Author: Empire

You’d be hard-pressed to find a star who radiates as much positive energy as Ke Huy Quan – from his ebullient young performances in The Goonies and Temple Of Doom, to his heart-swelling Oscar-winning turn in Everything Everywhere All At Once, to his affable performance in Loki Season 2. But beyond his impending fight-fuelled action-comedy Love Hurts, Quan has a desire to play against type. Yes, the friendliest man in Hollywood wants to see if being bad really does feel pretty good. “I would love to play a bad guy. Like a Bond villain,” Quan tells Empire in a major…

Legendary American filmmaker David Lynch has died at the age of 78, it has been confirmed. The beloved director behind some of the most boundary-breaking works of cinema – from Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive to Inland Empire – had previously announced a diagnosis of emphysema that left him unable to leave the house. The news was confirmed in a Facebook post from Lynch’s family that reads as follows: “It is with deep regret that we, his family, announce the passing of the man and the artist, David Lynch. We would appreciate some privacy at this time. There’s a big…

On this week’s Empire Podcast Chris Hewitt, Alex Godfrey and Beth Webb gather together to bid a hard but heartfelt farewell to the great David Lynch, who sadly died at the age of 78 this week. Over the course of a wide-ranging, anecdote filled forty or so minutes, the trio — all huge, dyed-in-the-wool Lynch fans — pay tribute to the genius behind Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Dr., Twin Peaks, and so, so many more [44:18 — 1:26:33 approx.] Elsewhere in this week’s episode, which we hasten to clarify was recorded before the news broke of Lynch’s passing, Chris is…

When it comes to cinematic adaptations of beloved PlayStation games, so far we’ve enjoyed a mixed bag. HBO’s The Last Of Us series ranks among the great TV shows of the millennium thus far; Sony’s Uncharted movie with Tom Holland certainly ranks among the films that were released in February 2022; and Neil Blomkamp’s Archie Madekwe/Orlando Bloom/David Harbour led Gran Turismo is, well, actually probably a bit better than it gets credit for honestly. And after our first look at David F. Sandberg’s take on survival horror game Until Dawn caused no small measure of discourse about how much you…

You could hardly accuse James Cameron of playing it safe with Avatar, or Avatar: The Way Of Water. The first film in his Na’vi saga was a largely unknown quantity before it sizzled audiences’ eyeballs and transported them to the 3D wonderland of Pandora to record-breaking box office effect. And then, The Way Of Water did it all over again, well over a decade later, proving audiences were more than hungry for a return trip to bioluminescent paradise. But according to the filmmaker, the third Avatar film is going to be even braver – taking audiences, he tells Empire, to…

Who’s ready to return to Pandora? Across Avatar and its belated follow-up Avatar: The Way Of Water, cinematic master James Cameron has taken audiences into the lush jungles, crystal waters, and serene skies of the verdant Na’vi moon – and at the end of 2025 he’s going to do it all over again with the third instalment in the series, Avatar: Fire And Ash. The next chapter of the Sully story will take Jake and Neytiri’s family into uncharted territory, meeting a new batch of Na’vi with their own relationship to the land – and things might not go as…

The horror scene in 2024 was dominated by Longlegs. Osgood Perkins’ occultist shocker became an instant genre classic – not just for its ‘Silence Of The Lambs goes to hell’ vibe, or that Nicolas Cage performance. It was also full of surprises, narrative and tonally, taking audiences on a wild ride. And with his imminent new film, Perkins is ready to take fans by surprise all over again. The Monkey – a loose Stephen King adaptation – is an absurdist tale of death-by-toy-ape, one that aims to take the undercurrent of dark humour in Longlegs and bring it to the…

When Danny Boyle and Alex Garland unleashed 28 Days Later back in 2002, they also introduced something new into the horror ecosystem: the running dead. Previously, zombies in cinema had been slow, shuffling, shambling things, creeping ever-forward in the night. But the very nature of 28 Days Later’s infected – technically not zombies, but humans who have contracted a blood-spewing rage virus – saw the afflicted sprint at a terrifying pace, with heart-pounding results. Even decades on, the cardio-prone terrors have lost none of their power – as Jodie Comer found out on the set of Boyle and Garland’s much-anticipated…

In bleak and troubled times, sometimes all it takes is seeing Jason Statham scowling in a hardhat to make it feel like maybe everything will be okay in the end after all. And that’s exactly what we get in the no fuss, no muss first trailer for A Working Man, the Stath’s latest team-up with The Beekeeper director David Ayer. Boasting a screenplay co-written by Ayer alongside action icon Sylvester Stallone, this one — surely the second in what will come to be known as The Three (Blue) Collars Trilogy — sees Stath play brilliantly named ex-black ops agent Levon…

When Alien: Romulus arrived last summer, it brought cinema’s greatest sci-fi-horror franchise screaming into new life, chestbursting a new Xenomorph rampage onto the big screen. And for the most part, Fede Alvarez’s film – set between the events of Alien and Aliens – revelled in played around with the established iconography of the series so far, touching on everything from Prometheus to Alien: Resurrection, while also liberally paying homage to Ridley Scott and James Cameron’s classics. Those callbacks didn’t always come without controversy – one surprise awaiting audiences was the arrival of android character Rook, given the face of the…