Latest news with #M:I
Boston Globe
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
N.Y. museum exhibition celebrates the ‘Mission: Impossible' franchise
Advertisement Tom Cruise, a wall text notes, was a fan of the series, which helped lead to the franchise. He better have been. Beside starring in all the movies, Cruise has produced them and served as perpetual-motion muse. Does the Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Installation view of "Mission: Impossible — Story and Spectacle." Thanassi Karageorgiou Other franchises are about a character — James Bond, say, or Indiana Jones — or the comic books that inspired them. The 'M: I' movies are about the franchise's star. Try to imagine these movies with anyone other than Cruise starring in them. Would most people even recognize the name 'Ethan Hunt,' his character? 'Sir,' Alec Baldwin's Impossible Missions Force secretary, tells the British prime minister in the sixth movie in the series, 'Mission: Impossible — Fallout' (2018), Advertisement Alec Baldwin in "Mission Impossible: Fallout." Chiabella James 'Story and Spectacle' isn't quite all Tom, all the time, but pretty close. That's all right, too. The snaggly smile, the endless energy, the well-mannered relentlessness: Resistance is futile. Among the 130+ items and displays in the exhibition are two brief video interviews with Cruise. 'I never do anything half way,' he says in one. 'My whole life, like, I'm in .' He's being modest. There's no 'like' about it. Think of the exhibition as an extended advertorial for the franchise — or, better yet, as a set of ex post facto trailers. Call it 'The M: I Experience.' That's all right, too (do you see a theme here?), since the show is very well done and quite entertaining. Happily overstuffed, the exhibition space is a black-box interior, like a cross between a warehouse and casino (always put your chips on Hunt). A Honda motorbike hangs from the ceiling. So do several Cruise mannequins. More than 40 screens show clips from the movies or behind-the-scenes explanations of various bits. Most of the screens are small, keeping the visual effect from being overwhelming, though several are large. The action is pretty much nonstop, not unlike the movies. Display of costumes from "Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning" in "Mission: Impossible — Story and Spectacle." Thanassi Karageorgiou Each 'M: I' gets its own section. The one constant is that each movie's Advertisement There are many, many props, handsomely displayed and all the more engaging for so many of them being so deadpan silly. They include a selection of fake passports (Ethan Hunt gets around), computer paraphernalia, several pairs of sunglasses (which aren't really sunglasses, of course), wristwatches (ditto), ID badges, a very high-end Technics turntable, a plutonium orb (don't ask), a sonic glass breaker (you never know when one might come in handy), not one but two mask-making machines (masks being a franchise trademark), and several masks. The masks, it must be said, are not the franchise at its best. Display of dossiers from "Mission: Impossible — Fallout." Thanassi Karageorgiou Deserving special mention are the gloves Cruise wore in 'Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol' (2001) while Stunts get a lot of attention in the exhibition, and rightly so. They are 'M: I' at its most 'M: I.' They're also Tom Cruise at his most Tom Cruise. In one of the interviews, he mentions Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and airplane wing walkers as inspirations. Looking at the accompanying clips, one sees how clearly he belongs in that lineage. Maybe even he marks its culmination. As the editor of the Guinness Book of World Records said earlier this month when The Academy announced Tuesday that Cruise will be one of four lifetime achievement Oscar winners this year. The other three are Dolly Parton, receiving the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, choreographer and actor Debbie Allen, and production designer Wynn Thomas. Advertisement Cruise previously had four nominations: two for best actor ('Born on the Fourth of July,' 1989, and 'Jerry Maguire,' 1996), one for best supporting actor ('Magnolia,' 1999 — he should have won, actually), and one for producer (' Might another nomination, or even Oscar, lie ahead? The Academy has added a category for stunt work, starting with 2027 releases. Depending on what movie — or movies — Cruise stars in two years from now, consider him the sentimental favorite in that category. MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE — Story and Spectacle At Museum of the Moving Image, 36-01 35th Ave., Queens, N.Y., through Dec. 14. 718-777-6800, Mark Feeney can be reached at
Buzz Feed
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Buzz Feed
The 8 Most Jaw-Dropping Stunts Performed By Tom Cruise In The Mission: Impossible Series
