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Total Film|January 2020WELCOME TO TOTAL FILMNew Podcast INSIDE FILM see page 26We’re out the other side! Welcome to 2020. This issue we’re celebrating the power of horror – kicking off with A Quiet Place Part II. I was the only UK journalist on set last year when I travelled to Buffalo in NY to watch John Krasinski direct Mrs. K, Emily Blunt, in a new chapter of a chiller that speaks to us a community, not just as an audience. In between set-ups, Krasinski and I bonded over our shared love of another apocalyptic blockbuster, Waterworld, and discussed just what it is about horror that gets under our skin in a way few other genres do. In the pursuit of trying to get the bottom of that question we also talked to fright supremo, Jason…1 min
Total Film|January 2020DialogueEMAIL totalfilm@futurenet.com WRITE Total Film, 1-10 Praed Mews, London W2 1QY (postal addresses will be used for the sole purpose of sending out prizes) gamesradar.com/totalfilm twitter.com/totalfilm facebook.com/totalfilm Drop us a line totalfilm@futurenet.comSTAR LETTERIn these days where film companies ask actors/directors to appear on long-form conversational podcasts/YouTube interviews as part of the promotional kit for new releases and more trailers feature ‘interviews’ with the cast, are we in danger of knowing too much about a film before its release?DAMIAN ROBINSON, BACKWORTHThere’s certainly more access than ever before – very different from back in the day when primary sources of film news were Blue Peter and your smug classmate who went to the States on holiday and saw a movie that’d be covered in moss by the time it reached the UK.…5 min
Total Film|January 2020DAYS OF WONDER01“Welcome to the future!” Well, 1984 and a quintessentially garish shopping mall. The Orwellian year was chosen for its connection to the burgeoning surveillance state, exploited here by…02…Maxwell Lord, Pedro Pascal’s business baddie. The rock he’s fondling appears to be a Chaos Shard, which can be used to rewrite reality. This may explain the return of Chris Pine’s very much dead…03…Steve Trevor. In a neat switcheroo, it’s Steve who will be this film’s flailing fish-out-of-water. He’ll provide, well, moral support as Wonders takes no prisoners during a White House incursion.04Kristen Wiig is also on antagonist duties as Barbara Minerva, aka Cheetah. Barbara and Diana start the film as friends before Babs gets her claws out. Expect a literal cat fight fraught with feelings.051984 will again flash back to Diana’s upbringing…1 min
Total Film|January 2020JANE ADDICTIONI’m really drawn to antihero characters,” says Autumn de Wilde, “the person who is just terrible and has to go on this long journey to be a better person.” It goes some way to explaining why this rock music photographer/promo director – who counts The White Stripes, Arcade Fire and The Flaming Lips among her subjects – found her way to Regency-era England and the spiky heroine of Jane Austen’s novel Emma for her feature debut.Played here by The Witch’s Anya Taylor-Joy, the self-deluded Emma Woodhouse isn’t the easiest woman to warm to. “We’ve all been Emma at times in our friendships and relationships, or suffered an Emma,” says de Wilde, but it was exactly this that intrigued her. “Women are either written as villains or as heroines, and everything…2 min
Total Film|January 2020SOUND BYTES“Please, please don’t look at it on a phone, please. An iPad, a big iPad, maybe.”Scorsese doesn’t want you to watch The Irishman on a phone.2 The number of stars Josh Trank gave his own Fantastic 4 film in a recent review on Letterboxd.26.4 MILLION The number of Netflix accounts that watched at least 70% of The Irishman during the first seven days of release.“SLAP THAT GREEN MAKEUP ON ME AND GET SOME CGI AND BENJAMIN BUTTON THE sh*t OUT OF THAT.”Idina Menzel still wants to play Elphaba in the Wicked movie.“IF I AGED AS SLOWLY AS BABY YODA I’D BE MAKING SOME SERIOUS BANK RIGHT NOW.”Macaulay Culkin wishes he looked like Baby Yoda at 50.GOOD THINGSEEING DOUBLEThe Matrix 4 has a release date: 21 May 2021. Which also happens…1 min
Total Film|January 2020FLOWER POWERMy initial idea was to make a Frankenstein film – a scientist who creates a monster that he loses control over,” smiles Austrian filmmaker Jessica Hausner (Lourdes, Amour Fou) of her sci-fi drama Little Joe. “But then I wanted to make a film about a female Frankenstein, and she does not create only that plant monster, [but] another monster as well, which is her child. So it’s a specific female issue.”Plant monster? Child monster? OK, let’s back up: Little Joe focuses on Alice (Emily Beecham), who balances being a single mother of young lad Joe (Kit Connor) with her duties as senior plant breeder at a Planthouse Biotechnologies lab. Her genetically engineered creation, which she names Little Joe, is a red flower with a scent so ambrosial it makes people…2 min
Total Film|January 2020DOUGRAY SCOTTWhat’s the first thing you do when you arrive on set?I get a cup of coffee. I’m not really a hurrier. I like to get into my costume as soon as possible, but the first thing I do is have a cup of coffee.Best on-set experience?I would say one of my first ones, Twin Town. I had such a laugh. We were all worked really hard, but I laughed so much every day.Do you eat craft services?No, I don’t, actually. I’m not a snacker. I’ve got a rigid diet. Hopefully, I’ll have a little bit of breakfast, usually oatmeal. And then I’ll have a light lunch. And then that’s kind of it.Do you sleep between set-ups?I’m pretty much awake for the whole day. When you do big films, they have…3 min
Total Film|January 2020STREET FIGHTERAveraging close to four movies a year since 1991, Takashi Miike is now up to 103 pictures with First Love, a typically gonzo crime-comedy-romance set over one Tokyo night and overspilling with pulp elements: a boxer, yakuza, crooked cops, a femme fatale and, er, a ghost who pops up wearing nothing but pants.“It might be influenced by my personality,” shrugs the Japanese master. “I’m not a person who’s strongly confident. No matter how many movies I’ve made, there are always joys and fears as if I’m making my debut film.”Miike has hopped and chopped his way through every genre, but he’s most renowned for taboo-smashing ultraviolence. First Love certainly delivers on the bloodletting front, marking a return to Miike’s most-visited genre – yakuza movies.“When I did my first cut, I…2 min
Total Film|January 2020LABOUR OF LOVEFor Georgian-Swedish filmmaker Levan Akin, and his cast and crew, making And Then We Danced was a dangerous endeavour. The Georgian-language drama, centred on a young male dancer who falls in love with his rival, received hom*ophobic backlash from conservative and Christian activists during production. That wasn’t going to stop them from telling this story. With little money at his disposal, Akin had to resort to guerilla filmmaking in order to bring this resonant tale to life.“We had to run around undercover,” he recalls. “We had security guards because we got death threats and would lose locations with a day’s notice so I couldn’t make this like a regular film.”Akin grew up in Sweden but has always felt proud of his Georgian heritage and wanted to champion that fact in…2 min
Total Film|January 2020BOMBSHELLOUT 17 JANUARYCERTIFICATE 15 DIRECTOR Jay Roach STARRING Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman, Margot Robbie, John Lithgow SCREENPLAY Charles Randolph DISTRIBUTOR Lionsgate RUNNING TIME 109 minsSomeone has to speak up. Someone has to get mad!” TV anchor Gretchen Carlson’s 2016 sexual-harassment suit against Fox News supremo Roger Ailes explodes like a megaton bomb in Jay Roach’s juicy, angry, darkly comic take on the real-life battle between Fox’s screen queens and the king of cable news.The first big #MeToo movie, it tracks the struggle to end Ailes’ 20-year reign as a sexual predator, with John Lithgow’s wily TV titan routinely demanding female “loyalty” in return for on-screen advancement. A pacy, glossy, star-packed drama about the high cost of doing the right thing, Bombshell never sinks into preachy, women-as-victims lecture mode. Instead, it…4 min
Total Film|January 2020DANIEL ISN’T REALOUT 7 FEBRUARYCERTIFICATE 15 DIRECTOR Adam Egypt Mortimer STARRING Miles Robbins, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Sasha Lane SCREENPLAY Brian DeLeeuw, Adam Egypt Mortimer DISTRIBUTOR Arrow Films RUNNING TIME 100 minsFrom Mr Hyde to Twin Peaks, dark-half tales often seek to unsettle psychological certainties. After debut Some Kind Of Hate (2015), co-writer/director Adam Egypt Mortimer brings a startling mind-splice of psycho-drama, surrealism and satanic fantasy, executed with energy and sly empathy.Adapted from co-writer Brian DeLeeuw’s novel In This Way I Was Saved, Mortimer’s movie casts the sympathetic Miles Robbins as Donnie Darko-esque Luke, who was pushed to grim behaviour as a child by Daniel, his imaginary friend. Daniel was no Bing Bong, so Luke repressed his id-buddy’s influence. As a grown-up law student still struggling inside, he is encouraged by a Lou Reed-quoting…2 min
