Espionage Archives - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) – 4K Ultra HD + Digital Code

November 3, 2023****/****, 2023, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Espionage, FFC Must-Own, Thriller, Tom Cruise

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

****/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Henry Czerny
written by Christopher McQuarrie & Erik Jendresen
directed by Christopher McQuarrie

by Walter Chaw I’ve liked every film in this series to some extent, the last few very much. Yet, pressed, I couldn’t tell you what any of them are about. If you ask me to recount the plot of this latest entry, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (hereafter Dead Reckoning), I would have a tough time only a few minutes out of the screening. This isn’t an inherently bad thing. If you were to ask most people who’ve seen North by Northwest, they wouldn’t know it’s about microfilm being smuggled in South American figurines, just as they will not question whether a crop duster is the best way to kill someone waiting for a bus in the middle of nowhere. They wouldn’t remember that Notorious is about radioactive ore hidden in wine bottles, or that Psycho is about a petty embezzlement scheme. That’s because it doesn’t matter. You’d probably even get pushback about how that’s not really what those films are about anyway, which is correct. Hitchcock called those things that matter a lot to everyone in the film–and almost nothing to anyone watching it–the “MacGuffin.” The Mission: Impossible films are the quintessential modern example of an old concept: if you do everything well enough, if you understand how to keep things snappy and populate the story with characters who feel like real, live people (thus imbuing all the noise with stakes), well, it doesn’t matter what the picture’s about, because what it’s actually about is so instantly relatable. Will they survive? Will they fall in love? Archetype and craft. There’s nothing simpler and nothing more complex.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)

July 7, 2023****/****, 2023, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Espionage, Theatrical, Thriller, Tom Cruise

****/****
starring Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Henry Czerny
written by Christopher McQuarrie & Erik Jendresen
directed by Christopher McQuarrie

by Walter Chaw I’ve liked every film in this series to some extent, the last few very much. Yet, pressed, I couldn’t tell you what any of them are about. If you ask me to recount the plot of this latest entry, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (hereafter Dead Reckoning), I would have a tough time only a few minutes out of the screening. This isn’t an inherently bad thing. If you were to ask most people who’ve seen North by Northwest, they wouldn’t know it’s about microfilm being smuggled in South American figurines, just as they will not question whether a crop duster is the best way to kill someone waiting for a bus in the middle of nowhere. They wouldn’t remember that Notorious is about radioactive ore hidden in wine bottles, or that Psycho is about a petty embezzlement scheme. That’s because it doesn’t matter. You’d probably even get pushback about how that’s not really what those films are about anyway, which is correct. Hitchcock called those things that matter a lot to everyone in the film–and almost nothing to anyone watching it–the “MacGuffin.” The Mission: Impossible films are the quintessential modern example of an old concept: if you do everything well enough, if you understand how to keep things snappy and populate the story with characters who feel like real, live people (thus imbuing all the noise with stakes), well, it doesn’t matter what the picture’s about, because what it’s actually about is so instantly relatable. Will they survive? Will they fall in love? Archetype and craft. There’s nothing simpler and nothing more complex.

Ghosted (2023) + The Mother (2023)

May 20, 20232023, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Espionage, Romance, Streaming, Thriller, ZERO STARS

GHOSTED
ZERO STARS/****
starring Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Mike Moh, Adrien Brody
screenplay by Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick and Chris McKenna & Erik Sommers
directed by Dexter Fletcher

THE MOTHER
**/****
starring Jennifer Lopez, Lucy Paez, Omari Hardwick, Joseph Fiennes
screenplay by Misha Green and Andrea Berloff and Peter Craig
directed by Niki Caro

by Walter Chaw Two new entries in the woman-warrior subgenre of action pictures find a pretty abysmal knock-off of Knight and Day in the Ana de Armas vehicle Ghosted (with villain Adrien Brody doing a weird accent) and a pretty fair knock-off of Hanna in the Jennifer Lopez vehicle The Mother (with villain Joseph Fiennes doing a different weird accent). The one is ultimately a half-assed romcom, the other a grim survivalist ex-military Stella Dallas melodrama. They share a queasy desperation, as well as a sense that they’ve lapped their respective sell-by dates by at least a full creative cycle. It’s that feeling where you recognize someone at the party who hasn’t been invited, and they know you know but no one wants to say anything. The best modern iterations of this kind of movie are Renny Harlin’s The Long Kiss Goodnight and James Cameron’s Aliens. I wonder if my overall fatigue with the genre isn’t a product of my searching for those highs again in the intervening, largely disappointing decades. Part of me feels like I should celebrate non-IP attempts at mature actioners–but the rest of me feels like I’d rather be watching something that doesn’t suck. It’s the eternal struggle.

