Review: With 'Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning, Part One,' the action franchise hits all the right buttons

For a franchise I didn’t particularly like when it started, I must admit that the “Mission: Impossible” films have become the most reliably thrilling blockbusters out there — the latest, with the subtitle “Dead Reckoning, Part One,” among them, and it’s all because of star Tom Cruise’s willingness to risk life and limb for a good stunt.

I disliked the first “Mission: Impossible” movie, back in 1996, because director Brian de Palma let his cinematic ego get in the way of the excitement — and because, as a fan of the ‘60s TV series, I was torqued that they made the old show’s main character a villain. (Sorry, it’s been 27 years, and there’s a statute of limitations on spoiler alerts.)

After experimenting with a slew of hot-shot A-list directors — John Woo, J.J. Abrams and Brad Bird — who each put their spin on things, the franchise settled down with Christopher McQuarrie, who has been steadily building something spectacular. Think of the “Mission: Impossible” franchise as the thinking person’s “Fast & Furious.”

This time out, Ethan Hunt has been given a mission by the new CIA boss, Eugene Kittridge — played by Henry Czerny, returning to the franchise for the first time since the original in ’96. The mission is to find and steal two halves of a cross-shaped key. What it unlocks, Kittridge doesn’t say. He also doesn’t say much about who else may be looking for it.

Ethan and his stalwart Impossible Missions Force colleagues — tech wizards Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) and Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) — start their search at the airport in Dubai. They find someone with a part of the key, but they also find a clever pickpocket, Grace (Hayley Atwell), pinching it before Ethan gets to it. Ethan also finds two American intelligence agents (Shea Whigham and Greg Tarzan Davis) on his trail, and a shadowy figure, Gabriel (Esai Morales), who has a dark connection to Ethan’s past.

After a few minutes — which are spent dealing with a nuclear bomb scare and the return of Ethan’s past associate, the former MI-6 agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) — we start to understand a few things about Gabriel. One is that he has an assassin on his payroll named Paris (played by Pom Klementieff, in a role miles away from her comical Mantis in the “Guardians of the Galaxy” films). The other is that he’s working at the behest of a vast digital network called The Entity, and that the destruction of The Entity is now Ethan’s top priority — thus showing that McQuarrie and co-screenwriter Erik Jendresen were way ahead of the Writers Guild of America in warning about the dangers of an out-of-control AI.

It’s a weird coincidence that two of this movie’s biggest set pieces echo scenes from this summer’s other blockbusters — a car chase on Rome’s Spanish Steps (which they did in “Fast X”) and a train heading for a bridge about to explode (as seen in “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny”). It speaks to McQuarrie’s skill as an action director that both stunts, particularly the gravity-defying train sequence, work much better here.

The emotional heart of the movie, though, is Ethan’s byplay with his team, particularly the women. Ethan and Faust (who was featured in “Rogue Nation” and “Fallout,” the last two “M:I” movie) are veterans of this spy game, each knowing the sacrifices they have made for their work — and that the ultimate sacrifice, their lives, may be around the corner. And Ethan’s interactions with Grace, and the suggestion that he could be recruiting her to become the newest member of the IMF, are a fascinating mirror for Ethan’s psyche, as Gabriel’s appearance makes him think back to his origin story.

It’s also to Cruise’s credit that the marketing for this installment is up front about it being the first of a two-part story — something ticket buyers for “Dune” only learned when the movie started, and fans of “Fast X” and “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” didn’t discover until the credits rolled. It will be a year before “Dead Reckoning, Part Two” arrives, and all indications from this chapter indicate it will be worth the wait.

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‘Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning, Part One’

★★★1/2

Opens Wednesday, July 12, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, some language and suggestive material. Running time: 163 minutes.

Review: 'Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny' is a trip back in time, reliving some of the franchise's glory

You may have heard that time travel factors into “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” the fifth — and, considering the lead actor’s advanced age, probably final — movie in the series.