Total Film|January 2020TALKING ABOUT TREESOUT 31 JANUARYThis absorbing doc from writer/director Suhaib Gasmelbari traces the efforts of four Sudanese directors to bring cinemagoing back to their homeland. Thanks to Islamic fundamentalism and decades of military dictatorship, all movie theatres have been closed down. Our quartet decides to remedy this with a public screening of Django Unchained – but there are many challenges to overcome. The foursome’s attempts to share their passion for big-screen viewing is poignant, not least because their own careers have been stymied by the authorities.…1 min
Total Film|January 2020PRESENT.PERFECT.OUT 24 JANUARYRanging from pavement art to pig farms, director Shengze Zhu’s experimental docu-compilation of Chinese live-streaming footage wobbles frustratingly between curious and shapelessly quotidian. The lengthy, monochrome collection spotlights marginal lives connected online: a candid factory worker monologues, a crane driver craves connection, a dancer hoofs, a disabled street artist works. Sometimes touching, sometimes troubling snapshots of fringe netizens’ lives emerge, linked by implied themes of isolation, resilience and online dependence that could’ve used more teasing out.…1 min
Total Film|January 2020MR JONESOUT 7 FEBRUARYCERTIFICATE 15 DIRECTOR Agnieszka Holland STARRING James Norton, Vanessa Kirby, Peter Sarsgaard SCREENPLAY Andrea Chalupa DISTRIBUTOR Signature RUNNING TIME 119 minsIn films from Europa Europa (1990) to In Darkness (2011), Agnieszka Holland anatomised grim truths about survival during the Holocaust. After detours into American TV (Treme, The First) and cine-experimentation (2017’s Spoor), the Polish veteran issues another potent message from history with an uneven but crisply performed, keenly resonant take on the ‘Holodomor’: the 1932-33 Ukrainian famine that killed millions and influenced George Orwell’s Animal Farm.Fusty period-piece beginnings slowly give way to tougher developments as Gareth Jones (James Norton), Welsh journalist and foreign advisor to Lloyd George, outlines his ambition to interview Stalin. He’s done Hitler, so why not? As Jones hits Moscow to engage Stalin on his…2 min
Total Film|January 2020CATSOUT NOWCERTIFICATE U DIRECTOR Tom Hooper STARRING James Corden, Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Idris Elba SCREENPLAY Lee Hall, Tom Hooper DISTRIBUTOR Universal RUNNING TIME 109 minsEven back when it was a hit West End mewsical, Cats existed in an uncanny valley between emotive anthropomorphic fantasy and cutesy costumed kitsch. That valley becomes a canyon with the addition of CGI motion capture in Tom Hooper’s adaptation, in which a host of familiar faces (plus some refreshingly unfamiliar ones) are transmogrified into human-hairball hybrids with twitchy ears, priapic tails and bizarrely inconsistent accoutrements.Why, for example, are Francesca Hayward’s abandoned albino Victoria and Idris Elba’s cat-napping criminal Macavity – just two of the critters hoping to be granted another life by Judi Dench’s Old Deuteronomy – effectively rendered naked, when other denizens of…2 min
Total Film|January 2020A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBOURHOODOUT 31 JANCERTIFICATE PG DIRECTOR Marielle Heller STARRING Tom Hanks, Matthew Rhys, Chris Cooper, Wendy Makkena, Tammy Blanchard SCREENPLAY Micah Fitzerman-Blue, Noah Harpster DISTRIBUTOR Sony RUNNING TIME 109 minsFor those who haven’t seen acclaimed 2018 doc Won’t You Be My Neighbor? or didn’t grow up Stateside with his lilting, gentle advice, Mr. Rogers may be at best a mystery and at worse, an irrelevance. But Can You Ever Forgive Me? director Marielle Heller expertly manages to satisfy both fans and the uninitiated with this warm, cosy hug of a film.Based on Tom Junod’s 1998 Esquire cover feature (‘Can you say… hero?’ is worth a read), A Beautiful Day introduces us – via whimsical miniature sets – to life-worn journalist Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys), whose estrangement from his boorish dad (Chris…3 min
Total Film|January 2020Silence is goldenOften on a film set, the atmosphere is one of cathedral-like silence. Crew scamper around whispering, the admonishment of ‘Quiet please!’ is shouted regularly, and any on-set dialogue is captured by mics and relayed noiselessly through headsets to those mutely watching proceedings. Amid the disused steelworks of Seneca in Buffalo, New York, on a bright August day before the 2019 Labour Day weekend, the production of A Quiet Place Part II observes no such repose.In a film with very little dialogue, there’s no need for headsets, and in the cavernous mill building, as dust motes swirl, John Krasinski is enthusiastically bellowing orders to his buzzing team. An upbeat but commanding presence, he’s working fast to make use of the precious hours he has with his two child actors before they…17 min
Total Film|January 2020HOUSE OF HORRORSconventional wisdom would say that Hollywood’s most successful production outfit over the last decade has been, hands down, Marvel Studios. After all, the MCU is the ultimate box-office behemoth, boasting four of the 10 highest-grossing movies of all time. But there may be another contender for the crown…Jason Blum’s Blumhouse Productions generally spends significantly less on an entire movie than Marvel would pay Robert Downey Jr. for donning the Iron Man armour, but their returns are huge. Since Paranormal Activity earned nearly $200 million on a miniscule $15,000 budget, Blumhouse has repeatedly turned movies that cost $5-10 million (tiny by Hollywood standards) into box-office hits.“Our business is really a combination of independent filmmaking and studio marketing,” Blum tells Total Film when we sit down to chat. “The eureka moment for…8 min
Total Film|January 2020GHOSTBUSTERS: AFTERLIFEThe new Ghostbusters movie is all about legacy, both on and off screen. Indie auteur Jason Reitman (Juno, Up In The Air, The Front Runner) is taking the reins from his father, Ivan, who directed the first two ’80s instalments in the paranormal franchise. And the film will directly follow the events of those films, sidestepping Paul Feig’s 2016 reboot which didn’t exist in the same universe occupied by Venkman, Stantz, Spengler and Zeddemore.“I’ve always thought of myself as the first Ghostbusters fan, when I was a six-year-old visiting the set,” said Reitman. “I wanted to make a movie for all the other fans.” Reitman has also co-written the screenplay with Gil Kenan (Monster House); Afterlife sees a down-on-their-luck family moving to Summerville, where they’ve inherited a house from their…2 min
Total Film|January 2020HORROR ROUND-UPCANDYMANETA 12 JUNEJordan Peele is producing this franchise continuation – a direct sequel to the 1992 original – starring original icon Tony Todd alongside rising star Yahya Abdul-Mateen II. Producer Ian Cooper says, “What we’re trying to do with Candyman is both be mischievous in how we address the relationship to the first film, but also be very satisfying.”NEXT PURGE CHAPTERETA 8 JULYThe juggernaut dystopian franchise – which has also spawned a TV series – continues with this fifth instalment, written by series creator James DeMonaco. While plot details are under wraps for now, DeMonaco has suggested this might be a finale for the films. “I think it’s a great way to end it all,” he says. “I think it will be a really cool ending, how we take this…3 min
See Also
Harris explains in exclusive CNN interview why she’s shifted her position on key issues since her first run for president | CNN PoliticsSocial Media Reacts To Obama's 'Size' Joke About TrumpApollo Quiboloy: Standoff as police close in on 'Son of God' pastorFintastic or a flop? I review the food at Rosemount chipper Fish 'n' HookTotal Film|January 2020FORMATIVE FEARS PATIENT FILMSINTRODUCTIONWhat film absolutely terrified you as a kid? We’re talking family favourites here, not the time you accidentally walked in on your older brother watching A Nightmare On Elm Street. Well, the TF team have dug up their most potent repressed fears from childhood. From Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’s Child Catcher to the Grinch to, erm, Mickey Mouse, there’s a smorgasbord of genuine terrors, cute critters and outright oddities. Consultant clinical psychologist Dr. Rachel Andrews has provided insights into each particular fear, while clinical psychologist Linda Blair gives an overview into our fears as a whole, and what makes children scared of certain movies…PATIENT NAMEMATTHEW LEYLAND, REVIEWS EDITORFEARWORK THE BROOMThe Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Fantasia (1940/2000)My memory’s foggy (read: repressed), but I believe I was first ambushed by this Mickey Mouse short…13 min
Total Film|January 2020Seeing NEDThe Story Of The Kelly Gang 1906)Shown in Melbourne on Boxing Day 1906, this black-and-white silent was the world’s first feature-length narrative flick – clocking in at just over an hour. Though silent, sound effects were added during its five-week run – coconut shells for horses hooves and blank cartridges fired for gun shots. Released only a couple of decades after the real incident, Kelly’s mother, Ellen and younger brother, Jim, were still alive to see the film.The Glen rowan Affair 1951Based on a script by Melbourne journalist and starring a regional football star, Bob Chitty, in the titular role, this cheaply made account of Kelly’s stand-off with police at the Glenrowen Inn from director Rupert Kathner was not well received by critics. “This near-unendurable stretch of laboured, amateurish film-making…1 min