Jumping Between Biplanes - Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning I'm sorry, but I don't understand how Tom Cruise is still alive after all these years performing these death-defying stunts. With the climactic biplane chase scene in The Final Reckoning, Cruise and Company outdid themselves. Not only is Cruise hanging off a flying plane, but he must jump onto another flying one and get into the cockpit. Pure insanity, and we loved every minute of it. Piloting and Falling Out of a Helicopter - Mission: Impossible - Fallout By the end of Fallout, Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt should be out of breath. After all, the audience certainly is! Yet, here he is, climbing up to a mobile helicopter, flying it, and falling out of it in a thrilling chase sequence. This action setpiece was practically a victory lap for the M:I team in their most daring mission to date. Free-Fall Motorcycle Jump - Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning Although Dead Reckoning was relatively light on bonkers stunts, it slowly built up to one of the most harrowing set pieces in the franchise's history. In one of the most meticulously crafted stunts, one error could've derailed everything and potentially harmed Cruise's life. But of course, the star successfully vaulted from a moving motorcycle off a ledge. Even more impressive than the execution of the stunt is the breathtaking photography capturing Cruise's audaciousness. Burj Khalifa - Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol Anyone who experienced the IMAX aspect ratio shift when Tom Cruise steps out onto the ledge inside the Burj Khalifa in Ghost Protocol is truly blessed. More reliant on sweat-inducing thrills than visceral action (while also providing an unexpected amount of laughs), you feel like Cruise will plummet to the earth's crust at any moment. The actor and the filmmakers behind M:I never make it easy on themselves. Only they would think to perform a free-solo climb on one of the tallest buildings in the world. Underwater Submarine Dive - Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning In a shocking change of pace for the series, The Final Reckoning's first major set piece features no dialogue or score. The audience is forced to sit with Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt as he submerges into the deep sea and searches through the ruins of a submarine. It's eerily claustrophobic and moody, and being a world-class super-spy never seemed so scary. HALO Jump - Mission: Impossible - Fallout Fallout gets to an incredibly fast start, and by the time Tom Cruise is performing a real HALO jump from an aircraft, moving through the clouds at breakneck speed, the film is officially shot out of a canon. It's almost amusing how much Cruise is willing to go to entertain us and push the boundaries for stunt performance in movies. Hanging Off the Side of a Plane - Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation In a bold storytelling decision, Rogue Nation uses his signature stunt in the cold open, and what a way to grab the audience's attention. You can see it in his face--Tom Cruise is holding on for dear life as a plane takes off at full speed. It may not factor into the main plot of the film, but it captures the essence of M:I to a tee. Free Solo Climb - Mission: Impossible II Mission: Impossible II is known for its dazzling style that doesn't always amount to substance. This impressive, while now relatively rudimentary stunt, speaks to the gaudy nature of the series' second entry. Tom Cruise is in pure movie star mode as he does a free-solo climb on a mountain. The minimalism of the stunt enhances the maximalism of the film's larger-than-life movie star, who hasn't lost a beat twenty years later.
Yahoo
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Michael Phillips: In a world of easily manipulated images, can movies retain their magic?
I love getting faked out by the movies. I love believing the impossible, if only for a moment. Moviewise, I live for a lot of things; one of them, by which I was floored at the age 5, was Buster Keaton's 'Cops' (1922) and his startling genius as a physical and comic presence. Half the time, at that age, I wasn't sure if what I was watching was actually happening. That's how it is with beautiful illusions, created from real risks that become the audience's reward. When the right people collaborate on the right movie, it sometimes happens: a fresh combination of legitimately dangerous stunt work and crafty but not frantic editing, along with the inevitable layer of digital effects elements. What do you get? Honest fakery. The best kind. The kind that elicits a single, astonished, delighted response in the mind of the beholder: Can I believe what I just saw? Across eight 'Mission: Impossible' movies, including the one now in theaters, Tom Cruise has been doing the damnedest stunts for nearly 30 years to provoke that response. Action movies can make anybody do anything on screen. Cruise doesn't do it alone; the digital effects teams stay pretty busy on the 'M:I' franchise. Cruise is now 62, and