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|  This Week... If you're reading this, then congratulations! You have survived the apocalypse predicted by (a misinterpretation of) the Mayan Long Count calendar and are heading peacefully into the Christmas season. Discounting several of next year's biggest movies (Oblivion, Elysium, After Earth, World War Z) the Earth has nothing to worry about! With that in mind, we'd like to wish you and yours the very best for the holidays, and a very Happy New Year in 2013. We wish it so hard that the Empire team even donned very loud Christmas jumpers and had our photo taken to prove it. Where you are concerned, dear readers, we have no dignity. And we're sure you'll agree that we look every bit as good in our knitwear as Colin Firth did in his in Bridget Jones' Diary. Well, nearly anyway. Merry Christmas! Helen O'Hara
Deputy Online Editor, Empire | | |
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|  | | | Is he smashing a melon with an umbrella? | | |  | | | Phil wonders what Chris is up to. Chris is in fact smashing a melon with an umbrella, so it's a good guess. | | |
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Dubai International Film Festival 2012: The Winners
The last weekend of the festival was launched in fine style on Friday with a gala charity dinner in aid of Dubai Cares and Oxfam, an annual event that last year raised over $1 million. Held at the Armani Hotel - or rather, on the terrace of the Armani Hotel - at the Burj Al Kalifa, the world's tallest building and \ jewel in the crown of downtown Dunai's sci-fi skyscrapers. The event was held under the patronage of UN Messenger of Peace HRH Princess Haya Bint Al Hussein, wife of HH Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai. | | | |
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Empire's Best Films Of 2012
This list is compiled through everyone at Empire submitting a personal top 10 list of their favourite movies released over the course of 2012. These votes are then collated together to produce this bigger list, so if a film was in many peoples' top 5s, say, those movies ended naturally higher up on this longer list. | |
|  | | The Empire Podcast #42
The final Empire Podcast of the year brings three directors into the studio, namely Christopher McQuarrie (Jack Reacher), Colin Trevorrow (Safety Not Guaranteed) and Juan Antonio Bayona (The Impossible), as well as your regular mix of movie news, reviews and general film waffle. |
| | | Empire's Hobbit Spoiler Podcast #2
In the following hour-long spoiler special, Team Empire gather together to tackle a film that has produced approximately three decade's worth of devisive pub chat since its release last week, Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. |
|  | | Before And After: A Look At Life Of Pi's Visual Effects
The old adage about never working with animals or on water applies double in VFX work. Ang Lee's Life Of Pie - water, animals, animals in water - was a challenge tackled over two years of toil, technical innovation and computers so powerful they make the grid in Tron look like your old Atari. Lee demanded that each of the movie's 700-odd effects shots was grounded in something real, as the film's VFX Supervisor, MPC's Guillaume Rocheron tells us. The result is a game-changer: a five-star, ocean-going spectacular. Rocheron took us through six 'before' and 'after' shots and explained six keys steps to achieve the film's astonishing visuals. |
|  | | Last Few Days! Empire's Christmas Competition Advent Calendar
We've team up with our pals at HMV to bring you especially festive '24 Days of Christmas' Advent Calendar give-away. Each day will open and give you the opportunity to win an amazing competition prize - which we'll make sure gets to you by Christmas day! Prizes will range from new releases of films on Blu-ray and DVD, TV box sets, soundtracks,the very latest portable technology and much, much more! Christmas has definately started early, all courtesy of HMV and Empire, of course. |
|  | | 2012's Spoilers Of The Year
2012 has been one hell of a year for plot points you can't mention in public. Reveal to the wide world that dies in the final act of before getting into a with a rather large and you can expect to get quite seriously up the . Skyfall, Prometheus, The Dark Knight Rises, The Avengers... the big Hollywood blockbusters have been full of them, and below are 10 of the most intriguing. So if your interest has been piqued - and you've watched the films or are a glutton for punishment - click on the appropriate film title and join in the discussion... |
|  | | 2012 In Movie Motion Posters
