WRB—June 2025 Film Supplement

Mission: Impossible—Eyes Wide Shut

“I do love you and you know there is something very important we need to do as soon as possible.”
“What’s that?”
“Read the Washington Review of Books.”

Links:

• In Vulture, Bilge Ebiri on Wes Anderson:

  Asteroid City (2023) built on the dense and perplexing anthology of The French Dispatch (2021), which presented a series of stories about journalists. In each of these episodes, characters long to break free of their realities without ever quite knowing how: an imprisoned mentally ill artist in love; French students rebelling against a system that predetermines their fate; and a gay African American writer (modeled partly after James Baldwin) living in self-exile in France who pours all his emotions into impeccably crafted articles about food. That film’s repeated mantra—“Try to make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose,” offered up by a domineering magazine editor to all his writers young and old—could easily be Anderson’s own. In his work, a veil of purposefulness hides the despair. Artifice masks the presence of the unknown.

  Oddly enough, as Anderson has become wiser and more reflective, his pictures have become downright meme-worthy in their fastidiousness and precision. The director’s camera moves are exacting, and his compositions carefully arranged, like a cross between a mid-century Belgian comic book and a prizewinning American high-school science-fair project. Some have wondered if he’ll ever relent and go back to working in a more naturalistic vein. Instead, he’s doubled down. “That’s not always my choice,” he says, laughing again. “Somehow, whatever I do, it ends up seeming like I did it. When it’s processed through me, it kind of comes out this way. If you were sitting there next to me, and you said, ‘I can tell you some ways to make this seem like you didn’t do it. Move the camera over here,’ I would probably say, ‘I know . . . but I think I like it more here.’”

Reviews:

• Three of Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning (2025)

  • In The Ringer, Adam Nayman:

    It’s a show of respect that Rhames, rather than Cruise, also gets the movie’s last word, a voice-over about world peace and the need for people to look past their differences and realize that [extreme Larry Gopnik voice] we are all one, or something. Cruise is, surely, a Serious Man, but he’s also a savvy operator, speaking through others like a skilled ventriloquist or an Old Testament God. If our Maverick’s oft-repeated belief in the unifying power of cinema—a religious experience experienced with, at minimum, two extra-large bags of popcorn—is what sustains him and what makes him the closest thing we have to an A-list Dorian Gray, then more power to him. (Actually, maybe no more power to him. He has exactly enough power.) But these big-picture platitudes—and the wholly disingenuous self-effacement of the last shot, with our star humbly receding into the shadows—are easier to take when the movies are up to a certain standard. For all the vertiginous excitement of its final aerial set piece, The Final Reckoning comes in under that bar.

  • In Christianity Today, Hannah Long:

    In Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning, the concluding installment to the franchise, superspy Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) borrows Lawrence’s catchphrase as a response to his enemies: “Nothing is written.” One suspects he has in mind not just fictional supervillains but also risk-averse studio executives.

    This phrase, shot through with the hubris of the Lawrence character, is paired with a film that’s chock-a-block full of Christian imagery. None of it hangs together in a coherent way. (Neither does the film.) But as an expression of Hollywood megalomaniacal vision, it’s still strangely pious, a grab bag of Saint Christopher medals, paeans to free will, Cold War–liberal aspirations for global harmony, and an overall lament that no one seems to know the truth anymore because it’s been redefined by “the Lord of Lies.”

  • In Prospect, Alexander Larman:

    Much the same could be said of Cruise, whose 2022 mega-hit Top Gun: Maverick saved theatrical exhibition from its post-Covid malaise, gave him his biggest ever commercial success and made him synonymous with two characters who, in truth, it would be hard to tell apart: Hunt and Top Gun’s Maverick. When it is said, with great awe, of Maverick that “He’s the fastest man alive”, the moment isn’t risible, as it would be with any other actor: it is thrilling, because we sincerely believe that to be the case.

    There are many reasons why Hunt-Cruise remains the last movie star. His dedication to doing his own stunts, however dangerous they might be—and his broken ankle while filming the sixth and best Mission: Impossible picture, Fallout, is testament to the possibility of things going awry—is tied up with an old-school entertainer’s belief in giving his audience value for money. You pay your £10 and, in turn, you see the star risk life and limb on your behalf. Are you not entertained?

