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Almost at the end of this tremendously entertaining movie, there’s a moment where the bad guy is cooly standing around, waiting to be beaten up by Ethan Hunt. The thing is, he is cooly standing atop the Orient Express as it steams through the Alps. It’s not the first time a train-top fight has been staged, and it’s not the first one in a Summer 2023 franchise movie, but the coolness and the chutzpah is at minimum levels, and the franchise has easily surpassed its nearest competitor, the Bond films. It doesn’t really matter though because it’s so much fun. A lot earlier, at the end of the epically preposterous pre-title sequences, we see “A Tom Cruise Production” and then the name “ Tom Cruise ”… and he is famous in this film for being a Producer who shouted at people for ignoring Covid restrictions back when this film was being made. Now, while most people have forgotten about the lockdown and cinema is facing a new crisis, Cruise is famous for having six times done the stunt that domi...

The threat of nuclear war is something people lived with if they grew up in the 1980s and earlier. As a child of the era there was of course no memory of the Cuban Missile Crisis but 1983 was one of the most dangerous years in terms of the prospect of the bomb being used. Greenham Common protests mixed with skirmishes in the Middle East and cultural icons like Threads [didn’t watch!] and When The Wind Blows [Plenty harrowing enough, please and thank you!]. And obviously “ Two Tribes ” by Frankie Goes To Hollywood. The reality of the nuclear bomb from its discovery to the beginning of its impact, especially on America in the 1940s onwards, is told in Christopher Nolan’s new biopic of “The father of the bomb” Oppenheimer. Cillian Murphy takes the role of a young man steeped in physics and in love with the world which it underpins. Also he was in love with another scientist, with Communist links, as well as with his wife, played by a steely, wary looking Emily Blunt —a necessarily for...

  “I didn’t think I’d be singing this song in my seventies… I didn’t think I’d be playing this gig in my seventies.” Seventy-four year old singer-songwriter is preparing his adoring Hyde Park crowd for a high note that he might not hit in ‘An Innocent Man’ from the eponymous 1983 album. Joel, who is known mainly for an apt autobiographical song ‘Piano Man’ was mostly known only for three or four songs which had British chart success. In a long and phenomenally popular career he has delighted those who love his work, but in this country has always seemed like songs your Dad likes. And that’s fine. The man who used to climb on pianos and jump around, the man who had a headline-grabbing temper tantrum in Leningrad during the final years of the Cold War: he has mellowed from a punchy writer of elegantly-written, fondly rendered takes on classic American music styles and acts. So some of his biggest successes have belonged to Barry White or Garth Brooks. But now, with all his youthful e...