Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning ★★★☆☆
Directed by Christopher McQuarrie. Starring Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Henry Czerny, Angela Bassett, Esai Morales, Janet McTeer. 12A cert, gen release, 169 min
The opening hour to the eighth film in the action sequence is little short of disastrous: a seemingly endless reiteration of the previous film’s plot. Stop talking to me! Nobody cares about the Macguffin! Stage a car chase on the Great Wall of China. Abseil down the Eiffel Tower. What are we paying you for? It then picks up with some murky but diverting underwater stuff and a fine closing aerial stunt. Then we get an ending shameful in the lachrymosity of its auto-mourning. Still, it is sad to see the back of an imaginative franchise. Full review DC
The Phoenician Scheme ★★★☆☆
Directed by Wes Anderson. Starring Benicio del Toro, Mia Threapleton, Michael Cera, Riz Ahmed, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Mathieu Amalric, Richard Ayoade, Scarlett Johansson, Jeffrey Wright, Willem Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsbourg. 12A, gen release 105 min
In the latest, entirely characteristic Anderson film, del Toro stars as a wealthy businessman who draws a vast array of characters into complex construction projects. Don’t expect the aching melancholy of The Grand Budapest Hotel but, unlike the sprawling Asteroid City and scattershot French Dispatch, the machinations find a charming focus in the thawing between Del Toro and Threapleton (Kate Winslet’s daughter) as his daughter, a nun. Both actors bring a jouissance to the slightly jaded milieu. Cera’s untrustworthy tutor-turned-personal secretary similarly makes for a welcome third wheel in the espionage-adjacent drollery. Full review TB
‘He is 13 and he’s huge. He will be the next Wayne Dundon’: Limerick on edge as a new generation takes over gangland
‘There’s a menace, an edge to life in America that wasn’t there before. And the possibility of dark stuff’
My mother’s plan to leave her house to my sister and I could create more problems than solutions
The Macron shove is not a sign of a very French love story, but something more disturbing
The Flats ★★★★☆
Directed by Alessandra Celesia. 15A cert, gen release, 114 min
Moving, troubling documentary of the largely republican New Lodge area of Belfast as it fails to appreciate any ceasefire dividend. Most of the film focuses on Joe McNally, a man who, raised among the worst of the atrocities, understandably finds it harder to set aside the old unhappiness. But there is positivity here too. Youngish Jolene, a fine singer, seems less caught up in the old tribal binaries. Her Irish passport will, she clarifies, allow her to skip the queues at the airport. So there is that. Full review DC
When the Light Breaks/Ljósbrot ★★★★☆
Directed by Rúnar Rúnarsson. Starring Elín Hall, Mikael Kaaber, Baldur Einarsson, Katla Njálsdóttir, Ágúst Wigum, Gunnar Hrafn Kristjánsson. 15A cert, gen release, 81 min
Una and Diddi (Hall, Einarsson) are cool kids and lovers attending art school in Reykjavik. He’s tall and good-looking; she’s an elfin variation on Annie Lennox’s androgynous ’80s years. They have dreams. He’d like to visit Japan; the well-travelled Una will settle for the Pharaoh Islands. The funeral experience is condensed into a single day in this emotionally astute drama, a much-admired contender at Cannes last year. Composed of small gestures and unspoken truths, it’s a bonsai miniature of the vastness of overwhelming grief. Full review TB
