July 2021

Total Film

The Modern Guide to Movies

Total Film1 min read
Welcome To Total Film
This month it’s all about adventure and we sent our intrepid Mr. Mottram to far-flung climes for a set visit on Jungle Cruise many moons ago. It’s now heading for big screens as well as small, so we can watch it in the format we prefer. It’s not the
Total Film2 min read
Total Film
JANE CROWTHER (JC) jane.crowther@futurenet.com @totalfilm_jane One-Eyed Willy’s Inferno (The Goonies). DEPUTY EDITOR MATT MAYTUM (MM) matt.maytum@futurenet.com @mattmaytum The Moonstone (Dunkirk) – because I’ve been on it. REVIEWS EDITOR MATTHEW LEYL
Total Film1 min read
Call Sheet
CONTRIBUTING EDITOR While I was on the set of Jungle Cruise, Jack Whitehall told me he dislocated a rib while in the gym, on an exercise bike – while watching 50 First Dates! EDITOR-AT-LARGE I had a great Zoom chat with Edgar Wright. He’d had his sec
Total Film1 min read
Total Film Wingman
In an age where all movies are going digital and everything’s coming out in mega HD, why do I have the urge to dig out some old VHS tapes? Maybe it’s nostalgia, but I’m thinking of rebuilding the collection I got rid of years ago. I remember watching
Total Film4 min read
American Dad
Stillwater is writer/director Tom McCarthy’s return to drama following his critically adored 2015 film Spotlight that bagged him a Best Picture Oscar. It tells the story of Matt Damon’s Bill, a working-class man from Stillwater, Oklahoma whose daught
Total Film4 min read
Dialogue
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Total Film2 min read
Aaron Taylor-johnson
Aaron Taylor-Johnson already boasts two comic-book credits to his name. He played dork knight Dave Lizewski in 2010’s Kick-Ass, then later graduated to a less DIY role as Pietro Maximoff, the Quicksilver who isn’t Evan Peters, for Avengers: Age Of Ul
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Good Sign
I hope this is the start of a movement,” says Siân Heder (Tallulah), writer-director of this year’s Sundance mega-hit CODA. Meaning ‘Child of Deaf Adults’, it tells the story of Ruby, who is able to hear but grew up in a Deaf family. Hot on the heels
Total Film2 min read
Ring Cycle
In the first Marvel Cinematic Universe origin story since Captain Marvel, we’re going to meet master martial artist Shang-Chi, appearing on film for the first time, despite his comic-book legacy dating back to the 1970s. “It’s very much a character-o
Total Film2 min read
Infernal Affairs
Fans of Neill Blomkamp’s knack for sci-fi will be glad to hear that his first horror feature Demonic is not a complete departure from the genre. There are plenty of high concepts, shady government organisations and sinister technologies that wouldn’t
Total Film3 min read
You Talkin’ To Me?
