May-June 2025

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE—THE FINAL RECKONING (2025)

     If a movie includes a scene every 30 minutes or so explaining what just occurred or what is about to happen, the script definitely needs a rewrite. While the plot of the apparent final entry in this mostly excellent action franchise isn’t that complex—I was more confused by “Dead Reckoning”—writer-director Christopher McQuarrie (his fourth “M:I”) and co-writer Erik Jendresen don’t seem to trust their audience.

      Yet despite the script’s overuse of exposition, there is plenty to savor about this daring, save-the-world adventure led by Ethan Hunt (the ageless Tom Cruise), including two lengthy, jaw-dropping sequences, below the ocean and in the sky, along with a cleverly plotted trip to a remote CIA station.

     If you saw “Dead Reckoning Part One” (and it’d be foolish to see this film otherwise), you know that the world, and, more importantly Hunt and his team, must find the source of the Entity before it unleashes the apocalypse. It’s a bit difficult to wrap one’s head around this AI foe; I preferred the old days when the source of evil was a mustache-swirling megalomaniac living in a luxurious fortress.

    While the (male) cabinet members demand drastic action, Hunt persuades President Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett, once his CIA adversary) to trust him and his team to make it right without going nuclear. It takes a while to get to the movie’s major set-piece but it is worth the wait. When his team, now including pickpocket Grace (Hayley Atwell) and one-time terrorist Paris (Pom Klementieff), locates the CIA outpost in the Bering Sea, they transmit to Hunt the coordinates of a sub that went down long ago, the first victims of the Entity.

      Hunt dives down to find the key to disarming the Entity, swimming through the crumbling nuclear sub and barely avoiding getting entombed near the ocean floor. The entire sequence, Hunt getting there on a military submarine and then diving down, represents everything that has made this franchise so entertaining.

     The 62-year-old actor remains the same intensely determined hero he was at 32; his insistence that he still perform many of his own stunts makes the set pieces even more breathtaking. And, more than most contemporary pictures, the film’s muscular soundtrack, with Lalo Schifrin’s famous theme just waiting to take over at the most dramatic moments, remains essential to the movie-going experience. It was composed by Max Aruj and Alfie Godfrey, the team that worked on “Top Gun: Maverick.” (The legendary Schifrin died this week at age 93.)

     Oddly, the movie features the kind of film-clip sequences, looking back on the previous seven films, that usually play at the Academy Awards shows honoring a series or actor, but not within a feature film. (Next year will be “M:I” 30^th anniversary so the Oscar producers can just cut and paste for its tribute). In “Final Reckoning,” the flashbacks play into the nostalgic mood, its heartfelt goodbye.

     I still maintain the best of the franchise is the Brian De Palma 1996 original—closest in spirt to the inventive TV show and filled with first-rate supporting work by Jon Voight, Kristin Scott Thomas, Emmanuelle Béart, Vanessa Redgrave and the indispensable Henry Czerny. But nearly as good are “Mission: Impossible III” (2006), featuring a bravado performance by Philip Seymour Hoffman while establishing the core team of Hunt, Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg); “Ghost Protocol” (2011), with its thrilling set piece that climaxes with the destruction of the Kremlin; and the globe-trotting “Fallout” (2018) in which the White Widow (Vanessa Kirby) steals the picture as an alluringly rival.

     As much as I’ve enjoyed the series, I’m hopeful that Cruise sees his upcoming Medicare years as a reason to return to more challenging (acting wise) roles that he pursued in “The Color of Money,” (1986), “Born on the Fourth of July” (1989), “Magnolia (1999) and, more recently, the underrated “American Made” (2017). While he’s not quite the last Hollywood superstar, it’s a dying tradition that he’s shown to be the best exemplar of since the 1980s.

 

THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME (2025)

     While working in that space somewhere between absurdist Luis Bunuel and Bugs Bunny cartoons, Wes Anderson makes the most interesting (only?) dioramas in movie history. This rigorously created series of comic set pieces (co-written by Roman Coppola), which owe much to the style and tone of “Asteroid City” and “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou,” are held together by the stoic, unflappable Zsa-zsa Korda (underplayed with supreme coolness by Benicio Del Toro), determined to find financing for his “scheme.”

     With his estranged daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton), pulled out of a nunnery, and new personal secretary Bjorn (Michael Cera, in the role usually played in Anderson films by Jason Schwartzman), Korda tracks down relatives and one-time allies (played by Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Jeffrey Wright, Scarlett Johansson and Benedict Cumberbatch, among others) to aid him in a giant infrastructure plan for the desert country of Phoenicia. His lifelong dream, contained in shoe and sock boxes he carries around, is as nutty as his trust in acquaintances, who may be involved in various assassination attempts.

