Indholdsfortegnelse for January 2024 i Total Film

We’re coming back after the holiday with a roar. Or a couple of roars. Yep, Godzilla and Kong are back and stomping through 2024 like champs. Let’s start as we mean to go on, right? In this issue we’re digging into that monster mash as well as the dust-up in the family and the ring in awards-bait must-see The Iron Claw. I had the pleasure of chatting with Willem Dafoe about his diverse career, currently capped by the superlative Poor Things, and trying to get a word in edgeways with George Clooney and Callum Turner for The Boys in the Boat (and checking out Clooney’s goofy videos of Brad Pitt on his phone). I also got to talk to the team behind Masters of the Air (Callum Turner again!) and…

Juliette Binoche The cooking scenes are splendid, almost dance-like. Did you feel that? Very much so, with the camera movements and us cooking together. But also it was very much Hùng’s precision, that he wanted to feel things in our movement. Being delicate with the way we cook. And he had to teach me sometimes because I was more brutal. He wanted to have this kind of refinement that I don’t always think about. With all the cooking you did, were there any top tips you picked up? A lot of butter! Which I am not used to because my mother never really cooked with butter. So recently I did more… I added more butter than I usually do. And making an omelette, I learned to use a lot of…

Best known as an award-winning musical artist, Fantasia Barrino hits all the right notes as Celie in director Blitz Bazawule’s musical reimagining of The Color Purple – a role she was previously celebrated for on stage. On the day she speaks to Teasers, her nomination for Best Performance at the Golden Globes has just been announced. ‘Excuse my voice, but I’ve been screaming on the phone with my mom!’ What was your relationship to The Color Purple? I’ve always been a fan of the original movie. I could relate to Celie and Miss Whoopi Goldberg, who laid the foundation where no one can even try to do what she did. But I had a connection. It meant a lot to me because I had been through some things at a…

What’s the first thing you do when you get to set? Music is important for me, with characters. I always have music on in the trailer. Sometimes I’ll make these slides of inspiration – art or photography or pictures of people, and references, and things like that. So I’ll have that on a loop, on the iPad, playing music and stuff. Are you a hot-lunch or a cold-lunch person? I hate eating on set. To eat food is the enemy of, I think, acting. It wants to fuck you up. That’s why I like French hours, where it’s running lunches. I just don’t want people to eat [laughs]. Do you ever sleep on set? Absolutely not. No way. Here’s the thing – especially on [All of Us Strangers], and obviously…

Every movie, the quality gets better, and the viewership becomes more refined. An effect 10 years ago that was deemed amazing, now they’re, “Meh, it’s not that good, is it?” ‘In the case of Kong, we spent an enormous amount of time on the eyes, because they’re so expressive and we have a lot of close-up shots: the way that the pupils dilate, and we have a little water retention under the eyelid; the way that the muscles move. It’s the uncanny valley. You can very quickly become a plastic maquette, you know? Too much detail, too much movement to the facial expression, and suddenly it’s not good. And when you don’t have enough, it’s not good. There’s a fine line between being expressive and being fake. We spend an…

CALLUM TURNER ‘There was an office that they built in the POW camp, the set for that was just extraordinary. And in that room there were two brown, leather armchairs. I’d sneak into that room and I used to go to sleep for five minutes or 10 minutes, just to rest my head. I asked for those, and Gary very kindly gave me those.’ ANTHONY BOYLE ‘I steal everything from every set I’ve ever been on that’s not nailed down! I got away with a fucking World War Two jacket. The costume designer let me take it, with a little wink and a nudge. I took the leather one. And a big, massive coat… It’s a bit Count Dracula. It looks ridiculous. You can’t wear it in any setting, other…

‘I wanted to make the ultimate date movie. It’ll be out just before Valentine’s Day. When we test-screened it… I don’t know if this is an insult or a compliment, but one of the anonymous things went, “This is the first Matthew Vaughn movie I feel comfortable sharing with my wife.” ‘I went to see Romancing the Stone on a date. I was very young and inexperienced, and I didn’t know what to do. And somebody said, “Always go on a date to the cinema, because then you don’t have to talk. I was like, “I fucking like that idea.” I went in thinking I would be bored out of mind, and I’d pretend to like it, and then I’d have something to talk about. And I loved it more…

‘I STILL HAVE THAT FEAR, THAT SENSE OF NEWNESS, THAT CURIOSITY EVERY TIME I START A FILM’ I always skip onto set,’ Willem Dafoe enthuses as he talks about getting back to work after the lengthy SAG-AFTRA actors’ strike. ‘It’s like riding a bike, right?’ Certainly it could be assumed that for Dafoe, after four decades of challenging roles, many in era-defining works, emoting is now a muscle memory, easy. Like hopping on a bicycle. A pro who’s been on the big screen since his ill-fated 1980 gig on Heaven’s Gate (he was fired for laughing at a dirty joke on set), Dafoe has turned his hand to Oliver Stone war movies, Scorsese biblical epics, David Lynch crime thrillers, Lars von Trier provocations and superhero tentpoles. But the four-time Oscar-nommed…

