For me, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning sticks the landing. It does not do so perfectly, and it is not always graceful on its way to the end, but within the giant, sprawling, undeniably messy creativity of this last chapter, I felt the kind of finality that tells me the artists making this series love and understand it in the same way I’ve long loved and understood it. It delivers the kind of ending that brings closure through a…

“I swear your life will always matter more to me than my own.”

“You don’t even know me.”

“What difference does that make?”

The big mountaintop stunt, central to the film’s marketing, points to one of the core ways Dead Reckoning feels like it has formally evolved over past installments: the way McQuarrie crafts and deploys mise-en-scene to create potent psychologically expressive spaces for the characters: an international airport as a dense space of comings and goings, full of complex…

The thought that kept running through my mind as I sat through all twelve hours of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny was “How?”

How can a movie with “Indiana Jones” in the title be this boring?

How can a movie starring three of my favorite actors – Harrison Ford, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and Mads Mikkelsen – be this lifeless?

How can a movie that reportedly cost $300 million to make – one of the highest budgets in film history…

These three films – 2018’s Halloween, 2021’s Halloween Kills, and this weekend’s new Halloween Ends – would all, in different ways, be impossible for me to review. Are they good? In some ways, yeah. Are they bad? In many ways, yes. Do they give you something to chew on? For me, at least, the answer is a resounding and overwhelming yes, and it’s a ‘yes’ that outweighs anything I could say about their relative ‘quality.’ These are fascinating movies to…