Really, though, all of this series — starring Harrison Ford as the archaeologist, adventurer and Nazi puncher of the title — has been an exercise in time travel. They were movies made in the 1980s (or later), mostly set in the 1930s, with occasional flashbacks to even earlier eras. (Remember River Phoenix as Indy as a Boy Scout, touring Arches National Park?) The series had the magical gift of transporting the audience to those times, and to make us feel like kids watching Indy’s death-defying exploits, no matter how old Indy or Ford got.

That same magic is harder to achieve in this installment — not because Ford is 80 years old, not because he’s largely surrounded by much younger actors, but because so many of us who grew up with Indy have now grown old with him, too. But the magic is still there, in fits and sparks, and when it happens, it’s glorious.

The prologue takes us to 1944, with a young-ish Indy (played by Ford with de-aging technology) trying to get on a Nazi train carrying stolen loot. The commandant, Col. Weber (Thomas Kretschmann), is eager to transport one artifact to Der Führer — but both Indy and Weber’s science adviser, a physicist named Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), know the artifact is a fake. Voller is far more interested in a different artifact, the Antikychera, a circular mechanism from Ancient Greece that’s known as “Archimedes’ dial,” which he thinks can yield unlimited power to the person who possesses it.

This brass-plated MacGuffin goes from Voller to Indy, and later to Indy’s British archaeological colleague, Basil Shaw (Toby Jones). Shaw, we learn later, became obsessed with the dial, to the point of madness.

Flash-forward to 1969, and Indy is living in New York, a professor at a small college about to his retirement. But his quiet, solitary life — we see separation papers, filed by his old love Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen) — is disrupted by the return of Basil’s daughter, and Indy’s goddaughter, Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge). Helena is looking for the dial, and suspects Indy has it.

There’s also a CIA agent (Shaunette Renée Wilson) on Helena’s trail, and that operative is working what appears to be an uneasy alliance with some shadowy operatives (Boyd Holbrook and Olivier Richters). These operatives are working for a German rocket scientist named Schmidt, but we recognize quickly that it’s Voller, still looking for the dial.

The bulk of the movie puts the crotchety Indy and the scheming Helena in an uneasy alliance, hopping to Morocco and Italy and Greece on the trail of the dial and the artifacts needed to work it. They run into some old friends — like John Rhys-Davies’ Sallah — and some new ones (no spoilers here), and enlist Helena’s teen accomplice Teddy (Ethann Isidore), who’s as agile a thief as Helena.

Director James Mangold (“Logan,” “Ford vs. Ferrari”) manages to keep the convoluted script — on which he is one of the four credited writers — reasonably coherent, though the mood swings are pronounced. It’s a little slow in the middle, but that’s made up for with a grand finale that’s fast-moving and borderline insane (in a good way).

The magic, and the time travel, is saved for the absolute end of the movie — a scene that references one of the signature scenes of “Raiders in the Lost Ark.” One might dismiss it as fan service, tapping into a nostalgia the movie hasn’t earned. But I enjoyed it, because it delivered the old-fashioned thrill and romanticism that the series delivered at its best.

One more thing: Indiana Jones gets to punch Nazis again. Some movie joys are timeless — even if, unfortunately, they’re also timely.

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‘Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’

★★★

Opens Friday, June 30, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for sequences of violence and action, language and smoking. Running time: 153 minutes.

Review: 'Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken' has gorgeous animation and a puny story to go with it

DreamWorks’ new animated tale, the skimpy but colorful “Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken,” is another example of a genre whose technical expertise has outpaced its storytelling abilities.

Ruby, voiced by Lana Condor (from the “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” movies), wants to be a typical teen hiding in plain sight in her high school in Oceanside. It’s not easy to do when you, and your family, are kraken, “the monsters of the sea.” Ruby’s parents, Agatha (voiced by Toni Collette) and Arthur (voiced by Colman Domingo) moved onto land when Ruby and her brother Sam (voiced by Blue Chapman) were little — and Ruby is under strict orders never to go to the ocean.

Ruby’s high school life involves hanging with her friends, and pining for Connor (voiced by Jaboukie Young-White), the skater boy to whom she’s teaching math. Connor’s the reason Ruby wants to go to prom, something Agatha won’t allow because prom is on a cruise boat on the ocean. 

