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Critics are celebrating HBO’s adaptation of Naughty Dog and Sony Corporation’s acclaimed 2013 action adventure video game “The Last of Us,” which will premiere this coming Sunday.

“The Last of Us” takes place 20 years after modern civilization has been destroyed. Joel (Pedro Pascal), a hardened survivor, is hired to smuggle a 14-year-old girl named Ellie (Bella Ramsey) out of an oppressive quarantine zone. What starts as a small job soon becomes a brutal, heartbreaking journey, as they both must traverse the U.S. and depend on each other for survival.

The show is written and executive produced by Craig Mazin (“Chernobyl”) and Naughty Dog co-president Neil Druckmann.

Also Read:

‘The Last of Us’ Review: Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey Are Perfect in HBO’s Faithful Adaptation

TheWrap’s Karama Horne said that HBO, Druckmann and Mazin have done “an excellent job of sticking close to the source material while...

Ah, Christmas. It’s a time of good food, glad tidings, and…erm… Grinch horror parody movies? Yes, new festive slasher The Mean One, clearly taking inspiration from Dr. Seuss’s iconic Christmas-hating recluse, shared a trailer this week – and given it’s the season for gifts (and our Twitter Advent Calendar is in full swing), Team Empire couldn’t resist gathering for a special, bonus, online-only edition of Trailer Talk. Watch the trailer below, and read our unfiltered, uncensored, uncompromising reactions…

John Nugent (Reviews Editor): What is The Mean One? Is the Grinch out of copyright or something? Is this like a Winnie The Pooh: Blood And Honey thing?

Sophie Butcher (Social Media Editor): It looks like the filmmakers can't use the original version, it's still under copyright. Maybe that's why they don't ever actually mention 'The Grinch'. It's also set in Newville, not Whoville,...

Click here to read the full article.

The review embargo for Antoine Fuqua’s much-talked about escaped slave drama Emancipation lifted Wednesday evening and early critics reaction to the Apple Original Films feature is decidedly mixed.

Critics praised Emancipation‘s cast, with Will Smith, the film’s controversy-stricken star, receiving plaudits along with co-stars Ben Foster and Charmaine Bingwa. There was also praise for the survival thriller setup of the film, with an appreciation for the different approach to the subject. But some critics took issue with the unrelenting brutality as well as the look of the film, with questions about Robert Richardson’s stylized cinematography as well as the sparse script.

The Hollywood Reporter‘s Lovia Gyarkye writes that Emancipation treats Peter’s escape and journey well, but the film is “hampered by a spare and spiritless screenplay.” Gyarkye feels that the current reality of a growing refusal to...

This week's episode of the Empire Podcast sees Luca Guadagnino, director of Call Me By Your Name, talk about his new movie, the dark cannibal romance Bones And All, and to spare him the ignominy of Chris Hewitt bellowing that song at him, we asked John Nugent to Zoom with Guadagnino instead. The result is a fascinating and frank discussion about the director's creative process. Also being frank and fascinating about their creative process is Tim Minchin, the genius songwriter behind the tunes of this week's Roald Dahl's Matilda The Musical. He talks to Helen O'Hara about turning the hit stage musical into a movie, and about the sad failure of the quite wonderful Groundhog Day The Musical.

Then, in the podbooth, Chris Hewitt returns and, as well as Googling 'how to host a podcast', welcomes Helen, James Dyer and fourth chair newcomer, Kelechi Ehenulo for discussions of random...

The first reactions to House of the Dragon have arrived, ahead of theGame of Thrones spin-off’s long-awaited launch.

House of the Dragon is set two centuries before “the fall of the throne”, and features a cast including Matt Smith, Olivia Cooke and Rhys Ifans.

In the UK, the show will premiere at 2am on Monday 22 August on Sky Atlantic. The episode will then be repeated at 9pm on Monday, and will be available to stream on Now after its initial airing.

After a glimpse of the first few episodes of the fantasy epic, critics have had mixed responses to the series.

The Independent’s critic Nick Hilton gave House of the Dragon four stars, writing that the show is “bigger, bolder and bloodier than Game of Thrones”.

He added: “It’s immediately clear that, even in the just over 11 years since Thrones first aired, the scale of the world on display has increased.

We’re just a month out from Edgar Wright’s latest film, Baby Driver, a movie that takes its title from a song off Simon And Garfunkel’s final album together, Bridge Over Troubled Water. Earlier this week, Wright noted on Twitter that there’s another S&G-inspired film currently in the works—Marc Webb’s The Only Living Boy In New York—and things sort of snowballed from there. Soon, Wright and Webb were luring some of the biggest names on Twitter—including The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and The Rock—to fill out the ranks of The Simon And Garfunkel Song Title Cinematic Universe.

Amazing. The Simon And Garfunkel Song Title Cinematic Universe is growing; The Rock confirms he will star in ‘I Am A Rock’. pic.twitter.com/rmTC0v6yOd

— John Nugent (@mr_nugent) May 26, 2017

Wright basically drafted Rian Johnson, noted that his...

