Succeeds in distilling the series to what the last few have been building up to, a sublimation of all talents towards the worship of Tom Cruise. There are no real characters here besides Ethan Hunt, and he himself is barely a character. Instead, we get fawning tributes and pained longing gazes from a cast of potentially interesting people the.

Paris is the best example of this transformation from riveting villain to furniture.

Before the screening, a trailer played roundly crooning “Rihanna is Smurfette”. Perhaps cinema isn’t worth saving.

Made significantly worse by having watched Unknown Pleasures the night before, and by holding Still Life in high regard. This uses the pieces of those films toward less interesting ends. I was jealous of my companion who’d never seen any of the films this draws from, and will have the pleasure of recontextualizing scenes later as she goes through his oeuvre.

It’s shocking the extent to which the (presented as) everyday can carry a cinematic gravitas. Both one-sided phone calls here (“Ms Hightower!”) are heroic, and of course the bad trip sequence and fakeout are peak comedy.

Examing the content, one quickly discovers that an underlying malady of almost all of the patients featured is loneliness. An absence of enough others to take care of themselves and their loved ones. This is especially evident with the man who declines overnight attendance so that his children won’t be alone, and the older woman who had nobody around to notice she’d collapsed.

Didn’t cohere for me. Lots of individual components to love, but the whole evaded me.

Preceded by Zoom Q&A with Talalay (by Alice Wu)

Not good, but I had a good time. I was kind of shocked by all the build-up by Alice Wu of the movie’s queerness and its non-conformance to the male gaze. Perhaps those comments make more sense in its temporal context. Maybe its contemporaries were more prone to leer, but I didn’t see a whole lot that I’d register as subversive (today).

I appreciated all of the barely motivated costume changes. Seems like they were having a lot of fun, and on more than one occurrence the laughter on screen seemed genuine.

Followed by Q&A with Davis, Chéry, and Auntie Chris.

There are rare moments when one experiences the promise of a truly pluralistic society. Here, the assembled audience was maybe ¼ Black (in a city with a small and decreasing Black population), maybe ⅓ signing. Multiple signers repeated the responses of the hearing speakers as well as Auntie Chris’s own signs. The audience signed applause at all of Chris’s responses. One audience member asked their question (more of a statement) in sign, and another blind audience member asked about audio descriptions in the physical release (it’s happening!).

Followed by a Q&A with Cronenberg.

Not feeling it. Far too much plot has been crammed in here, and then it all gets resolved with a videotaped confession.

Watching this, I was reminded of an issue I had with Crimes of the Future, a film I much preferred to this, about the way sex was depicted. It’s not erotic. And it’s not voyeuristic in any kind of sensual way. Its gratuitous, on-the-nose, presentation is deeply unsexy. As an acquaintance of mine put it, “at least show us hole!”

In close contention with the first for my favorite of the series.

Ilsa and the uncertainty around her character’s motivations is fun spy thriller material, but what really makes this magical is that Cruise and Hunt blend in a strangely critical way. Hunt/Cruise is a dangerous and paranoid thrill-seeker, and everyone around him can see that, but they’re perhaps too afraid to talk him down and charge forward anyway. It’s a shame, but understandable, that the follow-up discards this entirely and casts his unhinged tendencies as chivalric instead.