with her father (Stéphane Varupenne). But soon our young heroine’s days are dedicated to building a hut in…

THIS MONTH MEETING HORROR ICONS… As a teenager in the 1980s, I couldn’t get enough of slasher movies. Halloween, Friday The 13th, A Nightmare On Elm Street… I hoovered up each series at my best friend’s house with the lights off, and my cycle ride home, along winding country lanes in the pitch black, was a terrifying affair. Particularly traumatic was the bit where I had to peddle furiously past two trees that stood opposite each other on either side of the lane – in Friday The 13th: A New Beginning, a motorcyclist is decapitated by a cunningly stretched-out clothesline, so I always ducked low to my handlebars and prayed. But what happens when you meet the guys behind the masks? Does it strip these nightmare movies of their fear…

It feels like yesterday, really,” says Chris Columbus, considering the impending 20th anniversary of Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone, which is being marked in the UK by a cinema rerelease. “Every aspect of that first movie, in terms of initially auditioning for the job, and waiting to find out if I was going to get the job, the casting process, the building of the sets, the design of the entire world… everything is very vivid.” The Harry Potter film series has, to date, earned $9.2bn at the worldwide box-office, adapting eight films from seven books, plus two (soon to be three) Fantastic Beasts spin-offs. And don’t forget the ever popular themepark attractions, Lego sets and studio tour that the films have inspired. But, back at the dawn of the…

♦ It’s 10am. The patio at the Hungaria Hotel on the Lido is buzzing with guests, staff and film-industry types attending this year’s Venice Film Festival. In a quiet corner sits Paul Schrader, the famed writer of Taxi Driver and director of such celebrated films as Blue Collar, Light Sleeper and Affliction. His last film, 2017’s priest-led drama First Reformed, earned the 75-year-old the first (very overdue) Oscar nomination of his career for Best Original Screenplay. Now he’s back with The Card Counter, a brooding gambling drama with a darkly political undertow. “I was looking at professional gamblers on television, thinking it’s such an interesting way to spend your time,” he recalls. “Because all you’re really doing is running numbers. Card counting if you’re playing blackjack. Odds, if you’re playing…

HENRY V 1989 Having earned his Bard stripes on the boards, Branagh adapted this historical play for cinema, playing the lead himself. He was Oscar-nommed for acting and directing and went on to put Shakespeare on film over five further movies. THOR 2011 An unexpected choice to helm a Marvel film, but Branagh excelled in casting series stalwarts Hemsworth and Hiddleston and found a comedydrama tone that worked for the Norse god and ensured the further success of the MCU. MY WEEK WITH MARILYN 2011 Branagh shared the same shoemaker (George Cleverly) as Laurence Olivier so wore his own custom-made brogues to play the esteemed actor opposite Michelle Williams’ Monroe. He got an Oscar nom for his performance. MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS 2017 Branagh donned a truly stupendous moustache…

LAST NIGHT IN SOHO TBC FILM OUT 29 OCTOBER CINEMAS There’s something about the ’60s that speaks to me!” says Last Night In Soho’s aspiring fashion student Ellie (Thomasin McKenzie), a Redruth rube who’s left her native Cornwall and her doting gran behind to try her luck in London. She’s not kidding. No sooner has she turned the lights off at the shabby bedsit she now calls home than she is magically transported back in time to a neon-drenched vision of that most swinging-est of decades: a nocturnal wonderland full of happening nightclubs, sharp-suited gentlemen and darkly seductive temptations. The twist in Edgar Wright and co-writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns’ (1917) lushly retro Valentine’s card to Soho’s romanticised past is that Ellie doesn’t see it through her eyes, but through those of…

THE LAST DUEL TBC FILM OUT 15 OCTOBER CINEMAS Ridley Scott does Rashômon by way of medieval France in his latest historical epic The Last Duel, a multi-perspective tale of truth, justice and honour. Based on a true story (via author Eric Jager’s 2004 account), the film feels far removed from earlier Scott work such as the Crusades-era Kingdom Of Heaven. Yes, there’s plenty of blood and thunder, but at the core is a human drama played out between former friends. Scripted by Enough Said filmmaker Nicole Holofcener and Good Will Hunting bros Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, the story casts Damon as Jean de Carrouges. The nobleman falls from favour with the rakish Count Pierre d’Alençon (Affleck), who prefers the company of Adam Driver’s lusty, Latin-spouting Jacques LeGris, who…

Despite the cancellation of this year’s annual IFA tech fest in Berlin due to you-know-what, there’s still plenty of new gadgetry around to spruce up your home-cinema bunker... PHILIPS OLED+986 £TBC | OUT TBC OCTOBER Philips’ latest flagship OLED TV packs a re-engineered speaker system from British audio boffins Bowers & Wilkins, along with support for immersive DolbyAtmos. The whopping 65in panel sports Philips’ cool Ambilight tech, which projects coloured lights on the wall behind your TV to match the action on screen. Bringinggreater sharpness, more skin tones and better contrast, the new panel also combines HDR tech with real-time ambient light levels to automatically adjust brightness levels scene by scene. PANASONIC JX600 FROM £449.99 | OUT LATE OCT Rolling Panasonic’s TV tech into a more affordable package, this budget…

Michael K. Williams, the five times Emmy nominated actor who was best known for his roles as Omar Little in The Wire and Albert ‘Chalky’ White in Boardwalk Empire, was found dead in his Brooklyn home on 6 September. Starting his career as a model/dancer, Williams was hand-picked by Tupac Shakur to star as the rapper’s brother in crime-drama Bullet (1996). Initially typecast as heavies by the scar on his face, the result of being sliced with a razor blade in a fight on his 25th birthday, he played a drug dealer in Martin Scorsese’s Bringing Out The Dead (1999) and landed small roles in The Sopranos (2001) and Law & Order (2003). The actor was in debt, describing himself as “lost”, when he was cast in David Simon’s Baltimore-set…

Born and raised in New York State, Jennifer Lynn Connelly has spent most of her life in front of the camera. At the age of 10 she landed a modelling contract; two years later she made the jump to the silver screen, appearing in Sergio Leone’s gangster epic Once Upon A Time In America (1984). Fellow Italian filmmaker Dario Argento then gave Connelly her first lead role in his 1985 fairytale fright-flick Phenomena. Connelly says her adolescent years left her feeling “like a kind of walking puppet”, making it oddly fitting that she entered the mainstream with Muppets creator Jim Henson’s 1986 fantasy Labyrinth. However, teen flicks Some Girls (1988) and Career Opportunities (1991) and comic-book flop The Rocketeer (1991) failed to launch Connelly’s career into the stratosphere – although…

EASY 1. True or false? The Sixth Sense was nominated for six Oscars but won none. 2. Which actor’s Jedi ghost was ex(or)cised from the 2004 DVD release of Return Of The Jedi? 3. Which Ghostbuster makes an uncredited appearance in 1995’s Casper? 4. And which of these is not one of Casper’s uncles? a) Stretch b) Stinkie c) Floater d) Fatso. 5. To date, what is the only film with ‘ghost’ in the title to be Best Picture-nominated? MEDIUM 1. To date, what is the highest-grossing film worldwide with ‘ghost’ in the title? 2. Nearly Headless Nick is the ghost of which house of Hogwarts? 3. Ice Cube and Jason Statham versus possessed miners: name the movie. 4. Which title links directors Tobe Hooper and Gil Kenan? 5. Which…