OUT 26 JANUARY CINEMAS Perhaps one of the reasons Back to the Future has endured - besides being an expertly calibrated adventure with a charismatic lead, iconic imagery and clockwork-perfect script - is its endlessly fascinating concept of meeting your own parents at the same age as you. Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers also explores that idea, though there are no flux capacitors or Enchantment Under the Sea dances here. Loosely based on Japanese novelist Taichi Yamada’s Strangers (1987), Haigh’s adap is initially set in present-day London. But the high-concept hook sees the protagonist travelling back to his childhood home, only to interact with his parents, who - if you’ve got a torch to hold under your chin, now’s the time - died decades earlier, when he was just…

OUT 26 JANUARY CINEMAS The word ‘documentary’ doesn’t quite do justice to this transportive cinematic experience from Galician filmmaker Lois Patiño. Taking its title from the Buddhist concept of life being a cycle of birth/death/rebirth, it begins in a dreamily lensed rural Laos, where a teenager is reading extracts from The Tibetan Book of the Dead to an ailing elderly woman. Patiño proceeds to chart no less than the reincarnation of the latter’s soul. Particularly audacious is a 15-minute bridging sequence where the viewer is encouraged to experience the diverse sounds and flashing images behind closed eyes. No peeking!…

SCREEN OUT NOW SHUDDER From shocking opening to twisty climax, this period horror from Jenn Wexler (2018’s The Ranger) is a class act. Christmas Eve, 1971: misfit pupils Samantha (Madison Baines) and Clara (Georgia Acken) and their teacher Rose (Chloë Levine) are stuck at boarding school over the holidays when a murderous, Manson-like cult headed by Jude (Mena Massoud) and former student Maisie (Olivia Scott Welch) breaks in. What follows riffs on familiar home-invasion themes, but Wexler and Sean Redlitz’s excellent script conjures laughs and bursts of poignancy amid all the bloodletting.…

OUT 8 JAN DIGITAL Novelist Claire (Rachel Shelley) signs up for a fully AI-operated retreat in a bid to shift her writer’s block. But when a virus infiltrates her unit’s software the system glitches, leaving her locked inside with an increasingly unstable android called Rita (Heida Reed). Can Claire resolve her IT issues and escape? Brit director Natalie Kennedy’s debut plays like a mash-up of M3GAN, Misery and Black Mirror, though what might have made a tight 45-minute TV episode feels somewhat stretched at feature length. Reed and Shelley are solid throughout, however, and the last act satisfies.…

OUT NOW CINEMAS In Paul King’s (Paddington) Dahl-iverse confection, Willy Wonka (Timothée Chalamet) is a young man with a crazy dream, hungry to share his bespoke chocolate creations with the world’s candy capital. Our guileless fantasist clashes with chocolate-cartel boss Slugworth (Paterson Joseph) and winds up reduced to forced labour. Yet as Wonka befriends fellow outcasts, including orphan Noodle (Calah Lane), he clings to his vision. Resisting Wilder/Depp mimicry, Chalamet whisks up his own gentle Wonka from a measured mix of naivete and knowing wiles. Some will complain he’s too benign, too warm, but he summons a musical-ready lightness and bonds generously with the winning Lane. The vibrant stylings are equally on-point, accommodating hints of playful whimsy and Wizarding World-ish world-building to maintain a sense of handmade personality. The tunes…

OUT 19 JANUARY CINEMAS The Hollywood Biblical epic was always ripe for parody - and so it came to pass in the classic likes of Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Four decades on, writer/director Jeymes Samuel (The Harder They Fall) has another stab at pricking the genre’s pomposity, with amusing but muddled results. It’s certainly great fun watching Jerusalem deadbeat Clarence (LaKeith Stanfield) try to dodge a gambling debt by attempting to become Jesus’ 13th apostle, and when that fails, setting out his stall as a messianic miracle-worker. It’s clear, meanwhile, that Samuel is having a ball himself crafting a hip new spin on Roman Judea: one in which Shisha pipes turn their users into floating stoners and a chariot race occurs on the same Matera thoroughfare seen in No…

SCREEN 1976 OUT 22 JANUARY 4K UHD EXTRAS Commentary, Featurettes, Visual essay, Alt TV opening, Gallery, Booklet, Poster, Postcards It’s hard to believe now, but Carrie almost ended up in Stephen King’s rubbish bin. Instead, his wife Tabitha saved the pages and convinced him to keep writing. It became a smash hit – as did Brian De Palma’s Oscar-nominated adaptation. Re-released in glorious 4K almost 50 years after the fact, the film retains its power. Like many of King’s strongest works, it’s a tale of child abuse. At its centre is telekinetic teen Carrie (Sissy Spacek) who’s tormented at home by her religious mother (the late Piper Laurie), taunted at school by the other kids, then horribly pranked at the prom - at which point all hell breaks loose. De…