Saboteur (1942) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

May 22, 20221940s, 2022, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, Disability, Espionage, Road Movie, Thriller, War

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

*/**** Image A Sound B Extras C
starring Priscilla Lane, Robert Cummings, Norman Lloyd, Otto Kruger
screenplay by Peter Viertel, Joan Harrison, Dorothy Parker
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw When I think of Saboteur, which isn’t often, it’s as the first American project Hitchcock developed largely without his beloved assistant Joan Harrison, who left after co-writing the first draft (seeing in the opportunity to produce The Phantom Lady her chance to wriggle out from under Hitch’s shadow), and, maybe more significantly, without his most essential collaborator, wife Alma Reville, then away in New York with their daughter Pat, who had just won the lead role in a play. They left creative absences Hitch tried to fill–disastrously, I think–with Algonquin Roundtable alumni Peter Viertel and Dorothy Parker. (If there’s a case to be made about the importance of Alma to Hitchcock’s career, it may be useful to examine those films where we know she was absent.) I also think of Saboteur, when I do, as an attempt at an “all-American” film of the kind Hitchcock, fearing he’d left Britain trailing with him too much of the old country, was desperate to make. The desire to embrace his adopted culture is so conspicuous it becomes uncomfortably obvious in multiple instances (stops at the Statue of Liberty, Rockefeller Center, and even the Hoover Dam) that setting has fatally superseded narrative. His follow-up, the Thornton Wilder-penned Shadow of a Doubt, is the all-American Hitchcock that works, locating the country’s heart in the introduction of a human stain into a small town and a wholesome family.

All the Old Knives (2022)

April 7, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Espionage, Streaming, Thriller

*/****
starring Chris Pine, Thandiwe Newton, Laurence Fishburne, Jonathan Pryce
screenplay by Olen Steinhauer
directed by Janus Metz

by Walter Chaw Fred Schepisi’s The Russia House is a dignified, austere, mature adaptation of John le Carré that feels like a Graham Greene in its colonial exhaustion and resignation. Sean Connery plays “Barley” Scott-Blair, a publisher pulled into a game of international intrigue as the CIA and MI6, from opposite sides of the pond, seek to make him and a young Russian, Katya (Michelle Pfeiffer), into pawns in a game of Cold War chess. Barley falls in love with Katya, of course; who wouldn’t fall in love with Michelle Pfeiffer? And he plays both sides–well, all three sides–against the middle in order to secure a romantic future for himself and his lady fair. It’s the best film Schepisi’s made outside his native Australia, with a Jerry Goldsmith score (featuring Branford Marsalis on the soprano sax) that treats it as a bit of a chamber piece, like a story told to grandchildren when the danger has faded but the love’s continued to bloom. They’ve heard it a million times, but let the old guy tell it: he seems so happy when he does. I’ve loved The Russia House ever since seeing it on Christmas in 1990. It’s one of my comfort movies, twisty enough to engage with performances that feel lived-in like an old and beloved sweater.

The King’s Man (2021) [Ultimate Collector’s Edition] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

March 17, 20222021, 2022, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Espionage, Thriller, UK, War

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Ralph Fiennes, Gemma Arterton, Rhys Ifans, Charles Dance
screenplay by Matthew Vaughn & Karl Gajdusek
directed by Matthew Vaughn

by Bill Chambers Make no mistake, 2014’s Kingsman: The Secret Service is reactionary horseshit, but I got a kick out of its shock tactics and couldn’t deny that this new chapter in producer-turned-director Matthew Vaughn’s career held some unlikely appeal as an alternative if not an antidote to the antiseptic Marvel and faux-gritty DC cinematic universes. The film was tacit confirmation that Vaughn, after courting controversy with Kick-Ass, had embraced his inner Droog: he would now revel in the violence and latent fascism of his favoured crime and superhero fiction–albeit drolly, like a more cartoonish S. Craig Zahler. In retrospect, however, it’s probably more accurate to say that Vaughn let muse Mark Millar, who wrote the graphic novels Kingsman and Kick-Ass were based on, Pied Piper him into a brick wall, i.e., the dead-end that is The King’s Man, the third chapter in a trilogy that had nowhere to go and so goes backwards to tell an origin story–complete with the dulled edges that tend to happen to adult-skewing franchises as kids become their prevailing consumer. Unlike RoboCop 3 or Police Academy III: Back in Training, The King’s Man retains the R rating of its predecessors, though here it feels like the MPA is primarily trying to protect children from boredom.