       Early in the film, Korda is aboard his private plane (an odd-looking contraption—the setting is the 1950s) when his assistant is blown out of the plane and it’s headed for a crash landing. He goes to the cockpit and after a brief dispute with the pilot, calmly hits the eject button, sending the pilot flying out of the plane (he survives). This cartoon-inspired moment typifies the dark, underplayed, offbeat humor that makes this one of Anderson’s best films.

     If the earthly adventures of Korda and his daughter aren’t enough, when the businessman comes close to death (which occurs regularly), he dreams of trying to enter the pearly gates of heaven, where Bill Murray (who else?) plays God.

      As good as del Toro is in this role, equal to his artist-prisoner in “The French Dispatch,” Threapleton steals the picture. This is the first major film role for the 24-year-old who is the daughter of Kate Winslet (tell me that doesn’t make you feel old?). Her flat affect and cold line readings make her a perfect Anderson actress. One of my favorite moments of the film is when Liesl starts smoking a pipe.

     No doubt, Anderson remains an acquired taste who seems to have little connection to contemporary Hollywood comedy filmmaking, which may be his best attribute. (If you have Netflix, don’t miss his series of quirky shorts, mostly starring Ralph Fiennes.)

  

THE SOPRANOS (1999-2007, TV)

     While it’s not my usual practice to offer commentary on television products, I feel compelled to weigh in, after all these years, on what has become the iconic series of the small screen’s cable era.

        Though I had seen the occasional episode of David Chase’s mob soap opera over the years, only in the past six months did I methodically watch all six seasons from start to finish.

       As someone who has read and seen more than his fair share of fictional and nonfiction accounts of La Cosa Nostra and ranks the first two “Godfather” films (referred to by characters in the series as simply “one” and “two”) at the top of his favorites list, not to mention multiple viewings of “Casino” and “Goodfellas,” I fully expected to be enraptured by “The Sopranos.” I was not.

      Or, at least, I was greatly disappointed by this overhyped series, finding fault with its fractured story, inconsistent performances and the reliance on similar scenarios year after year. There are moments, even full episodes, that rise to greatness but in full I’d be pressed to including the show in a ranking of the 20 best TV series.

       (For the handful of viewers who haven’t seen the series, read at your own risk—possible spoilers ahead.)

      And for those same readers: The series follows the difficulties faced by Tony Soprano, a depressive, brutal but also doting family man who takes control of the New Jersey mob family (“our thing” in gangster parlance) once run by his deceased father. Most of the action takes place in Soprano’s home, which he shares with wife Carmela and their two children, in his therapist office where he seeks help for his panic attacks and depression, and in his office at the strip club Bada Bing (a reference to “one”) where Tony and his underlings hang out when not out collecting money from their various nefarious enterprises.

      How many times did I need to see James Gandolfini’s Tony lumber down the stairs of his home in his robe to argue with his conflicted wife (Edie Falco) over coffee or listen to Tony and his captains discuss pedestrian issues at the bar or in the office? The show also offers an endless parade of funerals, where the mobsters stand around at the viewing of another of their “family” who has been killed (often at the hands of the mourners.)

      Adding to the highlight-reel feeling the show grows into, Chase and his phalanx of writers often turned the hour-long episodes into a potpourri of scenes only loosely connected by Tony’s presence.

      The first few seasons focus on Tony’s therapy sessions (Lorraine Bracco as Dr. Melfi), focused on his unhealthy relationship with his aging, spiteful mother (Nancy Marchand) and his troubled marriage, but these scenes quickly become redundant. In the last few seasons, Tony Jr. (known as A.J.), played by Robert Iler, becomes a major subplot, his life often used to explore social issues of the day. The series also spent way too much time on the ups and downs of the self-destructive Christopher (Michael Imperioli), Tony’s surrogate son; I’m surprised Chase didn’t turn it into a spinoff.

      The argument can be made—and certainly was during its original run on HBO (now MAX)—that viewers had never seen a Mafia chief deal with depression or fight with their children to stay in school.  (Imagine Michael Corleone meeting with his son’s school principal.)  It’s the every-day situations mixed with the usual collection of treats, beatings and executions that earned the series its acclaim (and an astonishing 21 Emmys).

       “The Sopranos” was among the first series to feature female nudity, at the family’s strip joint, what would be R-rated sex scenes between Tony and his various mistresses and unceasing profanity. I’m convinced that those were important reasons for not only its contemporary popularity but its critical acclaim.

      Yet despite all macho posing, the series dared to introduced a gay mobster (played by Joseph R. Gannascoli), who attempts to find a life away from the family before facing the intense homophobia of the mob—you won’t see that in a Scorsese film.

       While Gandolfini had the hang-dog look down pat, too often he does little to energize scenes that are begging for his presence; in fairness, the writing often failed him. I think he suffered the most from the changing directors (I counted 25 in the 86 episodes).