IN THE CROSSHAIRS THIS MONTH RICHARD ARMITAGE Are you talkin’ to me? I am talking to you. If I’m perfectly honest, I’d rather be face to face, because I’m sick of Zoom. I went back to work on the show that I’m on at the moment, for Netflix. The first
Total Film1 min read
Sound Bytes
The average number of films each UK adult watched in lockdown last year. Seems a bit low to us… Peter Rabbit 2’s opening box office weekend in the UK – the biggest of the pandemic era. Eighteen years on from Peter Weir’s nautical masterpiece, Master
Total Film2 min read
Lost In Translation
You start out in Brentford, just fucking around in a bedroom with some decks, so I guess Japan’s the logical next step!” Director Jack Clough is only half-joking. Taking People Just Do Nothing from an online short to a BBC Three series that ran for f
Total Film1 min read
Q&A ASIM CHAUDHRY
What did Tokyo make of Kurupt FM? The Japanese have seen everything before. You’ll be walking down the street and you’ll see a guy dressed up as a Disney princess and a woman pretending to be Sonic the Hedgehog, so you can just be who you want to be
Total Film2 min read
Kathryn Newton
I love going to horror films, but I’m the biggest scaredy cat,” says American actress Kathryn Newton. This may be surprising – after all, Newton starred in Paranormal Activity 4 aged just 14 and next month plays body-hopping slasher killer The Butche
Total Film2 min read
Amazon Buying MGM
When Amazon snapped up MGM Studios for an extraordinary $8.45bn last month, eyebrows were justifiably raised around Hollywood. This was, by some distance, a Silicon Valley giant’s biggest move into the film industry to date, with Amazon acquiring a l
Total Film2 min read
Cannes Goods
From his early Dutch provocations like Soldier Of Orange and Spetters to violent, satirical Hollywood sci-fi actioners RoboCop and Starship Troopers to saucy noir Basic Instinct to excess-all-areas Vegas drama Showgirls to his corrosive study of unco
Total Film2 min read
Björn Again
In 1970 director Luchino Visconti held auditions throughout Europe for a boy to play a key role in his lush adaptation of Thomas Mann’s Death In Venice, and found him in shy Swedish 15-year-old newcomer Björn Andrésen. Playing ‘the most beautiful boy
Total Film2 min read
Ready Player Lebron
After cinema’s recent absence from our lives, our love for big-screen favourites has grown. So, anyone fancy a film that crams a multiverse of movie homages into one, with the happy hooks of family fun, charismatic sports stars and brimming nostalgia
Total Film3 min read
It Shouldn’t Happen To A Film Journalist
THIS MONTH DUMPING MY VIDEO COLLECTION. When I was 15 years old, I bought my first video: Stand By Me. I’d been taping movies off TV for years, forever schlepping to Woolworths to stock up on Scotch cassettes (“Re-record, not fade away… re-re-re-reco
Total Film2 min read
Max Mads
The latest film from writer-director Anders Thomas Jensen, Riders Of Justice begins with a bike being stolen, and from there events ripple out, impacting the family of Markus (Mads Mikkelsen), a soldier away on a tour of duty. Returning to Denmark, M
Total Film2 min read
Gripping Yarn
It was like a kingdom, with kings, with queens. It was a sort of fantastical place,” says Philippe Lacôte, the West African writer-director of Night Of The Kings. He’s recalling an early trip to the Ivory Coast’s notorious La MACA jail, where his mot
Total Film2 min read
Fright Knight
If Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, Pete’s Dragon and The Old Man And The Gun all feel wildly different, it’s news to director David Lowery. “People are like, ‘You’re making a medieval film? What a crazy left turn.’ I was like, ‘No! Of course that’s what I
Total Film3 min read
Felicity Jones
What is the first thing you do when you get on a set? I always like to have a little mooch around my trailer, and make friends with it – light a candle. I often have a lot of images connected to the character I’m playing so I’ll put those up around t
Total Film1 min read
Q&A SIDSE BABETT KNUDSEN
What drew you to Wildland? I really liked the script. It was quite special. It had a personal voice. It was very impressive. You could just read it, and [the writers] knew what they were doing. And the characters are very detailed. Everything was jus
Total Film2 min read
Bloody Mama
From a country well known for its Scandi noir, Danish drama Wildland offers something a little different. Jeanette Nordahl’s directorial debut deals with a low-level criminal family. “It’s not The Sopranos,” she says, “We don’t have a huge mansion.”
