If You Choose to Accept It: Tom Cruise and the Mission: Impossible Franchise

Tom Cruise is one of this generation’s most enduring movie stars. In 1986, he piloted Top Gun to the top of the box office; three decades later, well into his fifties, he launches the fifth instalment of the Mission: Impossible franchise while his Top Gun contemporaries have faded into irrelevance (or television). So what is…

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes rejects the modern blockbuster’s inclination towards weightlessness; for a film about super-intelligent monkeys, this is a surprisingly heavy picture. While its predecessor, Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Rupert Wyatt, 2011), half-heartedly feinted at social resonance before shrugging and descending into frivolity, Dawn unapologetically bears the burden…