No Time to Die (2021)

November 16, 2021****/****, 2021, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Espionage, James Bond, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

****/****
starring Daniel Craig, Rami Malek, Léa Seydoux, Christoph Waltz
screenplay by Neal Purvis & Robert Wade and Cary Joji Fukunaga and Phoebe Waller-Bridge
directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Cary Fukunaga’s No Time to Die, the twenty-fifth canonical James Bond film, is the best one since Peter Hunt’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and for many of the same reasons. One could hazard that the similarities, a vulnerable Bond chief among them, comprise the guiding principle behind this picture, with its multiple call-outs to Fleming’s books–On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, in particular, along with its downbeat, mortal sequel You Only Live Twice, the last Bond Fleming completed himself. In the latter, 007’s boss, M, uses the same Jack London quote to eulogize the presumed-dead superspy (“The proper function of a man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time”) that his screen counterpart (Ralph Fiennes) uses to eulogize Bond in No Time to Die. It ends with Bond, initially dumbstruck by grief over the death of his wife in the previous novel (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service), now stricken by amnesia and about to abandon his impregnated wife–the child a development Fleming never got to bring to term, but who finds her fruition in Fukunaga’s film. At a late point in No Time to Die, two combatants reaching the end of their struggles agree that the only reason to live is to leave a legacy. I find it touching that this film brings a small and precious note of Fleming’s to life, so many years after his death.

The Rhythm Section (2020)

February 12, 20202020, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Espionage, Revenge, UK

***½/****
starring Blake Lively, Jude Law, Sterling K. Brown, Daniel Mays
screenplay by Mark Burnell, based on his novel
directed by Reed Morano

by Walter Chaw Over a black screen at the start of Reed Morano’s The Rhythm Section, we’re invited to think of the heartbeat as drums and breathing as the bass accompanying it. I would have swapped them, but either way it works as a symbolic framework to marry film to music, and perhaps the process of making a film to a collaborative endeavour like the frisson between musicians in a band–or the autonomous functions of the body that keep you going even when you’re unconscious. When I think about “rhythm” as a metaphor, I think of the various breathing methods and strategies devised to help women through labour. Blame Stephen King’s The Breathing Method, the only one of the four novellas from his Different Seasons anthology yet to be adapted for the screen. In it, a young woman has so prepared herself for the birthing process that her head goes through the motions of it even after being separated from her body. The thing to which The Rhythm Section aspires, then, appears to be to create something, or to indeed be something, so drilled and efficient that it operates purely on impulse and instinct.

Telluride 2019: The Report

September 6, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Espionage, Film Festivals, Telluride

**½/****
starring Adam Driver, Annette Bening, Ted Levine, Jon Hamm
written by Scott Z. Burns, based on the article "Rorschach and Awe" by Katherine Eban
directed by Scott Z. Burns

by Walter Chaw The very definition of "nutritious cinema," The Report details the process of writing and the struggles to publish the Senate oversight report on CIA torture tactics during the Bush II administration. The directorial debut of screenwriter Scott Z. Burns, a frequent Steven Soderbergh collaborator, it's dry as a soda cracker and full of the deep shadows of an All The President's Men but without, alas, much of the kineticism. The problem with movies like this is that the key audience for them probably doesn't have a lot to learn from the revelations therein. What remains, then, is a procedural exercise with a known resolution that starts to feel repetitive at the same time it starts to feel depressing. Adam Driver is typically good as Senate analyst Daniel Jones, driven by the events of 9/11 to pursue a career in intelligence. Over the course of five years working as part of a small team for Sen. Diane Feinstein (Annette Bening), he uncovers a narrative within the CIA that torture does not produce good information, that there was precious little oversight over the agency, and that although the Obama presidency abolished "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques," it was deeply interested in keeping Jones's report out of the public eye.

