Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning (2025)

The final episode goes to a lot of trouble to tie in characters and storylines from across the previous I-don't-know-how-many movies, and the result is an exhausting first hour of bombast, but once these operatics are out of the way, the action starts - also exhausting (impossible missions, truly, in sunken submarines in subzero temperatures, and high-speed dogfights and plane-hopping at high altitudes) but exhausting in exactly the way fans of the Mission: Impossible movies want.

★★★★☆

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Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)

These Mission Impossible movies have steadily become more bombastic with agents like Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt - old now, his old experienced eyes staring out from under a peculiarly manicured lawn of hair and through impossibly youthful skin - now uttering lines like, "We live and die in the shadows, for those we hold close--and those we never meet" - eye roll - but the set-pieces showcasing 'those' stunts and offering visions of near-future tech, plus an entertaining sequence on the Oreint Express and a pretty good snarling, gnashing new villain played by Pom Klementieff, are enough to keep you watching, just not with as much excitement as when you watched episodes 1, 4, 5 and 6.

★★★☆☆

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Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief (2015)

I'm not alarmed by stories of intergalactic wars, nor do I 100% accept that this is in fact the genesis story of the Scientology faith - could it possibly be? - and the abuses of power alleged here and in every other Scientology documentary ever made are concerning and warrant investigation but until proven do not induce in me the level of outrage and dismay that, say, the abuses of another secretive, closed church regularly in the media have caused me - no, the thing that most shocks me about this documentary, one a lot more illuminating, a lot more interesting than many especially given the gormless Louis Theroux hasn't thrust himself smack in the middle of it, is so many people's readiness to believe and their willingness to commit wholeheartedly and whole-financially to the thinnest, flimsiest of premises or promises - I must be too stingy with my time and money.

★★★☆☆

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Mission: Impossible Fallout (2018)

About the only area that could be improved is the likeability of the central characters but otherwise action doesn't get much better than this two-and-a-half-hour string of foot, motorbike, car and helicopter chases filmed so spectacularly every microfacial expression on Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt's face is crystal clear as he careens cars through city streets, dogfights over Kashmir, sprints glamorous European city blocks at roof level and, as is known very well right from the start, saves the world from the dastardly plot of a bamboozling number of counter- and counter-counter-spies in what is essentially the same plot as Rogue Nation.

★★★★☆

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American Made (2017)

Tom Cruise's new movie has a lot going for it - he plays this kind of character well (the Knight and Day daredevil with a screw loose) and generates huge laughs as true-life Barry Seal in the 80s bumbling through the chaos of his myriad conflicting roles (simultaneously a CIA reconnaissance pilot, Pablo Escobar's drug runner, an arms supplier for the Contra in Nicaragua, a bribe deliveryman in Panama, not to mention a husband and a father of growing numbers of children), and the movie also offers up the dizzying sights of Central America passing below Seal's aircraft as he flies back and forth and back and forth between Arkansas and Colombia, but there's never a sense that Barry Seal is an American-made tragedy - the CIA and Pablo Escobar approach him because he was already the sort of character they could use (a wild and free agent living dangerously) and so there is no sympathy for him when things really spiral out of control, even if the Government is complicit in his crimes - he has dug his own grave and at the movie's end, viewers are spat out of the cinema having been momentarily swept up in an always interesting but chaotic, charmless whirlwind, and it probably doesn't occur to many of these viewers in their resigned state to stop and question who the shadowy figures are that approach Seal's car in the movie's final scenes, even though this is the question.

★★★☆☆

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Rain Man (1988)

After his father's death, self-interested wheeler-dealer Charlie Babbage discovers he has an older brother with autism who has inherited his father's entire estate, and so with his eyes on the money, Charlie whisks this brother, Raymond, out of his care facility and on a transAmerican roadtrip where the two engage on topics such as airlines, underwear, hot water, smoke alarms and "watchmans", and that's it.

★★★☆☆

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The Mummy (2017)

At his best when playing steely-eyed and unerring truthsayers, Tom Cruise as this movie's Nick Morton, a character of "troubling moral turpitude", is the first thing that is wrong with The Mummy, and the second is the movie's three disparate elements - action adventure, horror, and longwinded "Dark Universe" exposition, all presented in switching, changing fashion, a symptom of the curse affecting Universal Studio's overriding concept: like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen which failed to get viewers excited about a bewildering mix of disparate literary figures (the Invisible Man, Mina Harker, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Captain Nemo, Dorian Gray, etc, all thrown together in one story), Universal Studios wants the world to get excited about a "Dark Universe" in which gods and monsters from all over hangout and cross paths and mix in a universe that Universal hopes will lead to endless blockbuster instalments, but I'd have preferred intelligent updates of individual monster classics linked together by genre alone over this already, after just one instalment, disjointed marketing exercise.

