The 2018 Mission: Impossible—Fallout is another top-notch action picture in the long-lived saga.  Near the end there are the unkillable bodies of the good people (especially Tom Cruise‘s Ethan Hunt) amid mountains in Kashmir, which is fine.  But the film is probably more satisfying when it is set in France and duly doubles down on The French Connection—the car chase, I mean.  And, to me, it was pleasing to see Ethan, perplexed about how to save a struck-down policewoman’s life, pull out a simple handgun and shoot every single man disposed to commit murder.

The cast isn’t great, it’s perfect.  Perfect for an MI movie.  Henry Cavill does not disappoint as a nefarious double agent, and Vanessa Kirby, very good-looking, is seductively adroit as The White Widow.  Unlike Cavill, she gets to keep her British accent.

Written and directed (without in-your-face obtrusiveness) by Christopher McQuarrie.

The American version of Gabriele Muccino’s Italian film, The Last Kiss, directed by Tony Goldwyn, is as dandy as the original.  Neither flick is great, but both are vivacious dramatic grabbers.

Goldwyn’s film (2006) is, as critic Ella Taylor opined, an “admirably understated handling,” albeit she adds that it’s a handling of “dispiritingly slender material.”  Not to me.  Slender material, yes, but not dispiritingly slender.  The movie is a partly comic roundelay of absolute chemistry between guys and gals and of turmoil and bitterness.  It’s simple but electric.

More, it’s an actor’s triumph.  Well, not for Casey Affleck, neither interesting nor deep enough, but Jacinda Barrett is entirely convincing in sweet calm and in fury.  Zach Braff and Rachel Bilson, though they never surprise us, are never false.  Blythe Danner is commanding in nuance, and Michael Weston is all earthy appeal.  It is, finally, proper that Goldwyn’s Last Kiss is sexier than Muccino’s original—that it is spicy and somewhat candid since the first version has the advantage of being the first version.

Cover of The Last Kiss (Widescreen Edition)

Life is hard enough without subjecting yourself to your own stupidity.  The store owner played by the peerless W.C. Fields in It’s A Gift (1934) could attest to this if he wasn’t wearing blinders.  Comic misery grows as Fields allows himself to be flatly cheated at the same time he is victimized by a shrewish wife and a contrary daughter.  The movie exists for its extended sight-gag situations, well enough directed by Norman McLeod, notwithstanding it all starts weakening in the last 15 minutes.  One remembers the down-to-earth farce, though.

It’s a Gift (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Miranda Otto, as 20-year-old misfit Dimity in Love Serenade (1996), gets it right:  Dimity’s loneliness, shyness, quirkiness, and naive impulsiveness.  And, like her fellow players Rebecca Firth and George Shevtsov, she succeeds as a comic actor, indispensable for shaping Shirley Barrett‘s Australian film into a funny curio.  But a curio, according to dictionary.com, is “valued as a curiosity.”  Love Serenade ought to be valued as that and more—as a startling look at isolation, at the abovementioned loneliness.  This isn’t done, however, without the film getting (amusingly) weirder as it goes along.

Barrett—director and sole writer here—is good at seeing scenes and makes competent use of space.  The dialogue she has written for her characters is wildly clever.  She is patently talented, and LS should be seen several times.

Centered on the characters of Krystyna, Stefan, Bruno and Rachel, the novel Polonaise, by Piers Paul Read, concerns Polish people from decades past who join, and eventually depart from, the Communist movement.  One of the book’s themes is nihilism.  Another is the way Life overwhelms Ideology, or at least forces it to take a back seat.  It is a compelling read which nevertheless mildly disappointed me with its final standard anti-nihilistic philosophy—a not very fresh summation.

All the same, the book is wonderfully intelligent.  It is interesting to see it go from being a depiction of political sweat and commitment to being a chaste drawing room drama before it gets its hands dirty again.  And, ineluctably, Read is disinclined to ignore sex—significant but no source of salvation—but is never sensationalistic.