Total Film|January 2020JOKER 15FILMEXTRASOUT 27 JAN DIGITAL HD 10 FEB DVD, BD, 4K, STEELBOOK EXTRAS FeaturettesHow many times has a comic-book movie been described as the darkest, or most adult, ever made? Well, Joker really is that film, dumping quips and capes, ostentatious VFX and large-scale action set-pieces into a vat of chemicals. It emerges, stripped to the bone, as a distressing character piece, concerned not with a man’s elevation to the Clown Prince of Crime but his descent into squalor and madness.Made for $65m – a quarter or less of many comic-book movies these days – and leaning heavily (perhaps too heavily) into Martin Scorsese’s meltdown classics Taxi Driver (1976) and The King Of Comedy (1982), Joker sees Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) lose his job and his family, fail miserably at his…2 min
Total Film|January 2020DISTURBING THE PEACE 15FILMEXTRASOUT 27 JANUARY DVD, Digital HD EXTRAS NoneGuy Pearce hits the bargain-bin doldrums as a tragedy-haunted Texas marshal whose no-guns policy is tested when a no-good biker gang with grudges rolls into town. Will Guy take up arms again? Goddamn right he will, but York Alec Shackleton’s modern-day quasi-western is no Unforgiven. Saddled with stiff performances, dead-weight action scenes and dialogue so corny it should come buttered on a cob, this is the kind of hokey, blanks-shooting misfire only the NRA could like.…1 min
Total Film|January 2020ON THE WATERFRONT PGFILMEXTRAS1954 OUT NOW BD EXTRAS Commentary, Featurettes, Video essay, Alternate aspect ratios, BookletQuit worryin’ about the truth all the time,” says Marlon Brando’s conflicted longshoreman Terry Malloy to Eva Marie Saint’s Edie as she again presses him about her brother’s death. OK, so it’s hardly up there with “I coulda been a contender!” when it comes to On The Waterfront’s most famous dialogue. But it does perhaps suggest the best way of approaching this classic, if controversial, Hollywood melodrama.After all, it’s not exactly hard to read the film’s story of an honourable rat testifying against union corruption as a defence of screenwriter Budd Schulberg and, especially, director Elia Kazan’s decision to name names to the House Un-American Activities Committee just a couple of years earlier, resulting in the blacklisting of…1 min
Total Film|January 2020SPETTERS 18FILMEXTRAS1980 OUT NOW BD EXTRAS Commentary, Making Of, Featurettes, Video essay, Stills, BookletSteven Spielberg reportedly suggested Dutch director Paul Verhoeven to George Lucas for the Return Of The Jedi gig… then Spetters came out. “I suppose he was scared the Jedi would start f*cking each other,” shrugged Verhoeven. Following a trio of dirt-bike riders from Rotterdam, this naturalistic drama explores masculinity, materialism and religion in none-too-subtle but compelling ways. Extras include director’s commentary, Making Of from 2002 plus an extended chat with DoP Jost Vacano, who went on to shoot many of Verhoeven’s greatest Hollywood hits.…1 min
Total Film|January 2020OPERATION PETTICOAT UFILMEXTRAS1959 OUT NOW BD EXTRAS NoneThis Cary Grant/Tony Curtis starrer inspired a 1977 TV spin-off (featuring Curtis’ daughter, Jamie Lee). But there’s already something a bit ’70s sitcom about Blake Edwards’ episodic romp, set aboard a WW2 submarine whose crew must contend with goats, pigs and – good grief! – stranded nurses. Unsurprisingly, the sexual politics are dated, with nudge-nudge gags that creak like the ailing sub. Yet the exasperated Grant and frisky Curtis are on fine form, while an 11th-hour crisis effectively marries danger and daftness. No extras bar a very vintage trailer (“a squeeze-play you’ll take to your bosom”).…1 min
Total Film|January 2020A FISTFUL OF DYNAMITE 15FILMEXTRAS1971 OUT NOW BD EXTRAS Alternate versions, Commentaries, Featurettes, Video essay, Galleries, BookletIt may fall short of his earlier masterpiece, Once Upon A Time In The West, but there’s still plenty to savour about Sergio Leone’s idiosyncratic ‘Zapata Western’, in what would be his final foray into the genre, not least another unforgettable Ennio Morricone score. In addition to alternate presentations of the newly restored film, this double-disc offering also serves up multiple extras, including a detailed commentary from Leone expert Sir Christopher Frayling and an invaluable video guide to the film’s convoluted release history.…1 min
Total Film|January 2020learning curveTEEN LIFE IS MORE COMPLEX THAN EVERSex Education is back for a new term at Moordale Secondary School – and despite Otis Milburn (Asa Butterfield) having a girlfriend and a dose of self-confidence, he remains as riddled with neuroses as ever. “He’s overcome his sexual block, but now he’s in battle with his hormones – he’s lost a bit of his innocence,” says series creator Laurie Nunn, who wrote the second season before the release of the first. New arrivals are also turning heads (not least that of Otis’ best friend Eric, played by Ncuti Gatwa) and ensuring the journeys of self-discovery are far from over. “You don’t just want to shoehorn in new characters,” says Butterfield. “They’re not just there to tick a box. We explore asexuality, bisexuality, trauma,…3 min
Total Film|January 2020unsafe journeyBy and large, blockbuster videogames have grown safe and predictable. Given the spiralling costs of development for ever more advanced hardware, it’s no surprise that most games in the so-called ‘triple-A’ space are increasingly reliant on familiar brands and tried-and-tested formulas to appeal to the widest possible audience. And so, in such a risk-averse environment, it’s all the more remarkable to play a game like Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding.Like many of its kind, it can afford to push the visual envelope, to hire an all-star cast and use expensive performance capture to record their performances in astonishing fidelity. But while it doesn’t necessarily make the best use of such tech – a terrible script, sketchy characterisation and endless expository dialogue see to that – it is, at least, trying to…2 min
Total Film|January 2020two moreTHE A TO Z OF SUPERHERO MOVIESCapsule reviews of more than 1,000 super-movies from across the globe. Author Rob Hill (The Bad Movie Bible) avoids blockbuster bias; MCU movies receive similar column space to the many obscurities, parodies and rip-offs. Selection criteria is broad – Whovians may raise an eyebrow at their hero’s inclusion; but then, as Hill’s intro suggests, debating what is/isn’t a superhero would take a whole other book. Text is chatty and lively, but monochrome pics do a disservice to the lurid-sounding likes of Bobo Cop or Infra Man (‘The Man Beyond Bionics’).POKÉMON COLLECTIBLESBig, adorable, dead eyes stare out from every page of this overview of the pocket-monster merch produced since the mid-’90s. Cataloguing items from Japan and the UK, it’s a mindboggling array, but you’re always…1 min
Total Film|January 2020CALL SHEETJORDAN FARLEY NEWS EDITORVisiting Pixar for this issue’s Onward report was a thrill. The in-world ‘Unicorn Poop’ cupcakes were much tastier than they sound.MATTHEW LEYLAND REVIEWS EDITORMy New Year’s Resolution: to watch all of 2020’s many animal-themed/titled movies. But can I be excused from Paw Patrol if I see Greyhound twice?MATT MAYTUM DEPUTY EDITORTodd Haynes was fascinatingly self-aware: “The films I made took time [to be appreciated]. I don’t know if our culture still has that kind of patience.”…1 min
Total Film|January 2020OUT OF SIGHTWhen the Dark Universe went the way of Drac in the daylight, there was a silver lining. Instead of an over-ambitious interconnected universe that was riding Marvel’s coat-tails, Universal would instead do things the old-fashioned way: by assigning their roster of iconic monsters to filmmakers with unique visions, on a case-by-case basis, and, crucially, with no expectation that the films would also be a piece of a larger puzzle.Enter Upgrade writer/director Leigh Whannell. Though no stranger to horror, and a fan of James Whale’s 1933 adaptation, Whannell admits that making an Invisible Man movie wasn’t on his bucket list. “It was something that was pitched to me. I was not out there hankering to make an Invisible Man movie,” Whannell tells Teasers. After being called into – he thought –…5 min
Total Film|January 2020PARTING SHOTI’ve always been a fan of miniguns!” laughs Cary Joji f*ckunaga. The director of the landmark 25th Bond film has just screened No Time To Die’s debut trailer to a giddy Teasers, but for all the excitement surrounding Rami Malek’s mysterious villain, the return of Blofeld, and the weight that comes with sending Daniel Craig’s 007 on his final mission, first and foremost on our mind is that Aston upgrade.“I built one of the Goldfinger Lego DB5s when we were first writing the screenplay,” smiles f*ckunaga, who clearly enjoyed his first weeks on the job after replacing Danny Boyle in late 2018. “One of the things that made me realise with the machine guns was having them behind the orange signal lights does not make sense in the real world.…3 min