1983 OUT NOW 4K UHD EXTRAS Featurettes, Deleted scene John Landis’ Pygmalion-esque comedy stars Dan Aykroyd as a commodities trader and Eddie Murphy as a street hustler whose lives are swapped as part of an elaborate bet about nature versus nurture. While some aspects haven’t aged well, for the most part this is a LOL-filled update of the sort of social comedies Preston Sturges was making five decades earlier (Sullivan’s Travels, et al). In other words, bawdy comic brilliance that might just teach you something about the human condition. Extras are mostly old material, aside from a brief new Landis chat.…

BETHONIE BUTLER BLACK DOG & LEVENTHAL Journalist Butler curates a comprehensive and celebratory guide to 50 years of Black storytelling on the small screen. Opening with influential sitcom Julia, Butler traces a path through the 60s and 70s - a time of unprecedented representation to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and other Black-led comedies of the 90s and beyond. Fully decked out with on-set photos and production stills, this vibrant tribute to a host of groundbreaking Black talent is long overdue.…

The Daily Telegraph, November 2023 ‘Aardman is about to run out of clay – now the Chicken Run creators face a crisis.’ Aardman, November 2023 ‘We wanted to reassure fans that there is absolutely no need to worry. We have high levels of existing stocks of modelling clay to service current and future productions.’ REEL ESTATE FOR SALE Stunning red-brick Boston mansion with fairy-tale spire and highly desirable literary history – this was the former home of iconic author Harlan Thrombey. Current owner wishes to sell as property too spacious for one. Would suit a large, backstabbing family with ample grounds for high jinks and writer’s garret for wannabe New York Times bestseller. Numerous elegantly appointed rooms for family gatherings and visiting detectives. A perfect property to flip – new…

POINT BLANK 1967 Double-crossed and left for dead, Lee Marvin’s Walker implacably treads the road to revenge. TAXI DRIVER 1976 The influences are clear: Travis Bickle’s twisted mind, Scorsese’s use of found locations, and fever-dream waves of expressionistic flourishes… COLLATERAL 2004 Tom Cruise excels as assassin Vincent, cruising the mean streets of LA in Michael Mann’s stylish neo-noir. THE KILLER 2023 Fincher’s controlled study of a contract killer owes a huge debt to Murder by Contract and Blast of Silence.…

TEASERS 1 PANDA EXPRESS ‘It’s been a while since the last Kung Fu Panda movie,’ director Mike Mitchell tells Teasers – eight years to be exact. ‘And that’s because we wanted to make the best sequel of all time.’ Now that’s fighting talk. The fourth mainline Kung Fu Panda movie has heavyweight competition if it wants to emerge victorious in the battle for best-sequelevs, not least from Kung Fu Panda 3, which brought the story of dumplingdevouring Dragon Warrior Po to a conclusion of sorts in 2016. ‘When we made 3, we were like, “Wow, we’ve really wrapped it up.” We patted ourselves on the back,’ smiles Mitchell, while talking to TF over Zoom from DreamWorks HQ in LA. ‘But there was such a hunger to see this character again.’…

You talkin’ to me? This is going to be absolute chaos. I’ve read these pieces before and how do you even answer these questions? So, you talkin’ to me?… [Laughs] How many people have done really shitty impressions [of Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver]? I’m not even going to attempt it. So… Yes, I am talking to you. I suppose you think you’re brave, don’t you? I’d like to think so. I feel it’s a mixture of delusion and insanity to go and do this sort of job, so there’s got to be some bravery in there somewhere. It’s scary. Some days I think, ‘What are you doing?’ Anything creative… it’s such a weird thing. There’s a part of you, somewhere deep inside, that believes you can do this.…

‘AFTER 45 YEARS OF DOING THIS… I FEEL I’VE PRETTY MUCH SAID WHAT I’VE HAD TO SAY WITH CINEMA.’ NICOLAS CAGE MAY ‘SWITCH FORMATS’ TO TV AFTER ‘THREE OR FOUR’ MORE FILMS. ‘We would never want to magically undo it in any way.’ KEVIN FEIGE SAYS TONY STARK WON’T BE BACK IN THE MCU. 1,300 THE NUMBER OF ARTISTS WHO SIGNED A LETTER OF PROTEST AFTER MELISSA BARRERA WAS FIRED FROM SCREAM 7 OVER SOCIAL MEDIA COMMENTS. $19.5M THE OPENING WEEKEND BOX-OFFICE TOTAL FOR DISNEY’S WISH IN THE STATES, CAPPING A YEAR OF UNDERPERFORMING TITLES FOR THE MOUSE HOUSE. ‘I WANNA KISS RYAN G O SL ING IN THE RAIN.’ PAUL MESCAL DREAMS OF STEPPING INTO RACHEL MCADAMS’ SHOES IN THE NOTEBOOK. GOOD THING BAD ROMANCE Todd Solondz is gearing up to…