denying it with every maniacal sprint down some faraway city's waterfront boulevard. He knows that dangling, at high speed and altitude, from various parts of an antagonist's biplane in 'Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning' is a good, old-fashioned selling point, in an era crowded with deceptions. In 'Final Reckoning' we don't see the harnesses and cables ensuring that stunt's relative safety. Those implements have been digitally erased, a visual filmmaking practice now as common as the common cold. But there he is, the secret agent ascending and descending, with someone trying to kill him. Tom Cruise, doing something most of us wouldn't. Lately, though, the movie industry's most sought-after audience response — can you believe what we just saw? — lands differently than it did a few years ago. We mutter that question more darkly now, with troubling regularity. And it's not when we're at the movies. The real world lies to us visually all the time. An onslaught of photographs and videos are presented as verified visual evidence without the verification part. It happens everywhere around the world, every day. And I wonder if it's altering, and corroding, the bargain we make with the movies we see. Can honest fakery in the name of film escapism compete with the other kinds of fakery permeating our visual lives? 'It's an interesting question,' says University of California-Berkeley computer science professor Hany Farid, a specialist in digital forensics and manipulated media detection. 'It was easier to separate the movies from real life in the analog days, before digital. Now we live in a world where everything we see and hear can be manipulated.' The real-world stakes are high, Farid warns, because so much evidence in courts of law rests on the truthfulness of visual evidence presented. He says he's been asked to verify a dizzying number of photos for a variety of purposes. The questions never end: 'Is this image really from Gaza? Is this footage from Ukraine real? Is the image Donald Trump holds up on TV real, or manipulated for political purposes?' Farid's referring there to the alleged and quickly debunked veracity of the photo the president held up on camera during his March 2025 ABC News interview with Terry Moran. In the photo, Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia, deported to an El Salvadoran prison, is shown as having 'MS-13' gang-signifying tattoos on his hand. The image, widely cited as having been altered, doesn't qualify as a deepfake, Farid says. 'It's not even a shallow-fake.' Manipulated images and audio have been with us as long as technology has made those images and sounds possible. Not long ago, manipulated falsehood and verifiable visual truth were a little easier to parse. 'When we went to the movies,' Farid says, 'we knew it wasn't real. The world was bifurcated: There were movies, which were entertainment, and there was reality, and they were different. What's happened is that they've started to bleed into each other. Our ground, our sense of reality, is not stable anymore.' Part of that is artificial intelligence, 'no question,' says Farid. 'Generative AI is not just people creating images that didn't exist or aren't what they're pretending to be. They accumulate to the point where we're living in a world in which everything is suspect. Trust is shaken, if not gone.' And here's the blurred line concerning the movies and real life, Farid says. Earlier, 'when we viewed images and video, or listened to audio, we thought they were real and generally we were right. And when we went to the movies, we knew the opposite: that they weren't real. Reality and entertainment — two different worlds. Now, though, they're bleeding into each other. The ground is not stable anymore.' That, in Farid's view, has a lot to do with contemporary American politics and a climate of strategic mistrust created by those in power. 'The outright lying,' he says, is 'dangerous for democracy and for society. And it makes the idea of believing in movies sort of weird.' Our entertainment can't get enough of AI as a villain right now. On HBO, we have 'Mountainhead' with its Muskian creator of next-generation deepfake software too good to pass up, or slow down. Meantime, the plot of the new 'Mission: Impossible' hinges on AI so fearsome and ambitious, the fate of the world hangs in the balance. Though, for some of us, seeing Ethan Hunt dangle from a biplane, however rickety the narrative excuses for that to happen, is more fun. So we turn, still, to the movies for honest fakery we can trust. But these are strange days. As Farid puts it: 'You sit in the theater, you immerse yourself in the fantasy. But so much of our real world feels like that now — a fantasy.' Maybe it's time to retire the phrase 'seeing is believing.' ——— (Michael Phillips is the Chicago Tribune film critic.) ———
Chicago Tribune
05-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Column: In a world of easily manipulated images, can movies retain their magic?
