Mission: Impossible -- Fallout (Christopher McQuarrie, 2018)

Henry Cavill, Tom Cruise, and Rebecca Ferguson in Mission: Impossible -- Fallout

Cast: Tom Cruise, Henry Cavill, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Sean Harris, Angela Bassett, Vanessa Kirby, Michelle Monaghan, Wes Bentley, Frederick Schmidt, Alec Baldwin, Liang Yang, Kristoffer Joner, Wolf Blitzer. Screenplay: Christopher McQuarrie. Cinematography: Rob Hardy. Production design: Peter Wenham. Film editing: Eddie Hamilton. Music: Lorne Balfe.

There seems to be a critical consensus that the Mission: Impossible films have gotten better, and that the sixth film in the series, Mission: Impossible -- Fallout, may be the best of the lot. It's the usual improbable if not impossible story of Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his doughty crew trying to prevent catastrophe, but it proceeds at a breathless pace. It also features a villain played by an actor who's possibly more attractive than Cruise: Henry Cavill. Is it a sign of Cruise's maturity that he's willing to let himself be upstaged by a younger and handsomer actor? Well, maybe not. Cruise still gets the lion's share of the more spectacular stunts. A seventh film in the series, once again directed by Christopher McQuarrie, is in the works, although filming recently stopped because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Mission: Impossible -- Rogue Nation (Christopher McQuarrie, 2015)

One of the things that make me think Tom Cruise is smarter than his involvement with Scientology suggests is that lately he has been willing to surround himself in his films with actors who are more appealing than he is. In the case of Rogue Nation, they include Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, and Rebecca Ferguson. He has also shed the tendency to flash the famous toothy grin on any occasion, though his Ethan Hunt in this film doesn't have much to grin about. As the movie begins, the Impossible Missions Force is about to be disbanded and its members labeled "shoot to kill" by CIA director Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin). It's a good premise for a thriller, if perhaps an over-familiar one: Make your good guys the target not only of the bad guys but also the other good guys. So off we go on a round of stunts that don't bear summarizing, but McQuarrie's script and direction keep the gee-whiz response pumping for an enjoyable couple of hours. Some critics thought the chief villain, a rogue MI6 agent named Solomon Lane (Sean Harris), wasn't villainous enough, but I have liked Harris's work since I first noticed him as Cesare Borgia's gay henchman Micheletto on the Showtime series The Borgias (2011-2013). He underplays in Rogue Nation, and the decision to dye his hair blond was probably a mistake, but I thought his subtlety was an effective contrast to Cruise's usual tendency to overplay. It has to be said that, at 55, Cruise is just beginning to be a bit implausible in his action sequences, especially the one at the film's beginning that has him leaping onto the wing of a cargo plane and clinging to it as it takes off, Perhaps it's true that he still does his own stunts, but in this golden age of camera tricks and CGI, that seems unnecessary: Audience are going to think it's faked anyway. There may in fact be a nod or two in the movie to Cruise's aging: After the extended underwater swim, Hunt has to be resuscitated, and there are a few moments, played mostly for comic relief by Pegg, when Hunt's disoriented state becomes a matter for concern. A sixth M:I film is evidently in the works. It will be interesting to see whether age plays more of a factor in it.

Macbeth (Justin Kurzel, 2015)

Translating a play from its theatrical mode into a cinematic one is never easy, but Justin Kurzel and his screenwriters, Jacob Koskoff, Michael Lesslie, and Todd Louiso, do several smart things in their adaptation of Macbeth. They open the film with a scene not in Shakespeare's play, the funeral of a small child presumably born to Macbeth (Michael Fassbender) and his Lady (Marion Cotillard), an extrapolation from Lady Macbeth's later claim that she has "given suck" to an infant. It establishes the sense of unsettling loss and grave disorientation that feeds the Macbeths' ambition. The film also scraps the witches' cauldron scene, its "double, double, toil and trouble" and "eye of newt" incantations, which can become ludicrous even in a well-done modern production, turning the witches into Halloween hags instead of the eerie prophets Shakespeare portrayed. In their place, the witches become three peasant women, one of whom has a baby in her arms, accompanied by another child. They seem indigenous, gifted with the air of prophecy attributed to those close to the land. Another problematic element of the play, the movement of Birnam Wood to Dunsinane, which can look silly on stage, with soldiers carrying branches in their hands, is resolved into something terrifying: Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane in the form of ashes and sparks, after the forest is set fire to by the troops of Macduff (Sean Harris) and Malcolm (Jack Reynor). This also creates a hellish landscape for the final duel of Macbeth and Macduff. There are some other touches that, though cinematic, don't work quite so well. Lady Macbeth's line, "screw your courage to the sticking place," is turned into a kind of dirty joke: an encouragement for Macbeth to penetrate her sexually. The banquet scene and the appearance of Banquo's ghost (Paddy Considine) is awkwardly staged. The lady's sleepwalking scene is shorn of its witnesses, and despite Cotillard's fine performance, it becomes a disjointed monologue in which she returns to the scene of the original crime, the murder of Duncan (David Thewlis). And worst of all, I think, the fear that speaking Shakespeare's verse aloud could become "stagey," leads Kurzel to reduce much of the dialogue and soliloquies to murmurs and whispers. The "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" speech is barely coherent when Macbeth mutters it as he hauls Lady Macbeth from her deathbed. Fassbender and Cotillard are formidable actors, but they have been done a severe disservice by not allowing them to use their voices to full effect.