1 IT'S A LOVING TRIBUTE TO THE 80S Zelda Williams wanted Lisa Frankenstein to be an unabashed ‘love letter’ to the 80s, zombies and romcoms. Scripted by Diablo Cody, the story of a teenage girl, Lisa (Kathryn Newton), falling for a reanimated corpse, Creature (Cole Sprouse), is transformed into a fun, wacky and ghoulish delight in the director’s hands. ‘I’ve been lovingly calling it Edward Scissorhands, by way of Death Becomes Her. I feel like everything these days has to look at the joke and acknowledge it.’ But she wasn’t interested in being meta. ‘I wanted to do the opposite.’ 2 A LOOKBOOK WAS KEY ‘I have something called aphantasia [the inability to create mental imagery] so I need visual references.’ That meant creating a lookbook when Williams was initially…

A child actor especially beloved for playing Sarah, the heroine of Labyrinth, Jennifer Connelly transitioned to adult roles in movies like Requiem for a Dream, A Beautiful Mind – for which she won an Oscar – and Reservation Road. ‘My relationship to the work changed,’ she says, as she learned to dig deep. After sailing to box office glory with Top Gun: Maverick, she’s now playing a traumatised former child actor looking to heal in comedy drama Bad Behaviour. Bad Behaviour is set in a New Age enlightenment camp. Have you ever been to one? I’ve never been to a retreat like that, no. But she’s looking to find peace and happiness, so that’s familiar. We can all relate to that. The film is comedic in places. You normally do…

LITTLE KONG Kong’s son appeared in Son of Kong (1933), released just nine months after King Kong wowed cinemagoers. This 12ft offspring had all-white hair and a cheery disposition, and sacrificed himself at the end of the story to save movie producer Carl Denham. ‘Laughably bad,’ scoffed The New York Times. LUMPAWAROO Initially created for TV movie The Star Wars Holiday Special (1978), ‘Lumpy’ is the son of Chewbacca and Mallatobuck. He suffered a torrid childhood, enslaved by the Galactic Empire, though he reunited with his famous dad following the liberation of Kashyyyk. He’s also in 2020’s The Lego Star Wars Holiday Special. COUNTESS MARYA ZALESKA The title character in Universal’s Dracula’s Daughter (1936), the Countess is also a vampire, though desires to rid herself of the thirst to drink…

OUT 12 JANUARY CINEMAS George Clooney follows up The Tender Bar (2021) with another unabashed heartwarmer, a solid but fairly predictable old-school sports biopic celebrating a scrappy US university rowing eight who powered to the 1936 Olympics against all the odds. Adapted from Daniel James Brown’s bestseller, this real-life underdog story zeroes in on Callum Turner’s proud but penniless Depression-era student Joe Rantz, who desperately battles for a crew place just for the free lodging. Director Clooney’s sweaty close-ups of the crew’s back-breaking training adroitly emphasise the teamwork that gruff coach Al Ulbrickson (Joel Edgerton) instils into his argumentative recruits, who combat their hard times with inspiringly hard work. Too bad, then, that Mark L. Smith’s taciturn script (it’s a manly movie, set in a stiff-upper-lip era) is too understated…

SCREEN OUT 26 JANUARY CINEMAS When Chinese filmmaker Lori (Yingge Lori Yang) comes to stay in Thaxted, Essex, she’s drawn into the lives of the local townspeople: both the living and the dead. As well as uncovering familial secrets, she communes with several ghosts, offering an outsider’s perspective on parochial English life. Despite exploring interesting ideas about faith and socialism, this docudrama from writer/director Marc Isaacs (2020’s The Filmmaker’s House) sadly underwhelms. From production values to nonprofessional performances, it has the feel of a village am-dram show.…

OUT 19 JAN CINEMAS 19 FEB BD, BFI PLAYER Thomas von Steinaecker’s documentary takes us on a whistlestop tour of the legendary filmmaker’s greatest hits. Beginning with a very Herzogian ‘Based on a true story’, it whizzes us from the director’s humble beginnings in rural Bavaria through chaotic classics such as 1972’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God to gonzo documentaries such as 2005’s Grizzly Man. At 96 minutes it only digs so deep, but offers a diverse range of contributors: Christian Bale, Wim Wenders, Carl Weathers and more pay homage to a self-confessed ‘good soldier of cinema’.…

OUT 12 JANUARY CINEMAS Writer/director Gabriele Mainetti nods to the Fantastic Four and Fellini with his ambitious but meandering wartime epic. It’s WW2, and clairvoyant Franz (Franz Rogowski) wants to force a quartet of superpowered circus stars to help Germany and prevent Hitler’s death. The troupe, however, have other ideas. Mainetti assembles impressive effects and strong leads, notably Aurora Giovinazzo as tormented Matilde, but his handling is otherwise loose: slow pacing dilutes the thrills, while the choppy tone lacks – say – Guillermo del Toro’s sensitive facility for historical fantasy.…