      While I always enjoyed scenes with Silvio, Tony’s consigliere, played with snarling sarcasm by rock ‘n’ roller Little Steven Van Zandt, you can count on one hand the number of impactful scenes he had in the six seasons. Not even at the end did Chase offer a meaningful last exchange between Silvio and Tony.

      In the same manner, Bracco had some memorable scenes early in the show but her importance to the show diminished in the last three seasons.

     The finest work in “The Sopranos” was done by Falco as Carmelo, the rare character who goes through changes over six seasons, as she struggles with enjoying the riches of the criminal life while living with the guilt over what her husband does. Also memorable is Aida Turturro, playing Janice, Tony’s unstable, mostly irritating sister who ends up marrying one of her brother’s lieutenants.

Early in the series Dominic Chianese as Uncle Junior, fighting with Tony for control of the family, and Marchand as Tony’s mother have great moments.

       The series is filled with lively guest performances, including movie directors Peter Bogdanovich as the therapist’s therapist and Sydney Pollack as a prison orderly; Annabella Sciorra as one of Tony’s mistresses and Steve Buscemi as a long-incarcerated cousin who wants back in the action.

       As for the much-debated final episode, it summarizes so much of what I disliked about the series: short scenes taking care of plot points rather than rising action leading to a dramatic climax. It felt like Chase needed another episode or two to bring this tale to a worthy conclusion. At the end, in the dinner, I still don’t understand the focus on daughter Meadow’s parking or the point of suddenly becoming so symbolic when you’re on the last page. I would rather have seen Tony taken away in handcuffs by the FBI; justice rather than the thought of another needless bloodletting.

      While I don’t regret the time I spent watching (the beauty of retirement life), considering the acres of praise the series has received over the past 25 years I felt a bit cheated. A story with great potential, unfulfilled.

  

A MODERN MUSKETEER (1917)

      One of the more amusing silents I’ve seen recently stars Douglas Fairbanks as a Kansas man who, after listening to his mother repeatedly read “The Three Musketeers” to him as a boy, becomes a modern-version of D’Artagnan.

     This Allan Dwan-directed picture begins with a scene of the 17^th Century swordsman taking on a room-full of bad guys so he can return a dropped handkerchief to a woman. In typical Fairbanks’ style, he flips and leaps all over the place, dismantling the room and the those who foolishly confront him. At first, I assumed this was an outtake from the picture that made Fairbanks’ a superstar “The Three Musketeers,” but that wasn’t made for another four years!

      After the intro, we meet Ned Thacher, an overly sincere 20^th Century man who will do anything to defend a female’s dignity and shows the same acrobatic and pugilistic skills as his French literary hero.

       Leaving his dusty small town for adventure, he runs into wealthy heal Forrest Vandeteer (Eugene Ormonde), who is headed for the Grand Canyon with Mrs. Dodge (Kathleen Kirkham) and her pretty, young daughter Elsie (teen actress Marjorie Daw) in tow.

      The real adventure begins when they arrive at the El Tovar Hotel (fascinating to see how the now very exclusive inn looked 107 years ago) and venture into the canyon, beautiful shot by cinematographers Hugh McClung and Harris Thorpe. The film doesn’t hold back on its racist portrayal of a Native-American tour guide, named Chin-de-dah and played by white actor Frank Campeau, who plans to kidnap Elsie and make her his “wife.”

    Along with Charlie Chaplin, Fairbanks was the biggest star of the silents, reportedly earning $10,000 a week by 1916 and all but inventing the movie action hero in hits such as “The Mark of Zorro” (1920), “Robin Hood” (1922), “The Thief of Bagdad” (1924) along with “The Three Musketeers.”

     Dwan’s incredible career spanned from 1911 to 1961, but, despite silent successes, was relegated to mostly B-movies in the sound era.

  

TWILIGHT (1998)

     Just before the last act of Robert Benton’s senior-citizen neo-noir, Paul Newman’s Harry Ross, a “retired” private eye, sums up the entire history of movie detectives, appropriately in the bathroom of a pair of murder victims: 

    “Ever strike you this is a lousy way to make a living? Start out thinking you are going to win a few, but mostly it’s, just like tonight, watching people run out of the little bit of luck that they got left. Think you are going to beat the odds, but you don’t or not very often.”

       The dialogue of “Twilight,” like most of Benton’s scripts (here co-written with novelist Richard Russo), captures his characters’ lifetime of struggle or, on the other side, the arrogance of privilege, and the poor choices they’ve made. In his best work—“Bonnie and Clyde” (1967), “The Late Show” (1977), “Kramer vs. Kramer” (1979), “Places in the Heart” (1984) and “Nobody’s Fool” (1994)—Benton, who died last month at age 92, created people who were distinctly of a time and place but edgy enough to leave a memorable impression. Though he worked infrequently, directing only 11 pictures, Benton elicited more first-rate performances than most filmmakers with three times the credits. Dustin Hoffman, Meryl Streep and Sally Field won Oscars in his films; Art Carney, John Malkovich and Paul Newman gave performances among their best.

