Monday new releases: 19 May 2025

One can’t help feel­ing that the title change from Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two to Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is a bit like those doc­u­ments you work on that end up being called “Important Film Review 250519 – FINAL-FINAL this time – no more edits” but still has to get that last sign-off from the boss. The boss in this case being Tom Cruise.

In the open­ing cred­its, the film is called “A Tom Cruise Production” and I don’t recall pre­vi­ous epis­odes being quite so closely aligned to its star. It’s an appro­pri­ate cred­it, though, because the sub­text through­out is about how there is no one alive like Cruise and we’re going to prove it to you.

I’ve seen the word Messianic used about the clos­ing chapter of this Mission: Impossible arc. We’re told (often) that Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is the only per­son who can save the world from the rogue A.I. known as The Entity and that we need to trust him – have faith in him – one last time. He even dies and is resurrected.

The prob­lem with put­ting our faith so squarely in Mr. Cruise is that Hunt is now so far from being a char­ac­ter we can identi­fy with that there’s noth­ing there for an audi­ence to feel. I appre­ci­ated the extraordin­ary set-pieces and enjoyed the superb crafts­man­ship, but all that happened for me was that I was enter­tained. It meant noth­ing to me. The flat end­ing – the absence of emo­tion­al or cel­eb­rat­ory release – didn’t help.

Another prob­lem the film has in enga­ging us in any­thing deep­er is that “The Entity” isn’t a char­ac­ter, as such. We have to be told what it wants – over and over again – and that its endgame feels like a 1980s Cold War retread. Nuclear weapons in bunkers, a digit­ally enhanced glob­al anni­hil­a­tion fantasy.

What The Final Reckoning does excep­tion­ally well – it’s in the franchise’s DNA after all – are tick­ing clocks and count­downs. Director Christopher McQuarrie and edit­or Eddie Hamilton ensure that each of those spec­tac­u­lar set-pieces are (lit­er­ally) grip­ping – the editor-in-chief and I still hold hands in the movies and it took me a few minutes to get the blood cir­cu­lat­ing once again when the lights went up.

The sta­ging of mul­tiple action scenes in par­al­lel also works bril­liantly well. Shots match from sub­mar­ine to Arctic cab­in and back again, but they also know when we need to linger. Cruise’s battle against the dead Russian sub­mar­ine that’s determ­ined to thwart his efforts at escape is a superbly real­ised tour-de-force.

The best thing I can say about Final Destination Bloodlines – this fran­chise has as con­fus­ing an atti­tude to punc­tu­ation as Mission: Impossible and, like many of its char­ac­ters, is miss­ing a colon – the best thing I can say is that I sur­vived it.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

I’m grate­ful that the over­whelm­ing pres­ence of hor­ror in cinemas these days is a reli­able source of box office – and the hor­ror fans love of lore makes them as close to cinephiles that we have these days – but I do not enjoy them. On Saturday, I found myself check­ing my watch reg­u­larly dur­ing Final Destination, won­der­ing wheth­er read­ers like your­self would for­give me if I left early.

In the end, I stuck it out but I feel like I gained noth­ing from the exer­cise apart from a renewed respect for the craft of gory phys­ic­al pup­petry effects and the pre­ci­sion engin­eer­ing skill on the part of screen­writers Gary Busick and Lori Evans Taylor and co-directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein. A bit like “The Entity” in The Final Reckoning, in Final Destination “Death” is a char­ac­ter who we are told about often – and we become intim­ately acquain­ted with their handi­work – but they are an ant­ag­on­ist that no one can engage with mean­ing there’s no conflict.

Who, then, is the ant­ag­on­ist in The Salt Path? A middle-aged couple lose their home and live­li­hood as a res­ult of a poorly con­sidered busi­ness invest­ment and decide that, in the absence of any bet­ter ideas, they will walk the 600-mile South West Coast Path from Somerset to Cornwall and back. Ill-equipped phys­ic­ally and emo­tion­ally, they even­tu­ally dis­cov­er that life hasn’t robbed them of all their resi­li­ence after all.

Superb per­form­ances from Jason Isaacs and, espe­cially, Gillian Anderson are the found­a­tion for a film that should prove pop­u­lar. I didn’t real­ise that it was based on a true story until the clos­ing cred­its and find­ing that out was icing on the cake. I’m sorry if I’ve spoiled it for you now.

If you’d told me that, of the two restaurant-set films this week, I would be recom­mend­ing the straight-to-Netflix soft-hearted crowd-pleaser instead of the Golden Bear-nominated black and white drama, I would be as sur­prised as anyone.

La Cocina is an adapt­a­tion of Arnold Wesker’s ground-breaking 1960s play set in the kit­chen of a busy res­taur­ant where class and gender divides are palp­able and where des­per­ate migrant work­ers are exploited by the cap­it­al­ist machine.

Mexican dir­ect­or Alonso Ruizpalacios brings the story to mod­ern day New York and a res­taur­ant called The Grill. There, dozens of cooks, kitchen-hands and wait­staff toil under­ground so that tour­ists and loc­als can enjoy clas­sic American dishes like pizza, par­mi­gi­ana and lob­sters. As old hand Pedro points out, lob­sters used to be peas­ant food – chick­en of the sea – but now it’s only for the well-to-do.

Pedro (Raúl Briones) is los­ing his mind, though, as prom­ises from his boss to help make him leg­al go unful­filled and his American wait­ress girl­friend Julia (Rooney Mara) doesn’t want to have the baby she is car­ry­ing. Over the course of two ser­vices – lunch and din­ner with an ele­gi­ac­al break in between – chaos reigns as fra­gile rela­tion­ships all over the res­taur­ant nois­ily collapse.

Ruizpalacios has his heart in the right place – and there are some incred­ible long-takes here includ­ing one that ends with the kit­chen flooded with Cherry Coke – but it’s all too much, even the quiet bits. This was the second film of the week­end that I couldn’t wait to end.

In Nonnas, Vince Vaughan plays an Italian-American bus mech­an­ic who wants to open a res­taur­ant in hon­our of his late moth­er except that he knows noth­ing about the hospo busi­ness and the secrets of her beloved recipes are a mys­tery to him.

So he decides to staff his kit­chen with real Italian grand­moth­ers who can cook the dishes that have been handed down through the gen­er­a­tions. Enter some act­ing legends who deserve this vic­tory lap even if it’s a long way from their best work. Susan Sarandon, Lorraine Bracco, Talia Shire and Brenda Vaccaro all play as broad as you might expect in a film that’s as much an uplift­ing fantasy as La Cocina is a down­beat one.

The biggest prob­lem here is that there isn’t enough time spent with the food. That should be “Restaurant Movie 101” – linger on the dishes, make us desire them.