OUT 12 JANUARY CINEMAS Why did feminist sex researcher and academic Shere Hite fall off the radar? The answers ring out clearly from this fascinating, thoughtful and revealing doc by Nicole Newnham. Huge in the 70s, Hite broke ground by discussing women’s sexual pleasure and publishing her rigorous research in The Hite Report. Men got so freaked, watching their butt-hurt responses here is enough to make you think Anchorman was a documentary. While it’s no surprise Hite ‘disappeared’, Newnham restores her rep to stress how vital her work was – and still is.…

SCREEN OUT NOW CINEMAS Twenty-plus years after facing off in Infernal Affairs, Hong Kong superstars Tony Leung and Andy Lau return as implacable adversaries in this white-collar crime epic from writer/director Felix Chong (Affairs’ co-scripter). Set in HK during the 1970s and 80s, it adheres to a familiar rise-and-fall template, following the chairman (Leung) of a conglomerate as he’s investigated by an anti-corruption officer (Lau) in the wake of a stock-market collapse. There are shades of Scorsese’s Wolf of Wall Street in the impressively choreographed displays of hedonism, but the storytelling proves overly frenetic.…

OUT 26 JANUARY CINEMAS Ageing novelist Robyn (Diana Quick) is full of regret, so when she’s offered a serum that will return her to being 20 again, she jumps at the chance. Issues arise, however, when Robyn’s rewind begins to impact on her relationship with husband Oscar (LotR’s Bernard Hill), who is more philosophical than his wife (now played by Amy Tyger) about growing old. What could have been a twee sci-fi morality tale instead emerges as an elegant meditation on morality, thanks to writer/director Henk Pretorius’ poignant, pointed script and sterling performances, particularly from Hill.…

1978 OUT 2 FEBRUARY CINEMAS As with his 1973 debut Badlands, Terrence Malick’s astonishing sophomore feature is narrated by a teenage girl, the action filtered through her perceptions. In Badlands, Sissy Spacek’s Holly views events like they were straight out of the trashy celebrity magazines she pours over. In Days of Heaven, Linda Manz’s Linda has been beaten down by a hardscrabble life, her emotions muted. She tells of the days before the Great War, as she and her elder brother Bill (Richard Gere) and his lover Abby (Brooke Adams) flee Chicago for Texas to work as labourers in vast wheatfields. Overhearing that the farmer (Sam Shepard) is ill, Bill plots that Abby should seduce him and become his wife, so that she might inherit his fortune. But fate ravages…

1988 OUT NOW 4K UHD EXTRAS Commentary, Featurettes There have been countless memorable screen versions of Dickens’ festive miser, but only one we can think of who gets kicked in the balls by a Christmas spirit. And boy, does he deserve it. Bill Murray’s TV exec Frank Cross is such a misanthrope he makes other cine-Scrooges look like Tiny Tim. He’s the cruel, shouty core of Richard Donner’s uneven but marvellously mean-spirited Yuletide comedy, which adds a dollop of Network-style showbiz satire to A Christmas Carol. A cracker of a film for all real-life Grinches. Donner’s commentary is the plum extra.…

1974 OUT 19 JANUARY CINEMAS A 50th-anniversary big-screen rerelease for one of Werner Herzog’s best films. Set in a Bavarian town and the surrounding countryside in the late 1820s, this richly allegorical fable of innocence lost centres on Kaspar (played by real-life Berlin street musician Bruno S.), a young man who has spent the first 16 years of his life locked in a cellar without human contact. Scenes of society’s efforts to ‘civilise’ this Christ-like outsider are endowed with a rare acuity - yet it’s the mysterious dream sequences that truly showcase the director’s visionary capabilities.…

THE PATH TO PARADISE In his 70s pomp, Francis Ford Coppola was a god-like visionary who, via personal fiefdom American Zoetrope, sought nothing less than a creative, communal utopia. Sam Wasson’s successor to his Chinatown-inspired The Big Goodbye charts the crumbling of that dream, the draining trials of Apocalypse Now serving as an appetiser to the fiasco of One from the Heart. For Wasson, Coppola’s life is a ‘colossal project of experimental self-creation’. Fitting, then, that it ends with Megalopolis, a 40-year passion project now finally nearing completion. NEIL SMITH SPIDER-MAN VOL.2: 1965-1966 It’s easy to forget just how pioneering Peter Parker was when he first swung into comic books. The idea of a teenage superhero who lived with his aunt, got bullied at school and was rubbish at romance was…

JEFF YANG BLACK DOG & LEVENTHAL Spanning more than 100 years, this coffeetable tome charts the rise of Asian American representation on the silver screen. With a foreword by Michelle Yeoh, plus interviews with other big names (Daniel Kwan, Simu Liu, John Cho…), it offers a wide-ranging history of cinematic depictions, both positive and problematic. Yang also celebrates the stand-outs - including hits like Crazy Rich Asians and Everything, Everywhere… that have brought Asian stories to the mainstream.…

