Christopher McQuarrie returns to direct the sixth installment of Tom Cruise’s vanity project, which he has every right to be proud of, and not just because it continuously breaks box office records internationally. For what it’s worth, the Mission: Impossible franchise is the most seaworthy of action vessels, but that reliability is only partly due to its watertight premise based on the famous 1960s TV series about a secret organization that tackles cases too difficult for the usual U.S. government intelligence bodies. What generally keeps the series afloat is Cruise’s unflappable penchant for his own impossible stunts and scripts that are not built to be taken seriously by anyone.
It’s rumored, in fact, that McQuarrie and his writers mostly came up with the story as they filmed. This is certainly the most carefree addition to the monolith, a trait that doesn’t impinge on those moments of ludicrous suspense as Impossible Missions Force team leader, Ethan Hunt (Cruise), dangles precariously from an airplane fuselage or scales a rock face while dripping blood. And while attempting to follow the plot closely amounts to a chump’s game, there are moments of coherence that are so startling as to make you wonder if McQuarrie and his gaggle of writers might have boned up on their Le Carre beforehand. As is often been the case in all the movies in the series, the IMF is working at odds with the CIA, who as represented by an often confused Alec Baldwin and a steely Angela Bassett, is as likely to feed Hunt to the sharks as send in the cavalry to save him. But that theme results in one of the series’ most intriguing characters, a CIA bruiser named Walker (Henry Cavill), who at first seems to be working for the other side but eventually reveals himself as Hunt’s government appointed minder. The tension between the two men as they carry out their mission, which is to retrieve nuclear bomb parts that are on their way to some secretive, freelance terrorist organization, is the most satisfying aspect of the film and makes for a compelling love-hate relationship between the two men that often results in violence. Lovers’ spats can be so thrilling, especially when one of them is known for having played Superman.
This dynamic makes the more conventional romantic relationship between Hunt and the returning turncoat Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) and the one-that-got-away, Julia (Michelle Monaghan), trite, but while both women are injected into the festivities rather gratuitously, they do manage to bring a welcome feminine sensibility to proceedings that are top heavy with the tired boys club atmosphere supplied by the dwindling IMF team of Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg). Nobody expects an MI movie to be boring—that would be a violation of Tom Cruise’s contract with Paramount—but Fallout is actually better than it has any right to be. It’s stupidly thrilling.
Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shinjuku Picadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (0506868-5002), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024), Ikebukuro Humax Cinemas (03-5979-1660), Toho Cinemas Ueno (050-6868-5066).
Mission: Impossible – Fallout home page in Japanese.
photo (c) 2018 Paramount Pictures
Though Francois Ozon has made an enviable reputation for himself by being both prolific and consistently engaging, his best movies are throwbacks to enduring styles that have never really benefited from being updated. Double Lover falls into this category. It’s the kind of psychological thriller that Hitchcock not only invented in cinematic terms but seemed to have perfected before anyone else tried to recreate it. Though relatively free of shock value and suspense, the movie nevertheless casts a queasy spell that lasts well after the lights go up.
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As he proved with the 2009 political satire, In the Loop, director Armando Iannucci is not afraid to delve deep into the curdled souls of ambitious men and women for comedy that smarts more than it entertains. He is the reason a wholly offensive TV show like Veep works as well as it does, and his reimagination of the inner-Kremlin machinations following the sudden death of Joseph Stalin in 1953 is funny for the same wincing reasons, but it offers something even more subversive: History you can use and laugh at at the same time.
Though Pixar and Marvel are two separate production companies, both are distributed by Disney, a context that becomes problematic as the sequel to one of the best Pixar movies ever begins. The superhero Parr family battles a villain called the Underminer in Metroville and in the process destroys the city in order to save it. That is the same plot device that activated one of the Avengers movies, so you accept that fact as either a comment on Marvel or a shameless simulation of the studio style.
Though more photographically distinctive than the Go Pro-recorded factory ship documentary, Leviathan, Rahul Jain’s meticulous study of a huge textile factory in Gujarat, India, is similarly obsessed with the process of labor and how mechanization complements human actions rather than supplements them. Jain’s purposes are more activist, some might say political, since there are also interviews with workers and management that clearly show the class dynamics at work. Rodrigo Trejo’s beautiful cinematography almost aestheticizes the grind, and in the end it may turn people away from the film’s most powerful implication, that mechanization both demeans human effort and destroys everything that comes into contact with it. A similarly themed movie shot in Europe or North American might convey a totally different message, but by showing in clear detail the garbage and heat and dim working conditions of this textile factory Machines goes the extra mile to tell us that the industrial world still has a long way to go toward recognizing the human dignity of manual labor.
Though it wasn’t necessarily inevitable that the Jurassic Park franchise would get this far 25 years after it began, it was inevitable that if it did get this far the animals themselves would be portrayed as victims rather than whatever it is these days qualifies as the opposite of victims. When last we visited Isla Nubar, where the uber theme park Jurassic World imploded thanks to the double dealings of 0ne-percenters who saw money in cloning dinosaurs for nefarious purposes, it seemed obvious that humans and big lizards would never get along and so they were left to their own devices, so to speak. Now, it turns out, the island is undergoing volcanic activity that threatens a second extinction for the dinosaurs left there, so naturalist Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallace Howard) and her team of bleeding hearts once again enlist the help of dino wrangler Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) to help them evacuate the beasts to somewhere safer.
On the surface, Michel Hazanavicius’s decision to adapt a chapter in Jean-Luc Godard’s love life as a romantic comedy makes a certain amount of sense given the early New Wave crowd’s love of classic Hollywood screwball comedies, but Hazanavicius invariably falls into the trap that even modern American directors can’t avoid when tackling romantic comedey: the impulse to be cute. Though casting Louis Garrel, with fake receding hair and thick-rimmed glasses, as JLG was a minor stroke of genius, choosing Stacy Martin to play his first wife, Anne Wiazemsky, was a little too on the nose. There’s no doubt that this is a fictionalized version of their relationship, but the sight of JLG acting all super sophisticated and intellectual while Wiazemsky purrs and wrinkles her nose is only funny one time.
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