      Of course, it all began when his and David Newman’s script for “Bonnie and Clyde,” written while they worked for Esquire magazine, was turned into a seminal film of the 1960s by star-producer Warren Beatty and director Arthur Penn.    

       Benton took home screenwriting and directing Academy Awards for the child-custody drama “Kramer vs. Kramer,” and then won his second screenplay Oscar for the Depression-era farm tale “Places in the Heart.” He was nominated five times for his scripts.

      He might have deserved another for “Twilight,” which, on a second viewing, makes most contemporary films look and sound like cheap TV melodramas. To start with, the cast is a filmmaker’s dream: Newman, Susan Sarandon and Gene Hackman are the principals with exemplary supporting from James Garner, Stockard Channing, Reese Witherspoon, Liev Schreiber, Giancarlo Esposito, M. Emmet Walsh and Margo Martindale. In the first 20 minutes of the film, no one shows up on screen who isn’t a familiar face.

      After retrieving their underage daughter (Witherspoon) from a Puerto Vallarta love nest, Harry becomes house guest and handyman for one-time Hollywood actors Jack (Hackman) and Catherine (Sarandon) Ames. Seeing Harry eying her flirty mother, the daughter tells him, “You’re just the hired help.”

     The scenes between Newman and Hackman are priceless—two of Hollywood’s all-time greats in a game of deceit and confession. Harry finds himself knee-deep in a 20-year-old murder after Jack sends him to deliver a blackmail payoff.

      Not only is this one of the last great performances in Newman’s storied career (he was 73), but the older actors, including Sarandon, Garner and Channing, have rarely been more self-assured.

     One could argue that the plot is a bit too obvious, telegraphing the bad guys early on and relying on puzzle pieces from 1940s and 50s film noirs. So what?

       The pleasure of watching these veteran actors play out the intriguing machinations tops 90 percent of what Hollywood markets as mystery today.   

THE GODLESS GIRL (1928)

     Few would make the case for Cecil B. DeMille as a great director but his importance to the industry cannot be overstated. After directing the first movie in what would become “Hollywood” (“The Straw Man” in 1914, which he remade twice), DeMille all but created the movie melodrama, making more than 50 pictures before the coming of sound. He also was one of the founders of the movie company that became Paramount Pictures.

     The talkies slowed DeMille’s unsustainable pace, but he also produced and directed some of the biggest hits of the 1930s, including “The Sign of the Cross,” “Cleopatra,”—both with Claudette Colbert—and “The Plainsman.” When he made his final picture in 1956, the epic “The Ten Commandments” with an all-star cast, it was the year’s top box-office winner and soon became an annual Easter event on television.

     One of his lesser-known efforts, “The Godless Girl,” takes on two controversial issues: atheism and the harsh conditions of juvenile detention centers, the plot inspired by actual events at Hollywood High School in the late 1920s. The first-rate restoration of this silent is shown on TCM and available on YouTube.

       Lina Basquette, part of DeMille’s troupe before she was a teen, plays Judy (the credits call her “The Girl”), an outspoken high school student who leads the atheist club. Of course, this “disturbed” group is condemned by school officials and then psychically attacked by a group of conservative Bible-loving students. (DeMille plays the two sides somewhat evenly, but you just know Judy will eventually see her way to Christianity.)

    The clash between the two groups results in three of the students getting shipped to juvie, Judy, Bob or “The Boy” (Tom Keene, future star of B-cowboy movies, in his debut) and the jokester Bozo (Eddie Quillan, who was still working in the late 1980s). There they battle with The Brute (veteran bad guy Noah Beery), the facility’s unforgiving guard.

     The controversial picture was written by Jeanie Macpherson and features set designs by Mitchell Leisen, who worked with the director through “The Sign of the Cross” (1932), after which he became a director himself (“Death Takes a Holiday,” “Midnight”).

     It is somewhat ironic that Basquette’s stardom disappeared when sound came in as she was married to Sam Warner (one of her seven husbands), who was the real force behind Warner Bros. experimenting with sound films. He died of a heart attack the day before “The Jazz Singer” premiered in 1927.

PHOTOS:

Tom Cruise with Simon Pegg and Hayley Atwell in “Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning.”  (Paramount Pictures)

Michael Imperioli, James Gandolfini, Tony Sirico and Steven Van Zandt in “The Sopranos.”  (HBO)

Writer-director Robert Benton at the Venice Film Festival in 2003. (Wireimage)

Lina Basquette and Tom Keene in “The Godless Girl.” (Image Entertainment)