★★☆☆☆

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Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011)

Years after its release in 2013, this M:I entry - the better-than-usual fourth in the series - happened to come on TV while I was sitting with the person I'd gone to see it with in the cinema, and neither of us could recall a single plot detail - only that Simon Pegg returns as Benji, that seemingly constipated comic-relief tech guy who bungles every part of the mission (Ethan, does Benji need to be trained up before going into the field?), that Ethan Hunt suction-cups up a Dubai skyscraper, races through a sandstorm, and that there is a stunt in a hotel involving diamonds and Mission: Impossible's clunkiest spy tool yet - a fake arm on a white man in a Chinese waiter uniform (guess who) - which all just goes to show how little bearing plot has on how enjoyable an M:I episode is.

★★★★☆

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M:i:III (2006)

Number 3 is a return to form after the lamentable John Woo-directed second in the M:I series, and although it is slightly histrionic, Mission: Impossible 3 benefits from a chilling turn by Philip Seymour Hoffman as a sociopathic villain and is also aided by a threadbare plot centred around a McGuffin that allows action and spy thrills to come to the fore.

★★★☆☆

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Jerry Maguire (1996)

As far as I can tell, the point of this entertaining but slightly mystifying feelgood comedy-drama is that there are corporate dangers in being authentic but enormous personal gains, as demonstrated by Tom Cruise's title character who through being too honest commits career suicide but falls in love with Renee Zellweger's Dorothy Boyd and becomes a successful agent to Cuba Gooding Junior's memorable football star Rod Tidwell.

★★★★☆

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War of the Worlds (2005)

Dakota Fanning screams alot when she needs to be quiet and is struck dumb when she needs to scream, but rather than feed her to the alien pods that have taken over the Earth, Tom Cruise valliantly carries her through this big budget Spielberg film version of the H G Wells novel, which includes an extended Hitchcockian basement scene and many scenes like those in Signs (2002) in which the human drama fills the foreground and the horror of an alien invasion takes place in the often unseen or only partially seen background.

★★★★☆

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Minority Report (2002)

Philip K Dick's 1956 sci-fi short story, The Minority Report, about three future-seeing "pre-cogs", is brought to the big screen by Steven Spielberg who wrangles the themes and details into his own uneven creation - an occasionally engaging, occasionally ridiculous (especially the video-upload-at-a-gala-dinner denouement) crime mystery with Tom Cruise not in top form as Detective John Anderton, Head of the Pre-Crime Division and - according to the precogs - murderer-to-be of a man he is yet to meet!

★★★☆☆

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Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015)

The worst line in this, the most incessant and most implausible M:I movie yet, is, "Ethan Hunt is the epitomy of destiny," (thanks, Alec Baldwin, the new secretary of the IMF), a line as overwrought as the whole of this fifth outing that goes on and on, never letting up, with the most bombastic and ridiculous set-pieces ever, making me wonder if it is me that is too old for this, not Cruise. 

★★★☆☆

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Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

The repetitive Groundhog Day nature of this sci-fi action, about a man who lives and relives the same day of an alien invasion on the beaches of France, is like watching a friend grapple repeatedly with a difficult boss encounter, but the live-die-repeat loop is made fairly interesting with some dry humour, good performances by the leads, and impressive cgi detail.

★★★★☆

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M:i-2 (2010)

Tom Cruise is the best thing in this, the worst of the five Mission: Impossible movies so far and one that plays like an Australian tourism advertisement marketed to an Asian movie-going audience, with pointed Australian accents and Aussie tourism icons placed throughout and with direction by John Woo despite his balletic "heroic bloodshed" style not being suited to the spy series.

★☆☆☆☆

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Mission: Impossible (1996)

Heralding a Hollywood trend that continues today (that of television series being reinvented as mega movies) Brian de Palma's Mission: Impossible made a big impact with its big name stars - Tom Cruise, Kirstin Scott Thomas, Jon Voight - and with its tv-style credit opening, with its thrilling plot and set pieces on a scale far bigger than its tv namesake, and it paved the way for three lesser sequels and a slew of similarly big budget 80s-tv inspired blockbusters (Charlies Angels, A Team, Lost In Space, Miami Vice...)

★★★★☆

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Knight and Day (2010)

Despite my doubts Tom Cruise would be able to emulate the sort of debonair, rakish Cary Grant lead required for this romantic action comedy - like a modern North by North West - he does a great job and Cameron Diaz more than adequately fills her role of ditzy heroine-in-distress who gets tied up in an international intrigue by forever being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

★★★☆☆

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Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

Based on a short story, Traumnovelle by 'the literary Sigmund Freud' Albert Schnitzler, Stanley Kubrick's last film is a slow-burn psychological suspense drama about adult sexual relations and monogamy, pondering whether a wife's erotic fantasy about an American Naval officer constitutes a betrayal of some kind against her husband.

★★★★☆

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Vanilla Sky (2001)

Awful, painfully long-winded "Total Recall" minus the fun and action, preoccupied instead with the psychological anguish of its hero who doesn't know minute to minute what is real, whether he killed one of his girlfriends, or if he has just been "Rekall-ed" by a sinister company called Life Extension.

★☆☆☆☆

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