1 THE USUAL SUSPECTS As Special Agent Kujan (Chazz Palminteri) sips his coffee and basks in the glow of a job well done, he slowly realises the identity of mythical mob boss Keyser Söze in the climatic moments of Bryan Singer’s thriller, his Kobayashi mug slipping from his hand. 2 THE OFFICE (AMERICAN) Regional manager of Dunder Mifflin’s Scranton branch, Michael Scott (Steve Carell) knows what it takes to be the ‘world’s best boss’: at least that’s what his mug says. ‘I think that pretty much sums it up,’ he says in the show’s pilot: ‘I found it at Spencer Gifts.’ 3 FRIENDS Set around Central Perk, the titular chums have more mugs of coffee than most. But when Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow) breaks up with a psychiatrist beau, he offers his Freudian analysis…

A re we gonna jump or jerk off?’ This was the last text message I received from Gary, one of my best friends since I was 12. It was sent at 11.57pm on Friday 29 September 2023, and a week later I got a phone call telling me that he’d died of a heart attack. He was 50. ‘Are we gonna jump or jerk off?’ No more. Just those words. I’d replied with, ‘Brokenglass reflections, show your flesh eaten away.’ No more. Just those words. It’s something we’d done since we’d first got mobile phones in the late 90s – sending each other quotes from our favourite movies and music. Sometimes we’d then move on to a general catch-up, sometimes a phone call. But often that was it. Nothing else…

CENSORSHIP Sponsored by the studios themselves, the Motion Picture Association (MPA) is effectively the US movie industry’s moral guardian. Originally known as the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), it was founded in 1922, under the leadership of former postmaster general William H. Hays, in response to a series of bad-for-business Tinseltown scandals. Hays produced a series of rules, known colloquially as the Hays Code, severely restricting what could be shown on screen. CERTIFICATION By the mid-1960s, the Hays Code was hopelessly out of date. To replace it, former political advisor Jack Valenti, who became MPA president in 1966, brought in a voluntary age-rating system that remains more or less intact in the 21st century. Established in 1968, the ratings (determined by an independent group of parents) run…

INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM 1984 Its torn-out hearts and child peril were deemed so violent, Spielberg’s prequel helped usher in the PG-13 rating. SHOWGIRLS 1995 Paul Verhoeven’s glossy grot-fest became the most widely distributed NC-17 film ever, shown in nearly 1,400 cinemas. EYES WIDE SHUT 1999 In order to receive an R rating, Stanley Kubrick’s erotic drama had several sex scenes digitally altered after his death. THE KING'S SPEECH 2010 Tom Hooper’s Oscar-winning historical drama was given an R for a single sweary scene. The MPA rejected the appeal.…

HAVE YOUR SAY TOTALFILM.COM VIDEOS • REVIEWS • TRAILERS • NEWS totalfilm.com twitter.com/totalfilm facebook.com totalfilm totalfilm@futurenet.com STAR LETTER After watching Drive My Car and The Transporter in the same week (not by design), I was struck by their superficial similarity and had fun imagining Jason Statham’s Frank Martin replacing Tôko Miura’s Misaki Watari and vice versa. Can you imagine Frank listening to Uncle Vanya and ferrying the ‘package’ – theatre director Yûsuke Kafuku – between home and rehearsals? Can readers think of any other daft swaps where action stars are inserted into arthouse gems because of their jobs? What would happen if Steven Seagal’s Under Siege chef turned up in Eat Drink Man Woman? ALAN EDWARD ROBERTS, VIA EMAIL Can we go with The Stath turning up unexpectedly, in a sort of…

TEASERS I was not really ever a star,’ Nicholas Hoult told The Guardian in April last year. ‘I’ve never viewed the success I’ve had as being too much. It was never astronomical, your world flipped upside down, you can’t live a normal life.’ Well, that’s about to change. Unless you’ve been living in the Fortress of Solitude, you’ll know that the 34-year-old Brit has been cast as Supes’ arch nemesis Lex Luthor in James Gunn’s Superman: Legacy. Just how front and centre the big-bad billionaire will be in this particular film awaits to be seen – as well as Superman (David Corenswet) and Lois (Rachel Brosnahan), we’re getting heroes Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced), Green Lantern Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion), Mister Terrific (Edi Gathegi) and Metamorpho (Anthony Carrigan), plus antagonist the Engineer…

LOVE LOST Ryan O’Neal has died at the age of 82. After shooting to fame in 1970 tear-jerker Love Story, earning a Best Actor nom in the process, O’Neal went on to star in several classics, including Barry Lyndon, Paper Moon and The Driver. TIME SPLITTERS Amid public legal woes for star Jonathan Majors, both director Destin Daniel Cretton and writer Jeff Loveness have departed Avengers: The Kang Dynasty. Loki’s Michael Waldron has since signed up to write, but the hunt for a director continues. KIDDING AROUND The Miyagi-verse continues to expand. OG kid Ralph Macchio and reboot sensei Jackie Chan are teaming up for a new Karate Kid movie, and the hunt is on for a 15-17-year-old Chinese lead. Jonathan Entwistle will direct. THE HUSTLERS Following a fleeting collab…