Total Film|January 2020H.P. SOURCEAfter making a splash with early-’90s cult curios Dust Devil and Hardware, Richard Stanley’s career was torpedoed when he was fired from 1996’s notorious Marlon Brando-starring disaster The Island Of Dr. Moreau. After helming shorts, docs and finding peace in his Pyrenees home, the 53-year-old has finally returned to features, with Color Out Of Space, a gloriously unhinged adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s 1927 book.Starring Nicolas Cage as a father increasingly disturbed after an alien meteorite hits his Massachusetts home, Stanley was roped in after some producers cornered avowed Lovecraft fan Cage in a Las Vegas bar. “In the course of the evening Nic ran up a bar tab in excess of $30,000, which was extraordinary,” laughs Stanley, who recollects getting a call at 3am – he was in France, sound…2 min
Total Film|January 2020WAY OUT QUESTThe first of two original Pixar films releasing this year, Onward may be set in a magical world full of elves, centaurs and trolls, but the story it’s telling is as human as they come. “I started from the personal story first,” writer/director Dan Scanlon (Monsters University) tells Teasers. “My father passed away when I was a year old. Really, it was the idea of: ‘What if I got a chance to spend a day with him? What would my brother and I learn about ourselves, and about him?’”THE WRONG TROUSERSWhen a powerful conjuring spell goes wrong, Ian and Barley bring their dearly departed dad back, but only from the waist down. And they have until sunset the next day before he disappears forever. “There really isn’t much in the…3 min
Total Film|January 2020EMILY BEECHAMDid you become friends with the Little Joe plant?Yeah, I’ve got one now, actually. We got very attached. It wasn’t the scent, I promise. They’re actually plastic. If they were real, it would be frightening. We’re just moving in somewhere, so it’s in storage at the moment. Poor Little Joe. He’s not very happy. He’ll seek vengeance on me later.The clinical, dispassionate style of the film extends to the acting…It was quite tricky. It’s very choreographed and stylised. We’d do about 20 takes of each scene, perfectly timed with the beats: the second that the camera hits you, or the focus pull, or an extra walking past, or you’re picking up a specific prop. Also, when Alice talks to her son, there’s a very high intonation because she’s playing this…1 min
Total Film|January 2020FIGHT THE POWERHe might be a critical darling after directing Neighbouring Sounds and Aquarius, but Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho is right now telling Teasers how he stalked John Carpenter after the horror legend gave a masterclass at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. He even managed to snap a photo of Carpenter meeting up with old pal Dario Argento, as the two of them greeted each other with a hug.Maybe Filho’s fanboy admission shouldn’t come as such a surprise given his third movie, Bacurau, is a (mixed) genre movie set in the near future. A sci-fi-horror-thriller-western, it sees Teresa (Bárbara Colen) return to her home town to attend a funeral. Only something isn’t right: water’s in short supply, phone signals are fading, and a group of armed strangers are closing in.“All of…2 min
Total Film|January 2020THE RISE OF SKYWALKERAs with a great many things in the 21st Century, the internet is partly to blame for the shortcomings of The Rise Of Skywalker. Following the vitriol flung at The Last Jedi, the grand finale of the Skywalker Saga feels less like a culmination of the current trilogy than an overreaction to its divisive middle chapter.One could argue this had to happen. A film as bold, unexpected and challenging as TLJ wouldn’t satisfy as a finale, where concrete answers and happy endings are expected. But when it comes to certain choices, J.J. Abrams and screenwriter Chris Terrio have Force-pushed too far in the other direction, giving fans what they want, but not what they need.The clearest examples of this reactive pandering are Emperor Palpatine, and his connection to Rey. In…2 min
Total Film|January 2020LEVAN GELBAKHIANIThis is your first film role – had you had much acting experience beforehand?When I was a kid it was kind of my dream to be an actor. I applied to study theatre at university but they rejected me so I decided to dance instead.You have a powerful solo number. How tough was that to shoot?The previous day we had a full day of filming so when we rehearsed the dance I was dead because I had only had two hours’ sleep. It took 12 hours to film, we did maybe 24 takes, and it was really difficult to go from Georgian to contemporary dance, but in the end, it really worked.Were you nervous about the controversy the film would cause in Georgia?I was nervous because even though the response…1 min
Total Film|January 2020THE LIGHTHOUSEOUT 31 JANUARYCERTIFICATE 15 DIRECTOR Robert Eggers STARRING Willem Dafoe, Robert Pattinson, Valeriia Karaman SCREENPLAY Max Eggers, Robert Eggers DISTRIBUTOR Universal RUNNING TIME 109 minsBack in 2015, Robert Eggers made a blistering first impression with New England horror The Witch. He makes an even stronger second one with his follow-up, an oppressively nightmarish two-hander starring Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe as a pair of lighthouse keepers who go mad off the mainland after a devastating storm strands them on their temporary island home. This film does for lighthouses what The Shining did for five-star hotels.The Lighthouse is shot in exquisite, full-frame monochrome – an aspect ratio that adds to both the squirming claustrophobia and period aesthetics – with a custom orthochromatic filter that brings every pore, blemish and twitch of…4 min
Total Film|January 2020THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF DAVID COPPERFIELDOUT 24 JANUARYCERTIFICATE PG DIRECTOR Armando Iannucci STARRING Dev Patel, Peter Capaldi, Tilda Swinton, Hugh Laurie, Ben Whishaw SCREENPLAY Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci DISTRIBUTOR Lionsgate RUNNING TIME 119 minsSatirist Armando Iannucci is best known for his biting politi-TV shows The Thick Of It and Veep, as well as his superb 2017 historical comedy The Death Of Stalin, so he might not seem like the most obvious candidate to direct a Charles Dickens adaptation. Happily, The Personal History Of David Copperfield thoroughly disproves that notion.Iannucci doesn’t bend the material to suit his style – there’s no fly-on-the-wall shaky-cam or extravagant swearing here – but instead he brings out Dickens’ inherent humour in an adaptation that manages to feel fresh without alienating purists. It’s an impressive feat, especially as the ubiquitous and…3 min
Total Film|January 2020FANDO Y LISOUT 7 FEBRUARYOutraged audiences went loco down in Acapulco at a 1968 film festival screening of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s debut feature. Now more likely to raise eyebrows than rouse riots, the acid-surrealist’s quest movie plays like an ill-focused dry run for stronger head trips to come. In a postapocalyptic landscape, Fando (Sergio Kleiner) and paraplegic beloved Lis (Diana Mariscal) begin a trek to a mystical city; en route, angry dominatrices, mud zombies, transvestite gangs and more jump cuts than Jean-Luc Godard’s filmography await. Surreal, carnivalesque echoes of Buñuel/Fellini pile up, randomly jostling for attention in Jodo’s variably…1 min
Total Film|January 2020EVERYTHING: THE REAL THING STORYOUT 24 JANUARYEveryone knows ‘You To Me Are Everything’, but who knows the story of the band behind the 1976 hit? Journalist/filmmaker Simon Sheridan celebrates Toxteth’s oft-neglected The Real Thing in a rich, enveloping docu-study with a keen socio-historical eye. Both a ‘story of the song’ and much more, Everything digs deep into the specific struggles faced by a black pop-soul band in racist Britain. With passion and insight, surviving bandmates, journos and star fans (Billy Ocean, Kim Wilde) help flesh out a heartfelt, well-told tale from ’70s pop’s forgotten fringes.SPARKY PICTURES, MUSICFILM NETWORK, NEW WAVE, DISNEY, MIRACLE/ALIPUR, ICA FILMS…1 min
Total Film|January 2020NO FATHERS IN KASHMIROUT 24 JANUARYAshvin Kumar’s powerful, part-crowdfunded drama examines the tensions of the titular region through the prism of a budding romance between Brit-out-of-water Noor (Zara Webb) and local boy Majid (Shivam Raina). As the pair search for Noor’s missing father, Kumar steadily cranks up the tension. Though there’s some clumsy manoeuvring to engineer a confrontational climax, Kumar’s script deftly highlights the plight of Kashmir’s ‘half widows’. His sensitive direction, meanwhile, draws fine performances from Webb and Raina as the star-crossed teens.…1 min
Total Film|January 2020LUCIAN FREUD: A SELF PORTRAITOUT NOWTying in with the Royal Academy’s Freud exhibition, David Bickerstaff’s doc offers a well-rounded study of the late Brit-painter’s life and selfies. Art lovers will enjoy the explication of Freud’s working methods, the close-ups of cruddy brushes; while gossip-fanciers will lap up the ‘bad boy’ anecdotes (smashing a hotel window to get better light; capturing on canvas the black eye he received in a row with a cabbie). And film fans will zoom in on Freud’s Hitchco*ckian habit of ‘cameoing’ in his portraits of others: a foot here, a shadow there……1 min