One day, while trying to arrange a prom-posal, Ruby accidentally knocks Connor into the water — and when she goes in to save him, she discovers the sea water gives her powers, and makes her gigantic. This is the talent of the female kraken in her family, something Agatha has kept from Ruby since babyhood. Ruby also learns that she has a grandmother (voiced by Jane Fonda), who’s the warrior queen of the kraken, and eager to train Ruby to defend the oceans and eventually inherit the throne.

It’s Grandmamah who tells Ruby that the kraken have been in a generations-long war with the evil mermaids – and that the humans have the roles switched, thinking mermaids are friendly and kraken are monsters. But when Ruby finds out that her school’s popular new girl, Chelsea (voiced by Annie Murphy, from “Schitt’s Creek”), is a mermaid who wants to be Ruby’s friend, Ruby’s not sure who to believe.

Director Kirk DeMicco, who helmed “The Croods” and “Vivo,” and co-director Faryn Pearl (a story artist on “The Croods: A New Age” and “Trolls World Tour”) create a rich, colorful palette, both of Oceanside’s bustling human population and the ocean wonders Ruby encounters as her learns of her family’s history.

If only the story could match the visuals. The script — credited to “South Park” veteran Pam Brady and the team of Brian C. Brown and Elliott DiGuiseppi (who co-wrote “Lucy in the Sky”) — is a by-the-numbers coming-of-age story that, like Pixar’s “Turning Red” before it, equates female puberty to transformation into a giant creature. It’s a sturdy foundation for an animated movie, but the story needs more meat on the bones to truly engage the audience. 

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‘Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 30, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for some action, rude humor and thematic elements. Running time: 91 minutes.

Review: 'Asteroid City' shows the heartbreak under the whimsical surface of Wes Anderson's offbeat worlds

So much time and TikTok real estate has been spent lately mocking the director Wes Anderson for his whimsical, symmetrical visual esthetic — with parody sketches showing the Anderson versions of “Star Wars” and “The Lord of the Rings,” among others — that it takes Anderson’s real work, like the melancholy “Asteroid City,” to remind viewers that it’s not the artifice that counts but what’s going on beneath it.

(Besides, TikTokers, “Saturday Night Live” beat you to it by 10 years, with their Anderson-style horror movie “The Midnight Coterie of Strange Intruders.”)

Asteroid City is a town in the Arizona desert, population 87 — as the sign leading into town informs us. It’s a place of pastel skies and red-rock formations, and Anderson lets us know he’s in on the visual joke by having an actual roadrunner dart past. Aside from the occasional cops-and-robbers chase speeding through town without stopping, not much happens here.

Something did happen some 5,000 years ago: A meteorite landed here, creating the crater in which the town sits. This summer, sometime in the Cold War-obsessed 1950s, the town is visited by a convention of junior stargazers, showing off their inventions in hopes of a scholarship, bankrolled by a defense contractor and handed out by an officious military man, Gen. Gibson (Jeffrey Wright). Meanwhile, the stargazers seek to impress a scientist, Dr. Hickenlooper (Tilda Swinton), who’s studying the meteorite.

During all this, war photographer Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman) has brought his teen son, Woodrow (Jake Ryan), a stargazer himself, and his three younger daughters, to the town. The family is still coming to grips with the death of Augie’s wife, the kids’ mother, and were supposed to meet the children’s grandfather, Stanley Zak (Tom Hanks), when their car broke down in Asteroid City. While the Steenbecks are stuck here, Augie makes a connection with an actress, Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), whose daughter is also a stargazer.

Through all this, Anderson adds another layer. The story of Asteroid City, we are told early, is a Broadway play — and we’re viewing it through the lens of a TV documentary about the production, with Bryan Cranston as the TV anchor following the playwright (Edward Norton) through the steps from typewriter to auditions to rehearsal to stage.

