Paramount Pictures
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025)
This is going to date me, but Tom Cruise’s first stab at “Mission: Impossible” in 1996 was also my first review assignment for my college campus newspaper. Even though my editor went at it with a heavy hand, the result was still fairly amateurish. Thankfully, my most embarrassing writings were at the infancy of the internet and left no digital trace. In 2011, I critiqued the fourth entry in the series, “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol,” on this very site when it was still somewhat thriving. And here I am again, checking out the eighth installment at its Cannes Film Festival premiere and sashaying down the same red carpet as the cast and crew. But enough about me.
I am bringing all this up because Late Cruise has been mostly trafficking in nostalgia. Hollywood’s last movie star reminds us all of the good ol’ days when marquee names could make or break the box office, the days before Netflix and venture capitalists spoiled everything. “Top Gun: Maverick” was the template. Sure, it had “it” boys like Glen Powell, but the most memorable moment for boomers and Gen-X had to be Mr. Cruise’s reunion with an ailing Val Kilmer. “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” sort of does the same thing. It gathers the likes of Henry Czerny and Rolf Saxon from way, way back. There are even montages of earlier films peppered throughout.
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Courtesy of Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
Eileen (2023)
While the charming animated movie “Inside Out” made it plain that disgust is one of the core emotions necessary for our survival, it’s also the one people enjoy the least. Therefore a movie about disgust must find a way to portray disgusting things in such a way that audiences are not disgusted themselves. It’s a very, very fine line to walk, and therefore something of an achievement that “Eileen’s” director William Oldroyd does it so well, and no doubt why “Eileen” screened at the Sundance Film Festival. But the human instinct to sniff one’s fingers after masturbating is not to be encouraged.
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MOVIE REVIEW
Take Shelter (2011)
Sony Pictures Classics
"Take Shelter," written and directed by Jeff Nichols, is a prescient film in this time of perpetual natural disasters, as it centers around a man preparing for a storm that may or may not come. While New Yorkers boarded up windows and stockpiled canned vegetables in preparation for Hurricane Irene, Curtis LaForche (Michael Shannon) is faced with an even more fraught dilemma: Predictions of this storm stem not from the weather report, but from within his own mind. Plagued with anxiety about his family's safety while inwardly acknowledging that he may be delusional, he begins to take dramatic measures to ensure survival in the face of impending doom. The film touches on many subjects — family, mental illness, masculinity, vulnerability — but never alights on any issue with enough significance to rise above what is, essentially, schlock.
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MOVIE REVIEW
Splinter (2008)
Magnet Releasing
Let’s forgo the exposition and come right out with it: Anyone looking for a horror movie fix at the multiplex this Halloween will find every bit of what he or she is looking for in “Splinter.” Or he or she would, were the movie actually opening on more than four screens nationwide. I’ve given up trying to understand how these decisions are made, but surely the folks at Magnet Releasing could have done more with this brutally efficient genre exercise than they have. The film lacks star power and comes from a first-time director, but it’s an ideal antidote to both the glossy PG-13 horror fluff that so often manages to get a wide national release and the tired brutality of the “Saw” franchise.
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