Forget quads, one-sheets and billboards - the future of posters is in jerky, repetitive movements. Typically used by horror movies looking for an innovative way to scare their potential audiences into cinema seats, 2012 has seen an uptake from non-scary movies too, with the likes of Wolverine and Cloud Atlas getting in on the action. Below are 12 of 2012's batch of kind-of-sorta-3D posters, none of which really stand up against Empire's 3D lenticular Hobbit covers, naturally. *cough* |
|  | | Alice Eve, Benedict Cumberbatch And Bryan Burk Star Trek Into Darkness Q&A
Cinemagoers who have been to certain IMAX screenings of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey will have been treated to the first nine minutes of Star Trek Into Darkness. Paramount put on a special screening of these nine minutes to journalists in the BFI IMAX in London last Friday, and brought along Alice Eve and Benedict Cumberbatch, as well as the film's producer Bryan Burk. Below is a transcript of both video intros from J.J. Abrams and Simon Pegg (neither of whom could make it) and the Q&A with Alice, Benedict and Bryan that followed. |
|  | | The Ultimate 2012 Movie Tagline Quiz
Every movie must have a tagline. Well, almost every movie - take a bow, The Avengers, a bunch of superheroes so tough they don't need one - and as with any year, there have been some beauties over the past 12 months. Here are some of the best (and a couple of the worst, to be honest) and we want you to use these to deduce the film's name. Just pop the full title in the box beneath the tagline and find out if you're right: green tick for good, red cross for not so good. Enjoy! |
|  | | Billy Crystal Talks Parental Guidance
Speaking to the great Billy Crystal about his family friendly latest, Parental Guidance, Empire got the chance to ask questions about the movie's Tony Hawk cameo - yep, the skateboarding one - which quotes are shouted at him the most in the street ("Humperdink!"), why he hates mimes so much and what his nickname at school was (hint: it was "The Brute"). So for answers to all that - and a top notch De Niro impersonation - click Billy's face now. |
|  | | Salman Rushdie: My Movie Life
It's not every day Empire meets a Booker Prize winner and even rarer for us to get the chance to trade blows with the winner of the 'Booker of Bookers'. But then there's only one Salman Rushdie: novelist, cinephile, Spurs fan and now screenwriter. He's translated his best-loved work, Midnight's Children, from the page to the screen in Deepa Mehta's ambitious new dramatisation. We took the chance to quiz him on the films that have been most important to him during his life. |
|  | | Deepa Mehta On Midnight's Children
If the thought of magical realism on the big screen brings the idea of Ken Loach's Harry Potter bounding to mind, Midnight's Children should change all that. It's an adaptation that shoehorns plenty of the Booker Prize-winning novel's fantasy into a tumultuous stretch of Indian history. Fans of the book have director Deepa Mehta and Salman Rushdie, the screenwriter who brought his own book to life, to thank for this faithful adaptation. Empire chatted to the director about the cobras-and-ladders process of bringing it to the screen. |
|  | | The Killing: A Guide To Making A Crime Classic
"I'm not missing Sarah Lund yet," says The Killing's creator and show-runner Søren Sveistrup. "Maybe that day will come. Now it's a bit of a relief." Having finished in Denmark in November and on Saturday night on BBC4, the finale of season three retires one of TV's greatest detectives, Sofie Gråbøl's Sarah Lund, and, especially in season one, one of TV's greatest crime thrillers, a gripping mixture of mystery, miserablism, family, politics and knitwear. Here Sveistrup talks us through the ten key ingredients that made the show successful. "We are all suckers for a good crime story," he says. "Maybe we feel attracted to it because as we live our normal lives and these stories take us to the edge. We get a chance to look into the abyss and then move back to the sofa and say, 'Ooh, I'm happy that's not me." | | | |
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Despite appearing in a movie called Texas Chainsaw 3D, a mystery guest goes for altogether less intimidating tool to cut up some chicken. | | | |
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|  | | | |  | |  | |  | |  | | | Alcohol could make you SPONTANEOUSLY COMBUST! | | Freestylin' Bane. | | A sad Christmas with Sam and Anne. | | Which Wes Anderson character are you? |
If you have any timewasters to share, then e-mail them in to us. | | | |
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Life Of Pi 
To produce a coherent film from Martel's tricky novel would be achievement enough, but Ang Lee has extracted something beautiful, wise and, at times, miraculous. | | | |
Also Out
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This week's video trailers and clips. Every week, our video player will update to show trailers and clips from the week's movie releases listed above. | | |
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