Emily Blunt’s 20 best film performances – ranked!

Posted on July 15, 2021 by Admin

With her latest movie, Jungle Cruise, out this month, we round up the finest work by the star of The Devil Wears Prada and A Quiet Place Part II

Emily Blunt can make bad films tolerable. Even her talents were stretched, though, by this horror reboot. She lounges demurely on a riverbank in funeral dress while Benicio del Toro grunts and growls and Anthony Hopkins goes full ham. The original director, Mark Romanek, jumped ship to be replaced by Joe Johnston. The result is a wolf’s dinner.

Cillian Murphy: ‘I was in awe of how Helen McCrory lived her life’

Posted on May 28, 2021 by Admin

The star of Peaky Blinders on his late colleague, how he convinced the producers to cast him rather than Jason Statham as Tommy Shelby – and returning to the monster-movie genre in A Quiet Place Part II

Cillian Murphy, star of the new horror sequel A Quiet Place Part II, is something to behold: X-ray eyes at once penetrating and ethereally blue, cheekbones so pronounced you could stretch out and go to sleep on them. Unfortunately, the beholding will have to wait. We have barely exchanged greetings over Zoom when his voice breaks up, the screen freezes and the room falls silent. A quiet place, indeed.

We switch to phones. We can do this, I tell him. “I have faith,” he replies, in a soothing Cork accent that compensates for the lack of visuals. Murphy’s gift for intensity has made him a natural fit for characters damaged (Dunkirk, The Edge of Love) or outright villainous (Batman Begins, Red Eye), but today he is quick to laugh and keen to talk. He is speaking from a flat in Manchester, where he is staying while he shoots the sixth and final series of Peaky Blinders. That stylish crime drama, which rocketed from BBC Two cult success to global phenomenon, revolves around a 1920s Birmingham gang led by Murphy as the vicious Tommy Shelby. With his eyes, looks could kill – although he keeps razor blades in the brim of his cap, just in case.

Dune, Bond and Top Gun returns: Films to look out for in 2021

Posted on December 29, 2020 by Admin

Daniel Craig hands in his licence to kill, Frances McDormand delivers her best ever performance, Carey Mulligan unsettles in a rape-revenge drama and Tom Cruise reaches for the skies … this year’s must-see films

Paul Greengrass’s latest film is based on the western novel by Paulette Jiles, about a girl returning to her family in 1860s Texas after being kidnapped by the Kiowa tribe. Helena Zengel plays the girl, Johanna, and Tom Hanks plays the man who must look after her: Captain Kidd, an ex-army veteran who makes a living reading aloud from newspapers to illiterate townsfolk, and who is now in the middle of a very big news story.
• Released in the UK on 1 January

Emily Blunt: ‘It’s about human beings and how they’re affected by a crisis’

Posted on March 13, 2020 by Admin

Now postponed because of coronavirus, A Quiet Place 2 explores a world untethered by fear. Its star discusses parenthood, in film and real life, and her terror of doing SNL

Emily Blunt and her husband, John Krasinski, devised a rigorous self-care regime when the pair were making A Quiet Place, 2017’s harrowing self-isolation horror hit. “I always say that Macallan 12 sponsored A Quiet Place,” says Blunt. “John and I would just go home and drink a lot of whisky every night. And that sort of continued on A Quiet Place 2.”

You, too, might need a tumbler of scotch while watching the film. Blunt describes it as a “runaway train that grips you by the neck”, which is half-right. It also takes that neck and lays it on the tracks before running over it repeatedly. “I realised what an investment people had in this family from the first film,” says Blunt. “Everyone asked: ‘What happens next?’”