As with any Anderson ensemble, there are more subplots and characters, and a sprawling cast that includes Maya Hawke, Rupert Friend, Steve Carell, Willem Dafoe, Hope Davis, Steve Park, Live Schreiber, Matt Dillon, Adrien Brody and a few it’s best you not know about before watching.

It may feel overstuffed, as Anderson’s movies often do — about three of the five interlocking stories in “The French Dispatch” really came together — but it works. The pieces fit like a jigsaw, and Anderson’s toggling between the widescreen color vistas of Asteroid City and the boxy screen ratio of the black-and-white TV segments ensure that the foreground story and the background commentary never get confused.

And through the droll humor of Anderson’s surface details, he finds the ragged heart of the story. That heart is the shared grief of Augie, his kids, and Stanley, over the loss of Augie’s wife, seen only in a photograph — and how Augie, as a photographer in one plane of existence and as an actor in another, tries to come to terms with that loss in ways that no one on Earth, even the playwright, can answer for him.

“Asteroid City” may be Anderson’s most resonant work since the innocent preteen romance of “Moonrise Kingdom.” It’s a movie that disguises its seriousness within layers of playful humor — but the emotion is always hiding in plain sight. 

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‘Asteroid City’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 23, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for brief graphic nudity, smoking and some suggestive material. Running time: 104 minutes.

Review: 'No Hard Feelings' is a raunchy sex comedy that skates by on Jennifer Lawrence's considerable talent and charm

Apparently, when Jennifer Lawrence gets material that’s beneath her — and the raunchy sex comedy “No Hard Feelings” is definitely beneath her — her response is to raise it up closer to her own level, through the sheer force of her talent and magnetism. 

Lawrence plays Maddie Barker, a 32-year-old Uber driver who’s a full-time resident of Montauk, a summer resort town on the farthest end of Long Island. On the morning we meet her, she’s fighting to keep her car from getting towed over nonpayment of house taxes — and the tow truck driver, Gary (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), a guy she once ghosted, isn’t in the mood to hear her pleas for leniency.

In need of a car, so she can earn enough money off the summer tourists to see her through the year, Maddie gets desperate. Then her pregnant best friend Sara (Natalie Morales) shows Maddy a Craigslist ad, from a rich couple (Matthew Broderick and Laura Benanti) who offer a lightly used Buick Regal in exchange for “dating” — and the quotation marks are key here — their introverted 19-year-old son, Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman), before he leaves for Princeton. Maddie agrees to “date his brains out,” under the instructions that Percy’s not supposed to know the deal.

At first, Maddie comes on too strong, like when she finds Percy volunteering at an animal shelter, tending to a dachshund, and asking, “Can I touch your wiener?” After a few false starts — including an incredible scene where Maddie and Percy are skinny-dipping, and some drunk teens steal their clothes, only to get beaten up by Maddie, fully nude — Maddie starts to figure out that the way to fulfill her contract is to make friends with Percy. And when emotions come into play, everything gets complicated.

Director Gene Stupnitsky and co-screenwriter John Phillips, who previously made the kids-discover-porn comedy “Good Boys,” know their way around a dirty joke, and the movie has plenty of those. They’re less sure of themselves when the story turns tender, but by then the audience has built up enough goodwill for messed-up Maddie and painfully shy Percy to go with it.

None of it works, though, without Lawrence deploying her charm and forsaking her dignity in pursuit of a laugh. Lawrence shows a flair for physical comedy we haven’t seen much of, and she draws strong laughs with Maddie’s clumsily slutty attempts to woo Percy. When the movie turns sappy, though, Lawrence reminds us why she’s Oscar-caliber good, and gives “No Hard Feelings” some genuine feelings.

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‘No Hard Feelings’

★★★

Opens Friday, June 23, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for sexual content, some graphic nudity and brief drug use. Running time: 103 minutes.

Review: 'The Flash' is a monster mash of references to other superhero movies, with only a dash of originality

Do you remember in the first “Ant-Man” movie, there was a cameo by Garrett Morris — who, as die-hard fans would know, portrayed Ant-Man in a sketch on “Saturday Night Live” in the ‘70s? Now imagine a whole movie of callbacks like that, and you have DC’s “The Flash” in a nutshell.