Total Film1 min read
Q&A AMIR EL-MASRY
How did you prep for Limbo? I had done a series before called The State with Peter Kosminsky. So I had already done some research around the region itself, in Syria. But in Ben’s script, it was less about the refugee crisis and more about detailing s
Total Film2 min read
Island Living
It’s been very strange, very bittersweet,” admits Scottish filmmaker Ben Sharrock, whose acclaimed movie Limbo was selected for Cannes 2020 – and numerous other festivals – but Covid-inspired cancellations and travel restrictions meant he’s not been
Total Film3 min read
Temuera Morrison
I still want to play with the big boys,” says Temuera Morrison, the New Zealand-born actor who exploded onto the scene with Once Were Warriors, played Aquaman’s dad in the DCEU and went under the hood as two generations of bounty-hunting Fetts in Att
Total Film12 min read
The RIDE Stuff
a crumby-looking passenger boat, La Quila, bobs up and down by the side of a wooden dock that has seen better days. Passengers, dressed in early-20th-century finery, are making their way off this less-than-seaworthy vessel, given instructions by the
Total Film2 min read
Paul Giamatti
What was your initial interest in Jungle Cruise? There’s a lot of things about the script… not even stuff that I do in it. But I just thought it was a really way more interesting script than I thought it was going to be. It goes [in] really unexpecte
Total Film1 min read
Park Life
Inspired by a scene from Michael Crichtons book that never made Spielbergs movie, as Dr. Alan Grant and the kids float along the river, participants got the chance to tour Isla Nublar. The crescendo, a huge T-Rex encounter followed by an 80-foot wate
Total Film11 min read
LOVE On The Rocks*
*AND OTHER DANGEROUS TERRAIN PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL (2003) Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) is a blacksmith’s apprentice with a gift for making swords – and fighting with them too. Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley) is a gov
Total Film10 min read
Play Time
Ryan Reynolds and Jodie Comer are staring down the lens of a Zoom call from New York, peering at the cover of Total Film from May 2020. “Wow. The salad days of yesteryear…” deadpans Reynolds in his inimitable cadence, recalling the last time we all s
Total Film7 min read
Blade Of Honour
Watching a three-way samurai army battle in the middle of a burning village is about as exciting as it sounds. But throw in a few speeding motorbikes, dual-wielded machine guns, flying ninjas and exploding bridges and you’ve got yourself a proper set
Total Film6 min read
Coat Tales
quentin Dupieux is sitting at a beachside restaurant in Cannes. It’s the day after his latest film Deerskin has just opened the Director’s Fortnight strand of the 2019 film festival, leaving everyone in great spirits. It’s hardly a surprise, though.
Total Film3 min readPsychology
Better Together?
It totally depends on who you’re stranded with, for a start. There’s a whole different mix of things. It totally depends on who that person is, and what their skills are like, and what their psychological state is like. Because in theory, we’re socia
Total Film9 min read
Pop Art
Edgar Wright was five years old when Sparks first blipped on his radar. “Top Of The Pops and Doctor Who were the two shows I watched a lot,” he grins on Zoom, not needing a Tardis to travel back in time to the living room of his family home in Somers
Total Film1 min read
Top Of The Pops
This is their breakthrough album. It really is all killer. There’s not a bad track on it. I constantly come back to it as a favourite album. It opens with ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough For The Both Of Us’, but that’s not the peak! It keeps operating at
Total Film1 min read
David Oyelowo
76 Acting credits to Oyelowo’s name. $701m Box-office take of Oyelowo’s highest-grossing film, Interstellar. 5 Collaborations with Alfred Molina. 26 Episodes of Spooks Oyelowo appears in. 3 Best Picture nominees Oyelowo has appeared in: The Help, Lin
Total Film1 min read
How To... Survive A Shark Attack
Listen closely to James Wright, senior curator at Sea Life London Aquarium. What he says could save your life… There’s an adage that the shark that attacks you is the one you don’t see. Easy options for a shark are prey items that are not looking and