Domino (2019)

June 1, 20192019, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Belgium, Crime, Denmark, Directors: Brian De Palma, Espionage, France, Italy, Netherlands, Thriller

***/****
starring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Carice Van Houten, Eriq Ebouaney, Guy Pearce
written by Petter Skavlan
directed by Brian De Palma

by Alice Stoehr When Brian De Palma was 17, relates Julie Salamon in her book The Devil’s Candy, he tried to prove his father was having an affair. “All summer long he recorded his father’s telephone calls,” she writes. “On more than one occasion he climbed up a tree outside his father’s office and snapped pictures of him and his nurse.” Though perhaps too pat as an origin story, this experience–oft-repeated by biographers, as well as the director himself–haunts his filmography. From Dressed to Kill to Blow Out to Snake Eyes, his characters and camera fixate on audiovisual evidence. They foreground how film itself can act as documentation, to either reveal or distort the truth. These same preoccupations shape Domino, his thirtieth feature and the first he’s directed since 2012’s Passion. The espionage thriller, penned by Norwegian screenwriter Petter Skavlan, intertwines three sets of characters as they bound across Western Europe. Christian (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) is a Copenhagen cop who sees his partner’s throat slit in a set-piece modelled after the opening of Vertigo. He seeks vengeance against the assailant, Ezra (Eriq Ebouaney), who’s blackmailed by a handler at the CIA (Guy Pearce) into tracking down the same ISIS cell that beheaded his father. It’s tawdry material, nesting two revenge narratives and plenty of terrorist intrigue inside a film that’s under 90 minutes long.

The Spy Who Dumped Me (2018) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

October 28, 20182018, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Espionage, Romance

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Mila Kunis, Kate McKinnon, Justin Theroux, Sam Heughan
screenplay by Susanna Fogel and David Iserson
directed by Susanna Fogel

by Bryant Frazer The Spy Who Dumped Me is a lot–femme-centric rom-com, violent action-thriller, dopey spy farce, and genial paean to friendship in the face of adversity–and director Susanna Fogel revels in the tonal disparities from its opening sequence, which intercuts an enthusiastically mounted, bullet-riddled chase scene set in Vilnius, Lithuania, with scenes from a birthday party for Audrey Stockman (Mila Kunis), a 30-year-old grocery clerk who’s just been blindsided by a break-up text from Drew Thayer (Justin Theroux), her boyfriend of one year. The party’s been organized by Audrey’s devoted pal Morgan (Kate McKinnon), an aspiring actress whose ceaseless shenanigans help blunt Audrey’s sadness. It quickly becomes clear that, somehow, the guy hiding out from Lithuanian thugs in the gloomy, desaturated espionage thriller is Drew himself. When Morgan grabs Audrey’s phone and sends a text calling him a “worthless nutsack” and promising to “set his shit on fire,” Audrey gets a returned phone call from that other movie, in which Drew beseeches her to reconsider. Fogel keeps this up for a solid 10 minutes before the film’s title appears on screen, and it’s an intriguing overture.

Red Sparrow (2018)

March 2, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Espionage, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Jennifer Lawrence, Joel Edgerton, Matthias Schoenaerts, Jeremy Irons
screenplay by Justin Haythe, based on the book by Jason Matthews
directed by Francis Lawrence

by Walter Chaw “Degenerate,” a young woman says during class in self-described Russian Whore School, turning away from a surveillance image in which a middle-aged diplomat is seen snuggling a younger man in a car. “Why do you say that,” asks her teacher, a frightening harridan out of a Wertmüller fandango played by Charlotte Rampling (who else?), “is it because he’s homosexual?” It is. And here he is, dragged into the classroom by scary Soviet guards. The young woman is brought to the front of the class and instructed to fellate him, since what’s “between [her] legs” is obviously of no interest to the degenerate homosexual. For his part, the prisoner grunts like an animal as he wrestles his dick out of his pants and does his best to force the girl’s mouth onto it. Let’s take a moment to consider that Francis Lawrence’s ugly, punishingly violent, ultimately despairing Red Sparrow has characterized this gay guy as a sub-vocal animal interested in getting a hummer from this barely-adult woman–and the Russians as subhuman operators interested in training their youth in the art of fucking for the Motherland. It’s not despicable to depict bigotry; it’s despicable to be bigoted.