Total Film|January 2020THE RUNAWAYSOUT NOWA keen sense of place and a generous spirit help shepherd writer/director Richard Heap’s uneven but invitingly rugged debut over bumpy plot turf. Three kid siblings (Molly Windsor leads) and their donkeys flee Whitby to find their mum after a family tragedy; psycho-uncle Blythe (Lee Boardman) gives chase. Though Heap’s hold on tone/character wobbles, this folksy, kids-united fable (evoking The Night Of The Hunter and Swallows And Amazons) is a warm study of innocence and experience. But the runaway star is the setting: the cobbled streets and moors brim with atmosphere.…1 min
Total Film|January 2020Noah’s ArcIs there less anxiety coming back to a character you already know?This character is one that’s in a world of constant horror and panic. That in itself is quite tricky. So I was almost dreading it, but also really excited. But it’s great to have a character that you’ve already built upon at the same time.It looks like you’re pretty fluent in American Sign Language…In the first [film], I had a few sign lessons. I knew the alphabet, and then I met Millie [Simmonds], and I loved her so much, and we got on so well, I just started talking. I just slowly built on this vocabulary. And we’ve been trying really hard to see each other over the past few years – she’s in Utah, I’m in England –…2 min
Total Film|January 2020ANTLERSProducer Guillermo del Toro is a name that you immediately associate with the horror genre and fantastic beasts. Director Scott Cooper, less so. Cooper is best known for cracking dramas like Crazy Heart, Out Of The Furnace, Black Mass and Hostiles, but he’s turning his hand to horror with Antlers.A folkloric supernatural horror, Antlers is the story of a disturbed child, Lucas (newcomer Jeremy T. Thomas), who’s “harbouring a dangerous secret with disturbing consequences”, according to the official synopsis. Lucas’ creepy stories and sketches in class attract the attention of his teacher, Julia (Keri Russell), who sets out to protect him. The fact that Julia’s sheriff brother Paul (Jesse Plemons) has found “part of a man in the woods” only adds to the unease. The gut-churning teasers for the film…2 min
Total Film|January 2020HALLOWEEN KILLSAs sure as a night of trick or treating will be followed by the First of November, a Halloween movie will be followed by a sequel. This cinematic truism became even more inevitable when Michael Myers’ 2018 comeback scored big at the box office – big enough, in fact, to spawn an entire trilogy.“[The plan to make a sequel] definitely came when the movie connected as much as it did,” producer Jason Blum tells Total Film. “I went back to David [Gordon Green, Halloween director and co-writer] and asked if he could think of another one. He said, ‘I can’t think of another one but I can think of another two…’ I said, ‘Great, let’s do that!’ Initially we were going to shoot both films back-to-back [Halloween Ends is due…1 min
Total Film|January 2020Todd Haynes my life in pictureDark Waters 2020A crusading lawyer (Mark Ruffalo) takes on chemical giant DuPont in a shocking true story.“We’ve loosely called it the ‘whistleblower’ genre, as opposed to a sort of eco-thriller, because of the kinds of films that I was thinking about when I made it. Some aren’t necessarily based on real life, but it’s the paranoia movies of the 1970s, particularly the three classics by [Alan J.] Pakula: Klute, The Parallax View and All The President’s Men, which set a tone that others followed.“These films cast this existential anxiety in a way that makes you see the world differently. And of course, that is very much to do with the way we were looking at things in the 1970s, with a kind of new cynicism – a post-1960s, post-Watergate suspicion…9 min
Total Film|January 2020KELLY’S AntiheroWere you anxious taking on such a famous Aussie legend?There was definitely a sense of anxiety in terms of… you know, Ned Kelly is almost like the Opera House or the Sydney Harbour Bridge – a symbol of Australia. And his head, or his helmet, is tattooed on many bodies. He’s a stubby holder and a brand of beer. He’s a pie! You name it. He’s a piece of ‘Australiana’ that has totally transformed into whatever anyone wants it to mean. There’s a kind of nervousness about that. But this film shakes off expectations.You’re married to Justin Kurzel, so did you have your eye on this role early in development?It was completely Justin, actually. When he was reading the book, he said, ‘There’s a great role for you in this!…3 min
Total Film|January 2020PREMATURE 15FILMOUT NOW Digital HDA New York love story shot entirely on 16mm Kodak, Premature earned gentle buzz when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2019. That’s unsurprising, given it’s a quintessential indie film, boasting gorgeously grainy location shooting and engaging, committed performances. But like so many other similarly themed romantic dramas, Premature struggles to distinguish itself from the crowd.If anything, it works best as a showcase for the talents of Zora Howard, who co-wrote and stars as 17-year-old Ayanna. An introverted dreamer living in a single-parent household in Harlem, she’s wooed by the slightly older Isaiah (Joshua Boone), a music producer with a bewitching grin whose discussions with friends about the merits of art introduce Ayanna to a world she wishes she was a part of. Soon,…1 min
Total Film|January 2020SAMURAI MARATHON TBCFILMOUT 20 JANUARY DIGITAL HDMaverick British director Bernard Rose (Candyman) takes another sharp left turn with this literally dashing Japanese adventure. It recounts a strange-but-true anecdote from 1855 about a clan staging a cross-country race to train for war with invading American imperialists, much to the displeasure of the shogunate in Edo. With a reluctant spy and a fugitive princess in the mix, there’s plenty of action, adroitly choreographed to a rapturous Philip Glass score. Rose isn’t the first western director to indulge in Kurosawa cosplay, but few have done so with such wit, warmth and panache.…1 min
Total Film|January 2020THE AMAZING MR. BLUNDEN UFILMEXTRAS1972 OUT NOW BD EXTRAS Commentary, FeaturettesLionel Jeffries followed his much-loved debut The Railway Children with this neglected tale of a couple of kids living in 1918 who are visited by the ghosts of two children who died a century before. “An enchanted stillness” is what Jeffries aimed for and got – Mark Gatiss identifies “melancholy… and a proper sense of mystery and magic” in the extras – while themes of absent parents, city vs country, injustice, guilt and redemption chime with Jeffries’ first feature.…1 min
Total Film|January 2020MOULIN ROUGE 12FILMEXTRAS1952, OUT NOW Dual Format, Digital HD EXTRAS Commentary, Shorts, Gallery, BookletLacking both the exclamation mark and energy of Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 musical, John Huston’s drama focuses squarely on the life of Post-Impressionist artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. While the word ‘squarely’ may sound wrong when discussing the bohemian subculture of 19th Century Paris, sluggish plotting and José Ferrer’s unengaging lead performance make it sadly fitting. The film’s draw is its gorgeous production design and Technicolor styling, something this new restoration make more apparent than ever before.…1 min
Total Film|January 2020WATCHMEN: THE ULTIMATE CUT 18FILMEXTRAS2009 OUT NOW BD, 4K, Steelbook EXTRAS: Featurettes, Webisodes, Music videoWatching the Watchmen becomes an endurance test with this very extended version of Zack Snyder’s ambitious but flawed adap. Integrating the graphic novel’s ‘Tales Of The Black Freighter’ sequences takes up much of the extra 53 minutes, but these – like the numerous other protracted scenes – just make an already overlong movie longer. Still, the additions do make Snyder’s bold experiment - taking Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ work as a storyboard - even more fanboyishly faithful.…1 min
Total Film|January 2020house of picard’sAfter 15 glorious years exploring the final frontier, across seven TV seasons and four movies, the forgettable Star Trek: Nemesis (2002) was no way for a starship captain as iconic as Jean-Luc Picard to retire his commission. But nearly two decades on, the long-serving commander of the USS Enterprise is set to boldly go once more, in new streaming spin-off Star Trek: Picard.Running from 1987 to 1994, Star Trek: The Next Generation was the series that turned Sir Patrick Stewart into a star. Yet the actor was hesitant about engaging the warp drive once more. “I had been for a long time saying, ‘Thank you but no,’” Stewart says. “Then, as the subject matter of this new proposed series became clearer and clearer to me – and when I began…4 min
Total Film|January 2020TWIN PEAKS: FROM Z TO A 15SHOWEXTRAS1990 – 2017 OUT 20 JANUARY BD, 4K EXTRAS Deleted scenes, 4K episodes, Featurettes, Intros, Location guide, Music performances, Gallery, Art cardsWHAT IS YOUR NAME?’ S3, Ep 18With a question for a title, David Lynch and Mark Frost hold true to Peaks’ founding principles for its finale. As some mysteries unfold, others mount: time, place and identity emerge scrambled in an uncompromising send-off that eschews reassuring resolutions.Most Lynchian moment A name, a scream: Peaks returns to Laura Palmer.‘THERE’S SOME FEAR IN LETTING GO’ S3, Ep 15Peaks devotees are rewarded in an episode of autumnal love, heart-rending farewells and electricity metaphors fulfilled. Plus, Bowie’s Phillip Jeffries returns as a kettle-type thing.Most Lynchian moment Catherine E. Coulson’s speech packs an emotional punch.‘GOTTA LIGHT?’ S3, Ep 8Included in 4K in the boxset, S3’s…3 min
