Critics reviews

The geometric precision in the interplay between the compositions and editing would please Eisenstein, and the overall effect of its perfection is so gleeful that I practically barked and clapped at the screen like a hungry seal.

In Hereditary, Ari Aster not only handed Toni Collette the role of a lifetime but also a rare opportunity to plumb emotional depths that American horror films—and American films in general—seldom make time to examine.

Watching Cruise relentlessly pursue and destroy Henry Cavill’s double-crossing CIA hunk, whose dialogue seemed dubbed, was really satisfying. If anyone has earned the right to victory over a British superhero actor twenty years his junior with a porn mustache, it’s the movie star who has managed to avoid the trite universes of DC and Marvel, even if it took being in that mummy film to do it.

Fallout, like just a few standouts in Hollywood’s franchise era, pleases both audiences and critics. McQuarrie’s humble expertise and craftsmanship in an age of frenetic editing and ponderous and careless mise en scène ensures some appeal to the latter cateogry.

Its feat of cinematic engineering invites admiration for its engineering: the infrastructure is on the outside, the seemingly tenuous threads that dangle its dramatic pendants are on view, and the delights that it offers are those of a production video, showcased not in a behind-the-scenes reel but throughout the movie itself.

All of this is what we have come to anticipate of these films, but what is unexpected is that Fallout is also an affecting piece of work, and not only because one can sense the passage of time in the way Cruise has begun finally to show his age – if not in the spry stunts, then in the stubbled cheeks that have begun a slow descent into jowliness.

Why is Walker being picked up from the top of Tate Modern, exactly? Because it looks extraordinary. Why, earlier on, do Hunt and Walker . . . need to parachute into Paris – through a lightning storm moreover – rather than, say, use rubber masks as usual? . . . Well, there is a narrative explanation, but it fools no one: the real reason is that it makes possible some of the most astonishing images of the year.

It may be the best Mission: Impossible movie since the first, made in the dawn of the cat-Internet age, 1996, by Brian De Palma. Or perhaps it’s just the one with the mostest: even by the franchise’s extravagant standards, Fallout throws off Hope-diamond levels of grandeur.

The sixth movie in Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible series is a marvel of American engineering. This exciting, semi-adult cartoon of espionage could have been laid out in an intricate schematic instead of a screenplay. Its savvy amalgamation of gimmickry, glamour, and athletics, on the one hand, and spy games played like mind games, on the other, generates tension and release for a super-swift 147 minutes.

An entertainment machine par excellence that skitters around the world and has something to do with nuclear bombs, mysterious threats and dangerous beauties. Mostly, it has to do with that hyper-human Tom Cruise. . . . As usual, he works hard for our dollars and eyeballs in a movie that spins the oldies (a blonde with a knife in her garter) while pushing to greater spectacle-cinema extremes.

Look, I’m not made of stone: Pretty much everything in Mission: Impossible—Fallout is fun. The 150-minute running time, which felt like a death sentence in Avengers: Infinity War . . . , doesn’t get oppressive until the third final-act speech about what a swell guy Ethan is (poor Ving Rhames gets hype-man duty this time), and the main cast is used exceedingly well, each according to their abilities.

A cinematic centrifuge of acrobatic stunt work, breakneck chases and immersive action, Mission: Impossible – Fallout is a perfectly calibrated piece of filmmaking that plays the viewer like a drum right from the start.