I love getting faked out by the movies. I love believing the impossible, if only for a moment. Moviewise, I live for a lot of things; one of them, by which I was floored at the age 5, was Buster Keaton's 'Cops' (1922) and his startling genius as a physical and comic presence. Half the time, at that age, I wasn't sure if what I was watching was actually happening. That's how it is with beautiful illusions, created from real risks that become the audience's reward. When the right people collaborate on the right movie, it sometimes happens: a fresh combination of legitimately dangerous stunt work and crafty but not frantic editing, along with the inevitable layer of digital effects elements. What do you get? Honest fakery. The best kind. The kind that elicits a single, astonished, delighted response in the mind of the beholder: Can I believe what I just saw? Across eight 'Mission: Impossible' movies, including the one now in theaters, Tom Cruise has been doing the damnedest stunts for nearly 30 years to provoke that response. Action movies can make anybody do anything on screen. Cruise doesn't do it alone; the digital effects teams stay pretty busy on the 'M:I' franchise. Cruise is now 62, and denying it with every maniacal sprint down some faraway city's waterfront boulevard. He knows that dangling, at high speed and altitude, from various parts of an antagonist's biplane in 'Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning' is a good, old-fashioned selling point, in an era crowded with deceptions. In 'Final Reckoning' we don't see the harnesses and cables ensuring that stunt's relative safety. Those implements have been digitally erased, a visual filmmaking practice now as common as the common cold. But there he is, the secret agent ascending and descending, with someone trying to kill him. Tom Cruise, doing something most of us wouldn't. Lately, though, the movie industry's most sought-after audience response — can you believe what we just saw? — lands differently than it did a few years ago. We mutter that question more darkly now, with troubling regularity. And it's not when we're at the movies. The real world lies to us visually all the time. An onslaught of photographs and videos are presented as verified visual evidence without the verification part. It happens everywhere around the world, every day. And I wonder if it's altering, and corroding, the bargain we make with the movies we see. Can honest fakery in the name of film escapism compete with the other kinds of fakery permeating our visual lives? 'It's an interesting question,' says University of California-Berkeley computer science professor Hany Farid, a specialist in digital forensics and manipulated media detection. 'It was easier to separate the movies from real life in the analog days, before digital. Now we live in a world where everything we see and hear can be manipulated.' The real-world stakes are high, Farid warns, because so much evidence in courts of law rests on the truthfulness of visual evidence presented. He says he's been asked to verify a dizzying number of photos for a variety of purposes. The questions never end: 'Is this image really from Gaza? Is this footage from Ukraine real? Is the image Donald Trump holds up on TV real, or manipulated for political purposes?' Farid's referring there to the alleged and quickly debunked veracity of the photo the president held up on camera during his March 2025 ABC News interview with Terry Moran. In the photo, Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia, deported to an El Salvadoran prison, is shown as having 'MS-13' gang-signifying tattoos on his hand. The image, widely cited as having been altered, doesn't qualify as a deepfake, Farid says. 'It's not even a shallow-fake.' Manipulated images and audio have been with us as long as technology has made those images and sounds possible. Not long ago, manipulated falsehood and verifiable visual truth were a little easier to parse. 'When we went to the movies,' Farid says, 'we knew it wasn't real. The world was bifurcated: There were movies, which were entertainment, and there was reality, and they were different. What's happened is that they've started to bleed into each other. Our ground, our sense of reality, is not stable anymore.' Part of that is artificial intelligence, 'no question,' says Farid. 'Generative AI is not just people creating images that didn't exist or aren't what they're pretending to be. They accumulate to the point where we're living in a world in which everything is suspect. Trust is shaken, if not gone.' And here's the blurred line concerning the movies and real life, Farid says. Earlier, 'when we viewed images and video, or listened to audio, we thought they were real and generally we were right. And when we went to the movies, we knew the opposite: that they weren't real. Reality and entertainment — two different worlds. Now, though, they're bleeding into each other. The ground is not stable anymore.' That, in Farid's view, has a lot to do with contemporary American politics and a climate of strategic mistrust created by those in power. 'The outright lying,' he says, is 'dangerous for democracy and for society. And it makes the idea of believing in movies sort of weird.' Our entertainment can't get enough of AI as a villain right now. On HBO, we have 'Mountainhead' with its Muskian creator of next-generation deepfake software too good to pass up, or slow down. Meantime, the plot of the new 'Mission: Impossible' hinges on AI so fearsome and ambitious, the fate of the world hangs in the balance. Though, for some of us, seeing Ethan Hunt dangle from a biplane, however rickety the narrative excuses for that to happen, is more fun. So we turn, still, to the movies for honest fakery we can trust. But these are strange days. As Farid puts it: 'You sit in the theater, you immerse yourself in the fantasy. But so much of our real world feels like that now — a fantasy.' Maybe it's time to retire the phrase 'seeing is believing.'