ANDRÉ THE GIANT The man-mountain French wrestler known as ‘the Eighth Wonder of the World’ made his US screen debut playing Sasquatch in the TV series The Six Million Dollar Man. His horned god is killed by Arnie in Conan the Barbarian. Most famously, he played the giant Fezzik in The Princess Bride. RODDY PIPER One of the ‘bad guys’ of the WWF in the early 80s, he had a feud with Hulk Hogan. Hogan fought Balboa in Rocky III. As for Piper, he fought alien infiltrators in John Carpenter’s satire They Live, delivering the famous line, ‘I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubblegum.’ DWAYNE JOHNSON The Rock proclaimed himself the People’s Champion in the ring, and he’s been a box-office…

OUT 12 JANUARY CINEMAS DIRECTOR Yorgos Lanthimos STARRING Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef, Jerrod Carmichael SCREENPLAY Tony McNamara DISTRIBUTOR Searchlight RUNNING TIME 141 mins Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone’s second collaboration mirrors 2018 awards darling The Favourite, inasmuch as it’s another feminist period dramedy charting the emancipatory journey of a girl of little means. But Poor Things isn’t as concerned with the chess-playing and wit that women use to survive. A steampunk, gender-flipped Frankenstein of sorts, it explores and challenges the way society dictates and stifles female behaviour. Lanthimos also tackles our own prurience and the seemingly monstrous concept of a woman without shame. The film opens with Victorian doctor Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) in the midst of medical experimentation, to the admiration of student Max McCandles…

OUT 26 JANUARY CINEMAS This latest adaptation of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer-winning tale of an African-American girl’s coming of age in early 20th-century Georgia takes its cue not from the 1985 Spielberg movie but the noughties Broadway musical. Making her screen debut, Fantasia Barrino reprises her stage role as the abused Celie, whose only respite comes from her bond with sister Nettie (radiant Little Mermaid star Halle Bailey). Celie is handed over to cruel farmer Mister (Colman Domingo) to care for his home and ungrateful brood, but a lifeline arrives in the form of jazz singer Shug Avery (Taraji P. Henson). Although Mister is infatuated with Shug, she’s the one who helps set Celine on the path to sexual and spiritual empowerment. Despite its cast’s myriad talents, Blitz Bazawule’s movie proves…

OUT 26 JANUARY CINEMAS A full-throttle thriller, this debut from British director Jamie Childs sees desperate, double-crossed army veteran Jack (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) hunting for his kidnapped brother (Leon Harrop) through the industrial badlands of the North East. Crammed with white-knuckle motocross chases and crunchy shotgun-toting fights, it rocks a nice Drive-in-County-Durham vibe… until, that is, the story skids into soapy melodrama and starts to sputter. Still, Jackson-Cohen’s taut, taciturn performance, finding vulnerability under Jack’s violence, proves he can handle action-hero duties with aplomb.…

OUT 19 JANUARY CINEMAS Climate change knows no borders. Yet it’s still a shock to see London become its latest victim in Mahalia Belo’s apocalyptic drama, where rising flood waters send residents out of the capital in an increasingly desperate search for sustenance and shelter. Among the affected is an unnamed woman (played by Jodie Comer) who’s had a baby with her partner (Joel Fry) just as the world starts to crumble around her. The man’s mum and dad (Nina Sosanya, Mark Strong) offer an immediate safe haven, yet when that too is compromised they head further north – first to a government-run encampment where only Comer’s character and her baby are admitted, and from there to a commune in the Orkneys where friendship with another young mother (Katherine Waterston)…

OUT 5 JANUARY CINEMAS 22 JANUARY BD, BFI PLAYER There aren’t many independent picturehouses you could convincingly build a documentary around, but London’s Scala repertory cinema is the exception. When it took up its residence in King’s Cross in 1981, after a spell in Fitzrovia, it created a halcyon haven for film buffs to get their fix of cult cinema from around the world. Film journalist Ali Catterall and his co-director Jane Giles, the former booker at the Scala, clearly come from a place of love for the venue. Among the roster of talking heads, Pink Flamingos’ John Waters recalls taking his late star Divine to the Scala, which he memorably describes as ‘a country club for criminals and lunatics and people that were high’. Other celeb contributors include filmmakers…

OUT NOW NETFLIX Zack Snyder doesn’t do things by halves, but even by his standards, part one of his long-gestating space saga is a thunderous slab of mythological sci-fantasy. This epic re-do of Seven Samurai takes a standard ‘getting the band together’ scenario and elevates it to operatic heights. Anthony Hopkins’ voiceover establishes the Rebel Moon universe, which has been plunged into discord by the slaying of a benevolent king. Asserting their authority, the forces of the Motherworld demand that the farmers of peace-loving satellite Veldt surrender their harvest. What nasty Admiral Noble (Ed Skrein) doesn’t know is that runaway warrior Kora (Sofia Boutella) isn’t about to let her new pals get picked on. Kora sets off across the galaxy to find a posse of freelance fighters who’ll repel Noble’s…