Total Film|January 2020on her majesty’s secret serviceWhen David Arnold began scoring for Pierce Brosnan’s James Bond films, veteran Bond composer John Barry offered this advice: “It must always be all about co*ck.” Make no mistake, Barry undersold his MI6 record there. Proof abounds across his 25-year 007 service, but the sixth Bond film served the strongest evidence of Barry’s vital role in the spy’s growth curve.Tasked with scoring the transition from Sean Connery to George Lazenby, Barry opted to not only reinforce, but also reinvent and re-energise the Bond soundscape. It was a risk, but his confidence was earned. Schooled in jazz, pop and soundtracks, Barry banked Oscars (Born Free, The Lion In Winter) and made pop-soundtrack history (Midnight Cowboy) in the late-’60s. To paraphrase Bond himself, he had the tools and he knew how to…2 min
Total Film|January 2020GREASE: THE DIRECTOR’S NOTEBOOKBOOKRANDAL KLEISER | HARPER DESIGNPeople always ask why Grease has remained so popular through the years,” writes director Randall Kleiser in this yearbook-like tribute to his 1978 smash musical. “I say it’s because it captures the nostalgic feeling of a more innocent time, it had terrific music, and it had a one-of-a-kind cast.” All true – though that cast could have been different had producer Allan Carr had his way – the flamboyant movie mogul originally had p*rn actor Harry Reems in mind for Sid Caesar’s Coach Calhoun part.Not only that, but it’s also entirely possible Carrie Fisher might have landed the iconic role of Sandy, had Olivia Newton-John not been happy with the screen test she insisted upon before inking her contract.From the foot injury John Travolta sought to…1 min
Total Film|January 2020TOTAL FILM WINGMANDEAR WINGMANApologies, I’m a little behind on my mag reading but I very much enjoyed the interview with Sandra Bullock in issue 280 and wondered if you could reassure me on something. After the revelations from Sandy and Keanu about their mutual but unrealised attraction, do you think there’s an alternative universe somewhere in which they’re a couple who’ve been together since Speed?HANNAH JONES, FAREHAMWINGMAN SAYS…No worries – Wingman is behind on his letter reading (Christmas closedown, bone-idleness, etc). Yes, we’re sure there’s branch of the multiverse where two lovebirds have been perched since the ’90s, thanking Cupid for bomb-ridden buses. But there’s also the darkest timeline, where they book a romantic getaway at a dreary Lake House. Any other alt-universe hook-ups you’d like Wingman to ponder? He spends half…1 min
Total Film|January 2020YOU TALKIN' TO ME?IN THE CROSSHAIRS THIS MONTH DANIEL RADCLIFFEAre you talkin’ to me?Yes, I am. I, Dan Radcliffe, am talking to you. I bet people have come up with really clever answers, and I just… haven’t.Do you feel lucky, punk?Yes, actually. I feel incredibly lucky. It is a cliché to say that acting is an amazing job, but to have a career where you have some say over what you want to do, it puts you in a very small percentage within the acting world. So I am ridiculously lucky, and try not to forget this.Do you have an off switch?I’ve got better at having an off switch. I still am not great at sitting. I need to do one thing a day to feel productive, and if I don’t, I feel…4 min
Total Film|January 2020HISS AND MAKE UPSome films just know their core audience. Take Like A Boss, the new laugh-fest starring Tiffany Haddish, Rose Byrne and Salma Hayek. “It’s definitely a girls’ night out movie,” says Miguel Arteta, a director already familiar with female-driven features after making The Good Girl with Jennifer Aniston and Beatriz At Dinner with Hayek. “But my hope is that men will also have a good time.”If the early test-screenings are anything to go by, Arteta will get his wish. “When we tested the movie, guys were like, ‘I thought it was a chick flick but it’s really funny!’” Haddish and Byrne play Mia and Mel, two long-term friends who start up a successful beauty company together. Then in comes Hayek’s cosmetics mogul, Claire, causing all sorts of havoc. “It’s a bit…2 min
Total Film|January 2020MORFYDD CLARKRaised in Cardiff, Morfydd Clark turned heads in Les Liaisons Dangereuses at the Donmar Warehouse and as Cordelia in King Lear at the Old Vic. Her small-screen roles include Sister Clara in His Dark Materials, Mina Harker in Dracula, and young Galadriel in Amazon’s The Lord Of The Rings series, and she’s set for a huge year at the movies in 2020, with The Personal History Of David Copperfield, Eternal Beauty and Saint Maud…Was it a head-trip working with Armando Iannucci and all those stars on David Copperfield?There were all these huge names but also quite a lot of us who’d not been in anything major before, so you didn’t feel you were alone. And Armando lived up to my expectations. He’s just so kind.How did you get into the…2 min
Total Film|January 2020IT SHOULDN’T HAPPEN TO A FILM JOURNALISTTHIS MONTH THE LANGUAGE BARRIERI am writing this month’s column on the plane back from Berlin, but I almost wasn’t because I only just made my flight.The problems started when I checked out of my hotel and the desk clerk advised me, too late, to leave an extra hour for the airport run as there was a tractor demonstration in the city. I thought I’d misunderstood, though her English was exemplary compared to my GCSE German (Grade E, in case you’re wondering). But no, it really was a tractor demo, with 15,000 farmers riding their high green vehicles to the capital to protest against changes to agricultural policy. So there I was stuck in a cab crawling behind a pair of gigantic rear wheels, while all around me, and through…3 min
Total Film|January 2020TUNE INEverything I do is compared to The Full Monty!” laughs Peter Cattaneo, when Teasers asks if he was concerned his latest movie, Military Wives, would be pitted against his 1997 feelgood hit about Sheffield steelworkers-turned-strippers. “I was aware of it and nervous of it, but in the end, I thought, ‘I’m not going to let that stop me making the film, because I’m worried that it’s a bit similar to The Full Monty.’”Fortunately, while Military Wives rides that similar heartwarming wave, the two films are very different. Inspired by a real-life British military wives’ choir, who went from featuring in BBC doc The Choir to performing at the Royal Albert Hall, the film centres on two very different conductors: down-to-earth Lisa (Catastrophe’s Sharon Horgan) and well-to-do Kate (Kristin Scott Thomas).While…2 min
Total Film|January 2020JOHN BOORMANA contemporary of Kubrick, Lean and Kurosawa, John Boorman is responsible for some of the defining films of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s (Point Blank, Deliverance, Excalibur) as well as some legendary misfires (Zardoz, Exorcist II: The Heretic). Boorman looks back on his life in film, and offers some closing thoughts, in new autobiography Conclusions.You admit in your book that it may have been better named “confusions” or “confessions”. What did you set out to write with Conclusions?Coming into my eighties I set out to write Conclusions to find out if there was some pattern or meaning to my life, or was it just kick, bollock and scramble? Whatever else it is, a film is also a record of its time and place. A Roman epic of the ’50s tells…3 min
Total Film|January 2020PARASITEOUT 7 FEBRUARYCERTIFICATE 15 DIRECTOR Bong Joon-ho STARRING Song Kang-ho, Lee Sun-kyun, Cho Yeo-jeong, Choi Woo-sik, Park So-dam SCREENPLAY Bong Joon-ho, Jin Won-han DISTRIBUTOR Curzon RUNNING TIME 132 minsA new Bong Joon-ho film always excites expectations. The South Korean director has amassed quite a CV: Memories Of Murder, The Host, Mother, Snowpiercer and Netflix giant-pig movie Okja. The Palme d’Or-winning Parasite follows suit. Gripping from first frame to last, it again showcases Bong’s love of hopping between genres – pitch-black comedy here holds sway, but there’s drama, social commentary, horror and a surprising amount of heart.Starting off as something of a mirror image to 2018’s Shoplifters, it introduces us to the Kim family, barely getting by as they share a cramped basem*nt with scurrying bugs. Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho) and his…3 min
Total Film|January 2020RICHARD JEWELLOUT 31 JANUARYCERTIFICATE TBC DIRECTOR Clint Eastwood STARRING Paul Walter Hauser, Sam Rockwell, Jon Hamm, Kathy Bates, Olivia Wilde, SCREENPLAY Billy Ray DISTRIBUTOR Warner Bros. RUNNING TIME 129 mins TBCThe real-life Richard Jewell’s moment in the sun came back in 1996, working as a security guard at a concert celebrating the Atlanta Olympic Games. After shooing away some drunken kids, Jewell found an unattended backpack under a bench. Reacting quickly, he led the operation to clear the area. A bomb exploded, but his actions saved thousands of lives.Clint Eastwood previously tackled true-life terrorism prevention in his 2018 misfire The 15:17 To Paris. Here, the hook is less the act of everyday bravery, more what happened next. Following the backpack incident, Jewell (I, Tonya’s Paul Walter Hauser) is lauded in the…3 min