Total Film15 min read
David Oyelowo
When Total Film catches up with David Oyelowo in June 2021, he’s just returned to his home in LA after a trip to the UK. Not that he’s showing any signs of jetlag. Every bit as eloquent and measured as you’d expect, he’s also surprisingly forthright,
Total Film3 min read
Cena Evil
FILM OUT NOW CINEMAS Things change,” growls Vin Diesel’s Dom Toretto during the opening moments of this long-awaited, nitro-fuelled Fast sequel. Technically, he’s referring to the serene life he and Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) have reluctantly embrace
Total Film1 min read
Screen
GENERATION-DEFINING WELL ROOTED RELATIVELY DECENT OVER-EXTENDED DYSFUNCTIONAL
Total Film2 min read
Blood On The Tracks
FILM OUT 2 JULY CINEMAS Nick Broomfield’s latest investigative doc returns to territory explored in one of his best-known works, 2002’s Biggie & Tupac. One of the key players in that film, Suge Knight, is again central; following Knight’s 2015 convic
Total Film2 min read
Wave Culture
FILM OUT NOW DISNEY+ Pixar is renowned for stretching the conceptual boundaries of family entertainment, demanding that kids (and trickier still, adults) keep up: a lonesome robot clears up trash on a desolate future Earth in WALL•E; a little girl’s
Total Film2 min read
Prehistory Lesson
FILM OUT 16 JULY CINEMAS Reuniting us with the prehistoric family from 2013’s The Croods, this is a fine example of a sequel improving on the original. It zips along from the off, reintroducing us to caveman Grug (Nicolas Cage), wife Ugga (Catherine
Total Film2 min read
Swap Chop
FILM OUT 2 JULY CINEMAS Directed and co-written by Happy Death Day’s Christopher Landon, this Blumhouse-backed slasher-com kicks off in frantically gruesome fashion. But it quickly takes a hard left into the supernatural, as Vince Vaughn’s masked kil
Total Film2 min read
Grand Designers
FILM OUT NOW CINEMAS, DISNEY+ How do you solve a problem like Cruella? Disney’s dastardly Dalmatian-napping designer doesn’t seem a natural fit for a family-friendly origin story. Yet this zesty prequel succeeds by creating its own wild world. Bursti
Total Film2 min read
Two For The Road
FILM OUT 25 JUNE CINEMAS You’re not supposed to mourn someone when they are still alive!” sighs US expat Tusker (Stanley Tucci), a writer and astronomer facing up to how having early onset dementia will impact his relationship with his pianist partne
Total Film4 min read
Drunken Masters
FILM OUT 2 JULY CINEMAS Thomas Vinterberg and Mads Mikkelsen reunite for another study of a man in education – but don’t expect the same scalpel sharpness as The Hunt (2012) in this awards-chugging cautionary tale, which loses focus as surely as a da
Total Film4 min read
Zing Street
FILM OUT NOW CINEMAS This is a vaccine for your soul,” director Jon M. Chu promised of his ebullient, high-energy, big-screen adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tony-award winning 2007 musical about young Latino New Yorkers chasing their dreams in a
Total Film2 min read
Star Vehicle
FILM EXTRAS 1971 OUT NOW BD, DVD EXTRAS Featurettes, Gallery It may be turning 50 this year, but the decades have taken none of the shine off Steven Spielberg’s thrilling feature directing debut. Graduating to his very own TV movie after helming epis
Total Film2 min read
Hidden Depths
FILM EXTRAS 2008 OUT NOW BD EXTRAS Commentaries, Interviews, Video essays, Deleted scenes, Art cards, Booklet Ask 10 genre aficionados what is the best-kept secret of postmillennial horror and eight of them will say Lake Mungo, a small fake-doc offer
Total Film2 min read
Growing Gains
The 2020 debut season of Never Have I Ever was a big Netflix hit, watched by a reported 40 million households and scooping the People’s Choice Award for Comedy Show Of The Year. Co-creator Mindy Kaling’s childhood is the inspo for topsy-turvy teen De
Total Film2 min read
Well Tuned
Following musical roles in The Prom and Jingle Jangle, Keegan-Michael Key makes it a hat-trick with Apple TV+ comedy Schmigadoon! Key heads the cast alongside SNL star Cecily Strong: they play a couple, Josh and Melissa, seeking to pep up their relat
Total Film4 min read
Return To Power
