Film

It’s not clear when it happened — sometime in the past 30 years — but the Mission: Impossible movies gradually evolved into Hollywood’s most dependable modern action franchise. Figuring out how this happened is far easier: Star Tom Cruise‘s legendary willingness to do anything and everything to make each film a blockbuster while — as the franchise’s most powerful producer — savvily finding creative partners that bring out his best. In fact, Cruise is much like his IMF agent Ethan Hunt: When the man’s on a mission, he’s an unstoppable force who’ll never stop running until he saves the day — or, the summer box office. Below, The Hollywood Reporter ranks every Mission: Impossible film, including the newly released The Final Reckoning, from the very worst to the definite best. 08 ‘Mission: Impossible II’ (2000) 'MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE II' Paramount Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection Ranked worst and to the surprise of no one. John...

Pedro Pascal had some competition for his Reed Richards, aka Mister Fantastic, role. During a recent conversation at MCM Comic Con, David Tennant was asked by a fan about which superhero he would like to play in a film, and he revealed that he had his eyes on the role Pascal ultimately landed in Marvel’s forthcoming The Fantastic Four: First Steps. “In terms of superheroes, I did slightly have my eye on Reed Richards and unfortunately, it looks like they’ve gone in a different direction,” the Doctor Who star said. “Although if it has to be someone, I’m very happy for it to be Pedro Pascal, frankly.” The Fantastic Four: First Steps, which hits theaters July 25, also stars Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm, Joseph Quinn as Johnny Storm, Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Ben Grimm, Julia Garner as the Silver Surfer and Ralph Ineson as Galactus. In the...

Marcel Ophuls, the Oscar-winning, German-born French filmmaker whose powerfully eloquent documentaries confronted difficult political, moral and philosophical issues, has died. He was 97. Ophuls “died peacefully” at his home in the south of France, his grandson Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert told The Hollywood Reporter.  Ophuls earned his Academy Award — as well as prizes from the Cannes and Berlin film festivals— for Hotel Terminus (1988), a 4-hour, 27-minute documentary that examined the life of the notorious Klaus Barbie, convicted in Bolivia of his Nazi war crimes in 1987. Ophuls’ best known work, however, came almost two decades earlier with The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), which explored the reality of the Nazi occupation in the small industrial French city of Clermont-Ferrand. Ophuls spent more than two years compiling the more than 60 hours of footage that was eventually boiled down to that 4-hour, 11-minute film, which...