OUT NOW SKY CINEMA/NOW Hong Kong action maestro John Woo’s first Holly-movie since 2003’s Paycheck is a shoot-’em-up sans dialogue (bar a spot of police radio). Electrician Brian’s (Joel Kinnaman) son is killed by gangbangers who also put a bullet in his throat, leaving him, literally, speechless. Woo ladles on the maudlin sentiment before Brian turns from sad dad into buff punisher, with a little help from YouTube (no, really). It takes its time setting things up, but when our hero starts dispatching gang members over the course of one bloody Christmas Eve, it becomes a grimly entertaining gunfest.…

OUT 26 JANUARY CINEMAS Controversial filmmaker Abel Ferrara casts controversial actor Shia LaBeouf in this unconventional biopic about revered Italian priest Padre Pio, which makes for challenging but ultimately unrewarding viewing. It’s set in the aftermath of World War One; as young soldiers return home, LaBeouf’s Pio experiences torturous visions that force him to confront past sins. The spectacle of LaBeouf self-flagellating over previous behaviour is certain to raise eyebrows, but the rest of the film simply isn’t interesting enough to keep this from being a punishing watch, in every sense.…

1988-2022 OUT NOW BD, 4K UHD EXTRAS Commentaries, Documentary, Featurettes, Deleted scenes, Galleries, Storyboards, Booklet, Posters From Dead of Night (1945) to last year’s M3GAN, deadly dolls have enjoyed a long history on the silver screen. None, however, has had quite so big an impact as Chucky, the ‘Good Guy’ doll possessed by the soul of serial killer Charles Lee Ray (Brad Dourif). Making his debut in 1988’s Child’s Play, the diminutive plastic sadist quickly became a favourite with fright fans thanks to Dourif’s gleefully malevolent vocal performance. But even then, who could have guessed that Chucky would still be slicing bodies and cracking wise so long after Freddy Krueger last hung up his glove? Credit here goes to series writer Don Mancini who, following the disappointingly rote Child’s Play…

1963 OUT NOW BD, DIGITAL, BFI PLAYER EXTRAS Featurettes, Stills gallery, Booklet Three years after the reactions to Peeping Tom effectively ended his career, Michael Powell made another serial-killer film for West German TV. An adaptation of Béla Bartók’s expressionist opera, it sees Norman Foster and Ana Raquel Satre ratcheting up the warbles as they glide from room to room. Unavailable for years but now with a 60th-anniversary restoration, Bluebeard’s Castle is a revelation, sure to make you swoon with its tracking shots, vivid colours and Hein Heckroth’s dazzling production design.…

WISH Should Disney have wished a little harder? While Encanto’s tunes brimmed with zip, the uniformly pleasant songs here need more We Don’t Talk About Bruno-esque pep and punch. This Wish’s pop charms lack Lin-Manuel Miranda’s light-up-the-sky dazzle; I’m a Star and villain song This is the Thanks I Get?! are vaporous. Chris Pine and Ariana DeBose duet sweetly on At All Costs, but otherwise only the percussive Knowing What I Know Now drums up the verve and gusto that Wish so clearly yearns for. POOR THINGS British experimentalist Jerskin Fendrix approaches his intoxicatingly lush debut score like someone discovering film music anew. Tinkly and innocent, canted and weird, Fendrix’s skewed punk symphonies mismatch instruments – drunken squeezebox, piercing strings, breathy pipe organs – instinctively, showing delicious disregard for convention.…

FILM BUFF THIS MONTH Murder by Contract and Blast of Silence I write this at the end of November, or Noirvember as it was for me, as I watched a film noir every day of the month, mostly from the classic period (1941-1958). Some were rewatches of recognised masterpieces: The Maltese Falcon, Laura, Double Indemnity, Detour, The Big Sleep, Out of the Past, In a Lonely Place, Sunset Blvd., The Big Heat, Kiss Me Deadly, Touch of Evil, etc. But mainly I tried to seek out lesser-known entries, for the 40s and 50s – scarred by the Great Depression and World War Two – were stacked with these poetic, cynical, shadow-drenched crime thrillers, in which tough-talking guys and duplicitous dames mashed lips and murky morals. In the dark, dark corners,…

TOTAL FILM SPOILER ALERT! FADE IN: INT. HOTEL, HAITI Immediately after receiving a protective blessing from strangers, LESLIE ODOM JR.’s pregnant wife is crushed in an earthquake. PARAMEDIC Due to improbable medical reasons, I can only save your wife or the baby. You have to choose. LESLIE ODOM JR. Could you… maybe take her to the hospital first to be sure? INT: HOME, GEORGIA – 13 YEARS LATER A very protective LESLIE ODOM JR. lets his daughter LIDYA JEWETT go to her friend OLIVIA O’NEILL’s house after school because it seems perfectly safe. They go missing. LESLIE teams up with OLIVIA’s mum JENNIFER NETTLES. JENNIFER NETTLES I’ve phoned around and they were last seen walking into the woods together. LESLIE ODOM JR. OK, let’s search there. They probably just got…