Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.
Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.
Good and evil, love and hate – these are perennial themes of cinema. But this spring, the dualities seem sharper, at times with literal on-screen twinning. Robert De Niro (The Alto Knights) and Michael B Jordan (Sinners) are each playing double roles.
Then there’s the double helix of existence itself,threaded through the fabric of several upcoming movies: not just life and death, but undeath, if you will.
From ghosts and vampires to reincarnation and a sleeplike death - I’m looking at you, Snow White – the idea of something beyond the grave, or maybe between this world and the next, pops up again and again. Characters that take a licking and keep on ticking are there too, in Novocaine and Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.
That last one is arguably the apotheosis of this idea. As hinted at in the film’s subtitle, and a line spoken by Tom Cruise’s character in the trailer – “I need you to trust me - one last time” – this could be the last hurrah for a franchise and a character that just won’t die.
Sonequa Martin-Green plays an Afghanistan war veteran whose grief over the death of a platoon mate (Natalie Morales) is made palpable by her late friend’s haunting presence. The feature directorial debut of Kyle Hausmann-Stokes, the dark dramedy was inspired by the film-maker’s own experience of loss while serving as a paratrooper in Iraq. Also with Morgan Freeman and Ed Harris.
Mickey 17
Parasite writer-director Bong Joon-ho adapts a 2022 sci-fi novel by Edward Ashton about Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson), a space colonist whose high-risk job as an “expendable” causes him to experience his own gruesome death, over and over again. After each demise, a fresh copy of Mickey’s body is 3D-printed, with all his memories intact until, by mistake, two versions of him unwittingly come face-to-face with each other.
Fresh off their ghost story Presence, film-maker Steven Soderbergh and writer David Koepp return to the tone they set with 2022’s cyber-thriller Kimi. The new film revolves around married American spooks (Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett) who become cat and mouse when the wife is suspected of betraying the nation, with potentially violent consequences, and her husband is assigned to terminate her rogue mission.
Novocaine
Jack Quaid (The Boys) plays Nathan Caine, an average Joe with a congenital insensitivity to pain (yes, it’s a real thing). When his girlfriend (Amber Midthunder) is taken hostage, Nathan attempts to take on the bad guys himself. That and a quippy screenplay positions him in superhero territory. Hellooo, Deadpool.
Snow White
Disney continues its string of live-action remakes of classic animated films with the tale of a young woman (Rachel Zegler) who is poisoned into a deathlike sleep by a jealous witch (Gal Gadot). Here, Snow White’s love interest (Andrew Burnap) has been demoted from prince to a Robin Hood-like bandit named Jonathan, and the seven dwarfs will be rendered not by short actors but CGI.
The Alto Knights
If you’re a tad confused by the trailer for this fact-based crime drama about the 1950s rivalry between leaders of the Luciano crime family, it may be because both antagonists – Vito Genovese and Frank Costello – are played by Robert De Niro. Reuniting with director Barry Levinson (The Wizard of Lies) and writer Nicholas Pileggi (Goodfellas) for a story about Genovese’s unsuccessful 1957 attempt to put a hit on Costello, the actor can add two more notches to his belt of criminal roles.
A Minecraft Movie
In this part live-action, part CGI fantasy adventure inspired by the popular world-building video game, four outcasts from the real world (Jason Momoa, Danielle Brooks, Emma Myers and Sebastian Eugene Hansen) find themselves transported to the Overworld, a magical place described by Jack Black’s guide, Steve, as “a wonderland where anything you can imagine is possible – as long as what you imagine can be built out of blocks”. Directed by Jared Hess of Napoleon Dynamite, the family-friendly film involves a battle against evil forces.
Michael B Jordan reunites with frequent filmmaking partner Ryan Coogler to play twin brothers, in what the director calls a “genre-fluid” supernatural horror thriller about vampires and “more than just that,” set in the Jim Crow South.
Thunderbolts*
Scraped together from the detritus of more comic-book movies and TV series than can be enumerated in this space, a ragtag team of Marvel superheroes, anti-heroes and reformed supervillains (Sebastian Stan, David Harbour, Wyatt Russell, Hannah John-Kamen, Olga Kurylenko and Florence Pugh) are recruited by an intelligence operative (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) to perform missions deemed too dangerous and/or sensitive for normie heroes. It’s the final chapter in Phase 5 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, if that means anything.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
The Final Reckoning picks up where Dead Reckoning left off. (Since that film’s release, Paramount has dropped “Part One” from the title, but the 2023 feature ended in a literal cliff-hanger.) Bad guy Gabriel (Esai Morales) has made off with part of the key that unlocks a world-threatening AI device known as the Entity, and Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and his team must stop him. What are the stakes? Only the fate of every living soul on Earth, as the trailer tells us – or at least the destiny of those who can’t get enough of what Cruise, so far, keeps delivering.
