The ‘Mission: Impossible’ Franchise’s Reckoning
Starting with 2011’s Ghost Protocol, the Mission: Impossible films found a schtick in doubling and tripling and quadrupling down on the tension of elongated, elaborate, and escalating action set-pieces. The five films since and including that one form a bell curve that almost perfectly illustrates the franchise’s journey to balance tone (left of curve) and plot (right) around said schtick.
Three Films by Sean Baker: An Assessment
The Italian neorealism movement rose from the ruins of WWII, and its characteristic pseudo-aimlessness was a powerful metaphor for life in the time of recovery. Without war recovery, the effect is mostly lost; the movement’s been dead for 70 years and a longshot for revival, especially in American cinema.
Robert Bresson’s ‘The Devil, Probably’
Like A Gentle Woman (1969), The Devil, Probably (1977) opens on (two contradictory reports of) the main character’s suicide, then jumps backward in time. At the 4-minute mark, at a gathering of students (which through context we can infer are an analog to “68ers”), a guy says into the mic, “I proclaim destruction. Everyone can destroy. It’s easy.” Sure enough, the next shots are of polluting smokestacks and dead trees.