★★★☆☆ The title of Mexican arthouse director Carlos Reygadas' fourth feature, 2012's Post Tenebras Lux, means 'light after darkness' in Latin - and unwittingly, it perhaps alludes to the polarised reaction it has received since its world premiere at last year's Cannes Film Festival. Met, at its very first screening, with the absurd chorus of boos that spoilt Cannes audiences often like to dole out to unsuspecting filmmakers, it went on to win Best Director award for Reygadas, and opinions continue to diverge sharply. As with his earlier efforts, Reygadas' approach - artful, unhurried, often bafflingly aloof - has delighted and infuriated.

There's much to compare here with Terrence Malick, that other Cannes darling, in the reverence and quiet esteem it gives to the natural world, and our relationship with it. Like Malick, Reygadas presents ideas slowly, thoughtfully and with an impassive precision. Minutes pass without any dialogue or notable action.

★★★☆☆ It's been mere weeks since the 2013 edition of the Glastonbury Festival ended - the cows are not yet back in the hallowed fields of Worthy Farm - but festival fans still shaking off withdrawal symptoms could do worse than Glastonbury: The Movie in Flashback (2012), an affectionate rockumentary of the festival as it was in 1993. A director's cut of the film first released back in 1996, it is an oddly passive account. Director Robin Mahoney presents the festival on its own terms and generally allows the action to play out organically. There's no commentary, few interviews, and the only ostensible structure is a day-by-day division.

We follow a few characters ('Vanessa the Pink Dress Girl", for example) but otherwise it's defiantly loose. This certainly sets a spirit-of-the-sixties tone - the use of split-screen is perhaps a rather conspicuous nod to Woodstock (1970), that other doc about that other legendary festival - but the...

One of London's few independent multiplexes

This week's Cine-files is by blogger and critic John Nugent, who is on Twitter at mr_nugent and posts at thenuge.co.uk. If there's a cinema you'd like to tell us about for a future Cine-files, drop an email to adam.boult@guardian.co.uk.

Location

PeckhamPlex is, naturally, found in Peckham, an unlovely but lively London neighbourhood still struggling to shake off its unmerited reputation as a hive of gang violence and the home of Del Boy Trotter. Though the edges may admittedly be scruffy, there is a vibrant, buoyant local community, and the cinema - one of the few wholly independent multiplexes in the country - is a gleaming beacon to that community spirit.

Building

Nestled between a train station and a multi-storey car park (which, in a sign of the area's ongoing gentrification, doubles as a rooftop bar and art...

★★☆☆☆ This latest installment in the post-Expendables renaissance of Sylvester Stallone ticks all the sorts of boxes you might expect from an action star old enough to draw a state pension: there are guns, there are girls, there are explosions, there are rippling, steroid-enhanced muscles, there's a dunderheaded plot of sorts, there's even a few choice one-liners. And yet, despite all these key elements dutifully present, Bullet to the Head (2012) rarely rises too far beyond mediocrity. Perhaps it's down to being lost in translation - the film is an adaptation of the French graphic novel Du plomb dans la tête, providing Stallone with the character name Jimmy Bobo.

Perhaps in French, the name Jimmy Bobo is tough and masculine, not absurd and cuddly as it is in English. Sadly, it's rather indicative of the film's wobbly disconnect with the hearty action vintage to which Stallone clearly aspires. Bobo (seriously, that really...

★★★☆☆ Korean animation has skulked in the shadows for some time: South Korean animation houses have long performed the grunt work for countless popular Us cartoons - from The Simpsons onwards - whilst homegrown efforts have always had to compete with the established heritage of the neighbours on the other side of the Sea of Japan. However, a quiet renaissance has occurred over the last few years and the Lord of the Flies-esque The King of Pigs (Dwae-ji-ui wang, 2011) is one such example. Directed by débutante Sang-ho Yeon, it's a grim morality tale, mostly told through flashbacks to a violent school classroom.

We open on a woman, lying dead on a dining table. This is the wife of Kyung-ming, a depressive CEO, and in the wake of his business collapsing, it is implied that he murdered her. This sudden spark of barbarity compels Kyung-ming to reconnect with his old school friend,...

★★☆☆☆ Irish director Ian Fitzgibbon impressed us last year with Perrier's Bounty (2009), a darkly funny crime thriller which drew inevitable but fair comparisons with In Bruges (2008), amongst others. But this, his debut from 2008, has only just made it to this side of the Irish Sea: the cheekily titled A Film with Me in It (2008), starring Dylan Moran Fitzgibbon's first effort treads a roughly similar path to his second, but the tone is darker, the pace is slower, the budget is noticeably smaller, and the success rate is generally lower - still, it has its moments.