Total Film|January 2020THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTEOUT 31 JANUARYCERTIFICATE 15 DIRECTOR Terry Gilliam STARRING Adam Driver, Jonathan Pryce, Joana Ribeiro, Olga Kurylenko SCREENPLAY Terry Gilliam, Tony Grisoni DISTRIBUTOR Sparky Pictures RUNNING TIME 132 minsSome 25 years in the making (and ‘unmaking’ as the pre-credits joke), Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote has become a millstone around the director’s neck. The infamous collapse of the original production led to 2002’s Lost In La Mancha, a documentary significantly more entertaining than the film he’s finally delivered.Adam Driver is Toby, a commercials director who, when he’s not selling his soul for yet another meaningless brand, is getting it on with the wife (Olga Kurylenko) of his boss (Stellan Skarsgård). Toby, we learn, was once an art-loving student filmmaker who made a short inspired by Cervantes’ Don Quixote,…2 min
Total Film|January 2020SPIES IN DISGUISECasting coo…OUT NOWCERTIFICATE PG DIRECTOR Nick Bruno, Troy Quane STARRING Will Smith, Tom Holland, Ben Mendelsohn, Rashida Jones SCREENPLAY Brad Copeland, Lloyd Taylor DISTRIBUTOR Fox RUNNING TIME 102 minsLoosely based on 2009 short Pigeon: Impossible (one of the items found, bizarrely, on Osama Bin Laden’s hard drive), Spies In Disguise sees Ice Age outfit Blue Sky foray into Incredibles territory with mixed results. Essentially a buddy picture, it sees tuxedo-sporting agent Lance Sterling (Will Smith) team up with techie nerd Walter Beckett (Tom Holland) to bring down a terrorist (Ben Mendelsohn) armed with deadly weaponised drones. The twist is that the mission involves turning Lance into a pigeon…The juxtaposition of Big Willie’s outsized personality with an avian’s anatomy is unexpected enough to win Nick Bruno and Troy Quane’s ’toon brownie…2 min
Total Film|January 2020STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKEROUT NOWCERTIFICATE 12A DIRECTOR J.J. Abrams STARRING Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac SCREENPLAY J.J. Abrams, Chris Terrio DISTRIBUTOR Disney RUNNING TIME 142 minsAlong time ago, in a galaxy far, far away (Los Angeles, 1973), George Lucas saw his 13-page treatment for a space opera titled The Star Wars turned down by multiple studios before 20th Century Fox decided to invest. Lightspeed through the 42 years since Star Wars was released in May 1977, and you arrive at a time when the nine-movie Skywalker saga has shaped cinema, pop culture, generations… And now lands the film that concludes not just the story arcs unfurled in The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, but those running through a trilogy of trilogies. How can director/co-writer J.J.…3 min
Total Film|January 2020THE HOLY MOUNTAINOUT 24 JANUARYAfter the crackpot cowboy circus of El Topo, psychedelic maestro Alejandro Jodorowsky went for broke with 1973’s far-reaching career peak. As a thief (Horacio Salinas) begins a spiritual quest, his poo turns to gold; after encounters with self-replicating org*sm machines and costumed toads, his journey gets really peculiar. If Jodorowsky’s all-embracing melees of sacrilegious imagery, shamanism, surrealism, poetry, reptilian theatre and more verge precariously on the woolly, their wit, beauty, ambition and satirical jabs sharpen the film’s impact. There’s certainly nothing else quite like it.THE LUCIAN FREUD ARCHIVE, BRIDGEMAN IMAGES, ARROW FILMS, UNIVERSAL, SIGNATURE, SLACKJAW, BFI DISTRIBUTION…1 min
Total Film|January 2020A STREETCAR NAMED DESIREOUT 7 FEBRUARYTennessee Williams’ iconic study of sex, class and madness got the film (first released in 1951) it deserved in one of the great stage-to-screen adaps: director Elia Kazan captures Williams’ seething emotions and sweltering atmosphere with only minor concessions to censorship. It also marks the moment Hollywood acting changed forever. As Blanche DuBois, classically trained Vivien Leigh is tragic, poetic, Oscar-winning. But look! Here’s mumbling Method man Marlon Brando, whose Stanley Kowalski is all feral energy, smouldering charisma and the model for all who followed.…1 min
Total Film|January 2020COMING SOONONWARD OUT 6 MARCHYou’ve heard of ‘Dad cinema’. Well, now it’s time for ‘half-Dad cinema’! Chris Pratt and Tom Holland are elf bros racing to restore their semi-resurrected pop. It’s another of Pixar’s one-worders (á la Up, Coco, WALL-E), which always come with a tear-jerk guarantee. Lightfoot it to p22.BLOODSHOT OUT 21 FEBRUARYMore re-animation, this time with murdered marine Vin Diesel, brought back sans memories but with new super-soldier powers. Less reminiscing, more killing! Guy Pearce invites 20th-anniversary Memento comparisons.THE INVISIBLE MAN OUT 28 FEBRUARYA one-time Dark Universe prospect finds its new home at Blumhouse, starring not Johnny Depp (though how would we know?) but Elisabeth Moss, who’s being hounded by her unseen, un-dead ex. See your way to page 9.SONIC THE HEDGEHOG OUT 14 FEBRUARYSent back to the design…1 min
Total Film|January 2020Regan ReignsWhen we last saw Regan her father had died in front of her. Where do we find her now, emotionally?I think she was very devastated to lose her father, but she felt like she wanted to become him, so to speak – and become the patriarch, and replace him, in a sense. Because Regan shares so many things with her father, and she is very resourceful, she knew the technology that her dad had. And it’s been terrible for her. But yeah, she’s taken that road.You and Noah have maintained your off-screen friendship. Is that important in playing siblings?Oh, absolutely. In the first movie, Noah learned more sign language that he needed to in the movie, just to be able to communicate with me, and we immediately clicked. Before we…2 min
Total Film|January 2020LIGHT FANTASTICMeeting Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson in the luxury surroundings of London’s Soho Hotel is something of a jarring experience having seen their work together in The Lighthouse. There, they play grizzled 19th Century old-timer ‘wickie’ Thomas Wake (Dafoe) and chippy newbie Ephraim Winslow (Pattinson), who descend into booze-fuelled madness in a filthy lighthouse when a storm strands them on an unforgiving island in Maine. Filmed in a stifling 1.19.1 aspect ratio and lensed in monochrome with a custom orthochromatic filter – and often in queasy close-up – the duo are laid bare on-screen. Every fleck of spittle glints during rageful monologues about lobster and beans; circles under sleep-ravaged eyes bloom darkly; the rain, the bodily fluids, the oil glistens slickly. Combined with an insistent sound design (foghorns, bird screams,…14 min
Total Film|January 2020ANTEBELLUMSharing producers with Get Out and Us, Antebellum looks to have plenty of DNA in common with Jordan Peele’s hits. For starters, there’s the secrecy-shrouded premise. The striking poster art: in Antebellum’s case, featuring a butterfly trickling blood down a wall. The arresting teaser trailer: featuring indelible imagery with a big side order of mystery. Then there’s the exploration of historical and contemporary racism in the US. Yep, this film is going to be a big talking point.The logline has it that “successful author Veronica Henley (Monáe) finds herself trapped in a horrifying reality and must uncover the mind-bending mystery before it’s too late,” and what we’ve seen so far suggests that Veronica is trapped in the pre-abolition American South as a slave on a cotton farm, with memories of…1 min
Total Film|January 2020FANTASY ISLANDIf it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. That was the basic theme of Fantasy Island, the long-running US TV series where a pre-Wrath Of Khan Ricardo Montalban played the enigmatic maître d’ of a luxury holiday destination. Once checked in, his guests got the chance to experience their wildest dreams, before the show’s formulaic nature determined that their fun must come at a price.Now Fantasy Island is getting a reinvention courtesy of Blumhouse, the company behind Get Out, Insidious and The Purge – and as you’d expect, it’s set to emphasise the horror side of the story. “It’s a total reinvention, a straight scary movie,” says producer/studio head Jason Blum. “Genre-wise it’s very different to what the TV show was, but there’s a lot of other…1 min
Total Film|January 2020TRUE HISTORY OF The Kelly Gangdirector Justin Kurzel is sitting – rather incongruously considering the feral subject of his latest film – in an opulent champagne and oyster speakeasy at 2019’s Toronto International Film Festival, swirling a cut-glass tumbler around on a marble table in a velvet booth. We’re discussing pies.“In Australia, you have a Ned Kelly pie. He was at the beginning of our opening ceremony at the Olympics. There are beer products of him,” he muses of the 19th Century brigand who famously fought police wearing homemade armour and died on the scaffold a folk hero/antihero. “He’s used by the Far Right as a symbol of nationalistic pride. He is so many things to so many people. Is he a cop killer? Is he a Robin Hood? Does he slot into class in…8 min