Winnipeg Free Press
31-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
Cruise control locked in for the long run
Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, now playing at a multiplex near you, is the latest entry in a franchise that started way back in 1996. While these blockbuster flicks are ostensibly about the high-stakes missions of crack espionage operative Ethan Hunt, at the most profound and elemental level, the eight M:I movies are about Tom Cruise running. Of course, he also climbs, dives, parachutes, rides motorcycles, clings to airplane wings, pilots helicopters and jumps off cliffs, but the simplest, purest expression of Cruise's superstar persona, of his cinematic embodiment of relentless physical intensity, has to be those iconic, repeated, seemingly contractually obligated running sequences. You can find supercuts of 'Tom Cruise Running' on YouTube, the longest now clocking in at almost 19 minutes. There are videos devoted to charting the evolution of his running style from 1981's Taps (arms all anyhow, knees a bit slack) to his current preferred approach (compressed, precise, palms slicing the air like knives). There's a hardcore fan on Reddit who has listed, described and ranked 295 Tom Cruise Running scenes, from casual jogs to life-and-death sprints. There are online forums where runners and trainers and kinesiologists weigh in, analyzing his form. 'He's actually very inefficient and expends a lot of energy with his short choppy stride and tense upper body,' carps one observer, while others praises his 'high cadence,' 'core stability' and 'good knee lift.' There are deep statistical dives into how Cruise's running time correlates to critical response and ticket sales. Rotten Tomatoes recently got out the pedometer and crunched the numbers to determine that the more Tom Cruise runs in a movie, the higher its RT score and the bigger its box office take. There are some Tom Cruise Running buffs who like his duck-and-weave stuff — when he's dodging bullets, explosions, aliens, oncoming cars — viewing it as more expressive, more varied, more unpredictable. But purists tend to prefer the laser-like straight-line sprints, with the furious propulsion of the legs contrasting so effectively with the strange suspended stillness of the upper body. This is certainly the most characteristic and cinematic expression of the Cruise mystique — when he's running with hyper-focused force through some international locale, intense, unstoppable and alone, in an unalloyed distillation of physical will. Cruise gets one of these sequences — of course he does — in this latest M:I movie, racing through an eerily empty London street on his way to save the entire planet. And while we can talk about how Tom runs in 2025 — his form still looks terrific — maybe we should also talk about why. Often billed as 'The Last Movie Star,' the 62-year-old Cruise seems to be trying to outrun time. This notion is borne out by the data journalism. Rotten Tomatoes, reporting that Cruise has covered 'over 32,444 feet on screen throughout his 44 years,' adds that the older he gets, the more he runs. 'He covered almost the same amount of ground in 2006's Mission: Impossible III (3,212 feet) as he did in the entirety of the 1980s (12 movies, 3,299 feet run), and five of his top 10 running films were released after 2010 — the year he turned 48.' That tracks. As an actor, Cruise will never be known for intellectual introspection or layered emotional work. He's a star because of his physical, kinetic energy and charisma, his discipline and dedication, his loony insistence on doing his own daring, even dangerous stunts. Alberto Pezzali/The Associated Press Files Tom Cruise poses for photographers upon arrival at the premiere of the film 'Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning' in London. And because his brand is his body, Cruise has become, in recent years, even more intent on proving it's still functioning at peak levels. The Final Reckoning has triphibian action set-pieces, testing Cruise's speed, strength and endurance on land, air and water. On top of the running scenes, there's a biplane dogfight over a South African mountain range and a frigid, silent, dark diving scene in the Bering Strait. There's also an obligatory underwear fight sequence, just to strip things down to essentials. As Cruise runs more and more, his Ethan Hunt character has also changed, morphing from super-spy to superhero to — ultimately — a kind of demigod. In this latest instalment, Ethan Hunt is the only one who can save humankind. He suffers, dies and is resurrected for all of us. He is positioned as more than a man — he is a messianic figure, a manifestation of destiny, a force of nature. Monthly What you need to know now about gardening in Winnipeg. An email with advice, ideas and tips to keep your outdoor and indoor plants growing. The Final Reckoning, which spends so much time on callbacks, recaps and fan-service montages, also feels like an elegiac adieu to this almost three-decade-old franchise, which started when Cruise was 33. Actors respond to this kind of hinge-point in their careers in different ways. Sometimes they shift from leading-man roles to craggy character parts. Sometimes they subvert their onetime action-man legacies with comic spoofs or poignant counterpoints. I don't see Tom Cruise doing any of these things. And maybe that's the way it should be. When I consider his post Mission: Impossible filmography, I imagine him running, running, always running, toward a distant horizon line. Alison GillmorWriter Studying at the University of Winnipeg and later Toronto's York University, Alison Gillmor planned to become an art historian. She ended up catching the journalism bug when she started as visual arts reviewer at the Winnipeg Free Press in 1992. Read full biography Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber. Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