Telluride ’17: The Shape of Water

September 6, 20172017, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Espionage, Fantasy, Film Festivals, Horror, Romance, Telluride, Telluride 2017, Thriller

***/****
starring Sally Hawkins, Doug Jones, Michael Shannon, Richard Jenkins
screenplay by Guillermo del Toro & Vanessa Taylor
directed by Guillermo del Toro

by Walter Chaw I watched Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water in a packed auditorium in Telluride, CO as a torrential rainstorm pounded the roof of what is, outside of the festival, an ice-skating rink, perched there with a park in front of it, the headwaters of the San Miguel to one side and the mountains to the other and all around. As the main character, cleaning lady Eliza (Sally Hawkins), turned on water for her bath, the cascading cacophony in the theatre joined in with a warm insularity I always equate with the Mandarin term for "cozy": two words that mean, or at least sound like they mean, "warm" and "noisy." The Shape of Water is like that, too, a gothic romance in the new del Toro style (after Crimson Peak, which, for me, was more noisy than warm, but mileage varies), which del Toro introduced as the evocation of a fantasy he had as a child upon watching Creature from the Black Lagoon in which the Creature falls in love with the girl and they live happily ever after. That's it, and were that truly it, The Shape of Water would be an instant classic rather than an acquired taste, perhaps–a future cult classic, certainly, that is forgiven for its odd digressions while justly-celebrated for its audacity. It's a triumph when it focuses in on the essential loneliness of misfits (the melancholic, Romanticist engine that drives del Toro's Hellboy movies), but in a subplot involving Russian spies, it becomes for long minutes time spent away from what works in favour of time spent with what doesn't. When del Toro has allowed intrusions like this in the past (see: his early masterpieces The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth), it's been up to us to infer the connection between his dark fables and his political concerns. Here he brings the subtext into text at a cost to the "warm/noisy" coziness of his work. For del Toro, insularity is a strength.

Jason Bourne (2016)

July 30, 20162016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Espionage, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Matt Damon, Tommy Lee Jones, Alicia Vikander, Vincent Cassel
written by Paul Greengrass & Christopher Rouse
directed by Paul Greengrass

by Walter Chaw There are two modes in Paul Greengrass’s Jason Bourne, his and star Matt Damon’s return to the franchise after almost a decade away from it: thudding tedium, and incomprehensible chaos. By this fifth instalment (which follows the Jeremy Renner-starring spin-off attempt, The Bourne Legacy), it all plays a little too much like self-parody. Every time there’s a conversation about THE TRUTH now, it feels like a bad SNL skit. I still love The Bourne Identity. Watching it in comparison with the Greengrass films (and with most any modern action movie) underscores exactly how superior is Doug Liman as an action director. Liman shoots an action scene like the dance sequences in Saturday Night Fever: with respect for geography and the skill and physicality of his stunt performers and cast. The car chase through Paris in the original begins with a careful consultation of a map, a few questions about the state of the car, and some light but crucial character development, then proceeds into a nice, clean set-piece that establishes stakes, spatial geometry, and destination in a way that is Friedkin-esque. It’s a textbook, as good as the L-train underpass pursuit in The French Connection and the wrong-way freeway chase in To Live and Die in LA.. The Bourne Identity is defiantly classical action filmmaking and that’s why it still seems fresh, even though it will be fifteen years old next year.

No Way Out (1987) – Blu-ray Disc

July 4, 20161980s, 2016, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Espionage, Mystery, Romance, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

Please note that these screencaps are from an alternate source and do not necessarily reflect the Blu-ray presentation.

***/**** Image B- Sound B Commentary C
starring Kevin Costner, Gene Hackman, Sean Young, Howard Duff
screenplay by Robert Garland, based on the book The Big Clock by Kenneth Fearing
directed by Roger Donaldson

by Walter Chaw I was lucky enough to be 14 in 1987, right at that age where my buddies and I were dropped off at the theatre by our parents for whatever we wanted to see. Because we were generally not well-supervised in such matters, we talked them into buying us tickets for stuff like Hellraiser, RoboCop, Lethal Weapon, Full Metal Jacket, and The Untouchables. My first R-rated theatrical experiences were, in other words, magical. They were gleefully violent, extravagantly so, and the sex… Jesus. The sex in mainstream movies in 1987 was combustible–enough so that it formed the backbone of my onanism for the next several years. I saw Angel Heart this way, and Fatal Attraction of course. Key in there is Roger Donaldson’s largely-forgotten but durable political-paranoia thriller No Way Out. Starring Kevin Costner, cementing a legendary winning streak that began a month or two earlier with his starmaking turn in The Untouchables and continued with the dead sexy Bull Durham the following year and the legendarily-chaste Field of Dreams a year after that. Lost in conversations about Costner’s stardom during this period is his preternatural ability to be an Everyman sex symbol. Girls loved him, and guys didn’t mind because Costner isn’t really all that threatening. He sure is likeable, though. When he introduced a note of menace into his nice-guy archetype in A Perfect World, he in fact discovered his perfect role. The problems came when he tried to be something more than that. Cowboy, baseball player, fish-man, all-around all-American? No problem. Attorney, doctor–now we got issues.

Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

December 14, 20152015, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Espionage, Thriller, Tom Cruise

***½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Alec Baldwin
screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie
directed by Christopher McQuarrie

by Walter Chaw At some point, sneakily, wonderfully, Tom Cruise became our Jackie Chan. It happened when the storyline shifted away from his essential ickiness–the Scientology thing, the Katie Holmes thing, and all the attendant nightmare gossip–and onto his fearlessness and absolute willingness to perform his own stunts wherever possible. (I realize of course that said storyline may never shift for some.) There were murmurs when he did the rock-climbing in the second Mission: Impossible flick–the one where he recruited John Woo, who was at the time the best action director on the planet. Those murmurs turned to grudging admiration once it was revealed that Cruise let himself be suspended for real outside the Burj Khalifa in Brad Bird’s superior Ghost Protocol; and now, with Christopher McQuarrie’s fleet, intelligent, immanently professional Rogue Nation, for which Cruise hung from an airplane in flight and held his breath for six minutes, Cruise’s bravado is a big part of the draw.

Spectre (2015)

November 7, 20152015, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Espionage, James Bond, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Daniel Craig, Christoph Waltz, Léa Seydoux, Ralph Fiennes
screenplay by John Logan and Neal Purvis & Robert Wade and Jez Butterworth
directed by Sam Mendes

by Walter Chaw My favourite James Bond movie is On Her Majesty’s Secret Service: the first without Sean Connery as Bond, and the first and only featuring Australian model George Lazenby in the role. It’s the one where Bond falls in love, marries, and in the end is unable to protect his new bride from her demons. I like it the best because despite a few typically silly Bond moments, it has Bond’s Moriarty, Blofeld (Telly Savalas in that film), acting as the spear in our hero’s side, and it has Bond attempting to address his own failures as a human being and being taught, essentially, that the world is a cold place. I like it the best because it feels melancholy and hopeless. Bond is psychotic, you see, a serial philanderer and killer given license to do both by a broken state and the illusion of order. He’s a rapist in Fleming’s novels (and consider the conquest of Pussy Galore in Goldfinger)–literally in some instances, in others just given to taking advantage of women in extremis. It’s a very particular ruling-class fantasy punctuated by gadgets and automobiles–film noir, except the code our ambiguous hero plays by is more Humphrey Bogart’s from In a Lonely Place than Bogey’s from The Maltese Falcon.

Bridge of Spies (2015)

October 13, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coen Brothers, Drama, Espionage, Spielberg

*/****
starring Tom Hanks, Mark Rylance, Amy Ryan, Alan Alda
screenplay by Matt Charman and Ethan Coen & Joel Coen
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw Steven Spielberg is the great Hollywood pastry tube. He’s packed to the brim with sugary, awards-season sweetness, and he extrudes little nuggets of prestige with the greased regularity of a lifelong prune-eater. In his latest bit of machine-tooled calculation, Bridge of Spies, he makes the unintentional statement during his patented unforgivable epilogue that the American public is a disgusting, moronic, animalistic mob ruled by prejudices and the media (which is the foundation of a different, good movie on the subject of Bridge of Spies)–ironic, because it’s those very deficiencies in critical discernment, moral certitude, and sophistication that Spielberg has made a cottage career of taking advantage of. If it’s true that all films manipulate but we only complain when they do it poorly (and it’s more true than not), then let me complain that Spielberg is an absolute visual savant–proof of it in the first ten, wordless minutes of Bridge of Spies (compare it to the wordless section of Amistad)–and an absolute pandering whore in his inability to deliver an ambiguous ending. He’s said as much. He’s the only living director who could turn out a masterpiece from a Philip K. Dick short story and ruin it with a sunshine double-happiness lollipop of a ridiculous Hollywood ending. But have no fear: Bridge of Spies never threatens to be a masterpiece for even a moment. It’s no Munich or Saving Private Ryan–more like The Terminal. Bridge of Spies is decrepit, highly-polished garbage from almost the beginning, with no relief from its elderly ministrations all the way through to the end.

Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015)

July 30, 20152015, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Espionage, Theatrical, Thriller, Tom Cruise

***½/****
starring Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Alec Baldwin
screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie
directed by Christopher McQuarrie

The Fury (1978) [The Limited Edition Series] – Blu-ray Disc

April 18, 20131970s, 2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Brian De Palma, Espionage, Revenge, Sci-Fi, Teen, Thriller

***½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras D
starring Kirk Douglas, John Cassavetes, Carrie Snodgress, Charles Durning
screenplay by John Farris, based on his novel
directed by Brian DePalma

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. While Brian DePalma is nothing if not a leitmotif filmmaker, it’s curious that he chose to direct The Fury right after Carrie. Imagine Spielberg following up Jaws with Orca–it’s like De Palma was begging to be pigeonholed. And it’s not surprising that The Fury wasn’t as zeitgeisty: it lacks the classical simplicity and youth appeal of Carrie, with almost no one in the cast under 30 save for future softcore legend Andrew Stevens and Carrie holdover Amy Irving, a good actress who just doesn’t have that X factor. But The Fury‘s echo can still be heard, because its ending is indeed that impactful. Nearly every review mentions it, and the terms in which Pauline Kael and her acolytes described it gave it a kind of porny rep that’s since inspired generations of young film buffs to seek the movie out. (Armond White called it an “orgasm.”) It is a great ending, but a revisit makes clear that The Fury is worth reading for the articles.

G.I. Joe: Retaliation (2013)

March 28, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Espionage, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring D.J. Cotrona, Byung-hun Lee, Adrianne Palicki, Dwayne Johnson
screenplay by Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick
directed by Jon M. Chu

by Angelo Muredda While it's easy to snicker at a title sequence
that boasts of "Characters by Hasbro," G.I. Joe: Retaliation (hereafter Retaliation) is the kind of movie you root for. After the banality of
predecessor Stephen Sommers, John M. Chu is an inspired choice of director. This
is a guy who's made his name by bringing elegance and agility to his two
attempts at the surprisingly bullet-proof Step Up franchise.
There was reason enough, then, to hope his preference for long takes and
earnest interest in bodies in motion would translate to a franchise inspired by
a line of action figures. After all, such baubles are nothing if not fetish
objects, their biceps studied by the faithful with a mad love usually
reserved for dancers, matinee idols, and wrestlers. What better
meeting of the three than a project steered by the director of dance films and
anchored by Channing Tatum and Dwayne Johnson, née The Rock?

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

February 20, 20131930s, 2013, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, Espionage, The Criterion Collection, Thriller, UK

***½/**** Image A Sound B Extras A+
starring Leslie Banks, Edna Best, Peter Lorre, Nova Pilbeam
screenplay by Charles Bennett, D.B. Wyndham-Lewis, Edwin Greenwood and A.R. Rawlinson
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw The first fascination of Alfred Hitchcock’s original The Man Who Knew Too Much is that when a dashing foreign agent (Pierre Fresnay) is shot just minutes into the film, it’s Jill (Edna Best), the wife in the heroic central couple, who’s privy to his last words. They’re dancing together in the middle of a ballroom that feels like a glass cage (naturally) when the dastardly deed is done, a married English woman on holiday with husband Bob (Leslie Banks) and daughter Betty (Nova Pilbeam), who look on approvingly. When Hitchcock remakes this movie 22 years later with Doris Day and Jimmy Stewart, he has Ugly American Jimmy (the one privy to the dying man’s last words) drug his hysterical wife in the first of many instances of Hitchcock undermining Stewart’s status as everyone’s favourite Yank. 1934’s The Man Who Knew too Much, like so much of Hitchcock’s British output (this is the first of his six films for Gaumont), remains current for scholars looking for tropes, images, sequences that prefigure his later work. The premature demise of what would have traditionally been the star of the picture (poor, dead Louis, also a champion ski-jumper) prefigures Psycho, of course, while the glass cages recur everywhere from Young and Innocent (which likewise features the musical plot point of this film) to Notorious to Hitch’s collaborations with Tippi Hedren. A gaze at the 34-minute mark through wrought-iron gates predicts the moment of discovery in Strangers on a Train, followed fast by a deliciously uncomfortable dentist sequence I’m surprised Hitch never came back to. Leave that, I suppose, to William Goldman and Marathon Man.