• Christian Lorentzen
  reviews The Iron Curtain (1947):

  The crudest aspects of The Iron Curtain are its newsreel-style voiceover narration and the welling score, especially the bit that sounds like a July 4 marching band playing as Igor steals the secret documents that buy him his freedom. But something about its pure ideological libels made me nostalgic for my own late Cold War youth, when it was clear that the Commies were the enemy, even during perestroika and glasnost when network sitcoms would send their casts on very special episodes to Moscow and Leningrad to discover that the Russians were just like us, simply a bunch of jocks and nerds who only wanted to rock and roll. (I’m thinking of Head of the Class.) Of course, Cold War thrillers, which basically adopted the genre from earlier more sophisticated films like Nazi Agent (1942) with Conrad Veidt as the innocent German philatelist compelled to pose as his evil SS twin brother, didn’t remain this purely crude for long. Even the Bond franchise had to substitute the criminal machinations of SPECTRE for straightforward ideological antagonism. Le Carre knew that most spy stories were really stories about adultery and office backstabbing. Now in a drama like Slow Horses what we get are plots about entrapment, false flag operations gone wrong, and blowback from nihilistic mercenaries still on the loose from the old days and looking for revenge.

• In The Baffler, John Semley reviews Pavements (2025):

  Selling out was, of course, the mortal sin of the 1990s heyday of Pavement’s semi-popularity. Malkmus in particular seemed so resistant to achieving popularity on anything but his own terms that he committed to subtle acts of self-sabotage. Pavements repeatedly returns to the opening lyrics of “Here” as a kind of chorus: “I was dressed for success, but success it never comes.” But that’s not quite right. As depicted in the film, Malkmus seems more like the kind of guy who, if he heard opportunity knocking, would dive and hide behind the sofa. Throughout Pavements we’re shown archival footage of Malkmus sneering at music journalists desperate (or merely professionally motivated) to understand him. The film never really gives a sense of just how exasperated Malkmus’s bandmates were with his slacker obstinacy. As a subject, he remains aloof, if affable.

Reviews of books:

• In our sister publication on the Thames, David Thomson reviews a book about Terrence Malick (The Magic Hours: The Films and Hidden Life of Terrence Malick, by John Bleasdale, 2024):

  It was understandable by 2011 that Malick, or any of us, might be experiencing an existential crisis in which our feelings about family life could mesh with a fear that creation itself was in such jeopardy that any attempt at self-expression—whether in art, politics or religion—was irrelevant and even fatuous. You could imagine this dilemma inspiring a perverse comedy (think of Billy Wilder or Paul Thomas Anderson running it, let alone Preston Sturges) in which a respected movie director sits in a room full of Hollywood execs. He pitches a film about a vexed family from the 1950s and his own growing anxiety that nothing quite matters. The suits suggest that he warm it up with a little sex and computer-generated violence: they see Will Smith in an abandoned Manhattan, pursued by mad dogs. They perk up and crack open more San Pellegrino. Nevertheless, the room gradually sinks into depression over what their purpose can be, beyond making money from sentimental fantasies and superhero movies. A sort of pornography beckons—not just sex and violence, but dumb riffs on happiness or feeling good, and the dogma in which shots and storylines fit together like Ikea furniture. So what are movies for?

• In the Journal, Farran Smith Nehme reviews a book about the women of the New Wave (Nouvelles Femmes: Modern Women of the French New Wave and Their Enduring Contribution to Cinema, by Ericka Knudson, June 3):

  Thus the unselfconscious, world-changing sex appeal of Brigitte Bardot is analyzed in the chapter called “The Natural Woman.” Anouk Aimée, who left an indelible image in a lace bodysuit and top hat for Jacques Demy’s Lola (1961), has a section called “The Romantic Prostitute,” which enables Ms. Knudson to explore why the sex worker was as fascinating to these upstart directors as she had been to their cinematic forebears. Another chapter, called “The American in Paris,” tracks Jean Seberg’s “fresh and modern” style in Godard’s Breathless (1960). Closing sections give due tribute to Agnès Varda, virtually the New Wave’s sole woman director, and summarize some post-New Wave paths taken by women who had been part of “this exceptional moment in film history.”

N.B.:

• The people who won’t stop talking about the AMC A-List.

• Why Netflix’s action movies are like that.

• An interview with Clint Eastwood: “My philosophy is: do something new or stay at home.”

• Joe Don Baker died on Wednesday, May 7. R.I.P.

• Michael Roemer died on Tuesday, May 20. R.I.P.

• Marcel Ophuls died on Saturday, May 24. R.I.P.

Movies across the decades:

Eyes Wide Shut (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1999)