Ostensibly, director Andy Muschetti (“It” and “It Chapter Two”) is telling the story of Barry Allen, aka The Flash, the lightning-fast young superhero of Central City. In reality, though, Muschetti and screenwriter Christina Hodson (who wrote DC’s “Birds of Prey”) are reworking a catalog of DC’s intellectual property, throwing in elbow-to-the-ribs references to the DC-related movies of Tim Burton, the Snyder-verse and other eras — in an effort to show how clever it all is, at the expense of anything approaching a human emotion.

Barry, like most DC superheroes, is leading a double life. As The Flash, he works with his Justice League colleagues to thwart disasters, such as an early set piece where a hospital is crumbling and he catches babies as they fall out of the maternity ward. As Barry, he works in Central City’s police forensics labs, while trying to find the evidence to exonerate his father (Ron Livingston), who has served 20 years for the stabbing death of Barry’s mother, Nora (Maribel Verdú).

Barry realizes that he has the power, thanks to his rapid running, to travel back in time — something his mentor, Bruce Wayne, aka Batman (played by Ben Affleck), warns him will have unforeseen consequences. But Barry is determined to go back and make a tiny, prosaic change that will change the circumstances that preceded Nora’s death.

The effect Muschetti uses to depict Barry’s time traveling is visually arresting — like a giant zoetrope with images of the past duplicated and spun around him. But the effort, and a monstrous figure caught in the time stream, forces Barry out of time traveling, and he lands five years too soon, where he encounters himself as an obnoxious 18-year-old. 

And while Nora is still alive, there are other problems in this timeline. For starters, General Zoe (Michael Shannon), the world-dominating Kryptonian, is back on the scene — but there’s no sign of Superman, Wonder Woman or the other “meta humans” that are Barry’s super friends. When the two Barrys go looking for Bruce Wayne, they find him, but he isn’t Barry’s Bruce. He’s a scraggly, hermit living in Wayne Manor, and played by Michael Keaton.

Barry is determined to fix the timelines he broke, and make the universe normal again. But the movie, after a while, lets Barry come to the inevitable conclusion that for the universe to survive, Nora must be allowed to die.

Muschetti is saddled with inheriting the worse aspects of Zack Snyder’s influence on the DC movie universe — the drab color palette, the grim action sequences, and the poor use of the movie’s female characters, namely Barry’s crush, young reporter Iris West (Kiersey Clemons), and the emergence of the Kryptonian woman Kara (Sasha Calle), better known as Supergirl.

The bending of the timelines is convoluted, though anyone who’s a fan of time-travel scenarios will recognize the concepts immediately. Playing with time and having multiple actors play the same character?  “Doctor Who” does that with regularity. And after the dimension-hopping possibilities explored in “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” the options of the multiverse shown here — even in the grand finale, which resurrects three deceased actors through CGI — feel pedestrian.

The best thing about “The Flash” is the thing Warner Bros. can’t mention too loudly in its marketing: Its star, Ezra Miller. In the double role of both Barrys, Miller (whose offscreen bad behavior has eclipsed his onscreen talent) captures the comedy and drama of the situation, and gives a strong, empathetic performance that goes right even when so much else in this overamped movie goes wrong.

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‘The Flash’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 16, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for sequences of violence and action, some strong language and partial nudity. Running time: 144 minutes.

Review: Pixar's 'Elemental' is a gorgeously animated story of earth, air, fire and water — and a romance and an immigrant story, all in one

“Elemental,” the latest animated gem from Disney-Pixar, is an entertaining, tender look at cultural crossover, a romance that’s also the tale of a second-generation daughter trying to follow her heart and honor her family at the same time.

The action is set in Element City, a place where the inhabitants each represent, and are made from, one of the four classic elements — earth, air, water and fire — and display traits distinct to those identities. Air people can be a little dazed (head in the clouds, as it were). Earth folks are eco-conscious. Water people just “go with the flow,” and fire people can be, well, hot-headed.