Notorious (1946) – Blu-ray Disc

January 6, 2013****/****, 1940s, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, Espionage, Romance, Thriller

****/****
Image B Sound B- Extras C+
starring Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, Louis Calhern
screenplay by Ben Hecht
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw Other than Psycho, the most examined, most carefully raked-through picture in Hitchcock’s filmography might be the cold, meticulous, perfect Notorious. It serves as a model for technique, offered as the pinnacle of Hitchcock’s early American period and used as proof by some that Hitch was a misogynist. The Dark Side of Genius author Donald Spoto wrote a fitfully interesting (if ultimately useless) article about how the first half of the film is a mirror image of the second–rising to a midpoint before diminishing at the end to the same composition as the first shot. (I’d argue that you could say the same for Shadow of a Doubt–particularly during the movie’s character-/setting- establishing sequences.) Stories of how the FBI began a file on Hitch because of his prescient use of uranium as his MacGuffin in Notorious are among the most beloved Hitch arcana, and critics who favour Lacan as the prism through which to analyze the Master of Suspense have found in the picture compelling demonstrations of spectatorship and gender construction. For Freudians, it has its Oedipal elements, its Madonna/Whore complexities–it’s a very fine historical relic, one of maybe only two of the director’s films (the other being Shadow of a Doubt) that’s ever entered into a noir conversation. And at the end–among those in the know, at least–it’s the better version, in every way that matters, of Casablanca. Robin Wood writes a brilliant piece on it in his second Hitchcock book, taking on previous brilliant takes by Laura Mulvey, Raymond Bellour, and Michael Renov. I probably like Raymond Durgnat’s quick-hit the best, however, for his pegging of the picture’s iciness and of Hitch at this moment as midway between idealistic and cynical (though I’d go farther and say he’s pretty much all the way cynical by now). Notorious is possibly, neck-and-neck with Vertigo, the best film Hitchcock ever made, though it’s seldom identified–unless you’re Francois Truffaut–as anyone’s favourite (leave that for the bitterest (North by Northwest), the most nihilistic (Psycho), the least sick (Rear Window)), and when the dust settles, the prospect of writing about it is almost as intimidating as pretending that there’s anything new to say about it. But here goes.

The Bourne Legacy (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy + Ultraviolet

December 11, 20122012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Espionage, Japan, Thriller

½*/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B-
starring Jeremy Renner, Rachel Weisz, Edward Norton, Stacy Keach
screenplay by Tony Gilroy & Dan Gilroy
directed by Tony Gilroy

click any image to enlarge

by Walter Chaw By the end of Tony Gilroy's unbearably long and talky The Bourne Legacy, one is left feeling as though the film hasn't even started yet. Nothing happens in it, and the only thing it inspires is anticipation: it's all first act; all supplementary material; all self-importance and hot air. Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) sits this one out while another similar soldier, Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner), occupies a space parallel to the first three films, climbing mountains, Grey-ing wolves, and saving hot virologist Dr. Marta (Rachel Weisz) from the clutches of our evil government so that she can infect him with a virus that makes him smart. This leads to a moment, inevitable, where Cross suggests that losing 12 points off his artificially-inflated IQ would result in some personal "Flowers for Algernon" apocalypse where 12 points would probably result in him forgetting his phone number at worst. It also leads to a series of incoherent flashbacks that fit in perfectly with Gilroy's impossible-to-follow action sequences; if you're just going to turn a camera on and throw it out a window, why bother trying to set it up? For those keeping score, there are more spinning Lazy Susan shots here than in Transformers: Asshole. You've been warned.

Skyfall (2012)

November 7, 20122012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Espionage, James Bond, Theatrical, Thriller, Turkey, UK

**/****
starring Daniel Craig, Javier Bardem, Ralph Fiennes, Judi Dench
screenplay by Neal Purvis & Robert Wade and John Logan
directed by Sam Mendes

by Walter Chaw For me, the James Bond films are the literalization of a very particular Conservative fantasy in which a suave, quippy, emotionally-arrested sociopath battles Cold War foes, beds beautiful women without consequence, always has the latest technology, and engages in the endless murder of foreigners. Just suggesting a "license to kill" reveals a certain level of arrogance; and it's their confrontation of the noisome wake left by those attitudes that makes On Her Majesty's Secret Service and the more recent Casino Royale the powerhouses that they are. Skyfall, the latest in the decades-spanning series, tries but fails to do the same. A good part of the problem can be traced back to non-action director Sam Mendes (superseding Marc Forster, non-action director of the disastrous Quantum of Solace), who, in trying to honour the visceral requirements of the genre, finds himself unable to produce either a meaty melodrama or a capable action vehicle.