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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...

The thing is, no sequel is going to recapture the original and Raiders of The Lost Ark is a perfect film. Part of its perfect-ness must be the originality of it back in the day, kind of a laugh as it was made by academically schooled film-makers who were riffing on the cinema shorts of the early years. Then the fourth movie, Kingdom of The Crystal Skull, disappointed many fans and became a by-word for franchises going off the rails. Happily James Mangold’s new and presumably final episode in the saga has quite a bit going for it, with no sudden plot swerves towards aliens at the end. The result is an action film that indeed throws you right in to a wartime chase for a religious relic, which sees Harrison Ford digitally de-aged to look approximately as he did in The Fugitive . He and Basil Shaw ( Toby Jones ) are trying to rescue the relic from the collapsing Nazi regime. Yes, the Nazis are the enemy again—which is always good for Indiana Jones : the only grey areas are around their ...

  Messing around with the natural order of things causes, uh… chaos… again in the first sequel in a long time to bring back Laura Dern , Jeff Goldblum and Sam Neil to join Bryce Dallas Howard and Chris Pratt —uniting the first films and the more modern ones. The move from Dinosaurs as an attraction to Dinosaurs as a fact of everyone’s life is not —let’s be clear—the same as a global pandemic caused by poor food hygiene standards at a meat market in China. And a plague of locusts isn’t just the stuff of Biblical epics. Somehow between two ideas the film-makers have come up with an enhanced riff on the notion that if you mess around with nature it will come back and bite you. But if you’re in charge of a big biotech company you probably think you’ll get through it but you will end up in deep spit. The evil business continues from the previous film. Lewis Dodgson ( Campbell Scott ) is the white-haired BioSyn CEO who says how great his company is for people, but there’s a scand...

  If you didn’t ‘do’ To Kill A Mockingbird at school then it remains the one classic novel of the Twentieth Century that you can enjoy on your own terms. It’s a book with some remarkably vivid depictions of Alabama from the memory of Harper Lee, who based the heroic lawyer Atticus Finch on her own father, and who told the story from the point of three kids: Scout and Jem, Atticus’s children—and their friend Dill who is based on Lee’s childhood friend Truman Capote. The book was revered and the film starring Gregory Peck is one of the best cinematic adaptations of a novel. Nothing else came from the pen of Harper Lee and she didn’t say much more about it. However when she died there was an unseemly rush to release the work that Lee had originally presented: a memoir of Jean-Louise “Scout” Finch going back to her childhood home. It turned out that To Kill A Mockingbird had been taken from this work and that’s the novel. The ‘sequel’— Go Set A Watchman —had something going for it: mo...

The original Top Gun from 1986 is one of the most classically eighties films that’s still much loved although also mocked. There are some crazy lines of dialogue and the relationship between insubordinate pilot-genius Pete “Maverick” Mitchell ( Tom Cruise ) and his instructor Charlotte Blackwood ; and also the love between him and his copilot “Goose”—and rivalry with Tom “Iceman” Kasansky ( Val Kilmer ) which ends with hugging. Shot like a music video, and with a brilliant score, wonderful soundtrack some incredible flight scenes, it has its place—it is more awesome than it has any right to be, and better than anything that tried to recapture its recipe. The sequel doesn’t mess about: it’s full of nostalgia, of course, but also a modern movie. Cruise put the cast through a flight-school so they could look authentic in the cockpit.  The film begins in exactly the same way (and all the music is intact except the Berlin song) but we suddenly cut to a The Right Stuff style test fli...