That’s certainly the case with Ember (voiced by Leah Lewis), who lives in Freetown with her parents (voiced by Ronnie Del Carmen and Sheila Omni) and is working to keep her temper in check so the family can see she’s worthy of inheriting Dad’s store, the Fireplace, in the heart of Freetown.

Ember and her family are strong metaphors for the immigrant experience. Ember has seen the struggles in her lower-class neighborhood, and the discrimination against fire people. And when Ember meets Wade (voiced by Mamoudou Athie), whose water people are Element City’s upper-income bracket, everyone around them make it clear that elements should never mix.

Director Peter Sohn, who made Pixar’s “The Good Dinosaur,” and his three screenwriters let this fanciful story play out, as Ember works to hide Wade from her parents, while also hiding her feelings for him on the inside. And, as Ember prepares to take over Dad’s store, Wade helps her see that she needs to pursue her own path, even if it upsets her father.

The visuals are, as is common with Pixar, gorgeous. Pay special attention to the way the characters’ elemental nature is manifested in the complicated animation. Ember looks like she isn’t just a plastic figure covered in fire; no, with this animation, Ember is pure fire — and so is the movie surrounding them.

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‘Elemental’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 16, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for some peril, thematic elements and brief language. Running time: 104 minutes, plus a 7-minute short film, “Carl’s Date.”

Review: 'It Ain't Over' is an overdue appraisal of Yogi Berra's baseball talent, beyond his light-hearted personality

How can someone who earned 10 World Series rings, and was named Major League Baseball’s MVP three dimes, be underrated? That’s the question “It Ain’t Over,” a heartfelt if somewhat soft-edged documentary, works to answer with regard to Lawrence Peter Berra, known to the world as Yogi Berra.

The movie starts with Berra’s granddaughter, Lindsay Berra (who’s the film’s executive producer), recalling a night in 2015, during the pre-game rituals of the MLB All-Star Game. Four men, billed as the four greatest living baseball players of all-time, walked out onto the field in Cincinnati that night: Hank Aaron, Johnny Bench, Sandy Koufax and Willie Mays. Lindsay, watching on TV, looked at her grandpa, and wondered why he wasn’t included.

From there, writer-director Sean Mullin makes a strong case why Berra was one of the best players in baseball history. His career as a catcher for the New York Yankees, during which time the Bronx Bombers won the World Series 10 times, is proof of that. The film tells how Berra would use a long bat, swinging at balls other players would think were outside the strike zone — and often he connected to get a hit. As catcher, he was a master tactician, a skill that guided Don Larsen, during the 1956 World Series, to pitch the only perfect game in the World Series.

So why didn’t Yogi get the acclaim he was due? The film argues that Berra’s small frame — he was 5-foot-7, a small fry next to the lanky Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle — made other teams, and the New York sportswriters, underestimate him. He also was known as a clubhouse comedian, a reputation that grew as his mangled syntax blossomed into the paradoxical phrases that became known as Yogi-isms. Some examples were “you can observe a lot by watching,” “when you come to a fork in the road, take it,” and “it’s déjà vu all over again.” (The one that gives the movie its title — “it ain’t over ’til it’s over” — is one that Yogi may not have ever actually said.)

Mullin gathers interviews from several of Berra’s surviving ‘50s and ‘60s teammates, as well as the Yankees who played when he managed the team. Throw in commentary from announcers and observers, such as Bob Costas and the late Roger Angell and Vin Scully, as well as lifelong Yankees fan Billy Crystal and Berra’s family.

But the best words about Yogi are uttered by the man himself, and there’s plenty of news footage and archived interviews to capture Berra’s charm. “It Ain’t Over” shows how Berra was a one-of-a-kind human being, on the diamond and off. As Yogi said once, “if you can’t imitate him, don’t copy him” — and when it comes to Yogi, nobody can.

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‘It Ain’t Over’

★★★

Opens Friday, June 16, in theaters. Rated PG for smoking, some drug references, language and brief war images. Running time: 99 minutes.