It’s 36 years since He-Man And The Masters Of The Universe finished its sword-swinging, epoch-defining run. Finally, OG fans get to find out what happens next with Netflix and Mattel Television’s Masters Of The Universe: Revelation. Extending charact
Total Film2 min read
Beasts In Show
Monsters, Inc. (2001) ended with the discovery that the factory could harvest power from kids’ laughter rather than screams. Starting the day after the movie stops, Monsters At Work captures the transition. “What I love is that the story just continu
Total Film2 min read
Extras
TOY/COLLECTIBLE OUT NOW Hold the front page: built from 3,772 bricks, this is the tallest Lego Marvel set yet (until they make, like, special edition tiptoes Galactus, or suchlike). Across three floors you get heroes, villains, window smashing, waffl
Total Film3 min read
Raising Wells
A modern, pan-European adap of H.G. Wells’ alien-invasion classic, War Of The Worlds launches into its second season with fresh threats, new characters and answers to cliffhanging questions. Creator Howard Overman and his cast discuss making a show a
Total Film1 min read
Fresh Spin
The de Vil rides out with Carnaby-chic style and swagger across two albums. Headlining an Awesome Mix-ish comp, Florence+ The Machine echo Siouxsie’s ‘Trust In Me’ on the silk-frocked ‘Call Me Cruella’. But Nicholas Britell steals the show with a mal
Total Film2 min read
Drive
When a film isn’t overburdened with idle natter, the music can step in and take over the emotional satnav. Still fresh a decade on, the soundtrack to Nicolas Winding Refn’s existential romantic thriller nails the job without once losing its cool. Exq
Total Film2 min read
Scare Package
OUT NOW | PC, PS4/5, XBOX ONE/SERIES, STADIA Talk about a cold open. Shifting from the sweaty Louisiana bayous of Resident Evil 7, Capcom pitches hapless protagonist Ethan Winters into a snowbound Eastern-European hamlet. Then it immediately turns up
Total Film2 min read
Books
BOOK SETH ROGEN | SPHERE Few celebrities are better at the awkward social encounter than Knocked Up’s Seth Rogen, an unlikely leading man with a diffident screen persona whose debut memoir reads like one long, nervous guffaw. Over the course of 220 f
Total Film1 min read
Two More
OUT TBC | PC, PS4/5 This compact Zelda-esque adventure sees you restoring colour to a washed-out world with the help of a magic paintbrush. Combining creative daubing with robust puzzles and witty dialogue, it’s a low-key charmer enlivened by an exce
Total Film1 min read
Two More
The makers of The Philosophy Of Deadpool dip back into the Marvel archives to give Spider-Man’s symbiote nemesis the same brash if slight treatment. Basically a collection of manic artwork divvied up under loosely suitable chapter headings, the resul
Total Film2 min read
Is It Bollocks?
Q In this classic swashbuckler, Douglas Fairbanks stabs a sail with his sword and rides it from crow’s nest to the deck. Much-copied and referenced – but three sheets to the wind or shipshape? A ANDY WILKINSON FILM SWORD MASTER, DIRECTOR AND AUTHOR O
Total Film1 min read
Alternative Box Office
ERLINGUR EINARSSON, PARK CIRCUS, DISNEY, WARNER BROS, SONY ■
Total Film1 min read
On Location
WHAT? In Bedknobs And Broomsticks, WW2 evacuee kids are sent to rural Dorset and find their mild-mannered carer is magical. Well, she’s Angela Lansbury. Of course she is. WHERE? Corfe Castle, Dorset. GO? Corfe stands in for the quaint hamlet of Peppe
Total Film2 min read
Jonah Hex
Why it was a good idea (on paper) An Oscar-nominated lead, scenery-chewing supports, writers with head-banging action form, a badass character... Scripted by Crank’s Mark Neveldine/Brian Taylor, Hex promised a rugged western, action, revenge and anti
Total Film2 min read
Top Gates
That famous theme swells as Dr. Ian Malcolm and wide-eyed nippers approach John Hammond’s new dino theme park in automated jeeps, via the torch-lit biblical gates. They look sturdy enough to keep a T-rex in, what could possibly go wrong? Golden-ticke
Total Film1 min read
Background Artistry
KINGSMAN: THE SECRET SERVICE 2014 WHO Chair man SPECIAL SKILLS As Colin Firth’s Harry Hart fights his way out of a church service gone feral, one chap’s really not going for the kill. He halfheartedly waves a chair around, making contact with no-one
Total Film1 min read
Hindsight Corner!
