If it’s possible for one scene to radically elevate an entire movie, it’s the scene where Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) gives his victory speech and the sound drops away apart from a solitary scream and the quiet aftermath of nuclear devastation.

Some great set pieces especially the underwater heist and the opera scene but overall a step backwards in terms of direction, script, and cinematography.

A film about discovering Scotland’s power to slow you down and let you see the world around you. It feels strange to use the word ‘efficient’ to describe the greatest movie ever made on the multivalent concept of ‘value’ but it’s striking how efficient Bill Forsyth’s scripting and staging are.

How does an intelligent, socially conscious woman approach writing a Barbie movie in the year 2023? Greta Gerwig approaches it in a way not unlike Charlie Kaufman adapting Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief: by deconstructing what it means to write a Barbie movie in our current sociopolitical moment and acknowledging the multivalent, complicated, and contradictory nature of Barbie’s image throughout the 20th Century and into the present.

Now we’re talking. GHOST PROTOCOL has the perfect blend of tense heist scene espionage alongside exciting practical action stunts. Most importantly, Brad Bird realises a sense of fun that has been sorely missing from these films involving rubber masks and floating magnet suits.

Mission: Impossible is proving to be a great franchise for charting trends of Hollywood filmmaking over the last 30 years. MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 2 is a perfectly preserved relic of high-octane early-2000s excess replete with nu metal, John Woo’s distracting slow-mo action scene cinematography, a particular brand of ‘edgy’ (but not yet ironised) casual misogyny, and a sense of pre-9/11 American triumphalism that is unafraid to imply that the USA has a horrifyingly comprehensive global surveillance program.

Continuing to view these films as barometers of Western cultural trends in entertainment, it’s now 2006 and so we have 24-style “enhanced interrogation” torture scenes, a man-of-the-moment director, a soft, shaky, and somewhat oversaturated digital camera aesthetic, an Abrams Mystery Box™, and that annoying thing that a lot of TV shows did in the mid-00s where the opening starts in medias res then we go back to ‘one week earlier’ or whatever.

A fascinating time capsule of a movie that, viewed alongside the latest film in the series, speaks volumes about how this franchise has adapted to filmmaking trends over almost 30 years.

Venice is a ghost town in this movie. Presumably due to Covid restrictions during filming, the city is heartbreakingly empty. Piazza San Marco and Campo della Salute bustle with tourists, even at night, and yet here they have only one or two people milling about as a backdrop for the main characters.

An impossible gem of a film. It seems impossible that you can push the form of a documentary so far towards social realist aesthetics and structure.