Over twenty years after Andy Lau and Tony Leung Chiu-wai were seen together in the Hong Kong police thriller Infernal Affairs, which Martin Scorsese remade as The Departed for which he won an Oscar, it is almost fitting that writer-director Felix Chong (who incidentally co-wrote Infernal Affairs) should allow himself inspiration from a select few …
On a couch at night, Adam (Andrew Scott), a forty-something single man with a loving nature, sits comfortably watching old episodes of the 1980s Top Of The Pops series, living in the past and munching biscuits. He goes to his refrigerator to find leftovers from a Chinese takeaway. Food for solace is plentiful here. This …
There’s always been something of the musical about Steven Spielberg’s 1985 version of The Color Purple. There are a couple of songs, that look sweet and play down the grown-up parts (domestic abuse and lesbianism) in Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to push up the book’s uplift factor to maximum. It is Spielberg’s film that …
Jamie Childs, a director who had been known for his work in prestige TV like The Sandman and His Dark Materials, has made a hugely confident first film. It’s an energetic and stylish piece that is packed with visual flare. Necessarily fast-paced given its limited budget. It is not a slow-burn horror but an adrenaline-fuelled …
The property of Rudolf Höss is a destination for clothes and other items belonging to Jews who are facing ill-treatment, malnutrition, or death. His wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) has taken on the role of a victor at Saks Fifth Avenue with her spoils. She wears a fur coat and twirls in front of a bedroom …
“Erasure” is a book written in 2001 by Percival Everett. The first feature film of Cord Jefferson as a director, in some ways, can be considered something of an echo of Spike Lee’s scathing satire “Bamboozled”. Two films depict the story of how African American creators are tired enough and develop offensive and derogatory works, …
Michel Franco has made a surprisingly buoyant film about an alcoholic survivor of child abuse in his new work Memory. The Mexican director’s violent and uncompromising narratives such as After Lucia and Chronic have positioned him as something of a cinematic sadist who enjoys causing pain to his characters; however, he takes up a different …
Adam Sandler is a great actor, even if people do not always appreciate his films. His movies are usually comedies, but there have been some serious roles in his career. Johan Renck’s latest project has none of the recognizable comedic style of play that he does and it sees The Sandman turned into the Spaceman, …
We at Empire HQ are big fans of documentaries. There’s nothing quite like getting the who, what, where, when, and why on stories and subjects that are just too amazing to be fiction. From miniseries that generate heated online debates to rug-pull moments that have given birth to a million memes; and from deep dives …
You can feel that Denis Villeneuve has been experiencing Spice-fueled hallucinations for his entire life. The director has always spoken about how reading Frank Herbert’s Dune in his childhood days opened his mind. Thus, it is a sort of a personal challenge to bring the book’s sci-fi mix of warring houses, psychedelic dreams, anti-colonial themes, …