Total Film|January 2020CLINT EASTWOOD“WHEN YOU START ACTING, YOU NEVER THINK IT’S GOING TO END… AND THEN YOU LOOK BACK AND GO, ‘WHY AM I STILL HERE?’”There are legends, and then there’s Clint Eastwood. The hair may be wispy-white, the frame a little fragile and slow-moving, but he’s still utterly distinct when Total Film meets him at the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles. This year, the 89-year-old actor-producer-director has hit a huge milestone: 65 years working in Hollywood.Discharged from the army in 1953, he started with bit-parts – “a one-liner if I was lucky,” he grins, popping a mint in his mouth. Those one-liners soon became full-blown roles – from cowboy Rowdy Yates on TV show Rawhide to Sergio Leone’s ‘Spaghetti westerns’, playing the Man With No Name in A Fistful Of Dollars,…20 min
Total Film|January 2020HUSTLERS 15FILMEXTRASOUT NOW DIGITAL HD OUT 20 JANUARY DVD, BD EXTRAS Commentary, FeaturetteIn all the hubbub about Martin Scorsese’s eventful year (inspiring Joker, irritating Marvel and releasing The Irishman), it went almost unnoticed that another of 2019’s best films was once mooted as a Scorsese project. Instead, Lorene Scafaria directed her own screenplay, en route to $150m at the global box office and serious awards buzz.There’s symmetry here, given that Scafaria’s smart, sexy caper is about overlooked women finally getting their due. Except the gang here are strippers, led by Destiny (Constance Wu) and Ramona (Jennifer Lopez), and the gig is fleecing Wall Street’s rich, horny wolves. For all the Scorsese influences in the film, it’s less homage-heavy than Joker. It’s a refreshingly progressive, politically savvy take on familiar tropes.What stands…1 min
Total Film|January 2020KILLERMAN 15 TBCFILMEXTRAS TBCOUT 3 FEB DVD, BD, DIGITAL HD EXTRAS TBCAlthough well crafted in the gritty image of Walter Hill and early John Carpenter, this overwrought thriller is ultimately crushed by the weight of its own melodrama. Liam Hemsworth and Emory Cohen are money launderers who tackle dirty cops, a panto crime lord and, in one soapy twist too far, amnesia as a job goes wrong and Hemsworth’s Moe Diamond (yes, really) loses his memory. Pregnant girlfriends and kindly shopkeepers all get caught in the crossfire in a diverting but farcical hodge-podge.…1 min
Total Film|January 2020PROM NIGHT 18FILMEXTRAS1980 OUT NOW BD EXTRAS Commentaries, Featurettes, Additional scenes, Outtakes, Gallery, BookletJamie Lee Curtis and Leslie Nielsen top the cast list in this curious Canadian slasher about a group of high-school seniors stalked by a masked killer. If the plot appears run-of-the-mill, what makes this movie unusual is the decision to delay the actual slashing until the third act and devote the rest of the running time to the travails of teen dating and some truly gobsmacking disco dancing. If nothing else, it’s far more memorable than the 2008 remake.…1 min
Total Film|January 2020NOW, VOYAGER UFILMEXTRAS1942 OUT NOW BD EXTRAS Commentary, Featurettes, Radio adaps, BookletPeak Bette Davis,” says critic Farren Smith Nehme, lauding one of the classical era’s top transformative turns, as she goes from mega-browed mouse to, well, Bette Davis. Irving Rapper’s ‘women’s picture’ is famed for its moony fade-out with Paul Henreid, but the real chemistry is with Davis’ immovable ma Gladys Cooper and kindly shrink Claude Rains. Davis theorises an alternative ending in an expansive 1971 interview – the highlight of a Criterion package that also hails Now, Voyager as a precursor to today’s makeover shows.…1 min
Total Film|January 2020IRONWEED 15FILMEXTRAS1987 OUT NOW Dual Format EXTRAS BookletEven in his ’80s pomp, Jack Nicholson was capable of restraint. Almost the best thing about Héctor Babenco’s uneven character drama, Jack steadies those eyebrows as a Depression-era drunk with grief/guilt issues. By contrast, Meryl Streep acts up excessively as his alcoholic pal; Babenco (Pixote), meanwhile, muffles his outsider sympathies with a flattening fealty to William Kennedy’s novel. But the show-stealer is Tom Waits, who invests the terminally cheery yet sickly Rudy with reserves of off-kilter dignity.…1 min
Total Film|January 2020state of emergencyI thought this was a story about a snake,” says Robert Carlyle on the Manchester set of Cobra. To be fair to the star, his initial take on Sky’s new six-part thriller wasn’t a million miles from the truth. Inspired by the shadowy nature of emergency meetings held in Cabinet Office Briefing Room A (aka COBRA) in response to potential or ongoing crises, the series features politicians, experts and advisors whose actions in response to reports of a solar storm range from honourable to, yes, somewhat serpentine.In the former camp is Carlyle’s Robert Sutherland, an oddity as a Scottish Conservative Prime Minister, albeit a centrist one. “Scotland’s gates are now shut to me,” he laughs. “It was the human, emotional aspect of Cobra that spoke to me: if it moves…5 min
Total Film|January 2020EXTRASHARRY POTTER KNITTING MAGICBOOK OUT 28 JANUARYWhy shell out for a Gryffindor scarf when you can knit one (purl one) instead? Well-timed for winter, Tanis Gray’s how-to features 28 Potter-inspired patterns, all graded on a five-point skill-scale (Hogwarts mug cosies = doddle; Fluffy The Three-Headed Dog = call for Dumbledore). As well as a nice balance of indoor/outdoor items, some designs allow you to wear your fandom on your sleeve more discreetly than others. Expecto pat-row-num!LEGO 1989 BATMOBILETOY/COLLECTIBLE OUT NOWWhere does he get those wonderful toys? Duh, from The Lego Store (and other good retailers)! Although sadly not available at a 1989 price, you do get plenty of bang for your buck, like the (non-firing) pop-up machine guns. Measuring 12cm x 60cm x 22cm, the Burton-mobile is also equipped with…2 min
Total Film|January 2020fresh spin1917Thomas Newman upends conventional war-pic bombast for Sam Mendes’ unconventional war movie. Ambient doom-scapes, tense pulses and electro-processed sounds heighten the mood of in-the-moment dread: ‘Gehenna’ broods ominously, ‘Tripwire’ builds unbearably, ‘Englander’ rumbles like a Fury Road escapee. When Newman caves to catharsis on the cello-led ‘Come Back To Us’, he caves with dignity.UNCUT GEMSAfter 2017’s Good Time, Daniel Lopatin’s latest Safdie bros team-up is another dense, intense synth-score-as-character study, sculpted with throbbing grandeur. Inhabiting the persona of Adam Sandler’s jeweller, Lopatin ranges from stressed-out to self-aggrandising impeccably: if ‘The Ballad Of Howie Bling’ recalls Blade Runner’s gleam, ‘School Play’ evokes mounting panic even before Sandler’s closing cry of “Help!”…1 min
Total Film|January 2020THE ART OF FROZEN IIBOOKJESSICA JULIUS | CHRONICLE BOOKSD’you wanna build a… water horse? Or a botanically correct enchanted forest? Good luck. With its avalanche of abstract ideas, Disney’s sequel posed some serious design hurdles, succinctly outlined by the production team. The movie’s landscape artistry is well captured in stunning spreads, while costume pages zoom in on tiny, telling details. Studio Ghibli’s influence is plain to see in several sketches, and we learn that one fiddly concept was made lucid with the aid of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.…1 min
Total Film|January 2020IS IT BOLLOCKS?THIS MONTH THE AERONAUTSQIn The Aeronauts, our heroes’ balloon rises so high it freezes, forcing Felicity Jones’ pilot to climb it to release an air valve while Eddie Redmayne’s scientist faints. Deathly true or hot air?AKEITH MOOREHEAD OF COLLECTIONS, THE ROYAL SOCIETYWhen writing about balloon ascents, the real-life James Glaisher commented upon the bodily pains of altitude: breathlessness, nausea and cold. On 5 September 1862, he was slumped insensible near to his meteorological instruments high above Wolverhampton. His companion, aeronaut Henry Coxwell, struggled to save their lives.The coal gas-filled balloon spun during its ascent. The valve-release rope became entangled, and as the craft climbed ever higher, so did Coxwell, forced to clamber onto the ring below the frosted envelope to free the vital cable. He succeeded, but with now blackened…1 min
Total Film|January 2020ON LOCATIONWHAT? The Bride turns up in the House of Blue Leaves to fight the Crazy 88 and O-Ren Ishii. It’s not only the sashimi that gets sliced.WHERE? Gonpachi Nishi-Azabu, TokyoGO? Great music (naturally), staff that announce your arrival and departure by all shouting “welcome” and “see you soon!” in Japanese. Fantastic (if slightly pricey) food. Wear a tracksuit. Thanks to Josh Winning.Snapped yourself at a film location? Send us the details at totalfilm@futurenet.com…1 min
Total Film|January 2020GHASTLY DINNER PARTIESABIGAIL’S PARTYPerhaps the cringiest cringe-com ever made, this vintage Mike Leigh film sees obnoxious social climber Beverly (Alison Steadman) invite the neighbours over for a horrid evening of sniping, inappropriate flirting and alcohol-induced vomiting.THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRETied to a chair, Sally (Marilyn Burns) is tormented by a cannibal clan while her pals, chopped and cooked, sizzle on the table before her. Shot in 100-degree heat over 27 hours, this climactic scene is guaranteed to make you gag.SALÒ, OR THE 120 DAYS OF SODOMSet in Fascist Italy during WW2, Pasolini’s notorious stomach-churner munches on pertinent themes of power, perversion and torture. The banquet scene is especially ghastly, with our kidnapped youths forced to eat human excrement.WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOLF?Plenty to chew on here as real-life couple Richard Burton and…2 min
