Tom Cruise

Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015)

~ Nikki Baughan ~ Leave a comment

MI5_Crop

Almost 20 years after he first appeared in rebooted sixties spy classic Mission: Impossible, Tom Cruise is back for his fifth outing as Ethan Hunt; top agent of the Impossible Mission Force (IMF). This time he’s on the trail of the nefarious organisation known only as The Syndicate, a task made even more difficult when the IMF is dissolved by the CIA. And when Ethan comes up against the mysterious Ilsa (Rebecca Ferguson) and shadowy Solomon Lane (Sean Harris), Ethan may finally have met his match…

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Brüno (2009)

~ Nikki Baughan

Vassup!

Get ready… Brüno ist coming. In Sacha Baron Cohen and Larry Charles’ uber-encore to 2006’s Borat, the cast and crew embark on a fresh globe trotting, guerilla-style filmmaking adventure and set a new standard of risky provocation. Cohen delivers another daring and unrestrained performance as Bruno, Austria’s most famous, flamboyantly gay fashionista with the acerbic wit who brazenly interviews his guests about fashion and celebrity on his top-rated TV show Funkyzeit mit Bruno (Funkytime with Bruno).

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Valkyrie (DVD)

~ Nikki Baughan

Cruise control…

Tom Cruise usually plays one of two roles; either he is cutting loose, having fun and not giving a damn (such as in Mission Impossible or his scene-stealing cameo in Tropic Thunder) or he is intense, focused and doing a lot of jaw clenching (Minority Report, say, or Lions for Lambs). It’s safe to say that Valkyrie well and truly belongs in the second camp, being as it is a deathly serious dramatisation of German Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg’s unsuccessful assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler during the dying days of World War II. Aided and abetted by a variety of sympathisers, including General Olbricht (Bill Nighy), General Fellgiebel (Eddie Izzard) and Ludwig Beck (Terence Stamp), Stauffenberg hatches a plan to assassinate Hitler (David Bamber), so initiating Operation Valkyrie in which the army would be able to seize control of Berlin and broker a peace with the Allies.

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