Writer Mark Doherty casts himself in the lead as Mark, a down-on-his-luck, out-of-work actor who can't get a break. The shy, nerve-ridden, softly spoken man is ignored by casting agents, nagged by his girlfriend and harassed by his landlord (an odd cameo from Keith Allen). His only friend is neighbour Pierce (the terrifically watchable Moran), a...

Matt here… Last year I asked all of the WhatCulture! (then Obsessed With Film) writers to come up with their own Top 10 favourite horror film lists as part of our 31 Days of Horror celebration to the genre but for some reason our New York based writer Mark Zhuravsky’s got lost in the fold. I was reminded this past week that we never did publish Mark’s and so here it is for your reading pleasure today, a particularly eclectic and intriguing list.

Also be sure to check our other authors lists at the end of this post.

I am not loath to say horror is not my choice genre – that honor goes to crime dramas, occasionally to my chagrin. That said, I love a good chiller as much as any other goodfella. Here’s a list of ten films, some obviously horror, others more subversive, that I consider my...

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

(John Nugent’s review re-posted as the film is released in the U.K. today)

Before we begin, it’s important for you to know that I approached No Strings Attached, the new romantic comedy starring Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher, with a consciously open mind. Knowing that I, as gender stereotypes dictate, would not be in the target audience, I nonetheless wanted to watch this film as objectively as I could. I’ll go further: I wanted to like it. I didn’t want to be the same old sneering, cynical critic. I wanted No Strings Attached to be the rom-com that turned the genre around, the one that explained the infinite trail of bland repetitive mediocrity behind it, the one that suddenly made sense of the ugly, cheesy, cringey history of cinematic romantic comedy, like the Lost finale you wished they’d made.

I genuinely wanted to love it,...

Hey guys, tonight is the final screening in the 12 week run of the debut film from Drafthouse Films, Four Lions. If you haven’t yet seen it, please check it out. It screens tonight at 8:35pm at the Alamo South Lamar. The first 20 people to the theater tonight get a free Four Lions T-shirt. Don’t just take our word for it that it was good (we bought it, we are biased). Below is the recap of the end of year top 10 Accolades for Four Lions. We hope to see you tonight!

Time Magazine: Top 10 2010

#10 on Richard Corliss’ list

#9 on Ain’t It Cool News: Top Ten of 2010 (Massawrym)

#2 on David Germain’s Associated Press: Top 10 Films

Austin American Statesman: Top 10 Movies of 2010

#2 on Matthew Odam’s list

#10 on John DeFore’s list

#9 on Charles Ealy’s list

Boxoffice Magazine: 2010’s Top Films

#8 on Sara Maria Vizcarrondo’s...

After so much hype that surrounded it’s promising premise, it’s star studded cast and surprisingly enticing trailer – Summit Entertainment’s October action offering Red turned into one of the biggest disappointments of the year – a thoroughly laborious letdown with a confused & inconsistent tone and a lack of coherent storytelling. It was dumb & loud, dumb & loud and yes… dumb & loud, trying to work both as a serious C.I.A. thriller and a light-hearted action satire – drastically failing at both.

But not unlike the other dumb & loud action movie of 2010, The Expendables, – the O.A.P. action thriller caught on at the box office with a healthy $90 million take and an impressive $164 million worldwide return on a budget of $58 million. It also happened to be nominated for the Golden Globes under the Best Picture Musical or Comedy category, which certainly helped raise the film’s profile among execs.

So...

Matt here…

John Nugent joined Owf in February and straight away grabbed the attention of you guys with a great review of the erotic thriller Chloe which instantly got you commenting. In fact he consistently gets your tongues wagging with his reviews, you just need to see your reaction to his Salt and Avatar: Se write-ups for that.

John also found the time to review Centurion director Neil Marshall, among others. Here’s his Top Ten list of the year…

10. Lebanon

This one never really got a look-in outside the arthouse world, partly because it’s mostly in Hebrew, and partly because – like Buried – it spends its entire screentime trapped inside an enclosed space, in this case, a tank. The word ‘claustrophobic’ doesn’t do it justice. Worth hunting out for.

9. Another Year

Nestled amongst the whizz-bang releases of Hollywood was the latest from Brit legend Mike Leigh, doing what...

Chelsea Clinton’s big day is being hailed as the wedding of the century — but she’s not the only presidential bride in our nation’s history!

When the child of a sitting or former U.S. President gets hitched, oftentimes the ceremony becomes a circus of no-fly zones and Secret Service guarding the über-exclusive nuptials. Before Chelsea Clinton, many other presidential children have tied the knot in ceremonies all their own. Whose big day was the “Most Like Chelsea’s” and who kept their nuptials the “Most Under the Radar”? Check out our White House wedding gallery and see for yourself!

Amy Carter: “Most Low Key” 28-year-old Amy Carter married 28-year-old computer consultant Jim Wentzel in a low key ceremony in Plains, Ga. Attended by 140 friends and family Amy baked her own cake Caroline Kennedy: “Most Like Chelsea’s” The 28-year-old daughter of Jackie O. and John F. Kennedy...