ON EMMA WATSON ‘STORMING’ OFF THIS IS THE END 29 MARCH 2021 “I don’t look back on that and think, ‘How dare she do that?’ [...] It was not some terrible ending to our relationship. She came back the next day to say goodbye. She helped promote the fil
Total Film1 min read
“Plain Talking”
Film crews work six hours from call time and then have a lunch break. If they work over six hours, producers must pay them a monetary penalty for eating into their right to a break. ■
Total Film2 min read
Coco
Back from the afterlife on a mission, 12-year-old Miguel tries to awaken great-grandma Coco’s memory of her father... Throughout the Pixar film’s development, this heart-rending sequence remained pivotal. “We always knew,” says co-director Adrian Mol
Total Film2 min read
Or Is The Last Boy Scout Bruce Willis’ Best Film?
If Bruce Willis had been a star in the ’40s and ’50s, he’d have been a staple of film noirs – the tough, smart-mouthed gumshoe with a code of honour hidden beneath corrosive cynicism. Sin City recognised this, casting him as detective John Hartigan,
Total Film1 min read
Last Time Is It Time To Ditch Holographic Interfaces?
A lot of them are impractical in the real world, but doubters should try virtual interfaces blended with real controls. You can do it in VR now by importing keyboard, mice, and desks into a virtual world. No... Wait until I have one in my house, in m
Total Film1 min read
Key Movies
Two orphaned siblings suffer war’s hell in Ghibli’s most heart-shattering feature. Beautiful and brutal, the watermelon sequence leaves deep scars. Blurred at the edges, just like memory, Takahata’s manga adap plots a young woman’s journeys between p
Total Film2 min read
Isao Takahata
Raised in Okoyama, Isao Takahata (1935-2018) studied French Literature at The University Of Tokyo, where Jacques Prévert’s poetry and Paul Grimault’s animations proved influential. On graduating, he worked at Toei Animation and befriended Hayao Miyaz
Total Film2 min read
Romeo + Juliet’s Pool Scene
One of the titular teenagers’ most famous scenes has long been performed from a balcony, as advised in Shakespeare’s stage directions. But Baz Luhrmann’s lysergic, poppy, sexy, cool interpretation doesn’t hold with tradition in any fashion. Though Cl
Total Film1 min read
Jungle Movies
1. Dwayne Johnson starrer Welcome To The Jungle (2003) is also known by which title? 2. The ‘Poo Hole Song’ features in which 2019 TV-adapted family flick? 3. The fifth Anaconda movie is a crossover with which horror series? a) Piranha b) Lake Placid
Total Film1 min read
Spot The Difference
SEE THE NEXT PAGE FOR THE ANSWERS... 20TH CENTURY STUDIOS, UNIVERSAL, SONY ■
Total Film3 min read
60 Second Screenplay
FADE IN: EXT. HIGHWAY A newlywed couple have sex while driving and crash into a military convoy transporting mysterious, possibly extra-terrestrial, cargo from Area 51. SOLDIER The film’s just started and we’ve already featured sex, aliens and explos
Total Film8 min read
Fin-tastic Beasts
A relationship, I think, is like a shark – it has to constantly move forward or it dies,” muses Annie Hall’s Alvy Singer (Woody Allen). “And I think what we got on our hands, is a dead shark.” Whether detonated, incinerated, electrocuted or devoured,
Total Film1 min read
Five Star Turns
After treading the boards in the RSC, Oyelowo broke out in the Beeb’s spy series alongside Keeley Hawes and Matthew Mcfadyen. “It’s where my screen career started and those guys are part of a formative time in my life,” he says. Oyelowo was now picki

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